Center for a New American Security

Now that I am no longer blogging on a daily basis, the best way to see what has caught my eye in a given day is by following this blog's Twitter feed. I know it can be an annoying bit of technology (not to mention a wee presumptuous to think you would want to read what I read), but it's a convenient way for me to link to articles and books of note.

First off, let me praise those bloggers -- Andrew Sullivan, Nico Pitney, Robert Mackey -- who have used Twitter feeds from Iran to tirelessly live-blog the uprising in Tehran. But all the same, I am happy that articles and analysis are now popping up that question the actual usefulness of Twitter as a tool of the revolution. Because it seems apparent that while Twitter has been useful in getting news out of Iran, it has been the more old-school techniques -- like, you know, word of mouth -- that have really been the driving forces behind organizing the protests that have shaken the mullahs.

The New York Times puts things in perspective in today's paper:

Skeptics note that only a small number of people used Twitter to organize protests in Iran and that other means — individual text messaging, old-fashioned word of mouth and Farsi-language Web sites — were more influential. But Twitter did prove to be a crucial tool in the cat-and-mouse game between the opposition and the government over enlisting world opinion.

More nuance arrives in today's Washington Post:

First, Twitter's own internal architecture puts limits on political activism. There are so many messages streaming through at any moment that any single entry is unlikely to break through the din, and the limit of 140 characters -- part of the service's charm and the secret of its success -- militates against sustained argument and nuance. (Yes, "Give me liberty or give me death" totals just 32 characters, but Patrick Henry's full speech exceeded 1,200 words.) What's most exciting is the aggregate effect of all this speech and what it reveals about the zeitgeist of the moment, but it still reflects a worldwide user population that skews wealthy, English-speaking and well-educated. The same is true of the blogosphere and social networks such as Facebook.

Second, governments that are jealous of their power can push back on cyberspace when they feel threatened. The Iranian state runs one of the world's most formidable online censorship regimes. In the past week alone, officials have blocked access to YouTube, Facebook and the majority of Web sites most often cited by reformist segments of the Persian blogosphere. They supplement this censorship with surveillance and the threat of imprisonment for those who speak out. Even if they fail to block political speech or organizing activities, the possibility of future retaliation can chill the most devoted activists and critics.

Paradoxically, the "freedom to scream" online may actually assist authoritarian regimes by serving as a political release valve of sorts. If dissent is channeled into cyberspace, it can keep protesters off the streets and help state security forces track political activism and new online voices. As Egyptian democracy activist Saad Ibrahim said last week during a discussion at the U.S. Institute of Peace in Washington, this appears to be part of a long tradition for governments in the Middle East, especially in Egypt, where dissent is channeled into universities and allowed to thrive there, as long as it does not escape the university walls.

Third, the blogosphere is not limited to young, liberal, anti-regime activists; state sympathizers are increasingly active in the battle for online supremacy. Our research into the Iranian blogosphere shows that political and religious conservatives are no less prominent than regime critics. While the Iranian blogosphere is indeed a place where women speak out for their rights, young people criticize the morality police, journalists fight censorship, reformists press for change, and dissidents call for revolution, it is also a place where the supreme leader is praised, the Holocaust denied, the Islamic Revolution defended and Hezbollah celebrated. It is also a place where Islamist student groups mobilize and pro-establishment leaders, including President Ahmadinejad, reach out to their constituents within the Iranian public. Our most recent research suggests that the number and popularity of politically conservative and Islamic bloggers has grown over the past year, relative to the number of secular reformists, possibly due to the events leading up to the presidential election.

So let's not go all Twitter crazy just yet. Oh, and Evgeny Morozov went off on Foreign Policy's net.effect blog. Worth reading.

Today's Washington Post had a really interesting op-ed by two U.S. pollsters:

Many experts are claiming that the margin of victory of incumbent President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad was the result of fraud or manipulation, but our nationwide public opinion survey of Iranians three weeks before the vote showed Ahmadinejad leading by a more than 2 to 1 margin -- greater than his actual apparent margin of victory in Friday's election.

 

While Western news reports from Tehran in the days leading up to the voting portrayed an Iranian public enthusiastic about Ahmadinejad's principal opponent, Mir Hossein Mousavi, our scientific sampling from across all 30 of Iran's provinces showed Ahmadinejad well ahead.

Now that bit about Ahmadinejad was interesting enough, but here's what really caught my eye:

Much commentary has portrayed Iranian youth and the Internet as harbingers of change in this election. But our poll found that only a third of Iranians even have access to the Internet, while 18-to-24-year-olds comprised the strongest voting bloc for Ahmadinejad of all age groups.

Why do I find this to be interesting? Two reasons. The first has to do with the way in which we Westerners might confuse the protests of the young, urban, and technologically savvy to be somehow representative of the population at large. The urbane urban classes of the Earth see themselves in each other. Persons living in New York and London might have more in common with one another than they would with persons from Sale Creek, Tennessee and Glencoe, Scotland, respectively. And those same urban classes might identify with those Western-clothed, rioting youths protesting in Farsi and English on the streets of Tehran. But are their protests representative of Iranian people overall?* Are we simply finding common cause with a technologically-assisted minority and confusing it for a popular movement? One observer of the Moldova protests noticed the way in which we Westerners get fascinated by "Twitter revolutions" because, hey! We use Twitter too! Elsewhere, sceptics wonder how much effect these technologies really have.

Second, another observation that came out of the Moldova protests was this maxim: Live by Twitter, Die by Twitter. Social networking technology like Twitter, Facebook and cellular phones allows all kinds of new capabilities -- such as the ability to call for a flash mob outside parliament on 30 minutes notice, far too quick for the authorities to respond. But what happens when the state simply shuts down all wireless networks? Or bans Facebook? Now what are you going to do? If you grow too dependent on social media the state can shut down, you've got a pretty big weakness. The counter-revolutionary forces, of course, have all kinds of secondary communications equipment they can use. The revolutionary forces might not.

*I should note here that the sample of the survey cited seemed small. But it's the best hard data I have seen. If anyone can offer other data, leave links in the comments section.

UPDATE: To go along with my own asterisk, ABC's director of polling has some harsh things to say. And in the comments section, there are helpful links to analysis by Juan Cole on the rural/urban divide and other good comments. My favorite, though, is this helpful tip for any Iranian readers, from everyone's favorite Norwegian anarchist:

[S]omeone should make a how-to book on rioting in farsi. You dont throw rocks 60 meters away, dammit, and one garbagebin does not a barricade make.

Sound advice.

A good op-ed from a fellow Iraq veteran. Just one quibble: sometimes being sensitive to cultural nuances is war-fighting prowess.

The simple fact of the matter is warfighting prowess necessarily takes precedence over cultural awareness training. For a commander, there is only so much time in a day for training before deployment. Soldiers already have to devote countless hours to scheduled ranges, courses and suicidal awareness training to include many other combat readiness obligations. The high operational tempo only adds to such a stressful schedule. Moreover, even in cases where a commander can address cultural awareness, there is no centralized system to ensure a metric for success for long-term learning.

Though the most recent release of military doctrine states that, the “Army seeks to develop an ability to understand and work with a culture for its Soldiers and leaders,” and provides a rubric for proficiency in both “cross-cultural-competency” and “regional competence,” no methods are provided to the leader for how to reach such ends.

In order to provide a successful, long-lasting cultural awareness training curriculum, the Department of Defense should appropriate funding that supports a two-pronged approach. First, the U.S. military should compile cultural curriculum in micro-correspondence courses accessible through soldiers’ Army Knowledge Online account (correspondingly with the other services as well), which every soldier has access to for email, records, and daily forums. Similar to the correspondence courses already in existence, these micro-courses would focus on culturally pertinent information—regional, national, and provincial-- that a soldier would need to know about an area that they will be operating. The curriculum associated with the testing, would give a soldier a foundation to build on and improve in order to reach the prescribed level of competence.

Second, the Army should develop and issue a personal PDA device – iTough, a variant of the Apple Company’s iTouch, to every soldier in the ranks. This tool would be combat efficient, and be an essential component of a soldiers battledress. Soldiers could download traditional and cultural correspondence courses on the go, as well as language training and podcasts. There could even be capability to download and keep track of PT tests and other training proficiency through a secured system, as well as a section to take notes necessary for drafting situational reports. This enhances accountability, and makes it easier for NCOs to screen and keep track of a soldier’s overall performance, evaluate their potential for promotion, and make the counseling process more efficient. In turn, such supervision will extend an obligation to the soldier to use the device often, and add competitiveness amongst others in the unit.

More at Small Wars Journal (.pdf).

When I was in Afghanistan and Iraq (between 2001 and 2004), I was so impressed with the satellite imagery we were always given of objectives and areas of interest. It was good, I thought at the time, to be in the service of a powerful nation-state capable of providing such resources to its lowly foot soldiers. Fast forward just a few years, then, to an era when -- thanks to Google Earth -- every Tom, Dick and Harry has access to similar technology. Hamas and Hizballah, for example, have been using Google Earth to plot rocket attacks on Israel for some time now. (And militants in Iraq and Afghanistan have used the program to attack U.S. and British bases.) As if that weren't bad enough, though, now Google Earth is putting both the United States and Pakistan under serious pressure by revealing the existence of our Predator bases in Pakistan, adding confirmation to Senator Feinstein's epic goof last week.

Despite the over-the-top subject line of this post, I'm not trying to blame technology -- lest the Google gods shut down my blogger.com account -- but damn it's both interesting and frustrating to see the speed with which technology super-secret just a few years back is now defused into the public domain.

P.S. Many thanks to the readers who have joined this blog over the past few days. We had over 21,000 visitors yesterday and more than 15,000 on Wednesday. The former is a one-day record.

I am now back in Tennessee. Apologies to anyone in DC I failed to meet on my brief trip -- I'll be back in January.

People like to sneer at the "MSM" for being too close to the powers that be. The New York Times, the Washington Post, CNN, and other media often hold off on reporting stories that might endanger national security. (Seriously -- I know some of you hate the left-leaning Times, but they do this a lot in the name of the national interest.) The problem with jackassess on "teh internets" is that we don't have the same editorial filter. So when a website like wikileaks publishes a classified report on a super-secret IED countermeasure that has saved countless lives in Iraq and Afghanistan, that's a problem. Right?

From our friend Noah at Wired:

In July, 2005, I asked a member of a Baghdad-based military bomb squad about the radio-frequency jammers his team was using to cut off signals to Iraq's remotely detonated explosives. His response: "I can't even begin to say the first fucking thing about 'em." A few days later, one of those jammers seemed to save me and him from getting blown up. Months after that, David Axe was thrown out of Iraq by the U.S. military, for a blog post which mentioned the Warlock family of jammers.

So I was more than a little surprised, when I saw that Wikileaks had posted a classified report, outlining how the Warlock Red and Warlock Green jammers work with — and interfere with — military communications systems. The report, dated 2004, gives specific information about how the jammers function, their radiated power and which frequencies they stop. That Baghdad bomb tech would've put his fist through a wall, if he saw it out in public.

Gang, this is not good. But what is the appropriate response? Sound off in the comments section.

Kip is supposedly responsible for technology commentary on this blog, and as Charlie reminds him occasionally, e.g., today, he has not exactly lived up to that responsibility.

But from time to time, the occasional story pops up on cell phones, and in the vein of going with what you know, here it is (thanks Charlie for sending me the article).

Anyway, in Tuesday's Washington Post, Frank Ahrens writes on new and novel uses for the cell phone. Kip believes that politics, of which war is an extension (or simply part of the continuum, or as Michael Foucault once wrote, its actually the other way around, but I digress), is in its simplest the effort to influence people to act in a particular manner; force is one of the ways by which they are influenced.

As such, cell phones add complexity to the battlefield by providing access to streams of influence regardless of the physical location of the individual, not to the mention all the nasty ways in which cell phones can be used to physically kill people as parts of weapons systems. Cell phones are nearly ubiquitous, as the article notes with penetration to 50% of the world and growing.

Indeed, cell phones have made their way into all walks of life and particularly so in the world's least developed countries. And they have made their way into war, as the article describes:

Cellphones played a key role in the recent Maoist insurgency against the Hindu monarchy, allowing protesters to quickly organize. They became so effective as a tool of the opposition, the government tried to ban texting twice. During spring elections, the Maoists sent texts to voters: "A new thinking and leadership for a new Nepal . . . Give Maoists a chance this time."

It is perhaps time we got as good at the text message as our counterparts in the developing world.

Kip is fascinated by a few things:

War
Afghanistan
Cell Phones

War, because the management of violence is my profession.

Afghanistan because I know we will be there long after we've left Iraq, and we (that is the institutional military to include myself) still know so little seven years into fighting there.

Cell phones because they've changed the very ways in which humans communicate, fight, trade, and learn (and because while personal computers are fascinating, I believe that most of humanity will access information and conduct monetary transactions from cell phones long before they do so through computers).

Now, I haven't quite figured out what exactly to make of the new service offered by Slydial, recently reported on in the N Y Times. The service allows you to avoid that awkward conversation by sending your call directly to voicemail, e.g., "Honey, I was just calling to make sure it's ok that I'm going to be out until 2 drinking with the boys--just give me a call if it's a problem."

(Warning: this only works if you then turn your phone off and claim bad reception--and if Lady Kip fails to read the blog tomorrow morning).

It seems that this is just another technology that builds on the modern paradox of increasing our capacity to communicate more often in more places with more people while simultaneously degrading the quality of interpersonal communications.

The global food crisis is perhaps the least reported big event of the year. It stands to kill far more people than the cyclone in Myanmar or the earthquake in China. First it will kill through starvation, and then through the conflict over resources that it spawns. At a conference of experts that Kip observed on Afghanistan several weeks ago, all agreed that rising food prices were the single thing capable of throwing the country into utter and perhaps unrecoverable chaos. The same might be true of nuclear-armed Pakistan as well, not to mention several dozen other weak or failing states.

Keith Bradsher and Andrew Martin of the NY Times yesterday authored an article detailing how the diminishing investment in global food research since the Green Revolution has contributed to the crisis. The highlights:

This is a stark example of the many problems that are coming to light in the world’s agricultural system. Experts say that during the food surpluses of recent decades, governments and development agencies lost focus on the importance of helping poor countries improve their agriculture.

The budgets of institutions that delivered the world from famine in the 1970s, including the rice institute, have stagnated or fallen, even as the problems they were trying to solve became harder.

“People felt that the world food crisis was solved, that food security was no longer an issue, and it really fell off the agenda,” said Robert S. Zeigler, the director general of the rice institute....

Now, a reckoning is at hand. Growth of the global food supply has slowed even as the population has continued to increase, and as economic growth is giving millions of poor people the money to buy more food.

With demand beginning to outstrip supply, prices have soared, and food riots have erupted that have undermined the stability of foreign governments. World leaders are scrambling to respond. On May 1, President Bush asked Congress for an extra $770 million to pay for food aid and to help farmers improve their productivity.

But cuts in agricultural research continue. The United States is in the midst of slashing, by as much as 75 percent, its $59.5 million annual support for a global research network that focuses on improving crops vital to agriculture in poor countries. That network includes the rice institute.

Robert Bertram, who oversees the funding for the United States Agency for International Development, said he was still trying to stop the cuts and argued that research to improve crop yields was “like putting money in the pockets of poor people, and I mean billions of poor people.”...

In Africa, where yields have remained stagnant since the 1960s, efforts to bolster them have been hampered by cuts not only in research but also in programs like fertilizer distribution...

Adjusting for inflation and exchange rates, the wealthy countries, as a group, cut such donations roughly in half from 1980 to 2006, to $2.8 billion a year from $6 billion. The United States cut its support for agriculture in poor countries to $624 million from $2.3 billion in that period.

“Agriculture has been so productive and done so well, people have kind of lost sight of how fragile it really is,” said Jan E. Leach, a plant pathologist at Colorado State University who works with rice. “It’s as if we have lost track of the fact that food is linked to agriculture, which is linked to human survival.”...

Yields soared [as a result of the Green Revolution], and by the 1980s, the threat of starvation had receded in most of the world. With Europe and the United States offering their farmers heavy subsidies that encouraged production, grain became abundant worldwide, and prices fell.

Many poor countries, instead of developing their own agriculture, turned to the world market to buy cheap rice and wheat. In 1986, Agriculture Secretary John Block called the idea of developing countries feeding themselves “an anachronism from a bygone era,” saying they should just buy American.

For the long warriors of the 21st Century, food security cannot be an issue on the back burner. Jared Diamond makes a compelling argument in Collapse that such poor resource management was, for instance, the deep cause of the massive genocide in Rwanda.

In Afghanistan, rising prices may result in further entrenching the opium economy as the sure way to provide the cash needed to import grains. This would be bad news for the counterinsurgency effort, which needs to weed the populace and the government off of the proceeds of opium if we are to have a shot at winning.

The current food crisis will both exacerbate existing conflicts and contribute to new ones. Solutions will require not only the military but also the other elements of national power acting in a concerted, unified effort to manage these conflicts. Thinking about items like new investment in agricultural research will be required. Family planning may be an important and politically sensitive topic. The political challenges remain daunting to preparing for conflict, however.

Congressmen like to pose next to us men (and women) in uniform working with our job-producing, high technology weaponry.

Posing by rice institutes doesn't quite have the same cachet (and even less, being the lead on administrative reform of the Departments of Defense, State, Agriculture, Transporation, etc.).

"How do you fight an enemy who hides among the innocent?" asks a new Air Force Commercial.

"Never let him out of your sight."

The screen shot is of a Predator drone.

Whether the Air Force as a whole is willing to accept the Predator as the be all of air power, Kip is doubtful. Even if it were willing (and no one in Afghanistan would complain for a second about having more surveillance, not to mention airlift, assets), it is easy to overestimate the usefulness of such technology.

Londonstani and AbuMuqawama in their every day travels through London, are monitored by literally thousands of closed circuit television cameras (CCTV) around the city (Great Britain has one CCTV for every 14 or so people). These cameras, which were initially introduced as a measure to disrupt Irish Republican Army attacks in Britain, are now meant to serve as a deterrent to prevent crimes and allow crimes to be solved. So how well does this constant, ubiquitous surveillance result in the maintenance of law and order? According to a recent article in the Scotsman:

Detective Chief Inspector Mick Neville, who is in charge of closed-circuit television for the Metropolitan Police Force, claimed only 3 per cent of the capital's street robberies are solved using security camera footage and criminals are not afraid of being caught on film...

"It's been an utter fiasco."

The solution to crime and disorder?

The spokeswoman added that the government was working to put more than 1,000 additional police officers on the streets to tackle the drink, drugs and deprivation which are the underlying causes of crime.

Another technological panacea turns out to be no substitute for boots on the ground. Unmanned Aerial Vehicles such as the Predator, essentially a super CCTV (occasionally with a missile), are incredibly useful when employed wisely and, most importantly, when employed in conjunction with well developed human intelligence and in conjunction with boots on the ground. They can help us make some order out of the chaos of a gun battle or provide surveillance of known insurgent infiltration routes.

That said, saturation of an area of operations with drone surveillance without a concomitant commitment of troops and local development of human intelligence will never be sufficient to maintain order and win in a war among the people. Developing sufficient boots on the ground, most importantly from the populace among which we are fighting, must be the first order priority if we are to succeed in maintaining order in order to develop governance and economic development. Unfortunately, we are still unwilling or unable to make developing local security forces the number one priority that we know it needs to be.