The latest buzz from the Deep Thinkers inside the Beltway shows that the Obama administration hasn't gotten the word on Afghanistan yet. OK, to err on the side of accuracy, the Profound Strategists of the new administration have heard a portion of the word but not yet gotten the whole message.
That means there is both good news and bad tidings.
The good news first. (Essential caveat: if true, it's good.) The administration is reportedly considering extending the geographic scope of the UAV attacks on Taliban's leadership cadre and foreign fighter contingents. Considering the positive effects of the drone delivered missile strikes in the FATA which are recognised as such by local anti-Taliban, anti-al-Qaeda forces if not by the MSM of the US and Europe, the time to expand the coverage to other parts of Pakistan currently dominated by the Islamist jihadists has come.
The Predator presence not only inflicts physical casualties, it has a pronounced psychological impact over time. The constant awareness of the distant presence with its potential for sudden and unannounced death is a factor in the progressive demoralisation of the jihadists. Or, at least this dynamic is indicated in some defector debriefings.
The use of Predators also has an effect on the uncommitted majority. The reminder of an American sort-of-over-the-horizon presence serves to tilt the balance of uncertain loyalties against the Islamist jihadists. The flights and periodic attacks serves to stimulate an observant Muslim to consider whether or not his religious beliefs really, really require embracing Islamism or becoming either an active jihadist or a firm member of its mass support base.
If the Predator flights have no impact beyond helping to convince a potential jihadist to climb back on the fence, they are a success. Remember, one does not kill his way to victory in a counterinsurgency, he wins by progressively reducing the insurgent's capacity and political will to keep on fighting.
On balance there are a number of very good tactical and strategic reasons to enlarge the scope of Predator operations--including those of a lethal nature. The only downside is the possible negative repercussions on the less-than-stable Pakistani government. But, given the other reasons for inherent political instability as well as the greater threat of Taliban success, this is a slight and completely acceptable risk.
One way to reduce the risk posed by any expansion of Predator missions can be mitigated by assuring that the US media are not brought into the loop by leakers no doubt motivated by such High Minded considerations as the inevitable collateral civilian casualties. The Islamabad regime is undermined not so much by the actual attacks as it is by Western, particularly American, media coverage of the strikes.
(These tender souls need to get a grip on a ground truth: The only way to limit civilian casualties to zero is ending the war. Whatever assures the most rapid and complete ending to hostilities is to the good in that regard.)
So much for the possibly good news. Now the dirty end of the stick.
The Deep Thinkers and Profound Strategists of the Obama administration have apparently bought into the disastrous mission creep in Afghanistan inaugurated by the Bush-Cheney neocon ninnies. The lads and lassies of the administration intend to complement the 17,000 new pairs of boots on the ground with a flood of diplomats and other civilian personnel.
Like the neocon ninnies of the past eight years, the Hope-and-Change Crowd seems hell-bent on pursuing the impossible mission of creating a modern Western style nation-state in the geographic expression called Afghanistan. In so doing they are showing they have as little grip on reality as the ideologues of Bush-Cheney.
Way back when, way back in the Eocene of 2002, the only realistic, achievable, plausible task for US military forces was the mounting of a pure punitive expedition. The only realistic, achievable, plausible goal for military force employment was the destruction of al-Qaeda and the Taliban government which hosted, protected and refused to hand over the men behind the 9/11 attacks as well as the predecessor operations. The establishment of a successor government to Taliban was not requisite, not rational and not achievable at any acceptable cost in time, lives and money.
When reality surrendered to a combination of American moral sentimentality and the pervasive neocon fantasy of a "democratic, liberal" Mideast being called into existence by an invasion of Iraq, the chances of the US accomplishing even a minimal punitive goal in Afghanistan went to zero at the speed of light. Ideology trumped realpolitick to the ultimate loss of all--the US, Afghanistan, the Sub-continent, Europe. Ideology trumped realpolitick to the ultimate success of those holding fast to another ideology--Islamism.
The roaring return of Taliban not only in Afghanistan but throughout Pakistan means one thing only. The US must focus upon achieving its minimum necessary strategic task. That task is the same as we faced following the Chinese intervention in the Korean War. The task is assuring that we are not militarily defeated. The polite and accurate term for this is, "not-losing."
"Not-losing" means that the situation in Afghanistan and Pakistan will not be optimal from our perspective. It means a politically inconclusive end to hostilities. It means that Islamism as a political and psychological force will remain unabated in the region. None of that is desirable.
Undesirable? Certainly. Achievable? Perhaps.
We can hope to achieve our minimal necessary strategic goal of "not-losing" if and only if we focus on defeating the armed forces of Islamism, the jihadist components of Taliban and al-Qaeda. This requires that boots be put on the ground. It requires triggers to be pulled with effect. It requires that Predators fly and missiles strike.
Achieving the minimum goal does not require nation-building. It does not require turning Afghanistan into a fully functioning nation-state resembling those in the West. It does not require diplomats, negotiations or the other features of diplomacy except as a sidelight to the main event on the battlefield.
As the Korean War paradigm shows clearly, negotiations with ideologically committed interlocutors constitutes a continuation of the battlefield around a baize covered table. Like the bloodletting war, the negotiations are a test of political will.
Again drawing from the Korean War analogy, the US did not attempt any exercise in nation-building in South Korea until after the shooting stopped. Even then it took a mort of years for South Korea to develop its own institutions of politics, press, society and economy. Many of these were not and are not fully compatible with their American counterparts. That, of course, is utterly irrelevant.
The ground truth is that no matter how many diplomats, lawyers, economists, and other learned professionals we pour into Afghanistan, their efforts are going to be utterly without any real-world relevance. Afghanistan will never, repeat, never become a facsimile of the US or any European state or even South Korea. Nor should we want it to be. That sort of neo-colonial condescension is quite passe.
Come on all you Deep Thinkers and Profound Strategists! Get a grip! Take a dekko at history. The history of counterinsurgency and the history of Afghanistan deserve at least a cursory glance.
History and reality agree. Forget nation-building. Dx the lawyers, diplomats and all the rest. Focus on killing and demoralising enough of the Taliban and al-Qaeda forces that they are reduced to a fair semblance of military impotence. At least enough of a reduction so that none can claim that a defeat was inflicted on the US and its partners.
Finally, folks, grin and bear it. Afghanistan will remain what it always has been. It ain't going to become the US with a funny accent. Accept that the Islamists will remain alive and well as a political and social force in both Afghanistan and Pakistan.
That means, unfortunately, we and the rest of the West will have to remain vigilant against the next storm out of the mountains.
Wednesday, March 18, 2009
Tuesday, March 17, 2009
Anybody Got A Glass Of Water?
According to a collection of Deep Thinkers, High Minded sorts and sundry politicos currently assembled in Istanbul we have another crises looming in the very near future. As if global climate change (that's the new approved phrase apparently with global warming having been consigned to the graveyard of yesterday's rhetoric) were not enough, the world's population now has to worry about where its next glass of water is coming from.
The Geek is sensitive about water since he lives in an area which is (at best) semi-arid. Not surprisingly he resonates with the problems surrounding acquiring sufficient clean water to meet basic requirements.
While the globe is mainly water, most of it is either (a)salty or (b) too concentrated in too few places. There are beaucoup losers in the water sweepstakes as a result of the inherent maldistribution of aquatic wealth.
Compounding the problem is the expense involved with capturing, purifying and distributing water to an increasingly urbanised world population. From the earliest days of urbanization down to the present time the provision of adequate water to a city's population has been a major financial challenge.
Of course one person's financial challenge is another person's financial opportunity. This brings into sharp focus the basic dilemma facing the crowd assembled in Istanbul for the Fifth World Water Forum.
The question at hand whether phrased this explicitly or not is this: Is access to water a basic human right akin to access to oxygen or is water a commodity access to which is predicated upon the user's capacity to pay?
In the US as in Europe and portions of Asia, Latin America, the Mideast and Africa, people are accustomed to the idea that the provision of water is a normal part of local government services. Water is or has been seen as readily available and modestly priced. Hardly anyone gives thought to the vast, complex and expensive infrastructure required to make sure that when the faucet is opened drinkable water flows out.
Only after a prolonged drought, the kind that ultimately results in restrictions on lawn watering or washing cars, does the average American think at all about water. Then it is usually with resentment toward those who seek to limit the right to green grass or shiny cars or sparkling pools in the backyard.
We forget (if we ever even knew) that water is required not only for mixing drinks, making coffee, or washing. It is the essential without which plants won't grow, cattle won't fatten and chickens won't lay. The wheels of industry (to use an old cliche) are lubricated with water not oil.
It is the agricultural and industrial usages of water which push the per capita consumption of the wet stuff to multiple hundreds of gallons throughout the developed countries. The centrality of water to economic well being even more than the cleanliness fetishes of the US and other countries constitutes the reason that our usage of water is so much greater than that of people in the lesser developed nations.
The commercial employment of water resources serves to further sharpen the basic question regarding the status of water: Is it a right or a commodity?
For the past two or three centuries the model of water as basic, cheap government service has performed very well in Europe and the US. Overall the US experience of the past 125 years has been exceptionally positive. Public health and economic well being alike have been enhanced enormously.
Our water supply in common with that of most of Europe reached such a level that we have been both worry free and wealthy enough to buy bottled water in oceanic quantities.
As we Americans surfed our way along the never ending wave of fresh, safe, (usually) good tasting water we have been willing to overlook some unpleasant realities. Water shortages are not limited to remote sections of the Sahel or desert metropoli such as Los Angles or Phoenix.
The great aquifers which run as slow moving vast rivers under the American Midwest are running dry. From the northern great plains to Texas the wells must go ever deeper and are ever more expensive. While not yet upon us, the potential of severe agricultural shortfalls and price increases is no longer lost in some far distant future.
The US is not alone in this situation. Consider China. The Chinese government undertook a large program of expanding cultivation in semi-arid lands in the north and west of the country. The idea was to tap underground water. This was done. As was predictable the demands to meet production quotas resulted in over pumping of the aquifers. These have been running dry for the past several years.
As a result China has had to go on the international market for basic commodities such as rice, wheat and corn. The "law" of supply and demand was invoked with the result that the prices paid by Americans for these commodities increased slightly but measurably.
The water-agriculture linkage is even more clearly seen in the Mideast. The assorted oil states cannot raise more than a small fraction of the food required to feed their population. The introduction of vastly expensive desalinization plants has in no way changed this fact.
The majority of Mideastern and Persian Gulf states have no choice but to import the majority, the overwhelming majority, of their food needs. Even Israel, which is a world leader in water conserving agricultural techniques, must either import food or water.
Turkey has put forward a scheme to export water to Israel. Turkey has an abundance of water, far more than its domestic requirements for all categories of use. From the perspective of Ankara it makes good sense to treat water as a commodity and sell it to any and all comers.
Dogan Altinbilek, the former head of the Turkey's General Directorate of State Hydraulic Works, is one of the developers of the sell-water-to-Israel plan. He sees it as a vital measure in the prevention of war. He has a point. A very good point. Israel's appetite for water has turned the Jordan River into a muddy ditch and dropped the level of the Dead Sea.
Buying water from Turkey is better than fighting for it with either or both Syria and Jordan. While the Turkish idea may have merit, would it not establish a potentially bad precedent?
The more water is treated as a commodity the more it will be a commodity. The slippery slope starts with the industrial and agricultural use of water. In these sectors the cost of the water can be factored into the final price of whatever is produced by its usage.
Historically water for agricultural and industrial use has been provided by either governmental owned and operated utilities or cooperatives. The costs have been low, often subsidised as is typically the case with American irrigation projects.
Introducing private sector vendors changes the nature as well as the scale of the game. It also greatly increases the risks to those dependent upon the private sector operator.
A fine example of the risk-enhancing nature of private operation of large scale water projects comes from the early experience in California's Imperial Valley. The irrigation which made agricultural prosperity possible in that region started as a private sector operation. The risks and costs grew too great. The private sector investors took their money elsewhere. The government, both state and federal, had to take over the system, improve it at general taxpayer expense and run it with tax payer subsidies for the benefit of the agricultural users.
Private corporations have no responsibilities other than providing a profit to stockholders. That's it. Period. There ain't no such critter as a "good corporate citizen." To assure a profit, corporations will cut services, raise prices, abandon projects.
Put together, these attributes of normal corporate behaviour assure that depending on the private sector for a constant supply of low cost water for either industrial or agricultural employment is a very risky affair--for the customers as well as anyone who relies on these customers for employment or products.
Experience in South America over the past decade shows that privatization of water utilities is a poor bet for residential or personal usage as well. Regardless of commitments, private owners of formerly governmental run water utilities have raised prices, cut quality, failed to improve infrastructure and generally behaved as if they had the people of the area by the short hairs. They did.
Once one leaves the rarefied realm of expensive bottled and specialty water or the narrow field of private, personal wells, the facts militate against the idea of water-as-commodity. This would seem to leave the field exclusively to the water-as-governmental-guaranteed-right alternative.
For the High Minded this seems self-evident. Other than oxygen, they argue, nothing is more essential to life itself than water. True. In principle.
But, there are a lot of places on the planet where there is no water. None falls from the sky. At least not dependably. Not predictably. Not enough in relation to the population. No water sits around in convenient rivers or lakes. Not even in ponds.
If there is water underground, it is deep. Expensive to tap. Expensive to pump. Even with the best of wills, a government cannot manufacture water.
Who is going to force a government to provide water? Who is going to provide the money and technical resources necessary to tap any (presumed) sub-surface water deposits?
Is some overarching body going to force a "water-rich" country such as Finland to provide low cost water to a "water-poor" country such as Mali? The UN? Some new entity--a Global Water Authority perhaps?
Right. Fer sure, dudes.
There are no easy, viable solutions for a very real problem. The problem is simple to state: There are too many people competing for too little water in much of the world.
The solution is not to be found in either the "market" or in some new global mechanism of coercion and control. The solution will require that one of two dynamics occur.
The first choice is that governments take their responsibilities for the well being of their citizens seriously, placing that above matters of personal ego, national ambition or ideological dictates.
The second option is a dramatic reduction in the number of people inhabiting the globe.
Either of these alternatives would require a miracle at least an order of magnitude greater than a mere Second Coming.
The Geek is sensitive about water since he lives in an area which is (at best) semi-arid. Not surprisingly he resonates with the problems surrounding acquiring sufficient clean water to meet basic requirements.
While the globe is mainly water, most of it is either (a)salty or (b) too concentrated in too few places. There are beaucoup losers in the water sweepstakes as a result of the inherent maldistribution of aquatic wealth.
Compounding the problem is the expense involved with capturing, purifying and distributing water to an increasingly urbanised world population. From the earliest days of urbanization down to the present time the provision of adequate water to a city's population has been a major financial challenge.
Of course one person's financial challenge is another person's financial opportunity. This brings into sharp focus the basic dilemma facing the crowd assembled in Istanbul for the Fifth World Water Forum.
The question at hand whether phrased this explicitly or not is this: Is access to water a basic human right akin to access to oxygen or is water a commodity access to which is predicated upon the user's capacity to pay?
In the US as in Europe and portions of Asia, Latin America, the Mideast and Africa, people are accustomed to the idea that the provision of water is a normal part of local government services. Water is or has been seen as readily available and modestly priced. Hardly anyone gives thought to the vast, complex and expensive infrastructure required to make sure that when the faucet is opened drinkable water flows out.
Only after a prolonged drought, the kind that ultimately results in restrictions on lawn watering or washing cars, does the average American think at all about water. Then it is usually with resentment toward those who seek to limit the right to green grass or shiny cars or sparkling pools in the backyard.
We forget (if we ever even knew) that water is required not only for mixing drinks, making coffee, or washing. It is the essential without which plants won't grow, cattle won't fatten and chickens won't lay. The wheels of industry (to use an old cliche) are lubricated with water not oil.
It is the agricultural and industrial usages of water which push the per capita consumption of the wet stuff to multiple hundreds of gallons throughout the developed countries. The centrality of water to economic well being even more than the cleanliness fetishes of the US and other countries constitutes the reason that our usage of water is so much greater than that of people in the lesser developed nations.
The commercial employment of water resources serves to further sharpen the basic question regarding the status of water: Is it a right or a commodity?
For the past two or three centuries the model of water as basic, cheap government service has performed very well in Europe and the US. Overall the US experience of the past 125 years has been exceptionally positive. Public health and economic well being alike have been enhanced enormously.
Our water supply in common with that of most of Europe reached such a level that we have been both worry free and wealthy enough to buy bottled water in oceanic quantities.
As we Americans surfed our way along the never ending wave of fresh, safe, (usually) good tasting water we have been willing to overlook some unpleasant realities. Water shortages are not limited to remote sections of the Sahel or desert metropoli such as Los Angles or Phoenix.
The great aquifers which run as slow moving vast rivers under the American Midwest are running dry. From the northern great plains to Texas the wells must go ever deeper and are ever more expensive. While not yet upon us, the potential of severe agricultural shortfalls and price increases is no longer lost in some far distant future.
The US is not alone in this situation. Consider China. The Chinese government undertook a large program of expanding cultivation in semi-arid lands in the north and west of the country. The idea was to tap underground water. This was done. As was predictable the demands to meet production quotas resulted in over pumping of the aquifers. These have been running dry for the past several years.
As a result China has had to go on the international market for basic commodities such as rice, wheat and corn. The "law" of supply and demand was invoked with the result that the prices paid by Americans for these commodities increased slightly but measurably.
The water-agriculture linkage is even more clearly seen in the Mideast. The assorted oil states cannot raise more than a small fraction of the food required to feed their population. The introduction of vastly expensive desalinization plants has in no way changed this fact.
The majority of Mideastern and Persian Gulf states have no choice but to import the majority, the overwhelming majority, of their food needs. Even Israel, which is a world leader in water conserving agricultural techniques, must either import food or water.
Turkey has put forward a scheme to export water to Israel. Turkey has an abundance of water, far more than its domestic requirements for all categories of use. From the perspective of Ankara it makes good sense to treat water as a commodity and sell it to any and all comers.
Dogan Altinbilek, the former head of the Turkey's General Directorate of State Hydraulic Works, is one of the developers of the sell-water-to-Israel plan. He sees it as a vital measure in the prevention of war. He has a point. A very good point. Israel's appetite for water has turned the Jordan River into a muddy ditch and dropped the level of the Dead Sea.
Buying water from Turkey is better than fighting for it with either or both Syria and Jordan. While the Turkish idea may have merit, would it not establish a potentially bad precedent?
The more water is treated as a commodity the more it will be a commodity. The slippery slope starts with the industrial and agricultural use of water. In these sectors the cost of the water can be factored into the final price of whatever is produced by its usage.
Historically water for agricultural and industrial use has been provided by either governmental owned and operated utilities or cooperatives. The costs have been low, often subsidised as is typically the case with American irrigation projects.
Introducing private sector vendors changes the nature as well as the scale of the game. It also greatly increases the risks to those dependent upon the private sector operator.
A fine example of the risk-enhancing nature of private operation of large scale water projects comes from the early experience in California's Imperial Valley. The irrigation which made agricultural prosperity possible in that region started as a private sector operation. The risks and costs grew too great. The private sector investors took their money elsewhere. The government, both state and federal, had to take over the system, improve it at general taxpayer expense and run it with tax payer subsidies for the benefit of the agricultural users.
Private corporations have no responsibilities other than providing a profit to stockholders. That's it. Period. There ain't no such critter as a "good corporate citizen." To assure a profit, corporations will cut services, raise prices, abandon projects.
Put together, these attributes of normal corporate behaviour assure that depending on the private sector for a constant supply of low cost water for either industrial or agricultural employment is a very risky affair--for the customers as well as anyone who relies on these customers for employment or products.
Experience in South America over the past decade shows that privatization of water utilities is a poor bet for residential or personal usage as well. Regardless of commitments, private owners of formerly governmental run water utilities have raised prices, cut quality, failed to improve infrastructure and generally behaved as if they had the people of the area by the short hairs. They did.
Once one leaves the rarefied realm of expensive bottled and specialty water or the narrow field of private, personal wells, the facts militate against the idea of water-as-commodity. This would seem to leave the field exclusively to the water-as-governmental-guaranteed-right alternative.
For the High Minded this seems self-evident. Other than oxygen, they argue, nothing is more essential to life itself than water. True. In principle.
But, there are a lot of places on the planet where there is no water. None falls from the sky. At least not dependably. Not predictably. Not enough in relation to the population. No water sits around in convenient rivers or lakes. Not even in ponds.
If there is water underground, it is deep. Expensive to tap. Expensive to pump. Even with the best of wills, a government cannot manufacture water.
Who is going to force a government to provide water? Who is going to provide the money and technical resources necessary to tap any (presumed) sub-surface water deposits?
Is some overarching body going to force a "water-rich" country such as Finland to provide low cost water to a "water-poor" country such as Mali? The UN? Some new entity--a Global Water Authority perhaps?
Right. Fer sure, dudes.
There are no easy, viable solutions for a very real problem. The problem is simple to state: There are too many people competing for too little water in much of the world.
The solution is not to be found in either the "market" or in some new global mechanism of coercion and control. The solution will require that one of two dynamics occur.
The first choice is that governments take their responsibilities for the well being of their citizens seriously, placing that above matters of personal ego, national ambition or ideological dictates.
The second option is a dramatic reduction in the number of people inhabiting the globe.
Either of these alternatives would require a miracle at least an order of magnitude greater than a mere Second Coming.
Monday, March 16, 2009
Could Cheney Be Right? Say It Ain't So!
Former Veep and Eternal Prince of Darkness Dick Cheney was on CNN's "State of the Union" show yesterday. He rendered an animadversion.
Specifically he charged the Obama administration with "de-escalating" the American efforts at counter terrorism from the war status it had during the Bush years to one of "law enforcement" such as had obtained during the Clinton period. While the Dick-man was making a particular reference to the more-or-less cosmetic changes introduced by the Obama people such as dropping the term "enemy combatants," Cheney's stance opens the door on a larger issue.
That issue is rather the hippo in the bathroom. It is not simply a matter of definition. No. The issue is one of strategy, tactics, the organisation and deployment of resources. And, it represents how an administration either does or does not effectively develop and maintain political will within We the People.
Put simply the issue is this. When an act of terror occurs or is detected prior to occurrence what does the man in the Oval do? Call the cops? Or, say to cabinet, Congress and public, "You realise this means war."
To put the question a little differently (and more realistically,) what are the criteria for parsing between the two potential responses--call the cops vs send the Marines--when any specific act of actual or intended terror is detected?
There is an axiom implied in these questions. Terror is a tactic so multi-faceted, so open as to goals and methods, so widely available to individuals and entities both foreign and domestic that no one-size-fits-all response is possible. Neither is one desirable. Nor will any universal application response actually be effective.
Herein lies both the flaw and the challenge of Cheney's accusation that the "de-escalation" to "law enforcement" has made the American public more likely to experience another terror attack in the near future.
The reason for this assessment resides in the historical record. (Big surprise there, eh?)
The American experience with "modern" terrorism can be conveniently and accurately dated to the first attack on the World Trade Center in February 1993. The off-shore dimension of this attack was known even before plot turned to the reality of death and fear shortly after noon on 26 February.
The FBI had the services of an undercover operative who had penetrated the terrorist cell long before H-hour. But, in some sort of institutional snit the responsible manager forced the asset to quit his task.
When the Clinton administration took a look at the attack and what was known about the attackers, the Deep Thinkers of the day had sufficient information to justify either the call-the-cops option or the send-the-Marines alternative. It comes as no surprise that the lawyer President and the coterie of lawyers who surrounded him opted for calling the cops, or to err on the side of accuracy, relying upon the FBI and Justice Department to arrest and convict the criminals.
This decision could be and was justified on several grounds. First, the bombing of the WTC was a Federal crime. Second, the FBI had the investigatory background to move quickly and effectively to take down some of the lesser participants. Third, by trivialising the bombing as some sort of street crime, the Administration effectively limited the terror.
Finally there was an unstated justification. Treating the bombing as a criminal matter of concern only to domestic authorities meant there were no foreign policy complications. This was important given that the plot originated in Egypt.
There were some very real disadvantages to the course of action chosen by Clinton. By giving the FBI pride of place the opportunity to fully develop the off-shore links was attenuated to say the least. Also the choice undercut the chance for the US to gain a firmer understanding of the new terror oriented Islamist group, al-Qaeda which was emerging from the haze of the Gulf War. Finally, the decision by the Clinton administration gave up any realistic chance of early, low intensity diplomatic arm twisting on Saudi Arabia, Yemen, and other governments having an involvement with the new threat.
These were not the worst consequences of the Clinton decision. The worst effects were those of precedent. The administration, public opinion molders and We the People alike were encouraged by the misleading success of arresting and convicting some of the participants in the bombing to believe that the law enforcement model was a sovereign remedy for terrorism in all its forms. Americans accepted wholeheartedly the idea that arrest-and-trial was infinitely preferable and more effective in countering terrorism than the alternative of waging war in the Israeli fashion against it.
This comforting notion was reinforced by the "successful" application of arrest-and-trial following the vehicle bombing of the Murrah Federal Building in Oklahoma City twenty-six months later. The narrative as presented by the government was simple, straight forward and quite satisfying--as long as it wasn't examined closely.
The narrative? Two of life's total losers, a failed Special Forces wannabe and a equally failed farmer got together in a right wing nut conspiracy and fabricated a highly lethal vehicle bomb which caused some 165 fatalities. End of story.
Like Lee Harvey Oswald, the two OK City bombers were lone wolves without external support who acted out some sort of dark fantasy. That's all, folks, nothing to see. Move along.
To accept this narrative all that is necessary is to ignore a couple of very inconvenient facts. Example? Terry Nichols resembles the sketch of John Doe #2 about as well as Chuck Norris looks like Brittany Spears.
Want more? According to the government's star witness the only time McVeigh tried to make a bomb before 19 April 1995, it fizzled.
Not enough? According to both US and Philippine government records Terry Nichols was in Davao City on Mindinao at the same time as Ramzi Yousef, the man behind the WTC bomb as well as other heavies from al-Qaeda.
While there is no direct evidence of any connection between Nichols or McVeigh and Yousef in the open sources, the record shows reason for further investigation. Suffice it to say that criminal trials are well known to be less than satisfactory venues for uncovering truth--particularly those truths which are either inconvenient or add undesired complexity.
But, high profile trials are fine mechanisms for assuaging public fears and reinforcing the appearance of governmental efficiency. The trials of Ramzi Yousef and others fit the bill perfectly. Again with the caveat that one does not look too closely at the reality behind the arrest-and-trial scenario.
Ramzi Yousef was a brilliant bomb maker. He was equally skilled at operational conceptualization. It was Yousef who designed the bomb and timer combination which would have been employed to drop a dozen US airliners over the Pacific ocean had chance not intervened. It was Yousef's design which may very well have been responsible for the downing of TWA 800 on 17 July 1996. (Pace, NTSB, but there are more holes in your hypothesis of electrical sparks in the center fuel tank than there were in flight 800 after it hit the water.)
Ramzi Yousef finally found himself in US custody as a result of accident, the actions of one determined Filipino cop, the determination of one man at the State Department's Security Service, and the decision of one man to rat out Ramzi. Intrepid spooks and shrewd FBI detective work had nothing to do with it. It was not American law enforcement at its finest, but none of those unpleasant realities were allowed to confuse the government's narrative at the time of Yousef's trial and conviction.
In short, one after another, the failures of the arrest-and-trial model were swept aside, ignored and expunged from public consideration. Instead, all was portrayed as being well in the contest between American justice and foreign terrorists.
The weakness or irrelevancy of the call-the-cops approach was dramatically illustrated on 7 August 1998 when vehicle bombs exploded nearly simultaneously at the US embassies in Nairobi and Dar es Salaam killing 234 and injuring more than 5,000. An attack on an embassy is the legal equivalent of an attack on home soil.
Even if the Clinton administration could paint the earlier bombing of the Khobar Towers residential facility in Saudi Arabia as an isolated act by Saudis hostile to the continued American presence in the Land of the Two Mosques, it was much harder to pretend that the embassy attacks were other than an act of war. But old habits, a love of seemingly successful precedent, to say nothing of a visceral fear and loathing of matters involving the military and war, kept the Clintonites to the law enforcement model.
Considering that al-Qaeda operators were willing, even eager to embark on suicide operations, the potential of eventual arrest and trial were not at all inhibitory. The lack of fixed, high value physical facilities meant that the sporadic Clinton authorised pretense of a warlike response--a few Tomahawks blowing up mud huts or the odd unused factory in Sudan had neither deterrent nor punitive effect.
The final Clinton adventure in defending the nation through law enforcement came on 12 October 2000. Most people well oriented as to time and place would consider an attack upon a warship to be an act of war. (For the historically challenged, it might be remembered that the ambiguous sinking of the USS Maine in Havana harbor a little over a century earlier had ignited irrepressible war fever in We the People.)
The Clinton administration declined to send the Marines or even the 82nd Airborne. Instead the US dispatched a slew of Feebs under the command of the aggressive and abrasive John O'Neil. Even with this less than robust response to armed and lethal attack on a US Navy ship, the administration did not show internal coherence.
The US Ambassador, Barbara Bodine, (who had earlier opposed the reward program directed at the arrest of Ramzi Yousef) now opposed O'Neil and his Special Agents. Presumably with the knowledge and support of the SecState, Ms Bodine went so far as to deny O'Neil a visa for his return to Yemen following a briefing visit to Washington.
With the (quite reluctant and incomplete) cooperation of Yemeni authorities, several surviving members of the al-Qaeda cell were identified. But that was all. There were no immediate arrests and consequent show trials.
The new administration of Bush and Cheney were no more eager to mount out against al-Qaeda then were the lawyerly types of the Clinton years. The macho bunch surrounding the "Decider Guy" were far more pecker up over anti-ballistic missiles and "shock and awe" oriented improvements in the military than they were about a bunch of scruffy Islamist jihadists lurking in camps in Afghanistan.
With a tunnel vision equalling that of the US civilian and military high command back in the Fall of 1941, the Bush-Cheney administration assumed--that's right, assumed--al-Qaeda et al could and would attack only overseas. The intelligence catch necessary to get a firm grip on reality was all there. What was lacking in the summer of 2001 was what had been absent sixty years earlier. The historically based contextual understanding to realise that both intents and capacities were far more far reaching than was thought.
In 1941 commanders and decision makers alike failed to realise that historically Japan had opened war with a surprise attack on the enemy's center of naval power. In 2001 the commanders and decision makers failed to realise that al-Qaeda had made its intentions clear--an attack on the symbolic centers of American power.
In 1941 the commanders and decision makers had undervalued the Japanese capacities with carrier based aviation despite all available evidence. Sixty years later the people occupying the same seats of power undervalued the capacities of al-Qaeda, again despite all available evidence.
Arguably the overwhelming evidence was not marshaled in a compelling form because of the arrest-and-trial orientation which had prevailed over the previous decade. A law enforcement agency's use of intelligence catch is markedly different from the way in which the same catch is assessed and assembled by a war oriented department.
Bluntly, the law enforcement approach had failed. Failed spectacularly.
To that extent Cheney's characterization of any presumed Obama administration "de-escalation" to the methods of the Clinton years is accurate.
Arguably, the warfighting approach to terrorism undertaken by a non-state actor is correct. But, and this is the usual very big but, the way in which the Bush-Cheney administration elected to wage war was not only wrong, it was completely counterproductive.
"Shock and awe" in Afghanistan has been, as was predicted by specialists in interventionary operations, a text book case of how-not-to-win. It has even been a text for how-to-make-the-enemy-the-unintended-winner.
The war in Iraq regardless of whatever good may have accrued to the Iraqis was a diversion at best. An unnecessary diversion. At worst it served to improve the position of the Islamist jihadists generally.
To put the matter bluntly, warfighting in the wrong way or in the wrong place is even worse than calling the cops. Unless Cheney can bring himself to realise this ground truth, his criticism of the Obama "de-escalation" is fatuous.
Terrorism is both a law enforcement and a warfighting concern. Terrorism which is totally domestic in nature falls in the law enforcement sphere. Terrorism which has any foreign dimension belongs properly in the purview of the warfighters and their cohorts in the foreign intelligence services.
From the opening act in 1993 to the bitter final curtain of 9/11 the events of the first decade of direct US experience with Islamist jihadist terror constituted a period of undeclared, unrecognised war. Unlike earlier acts of terror whether committed by anarchists, white supremacists, or Puerto Rican separatists were domestic acts. They were subject to effective law enforcement.
Those of recent vintage including the Oklahoma City bombing and the questionable crash of TWA 800 were acts of war. We didn't call the cops following Pearl Harbor. We shouldn't have called them after any of the attacks of the Nineties.
Specifically he charged the Obama administration with "de-escalating" the American efforts at counter terrorism from the war status it had during the Bush years to one of "law enforcement" such as had obtained during the Clinton period. While the Dick-man was making a particular reference to the more-or-less cosmetic changes introduced by the Obama people such as dropping the term "enemy combatants," Cheney's stance opens the door on a larger issue.
That issue is rather the hippo in the bathroom. It is not simply a matter of definition. No. The issue is one of strategy, tactics, the organisation and deployment of resources. And, it represents how an administration either does or does not effectively develop and maintain political will within We the People.
Put simply the issue is this. When an act of terror occurs or is detected prior to occurrence what does the man in the Oval do? Call the cops? Or, say to cabinet, Congress and public, "You realise this means war."
To put the question a little differently (and more realistically,) what are the criteria for parsing between the two potential responses--call the cops vs send the Marines--when any specific act of actual or intended terror is detected?
There is an axiom implied in these questions. Terror is a tactic so multi-faceted, so open as to goals and methods, so widely available to individuals and entities both foreign and domestic that no one-size-fits-all response is possible. Neither is one desirable. Nor will any universal application response actually be effective.
Herein lies both the flaw and the challenge of Cheney's accusation that the "de-escalation" to "law enforcement" has made the American public more likely to experience another terror attack in the near future.
The reason for this assessment resides in the historical record. (Big surprise there, eh?)
The American experience with "modern" terrorism can be conveniently and accurately dated to the first attack on the World Trade Center in February 1993. The off-shore dimension of this attack was known even before plot turned to the reality of death and fear shortly after noon on 26 February.
The FBI had the services of an undercover operative who had penetrated the terrorist cell long before H-hour. But, in some sort of institutional snit the responsible manager forced the asset to quit his task.
When the Clinton administration took a look at the attack and what was known about the attackers, the Deep Thinkers of the day had sufficient information to justify either the call-the-cops option or the send-the-Marines alternative. It comes as no surprise that the lawyer President and the coterie of lawyers who surrounded him opted for calling the cops, or to err on the side of accuracy, relying upon the FBI and Justice Department to arrest and convict the criminals.
This decision could be and was justified on several grounds. First, the bombing of the WTC was a Federal crime. Second, the FBI had the investigatory background to move quickly and effectively to take down some of the lesser participants. Third, by trivialising the bombing as some sort of street crime, the Administration effectively limited the terror.
Finally there was an unstated justification. Treating the bombing as a criminal matter of concern only to domestic authorities meant there were no foreign policy complications. This was important given that the plot originated in Egypt.
There were some very real disadvantages to the course of action chosen by Clinton. By giving the FBI pride of place the opportunity to fully develop the off-shore links was attenuated to say the least. Also the choice undercut the chance for the US to gain a firmer understanding of the new terror oriented Islamist group, al-Qaeda which was emerging from the haze of the Gulf War. Finally, the decision by the Clinton administration gave up any realistic chance of early, low intensity diplomatic arm twisting on Saudi Arabia, Yemen, and other governments having an involvement with the new threat.
These were not the worst consequences of the Clinton decision. The worst effects were those of precedent. The administration, public opinion molders and We the People alike were encouraged by the misleading success of arresting and convicting some of the participants in the bombing to believe that the law enforcement model was a sovereign remedy for terrorism in all its forms. Americans accepted wholeheartedly the idea that arrest-and-trial was infinitely preferable and more effective in countering terrorism than the alternative of waging war in the Israeli fashion against it.
This comforting notion was reinforced by the "successful" application of arrest-and-trial following the vehicle bombing of the Murrah Federal Building in Oklahoma City twenty-six months later. The narrative as presented by the government was simple, straight forward and quite satisfying--as long as it wasn't examined closely.
The narrative? Two of life's total losers, a failed Special Forces wannabe and a equally failed farmer got together in a right wing nut conspiracy and fabricated a highly lethal vehicle bomb which caused some 165 fatalities. End of story.
Like Lee Harvey Oswald, the two OK City bombers were lone wolves without external support who acted out some sort of dark fantasy. That's all, folks, nothing to see. Move along.
To accept this narrative all that is necessary is to ignore a couple of very inconvenient facts. Example? Terry Nichols resembles the sketch of John Doe #2 about as well as Chuck Norris looks like Brittany Spears.
Want more? According to the government's star witness the only time McVeigh tried to make a bomb before 19 April 1995, it fizzled.
Not enough? According to both US and Philippine government records Terry Nichols was in Davao City on Mindinao at the same time as Ramzi Yousef, the man behind the WTC bomb as well as other heavies from al-Qaeda.
While there is no direct evidence of any connection between Nichols or McVeigh and Yousef in the open sources, the record shows reason for further investigation. Suffice it to say that criminal trials are well known to be less than satisfactory venues for uncovering truth--particularly those truths which are either inconvenient or add undesired complexity.
But, high profile trials are fine mechanisms for assuaging public fears and reinforcing the appearance of governmental efficiency. The trials of Ramzi Yousef and others fit the bill perfectly. Again with the caveat that one does not look too closely at the reality behind the arrest-and-trial scenario.
Ramzi Yousef was a brilliant bomb maker. He was equally skilled at operational conceptualization. It was Yousef who designed the bomb and timer combination which would have been employed to drop a dozen US airliners over the Pacific ocean had chance not intervened. It was Yousef's design which may very well have been responsible for the downing of TWA 800 on 17 July 1996. (Pace, NTSB, but there are more holes in your hypothesis of electrical sparks in the center fuel tank than there were in flight 800 after it hit the water.)
Ramzi Yousef finally found himself in US custody as a result of accident, the actions of one determined Filipino cop, the determination of one man at the State Department's Security Service, and the decision of one man to rat out Ramzi. Intrepid spooks and shrewd FBI detective work had nothing to do with it. It was not American law enforcement at its finest, but none of those unpleasant realities were allowed to confuse the government's narrative at the time of Yousef's trial and conviction.
In short, one after another, the failures of the arrest-and-trial model were swept aside, ignored and expunged from public consideration. Instead, all was portrayed as being well in the contest between American justice and foreign terrorists.
The weakness or irrelevancy of the call-the-cops approach was dramatically illustrated on 7 August 1998 when vehicle bombs exploded nearly simultaneously at the US embassies in Nairobi and Dar es Salaam killing 234 and injuring more than 5,000. An attack on an embassy is the legal equivalent of an attack on home soil.
Even if the Clinton administration could paint the earlier bombing of the Khobar Towers residential facility in Saudi Arabia as an isolated act by Saudis hostile to the continued American presence in the Land of the Two Mosques, it was much harder to pretend that the embassy attacks were other than an act of war. But old habits, a love of seemingly successful precedent, to say nothing of a visceral fear and loathing of matters involving the military and war, kept the Clintonites to the law enforcement model.
Considering that al-Qaeda operators were willing, even eager to embark on suicide operations, the potential of eventual arrest and trial were not at all inhibitory. The lack of fixed, high value physical facilities meant that the sporadic Clinton authorised pretense of a warlike response--a few Tomahawks blowing up mud huts or the odd unused factory in Sudan had neither deterrent nor punitive effect.
The final Clinton adventure in defending the nation through law enforcement came on 12 October 2000. Most people well oriented as to time and place would consider an attack upon a warship to be an act of war. (For the historically challenged, it might be remembered that the ambiguous sinking of the USS Maine in Havana harbor a little over a century earlier had ignited irrepressible war fever in We the People.)
The Clinton administration declined to send the Marines or even the 82nd Airborne. Instead the US dispatched a slew of Feebs under the command of the aggressive and abrasive John O'Neil. Even with this less than robust response to armed and lethal attack on a US Navy ship, the administration did not show internal coherence.
The US Ambassador, Barbara Bodine, (who had earlier opposed the reward program directed at the arrest of Ramzi Yousef) now opposed O'Neil and his Special Agents. Presumably with the knowledge and support of the SecState, Ms Bodine went so far as to deny O'Neil a visa for his return to Yemen following a briefing visit to Washington.
With the (quite reluctant and incomplete) cooperation of Yemeni authorities, several surviving members of the al-Qaeda cell were identified. But that was all. There were no immediate arrests and consequent show trials.
The new administration of Bush and Cheney were no more eager to mount out against al-Qaeda then were the lawyerly types of the Clinton years. The macho bunch surrounding the "Decider Guy" were far more pecker up over anti-ballistic missiles and "shock and awe" oriented improvements in the military than they were about a bunch of scruffy Islamist jihadists lurking in camps in Afghanistan.
With a tunnel vision equalling that of the US civilian and military high command back in the Fall of 1941, the Bush-Cheney administration assumed--that's right, assumed--al-Qaeda et al could and would attack only overseas. The intelligence catch necessary to get a firm grip on reality was all there. What was lacking in the summer of 2001 was what had been absent sixty years earlier. The historically based contextual understanding to realise that both intents and capacities were far more far reaching than was thought.
In 1941 commanders and decision makers alike failed to realise that historically Japan had opened war with a surprise attack on the enemy's center of naval power. In 2001 the commanders and decision makers failed to realise that al-Qaeda had made its intentions clear--an attack on the symbolic centers of American power.
In 1941 the commanders and decision makers had undervalued the Japanese capacities with carrier based aviation despite all available evidence. Sixty years later the people occupying the same seats of power undervalued the capacities of al-Qaeda, again despite all available evidence.
Arguably the overwhelming evidence was not marshaled in a compelling form because of the arrest-and-trial orientation which had prevailed over the previous decade. A law enforcement agency's use of intelligence catch is markedly different from the way in which the same catch is assessed and assembled by a war oriented department.
Bluntly, the law enforcement approach had failed. Failed spectacularly.
To that extent Cheney's characterization of any presumed Obama administration "de-escalation" to the methods of the Clinton years is accurate.
Arguably, the warfighting approach to terrorism undertaken by a non-state actor is correct. But, and this is the usual very big but, the way in which the Bush-Cheney administration elected to wage war was not only wrong, it was completely counterproductive.
"Shock and awe" in Afghanistan has been, as was predicted by specialists in interventionary operations, a text book case of how-not-to-win. It has even been a text for how-to-make-the-enemy-the-unintended-winner.
The war in Iraq regardless of whatever good may have accrued to the Iraqis was a diversion at best. An unnecessary diversion. At worst it served to improve the position of the Islamist jihadists generally.
To put the matter bluntly, warfighting in the wrong way or in the wrong place is even worse than calling the cops. Unless Cheney can bring himself to realise this ground truth, his criticism of the Obama "de-escalation" is fatuous.
Terrorism is both a law enforcement and a warfighting concern. Terrorism which is totally domestic in nature falls in the law enforcement sphere. Terrorism which has any foreign dimension belongs properly in the purview of the warfighters and their cohorts in the foreign intelligence services.
From the opening act in 1993 to the bitter final curtain of 9/11 the events of the first decade of direct US experience with Islamist jihadist terror constituted a period of undeclared, unrecognised war. Unlike earlier acts of terror whether committed by anarchists, white supremacists, or Puerto Rican separatists were domestic acts. They were subject to effective law enforcement.
Those of recent vintage including the Oklahoma City bombing and the questionable crash of TWA 800 were acts of war. We didn't call the cops following Pearl Harbor. We shouldn't have called them after any of the attacks of the Nineties.
Saturday, March 14, 2009
Who Should Protect Civilians?
War used to be a simple business. Armies fought each other. The ideal, as expressed by Frederick the Great, was to fight so that "the merchant in his counting house and the farmer in his field didn't know the war was in progress."
"Them were the Good Old Days," the Geek sighs. The long ago, long gone days of limited war.
The American War Between the States pointed at the future. Specifically, Sherman's March to the Sea targeted the civilian population in order to sap the political will of Confederate forces and government alike to continue the war. While the "atrocities" committed by Billy's Bummers were exaggerated at the time as well as by later generations of historians, the fact remains that his strategic concept worked.
Bill Sherman apparently had, in the words of Lincoln Steffens, "been over to the future--and it works."
Appearances can be quite misleading. Therein lies the rub.
Technological changes made the waging of war directly on civilian populations more attractive. It did not, as the results of the "round-the-clock" and "worker dehousing" efforts of the US and British air forces demonstrated, make civilian targeting more effective.
It can be fairly argued from the experiences of both World Wars that in the case of total war of national survival, attacks on civilian populations do not undercut the political will of the targeted country sufficiently to bring victory in their wake. The best avenue to victory is the progressive reduction of the enemy's material capacity to wage war.
A close examination of inter-state war between opponents of equal levels of military technology and parity in social and economic organisational complexity shows that the way to victory is the combination of destroying the enemy's forces in the field and his infrastructure's capacity to maintain the war. Kill his soldiers and ruin his industry.
Since civilians have the annoying habit of littering the potential battlefield with farms, villages and cities, it is hard to avoid killing them in the process of going after gun toters and the factories which make the guns and bullets. As a result several approaches have been undertaken over the years to limit civilian damage and death.
The most commonly invoked of these is the doctrine of proportionality. Much beloved by the tender-minded adherents of "just war" philosophy, this doctrine requires that the level and scope of violence employed must not be disproportionate to the military advantage sought. Of course, this is an exceptionally subjective matter requiring judgments as to the appropriateness of the violence and the nature and value of the military advantage.
Another, far less commonly employed but far more pragmatic approach is that of placing responsibility for the defense and protection of civilians upon the government and military force of the target country. At the very least this requires that a government or an entity seeking to act as a government not emplace its military forces or equipment in a civilian context.
When the North Vietnamese government placed critical military facilities such as air defense missile batteries next to hospitals or deep in civilian population centers, the US government responded with a self-defeating action. LBJ ordered that US forces not attack these facilities. In short, the US took on the responsibility of protecting the civilian population of an enemy country. This wrong headed move allowed the North Vietnamese government to enjoy a significant military advantage by having willfully and deliberately placed its citizens at risk.
The problems associated with limiting civilian fatalities become even more complex in internal warfare (insurgency and its partner, counterinsurgency,) interventionary operations and the general category "asymmetrical warfare." The complications all arise from the fact that in this type of war the critical terrain is that comprised by the collective mind of the civilian population of the target area.
Internal wars, interventionary operations and asymmetrical conflicts can be distinguished from conventional inter-state wars by one critical factor. While conventional wars can be seen as real-estate deals, the internal war and its close relatives cannot. The internal war type is best understood as being a contest for the support--or at least the passive acceptance--of one contestant but not the other.
The key to success (or victory if you prefer the more robust term)is the attitude of the uncommitted majority of the target area's population. Each contender in the war wants to assure at the least that the uncommitted majority does not migrate to the other side. At the most each side wants to mobilize a greater percentage of the uncommitted majority to his side.
Far more than conventional inter-state wars, the internal war and its relatives constitutes a fight over human terrain. The civilian is the target. Even when one is busy killing enemy trigger pullers, the overarching goal is to rally support to one's side, or, at the necessary very least, prevent the enemy from gaining greater sympathy and active support from the people in the middle.
As a result of this fundamental reality both sides in an internal war will intentionally target civilians with lethal intent. Insurgents use terror. Counterinsurgents use it as well. Interventionary forces may not go after the folks in the middle with intent, but bombs, shells, bullets hit flesh without distinction.
It is (or should be) no big shock that civilians are at great risk. A very close look at civilian deaths resulting as a direct consequence of military actions in World War II shows that somewhat more died than did soldiers.
The disparity between military and civilian deaths resulting from either military actions or the lethal consequences of deliberate policy is orders of magnitude greater in the internal war. The historical record of internal and interventionary warfare in the 20th and (so far) in the 21st centuries demonstrates that one is far safer to be a shooter in the field than a civilian in the local market, a gunship pilot than an elementary school teacher.
In short, the doctrine of proportionality is as dead as Fredrick the Great's formulation.
There are two reasons for this conclusion. The first has already been laid out. The second is just as important and nearly never formally recognised. In every internal war and in many, if not most interventionary operations, the war is existential.
At the end of the war, only one side will still be standing in somewhat recognisable form. Unless and until a climate of pervasive war weariness sets in, the belligerents wil pursue total victory. Insurgent and counterinsurgent are joined at the hip in that each holds the same idea: victory or death. Internal war is total war.
With stakes this high and the collective mind of the uncommitted civilian majority being the crucial battleground, it should be not at all surprising that civilians are killed in job lots. That's the nature of this kind of war whether anyone likes the idea or not.
Here's the wrinkle. It's one which will tickle the innards of anyone who delights in irony.
Civilians do not like to get killed whether its in the crossfire or by deliberate intent. Also, civilians hate (that term is used advisedly) the side which kills them and not the government or governmental wannabe which fails to protect them.
(This not hard to understand dynamic explains why German and Japanese political will and dedication to the government increased as the weight of Allied bombs increased.)
This fact suggests two important strategic and tactical considerations. The first is that one's chances of victory increase if the responsibility for civilian deaths and general misery can be foisted off on the other side. The second is that few, if any, of the many, many belligerents in the many, many internal wars of the past century have recognised this.
Sherman's brilliant (and it was that, brilliant) strategic concept arose organically from the nature and character of social and familial dynamics in the Confederate states. It was brilliant in that time and place. It was not a universally applicable sovereign recipe for victory.
Ironically, the side which kills the fewest is the side which is most likely to gain support from the uncommitted majority. It is the side most likely to win.
This implies two tactical considerations must be observed. The first is to limit the killing be it advertant or accidental of civilians. That is self-evident. The second consideration is less obvious. It is important that the enemy be frustrated to the extent that he starts killing civilians in an attempt to terrorise his way to greater support and therefore victory.
In Iraq the insurgents of all stripes were forced by the results of the American escalation of ground troops to resort to terror tactics with a very large and highly visible body count. The more the insurgents killed the more actual and potential support they lost. Conversely, when the Americans got better at using their overwhelming firepower in a discriminating way, the more the uncommitted drifted to the government side.
The same dynamic has been evident in Afghanistan. A couple of years ago Taliban shifted from failed attacks on hard targets to a series of very high-vis soft target suicide bombings which caused significant civilian casualties. This was a misguided attempt to undercut the perceived legitimacy of the Karzai government.
As a consequence (clearly unintended by Taliban but quite predictable from the historical experience) civilians rushed to the Karzai government and its foreign supporters. Unfortunately, the US ended the campaign by killing its director.
Following this, a series of American airstrikes created a number of civilian corpses. The consequence (unintended by the American commanders but again drearily predictable from the historically informed) was a swell of hostility directed at Karzai and his foreign supporters.
In Sri Lanka the process is again at work. For at least the fifth time the government seems on the verge of victory against the remarkably persistent and come-back-from-the-grave Tamil Tiger insurgency. The Tigers are confined to a very small portion of Sri Lanka. The Tigers have resorted to forcing civilians to stay in harm's way as a species of human shield.
The government has decreed the existence of a "safety zone" in which fugitive Tamils can seek sanctuary. The Tigers have responded by killing civilians who attempt to reach the sanctuary area.
While the Sri Lankan government and its military on a few occasions shelled the "safety zone," the primary onus for responsibility has been correctly placed on the Tigers. The current trajectory bodes well to produce peace in Sri Lanka for the first time in more than twenty years.
Unless...
Unless outsiders huff and puff too much. The UN High Commissioner for Human Rights, Navi Pillay is bloviating at length alleging that the Sri Lankan government as well as the Tigers are possibly guilty of war crimes and crimes against humanity. The government has vigorously denied this accusation. The Tigers remain silent.
Perhaps the UN High Commissioner for Human Rights feels underemployed given that there are so few governments and non-governmental actors currently abusing human rights today. In any event the war in Sri Lanka will come to an end sooner if the government is allowed to continue its (at long last) successful campaign against the Tigers. It will come to an end sooner if the tail of civilian deaths is pinned on the Tiger.
If Ms Pillay doesn't get over her snit with counterinsurgency Sri Lankan style, a bad potential comes into view. The UN and its High Minded Lofty Thinking cohorts may come to believe that it is their exclusive mission to "protect" civilians wherever an internal war exists.
By its very nature internal war requires civilian death and wretchedness. The limiting factor to this unfortunate reality is defined by the ending of the war. Period. The faster the war comes to an end the fewer civilians will die. The quicker the war ends the fewer will be the number of displaced persons, refugees huddling in miserable camps operated and maintained by the High Minded.
An internal war will end most quickly when one side recognises that it is necessary to intentionally limit death and misery. It will end most quickly when one side understands the necessity of maneuvering its opposition into having responsibility for death and displacement among the uncommitted majority.
Outsiders including the UN have a role to play in limiting civilian deaths. It is incumbent upon the international community generally and any intervenors in the war more particularly to insist that the governmental entities have sole responsibility for protecting civilians under its sway.
The test case for this contention is the Gaza Strip. So far the outsiders of the world have failed the test. The responsibility for protecting the civilian population of the Strip resides solely with Hamas.
Hamas is the de facto government of Gaza. It has a minimal obligation to protect its population. At the absolute least Hamas must refrain from co-locating offensive weaponry with mosques, schools and hospitals. As the imagery demonstrates beyond any rational, reasonable doubt, Hamas has failed completely in this duty.
Hamas gun thugs and rocket shooters placed themselves and their lethal equipment in the midst of civilian heavy locations. They employed human shields in the most crass and cynical manner. Hamas was even worse than the Tamil Tigers in that regard.
Now the ever-so-indignant-and-concerned High Commissioner and her human rights coterie seem hell-bent on performing a replay in Sri Lanka. When will the ambitious High Commissioner seek to do the same in Afghanistan? Iraq?
One hopes the answer is "never." The alternative, the involvement, the threats of prosecution in the International Criminal Court will be counterproductive. Ironically, (and the Geek loves the taste of irony almost as much as chocolate) the consequence of any High Minded involvement will be to prolong the war and increase the net amount of human misery and death.
Internal war has its own logic--a grim and terrible logic to be sure--and we must all get a grip on that. That requires that we accept the necessity of civilian death and seek to limit the number of corpses using the logic of internal war itself. That implies we must both recognise and use the right tactics. Not kill civilians. Place the onus for civilian deaths on the opposition. Insist that governments and insurgent entities with de facto control of an area take the sole responsibility for protecting the population.
The logic of internal war correctly fought and not the UN High Commissioner for Human Rights or the International Criminal Court or the High Minded generally are the last, best hope of the people caught in the middle.
"Them were the Good Old Days," the Geek sighs. The long ago, long gone days of limited war.
The American War Between the States pointed at the future. Specifically, Sherman's March to the Sea targeted the civilian population in order to sap the political will of Confederate forces and government alike to continue the war. While the "atrocities" committed by Billy's Bummers were exaggerated at the time as well as by later generations of historians, the fact remains that his strategic concept worked.
Bill Sherman apparently had, in the words of Lincoln Steffens, "been over to the future--and it works."
Appearances can be quite misleading. Therein lies the rub.
Technological changes made the waging of war directly on civilian populations more attractive. It did not, as the results of the "round-the-clock" and "worker dehousing" efforts of the US and British air forces demonstrated, make civilian targeting more effective.
It can be fairly argued from the experiences of both World Wars that in the case of total war of national survival, attacks on civilian populations do not undercut the political will of the targeted country sufficiently to bring victory in their wake. The best avenue to victory is the progressive reduction of the enemy's material capacity to wage war.
A close examination of inter-state war between opponents of equal levels of military technology and parity in social and economic organisational complexity shows that the way to victory is the combination of destroying the enemy's forces in the field and his infrastructure's capacity to maintain the war. Kill his soldiers and ruin his industry.
Since civilians have the annoying habit of littering the potential battlefield with farms, villages and cities, it is hard to avoid killing them in the process of going after gun toters and the factories which make the guns and bullets. As a result several approaches have been undertaken over the years to limit civilian damage and death.
The most commonly invoked of these is the doctrine of proportionality. Much beloved by the tender-minded adherents of "just war" philosophy, this doctrine requires that the level and scope of violence employed must not be disproportionate to the military advantage sought. Of course, this is an exceptionally subjective matter requiring judgments as to the appropriateness of the violence and the nature and value of the military advantage.
Another, far less commonly employed but far more pragmatic approach is that of placing responsibility for the defense and protection of civilians upon the government and military force of the target country. At the very least this requires that a government or an entity seeking to act as a government not emplace its military forces or equipment in a civilian context.
When the North Vietnamese government placed critical military facilities such as air defense missile batteries next to hospitals or deep in civilian population centers, the US government responded with a self-defeating action. LBJ ordered that US forces not attack these facilities. In short, the US took on the responsibility of protecting the civilian population of an enemy country. This wrong headed move allowed the North Vietnamese government to enjoy a significant military advantage by having willfully and deliberately placed its citizens at risk.
The problems associated with limiting civilian fatalities become even more complex in internal warfare (insurgency and its partner, counterinsurgency,) interventionary operations and the general category "asymmetrical warfare." The complications all arise from the fact that in this type of war the critical terrain is that comprised by the collective mind of the civilian population of the target area.
Internal wars, interventionary operations and asymmetrical conflicts can be distinguished from conventional inter-state wars by one critical factor. While conventional wars can be seen as real-estate deals, the internal war and its close relatives cannot. The internal war type is best understood as being a contest for the support--or at least the passive acceptance--of one contestant but not the other.
The key to success (or victory if you prefer the more robust term)is the attitude of the uncommitted majority of the target area's population. Each contender in the war wants to assure at the least that the uncommitted majority does not migrate to the other side. At the most each side wants to mobilize a greater percentage of the uncommitted majority to his side.
Far more than conventional inter-state wars, the internal war and its relatives constitutes a fight over human terrain. The civilian is the target. Even when one is busy killing enemy trigger pullers, the overarching goal is to rally support to one's side, or, at the necessary very least, prevent the enemy from gaining greater sympathy and active support from the people in the middle.
As a result of this fundamental reality both sides in an internal war will intentionally target civilians with lethal intent. Insurgents use terror. Counterinsurgents use it as well. Interventionary forces may not go after the folks in the middle with intent, but bombs, shells, bullets hit flesh without distinction.
It is (or should be) no big shock that civilians are at great risk. A very close look at civilian deaths resulting as a direct consequence of military actions in World War II shows that somewhat more died than did soldiers.
The disparity between military and civilian deaths resulting from either military actions or the lethal consequences of deliberate policy is orders of magnitude greater in the internal war. The historical record of internal and interventionary warfare in the 20th and (so far) in the 21st centuries demonstrates that one is far safer to be a shooter in the field than a civilian in the local market, a gunship pilot than an elementary school teacher.
In short, the doctrine of proportionality is as dead as Fredrick the Great's formulation.
There are two reasons for this conclusion. The first has already been laid out. The second is just as important and nearly never formally recognised. In every internal war and in many, if not most interventionary operations, the war is existential.
At the end of the war, only one side will still be standing in somewhat recognisable form. Unless and until a climate of pervasive war weariness sets in, the belligerents wil pursue total victory. Insurgent and counterinsurgent are joined at the hip in that each holds the same idea: victory or death. Internal war is total war.
With stakes this high and the collective mind of the uncommitted civilian majority being the crucial battleground, it should be not at all surprising that civilians are killed in job lots. That's the nature of this kind of war whether anyone likes the idea or not.
Here's the wrinkle. It's one which will tickle the innards of anyone who delights in irony.
Civilians do not like to get killed whether its in the crossfire or by deliberate intent. Also, civilians hate (that term is used advisedly) the side which kills them and not the government or governmental wannabe which fails to protect them.
(This not hard to understand dynamic explains why German and Japanese political will and dedication to the government increased as the weight of Allied bombs increased.)
This fact suggests two important strategic and tactical considerations. The first is that one's chances of victory increase if the responsibility for civilian deaths and general misery can be foisted off on the other side. The second is that few, if any, of the many, many belligerents in the many, many internal wars of the past century have recognised this.
Sherman's brilliant (and it was that, brilliant) strategic concept arose organically from the nature and character of social and familial dynamics in the Confederate states. It was brilliant in that time and place. It was not a universally applicable sovereign recipe for victory.
Ironically, the side which kills the fewest is the side which is most likely to gain support from the uncommitted majority. It is the side most likely to win.
This implies two tactical considerations must be observed. The first is to limit the killing be it advertant or accidental of civilians. That is self-evident. The second consideration is less obvious. It is important that the enemy be frustrated to the extent that he starts killing civilians in an attempt to terrorise his way to greater support and therefore victory.
In Iraq the insurgents of all stripes were forced by the results of the American escalation of ground troops to resort to terror tactics with a very large and highly visible body count. The more the insurgents killed the more actual and potential support they lost. Conversely, when the Americans got better at using their overwhelming firepower in a discriminating way, the more the uncommitted drifted to the government side.
The same dynamic has been evident in Afghanistan. A couple of years ago Taliban shifted from failed attacks on hard targets to a series of very high-vis soft target suicide bombings which caused significant civilian casualties. This was a misguided attempt to undercut the perceived legitimacy of the Karzai government.
As a consequence (clearly unintended by Taliban but quite predictable from the historical experience) civilians rushed to the Karzai government and its foreign supporters. Unfortunately, the US ended the campaign by killing its director.
Following this, a series of American airstrikes created a number of civilian corpses. The consequence (unintended by the American commanders but again drearily predictable from the historically informed) was a swell of hostility directed at Karzai and his foreign supporters.
In Sri Lanka the process is again at work. For at least the fifth time the government seems on the verge of victory against the remarkably persistent and come-back-from-the-grave Tamil Tiger insurgency. The Tigers are confined to a very small portion of Sri Lanka. The Tigers have resorted to forcing civilians to stay in harm's way as a species of human shield.
The government has decreed the existence of a "safety zone" in which fugitive Tamils can seek sanctuary. The Tigers have responded by killing civilians who attempt to reach the sanctuary area.
While the Sri Lankan government and its military on a few occasions shelled the "safety zone," the primary onus for responsibility has been correctly placed on the Tigers. The current trajectory bodes well to produce peace in Sri Lanka for the first time in more than twenty years.
Unless...
Unless outsiders huff and puff too much. The UN High Commissioner for Human Rights, Navi Pillay is bloviating at length alleging that the Sri Lankan government as well as the Tigers are possibly guilty of war crimes and crimes against humanity. The government has vigorously denied this accusation. The Tigers remain silent.
Perhaps the UN High Commissioner for Human Rights feels underemployed given that there are so few governments and non-governmental actors currently abusing human rights today. In any event the war in Sri Lanka will come to an end sooner if the government is allowed to continue its (at long last) successful campaign against the Tigers. It will come to an end sooner if the tail of civilian deaths is pinned on the Tiger.
If Ms Pillay doesn't get over her snit with counterinsurgency Sri Lankan style, a bad potential comes into view. The UN and its High Minded Lofty Thinking cohorts may come to believe that it is their exclusive mission to "protect" civilians wherever an internal war exists.
By its very nature internal war requires civilian death and wretchedness. The limiting factor to this unfortunate reality is defined by the ending of the war. Period. The faster the war comes to an end the fewer civilians will die. The quicker the war ends the fewer will be the number of displaced persons, refugees huddling in miserable camps operated and maintained by the High Minded.
An internal war will end most quickly when one side recognises that it is necessary to intentionally limit death and misery. It will end most quickly when one side understands the necessity of maneuvering its opposition into having responsibility for death and displacement among the uncommitted majority.
Outsiders including the UN have a role to play in limiting civilian deaths. It is incumbent upon the international community generally and any intervenors in the war more particularly to insist that the governmental entities have sole responsibility for protecting civilians under its sway.
The test case for this contention is the Gaza Strip. So far the outsiders of the world have failed the test. The responsibility for protecting the civilian population of the Strip resides solely with Hamas.
Hamas is the de facto government of Gaza. It has a minimal obligation to protect its population. At the absolute least Hamas must refrain from co-locating offensive weaponry with mosques, schools and hospitals. As the imagery demonstrates beyond any rational, reasonable doubt, Hamas has failed completely in this duty.
Hamas gun thugs and rocket shooters placed themselves and their lethal equipment in the midst of civilian heavy locations. They employed human shields in the most crass and cynical manner. Hamas was even worse than the Tamil Tigers in that regard.
Now the ever-so-indignant-and-concerned High Commissioner and her human rights coterie seem hell-bent on performing a replay in Sri Lanka. When will the ambitious High Commissioner seek to do the same in Afghanistan? Iraq?
One hopes the answer is "never." The alternative, the involvement, the threats of prosecution in the International Criminal Court will be counterproductive. Ironically, (and the Geek loves the taste of irony almost as much as chocolate) the consequence of any High Minded involvement will be to prolong the war and increase the net amount of human misery and death.
Internal war has its own logic--a grim and terrible logic to be sure--and we must all get a grip on that. That requires that we accept the necessity of civilian death and seek to limit the number of corpses using the logic of internal war itself. That implies we must both recognise and use the right tactics. Not kill civilians. Place the onus for civilian deaths on the opposition. Insist that governments and insurgent entities with de facto control of an area take the sole responsibility for protecting the population.
The logic of internal war correctly fought and not the UN High Commissioner for Human Rights or the International Criminal Court or the High Minded generally are the last, best hope of the people caught in the middle.
Friday, March 13, 2009
"El Chapo" Makes The Big Time
The Mexican government has gone exoatmospheric. Their fast-burn boost was ignited by Forbes magazine.
The folks over at Forbes celebrate the achievements of capitalism and capitalists. Every year the rag lists the big winners in the race to pursue wealth and this year Joaquin (El Chapo) Guzman made the cut at number 701. El Chapo made his gigabuck or so by providing commodities much desired by many living in the United States.
That's what has the patrones in Mexico City so hacked off. Sr Guzman is the chieftain of the Sinaloa cartel. This means he is a criminal. A very big time criminal.
Sure, "The Dwarf" as the five foot tall Guzman has been affectionately (?) nicknamed has some unpleasant attributes. He has shown, for example, a tendency to eliminate competition and increase market share by killing members of rival syndicates. More than a thousand homicides have been laid at El Chapo's doorstep. He also has a fondness for kidnapping, torture, and suborning Mexican law, military, intelligence and governmental officials.
For these and related reasons such as increased social and political turbulence caused by the robust rivalries and vigorous defensive measures of Sr Guzman and his equivalents at the other three major drug trafficking cartels the Mexican government is righteously annoyed. At Guzman. At Forbes. At the United States.
Eighty or so years ago another capitalist made a remark to the press which is quite apropos today with regard to El Chapo. Al Capone, a man with unpleasant aspects and an acute business sense, commented, "I am doing what any good businessman does. I am meeting a public demand."
Yep, bucko, Al was doing just that. Meeting a widespread and readily expressed American need. The need to get high. To feel convivial. To lay aside worries and doubts, burdens and fears.
The need to get drunk. Or, at least, mildly tipsy.
Of course, Big Al was meeting that need during the time of the Noble Experiment, Prohibition. Reasons both sound and fantastic, arguments based on science, both legitimate and junk, justifications based on psychological, sociological and economic theories had all been invoked on behalf of a moral, not to say theological conclusion. Booze was evil. Alcohol was the devil's tool.
Caught up in a tidal wave of religiously derived morality as Americans have been from time to time in our history, the politicos and public combined to pass both a constitutional amendment and enabling legislation which, they were sure, would wipe out evil by eliminating the devil's beverage.
Al Capone moved quickly from the job of whorehouse bouncer to syndicate capo. He was not alone in effecting a rapid rise from obscurity to notoriety. He was not alone in reaping great wealth from the collective great thirst of We the People.
He was not alone in shooting and bludgeoning his way to greater market share, greater profits, greater success.
But, setting details of his business plan and methods aside, Al Capone was every bit as successful a capitalist as Henry Ford or David Sarnoff or Sam Goldwyn.
Ultimately Scarface took a fall for failing to pay income taxes. That wasn't what killed the blackmarket booze industry dead. Rather, when sanity finally prevailed in the collective American mind and the Noble Experiment was declared over, the need for bathtub gin and just-off-the-boat hooch disappeared overnight.
During the years of Prohibition the US government spent loads of money, made heaps of arrests, sent people to jail in large numbers. The American government even made ugly faces in the direction of foreign regimes which didn't make suitable efforts to stop the running of Demon Rum across the border.
Comes now Joaquin Guzman, Al Capone on steroids. El Chapo is Big Al magnified by a couple of orders of magnitude. As Al was the product of the moral climate of his times, so is Sr Guzman.
Theologically derived morality discretely clothed by science (more junk than genuine,) and data drawn from sociological, economic and psychological sources has been given free expression in the decades long "War on Drugs." Despite the risks, regardless of the hectoring, unconcerned over the warnings, a goodly number of Americans insist on altering their consciousness.
There is an evident need on the part of many humans to bend their brains via chemical means. It may even be inherent to our genome. It is a constant reality throughout our collective history. It is alive and well today.
This is the need which Sr Guzman meets. It is the need which has made him rich. It is the need which is costing Mexico many, many lives.
Far from Mexico, this need gives Taliban and others the monetary muscle necessary to kill Americans. The need for an altered state on the part of Americans, Europeans and others throughout the world fuels corruption, undercuts governmental integrity and legitimacy, diverts resources from vital, creative application to the wasteland of the "drug war."
Get a grip on it: Whether booze or smack, pot or pills, acid, shrooms or crank, Xanax from a physician or PCP from a pusher, people are bound and determined to move their minds, bend their brains, muck with the circuits, get high, stoned, wasted, tell the consensual, objective reality to shove it.
Cops and soldiers, therapists and presidents are not going to stop it. Preachers, pundits, politicos, tooth-gnashing, hand-wringing Health Nazis are not going to end the widespread human need to get high. Period. End of report.
The hang-'em-high, off-with-their-heads wallahs of Singapore or Iran or Saudi Arabia may kill those in need, but not the need. The need is always there, lurking in the brains and minds of humans generally.
That's right, ma, "everybody must get stoned."
As long as there is a need, there will be people like Al Capone, Joaquin Guzman, groups like the Mafia, or Taliban. People and groups ready and willing to meet the need, make the profits.
As long as the need and the meeting of it are considered immoral, against the will of whatsoever deity, including the god of "productivity" and the idol of "wellness," the business plans and methods exemplified by the "Outfit" in Chicago back in the good old days of blasting tommyguns or the cartels today with RPG's and LAW's, AK's and M-16s will continue in their customary bloody and corrupting ways.
It's time all and sundry got a grip on reality. The "War on Drugs" was lost before it was declared forty years ago by Richard Nixon. Every indicator both historical and contemporary undergirds that conclusion.
Unless and until that halcyon day somewhere in the haze of the future when we understand the many bases for the need to get high, the only realistic approach is to accommodate the reality of the need's existence. That means we have no genuine option other than legalization.
With legalization the profit disappears. There will be no need for the killing, the corrupting, the ripping of social and political fabric.
There will be no need for El Chapo. Metaphorically at least Sr Guzman and his ilk will be as dead as Al Capone. Or, if they stay in illegal businesses as did the Outfit after Prohibition's end, the nature of the goods and services will be different and perhaps more readily addressed by governments and societies.
SecState Clinton would be very well advised to keep this thought in mind when she heads to Mexico City in a couple of weeks to discuss cooperation in the "War on Drugs." Maybe it's time to agree, "We ain't going to study war no more."
The folks over at Forbes celebrate the achievements of capitalism and capitalists. Every year the rag lists the big winners in the race to pursue wealth and this year Joaquin (El Chapo) Guzman made the cut at number 701. El Chapo made his gigabuck or so by providing commodities much desired by many living in the United States.
That's what has the patrones in Mexico City so hacked off. Sr Guzman is the chieftain of the Sinaloa cartel. This means he is a criminal. A very big time criminal.
Sure, "The Dwarf" as the five foot tall Guzman has been affectionately (?) nicknamed has some unpleasant attributes. He has shown, for example, a tendency to eliminate competition and increase market share by killing members of rival syndicates. More than a thousand homicides have been laid at El Chapo's doorstep. He also has a fondness for kidnapping, torture, and suborning Mexican law, military, intelligence and governmental officials.
For these and related reasons such as increased social and political turbulence caused by the robust rivalries and vigorous defensive measures of Sr Guzman and his equivalents at the other three major drug trafficking cartels the Mexican government is righteously annoyed. At Guzman. At Forbes. At the United States.
Eighty or so years ago another capitalist made a remark to the press which is quite apropos today with regard to El Chapo. Al Capone, a man with unpleasant aspects and an acute business sense, commented, "I am doing what any good businessman does. I am meeting a public demand."
Yep, bucko, Al was doing just that. Meeting a widespread and readily expressed American need. The need to get high. To feel convivial. To lay aside worries and doubts, burdens and fears.
The need to get drunk. Or, at least, mildly tipsy.
Of course, Big Al was meeting that need during the time of the Noble Experiment, Prohibition. Reasons both sound and fantastic, arguments based on science, both legitimate and junk, justifications based on psychological, sociological and economic theories had all been invoked on behalf of a moral, not to say theological conclusion. Booze was evil. Alcohol was the devil's tool.
Caught up in a tidal wave of religiously derived morality as Americans have been from time to time in our history, the politicos and public combined to pass both a constitutional amendment and enabling legislation which, they were sure, would wipe out evil by eliminating the devil's beverage.
Al Capone moved quickly from the job of whorehouse bouncer to syndicate capo. He was not alone in effecting a rapid rise from obscurity to notoriety. He was not alone in reaping great wealth from the collective great thirst of We the People.
He was not alone in shooting and bludgeoning his way to greater market share, greater profits, greater success.
But, setting details of his business plan and methods aside, Al Capone was every bit as successful a capitalist as Henry Ford or David Sarnoff or Sam Goldwyn.
Ultimately Scarface took a fall for failing to pay income taxes. That wasn't what killed the blackmarket booze industry dead. Rather, when sanity finally prevailed in the collective American mind and the Noble Experiment was declared over, the need for bathtub gin and just-off-the-boat hooch disappeared overnight.
During the years of Prohibition the US government spent loads of money, made heaps of arrests, sent people to jail in large numbers. The American government even made ugly faces in the direction of foreign regimes which didn't make suitable efforts to stop the running of Demon Rum across the border.
Comes now Joaquin Guzman, Al Capone on steroids. El Chapo is Big Al magnified by a couple of orders of magnitude. As Al was the product of the moral climate of his times, so is Sr Guzman.
Theologically derived morality discretely clothed by science (more junk than genuine,) and data drawn from sociological, economic and psychological sources has been given free expression in the decades long "War on Drugs." Despite the risks, regardless of the hectoring, unconcerned over the warnings, a goodly number of Americans insist on altering their consciousness.
There is an evident need on the part of many humans to bend their brains via chemical means. It may even be inherent to our genome. It is a constant reality throughout our collective history. It is alive and well today.
This is the need which Sr Guzman meets. It is the need which has made him rich. It is the need which is costing Mexico many, many lives.
Far from Mexico, this need gives Taliban and others the monetary muscle necessary to kill Americans. The need for an altered state on the part of Americans, Europeans and others throughout the world fuels corruption, undercuts governmental integrity and legitimacy, diverts resources from vital, creative application to the wasteland of the "drug war."
Get a grip on it: Whether booze or smack, pot or pills, acid, shrooms or crank, Xanax from a physician or PCP from a pusher, people are bound and determined to move their minds, bend their brains, muck with the circuits, get high, stoned, wasted, tell the consensual, objective reality to shove it.
Cops and soldiers, therapists and presidents are not going to stop it. Preachers, pundits, politicos, tooth-gnashing, hand-wringing Health Nazis are not going to end the widespread human need to get high. Period. End of report.
The hang-'em-high, off-with-their-heads wallahs of Singapore or Iran or Saudi Arabia may kill those in need, but not the need. The need is always there, lurking in the brains and minds of humans generally.
That's right, ma, "everybody must get stoned."
As long as there is a need, there will be people like Al Capone, Joaquin Guzman, groups like the Mafia, or Taliban. People and groups ready and willing to meet the need, make the profits.
As long as the need and the meeting of it are considered immoral, against the will of whatsoever deity, including the god of "productivity" and the idol of "wellness," the business plans and methods exemplified by the "Outfit" in Chicago back in the good old days of blasting tommyguns or the cartels today with RPG's and LAW's, AK's and M-16s will continue in their customary bloody and corrupting ways.
It's time all and sundry got a grip on reality. The "War on Drugs" was lost before it was declared forty years ago by Richard Nixon. Every indicator both historical and contemporary undergirds that conclusion.
Unless and until that halcyon day somewhere in the haze of the future when we understand the many bases for the need to get high, the only realistic approach is to accommodate the reality of the need's existence. That means we have no genuine option other than legalization.
With legalization the profit disappears. There will be no need for the killing, the corrupting, the ripping of social and political fabric.
There will be no need for El Chapo. Metaphorically at least Sr Guzman and his ilk will be as dead as Al Capone. Or, if they stay in illegal businesses as did the Outfit after Prohibition's end, the nature of the goods and services will be different and perhaps more readily addressed by governments and societies.
SecState Clinton would be very well advised to keep this thought in mind when she heads to Mexico City in a couple of weeks to discuss cooperation in the "War on Drugs." Maybe it's time to agree, "We ain't going to study war no more."
Wednesday, March 11, 2009
Well, It's A Start--And Long Overdue
The Iranian ForMin has allowed that Iran will participate in a regional conference on security and stability in Afghanistan if the US does in fact offer an invitation. If the Iranians are not carrying a hidden agenda filled with assorted and irrelevant terms and conditions, this is an encouraging first small step toward constructive engagement.
Iran has a very long and equally permeable border with Afghanistan. The Mullahocracy has much to worry about should instability, Taliban-inspired enthusiasms, and ethno-religious insurgency pour across the border along with the flood of opium and opioids which has flowed for the last several years.
The extreme antipathy Tehran's mullahs held toward the Taliban was behind the incontrovertible fact that no country provided more to the American sponsored exercise in regime change way back in '02. The US and Iran had coinciding national interests then.
And, we and Tehran have them today. Coinciding national interests--the vanilla ice cream form of diplomacy.
But, before the Obama Administration and We the People take a lick from the old vanilla cone, some cautionary words are necessary. As the folks topside in the Obama Administration undoubtedly remember quite well, the initial, cautious open hand offered by the president was rudely, crudely slapped aside by Iran's Orator-in-Chief, Ahmedinejad.
Showing the diplomatic gaucherie which typifies not only Ahmedinejad but the Iranian regime generally, the Orator-in-Chief attached a list of conditions to any possible acceptance of the US demarche. These included offering a "sincere" apology to the Iranian government and people for all the icky-poo things the US has said and done over the last several generations.
The recycled Clinton crew may have a collective institutional memory up to the task of recalling just how often and in what ways the Iranian regime has initially seemed to accept an offer only to turn the acceptance into effective rejection by attaching provisos or demanding discussions on utterly irrelevant matters. There is no guarantee that this will not happen with regard to the regional conference on Afghanistan.
Mitigating against this possibility is an increasing Iranian alarm over the flood of opioids. As long as the narcotics were just passing through Iran with the usual gratuities being provided to the customary recipients including the Iranian Revolutionary Guard Corps, the traffic was acceptable and good for the economic climate generally.
But, in the last couple of years an ever-growing amount of the traffic has stopped in Iran. Since the regime is not about to join in a chorus of "It's alright, ma, everybody gotta get stoned," the drug trade is now a sort of public enemy.
(Hmm, the Geek wonders, could the explosion in heroin and opium use in Iran be at all connected with an inflation rate in excess of twenty percent and an unemployment rate above thiry percent? Well, Ahmedinejad would disagree with that and point the finger at capitalism in the West. But, the Geek is of the view that were he to live in a tanked economy like Iran's, he would seek the pleasures of drug induced euphoria. Of course, the way things are going here, he may get that chance--and inducement.)
Iran has actually cooperated with both Afghanistan and Pakistan in the sharing of information and the effecting of arrests of suspected traffickers. Who knows, some of those arrested might actually be smugglers of drugs rather than subversive insurgency oriented ideology.
So, the US is best off pretending that the crew in Tehran is being upfront in wishing to participate meaningfully in the Afghanistan stability conference. In any event it is an excellent test match to determine the degree to which Iran will be a genuine interlocutor in any dialogue regarding other vital, vexing matters such as its nuclear aspirations and support of Hamas and Hezbollah.
The nuclear program of Iran is top on the list. There is something just so damn scary about the idea of an eschatologically oriented collection of mullahs having the capacity in-house to inaugurate a nuclear exchange.
The matter of Iranian nuclear capacity is of an existential sort from the perspective of Israel. It is not from an American point of view. Thus, it is critical that the US not allow itself to be stampeded by the usual suspects of the Israel Lobby. This will not be easy given the long established power of the Lobby as has been demonstrated recently by the withdrawal of Chaz Freeman.
There is at least another year, perhaps two, before the Iranians can have a meaningful stockpile of highly enriched uranium. It will take longer than that for them to extract plutonium from the fuel rods of their soon to go online Russian supplied heavy water reactor.
In either case the Iranians will need some time to effectively weaponise their fissile materials. This time frame is ample to test the willingness of Tehran to abandon their domestic production schemes and accept fuel from the EU, Russia or even the Great Satan US.
Right now, today, the US as well as its partners in the Six Power Talks accepts the North Korean possession of several tens of kilograms of plutonium as well as an unknown amount of highly enriched uranium. The North Koran regime has not shown itself to be susceptible to either pressure or rational discourse. Indeed, since the last elections in South Korea tossed up a government far less diffident to the desires of the Hermit Kingdom of the North than its predecessors the rhetoric out of the North has been at least as inflammatory and utterly irrational as the remarks of the Orator-in-Chief at his worst.
Admiral Blair, the Director on National Intelligence, opined to Congress that the North Koreans were not intending their nuclear weapons for actual usage but rather as instruments of diplomatic leverage and expressions of national prestige. It is not impossible that Iran would see a limited nuclear capacity in the same terms.
The DNI also advised his Senatorial auditors that it was not likely that the North Koreans would sell or otherwise transfer fissile materials to another party, either a state or a non-state actor since it would suffer nuclear obliteration if material bearing the Made in North Korea isotope signature were to be used anywhere, at any time, against any target. The same logic applies to Iran.
One important caveat is necessary. The analogy between North Korea and Iran breaks down if the Tehran regime is actually as eschatological in motivation as sometimes seems to be the case. It also breaks down if the Iranian president at some future date is as seemingly irrational as Ahmedinejad so often appears to be.
Indeed, while surveying the participants in any regional conference on Afghanistan, there is one far more troubling than Iran. That, of course, is Pakistan.
Pakistan has the bomb. Several dozen of them at the most conservative. Pakistan has a military and intelligence community well penetrated at all levels with people who are strongly Islamist in bent. While Pakistan has repeatedly "talked the talk" regarding its actions against Islamist terror and insurgent groups, it has rarely, if ever, "walked the walk." In short, whether meaning to or not, the government of Pakistan has been repeatedly tergiversatious. (That means they lie a lot.)
If the Geek had the chance to talk with the president and/or his secretary of state, the Geek would say, "Sure, talk to Iran. Start the process slowly and without any real expectations. Don't fall into the diplomat's occupational disease--the love of process regardless of results."
Then as the audience was nodding in agreement the Geek would add, "And, worry a lot more about the Pakistanis. They are far more dangerous."
Iran has a very long and equally permeable border with Afghanistan. The Mullahocracy has much to worry about should instability, Taliban-inspired enthusiasms, and ethno-religious insurgency pour across the border along with the flood of opium and opioids which has flowed for the last several years.
The extreme antipathy Tehran's mullahs held toward the Taliban was behind the incontrovertible fact that no country provided more to the American sponsored exercise in regime change way back in '02. The US and Iran had coinciding national interests then.
And, we and Tehran have them today. Coinciding national interests--the vanilla ice cream form of diplomacy.
But, before the Obama Administration and We the People take a lick from the old vanilla cone, some cautionary words are necessary. As the folks topside in the Obama Administration undoubtedly remember quite well, the initial, cautious open hand offered by the president was rudely, crudely slapped aside by Iran's Orator-in-Chief, Ahmedinejad.
Showing the diplomatic gaucherie which typifies not only Ahmedinejad but the Iranian regime generally, the Orator-in-Chief attached a list of conditions to any possible acceptance of the US demarche. These included offering a "sincere" apology to the Iranian government and people for all the icky-poo things the US has said and done over the last several generations.
The recycled Clinton crew may have a collective institutional memory up to the task of recalling just how often and in what ways the Iranian regime has initially seemed to accept an offer only to turn the acceptance into effective rejection by attaching provisos or demanding discussions on utterly irrelevant matters. There is no guarantee that this will not happen with regard to the regional conference on Afghanistan.
Mitigating against this possibility is an increasing Iranian alarm over the flood of opioids. As long as the narcotics were just passing through Iran with the usual gratuities being provided to the customary recipients including the Iranian Revolutionary Guard Corps, the traffic was acceptable and good for the economic climate generally.
But, in the last couple of years an ever-growing amount of the traffic has stopped in Iran. Since the regime is not about to join in a chorus of "It's alright, ma, everybody gotta get stoned," the drug trade is now a sort of public enemy.
(Hmm, the Geek wonders, could the explosion in heroin and opium use in Iran be at all connected with an inflation rate in excess of twenty percent and an unemployment rate above thiry percent? Well, Ahmedinejad would disagree with that and point the finger at capitalism in the West. But, the Geek is of the view that were he to live in a tanked economy like Iran's, he would seek the pleasures of drug induced euphoria. Of course, the way things are going here, he may get that chance--and inducement.)
Iran has actually cooperated with both Afghanistan and Pakistan in the sharing of information and the effecting of arrests of suspected traffickers. Who knows, some of those arrested might actually be smugglers of drugs rather than subversive insurgency oriented ideology.
So, the US is best off pretending that the crew in Tehran is being upfront in wishing to participate meaningfully in the Afghanistan stability conference. In any event it is an excellent test match to determine the degree to which Iran will be a genuine interlocutor in any dialogue regarding other vital, vexing matters such as its nuclear aspirations and support of Hamas and Hezbollah.
The nuclear program of Iran is top on the list. There is something just so damn scary about the idea of an eschatologically oriented collection of mullahs having the capacity in-house to inaugurate a nuclear exchange.
The matter of Iranian nuclear capacity is of an existential sort from the perspective of Israel. It is not from an American point of view. Thus, it is critical that the US not allow itself to be stampeded by the usual suspects of the Israel Lobby. This will not be easy given the long established power of the Lobby as has been demonstrated recently by the withdrawal of Chaz Freeman.
There is at least another year, perhaps two, before the Iranians can have a meaningful stockpile of highly enriched uranium. It will take longer than that for them to extract plutonium from the fuel rods of their soon to go online Russian supplied heavy water reactor.
In either case the Iranians will need some time to effectively weaponise their fissile materials. This time frame is ample to test the willingness of Tehran to abandon their domestic production schemes and accept fuel from the EU, Russia or even the Great Satan US.
Right now, today, the US as well as its partners in the Six Power Talks accepts the North Korean possession of several tens of kilograms of plutonium as well as an unknown amount of highly enriched uranium. The North Koran regime has not shown itself to be susceptible to either pressure or rational discourse. Indeed, since the last elections in South Korea tossed up a government far less diffident to the desires of the Hermit Kingdom of the North than its predecessors the rhetoric out of the North has been at least as inflammatory and utterly irrational as the remarks of the Orator-in-Chief at his worst.
Admiral Blair, the Director on National Intelligence, opined to Congress that the North Koreans were not intending their nuclear weapons for actual usage but rather as instruments of diplomatic leverage and expressions of national prestige. It is not impossible that Iran would see a limited nuclear capacity in the same terms.
The DNI also advised his Senatorial auditors that it was not likely that the North Koreans would sell or otherwise transfer fissile materials to another party, either a state or a non-state actor since it would suffer nuclear obliteration if material bearing the Made in North Korea isotope signature were to be used anywhere, at any time, against any target. The same logic applies to Iran.
One important caveat is necessary. The analogy between North Korea and Iran breaks down if the Tehran regime is actually as eschatological in motivation as sometimes seems to be the case. It also breaks down if the Iranian president at some future date is as seemingly irrational as Ahmedinejad so often appears to be.
Indeed, while surveying the participants in any regional conference on Afghanistan, there is one far more troubling than Iran. That, of course, is Pakistan.
Pakistan has the bomb. Several dozen of them at the most conservative. Pakistan has a military and intelligence community well penetrated at all levels with people who are strongly Islamist in bent. While Pakistan has repeatedly "talked the talk" regarding its actions against Islamist terror and insurgent groups, it has rarely, if ever, "walked the walk." In short, whether meaning to or not, the government of Pakistan has been repeatedly tergiversatious. (That means they lie a lot.)
If the Geek had the chance to talk with the president and/or his secretary of state, the Geek would say, "Sure, talk to Iran. Start the process slowly and without any real expectations. Don't fall into the diplomat's occupational disease--the love of process regardless of results."
Then as the audience was nodding in agreement the Geek would add, "And, worry a lot more about the Pakistanis. They are far more dangerous."
Tuesday, March 10, 2009
Not In An Ocean Near Us!
The Chinese are feeling peppy these days. Last week a heavy from the Peoples Liberation Army's Second Artillery Corps went international on how the PLA is developing information warfare technology. Of course, he denied that the boys and girls of the PLA were actually using this technology. Yet.
The general's denial of cyber-espionage or related activities was both pro forma and completely contrary to a goodly amount of evidence which has emerged in open sources over the past couple of years. Still, you can't expect the Chinese to come right out and admit what the hundreds of PLA personnel hovering over an equal number of terminals are actually doing in the cathodes' glow.
Comes now the the PLA's Navy. The peaceloving peoples of China acting through their equally peaceloving government have been beavering away down in Hainan. That island has been turned into a major naval and air facility. Nuclear submarine pens, dockyards, major air force installations and supporting structures litter the once pristine countryside.
Eight years ago the PLA's sensitivities over Hainan came into public view when one of their fighters had a mid-air collision with a US Navy elint aircraft. The US plane was able to make a forced landing at one of the airstrips on Hainan. The Chinese fighter was not so fortunate.
The resulting contretemps was finally resolved by the Bush Administration kind of, sort of, perhaps, maybe, offering a form of non-apology apology. The Chinese released the interned American crew and (ultimately) the remains of the aircraft.
One hopes the self-destruct gear built into the ferret's elint suite worked as promised.
At the time of the collision the US plane was over international waters although perhaps at the edge of the Chinese Exclusive Economic Zone which, in common with global practice. extends two hundred miles offshore. No one can allege that the US plane was illegally exploiting resources within the EEZ.
The same can be said regarding the incident involving units of the PLA's Navy and the US research ship USNS Impeccable. The Chinese craft maneuvered in a manner which put both them and the Impeccable at risk. In addition to this, one of the PLA (N) vessels strewed debris in the Impeccable's path.
The Chinese government has gone high volume noise machine in justifying their "defensive" action against the Impeccable. The usual accusations have flown from their Foreign Ministry regarding US provocation and violation of international agreements beyond numbering.
The Impeccable is equipped to do a number of tasks. One of its top functions is detailed sonar mapping. This sort of thing is useful but only in a military context.
The Chinese government and military know this. Both are fully aware that the US was not and is not violating the Chinese economic prerogatives in its EEZ. The PRC understands the military implications of the US doing detailed reconnaissance of the seabed only seventy-five miles from its naval constellation on Hainan.
That, however, is not the motivation behind the confrontation and resulting bellows of protest which nearly equal those following the mid-air collision in the first months of the Bush Administration.
So, what was it then? You want to know.
The action off Hainan was calibrated with care. The Chinese patrol vessels were all small, highly maneuverable and operated at slow speed. It is evident that the Impeccable had been under observation for some time before the event. Sonar mapping is not a high speed, low drag operation. It requires holding a constant course and speed with turns only at designated points. Thus, it is simple and relatively safe to approach the survey vessel at close range and hassle it.
Since the PLA is very, very hierarchical in organisation and under the firm control of the central authorities, it is proper to conclude that the operation was pre-approved, probably ordered by, the Lads in the Forbidden City. The locals carried out the order when the opportunity presented itself under conditions of good visibility and calm seas. (Cautious, very cautious boldness is a hallmark of the Beijing regime.)
It is fair to assume that the Chinese Foreign Ministry and its masters in the Forbidden City are perfectly well aware that the international agreements defining Exclusive Economic Zones provide certain rights. These rights do not include that of preventing maritime surveys of a non-economic nature conducted by unarmed naval vessels.
The Chinese know perfectly well that the EEZ definitions prevent not only the interference with innocent passage by armed vessels but also interference with normal subsea mapping and related activities. The PRC authorities know that if they were to send a ship equivalent to the Impeccable to map the seabed off the US coast there would be no American challenge--diplomatic or otherwise. We might watch them from a safe distance, but that would be the extent of our Navy's direct involvement.
This being the case, it is possible to conclude that the Chinese action was meant as a test of the Obama administration's patience and resolve. It is the equivalent of a shoulder bump in a crowd--a means of testing response without running a risk.
Think of it as a more finely nuanced and carefully controlled version of the airplane tag practiced with overly dramatic effects in the sky off Hainan eight years ago.
So why do it?
Because the Chinese want to know more about the capacity and will of the new administration to deal with the ever-increasing threat which they present to our freedom of action in the far reaches of the Pacific. The Chinese are in the midst of an immense improvement of their military capacities across the board.
They are rapidly developing a blue water capacity including not only nuclear submarines equipped with SLBMs but are edging into an area of naval warfare long the sole province of the US--carrier born aviation. The Chinese, like the Soviets before them, are abandoning coast defense as the primary function of their naval force.
The PLA itself is becoming leaner, meaner and more technologically advanced every day. It is far and away the most formidable force on the Asian landmass--including the Russian army in Siberia. Even without the evidently programmed improvements, the PLA has a capacity today far surpassing any legitimate defense requirement.
In air defense the Chinese have become a very, very tough target. Currently the programmed air defenses of the PLA are such that the US would have a difficult time effectively penetrating Chinese airspace. Only the F-35, F-117 and B-2 could penetrate without unacceptable losses. How long this will remain the case is debatable.
The Chinese have demonstrated an ASAT capacity and are known to be working on cloning the US ABM capabilities. Neither of these are reassuring to those who might want to see the US maintain its freedom of action in the far Pacific or elsewhere on the Asian landmass.
Of course all of these unpleasant Chinese developments became drearily predictable way back when. Way back when President Bill Clinton opened the doors of trade with the PRC. The neoliberals of that day believed that the web of trade made sure China was fully embraced and thus less likely to be truculent.
Access to American markets simply made sure that money flowed from the US to the PRC. It made certain that the Lads of the Forbidden City would have the means necessary to upgrade the peasant army of the PLA to a first class force and a genuine threat to American interests. The opening of the US also made it easier for the Chinese to gain access to American technology--by means either fair or foul.
As the experience of the previous half century had made clear, espionage simplifies research and development of advanced military technologies. Apparently neither the Clinton nor the Bush Administration bothered to review the history of the Cold War and the constant use made by the Soviets of espionage to gain access to critical US technologies.
With money gushing, secrets flowing and infrastructure growing there is no mystery to the growth of the Chinese threat to American national and strategic interests. Nor is there any mystery behind the periodic diplomatic jostles handed to us by the Chinese military. The Lads in the Forbidden City want to know--must know--how far they can push us before we push back.
The unarmed, non-lethal skirmish off Hainan may not be the "test" warned of by candidate Joe Biden last fall, but it is a test even so. More than seems to be involved hangs on the nature and character of the Obama Administration's response.
If the ripost is too mild, too lackluster, too apologetic, the US can expect more jostles, more tests. Perhaps even the big test of which Biden warned.
The general's denial of cyber-espionage or related activities was both pro forma and completely contrary to a goodly amount of evidence which has emerged in open sources over the past couple of years. Still, you can't expect the Chinese to come right out and admit what the hundreds of PLA personnel hovering over an equal number of terminals are actually doing in the cathodes' glow.
Comes now the the PLA's Navy. The peaceloving peoples of China acting through their equally peaceloving government have been beavering away down in Hainan. That island has been turned into a major naval and air facility. Nuclear submarine pens, dockyards, major air force installations and supporting structures litter the once pristine countryside.
Eight years ago the PLA's sensitivities over Hainan came into public view when one of their fighters had a mid-air collision with a US Navy elint aircraft. The US plane was able to make a forced landing at one of the airstrips on Hainan. The Chinese fighter was not so fortunate.
The resulting contretemps was finally resolved by the Bush Administration kind of, sort of, perhaps, maybe, offering a form of non-apology apology. The Chinese released the interned American crew and (ultimately) the remains of the aircraft.
One hopes the self-destruct gear built into the ferret's elint suite worked as promised.
At the time of the collision the US plane was over international waters although perhaps at the edge of the Chinese Exclusive Economic Zone which, in common with global practice. extends two hundred miles offshore. No one can allege that the US plane was illegally exploiting resources within the EEZ.
The same can be said regarding the incident involving units of the PLA's Navy and the US research ship USNS Impeccable. The Chinese craft maneuvered in a manner which put both them and the Impeccable at risk. In addition to this, one of the PLA (N) vessels strewed debris in the Impeccable's path.
The Chinese government has gone high volume noise machine in justifying their "defensive" action against the Impeccable. The usual accusations have flown from their Foreign Ministry regarding US provocation and violation of international agreements beyond numbering.
The Impeccable is equipped to do a number of tasks. One of its top functions is detailed sonar mapping. This sort of thing is useful but only in a military context.
The Chinese government and military know this. Both are fully aware that the US was not and is not violating the Chinese economic prerogatives in its EEZ. The PRC understands the military implications of the US doing detailed reconnaissance of the seabed only seventy-five miles from its naval constellation on Hainan.
That, however, is not the motivation behind the confrontation and resulting bellows of protest which nearly equal those following the mid-air collision in the first months of the Bush Administration.
So, what was it then? You want to know.
The action off Hainan was calibrated with care. The Chinese patrol vessels were all small, highly maneuverable and operated at slow speed. It is evident that the Impeccable had been under observation for some time before the event. Sonar mapping is not a high speed, low drag operation. It requires holding a constant course and speed with turns only at designated points. Thus, it is simple and relatively safe to approach the survey vessel at close range and hassle it.
Since the PLA is very, very hierarchical in organisation and under the firm control of the central authorities, it is proper to conclude that the operation was pre-approved, probably ordered by, the Lads in the Forbidden City. The locals carried out the order when the opportunity presented itself under conditions of good visibility and calm seas. (Cautious, very cautious boldness is a hallmark of the Beijing regime.)
It is fair to assume that the Chinese Foreign Ministry and its masters in the Forbidden City are perfectly well aware that the international agreements defining Exclusive Economic Zones provide certain rights. These rights do not include that of preventing maritime surveys of a non-economic nature conducted by unarmed naval vessels.
The Chinese know perfectly well that the EEZ definitions prevent not only the interference with innocent passage by armed vessels but also interference with normal subsea mapping and related activities. The PRC authorities know that if they were to send a ship equivalent to the Impeccable to map the seabed off the US coast there would be no American challenge--diplomatic or otherwise. We might watch them from a safe distance, but that would be the extent of our Navy's direct involvement.
This being the case, it is possible to conclude that the Chinese action was meant as a test of the Obama administration's patience and resolve. It is the equivalent of a shoulder bump in a crowd--a means of testing response without running a risk.
Think of it as a more finely nuanced and carefully controlled version of the airplane tag practiced with overly dramatic effects in the sky off Hainan eight years ago.
So why do it?
Because the Chinese want to know more about the capacity and will of the new administration to deal with the ever-increasing threat which they present to our freedom of action in the far reaches of the Pacific. The Chinese are in the midst of an immense improvement of their military capacities across the board.
They are rapidly developing a blue water capacity including not only nuclear submarines equipped with SLBMs but are edging into an area of naval warfare long the sole province of the US--carrier born aviation. The Chinese, like the Soviets before them, are abandoning coast defense as the primary function of their naval force.
The PLA itself is becoming leaner, meaner and more technologically advanced every day. It is far and away the most formidable force on the Asian landmass--including the Russian army in Siberia. Even without the evidently programmed improvements, the PLA has a capacity today far surpassing any legitimate defense requirement.
In air defense the Chinese have become a very, very tough target. Currently the programmed air defenses of the PLA are such that the US would have a difficult time effectively penetrating Chinese airspace. Only the F-35, F-117 and B-2 could penetrate without unacceptable losses. How long this will remain the case is debatable.
The Chinese have demonstrated an ASAT capacity and are known to be working on cloning the US ABM capabilities. Neither of these are reassuring to those who might want to see the US maintain its freedom of action in the far Pacific or elsewhere on the Asian landmass.
Of course all of these unpleasant Chinese developments became drearily predictable way back when. Way back when President Bill Clinton opened the doors of trade with the PRC. The neoliberals of that day believed that the web of trade made sure China was fully embraced and thus less likely to be truculent.
Access to American markets simply made sure that money flowed from the US to the PRC. It made certain that the Lads of the Forbidden City would have the means necessary to upgrade the peasant army of the PLA to a first class force and a genuine threat to American interests. The opening of the US also made it easier for the Chinese to gain access to American technology--by means either fair or foul.
As the experience of the previous half century had made clear, espionage simplifies research and development of advanced military technologies. Apparently neither the Clinton nor the Bush Administration bothered to review the history of the Cold War and the constant use made by the Soviets of espionage to gain access to critical US technologies.
With money gushing, secrets flowing and infrastructure growing there is no mystery to the growth of the Chinese threat to American national and strategic interests. Nor is there any mystery behind the periodic diplomatic jostles handed to us by the Chinese military. The Lads in the Forbidden City want to know--must know--how far they can push us before we push back.
The unarmed, non-lethal skirmish off Hainan may not be the "test" warned of by candidate Joe Biden last fall, but it is a test even so. More than seems to be involved hangs on the nature and character of the Obama Administration's response.
If the ripost is too mild, too lackluster, too apologetic, the US can expect more jostles, more tests. Perhaps even the big test of which Biden warned.
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