"Winning the Long War" and Effective Counterterrorism

I attended a panel discussion at the Heritage Foundation this morning, and while normally these events are filled with uber-conservative bobble head dolls, this talk was actually pretty good. It had to do with the emerging intellectual effort intended to balance the needs of homeland security with those of the people who must actually live in the homeland.

James Carafano, author of the recent book "Winning the Long War" moderated the session and gave short pitch for his work. His basic thesis is that, in the early years of the Cold War, the academy and government cooperated closely to create the toolbox necessary to defeat the Soviet Union.

The only problem is, we're still fighting that war; we didn't win it. The third world was and continues to be the battleground between western liberalism and a variety of frighteningly radical political movements. We managed to beat back the Soviets, but once we asserted our hegemony we didn't really know what to do with the billions of people who were now looking to us for hope and help. Throughout the Cold War, we kept telling everyone we had the answers. Unfortunately, our answers were the same ones the Soviets had: huge cash transfers to friendly states and a huge troop presence in the unfriendly ones.

Oops.

The panelists this morning came from military and civilian backgrounds, but their primary gripe was the "stovepipe" problem. This is the notion that solutions, plans, ideas and knowledge about the world are contained within distinct and often antagonistic organizations that are unable to cooperate with one another to achieve shared goals. Department of State, Department of Defense, USAID, Department of Agriculture, FBI, CIA, NSA, state and local law enforcement, the university system, the think tank system, these people typically hate each other and address problems in fundamentally different ways. There is no coordinating body capable of bringing their diffuse information together and making it usable. The National Security Council is supposed to do this job, but in recent years it has simply become its own mini agency, taking part just as aggressively as the others in petty turf wars and interagency bickering.

The panelists believe that new legislation and an overhaul of the executive are needed to fix this problem, but in the meantime, they suggested an extension of professional training in "homeland security" at the undergraduate and graduate levels. These programs would combine training in terrorism, counterinsurgency, human rights, intelligence, conflict resolution, and law enforcement in an effort to create a new generation of thinkers and bureaucrats wrestling with the most important issues in the field.

There's just one problem. The panelists did not seem conscious of the fact that the biggest gap in our knowledge about terrorism is HOW TO KEEP PEOPLE FROM BECOMING TERRORISTS. We know how to kill people really really well. We are so much better at it than they are it's not even funny. What we don't know how to do is save ourselves from the necessity of killing them. We don't know how to actually keep them from wanting to kill us. Until we figure that out, there will still be attacks, there will still be suicide bombings, and there will still be lines of disillusioned young people lining up to be killed until we run out of bullets or our trigger fingers get tired.

That is not how anybody wants this conflict to work out, so put your thinking caps on.

It Could Be Worse

I realize that my posts in the last few weeks have painted a somewhat dark picture of the world. I would like to take a moment to pull my loyal readers back from the brink of suicide.

We’re not all sheep:
A survey conducted in North Carolina during the fall of 2002, the golden age of W’s approval ratings, asked respondents “How much of the time do you think you can trust the government in Washington to do what is right - just about always, most of the time, only some of the time, or almost never?”

Nearly 2/3 replied “only some of the time” or “almost never.” Approval ratings for the President hover near their all time low, and Americans trust in Congress has been on a downward slide for a generation. In other words, people do notice when their government is corrupt, inept, and – dare I say it – evil. The question is how to channel this dissatisfaction into a meaningful reform movement. Good ideas and good marketing have historically and can still change the world. The revolution is not dead.

We’re in this together:
Somalia, one of the poorest places in the world and a country without an officially recognized government had some 500000 cell phone users in 2004. As borders are broken down by satellite media, the internet, and cellular phones, people all over the world become instantly aware of distant events and act to shape their outcomes. The power of information can help move resources where they are needed both through charity and through commerce. Person to person contact, even mediated by our gadgetry, forces us to recognize that people are people wherever they are.

When a tsunami hits South Asia, video feeds from survivors hit our screens in a matter of hours. In a few hours more the flow of money and relief supplies is already underway.

In ages past, genocides and atrocities went unnoticed by all but the killers and the killed. Today, few despots can afford to ignore the court of international public opinion.

The worse the better:
As much as it pains me to borrow an observation from Lenin, it seems that real political change is only possible at times of crisis. We don’t have to go communist though. In a recent panel at the Cato Institute, Jim Gwartney and Simeon Djankov, both noted economists and advocates of political reform in the developing world were asked to describe the background conditions most favorable to successful reform. Their nearly simultaneous answer: desperation.

Politicians just seem to work better with a mob banging at the door.

While the pep-talk is an art form I have not yet mastered, I think we still have reason to refrain from slitting our wrists. There are millions upon millions of scary brilliant people running around this globe; we just have to get them talking to each other.

Truth, Justice and the American Way

The United States Government has a fetish for large political communities. Its actions in the world demonstrate a belief that big is beautiful; we cajole our friends and enemies alike to align in ever larger groupings, federations, unions, blocs.

This is perhaps a consequence of our attachment to the highly profitable status quo. Large and established groupings almost necessarily abandon radicalism, they are less costly to negotiate with or deter, and the U.S. still believes that it can maintain economic and military primacy in a world of great powers.

These explanations do not go far enough to explain our obsession however. The real reason has to do with the core functions of the state, functions that are at odds with the political philosophy that shapes American thought on so many issues.

We can talk abstractly about the state as a guarantor of rights, a purveyor of public goods, a benevolent and civilizing force in the world, but these noble goals ignore the reality that the primary tool of the state is violence or the threat thereof. The cognitive dissonance that results from these facts – particularly under an American government founded on the idea of natural rights and which selectively and consistently ignores them – can only be calmed by a “great cause,” a purpose more important than the hopelessly violent rat race of human existence.

Call this mythical purpose God, call it Manifest Destiny, call it Democracy or the American Way, it is psychologically necessary if the nation is to persist. The large state and its great cause reinforce one another, they are complementary and inseparable.

And yet, stripped of its regional coloring and ideological twists, the nationalist lie is essentially the belief that “we” are different from “them.” That is to say, it is right and just and good that certain freedoms are exercised by patriots but denied to non-believers.

A political community is a responsible (justice must be left aside for this discussion) user of coercive power only to the extent that respect for natural human rights is central to decision-making and that its institutions provide for transparency and accountability when abuse invariably takes place.

Large political communities like the United States become dangerous on all three accounts when they begin to believe their own propaganda. The grand lie is used to justify widespread use of force and coercion. The fiction of the homogeneous and unified nation is used to silence dissent. The distance between the people and their agents obscures responsibility.

Individual citizens of the United States are carefully insulated from the violence committed on their behalf. Our television anchor men drone on about the trials and tribulations of war, but the networks are practically forbidden from showing glimpses of its true horror. We see cannons firing into the air, we see bombs explode from a distance, we see tanks rolling through the street. All very impressive, all calculated induce the catatonia of trust and security.

What we do not see however is where the shells land, the scene after the smoke clears, the human faces crushed beneath the tracks of the M-1. We do not see the smoking piles of human meat, we do not smell blood spray in the air, we do not watch the howling families tearing at mangled corpses.

When we hear of “bad guys” being tortured, we are not permitted to watch as the masked and ghoulish men that WE EMPLOY attach car batteries to their screaming victims.

We cannot see, we do not kill, our hands our clean . . . or so our government tells us.

The truth is at your fingertips if you can bear to look.

The Legitimacy Problem

It is amazing to me that a country called into being by cries of “no taxation without representation” can be so oblivious to the international implications of its actions.

The central contradiction facing western democracies, particularly the United States with its global presence and neo-imperial pretensions, is the fact that the people who vote a particular government into office represent a tiny minority of the people directly impacted by the resulting policy change. Taxes do not need to be paid by personal check to the Internal Revenue Service to be very real.

A commitment to democracy, to true rule by the governed, would seem to make our situation untenable, but the west continues to simultaneously argue in favor of democracy and increase its coercive power over non-citizens.

The ability to sustain such a glaring logical inconsistency is almost impressive. It represents a feat of doublethink on par with the old favorites “War is Peace, Freedom is Slavery, Ignorance is Strength.”

Launching wars against distant peoples not just with democratic approval but in the name of democracy itself is perhaps the height of such absurdity, but countless other examples present themselves if we begin to scrutinize the actions of our state.

Even policies that appear purely domestic, subsidies to farmers for instance, have measurable and dramatic effects on non-represented people across the globe. Quotas and restrictions on the flow of goods, people, and money are even more destructive. The provision of foreign aid through multilateral organizations and bilateral arrangements is overtly and obviously an effort to shape policy outcomes abroad, to govern by remote control, if you will.

These actions are usually justified with the following traditional realist argument: because certain states are able to exercise power in the world and because this exertion seems to be of material benefit the states and their citizens, it would be irresponsible not to act. It would be a serious violation of the public trust. These theorists truly believe that “might makes right.” Take the argument or leave it; their consistency at least is admirable.

The new and more insidious face of this old position is shaped by a belief that western democracies are so manifestly and completely correct in their method of government that whatever policy they choose to pursue is necessarily a just one. I will let my previous postings make the argument that this view is incorrect.

To justify a policy by the mechanism which produced it is to go against the skeptical rationalism of the Enlightenment and to cast aside the notion of a limited sphere of legitimate state action. The very core of our democracy is the idea that certain rights are fundamental and inherent in human beings regardless of their class or location.

The fact that people happen to reside outside the borders of the United States makes them no less human, no less deserving of protection, no less qualified to claim their rights. How then can we justify the exercise of coercive power over them?

Although it may be practically difficult to extend equal rights to the people of the world, we can certainly refrain from actions that have demonstrable negative consequences for them.

We cannot yet afford to forget what the liberal mission was about.

If we accept that our power confers license to act as we please, we do not just profane the name of democracy. We may also discover to our great misfortune that power used is power lost.