A happy new year to all. It’s been a busy break for me, so posts may not be forthcoming for a few more days yet. Best wishes to all for 2007.

I’m heading off for some R&R. Posting may not resume before the new year. Best wishes to each of you for a peaceful and safe holiday.

I’ve been doing some end of the year housecleaning here at Opposed Systems Design. I’m sifting through a slew of draft posts that have accumulated over the past 12 months. Most of them have been either overcome by events or are simply not worth posting. I’m dusting off the few that remain and tossing them out here, partly to be able to start the new year with a clean slate.

I originally wrote the following material, for example, back in April.

In a post tying together many of the themes I’ve been examining here, Wretchard examines a recent speech by UK Secretary of State for Defense John Reid.

Wretchard argues that Reid’s speech challenges three of basic pillars of international law: the Geneva Convention, the legitimacy of pre-emptive military action, and the principle of territorial soverignty. Reid sees the need for change in each of these interdependent rule sets due to the “new environment in which we operate.” Much of what we’ve been discussing here at OSD revolves around the nature of this new environment and appropriate responses to that new environment.

Read Wretchard’s post in its entirety for the rest of his analysis. I’ll focus on some of my own thoughts regarding these 20th Century rule sets.

Regarding the respect for territorial sovereignty, we ought to begin with a recognition that this rule set was used in writing the fundamental operating system of the UN. In reaction against the destruction of great power wars, the UN was chartered as a body whose highest priority would be to respect and defend the sovereignty of every nation. If no one ever impinges upon any else’s sovereignty, then there will never again be a great power war.

And this has been true - we haven’t seen a conflict like WWII since, well, WWII. Which is something to be thankful for.

Over the past sixty years, however, we have witnessed first hand that widespread violence, death, and misery can still haunt us - even as the sovereignty of every nation is being assiduously defended by the UN. In fact, some of the most traumatic memories of our collective consciousness come from moments when the assumptions of sovereignty collapsed. In order to respect the sovereignty of a nation, we have to assume that there is actually a nation there in the first place that has sovereignty over itself. In places like Somalia, Rwanda and Afghanistan Haiti we have confronted the reality that in many parts of the world, there is no state that can be treated as opaque. And treating sovereign states as opaque is the whole appeal of sovereignty - instead of dealing with a network of 6 billion +, we deal with a network of <300.

In other cases, we have confronted the reality that there are some states whose sovereignty we don’t want to respect. We have been witnessing the costs of pretending we were indifferent to the internal “sovereign” behavior of states like North Korea or Saddam’s Iraq. In the latter case, we were confronted with perhaps the most straightforward case of sovereignty enforcement imaginable. Iraq violated the sovereignty of Kuwait and, after an appropriately deliberate and diplomatic pace, the UN gave its blessing for a global coalition to rectify the violation. In order to ensure that Iraq would continue to respect the sovereignty of its neighbors, the UN placed sanctions upon it and inspectors in it - an intentional curtailment of Iraq’s sovereignty. Yet for more than a decade Saddam managed to blunt the effects of these measures upon himself (while the population of Iraq suffered) - often by appealing to the principle of Iraq’s sovereignty.

Many of these regions never had a modern state system but this detail was papered over by colonialism and the Cold War.

The final theme I’ll examine in George Packer’s Knowing the Enemy is how radicalization occurs. That is, how do non-combatants turn into active members of the global Salafi militant movement?

Australian LTC David Kilcullen, the primary figure in Packer’s article, references Marc Sageman and Olivier Roy’s work as he argues that:

“There are elements in human psychological and social makeup that drive what’s happening. The Islamic bit is secondary. This is human behavior in an Islamic setting. This is not ‘Islamic behavior.’ ” Paraphrasing the American political scientist Roger D. Petersen, he said, “People don’t get pushed into rebellion by their ideology. They get pulled in by their social networks.” He noted that all fifteen Saudi hijackers in the September 11th plot had trouble with their fathers. Although radical ideas prepare the way for disaffected young men to become violent jihadists, the reasons they convert, Kilcullen said, are more mundane and familiar: family, friends, associates.

This perspective leads to different metrics for success from what day-to-day press reports imply. The global struggle against the militant Salafi movement is not a popularity contest, rather it is a struggle over ideas and systems. Darren Kaplan made this case three years ago over at strategypage. Or, as Kilcullen puts it,

…winning hearts and minds is not a matter of making local people like you—as some American initiates to counterinsurgency whom I met in Iraq seemed to believe—but of getting them to accept that supporting your side is in their interest…

Looking at the issue from this perspective produces a need for different strategies for confronting individuals within the movement. Active members of the militant global Salafi movement need “counter-subversion, which Kilcullen compares to helping young men leave gangs.” In other words, there is a convergence between international security considerations for the Long War and domestic strategies for addressing urban violence.

Incidentally, this line of thinking leads Kilcullen to make a connection that might be familiar to long time readers of Opposed Systems Design:

In a lecture that Kilcullen teaches on counterterrorism at Johns Hopkins, his students watch “Fight Club,” the 1999 satire about anti-capitalist terrorists, to see a radical ideology without an Islamic face.

Without a clear understanding of these dynamics, we will lose the ability to think strategically. We need reach a level of insight sufficient to define a lasting strategy that will be neither Democratic nor Republican, because this struggle transcends domestic partisan concerns. To be sure, there are plenty of factions within our strategic debates but to attempt to organize these factions into the domestic political spectrum is a recipe for incoherence.

A brief story in today’s WSJ [1] indicates that Iran has been having trouble finding foreign capital for oil projects. Iran will need tens of billions of dollars in the next few years to develop the new fields necessary to boost production, but “US pressure has forced many banks to stop dealing with Tehran.” New investment is also needed if Iran is going to reduce its dependence upon gasoline imports.

Nations like Venezuela and Iran have significant energy resources, but those energy resources remain sub-optimally developed without international financing and the latest technology international companies bring.

[1] “Iran Says Reluctance of Foreign Lenders Troubles Oil Projects”, Wall Street Journal, 21 December 2006, A10.

Via Dracobs, a nice snip from a Boston Globe article regarding the growing momentum for an African Command:

The idea for a separate Africa command grew out of a major Pentagon review completed earlier this year. The study concluded that the US military needed to stop domestic security threats before they start by keeping unstable countries around the world from toppling into anarchy.

This justification illustrates the convergence between Homeland Security missions and Combatant Command (COCOM) missions. The issue is less where the operations takes place (inside the US or overseas) and more what the operation concerns. If it involves stabilization, disaster response, and infrastructure defense, then it’s the the Homeland Security flavor and you need one set of forces. If it involves major combat operations, and blowing big holes in things, then you need a different force. Or, as Tom Barnett likes to say, the home game and the away game are becoming the same.

Continuing where my first post on George Packer’s Knowing the Enemy left off, I’ll consider some of the article’s strategic aspects.

Packer introduces LTC David Kilcullen, an Australian Army officer currently on loan to the US State Department, who makes the following point:

It’s really important that we define the enemy in narrow terms… The thing we should not do is let our fears grow and then inflate the threat.

As I have written before, this sort of precision and clear vision is absolutely fundamental to successful strategic thinking. If we can only speak in generalities, then we will be unable to recognize when opportunities present themselves. When we are unable to clearly circumscribe a threat, we make al Qaeda’s job easier because they are actively working to make themselves look like a global movement. Kilcullen points out that we need to look for ways to disaggregate the movement,

finding ways to address local grievances in Pakistan’s tribal areas or along the Thai-Malay border so that they aren’t mapped onto the ambitions of the global jihad.

In order to narrowly define the enemy and disaggregate insurgencies, we need to have positive statements of what our objectives are. Ridding the world of terrorism, denying terrorists sanctuary in Iraq, preventing attacks on the US and reducing oppression are all negative definitions - they say what we want to prevent. What are our objectives? Spreading democracy is vague and begs the question of what qualifies as democracy (does just holding elections count? how about an independent judiciary? where do free markets fit in?). Grand strategy involves synthesis.

What is it that we want to stand for? I think that transparency is a good principle that could serve as a strategic wedge. John Robb has been mulling over the topic lately. Incidentally, this is an area where I see his and Tom Barnett’s work harmonizing, since a basic element of globalization is increased transparency. On the strategic level, focusing on this principle would help orient ourselves properly to the geostrategic environment. It would, for example, have led us to address Abu Ghriab in the manner that COL (ret.) Steve Fondacaro believes we should have:

I asked him what the government should have done, say, in the case of revelations of abuse at the Abu Ghraib prison. “You’re talking to a radical here,” Fondacaro said. “Immediately be the first one to tell the story. Don’t let anyone else do it. That carries so much strategic weight.” He added, “Iraqis are not shocked by torture. It would have impressed them if we had exposed it, punished it, rectified it.”

Transparency dictates that even if the news is bad - in fact, especially if the news is bad - then we had had better be the first ones to break it. We won’t always be right, but we can still demonstrate integrity if we admit when we are wrong.

Returning to the article at hand, the point is to “define the enemy as narrowly as you can get away with.” If we do not, and instead reduce our strategic thinking to opposing generalizations like totalitarianism or Islamofascism, then (in the words of McFate) we will “mislead policymakers into greatly increasing the number of our enemies and coming up with wrongheaded strategies against them.”

I finally had time to sit down and read the George Packer article that has been making such a buzz. And I can see why. I was underlining and scribbling in the margin throughout. The article brings together several important themes that I’ve touched on over the past year and synthesizes them with a strong social science knowledge. I’ll be addressing these themes individually over the course of a few posts. The first theme I’ll examine is the legacy of Vietnam.

Packer illustrates two ways in which the current strategic challenges dredge up the ghosts of Vietnam that our nation has been attempting to repress for the past three decades.

First, regarding counterinsurgency operations:

More than three years into the Iraq war and five into the conflict in Afghanistan, many members of the American military—especially those with combat experience—have begun to accept the need to learn the kind of counterinsurgency tactics that it tried to leave behind in Vietnam

As I have written earlier, this attempt to avoid counterinsurgency operations instead of adapting to them was obscured by our success in the first Gulf War. OEF and OIF have revealed the underlying and still unaddressed counterinsurgency trauma of Vietnam.

Second, Packer profiles the return of social scientists to strategic discussions. He profiles Montomery McFate, and anthropologist who explains her help for the war effort as “a massive act of rebellion against my hippie parents.” McFate goes on to explain that,

Academic anthropolgists hate me for working with D.O.D… This is fundamentally about the broken relationship between the government and the discipline of anthropology. What broke that relationship is Vietnam. And people still haven’t recovered from that.

Packer goes on to describe an anthropologist who supports the Cultural Operations Research Human Terrain project:

I end up getting shunned at cocktail parties… I see that there could be misuse. But I just can’t stand to sit back and watch these mistakes happen over and over as people get killed, and do nothing.

America’s need to actually understand its adversaries forces us to confront the still raw wounds of Vietnam.

Part II will examine the strategic perspective this article provided.

Robb linked to a Ralph Peters article about resistance to globalization:

For the billions remaining, globalization and its consort, the information revolution, merely open a window into an exclusive shop they are not allowed to enter. A second-hand Pittsburgh Steelers shirt on a Congolese beggar isn’t globalization, but only the hind end of global trade. The new awareness of the wealth of others is hardly pacifying. On the contrary, it excites the conviction (which local demagogues are delighted to exacerbate) that they can only be so rich because they stole what was ours. The uneven ability to digest the feast of information suddenly available even in the globe’s backwaters doesn’t bring humanity together (even if Saudi clerics and American bureaucrats visit the same online porn sites). Rather, it disorients those whose lives previously had been ordered, and creates a sense simultaneously of being cheated of previously unimagined possibilities while having one’s essential verities challenged. Feeling helpless and besieged, the victim of globalization turns to the comfort of explanatory, fundamentalist religion or a xenophobia that assures him that, for all his material wants, he is nonetheless superior to others.

While Peters feels that this recognition is missing from globalization’s “pop bestsellers,” the first example I thought of upon reading the above paragraph was an anecdote from Friedman’s The Lexus and the Olive Tree regarding a guide Laura Blumenfeld had while she was in Damascas:

My mom and I hired a guide when were in Damascas to take us around. His name was Walid. We got to know each other after a while… he told us that he liked to sit in his office at night, where he had a satellite dish, and watch Israeli TV. As he described the scene, I pictured this man in this dark office, his eyes wide with fascination, watching this TV screen with people he hated but wanted to be like and was jealous of. He said, though, that of all the things that he watched on Israeli TV, the thing that really bothered him was the yogurt commercials - the fact that the yogurt in Israel came in all these different fruit-colored containers - pink and orange, like in America - while in Syria they were just black or white. He eve, dejectedly, pointed out to us the Syrian yogurt containers on the street one day… One day he said to us, ‘It’s not fair that we are a hundred years behind the Israelis and they just got here.’

Reading Peters often leave me feeling schizophrenic. He describes topical dynamics eloquently and I find myself repeatedly nodding in agreement. Yet he bounces between so many topics and tosses out so many assertions that usually finish the article scratching my head and saying “okay, so…?”

To begin with, I’m not sure what definition of globalization Peters is using. He makes passing mention of globalization equating it with homogenization, which I simply do not see. In the 1990s, visions of a global monoculture may have seemed reasonable, but as New Core powers rise it becomes increasingly difficult to envision such a thing. Peters does an excellent job describing the shock response to the rapid influx of foreign media flows that globalization can bring to tribal cultures. During the late 20th Century these media flows were predominately American (with a European bit here and there) because that is where the most advanced media companies were (think Hollywood, the major television netoworks, etc). Now, however, there is media from New Core states like India and China flooding into those newly connected individuals. Think of the the Bollywood and Chinese films you’ve encountered in the past three years, for example. This new content is still disruptive, so Peters account of tribal resistance to globalization is still accurate, but it is hardly homogenizing. More choices emerge. The long tail becomes the model, not the one-size-for-everyone model. If anything, globalization is especially disruptive because it breaks up homogeny. Short term, yes, it can feel as if there is just one coffee shop (Starbucks) or one restaurant (McDonalds), but long term these companies will be overtaken by others drawn from a global market who are better able to deliver local consumers what they want.

Similarly, Peters’ comments on the EU leave me scratching my head. Creation of a European super-identity may have been associated with the increasing flows of individuals, capital, ideas and security between European states, but it is not an essential element of globalization (I can’t place the four flows definition off the top of my head; I know Barnett uses it but I also know he didn’t invent it. Anyone got the reference handy?).

As far as globalization only benefiting the upper crust, I want to see the data. Gapminder has several wonderful graphics that summarize UN development data indicating how much life has improved over the past few decades. This doesn’t prove that globalization has caused this improvement, but it certainly challenges an unsupported assertion that only the wildly wealthy have seen benefit.

So, yes, tribal forces are where we will see the greatest resistance to globalization. But this isn’t strategic vision. Peters offers precious little by way of prescription. How do we respond? How ought we respond? He feels that we ought to better prepare our soldiers for these tribal forces, but what else? This is the source of my “okay, so…?” feeling.

WaPo article today examines the situation in Somalia. This bit in particular caught my attention:

Somalia descended into chaos after U.S. and U.N. troops withdrew in 1994, with warring clans competing for power and the rest of the world turning away. When the Islamist push began several years ago, the Bush administration started paying attention — and funding locally unpopular warlords to gather intelligence and gird for battle.

“By making a bad bet on the warlords to do our bidding,” incoming Senate Foreign Relations Committee Chairman Joseph R. Biden Jr. (D-Del.) charged last week, “the administration has managed to strengthen the Courts, weaken our position and leave no good options. This is one of the least-known but most dangerous developments in the world, and the administration lacks a credible strategy to deal with it.”

During the Cold War, it may have been morally reprehensible to support warlords and authoritarian rulers, but at least it was strategically coherent. In our current environment, however, supporting such forces is morally and strategically wrong.

This type of problem isn’t going away. Back in 1994, we certainly wished that it would but the past twelve years has provided ample evidence that such wishes have not come true. The challenge of dealing with areas of chaos needs answers, not just short-term crisis response. Beyond the Bill Lind “let’s isolate ourselves from the instability” and Tom Barnett “shrink the gap” answers, can anyone point me to the other people who are proposing systemic solutions?