Mukhtar Mai and Pakistani Realities

The story of Mukhtar Mai, who was gang-raped in a punishment sanctioned by a tribal court in revenge for her teenage brother being seen alone with a girl from another clan is horrifying in every dimension. The fact that the Pakistani justice system acquitted most of the fourteen men accused is only worse. Mukhtar Mai has received international attention but her story is sadly not unique.

The Indian movie, The Bandit Queen tells a similar story based on the life of Phoolan Devi. There are a few differences, first that it is set in India, second that Phoolan turns to Muslim criminals for support against the Hindu higher castes, and that Mukhtar Mai has become an activist rather then a criminal. In the last point there is a small glimmer of hope. That a similar story is set among the Hindus of rural India highlights that this is not about Islam so much about tribalism.

The Washington Post article on the acquittal of Mai's rapists has a pair of revealing paragraphs that shed light on the nuts and bolts of Pakistani society:

…Pakistani women’s advocates said they feared the ruling will reinforce some of the cruelest traditions relating to women in rural society, where justice is meted out by semi-literate village leaders and the dominant land-owning clans wield more power than the police.

…In the interview, Mai said she feared violence from the freed defendants and noted that their clan has powerful local patrons in the ruling Pakistan People’s Party. But she said she was determined to keep helping girls in her community study, gain confidence and demand their rights.

The first paragraph cited highlights the general lack of rule of law in the face of clan affiliation. The second paragraph notes that the ruling Pakistan People’s Party – which is full of Westernized-leaders and includes figures who have been assassinated for standing against Pakistan’s draconian blasphemy laws - is also a product of the clan structure.

Pakistan (and all of south Asia) is a complicated place.

Re-assessing Failed States and International Security

In The Washington Post today CFR’s Stewart Patrick argues that failed states are exactly the geopolitical bogeyman that policy-makers often state. In particular he mentions that al-Qaeda found it very difficult to function in anarchic Somalia as an example. Having done an extensive study (which I have not read) he argues that:

The findings are startlingly clear. Only a handful of the world’s failed states pose security concerns to the United States. Far greater dangers emerge from stronger developing countries that may suffer from corruption and lack of government accountability but come nowhere near qualifying as failed states.

The key dangers are terrorism, WMD, and trans-national crime. Bad actors prefer weak but functional states where there are sufficient links and contacts to the world to get things done by the state’s control over its territory and institutions is limited so that the bad guys have room to play. Pandemics also come from functional but weak states, not truly failed ones because the failed states are too isolated from global trade networks for diseases to spread.

He also grants that there are sound humanitarian reasons to intervene, but we should be clear about our intent and purpose and that our real focus should be on strengthening institutions in weak but developing states.

These are sound arguments.

Although it must be pointed out that strengthening institutions is not easy – it is the philosopher’s stone of international development. But it is unfair to pick on this aspect of the paper, the discussion of institutional development is not the author's focus.

One question is whether or not Afghanistan of Taliban era was a failed state or just a very weak one. Granted that a failed Somalia is a limited threat to international security. But, what if a particularly nasty group emerges from the wreckage and re-establishes order. That can be a threat and Yemen (for example) would seem particularly ripe. The cynical policy response would be to keep the place in anarchy, but that is profoundly immoral.

The second question is not spillover effects of failed states globally but in their region. Would a collapsing Yemen have an effect on Saudi Arabia? This would be a very big deal. Trouble in Saudi Arabia leads to nervous energy markets, which drives up the prices for everything. The spikes in food prices seem to be a component in the disorders rocking the Middle East. If you want to see angry mobs in the street everywhere in the world, trouble in Saudi Arabia is the way to do it. Libya is a much smaller player in world energy markets, but still disorder there doesn’t help. Failed states tend to generate refugees, which are difficult to manage and cause problems of their own. A disintegrating Pakistan, for example, would probably send tens of millions of refugees into the Gulf and neighboring India. Besides humanitarian problems, these could also overwhelm local governments and trigger further instability.

In that situation failed states should be addressed on a case-by-case basis. Some would simply not rise to the level of geopolitical concern – others would. Nonetheless, better tools for intervention and prevention should be developed for those cases where a state failure crosses the intervention threshold and - wherever feasible - to prevent grief and suffering.

The Trouble with Czars

In The Wall Street Journal today former Secretary of State, Treasury, Labor (and OMB chief) George Shultz decries the growth of White House staff at the expense of the cabinet.

The practice of appointing White House "czars" to rule over various issues or regions is not a new invention. But centralized management by the White House staff has been greatly increased in recent years.

Beyond constitutional questions, such White House advisers, counselors, staffers and czars are not accountable. They cannot be called to testify under oath, and when Congress asks them to come, they typically plead executive privilege.

The consequences, apart from the matter of legitimate governance, are all too often bad for the formation and execution of policy. The departments, not the White House, have the capacity to carry out policies and they are full of people, whether political appointees or career governmental employees, who have vast experience and much to contribute to the making of ­policy. When White House staffers try to formulate or execute policy, they can easily get off track in a way that would not happen in a regular department.

As secretary of state under President Ronald Reagan, I experienced this with great pain when White House people developed and ran an off-the-books program of arms sales to Iran. It erupted in the Iran-Contra scandal involving the unconstitutional transfer of funds not appropriated by Congress to the Contras, and with close to devastating consequences for the president.

Iran-Contra is a dramatic example, but the more general problem is the inability to take full advantage of available skills and expertise in policy making, and the difficulty in carrying out the functions of government nationally and internationally.

Shultz sees the impossible confirmation process as a primary culprit in this emphasis on White House-based decision-making. The inability to fill critical sub-cabinet ranks quickly makes it impossible for the president to get a firm rein on the bureaucracy. My advisor, Mac Destler, in his Presidents, Bureaucracies, and Foreign Policy discusses the President's need to create centers of strength at various levels throughout the bureaucracy. It is also fair to say that the record of White House czars is not a strong one.

There is other literature that suggests that there are regular patterns to Presidential centralization and dispersion of power. On key issues, the President puts the issue under the White House rubric until he has built the bureaucratic network he needs to further the issue. There is also the issue of scale. Presidents now appoint thousands when they take office. It isn't that these appointees are disloyal, but they probably don't know what the President wants and thus are liable to capture.

None of this is to say that Shultz's argument for easing the appointment process is not a good one - it is! His own record of success as a bureaucratic infighter is impressive (I hope he'll let me interview him when I get to that stage...)

One interesting note to the VP obsessed is that back in the mid-80s when the Reagan Administration couldn't figure out how to manage international terrorism Shultz apparently proposed VP Bush to head a Terrorism Task Force (I wrote a paper on it). Terrorism is THE inter-agency problem and a White House coordination effort was the only way to manage the process. But of course the VP is not a staffer, he (and one day she) is very much a public figure that is ultimately accountable.

To Wonk is not to Know

Years ago at a party with a bunch of other foreign policy wonks I noticed a guest sitting quietly and not saying anything. I found this unusual because wonks like to talk a lot and show everyone around how clever they are so I introduced myself and asked what he did. He was a colleague of the host's wife and worked as a microbiologist. We talked about the general conversation and he observed, "You guys go somewhere and talk to some people and think you know something. That's just not what I do. I do experiments, under careful conditions I need to eliminate guesswork and assumptions."

There is a great deal happening across the greater Middle East and the TerrorWonk honestly can't keep up. But my interlocutor had a profound point. I'm not sure how much anyone knows about anything. We hear a great deal of conventional wisdom bandied about on everything - the Muslim Brotherhood, Gaddhafi, Assad and Syrian politics - you name it.

Unfortunately, the ability to collect the kind of knowledge that “counts” to a hard scientist is very difficult. But, whenever some part of the world erupts, we seem to know very little about it. We don’t know how much al-Qaeda is in the Libyan rebellion. I doubt we know much about the internal dynamics of the Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt, and if Syria falls apart we won’t have a clue who is running the show.

I work on models and recognize the difficulty of predicting a true “Black Swan,” that is a game-changing event. The countries of the Middle East are all ripe for revolution, but it didn’t happen for decades so why now? This is probably not an answer that can be given definitively.

But what can policy-makers do to caught a bit less flat-footed, when it occurs?

(Also, do you have any idea how hard it is to find a picture online of an actual black swan and not Natalie Portman.)

Escaping the Inbox
Most of our government is run by the mail – that is people try to answer whatever is in their inbox. This is how it has to be, but it leaves little time for deep thinking. At the same time, our government consists of vast organizations that develop organizational cultures, huge bodies of pre-conceptions, SOPs, and worldviews. While most agencies have planning boards of some sort, they are usually staffed by people who have served in other capacities so they are still very much part of that culture so that their thinking is shaped by the inbox.

The NSC was initially established to “staff” the president but over time has become an operational body. It is very hard not to get sucked into operations – ie answering the mail.

The intelligence community is extremely skilled at meeting the needs of its customers – the President, the armed services etc. But its ability to think deeply on non-pressing problems is limited. They do establish very capable specialized teams to take on high-priority issues.

Could a new intelligence agency be established specifically to research and prepare for outliers? Sort a classified university? (I have to grant some interest in this issue since I’d love to work at such a place.) Academia does a pretty good job of this sort of thing, but they have limited access to classified information. But what if such a group could fuse the academic research on the Muslim Brotherhood with whatever the IC has collected (which is certain to be extensive) and issue monographs, in-depth articles, and policy briefs. These researchers could also have a license to talk to agency experts on their issues. This way, if needed there is a ready source of expertise and a library on the Muslim Brotherhood that could be accessed to at least provide policy-makers reliable information. If Egypt doesn’t go under there would be another report sitting on a shelf somewhere.

There are budget constraints (there always are) but intelligence analysis is actually cheap compared to launching satellites and the other sophisticated collection mechanisms that US possesses. The IC’s budget is tens of billions of dollars, a modest sum ($20 million) could support 100 researchers easily.

The real challenge would be to keep such a group from becoming operational. Soon enough an IC executive or a politician would see these capable researchers and set them onto a pressing need. At the same time, these capable researchers might get tired of generating reports that no one reads and try to get positions n the IC proper. Various mechanisms could be adopted. Projects could be assigned and approved by a board of outside academics and maybe a term-limit on careers (ten years say and then move on) could keep the institution from getting stale or the researchers from getting bored.

A built-in red team/Black Swan organization could be extremely useful when disaster strikes. There are a number of relatively unlikely possibilities that someone should be thinking deeply about such as a state collapse in Pakistan (or hell – China – is that truly inconceivable)? What if Saudi Arabia goes under or even if oil production there peaks?

Most of these outliers wouldn’t come to pass. And even the terrible things that did happen, probably wouldn’t take the shape of this unit’s reports. But, as the military says, “Plans are nothing, planning is everything.” We need the institutions for deep planning.

Back to Business
This blog has gotten philosophical lately, in part because to write intelligently one needs to take in a great deal of information and then have something worth saying about it. There is too much information, and I kinda have job that occasionally requires my attention.

But, I shall attempt to again provide grounded analysis and perspective on the, while trying to shed light, not heat on the discussion. I'll start next week.

Lessons from the Bay of Pigs to the Shores of Tripoli

Despite the historical changes roiling the Middle East, this blogger has been quiet. I've been on vacation in Miami. While I've kept an eye on email, cable news, and Twitter, Miami is a very distracting place and I've been unable to concentrate on the deeper analysis necessary to shed light, not heat on events. (Although I did manage a quick post about Biden's role in the current crises on this blog's sibling.) Anyway, as my friend Ilan Berman observed just before going on a recent vacation, "Whatever, let this play out, I'll be back in a week, it'll still be going on. It's no big deal."

But one thing I saw in Miami was profoundly thought-provoking. Wandering along Calle Ocho, the heart of Little Havana, we came to the memorial for those killed in the Bay of Pigs operation. The Bay of Pigs is THE case study in Presidential fecklessness and poor decision-making. This is certainly worth considering as the US backs into Libya's civil war.

But that is only the first level. The memorial is a reminder that, however I'll-considered, the individuals who gave their lives there believed that they were fighting for freedom and that Cuba was (and is) under a monstrous tyranny - freedom matters. It is also worth remembering that Castro overthrew Batista, a classic LatAm tinpot dictator, not a good guy. Could the US have paid more attention to human rights and freedom in Cuba and less to it's business interests in the decades before Castro's revolution? (It is easy enough to criticize the US's imperfect record in this regard - but few great powers in history have even tried as much as the US, and actually fostering reform is a difficult achievement.)

Castro was of course a darling of the international left, but like so many other 20th century dictators he proved far more evil then the corrupt authoritarian he displaced. (There is an old story of the two old Polish Communists who had been imprisoned together in the1930s. Meeting decades later in NYC they recall who they had sat together in their cells and railed against Marshal Pilsudski as a terrible dictators. Then they nod, saying, "We didn't know anything about dictators then.") This was the point of Jean Kirkpatrick's classic essay, "Dictatorships and Double-Standards" - sometimes supporting our SOB is both the prudent and even moral thing to do.

Finally, even if, somehow the Bay of Pigs could have been successful, it might have had other costs. Latin America has had a long, difficult experience with US intervention. Another American-backed coup might have inspired greater anti-Americanism throughout the region increasing the costs of collaboration between the US and Latin America.

Food for thought as the president attempts to protect US interests as country, after country in the Middle East undergoes turmoil.

Update
Another, of the myriad possibilities is what if Bay of Pigs wasn't defeated quickly, but also wasn't strong enough to overthrow Castro plunging the island into an endless civil war.

Joe's Got no Action

The swirl of world events is incredible. Throughout the Obama administration, VP Biden has been in the center of national security decision-making. He liaised with leaders in Iraq and Egypt at critical junctures. He delivered speeches in Moscow, Beirut and elsewhere. So where is he now?

No court politics here, a review of the Vice President's schedule shows he is in regular meetings with the President and key national security figures - Combatant Commanders, SecDef, and this morning he hosted a meeting with the Secretary of State. But Biden is not taking a public role in explaining administration policy. Hillary Clinton and Robert Gates are, why not?

The VP has NO formal powers (unless specifically delegated by the President.) In upper levels of government, according to the classic Bureaucratic Policies and Foreign Policies a key question is "who has the action?" That is which official in which agency can actually sign off on an initiative. The VP doesn't have it. SecDef and SecState have a formal role in war-fighting and diplomacy. Having the VP out front in place of the President is useful in many situations, but not when forces are actually deployed. It would be Constitutionally and politically problematic to have Biden take a leading role.

Golden Oldies: Lax @ LAX

Since the CounterTerrorismBlog is no longer publishing I am re-posting my old CTBlog posts. This one will be relevant to an upcoming post about terrorism in Los Angeles. The piece was originally posted on June 1, 2007 here.

Lax @ LAX

Waiting for a shuttlebus at LAX (Los Angeles International Airport) a few days ago, I noticed an abandoned bag. It was an odd place to leave a bag for a few minutes. When I alerted the nearest airport employee – a baggage handler – his reaction was indifference. The bag’s owner turned up about 10-15 minutes later.

The bag had recent flight markings, definitely looked like it belonged to someone, and had been left in a less than ideal location for a bomb (outdoor waiting area with only a few people at a time.) So there were plenty of reasons not to regard the bag suspiciously. But I don’t think that the airport employees I alerted had applied an analytical framework and made this determination. It did not appear that they had any particular awareness of what to do or who to contact.

The employee's indifference was surprising. LAX has been the target of at least two terror attacks. When Ahmed Ressam was caught at the US-Canadian border on December 1999 with a trunk full of explosives, he intended to plant them at LAX as one component of al-Qaeda's planned Millenium attacks. On July 4, 2002 an Egyptian immigrant, suspected of having links to the Muslim Brotherhood, shot up the El Al counter at LAX, killing two and wounding four. Presumably the LAX administration would have instituted awareness training and procedures for all airport employees.

Israeli and also British acquaintances react nervously when they encounter abandoned bags in public places. This comes from those countries’ long years of experience with terrorism. Both governments recognized that an aware and prepared citizenry is a nation’s greatest homeland security asset. The investigation into the Fort Dix Six, spurred by an alert Circuit City clerk, is another illustration of that principle. It is worrisome that a major potential target has not seen fit to develop a comprehensive security awareness program and to take advantage of this valuable asset.