Enterprise Resilience Management Blog

Hindsight is Good -- Foresight is Better

It is no secret that the U.S. military and its political masters had little clue what to do in Iraq once it brought down Saddam Hussein's regime. There have been numerous books, blogs and articles written on the subject. Now the Army has published its own assessment of what went wrong ["An Army That Learns," by David Ignatius, Washington Post, 13 July 2008].

"The U.S. Army has done something remarkable in its new history of the disastrous first 18 months of the American occupation of Iraq: It has conducted a rigorous self-critique of how bad decisions were made, so that the Army won't make them again."

It may be remarkable that the Army published a critical report about its performance, but I'm not as sanguine that "the Army won't make [the same bad decisions] again," because not all decisions are the Army's to make. Preceding the war in Iraq there were numerous studies and war games conducted that could have better prepared the Army for occupying Iraq, but all of that material was ignored. While much of the blame for that ignorance falls on the civilian leadership who reportedly ordered military planners not to use it -- purportedly because those materials indicated that the force needed to keep the peace needed to be considerably larger than force needed to win the war -- the fact remains that the lessons weren't applied. There is nothing to prevent future civilian leadership from acting in a similarly foolish way. Nevertheless, Ignatius is impressed that the Army went to trouble of critiquing itself, even if he does admit that the civilians in charge continue to justify their decisions or point fingers elsewhere. He writes:

"Civilian leaders are still mostly engaged in a blame game about Iraq, pointing fingers to explain what went wrong and to justify their own actions. That's certainly the tone of recent memoirs by Douglas Feith, the former undersecretary of defense, and L. Paul Bremer, the onetime head of the Coalition Provisional Authority. These were the people making policy, yet they treat the key mistakes as other people's fault. Feith criticizes Bremer and the CIA, while Bremer chides former defense secretary Donald Rumsfeld and the military for ignoring his advice that the United States didn't have enough troops. The Army can't afford this sort of retroactive self-justification. Its commanders and soldiers are the ones who got stuck with the situation in Iraq and had to make it work as best they could. And this internal history, published last month under the title 'On Point II,' testifies to the Army's strength as a learning organization. (This study covers May 2003 to January 2005. An earlier volume, 'On Point,' chronicled the initial assault on Baghdad.)"

I won't quibble with Ignatius' description of the Army as a "learning organization." Like most military services, it works hard to ensure that its strategies, doctrines, and tactics provide its people with the best chance for success. But because the Army is doctrinally driven, there is a built-in tension between those who are trying to lock doctrine down (so that it can be published, promulgated, and practiced) and those who are trying to change it and make it better. Although this is a creative tension, it nevertheless means that parts of the Army will always be odds. What is refreshing about the Army report is the admission that the Army had spent too little time thinking about what comes after the war is won.

"The study is blunt about how unprepared the Army was for the postwar challenges: "The DOD and the Army lacked a coherent plan to translate the rapid, narrow-front attack [on Baghdad] . . . into strategic success. Soldiers and commanders at nearly every level did not know what was expected of them once Saddam Hussein was deposed and his military forces destroyed.' The situation in spring 2003 'evoked the aphorism, "if you don't know where you are going, any road will get you there."' Why was the Army so unready for the insurgency and chaos that followed the toppling of Hussein? The study rejects the easy (if largely correct) answer that it was the fault of poor civilian leadership and focuses instead on the Army's own shortcomings. The overall commander, Gen. Tommy Franks, 'did not see postwar Iraq as his long-term responsibility,' the study says. 'Franks' message to the DOD and the Joint Chiefs was, "You pay attention to the day after, and I'll pay attention to the day of."' But it turned out that nobody was preparing for the day after. The Army's chief of staff, Gen. Eric Shinseki, argued that more troops would be needed, but the Joint Chiefs supported Franks's under-resourced war plan. The chiefs assumed that a reconstituted Iraqi army would help secure the country after the war, little realizing that Bremer would disband it in May 2003. At that time, the military still was assuming that most American troops would be gone by that September."

Franks philosophical take -- "You pay attention to the day after, and I'll pay attention to the day of" -- is clever (and undoubtedly he had plenty to keep him and his planners busy), but he had to know that there was no force in training that was prepared to rush in and implement the occupation. Even if there were, he would have been in charge of it. Both the military and its civilian leadership deserve to take the hit for not having such a force in training. At the time the Iraq War started, my colleague, Tom Barnett, had already been pushing for a "System Administrator (SysAdmin) Force" whose primary purpose is to secure the peace. Although the report doesn't use that term, it laments the fact that such a force didn't exist.

"The United States had a force for 'regime removal' but not 'regime change,' write the authors, Donald P. Wright and Col. Timothy R. Reese. When the Army began to understand that it faced a well-organized insurgency, 'the transition to a new campaign was not well thought out.' The Army wasn't ready to train Iraqi security forces or to handle the thousands of Iraqi prisoners detained in places such as Abu Ghraib."

I don't believe that Ignatius is praising the Army simply for conducting and publishing a report. His real praise is for the men and women on the ground in Iraq who had to learn on the job and made the necessary adjustments in real time to achieve success (even if the learning curve was slower than necessary to prevent the chaos that ensued).

"The Army learned from its mistakes. Rather than sulking about the Iraq mess, commanders made necessary changes. The Army developed a new doctrine for fighting a counterinsurgency; it learned how to work with Iraqi tribal leaders; it pursued al-Qaeda into every village of Iraq; it experimented with soft power, by working closely with Provincial Reconstruction Teams. 'One could easily state that the U.S. Army essentially reinvented itself during this 18-month period,' the historians write. This study illustrates what's most admirable about the Army. It has maintained a tradition of intellectual rigor and self-criticism. That's nurtured in the Army's unique program of midcareer education. It's not an accident but part of that Army tradition that the current commander in Iraq, Gen. David Patraeus, took a doctorate in international relations at Princeton, or that the former Centcom commander, Gen. John Abizaid, had a stint as commandant of West Point. This tradition is exemplified, too, in the decision of Gen. George Casey, the current chief of staff, to publish this sometimes searing critique of his own service."

Throughout the period that the military personnel on the ground were transforming themselves, Tom was receiving emails from them indicating that they were doing exactly the things that he said SysAdmin forces had to do. They were grateful for his foresight and his insight. Ignatius, who has also praised Tom as strategist, concludes:

"Politicians repeat, ad nauseam, the maxim that 'those who cannot learn from history are doomed to repeat it.' The U.S. Army is that rare institution in American life that is actually putting this precept into practice."

As the title of this post declares, hindsight is good, but foresight is better. There were a lot of people, both in the military and out, who predicted that the kind of activities required to secure the peace were being ignored in military doctrine. They were not surprised by the chaos that following the toppling of Ba'athist regime. That said, I'm glad the Army had the courage to transform. I just wish it would have listened to those who had the foresight to call for it to change before thousands had to die because it was unprepared to win the peace.

Privacy and Connecting-the-Dots

The seeds of my current company, Enterra Solutions, can be traced back to the days following the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001. As a serial entrepreneur, I was between companies and looking for my next project. My sister, who was working in the now-condemned Deutsche Bank building which sat next to the World Trade Center towers, had definitely been in harm's way and I was motivated to do something to help. As the details of those tragic events emerged, it was clear that the intelligence community needed a better way to share information and I thought I could help them find it. The short story is those events catalyzed my thinking about rule set automation and how it could be used to make processes of all kinds (including information sharing) more efficient and effective. Sharing information (i.e., making sure the right person, with the right clearance, and a need to know gets the right data) is a very difficult challenge. Sources need protecting and privacy issues abound. It is the tension between the benefits of sharing information and the privacy concerns that it raises that is the focus of a recent article in the Washington Post ["Post-9/11 Dragnet Turns Up Surprises," by Ellen Nakashima, 6 July 2008]. Nakashima writes:

"In the six-and-a-half years that the U.S. government has been fingerprinting insurgents, detainees and ordinary people in Afghanistan, Iraq and the Horn of Africa, hundreds have turned out to share an unexpected background, FBI and military officials said. They have criminal arrest records in the United States. There was the suspected militant fleeing Somalia who had been arrested on a drug charge in New Jersey. And the man stopped at a checkpoint in Tikrit who claimed to be a dirt farmer but had 11 felony charges in the United States, including assault with a deadly weapon. The records suggest that potential enemies abroad know a great deal about the United States because many of them have lived here, officials said. The matches also reflect the power of sharing data across agencies and even countries, data that links an identity to a distinguishing human characteristic such as a fingerprint."

I have repeatedly, in my posts, trumpeted the power of connectivity -- not just for law enforcement purposes but for commercial activity as well. Although there are privacy concerns about information sharing in the commercial sector, they pale in comparison to the concerns raised in the security sector. Anyone whose name is on a terrorist watch list knows that life suddenly becomes more complicated and irritating. People don't really mind making life difficult for a person who is an actual security risk, but when an innocent person is affected we all feel his or her pain. We get outraged when they find themselves caught in a Catch 22 situation where everybody sympathizes but nobody does anything about it. Nakashima reports that warning flags have been raised anew by privacy advocates as a result of a recent directive issued by President Bush.

"The fingerprinting of detainees overseas began as ad-hoc FBI and U.S. military efforts shortly after the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks. It has since grown into a government-wide push to build the world's largest database of known or suspected terrorist fingerprints. The effort is being boosted by a presidential directive signed June 5, which gave the U.S. attorney general and other cabinet officials 90 days to come up with a plan to expand the use of biometrics by, among other things, recommending categories of people to be screened beyond 'known or suspected' terrorists."

Privacy advocates are not just concerned that the program is expanding in the United States, their concerns include the fact that databases are being shared globally.

"Fingerprints are being beamed in via satellite from places as far-flung as the jungles of Zamboanga in the southern Philippines; Bogota, Colombia; Iraq; and Afghanistan. Other allies, such as Sweden, have contributed prints. The database can be queried by U.S. government agencies and by other countries through Interpol, the international police agency. Civil libertarians have raised concerns about whether people on the watch lists have been appropriately determined to be terrorists, a process that senior government officials acknowledge is an art, not a science. Large-scale identity systems 'can raise serious privacy concerns, if not singly, then jointly and severally,' said a 2007 study by the Defense Science Board Task Force on Defense Biometrics. The ability 'to cross reference and draw new, previously unimagined, inferences,' is a boon for the government and the bane of privacy advocates, it said."

People are always wary about "big brother." That is why the Defense Science Board Task Force claim that information sharing is "a boon for the government" touches a nerve that sends shivers up the spine of privacy advocates. Proponents of sharing biometric information undoubtedly have a different perspective and use different language. They would argue that sharing biometric information is a boon for the traveling public and helps make people safer. Both sides have valid points. Nakashima's focus is on the benefits of such information sharing. She continues:

"The effort, officials say, is bearing fruit. 'The bottom line is we're locking people up,' said Thomas E. Bush III, FBI assistant director of the Criminal Justice Information Services division. 'Stopping people coming into this country. Identifying IED-makers in a way never done before. That's the beauty of this whole data-sharing effort. We're pushing our borders back.'"

The U.S. military has always stressed "defense in depth," by which it means defending the country as far away from its shores as possible. Law enforcement agencies have come to appreciate this approach. Nakashima reports that the current effort to collect fingerprints of possible terrorists began shortly after 9/11.

"In December 2001, an FBI team was sent on an unusual mission to Afghanistan. The U.S. military had launched a wave of airstrikes aimed at killing or capturing al Qaeda fighters and their Taliban hosts. The FBI team was to fingerprint and interview foreign fighters as if they were being booked at a police station. The team, led by Paul Shannon, a veteran FBI agent embedded with U.S. special forces, traveled to the combat zone toting briefcases outfitted with printer's ink, hand rollers and paper cards. The agents worked in Kandahar and Kabul. They traversed the Afghanistan-Pakistan border. They hand-carried the fingerprint records from Afghanistan to Clarksburg, W.Va., home to the FBI's criminal biometric database. As they analyzed the results, they were surprised to learn that one out of every 100 detainees was already in the FBI's database for arrests. Many arrests were for drunken driving, passing bad checks and traffic violations, FBI officials said."

Although that description of offenses would lead one to believe that the offenders were not very religious (e.g., Islam teaches that people are supposed to be honest and aren't supposed to drink alcohol), the FBI learned they were very committed to their cause.

"The people being fingerprinted had come from the Middle East, North Africa and Pakistan. They were mostly in their 20s, Shannon recalled. 'One of the things we learned is we were dealing with relatively young guys who were very committed and what they would openly tell you is that when they got out they were going back to jihad,' he said. 'They'd already made this commitment.'"

Nakashima provides other anecdotal evidence of the success of the fingerprinting program.

"One of the first men fingerprinted by the FBI team was a fighter who claimed he was in Afghanistan to learn the ancient art of falconry. But a fingerprint check showed that in August 2001 he had been turned away from Orlando International Airport by an immigration official who thought he might overstay his visa. Mohamed al Kahtani would later be named by the Sept. 11 Commission as someone who allegedly had sought to participate in hijackings. He currently is in custody at Guantanamo Bay. Similarly, in 2004, an FBI team choppered to a remote desert camp on the Iraq-Iran border, home to the Mujahedin-e-Khalq (MEK), whose aim is to overthrow the Iranian government. The MEK lead an austere lifestyle in which men are segregated from women and material goods are renounced. The U.S. State Department considers the organization to be a terrorist group. The FBI team fingerprinted 3,800 fighters. More than 40, Shannon said, had previous criminal records in the agency's database."

The FBI is not the only organization collecting biometric data. Nakashima reports that the U.S. military also a program.

"While the FBI was busy collecting fingerprints, the military was setting up its own biometrics database, adding in iris and facial data as well. By October, the two organizations agreed to collaborate, running queries through both systems. The very first match was on the man who claimed to be a poor dirt farmer. Among his many charges were misdemeanors for theft and public drunkenness in Chicago and Utah, a criminal record that ran from 1993 to 2001, said Herb Richardson, who serves as operations manager for the military's Automated Biometric Identification System under a contract with Ideal Innovations of Arlington. Many of those with U.S. arrest records had come to the United States to study, said former Criminal Justice Information Services head Michael Kirkpatrick, who led the FBI effort to use biometrics in counterterrorism after Sept. 11. 'It suggests there was some familiarity with Western culture, the United States specifically, and for whatever reason they did not agree with that culture,' he said. 'Either they became disaffected or put up with it, and then they went overseas.'"

Nakashima also provides anecdotal evidence about why civil libertarians are concerned with such programs.

"Errors in matching, though rare, have occurred. In a noted 2004 case, Oregon lawyer Brandon Mayfield was erroneously named as a suspect in the Madrid train bombings that killed 191 people. FBI lab analysts matched a print lifted from a plastic bag at the crime scene to his fingerprints that were stored in the FBI's criminal database because of a 1985 arrest for auto burglary when he was a teenager. The charge had been dismissed. After a critical Justice Department Inspector General audit, the FBI made fixes in its system. A recent inspector general report found the FBI fingerprint matching to be generally accurate. Civil libertarians, however, worry that the systems are not transparent enough for outsiders to tell how the government decides who belongs on a watch list and how that information is handled. 'The day when the federal government can tell people the basis they've been put on the watch list is the day we can have more confidence in biometric identification,' said Marc Rotenberg, executive director of the Electronic Privacy Information Center."

Nakashima goes on to report why watch lists are so problematic.

"Vetting the data is the job of analysts at the National Counterterrorism Center, an office park-like complex in McLean run by the Office of the Director of National Intelligence. Analysts there scour intelligence reports to create the master international terrorist watch list. 'You cannot draw a bright red line and say that's a terrorist, this person isn't,' said Russ Travers, an NCTC deputy director. 'If somebody swears allegiance to Bin Laden, that's an easy case. If somebody goes to a terrorist training camp, that's probably an easy case. What if a person goes to a camp and decides, "I don't want to go to a camp, I want to go home." Where do you draw the line?' Investigators are working on ever more sophisticated ways to evaluate the data. Analysts at the Army's National Ground Intelligence Center in Charlottesville, for instance, use software to scrutinize intelligence reports from sources such as electronic surveillance and informants. They then link the information to a person's biographic and biometric data, and look for relationships that might detect terrorists and plots. For example, a roadside bomb may explode and a patrol may fingerprint bystanders because insurgents have been known to remain at the scene to observe the results of their work. Prints also can be lifted off tiny fragments of exploded bombs, said military officials and contractors involved in the work. Analysts are not just trying to identify the prints on the bomb. They want to find out who the bomb-carrier associates with. Who he calls. Who calls him. That could lead to the higher-level operatives who planned and financed attacks. Already, fingerprints lifted off a bomb fragment have been linked to people trying to enter the United States, they said. In a separate data-sharing program, 365 Iraqis who have applied to the Department of Homeland Security for refugee status have been denied because their fingerprints turned up in the Defense Department's database of known or suspected terrorists, Richardson said."

The fact that vetting watch lists is so difficult is what makes civil libertarians so wary. While some privacy advocates insist that no personal data should be collected, stored, shared and analyzed, I believe most people understand that those activities play an important security role. There has to be some compromise reached. It may not make everybody happy, but such a compromise should make people on both sides the least unhappy it can. Nakashima concludes with an overview of how the program is changing to include the collection of domestic biometric data.

"If Iraq and Afghanistan were a proving ground of sorts for biometric watch-listing, the U.S. government is moving quickly to try to build a domestic version. Since September 2006, Homeland Security and the FBI have been operating a pilot program in which police officers in Boston, Dallas and Houston run prints of arrestees against a Homeland Security database of immigration law violators and a State Department database of people refused visas. Federal job applicants' prints also are run against the databases. To date, some 500 people have been found in the database and thus are of interest to Homeland Security officials. Steve Nixon, a director at the Office of the Director of National Intelligence, said the effort is key to national security. 'When we look at the road and the challenges, globalization and the spread of technology has empowered small groups of individuals, bad guys, to be more powerful than at any other time in history,' he said. 'We have to know who these people are when we encounter them. A lot of what we're doing in intelligence now is trying to identify a person. Biometrics is a key element of that.'"

As I noted above, there will undoubtedly be compromises in data collection programs that will leave neither side happy. The intelligence and law enforcement communities are always pursuing perfect information and civil libertarians are always looking to keep the government out the lives of individual citizens. The resulting tension may be uncomfortable, but it is also healthy and necessary. A free society that willingly surrenders its liberties doesn't remain free for long. On the other hand, a society without some norms and enforcement mechanisms quickly erodes into anarchy and chaos. Checks and balances relating to security and privacy issues will only remain strong as long as both sides keep up the good fight.

Kristof Pleads for Books, not Bombs

New York Times' columnist Nicholas Kristof spends a lot of his time traveling to locations never seen by most globe-trotting tourists. Such ventures, however, provide him with a world view that can only come through such experiences. I am working with the U.S. Chamber of Commerce and U.S. Department of Commerce to introduce U.S. business people to opportunities in Iraq, especially opportunities in the Kurdistan region where the environment is sufficiently stable to permit economic growth. A group of such business people were recently brought to Iraq to see conditions there for themselves. Sometimes that is the only way to really appreciate a situation. One of Kristof's latest ventures took him to countries surrounding Iraq and into areas where Iraqi refugees have fled over the course of the conflict there. He now fears that we are creating a new intractable security situation that will rival the Israeli-Palestinian situation ["Books, Not Bombs," 26 June 2008]. He writes:

"The dirty little secret of the Iraq war isn't in Baghdad or Basra. Rather, it's found in the squalid brothels of Damascus and the poorest neighborhoods of East Amman. Some two million Iraqis have fled their homeland and are now sheltering in run-down neighborhoods in surrounding countries. These are the new Palestinians, the 21st-century Arab diaspora that threatens the region’s stability. Many youngsters are getting no education, and some girls are pushed into prostitution, particularly in Damascus. Impoverished, angry, disenfranchised, unwanted, these Iraqis are a combustible new Middle Eastern element that no one wants to address or even think about."

Kristof is right to be concerned. As Bradd C. Hayes and Jeffrey I. Sands wrote in their book Doing Windows: Non-Traditional Military Responses to Complex Emergencies:

"[Refugees from conflict] become economic liabilities, have increased health risks, and form the core of politically discontent groups. Therefore, getting them out of refugee camps is one of the international community's highest priorities."

Policymakers (in the U.S. and elsewhere) apparently have not read the book because Kristof reports that Iraqi refugees have been all but forgotten. He believes the U.S. in particular owes it to these people to set things right.

"American hawks prefer to address the region's security challenges by devoting billions of dollars to permanent American military bases. A simpler way to fight extremism would be to pay school fees for refugee children to ensure that they at least get an education and don’t become forever marginalized and underemployed. We broke Iraq, and we have a moral responsibility to those whose lives have been shattered by our actions. Helping them is also in our national interest, for we'll regret our myopia if we allow young Iraqi refugees to grow up uneducated and unemployable, festering in their societies."

Kristof writes about the enormity of the challenge and why nobody wants to discuss it:

"Iraqi refugees don't get help in part because this is a problem that almost everybody wants to hide. Syria and Jordan worry that if the refugees get assistance, then they will stay indefinitely. The U.S. doesn't want to talk about a crisis created by our war, and Iraq's Shiite leaders don't much care about Sunnis or Christians displaced by Shiite militias. 'It's among the largest humanitarian crises in the world today,' said Michael Kocher, a refugee expert at the International Rescue Committee, which recently published a report on the crisis. 'It's getting very little attention from the Security Council on down, which we feel is scandalous and also bad strategy.' It's easy to blame the surrounding countries, such as Jordan and Syria, for not being more hospitable to Iraqis. But those countries have, however grudgingly, tolerated the influx despite the burden and political risk. Iraqi refugees are hard to count but may now amount to 8 percent of Jordan's population of six million. The average Jordanian family, which opposed the war in the first place, is now bearing a cost that may be as much as $1,000 per year for providing for the refugees."

Keeping the Iraqis in refugee camps in perpetuity is both bad policy and morally indefensible. What we need is a change of perspective -- a different way of looking at the challenge. Jonathan Moore has argued that the "reintegration into society of millions of repatriated refugees, returned displaced [persons], and demobilized soldiers presents an opportunity for wholesale progress in recovery and renewal" [The UN and Complex Emergencies: Rehabilitation in Third World Transitions (Geneva: UN Research Institute for Social Development, 1996)]. Looking at Iraqi repatriation as an opportunity rather than a problem may help garner support for Kristof's course of action. Kristof concludes:

"We have already seen, in the case of Palestinians, how a refugee diaspora can destabilize a region for decades. If Jordan were to collapse in part from such pressures, that would be a catastrophe — and the best way to prevent that isn't to give it Blackhawk helicopters, but help with school fees and school construction. If we let the Iraqi refugee crisis drag on — and especially if we allow young refugees to miss an education so that they will never have a future — then we are sentencing ourselves to endure their wrath for decades to come. Educating Iraqis may not be as glamorous as bombing them, but it will do far more good."

Kristof is being too sarcastic when he writes that "educating Iraqis" is not "as glamorous as bombing them." I have met far too many military people who are genuinely excited about helping the Iraqi people get back on their feet. These military people appreciate far more than their political masters the importance of programs that bring stability and prosperity to people's lives. There is far more satisfaction in helping people than in killing enemies -- although both may be necessary.

Iraq will probably not be the last intervention undertaken by the international community. When the next one comes around, they should not ignore the lessons that were re-learned during the Iraq War. Andrew Natsios has identified three operational principles that militaries should observe that would help mitigate future refugee crises ["Eleven Iron Laws for Responding to Complex Humanitarian Emergencies," speech given to participants in Exercise Agile Lion, U.S. European Command, 27 June 1995].

"First, avoid military actions that will encourage population movements and the subsequent creation of displaced camps;

"second, work with humanitarian relief organizations to develop a mix of incentives so people will not leave their home villages in the first place, and

"third, if camps are already formed, work with humanitarian relief groups -- as the military did so successfully in Kurdistan -- to return people voluntarily and as soon as practicable to their homes."

In Iraq, we are way beyond the "soon as practicable" timeframe, but it is not too late to address this challenge in a positive way. Returning Iraqis will need homes and jobs. Refugees should be given jobs helping to build the homes and other supporting infrastructure. Children need to get into school and off the streets. Hope needs to replace despair. This is best done by giving people a stake in Iraq's future. Living in camps outside the country gives them neither hope nor a stake in the future.

R&D in the Intelligence Community

This past April I wrote a blog entitled Happy Birthday DARPA that focused on an article celebrating that agency's 50th anniversary. DARPA has been a remarkably successful agency with a notable number of scientific and technological achievements that can be traced back to research it sponsored. Stephen Barr, on whose column I focused in that blog, wrote this about the agency:

"Unlike most federal agencies, DARPA operates with little red tape. It has only two management layers, encouraging the rapid flow of ideas and decisions. About 240 people work at DARPA, and 120 of them are program managers and office directors on appointments of four to six years. The agency does not own or operate labs, but sponsors research carried out by industry and universities. By rotating technical professionals every few years, DARPA has 'a constant freshness of people and energy,' Tether said. 'Everything else we do stems from that.'"

Apparently the intelligence community has suffered from "agency envy" and it has now established an R&D activity of its own ["Intelligence Agency Joins U-Md. Research Center," by Anita Huslin, Washington Post, 15 June 2008].

'The University of Maryland's newest tenant is not in the business of advertising its existence or its work. The Intelligence Advanced Research Projects Activity is the new corollary of the military's Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, created in 1958 in the wake of the Sputnik launch to develop new defense technologies. Among other things, DARPA's work led to the development of the Internet, global positioning systems and unmanned aircraft. IARPA is expected to perform similar work for the 16 U.S. intelligence agencies."

The intelligence community certainly has a requirement for an advanced research arm. Obtaining, sharing, and analyzing data so that it can be turned into actionable intelligence has always been a daunting challenge. In the information age, it has become almost impossible to keep up with the mountains of data that can be generated and with the technologies potential adversaries can use to conceal their activities. Don't expect to hear a lot of fanfare about IARPA. It will gladly operate as quietly as DARPA has operated over the past fifty years.

"IARPA is temporarily located in the university's Center for Advanced Study of Language, which is supported by the National Security Agency and, among other things, teaches Arabic to Iraq-bound Marines and researches cross-cultural interrogation techniques. Ground is expected to be broken this summer on IARPA's new digs: a 120,000-square-foot sensitive compartmentalized information facility designed to provide the highest level of security for government intelligence work. It will be in the university's M Square research park, just off campus. Similar to DARPA, in a nondescript, unlabeled brick building in Arlington, IARPA is not expected to advertise its presence, nor are officials permitted to discuss any details about it."

Although it may conduct its business quietly, its economic impact on the university and the surrounding community is expected to be big.

"This is what the region's first research park has been waiting for, members of the university and research community say. 'Projections are, it's going to become an enormous enterprise and there will be undoubtedly lots of companies, both as contractors and otherwise, that will locate around the building,' said William E. Kirwin, chancellor of the University of Maryland system. 'I think it will be substantial,' University of Maryland president C.D. Mote Jr. said of the new IARPA presence. 'This is expected to be the premier supporter of the most advanced thinking in far-reaching intelligence research -- new stuff that hasn't been thought of.'"

It's not just that intelligence community is establishing a research activity that is generating all of this enthusiasm it's the fact that it is bringing money with it.

"What does that mean in terms of budgets, employees, contracting jobs? No one at the university can say. And the agency's new director, who just recently put up help-wanted postings on the Internet for her top three project management jobs, is not available to talk about it, according to a spokeswoman for the Office of the Director of National Intelligence. The organization's budget is classified. In seeking congressional funding for the agency, officials last year said that IARPA will be significantly smaller than DARPA, which has a $3 billion annual budget. Its staff will consist of 35 national intelligence and 21 CIA employees, and research will be outsourced to contractors. Focuses will be language processing, quantum science, nanotechnology, biometrics, deception detection, counter-biological warfare and tagging, tracking and locating."

According to Huslin, IARPA will operate using the same philosophy embraced by DARPA. It will promote high risk, high payoff ideas.

"Last month, in an interview with the technology trade group IEEE, IARPA Director Lisa Porter suggested that the agency's new location at the University of Maryland indicates that it will be open to people and organizations, like academia and industry, that traditionally may not be able to access the intelligence research world. 'It sends a nice message that we're embracing the broad community to help us solve these challenging problems,' she told the IEEE. 'This is a great place for people with a great idea. It's really risky, the potential payoff is huge, and failure is okay -- that kind of environment is pretty hard to find.'"

Porter is right that it is difficult to find an environment where failing is "okay." Every credible study about innovative organizations concludes, however, that failure must be viewed as part of the learning process if the organization is going to foster an environment where people feel secure in pursuing their wildest ideas. Such an environment will attract innovative people like moths to a flame and that is exactly what the intelligence community is hoping to do. I suspect that the innovations that come out of IARPA will have an impact far beyond the confines of the intelligence community. That has certainly been the case with DARPA innovations.

The End of Intervention?

In a recent post, I focused on a column by Roger Cohen [Turning the World Upside Down]. In that post, I quoted Cohen on the subject of international security. He wrote about the future security landscape: "Less obvious is how the United States, which underwrites global security at vast expense, begins to share this burden, so that the new multi-polarity of wealth is reflected in a multipolarity of security commitments." I noted that a "tour d'horizon of countries into which wealth is flowing, however, doesn't exactly inspire one with confidence that they are willing or prepared to assume the responsibilities of keeping the global order moving forward. As the torch of influence passes to a new group, the old elite must help tutor the new elite about their global obligations."  Former Secretary of State Madeleine Albright argues in an op-ed piece that the failure of the international community to forcibly intervene to save lives in Myanmar following the deadly cyclone that slammed into its shores sounds a death knell for intervention ["The End of Intervention," New York Times, 11 June 2008].

"The Burmese government's criminally neglectful response to last month's cyclone, and the world's response to that response, illustrate three grim realities today: totalitarian governments are alive and well; their neighbors are reluctant to pressure them to change; and the notion of national sovereignty as sacred is gaining ground, helped in no small part by the disastrous results of the American invasion of Iraq. Indeed, many of the world's necessary interventions in the decade before the invasion — in places like Haiti and the Balkans — would seem impossible in today’s climate."

In "today's climate," I would probably agree with Albright. The Americans are bogged down in Iraq and Afghanistan and simply are incapable of taking on a new intervention and, as I noted above, the rest of the world is simply ill-prepared to act without the U.S. Nevertheless, I'm not so sure that I agree that we should write the eulogy for all future interventions just quite yet. The world is in a time of transition and, until the new order is fully established and newly influential countries become comfortable with the roles they must assume, it remains too early to make declarative statements about the future. Albright continues making her case:

"The first and most obvious reality is the survival of totalitarian government in an age of global communications and democratic progress. Myanmar’s military junta employs the same set of tools used by the likes of Stalin to crush dissent and monitor the lives of citizens. The needs of the victims of Cyclone Nargis mean nothing to a regime focused solely on preserving its own authority. Second is the unwillingness of Myanmar's neighbors to use their collective leverage on behalf of change. A decade ago, when Myanmar was allowed to join the Association of Southeast Asian Nations, I was assured by leaders in the region that they would push the junta to open its economy and move in the direction of democracy. With a few honorable exceptions, this hasn't happened. A third reality is that the concept of national sovereignty as an inviolable and overriding principle of global law is once again gaining ground. Many diplomats and foreign policy experts had hoped that the fall of the Berlin Wall would lead to the creation of an integrated world system free from spheres of influence, in which the wounds created by colonial and cold war empires would heal. In such a world, the international community would recognize a responsibility to override sovereignty in emergency situations — to prevent ethnic cleansing or genocide, arrest war criminals, restore democracy or provide disaster relief when national governments were either unable or unwilling to do so."

Undoubtedly the optimism that followed the collapse of the Soviet bloc has faded. The pin that burst that bubble occurred on 11 September 2001. The spirit of cooperation ended as people were asked to take sides in situations where doing so would have created difficult internal problems for some countries. Intervention, however, should be a tool of last resort. Albright touched on the subject of leverage and lamented that not all countries had used the leverage they have to help populations in distress. New York Times' op-ed columnist Thomas Friedman wrote a piece that emphasized the importance of using leverage when you have it ["It's All About Leverage," 1 June 2008]. Friedman writes:

"The Bush team negotiated with Libya to give up its nuclear program, even after Libya had accepted responsibility for blowing up Americans on Pan Am Flight 103. Those negotiations succeeded ... because, at the time, shortly after the invasion of Iraq, Mr. Bush had leverage. Iraq had yet to fall apart."

Friedman wrote his column in response to the uproar created by Barack Obama's declaration that he would talk to America's foes as well as his subsequent "clarifications" on that subject. Friedman continues:

"Mr. Obama would do himself a big favor by shifting his focus from the list of enemy leaders he would talk with to the list of things he would do as president to generate more leverage for America, so no matter who we have to talk with the advantage will be on our side of the table. That's what matters. ... As I have argued before: When you have leverage, talk. When you don't have leverage, get some. Then talk."

In the book Leveraging for Success in United Nations Peace Operations, Jean Krasno, Donald Daniel, and Bradd Hayes conclude:

"Instruments of leverage appear to range along a continuum, albeit overlapping at times, from hard leverage like the use of or threat to use military force at one of the spectrum, to soft leverage, exemplified by intangible qualities such as trust at the other."

They go on to list some of the instruments of leverage, which include: military force, economic and financial tools, nonfinancial constraints or sanctions, the power of information, legal leverage, the internalization of international norms, the use of local groups and international NGOs, moral authority, impartiality, prestige, social pressure and personal contacts, and exposure and accountability. Rarely are all those tools applied in a single situation. Albright concluded her op-ed piece by writing:

"The global conscience is not asleep, but after the turbulence of recent years, it is profoundly confused. Some governments will oppose any exceptions to the principle of sovereignty because they fear criticism of their own policies. Others will defend the sanctity of sovereignty unless and until they again have confidence in the judgment of those proposing exceptions. At the heart of the debate is the question of what the international system is. Is it just a collection of legal nuts and bolts cobbled together by governments to protect governments? Or is it a living framework of rules intended to make the world a more humane place?"

As I have written previously, the world needs leaders blessed with both wisdom and resolve. Such leaders would undoubtedly understand the importance of leverage and how to use it. It is too soon to raise our hands in submission and give up trying to make the world a more secure place. Security is essential to development and development is essential to helping bring billions out of the grip of poverty.

Moving Forward in Rwanda

I have written two posts over the past couple of years about Rwanda -- specifically about that country's attempts to get connected to the rest of the world [Wiring Rwanda to the World and Update on Wiring Rwanda to the World]. In the first post, I wrote: "In the panoply of nations, Rwanda stands out as one nation which has suffered through a number of calamities including civil war and genocide. Characterized by a treacherous, if beautiful, terrain, Rwanda is one of the most disconnected nations on earth. In fact, by most measures, Rwanda is an underdeveloped, if not failing, state." That post was about Greg Wyler, a 36-year-old American tech entrepreneur who had big dreams about connecting Rwanda to the rest of the world. His dream started when he met the chief-of-staff for Rwanda’s president, Paul Kagame, at a wedding and the chief-of-staff invited him to visit his country. Wyler accepted the invitation and once in Rwanda met with Kagame. President Kagame, knowing that Wyler had made his fortune in the tech sector, asked him for his opinion about a $50-million project to bring Internet service to Rwandan schools via satellite. Wyler's advice: Don't do it. Satellite service is costly, slow, and unreliable. Kagame scuttled the satellite plan and urged to Wyler to take on the project of wiring the schools with fiber. Wyler accepted. Unfortunately, as I noted in my second post, things have not gone well.

Rwandan officials complain that Wyler's company, Terracom, quickly refocused on the more lucrative cellphone market once it learned how difficult being an Internet service provider proved to be. Wyler actually stepped down as chief executive of Terracom in November 2006. Wyler indicated that he had underestimated the technical challenges of connecting Rwanda to the rest of the world. Even though he persuaded President Kagame to abandon his satellite plan, Wyler, in the end, admitted that the only way to do it is to buy bandwidth capacity on satellites. Unfortunately, there are not enough satellites to meet demand and the service remains costly. I review those posts because they set the stage for a recent op-ed column by David Ignatius ["A Past at Rest in Rwanda," Washington Post, 29 May 2008]. Ignatius doesn't discuss Rwanda's ambition to connect to the Internet; rather, he talks about how President Kagame has managed to maintain security and move Rwanda beyond thinking about its brutal recent history.

"It happened just 14 years ago -- the slaughter of roughly a million people here in only 100 days. 'More people had been killed more quickly than in any other mass killing in recorded history,' writes Martin Meredith in his book 'The Fate of Africa.' And yet today there are few visible traces of the genocide that began in April 1994. It's not that Rwandans have forgotten, but that they seem to have willed themselves to live in the present. That makes this place feel different from other post-conflict states I know, such as Iraq and Lebanon, where the past and present are congealed in a wound that never heals."

Much of credit must go to President Kagame, who Ignatius describes as, "a Tutsi who led the armed revolt that ended the genocide on July 4, 1994, [and] rules the country now with a firm hand -- maintaining order here even at the occasional cost of human rights." Kagame has an interesting history. He was forced to flee Rwanda as a child and was raised in Uganda, where he eventually joined a Uganda rebel group that helped bring Yoweri Museveni to power. He then joined with other Tutsi refugees to form the Rwandan Patriotric Front (RPF), the group he eventually led to victory in Rwanda. Kagame has always stressed discipline. In the book Coercive Inducement and the Containment of International Crises [Donald C.F. Daniel, Bradd C. Hayes with Chantal de Jonge Oudraat], it notes, "Although only in his thirties during the crisis, Kagame was 'demanding' and 'obsessed with discipline in the ranks.' Kagame's stress on discipline may have been a result of the fighting in 1990 when 'both sides behaved atrociously, murdering civilians of the wrong tribe and inciting villagers to do likewise.'" During the dark days of the 1994 crisis, Kagame learned the importance of connectivity. He maintained his control by constantly moving to check on his troops and always traveling with a cellphone. The people of Rwanda generally tolerate Kagame's firm rule because, unlike their neighbors in Burundi, Uganda, and the Democratic Republic of the Congo, they feel secure. It is this security that has allowed them to move forward. Ignatius continues:

"During a week spent traveling the country, I found that Rwandans rarely brought up the events of the past. They almost never named the ethnic groups involved in the 1994 genocide -- the Hutu perpetrators and the Tutsi victims. Expatriates would speak a kind of code, referring to 'H's' and 'T's.' At the Hotel des Mille Collines, made famous by the movie 'Hotel Rwanda,' you try to imagine the desperate refugees crammed together in a space that now features a fitness club and a poolside bar with live music. But here, again, the present has obliterated the past. Trying to fall asleep, you think how big the bedroom is, how many more people it could hold."

Although Rwandans might not speak often of the past, Ignatius reminds us that the horrors of those days should not be forgotten. He reminds us of how bad they were.

"A glimpse into the horror came from a family friend, Antoine Rwego. The Rwegos were Tutsis, the tribe that was favored by the Belgian colonizers but then repressed by the Hutu majority after independence in 1962. His father was a veterinarian; his mother worked in a bank. They were part of a privileged minority, so they were targets. Rwego remembers when the massacres began on April 7, 1994. Soldiers came looking for his father, but he was away. Rwego, then 16, escaped over the wall to the house of a Hutu neighbor who had married a Tutsi. His 12-year-old sister and 10-year-old brother were not so lucky. They were murdered by armed men who invaded the family compound. Rwego heard the screams next door, but he could do nothing. After several days, young Rwego fled the neighborhood and miraculously found his father. They hid in another part of town until May, when someone from his old district chanced to see them. On May 16, his father was tricked out of hiding on the pretext that he was needed for a medical emergency. He never came back. For Rwego, it was not a question of forgetting but of continuing: 'Why had I remained alive? So that I should do something for others.' He got top grades in school, earned a medical degree and now is a doctor with Rwanda's national AIDS research organization. He is a reserved, stoical man, like most Rwandans I met, but as he told this story, he brushed a tear from one eye."

The story of Rwanda is a story of hope. It should provide every war torn nation a glimpse of a future where opposing sides of civil war put aside differences and work for a brighter future. Rwanda is not perfect -- far from it. It still has mountains to climb -- thousands of them. But the bedfellows of security and hope spur them on. Ignatius concludes:

"Rwanda is again a bright, tidy spot in the center of Africa, and people talk of an economic boom. As my friend Dr. Rwego says, it is a question of breaking free from your history, even when you hear in your mind the cries of your brother and sister: 'To stay in the things of the past, it prevents you from changing.'"

Breaking free from history may be one of the hardest things for human beings to do. It was history that broke apart Yugoslavia. It is history that keeps the Israeli/Palestinian crisis festering. One can still drive through America's south and find those who are still fighting the Civil War. I'm sure that Rwanda's recent genocidal history smolders beneath quiet demeanor of many a citizen (both Hutu and Tutsi), but they should be applauded for accomplishing what so few societies have been able to do in so short a time. In another post, I'll examine the role of Rwanda's women and how they have emerged as a potent economic force.

Conflict and Dislocation

With over 5 million people in China having lost their homes during the recent series of earthquakes, the plight of the half a million people dislodged by conflict during the first five months of 2008 seems to pale in comparison ["UN: over 500,000 people uprooted by conflict this year," by Edith M. Lederer, Washington Post, 28 May 2008]. For dislodged individuals, however, the tragedy is the same no matter the location. What compounds the tragedy for those dislodged by conflict is that their situation is the result of deliberate human action rather than the vagaries of nature. Most of those dislocated because of conflict, Lederer reports, are found in Africa.

"John Holmes told the United Nations Security Council that although peace is being consolidated in Ivory Coast, Nepal and East Timor and there have been some other positive developments, 'millions of ordinary people are still trapped in the horror of war and conflict, hoping desperately to rise from the chaos that surrounds them into more peaceful times.' Holmes spoke at a daylong meeting of the council focusing on the protection of civilians in armed conflict, an issue that has produced four council resolutions but no real solution. A statement adopted by consensus and read at the end of Tuesday's meeting reaffirmed the council's commitment 'to addressing the impact of armed conflict on civilians,' including excessive use of force and sexual and gender-based violence. Holmes stressed the 'collective responsibility' of the U.N. and individual nations to prevent war, secure peace and protect civilians, citing varying degrees of progress."

Isaac Asimov once wrote, "Violence is the last refuge of the incompetent." In cases like Zimbabwe and the Sudan, that is probably true. Asimov, however, was highlighting the folly of incompetence not describing the causes of violence -- which are legion. After survival (i.e., the provision of food, water, and housing), what people desire most is security. A lack of security means that people live in constant fear and without hope. There has been some progress in fostering security in war torn regions, but not much.

"Mediation in Kenya reduced post-election violence, he said, and the full deployment of peacekeepers in Chad, the Central African Republic and Darfur 'has the potential to augment significantly efforts to protect and assist those caught in the turmoil of violence in the region. But the risks of deterioration are currently very great,' Holmes warned, urging that the three missions receive all the required troops and resources. He said in the first five months of the year, more than half a million people have been displaced by conflict, both within and across borders. 'In Burundi, the Central African Republic, Chad, Somalia and Sudan, over 337,000 civilians have been forced to flee violence this year, some of them not for the first time,' he said. In Congo, the fruits of a conference in January on peace, security and development are yet to be felt by those sheltering in camps and public buildings, including 175,000 people newly displaced this year. 'In Iraq, sectarian violence, as well as armed confrontations around Basra and Sadr City, have forced more thousands from their homes,' Holmes said. 'In Afghanistan, conflict-induced displacement continues to undermine the gains made in the return or resettlement of those previously displaced.'"

Diplomats once held the naive notion that conflict could be limited to soldiers on the battlefield. Although conventions remain on the books to that effect, the truth is that most conflict is now directed towards civilians. Civilian casualties are not "collateral damage" but intended consequences.

"[Holmes,] the U.N. humanitarian chief, lamented that civilians account for the majority of casualties in armed conflict, in violation of international humanitarian law governing the conduct of hostilities. In January and February, aerial bombings and ground attacks on villages in West Darfur left 115 civilians dead, including elderly and disabled people, women and children, he said. In April, hundreds of civilians were killed or injured in Somalia and thousands were forced to flee their homes because of fighting in the capital, Mogadishu, between government-supported Ethiopian troops and armed groups, he said. Holmes said hundreds of civilians have been killed or injured in Sri Lanka this year, 300 civilians were killed in the first four months in Afghanistan in attacks by 'anti-government elements' and suicide bombers struck 'with chilling effect' in Iraq. He called for greater adherence to international law, 'robust action' to prevent and respond to sexual violence in armed conflict, a treaty to ban cluster munitions which have a devastating impact on civilians and unhindered access for humanitarian workers. This is 'fundamental to our efforts to protect civilians and assist those in need,' he said."

Holmes' plea underscores what I have been saying about development and security. You can't have one without the other. Lederer's article is timely in that it reminds us, even as the world responds to massive natural disasters in Myanmar and China, that manmade disasters also cause devastation and heartbreak.

Seeking Security and Development in Afghanistan

I have often written about how development and security go hand in hand. Although security generally precedes development, it is not by much. In almost all situations where there is or has been a crisis, you are likely to find humanitarian organizations in place. While many of these groups are concerned with the immediate health and welfare of the victims of crisis, you will also often find non-governmental organizations in the area whose focus is on development and the long-term health and welfare of the local population. In areas where there are absolutely no assurances of security, you are likely to find no help at all. There are, apparently, many such areas in Afghanistan. They are the focus of a recent column by David Ignatius ["Building Bridges in the Back of Beyond." Washington Post, 1 May 2008]. Ignatius focuses on the work being done by Lt. Col. Chris Kolenda of the U.S. Army. Ignatius begins his narrative in Naray, Afghanistan.

"This remote, mountainous patch of Afghanistan is near where Rudyard Kipling set his famous story 'The Man Who Would Be King.' And as you listen to Lt. Col. Chris Kolenda rattle off the names of the region's tribes and subtribes, you realize that he and other Americans here might be Kipling characters themselves. Kolenda's base truly is 'the back of beyond,' as 19th-century British travelers sometimes described this part of the world. It's located in a hauntingly beautiful region of northeastern Afghanistan, a few miles from the Pakistan border -- a land of steep mountains, narrow river valleys and primitive terraced farms. There are no paved roads, and in most villages there is no electricity and no running water. You reach the base by Black Hawk helicopter, soaring above the rushing rivers and isolated canyons of the Hindu Kush."

It is into these isolated, disconnected areas that insurgents and terrorists like to flee. The only way to dislodge them is with the help of the local populace. That is the objective Lt. Col. Kolenda is pursuing.

"Kolenda talks like an amateur ethnologist as he explains the tribal makeup of Kamdesh, an area just north of here where U.S. forces have been trying to woo the elders and mullahs away from the insurgents. He identifies a main tribe, four subtribes and 12 clans, each with its own history of feuds and friendships. If the U.S. military doesn't understand the local culture, Kolenda explains, it will make mistakes in trying to forge alliances that can stabilize the area. The surprising fact is that Kolenda, a Nebraska native, and his soldiers in Task Force Saber are having some success. When he arrived here last June, this area was mostly a no-go zone for U.S. forces. That meant some hard fighting last summer to drive the insurgents away from population centers and deeper into the mountains."

Once U.S. forces had achieved a bit of security, Lt. Col. Kolenda could help local leaders visualize a better future with the promise of development. Like all people, those in the "back of the beyond" want some hope in their lives.

"Once he had pushed back the insurgents, Kolenda's strategy was to re-empower the traditional tribal structure, which had lost sway during 30 years of war to a new elite with guns and money. Working through tribal shuras, or local councils, he offered the elders a deal: If they would provide security, he would bring them economic development in the form of roads, bridges, schools and health clinics. He financed these projects mostly with quick cash from the Commander's Emergency Response Program, or CERP, which has proved to be one of the most potent American weapons in Iraq and Afghanistan. Kolenda gradually won the tribal leaders' trust, traveling to one insurgent haven 16 times to meet with the elders. This year, attacks on U.S. forces in most parts of the region have largely ceased."

Kolenda is performing the work of a group that my partner Tom Barnett calls the System Administration Force. The objectives of such a force are achieved using non-kinetic means (i.e., they don't want to blow things up -- they want want to build things up). Tom's vision of this force is one that is less military and more civilian. There are, in fact, non-military government personnel involved in this work.

"Alison Blosser, a young State Department officer, is using a similar approach to help guide the Provincial Reconstruction Team for Kunar province, based south of here in Asadabad. An Ohio State graduate, she speaks fluent Pashto, which she learned before taking up her previous assignment at the U.S. consulate in Peshawar, Pakistan. Dressed in a head scarf and body armor, she might be a modern version of Gertrude Bell, the celebrated British adventurer and colonial administrator of the 1920s. Blosser and her colleagues have employed what they call a 'roads strategy' to bring stability to Kunar. The biggest project so far was building a paved two-lane road from Jalalabad in the lush flatlands up the Kunar River valley to Asadabad. The road is a magnet for economic development in what had been an insurgent stronghold, and the PRT is planning new roads into what Blosser calls the 'capillary valleys' where the insurgents have fled."

Building infrastructure is a necessary precursor to real development work; but, as Ignatius points out, put in a road and economic development follows. Ignatius goes on to report that the old adage "success breeds success" is just as true at the edges of globalization and beyond as it is in the developed world.

"The tribal elders see the prosperity the new roads have brought and want the same for their villages. 'We say, "Fine, but you have to guarantee security,"' Blosser says. That's the essence of the counterinsurgency strategy U.S. forces are using in Afghanistan. As the military clears new areas, the PRTs follow quickly behind with roads, bridges and schools."

The secret to the success of such programs is that promises made must be promises kept. If they are not, unfulfilled expectations quickly turn into anger. Ignatius concludes:

"Back in Kabul, Gen. Dan K. McNeill, the overall commander of American forces in Afghanistan, reflects on how the counterinsurgency battles have changed the U.S. Army. Back when he was a battalion commander in the 1980s, he says, 'I thought the world was move, shoot and communicate.' The new generation, he says, understands that these traditional warrior skills won't win today's counterinsurgency wars. The modern term for what these American soldiers and diplomats are doing in Afghanistan is 'nation building,' but some of the strategies and skills are reminiscent of the old British Colonial Office. America has had little experience in this kind of faraway struggle but, as McNeill says, the Army is a 'learning institution,' and it's gradually learning how to fight this kind of war. Yet it should be remembered that even the wily British colonial administrators and brave regiments of the Raj couldn't subdue Afghanistan's warlords."

The military has come a long ways over the past decade and a half when it comes to understanding how important nation building is to creating stability. The Bush administration was dead set against nation building when it first came to office. It was not just the Bush administration that had it doubts. As I wrote in a previous post on the SysAdmin force, there was more than a little initial reluctance to nation-building when the term and potential mission first emerged. In fact, it was considered '"mission creep" and was anathema to many military leaders. Clinton Secretary of Defense William Perry remarked, "Generally the military is not the right tool to meet humanitarian concerns. We field an army, not a Salvation Army." There is a much better understanding now about the relationship between humanitarian needs and security. As a result, we are seeing programs breeding success in remote areas where fighting has never achieved peace.

The Growing Concern over Small Nukes

When analysts involved in national security affairs get together to contemplate the future, they must look at both the probability and potential consequences of various risks. Some risks have a high probability of occurrence but their consequences can be easily mitigated. Other risks are less likely to occur but their consequences are so significant that they can't be ignored. Arrayed between those two extremes are innumerable other risks with varying degrees of probability and outcome. One of those risks, the explosion of a small nuclear weapon inside the United States, was the topic of hearings held on Capitol Hill ["Risk of Nuclear Attack on Rise," by Mary Beth Sheridan, Washington Post, 16 April 2008].

"Concerned that not enough attention is being paid to the risk of a nuclear attack, a Senate committee yesterday looked at the consequences of such a terrorist strike in Washington -- and said that more could be done to save lives. A hearing, called by the Committee on Homeland Security and Government Affairs, featured charts showing the horrific effects of a small nuclear device detonating near the White House. It was the panel's third session in recent months on the threat of a nuclear explosion. 'The scenarios we discuss today are so hard for us to contemplate and so emotionally traumatic that it is tempting to push them aside,' said Sen. Joseph I. Lieberman (I-Conn.), the panel's chairman. 'However, now is the time to have this difficult conversation, to ask the tough questions, then to get answers.' The committee summoned witnesses yesterday who said the risk of such an attack on U.S. cities has grown in the past five years because of the spread of nuclear technology and the growth of a global terrorist movement."

I'm sure that not everyone sees the risk the same way Lieberman describes it. Some analysts believe that the global war on terror has reduced the global terrorist movement. Others believe that all of the attention to nuclear weapons in India, Pakistan, North Korea and Iran (not to mention the futile search for a hidden Iraqi nuclear program) has made the world more sensitive to the movement of nuclear material. Regardless of where one might fall on the spectrum of probability, one must admit that the consequences of such a detonation would be horrific (both physically and emotionally).

"Yet the experts agreed that even such a disaster didn't constitute the doomsday scenario imagined during the Cold War. Most District residents would survive. And 'much could be done to save lives' if the government made the right preparations in advance, said Ashton B. Carter, co-director of the Preventive Defense Project at the John F. Kennedy School of Government at Harvard University. At the committee's request, [Cham E. Dallas, director of the Institute for Health Management and Mass Destruction Defense at the University of Georgia,] prepared a report on the effects of a small nuclear device exploding near the White House. A 1-kiloton device, which could fit into a suitcase, could kill about 25,000 people, he said. A 10-kiloton explosive, which could be hidden in a van, could kill about 100,000, Dallas said. The 10-kiloton blast would release fatal doses of radiation in the immediate area and destroy almost all buildings within a half-mile radius, he said. The intense heat would burn people for many blocks and spark fires. Windows would shatter for miles, Dallas testified, gesturing to a color-coded map that showed damage as far out as Union Station. The danger wouldn't be limited to those in the blast area. A radioactive plume would start drifting from the blast point, subjecting those in its path to lethal levels of radiation, Dallas said. The plume's direction would be determined by weather conditions. Dallas's model envisions a 10-block-wide 'death plume' moving east, the direction the wind typically blows in Washington. It billows down Constitution Avenue, reaching Benning Road NE in 30 to 60 minutes."

That might not be a doomsday scenario, but it's pretty bad. I've been working with government leaders to help them understand the capabilities of a ResilienceNet™ Fusion Center. Such a fusion center would be connected to sensors that would detect a nuclear plume, alert local authorities and simultaneously gather all necessary meteorological and traffic data then feed it to a computer model that could determine where the radioactive plume will drift and issue recommended instructions for carrying out an evacuation. This kind of automated sense, think, and act system would go a long way towards saving thousands of lives. It would also help prevent panic and help keep people in unaffected areas off the roads in order to help with the evacuation. The Congressional experts agrees:

"'With proper communication, people can flee from the plume area,' Dallas said, noting that they can walk or run from what will likely be a narrow band of high danger. But, he added, authorities need to 'put more effort' into testing their ability to swiftly alert those in danger. Most people outside the blast zone or the path of the plume should stay in their homes for at least the first few days after an attack, and will probably suffer limited health problems, the experts said."

The experts recommended additional training and exercises to better prepare those who would have to respond to such a catastrophe. With faster warning and better communications, a properly operating fusion center could help reduce challenges that would be faced by healthcare providers as well as other first responders because it could significantly lower the number of casualties. Even a well prepared system can be overwhelmed and anything that can help that from happening should be pursued.

Two Views of the Emerging Geopolitical Landscape

I am a proponent of examining alternative futures in order to better prepare courses of action that might be needed as various trends like rushing rivers carve out the canyons of the future. Peter Schwartz, president of Global Business Network, is generally credited with creating alternative futures analysis while he was with Royal Dutch Shell. If one could divine the future, alternative futures analysis would not be needed. But we can't. Various people, from Yogi Berra to Neils Bohr, have been credited with saying, "It's hard to predict, especially the future." Whoever said it, they were right. A comparative book review in The Economist demonstrates this very well ["The empire strikes back," 29 March print edition]. The review begins by noting it is comparing two books [The Second World: Empires and Influence in the New World Order by Parag Khanna and The Return of History and the End of Dreams by Robert Kagan] that look at "how the world is changing" and that they "reach very different conclusions."

"On the face of it, these two books are about the same thing: the great trends in geopolitics as the economic power of Asia grows and as the world grimaces at America in the aftermath of the Iraq war. Yet they could hardly be more different. Parag Khanna's is a long, complicated book on the basis of which he has drawn a simple—well, simplistic—conclusion: that the world is now dominated by three great empires, those of America, China and the European Union. Robert Kagan's is a short, simple book which states that the world is much more complicated than it once appeared. Mr Kagan's is the better of the two, by a wide margin."

Khanna's conclusion may be simplistic, but one would be hard-pressed to argue that the U.S., China, and the European Union won't exert great influence into the foreseeable future. As discussed later, even Kagan agrees with that. It's clear, however, the reviewer for The Economist didn't really enjoy reading Khanna's book.

"What is impressive about Mr Khanna's book, however, is its range and ambition. Drawing inspiration from Arnold Toynbee's tour of the globe half a century ago for his 'East to West: A Journey Round the World', Mr Khanna, a scholar at the New America Foundation in Washington, DC, decided to set off on his own travels. He visited more than 50 countries, most of them in what he calls 'the second world', by which he means something between the rich developed West and the poorest parts of Africa. His tour thus took him to Ukraine, Turkey, the Balkans and the Caucasus; to the 'stans' of Central Asia and the borderlands of China; to Latin America, to the Middle East and to East Asia. The vast bulk of his quite bulky book consists of pen pictures of all these countries and regions and of what he found there. As a collection of essays the range is impressive, but taken one by one they are unremarkable: the observations are not terribly vivid, the analysis not terribly deep, and this reviewer kept on being tripped over by strange judgments and misconceptions."

The reviewer laments that Khanna simply dismisses some of the world's potentially up and coming players (like Brazil, Russia, and India) as not mattering much when it comes to world affairs.

"The common thread that Mr Khanna discerns from all his travels is that everywhere he goes he finds signs of influence coming from three outside forces: America, China and the EU. He sees the future of the world being shaped by those three 'empires'. Of the three, China is rising but problematic; America is declining, incompetent and arrogant; and the EU is rather cuddlier, cleverer and more powerful than even many proud Europeans would think. Other countries you might think of as potential great powers—India, Russia or Brazil, for example—are thought of by Mr Khanna simply as also-rans. India he wafts aside in a roughly 500-word box, at the end of a chapter on China, as too chaotic to count. If it rises at all, he claims, it will do so according to Chinese rules."

I, perhaps, would have begun my argument against Khanna's analysis by questioning his use of the term "empire" to describe the U.S., China and the EU. Of the three, China (flush with cash and globally on the prowl for natural resources) is probably acting more like an old colonial power than the other two. Still, its activities are not accurately described as imperial. In comparison to the criticism leveled at Khanna, the praise for Kagan's book is effusive.

"Mr Kagan probably never left his study while preparing 'The Return of History and the End of Dreams'. He has written just over 100 pages, the type is large and the spacing generous. Yet his book is subtle and deep where Mr Khanna's is clunky and shallow. His argument is that the short period after the end of the cold war when it was said that ideological conflict was over and that liberal democracy had prevailed was a delusion; we are now, he says, back in a world of clashing national ambitions and interests, one more akin to the 19th century than to the 1990s."

That description also harkens the world back to colonial times and imperial behavior. Kagan's emphasis, however, seems not to be on that period's colonial behavior but on its balance of power aspects.

"In that world there are no simple formulae for predicting or managing national behaviour. It is not a world in which one power—America—is dominant, though it remains the single most influential and capable country on a global scale, even after its debacle in Iraq. Nor is it a world, on his account, in which just three 'empires' hold sway in any sort of triangular balance. It is a world in which many countries and their ruling elites are jostling for position and advantage, some of them keen to prove that today's assumptions about influence and status can and will be overturned. If there is a broad trend to be discerned in recent years it is the revival of autocracy as a sometimes effective and even legitimate form of government. If there is a neat dividing line, it is the line between the democracies and the autocracies. But using that line in the operation of foreign policy is no easier now than it has ever been. One thing that both authors do agree on is that the dream of a simple, safe world has gone for good."

This latter analysis (that globalization's lines are being drawn between autocracies and democracies) is more interesting and intriguing than arguments presented in the review. I have heard my colleague Tom Barnett argue that most developing countries that embrace globalization and free markets do so as single-party states. He asserts that many Americans suffer from attention-deficit disorder when it comes to remembering how democracies emerge – "the process is slow and painful." Alternative futures analysis can be very useful in exploring how autocracies might evolve and what that might mean for the global economy.

Happy Birthday DARPA

Everyone who surfs the Internet or sends email owes a debt to the Defense Advance Research Projects Agency (commonly known as DARPA). It was DARPA (named ARPA until 1972) that, at the beginning of the networked age, developed the network (named ARPANET) that later became the Internet. It was set up as a response to the Soviet nuclear threat. The Air Force, in particular, wanted to ensure that it could maintain communication with its nuclear force commanders, even in the aftermath a nuclear attack and asked the RAND Corporation to study the problem beginning in 1962. RAND researcher Paul Baran recommended the development networks using packet switching as the answer. ARPA took up that challenge and in 1968 awarded the ARPANET contract to BBN. The actual backbone network was constructed a year later, linking four nodes: University of California at Los Angeles, SRI (in Stanford), University of California at Santa Barbara, and University of Utah. Ray Tomlinson of BBN had created a program that permitted the exchange of emails. Progress continued apace. The following year development began on an ARPANET protocol (later to be called TCP/IP). The group that developed this protocol was headed by Vinton Cerf from Stanford and Bob Kahn from DARPA. The importance of this new protocol was that it allowed diverse computer networks to interconnect and communicate with each other. A year later, 1974, Cerf and Kahn started using the term Internet. Ethernet, TCP/IP, and the Internet were now all in place. Washington Post columnist Stephen Barr, reminds us that the venerable agency just turned 50 ["The Idea Factory That Spawned the Internet Turns 50," 7 April 2008]. Barr describes DARPA this way:

"The best program managers are 'freewheeling zealots' with big ideas. The staff has been called '100 geniuses connected by a travel agent.' And the boss describes his agency as a home for 'radical innovation.'"

It has certainly been an engine for innovation, but not everyone is thrilled that the risk takers are working for the military.

"From its beginning, the Defense Department agency has looked worldwide for fundamental scientific and technology discoveries ready for conversion into a blockbuster asset for the military. 'DARPA will take a chance on an idea with no data. We'll put up the money to go get the data and see if the idea holds,' said Anthony J. Tether, the agency director. 'That is the highest-risk type of research you can have.'

One might be tempted to think of DARPA as the evil military group constantly searching to turn the world's most beneficial scientific discoveries into weapons (kind of like the plot in Val Kilmer's B movie Real Genius). Barr notes, however, that DARPA has achieved some significant scientific advances that have helped both the military and the public at large.

"Small and secretive, DARPA has compiled a number of impressive achievements in the past 50 years. It pulled together researchers who created the blueprint for the Internet. It sponsored the inventor of the computer mouse (the first was carved from wood and had one button). It developed the Saturn rocket engine program that allowed the nation to go to the moon. It came up with the technologies that have made possible stealth fighters and bombers, precision munitions and the pilot-less Predator planes used in Iraq and Afghanistan."

It should come as no surprise that DARPA was a creation of the Cold War and, more specifically, of the space race between the Soviet Union and the United Sates.

"Like many government initiatives, DARPA was born out of a crisis. The Soviets launched the satellite Sputnik in 1957, beating the United States into space. At the direction of President Dwight D. Eisenhower, DARPA opened for business the next year, focused on helping guard the nation against technological surprises. The agency's mission has been evolving ever since, and today DARPA also works to create its own technological surprises that permit the U.S. military to overwhelm adversaries."

What's so different about DARPA, besides its focus on radical innovation, is its almost total absence of the bureaucratic red tape that characterizes the rest of government.

"Unlike most federal agencies, DARPA operates with little red tape. It has only two management layers, encouraging the rapid flow of ideas and decisions. About 240 people work at DARPA, and 120 of them are program managers and office directors on appointments of four to six years. The agency does not own or operate labs, but sponsors research carried out by industry and universities. By rotating technical professionals every few years, DARPA has 'a constant freshness of people and energy,' Tether said. 'Everything else we do stems from that.'"

DARPA sponsors a lot of interesting projects -- like autonomous automobile races across the desert or a machine that can produce water "out of thin air" in almost any environment (see my post Water, Water Everywhere). Barr lists a few others.

"Some of DARPA's current projects may hold that potential. Researchers are working on a two-way speech translation system that would permit soldiers to go anywhere in the world and understand the people around them. The idea, Tether said, is to create a miniature headset that would immediately translate a foreign language into English and feed it to an earpiece. In turn, a reply by an English speaker would be converted into the appropriate language and broadcast from small speakers on the headset. When the technology is perfected, 'the world will become a safer place. People will be able to talk to one another and understand one another,' Tether said. Another project looks for ways to restore severely injured soldiers. Researchers are trying to develop a prosthetic arm and hand that can be directly controlled by the brain and used as a natural limb, with dexterity and sensations. Prototypes are in development, Tether said, and hold promise that disabled soldiers can stay in the military 'and contribute as before' rather than be discharged. DARPA conducts research in almost every field -- biology, microelectronics, satellites, unmanned cars and aircraft. 'We are extraordinarily broad. If you can think of it, we're doing it,' Tether said. Of course, numerous projects are classified because they may have a useful military application or because DARPA does not want the world to know everything it is doing. The government always will need a place to test and finance big ideas, Tether said. 'The 50 years of history proves it has been well worth it, and I have to believe that in the next 50 years DARPA will come out with technological advances that will stagger even my imagination.'"

DARPA has managed to create of culture of big ideas and risk taking. The fact that the world at large has benefited from its research is evidence enough that the 50-year investment has been worthwhile. I don't know if DARPA will ever create a universal translator à la Star Trek, but I suspect I'll be reading about a lot products that grow from research sponsored by DARPA over the next fifty years. Therefore, I join with Barr in wishing the agency a happy birthday.

The Search for Peaceful Transition

With the news that Robert Mugabe, the tyrant who has run Zimbabwe into the ground over the past 28 years, may be negotiating a peaceful exit from power ["Talks May End Mugabe’s Rule in Zimbabwe," New York Times, 2 April 2008], there is renewed hope that diplomacy may yet trump force when it comes to regime change in Africa. Although the talks of negotiation are accompanied by rumors that Mugabe and the military have held discussions about simply rigging the election to avoid humiliating Mugabe, things look grim for the man The Economist has labeled a "monster." The real death knell for Mugabe may be the reports that the elites who have supported him for nearly three decades are ready to abandon him ["Mugabe Losing Support of Elites," by Craig Timberg and Darlington Majonga, Washington Post, 2 April 2008].

Of course, peace in and between states has been a dream since Immanuel Kant first envisioned a world filled with perpetual peace in his 1795 essay, Project for a Perpetual Peace. Occasionally the dream has re-emerged, mostly after big wars. The League of Nations represented the dream as did its successor the United Nations. Although the dream remains unfulfilled, there have been a few encouraging developments in some parts of the world. New York Times' op-ed columnist Roger Cohen wrote about some of these developments the week that Fidel Castro stepped down as president of Cuba ["A Change to Believe In," 21 February 2008].

"Fidel Castro has quit after a half-century in power. An African-American has become a serious contender for the U.S. presidency, winning a 10th consecutive victory over his rival for the Democratic nomination. A new European state, Kosovo, has been born. And that's just in the last week. Communist dictators don't quit. Blacks don't have broad U.S. electoral appeal. European borders don't shift without bloodshed. History has been upended. Change, as Barack Obama would put it, is something you can believe in."

History may not have exactly been upended, but if Mugabe actually negotiates a peaceful exit, history may experience a topsy-turvy moment. Many observers expected (and probably still expect) a bloodbath in Zimbabwe if Mugabe is dethroned. It is preventing just such bloodbaths that Cohen addressed in his column.

"After the cold war's end, and close to one million dead in the genocides of Bosnia (1992) and Rwanda (1994), and the digitally-induced dissolution of barriers and distances and hierarchies, some governments thought everything could remain the same. They thought wrong, and not just in Havana and Pyongyang. They believed that in the age of globalization the principles of the Treaties of Westphalia, dating back to 1648, would be enough. In places like Moscow and Beijing and Belgrade, they clung to the idea that state sovereignty — the unfettered power of a state within its own jurisdiction — was the inviolable basis of international law. Boris Tadic, the Serbian president, took this line at the United Nations this week, insisting that Kosovo's independence 'annuls international law, tramples upon justice and enthrones injustice.' He's wrong."

Cohen is arguing that events, like genocide, that take place entirely within the borders of a sovereign country can no longer be ignored by the international community. In fact, his argument goes further and places an obligation on the international community to act in such cases. Ah, there's the rub. Without a Leviathan power that can force free and independent countries to act, such interventions remain hit and miss. For every Serbia (in which NATO intervened), you can find two or three Sudans where rhetoric replaces response.

"After the above-mentioned genocides, one perpetrated by the late Slobodan Milosevic of Serbia, both revealing a U.N. Security Council too divided to stop mass slaughter, NATO circumvented the council in 1999. It waged war for the first time to prevent Milosevic doing his worst again in Kosovo. The war, in the words of Thomas Weiss, a political scientist at the City University of New York, 'had legitimacy even if its legality was questioned.' This legitimacy stemmed from an evolving consensus that, as Tony Blair once put it, 'acts of genocide can never be a purely internal matter.' Sovereignty, after Bosnia, after Rwanda, in a globalized world, was more than authority over territory and people. It was also responsibility. When that responsibility to protect was flouted, when a government abused the basic rights of its citizens through slaughter or ethnic cleansing, sovereignty could in effect be suspended. As Kofi Annan, the former U.N. secretary general, put it: 'State sovereignty, in its most basic sense, is being redefined.' For Annan, as Weiss has noted, 'Human rights transcended narrow claims of state sovereignty.'"

Cohen notes that the concept that human rights trumps sovereignty was recognized more or less officially in 2005.