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MC MasterChef's blog
Secretary of Defense Gates made a speech at Kansas State University the other day, and if you have the time I would suggest reading or listening to it (links via SWJ). In it he made a rather unusual plea: Give The Other Agencies of US Government Some Money Too.
What is not as well-known, and arguably even more shortsighted [than the "peace dividend" defense and intel cutbacks following the end of the Cold War], was the gutting of America’s ability to engage, assist, and communicate with other parts of the world – the “soft power,” which had been so important throughout the Cold War. The State Department froze the hiring of new Foreign Service officers for a period of time. The United States Agency for International Development saw deep staff cuts – its permanent staff dropping from a high of 15,000 during Vietnam to about 3,000 in the 1990s. And the U.S. Information Agency was abolished as an independent entity, split into pieces, and many of its capabilities folded into a small corner of the State Department.
...[P]ublic relations was invented in the United States, yet we are miserable at communicating to the rest of the world what we are about as a society and a culture, about freedom and democracy, about our policies and our goals. It is just plain embarrassing that al-Qaeda is better at communicating its message on the internet than America. As one foreign diplomat asked a couple of years ago, “How has one man in a cave managed to out-communicate the world’s greatest communication society?” Speed, agility, and cultural relevance are not terms that come readily to mind when discussing U.S. strategic communications.
...Despite the improvements of recent years, despite the potential innovative ideas hold for the future, sometimes there is no substitute for resources – for money.
Funding for non-military foreign-affairs programs has increased since 2001, but it remains disproportionately small relative to what we spend on the military and to the importance of such capabilities. Consider that this year’s budget for the Department of Defense - not counting operations in Iraq and Afghanistan - is nearly half a trillion dollars. The total foreign affairs budget request for the State Department is $36 billion – less than what the Pentagon spends on health care alone. Secretary Rice has asked for a budget increase for the State Department and an expansion of the Foreign Service. The need is real.
From this we can reasonably conclude that the Secretary is a regular reader of WhirledView. Or, if not that, that he at least realizes, unlike his predecessor the famous bureaucratic infighter, that a successful US national strategy requires cooperation, coordination, and if not parity of resources then at least a balance less skewed than what we have now, between the critical agencies of US government.
I would strongly recommend MountainRunner's commentary on this speech as well. He mentions a report from Senator Lugar's office, "Embassies Grapple to Guide Foreign Aid" (.pdf) which he excerpts here in the bulleted points:
Not only has State's piece of the pie shrunk, but its leadership has, according to the report, become muddled. From four of the nine summary findings:
The last bullet is important as we see USAID working closely with the military in Africa, Iraq, Afghanistan, and elsewhere in the contested spaces. This stepchild is a core function of our mission to deny sanctuary and to counter ideological support for terrorism and insurgency. In this, the report notes the importance of the institutionalization of collaboration between the military in Iraq and Afghanistan and USAID in terms of cooperation, funding, mission, and leadership. But to really move this requires leadership that's not apparent in State.
- From the field, it is clear that we have failed as a government and as a community of international development supporters to agree on either the importance or the content of a foreign aid strategy...
- Overall agreement between headquarters and the field on foreign assistance is at low ebb and communications have been complicated rather than improved by the State Department’s efforts to provide strategic direction...
- Field complaints about the [new foreign assistance function headed by the Director of Foreign Assistance] at State focus on the lack of transparency, the weeks of extra paperwork, the differing priorities between post and headquarters, as well as inconsistent demands, but the underlying, only sometimes unspoken, fight is about money...
- USAID may be viewed as the neglected stepchild in D.C. but in the field it is clear that USAID plays either the designated hitter or the indispensable utility infielder for almost all foreign assistance launched from post...
Mountainrunner wonders in his conclusion whether "Gates [is] speaking out of turn or is the Bush Administration having Gates speak for the President?" My guess is former, since as he points out there's little evidence of any coordination with Secretary Rice on this (and Bush himself appears these days to be focused mostly on 1) attempting to maintain some appearance of relevance, nevermind the realities; and 2) trying to convince everyone that actually, General Petraeus is really The Decider.) But you do have to sort of wonder what an administration a few real adults in charge from the beginning would've turned out like.
Oh well.
Update - Much more at WhirledView here.
Ok, I know the Republicans are past masters at this, but really. Democrats. Nancy. C'mon. Let's see some better politicization of the military, please.
I've gotta agree with Prof. Bacevich on this one:
Andrew Bacevich, who was an Army officer in the Vietnam War and now teaches at Boston University, said Sanchez fundamentally misunderstood the nature of the conflict he faced. Sanchez's troops employed "kick-down-the-door" tactics that hardened resistance to the U.S. occupation, and helped turn an insurgency in its infancy into a guerrilla war spinning out of control, he said.
"Why he has chosen all of a sudden to attempt to return to public attention, and why he would do it in an overtly partisan way, frankly baffles me," said Bacevich, whose son was killed in Iraq."And why the Democratic leadership would say, 'Yes, this is the guy who is going to deliver our message' is just baffling. He is a largely discredited figure."
See also: Abu Muqawama, Small Wars Journal. Surely the Democrats can do better than this.
Book I recently finished: Six Days of War by Michael Oren.
Acting about three years too late on a recommendation of praktike's, I now can claim to know a very small amount about the Middle East conflict. The history was very thoroughly reported, but I probably need to read more on Nasser and Israel to appreciate it all. This is a conflict I'm more inclined to defer to others on.
Book I'm currently reading: The One Percent Doctrine by Ron Suskind.
Now that I'm living in the States and have access to English-language libraries again, I'm trying to catch up on several of the big political books to have come out in the past couple years. I'm liking this one better than The Price of Loyalty for the broader scope, although the prose is maybe a little too Esquire-esque. I'm about four chapters in at the moment and most of it is familiar from other sources by now, but he's putting together a pretty good narrative so far.
Book(s) I recently bought: Military Inc.: Inside Pakistan's Military Economy by Ayesha Siddiqa and Frontline Pakistan: The Struggle with Militant Islam by Zahid Hussain.
I got tired of recommending the first one on Pakistan threads while having to caveat that "I've heard it's good, but haven't read it myself yet", so I bought it. And then they hooked me with that free shipping deal for the second....
What are you reading?
I don't know what a map of our readership looks like these days at American Footprints, but if there are any Pakistan-based readers out there, you might be interested to know that the New York Times is looking to hear from you.
Ahem.
It has taken me a while to make my way through the commentary about Pakistan pulsing through the 'net in the wake of Musharraf's imposition of military rule, but after a few days I've managed to do so and put together some thoughts of my own.
My undergraduate studies took a rather roundabout course. After a semester-long independent study on the Cold War my final year of high school, the closest thing I had to a regional specialization was Soviet Russia; however, having taken Japanese as my language then, I ended up selecting East Asia as my "regional track" in Boston University's International Relations program. I then proceeded to largely ignore both those areas and ended up taking courses mostly on China, after having finished a fascinating course on Chinese culture and domestic politics my freshman year. Then my senior year, after first reading Charlie Wilson's War and Ghost Wars (thank you Blake for the recommendations!), I got hooked on South Asia and political Islam under the teachings of Prof. Hussain Haqqani. This does not make the job search process go easier, let me tell you (my cover letter: "Will generalize on various subjects in exchange for pittance and a health plan").
The advantage of this all though is of course the chance to make connections between the subjects. One lesson from my studies of Chinese politics that has stuck with me is how "civil society" groups — religious bodies, environmental advocacy organizations, women's groups, etc — represent real foundational blocks in a participatory democracy, and how in the absence of democracy they can potentially serve as channels for citizens to seriously challenge the priorities and policies of the authoritarian state government (Prof. Robert Weller's Alternative Civilities: Democracy and Culture in China and Taiwan was a formative introduction to this idea).
In societies where an autocratic government imposes limits on political participation — by banning, for example, the establishment of rival political parties — even ostensibly innocuous and apolitical gatherings of individuals can potentially offer an platform for organizing the aspirations of the unrepresented. Democratic transition in Taiwan was heavily dependent on these voluntary groups' participation, and the Chinese Communist Party, observing this, has sought to curtail the organization of independent groups and NGOs on the mainland out of the fear that a similar process would depose them from power (thus, for example, the officially-endorsed and -incorporated "Patriotic Religious Associations" all practicing religious leaders are required to join). It's my understanding that many Middle Eastern leaders have been suspicious of the Muslim Brotherhood and other faith-based service organizations out of the fear that they too will end up serving as the framework for popular opposition to their continued autocratic rule.
So, in authoritarian societies where political participation is circumscribed, protesters may take the path of least resistance and channel their energies into groups that the state either doesn't have the power and / or the inclination to totally shut off.
Pakistan's General Musharraf is telling Western audiences that he's made his recent power play in order to shore up his ability to confront the terrorists, but the days following the coup have shown his biggest priorities to in fact be a crackdown on members of the judiciary, political opponents, and the independent media. Today the New York Times reports:
General Musharraf invited Islamabad’s diplomatic corps to his official residence on Monday to brief them on the situation and on his reasons for declaring emergency rule. But two Western diplomats said the encounter only reinforced concerns that General Musharraf was more focused on vanquishing his political rivals than on fighting terrorism.This is not Pakistan's first military clamp-down by any stretch, but Ahmed Rashid writes that "[n]ever before in Pakistan's sad history of military rule has a general so reviled invoked martial law to ensure his own survival".At the meeting, the general primarily railed against his political opponents, with special venom reserved for the Supreme Court. When asked by a diplomat to describe specific plans to crack down on terrorists, General Musharraf gave only a vague answer.
“He effectively dodged the question and turned to the military presence in the room and asked them to organize a briefing for ambassadors,” said one of the Western diplomats. “It wasn’t very clear in terms of what was actually being done.”
The second Western diplomat said: “There was serious concern that terrorism and security was not front and center. What was really amazing was him going on and on and on about how bad the judiciary was.”
It's remarkable — particularly given the hand-wringing fears about Pakistan's imminent Islamization should Musharraf exit the stage, a notion which Musharraf himself has of course been happy to encourage —the degree to which Islamist parties in Pakistan are not actually all that popular at the polls. Hilzoy summarizes: "[I]f we are worried about what would happen if Pakistan held democratic elections, then it seems like a good idea to focus on the support enjoyed by actual political parties. Here the polls are unanimous: none that I'm aware of has Islamist parties enjoying more than the 11% support that they received in the 2002 elections." As the Taiwan example might suggest, this is not to say that such a political victory would be impossible: Joshua Hammer, in a much-noted piece in the Atlantic Monthly, explains that
Hammer, continues, however, by reinforcing Hilzoy's statistics when he explains that[t]he nightmare scenario for U.S. policy makers—and one reason they remain heavily invested in Musharraf—is an Islamic revolution in Pakistan. A tide of anti-American sentiment, some analysts fear, could bring to power Islamists, who would give free rein to the Taliban, spread nuclear technology to rogue states and terrorist groups, and support the mujahideen in Kashmir.
There’s no doubt that Islamists have grown in numbers and prominence in Pakistan since 9/11. In 2002, six fundamentalist parties formed an alliance called Muttahida Majlis-e-Amal, or MMA, and rode a wave of anger at the American-led war in Afghanistan, taking 53 of the 342 seats in the National Assembly and forming the third-largest bloc in the parliament. The alliance won outright control of the provincial assembly in the North-West Frontier Province, and it now governs Balochistan in a coalition with Musharraf’s ruling party. During the weeks that I spent in Islamabad earlier this year, the MMA repeatedly flexed its muscles in noisy protests—weekly demonstrations against legislation offering further legal protections to women, rallies against the government’s razing of illegal makeshift mosques that have sprung up throughout the city. The demonstrations brought out hundreds of police officers and paralyzed traffic in the city for hours.
Moderate Muslims in Pakistan are worried about the Islamists’ rising profile: Pervez Hoodbhoy, chairman of the Quaid-e-Azam University physics department, told me that the university has been “taken over” by Islamist fervor—more hijabs in the classrooms, more prayer, and “no bookstores, but three mosques with a fourth under construction” on campus. Hoodbhoy, a highly regarded nuclear physicist and a critic of military rule, told me that an Islamist takeover of the country, either by outright domination of the electoral process or in conjunction with a radical Islamist general, “is a real possibility.”
despite their clout in parliament and their seeming strength on the street, the Islamists are not widely popular: Their parties won only 11 percent of the vote in the 2002 elections (gerrymandering gave them a share of seats far greater than their numbers). Even in their stronghold, the North-West Frontier Province, they polled only 26 percent. Perhaps the biggest obstacle to the MMA’s growth is its abysmal record of governance: In the North-West Frontier Province, which the alliance controls, social services are disintegrating. Unless anti-Western sentiment reaches sustained and unprecedented levels, the Islamists seem highly unlikely to muster enough votes to gain control of parliament in the next decade.Pakistan actually has a number of pretty well-established secular political parties, but because of their potential to challenge his power it is they, not the militants or the Islamists, who Musharraf is targeting in his crackdown. Joshua Kurlantzick writes at The New Republic:
The only thing to add here is none of this began with Musharraf. Pakistan has never really had a chance to develop an effective governing class because whenever they've strayed from Army orthodoxy, coups have thrown them out of power. Having a weak and frequently corrupt political establishment serves Pakistani Army interests by offering easy pretexts for intervention and ready handles for less public manipulation when military rule is not overt. What to do if you're a Pakistani citizen who's fed up with this state of affairs? The Islamist program's appeal is not a special mystery, here.[Y]ears of a political vacuum under Musharraf meant that young Pakistani democrats, exactly the type of people the country needs to escape its feudal past, could not organize or build grassroots movements. When Musharraf finally agreed to allow greater political freedoms this year, the only politicians who could move into the vacuum were two feudal dinosaurs, former prime ministers Nawaz Sharif and Benazir Bhutto. Neither are paragons of democracy: Under Bhutto, Pakistan suffered an endemic of extrajudicial executions and torture, while Sharif was dismissed as prime minister for alleged massive corruption.
The Chinese Communist Party currently has the power and the inclination to restrict independent religious organizations within the Chinese state (although even they have been forced to permit a burgeoning network of environmental NGOs). Musharraf, lacking in electoral legitimacy, presiding over a state whose economy and institutions are teetering on the edge of failure, and whose military predecessors have historically embraced Pakistan's Islamic identity as a strategy for overcoming ethnic and economic divisions in the face of a powerful and hostile Indian neighbor, does not have the means to do so. While I imagine it's fairly unlikely he would effect an about-face and embark on a program of Islamization to match a predecessor like Zia-ul-Haq, I find it even less likely that he will find the means to launch a more concerted effort against Afghan and Pakistani Taliban forces in the tribal areas, even assuming he retains the desire to do so.
Out of concerns for their own power Pervez Musharraf and the Pakistani military establishment have retarded the development of the mainstream Pakistani political parties and weakened other institutions either through design or neglect; they simultaneously lack the means and will to confront separatist and terrorist movements which use the religion of Islam as a means of mobilization and organization. With other avenues of political participation restricted, Pakistan's gradual radicalization should not be unexpected. These groups' power will continue to wax, rather than wane, so long as Musharraf continues to cling to power, with serious strategic implications for America. While I don't want to overstate the degree to which the U.S. is able influence this process now — the military is deeply entrenched in Pakistani politics and will remain so for the forseeable future, as Hammer's article relates — I agree with Kurlantzick that it's time to recognize that our the perpetuation of Musharraf's rule is not serving our interests. Unless the political process is opened up through his removal, I think we can expect to see Islamist-based parties play an ever-growing role in Pakistan, and to the degree to which they cooperate and sympathize with groups like Al Qaeda and the Taliban that is going to be that much more of a Bad Thing.
Ok, back to job applications now.
[x-posted]
Thanks to a recent bulletin at the Small Wars Journal I caught notice of an article in the latest issue of the Joint Force Quarterly, a publication of the National Defense University for the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff. The primary topic of this issue is China. There are a lot of interesting pieces to check out there, but the one that first caught my eye was one by Martin Wayne titled "Five Lessons from China's War on Terror" (pdf).
While I think the simmering conflict in Xinjiang has gotten more press since I first started studying it in the fall of 2004 (probably thanks to the handful of Uyghur detainees at Guantanamo, not my term paper), it is still a fairly obscure region — one which I was lucky enough to travel through recently while taking the long way home from a two-year teaching stint in Japan. I don't speak a word of Uyghur and two and a half weeks was not nearly enough time to really get beneath the surface level so I can't claim any authority as a field researcher — if this is too obscure a subject and you want to just look at my travel pictures instead, they are available on Flickr here and here.
Anyhow, the thesis of my old paper was that the Chinese central government has, historically, enacted a number of discriminatory or inflammatory policies which have alienated the Uyghur population in Xinjiang and which, if continued, have the counterproductive potential to actually increase the appeal of militant Islam for some members of the dispossessed minority. Dr. Wayne's article, and to some extent my own travels in Xinjiang, seem to challenge some of those ideas. Xinjiang today appears — and I should stress the "appears", because again I have not spent enough time there nor do I have the fluency to accurately judge for myself —stable. It seemed to me that much of this stability has actually come from a growing Han Chinese population with a vested interest in reaffirming Xinjiang's status as part of China, and in conjunction with this in-migration the co-opting or commodification of several centers of Uyghur life. (Witness for example this classic sign at the Id Khah mosque in Kashgar — China's largest, and a major tourist destination for Han Chinese and Westerners now, like many other places in Kashgar, although there are still large local crowds at Friday prayers — or read the caption I excerpted from the Xinjiang Museum in Urumqi's exhibit on minority cultures.) Since the 1990s, Beijing has devoted a tremendous amount of effort to keeping Xinjiang in its place as a part of China, and thus far it seems they have succeeded. Violence has diminished and development continues apace.
Wayne identifies five aspects of the Chinese government's actions in Xinjiang, which he says hold lessons for understanding "the nature of China today and ... crafting more effective counterinsurgency policies". They are, in brief:
- The "targeting of indigenous support" for insurgency and cutting local links to broader jihadist movements
- Acting "early, forcefully, and comprehensively", using a graduated mix of security forces
- "Crafting meaningful security" through a comprehensive campaign in the areas of education, religion, economics, and governance
- "Countering the insurgency from the bottom up", by using "society-centric" warfare — holding groups accountable for the actions of their members
- Enabling counterinsurgency for the purpose of stability through "seemingly infinite political will" on the part of the regime
The "early, forceful, comprehensive" action in the first point describes, according to Wayne, the PRC's quick build-up of "forces capable of moving down the spectrum of violence — away from military actions in favor of paramilitary and then police forces more capable of moving in society". The "Four-in-One Defense" draws upon the People's Liberation Army; the paramilitary People's Armed Police; the Xinjiang Production and Construction Corp (a chain of farms, prison camps, and Han immigrant work groups established under Mao to ensure a loyal population); and the Han Chinese residents of Xinjiang, which today compromise a full 50% of Xinjiang's population, making them the largest ethnic group in what is officially the Xinjiang Uyghur Autonomous Region.
The entire third point of Wayne's article, "crafting meaningful security", is the vaguest, but the examples he gives seem to me more like a recipe for rebellion than stability: purging the local military of "not only of those suspected of separatism but also of ideas considered separatist"; pairing throughout government Han Chinese and minority officials where "[t]he key to knowing who holds the power at each level ... is looking at which post is controlled by the Han"; "education primarily in [Mandarin]", the content of which is "controlled by the party-state, and [with] spies and informants ... believed to police classroom compliance"; "mosques and other religious settings [likewise] infiltrated and monitored for political dissent by security forces"; and "pervasive ethnic discrimination" where "the most materially developed towns have the largest percentages of Han". I have to acknowledge that it is possible that overpowering tactics like this might be effective, but Wayne in his very first point says that "[e]ven the most brutal force can achieve ephemeral tactical victories, yet strategic effectiveness is ultimately achieved through political measures that deeply reshape society". Unless he's suggesting that Beijing is reshaping society so totally that the Uyghurs will become permanently marginalized and as a result quiescent, I'm at a loss as to how these tactics are going to bring about long-term political reconciliation and stability. I'm hesitant to make future predictions about where China or the Uyghurs is headed, but should violent instability return to Xinjiang these would seem to me like number one candidates for protest.
As for the notion of "society-centric warfare", this appears to me to be essentially a combination of 1) collective punishment; and 2) state corporatism. Functioning as the former, Wayne explains how
China practices the state corporatism function regularly through controls on the establishment and activities of non-governmental organizations, most notably through the "Patriotic Religious Associations" practicing Chinese priests and imams are required to join in order to gain the privilege of preaching to and representing their respective faiths. This divide, coopt, and rule is strategy is potentially effective (the British certainly were fond of it, weren't they?) but also has the consequence of legitimating and entrenching community divisions. I've written previously in my other huge-senior-year-term-paper that this has produced some challenges to integrating Europe's Muslim communities, and more directly related to Xinjiang Dru Gladney has written a lot on how Uyghur identities are being constructed in opposition to mainstream Han Chinese society, the most recent bit of which I've read being Chapter 10 in his book Dislocating China. So again, this "society-centric" policy is something which seems to be working ok now, but I think has the potential to come back and bite Beijing badly in the future — just as it may in Iraq today.In Xinjiang ... every grouping of society is held accountable for its rank and file. The region's government, as well as prefectures, villages, neighborhoods, and families, are responsible for their members. Employers, especially those directly controlled by the government, must account for their employees. The limited opportunities for moving or for obtaining new employment in Xinjiang throughout the 1990s greatly facilitated this strategy. Consequences for failing to prevent problems or respond appropriately range from stigma and stern warnings from the seemingly ever-present security forces ... to loss of employment (to which the entire family's housing, health care, and income may be tied) and perhaps worse. Some families reportedly have been threatened by security forces if a husband, father, or son failed to turn himself in after an incident of unrest.
Wayne's final fifth point is a good one, which is that "the prospect of unrest in Xinjiang shook the regime's veneer of stability and catalyzed government action with the full if uninformed backing of the Chinese people ... While the Communist Party's concern is for self-preservation atop the state, the state must produce the perception, and perhaps the reality, of internal stability". But while economic successes and very gradual political reform may buy continued acquiescence to CCP rule in the east for the time being, I don't know the extent to which that will work in Xinjiang (or in the east, for that matter). Wayne says that "like peoples elsewhere in China, the population of Xinjiang increasingly if grudgingly bought into the idea that stability across China leads to a better future. Acceptance of this vision of Xinjiang benefitting from increasing incorporation into China undercut passive support for insurgency and drew Uyghurs and Uyghur society into active stabilizing roles in governance, business, religion, and education." I can't argue with this — it certainly seemed that way when I travelled through Xinjiang over this summer — but I do wonder whether the Uyghurs will continue to buy in for the long term, given the number of intrusive policies they are subject to and the highly uneven distribution of this "better future" in Xinjiang. It also raises the question — which Wayne does raise in his final paragraph — as to what will happen in Xinjiang and throughout China if the country's growth slackens and the promised future benefits remain out of the grasp of the majority.
I really am interested in reading Dr. Wayne's full book, if I can ever manage to get a copy to do so, and would be very curious to see more analysis of Chinese policies from scholars better-versed than I in the intricacies of counterinsurgency strategy. Right now though, I'm not finding myself convinced by Dr. Wayne's article that China's actions in Xinjiang are in fact keys to "crafting more effective counterinsurgency policies", at least not through their emulation. After a period of spiking political violence in the mid-1990s Xinjiang has entered a fairly quiet stage, but I think it is still too early to say whether this will last or whether Chinese policies will actually provoke a more serious challenge to Beijing's authority in the future. We'll see.
[x-posted]
Rough week. Not only has the State Department lost the talents of Karen Hughes, it also lost control over the security contracts to guard its diplomats and convoys. The New York Times says:
Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice and Secretary of Defense Robert M. Gates agreed to the measure at a lunch on Tuesday after weeks of tension between their departments over coordination of thousands of gun-carrying contractors operating in the chaos of Iraq.Mr. Gates appears to have won the bureaucratic tug-of-war, which accelerated after a Sept. 16 shooting in central Baghdad involving guards in a Blackwater convoy who Iraqi investigators say killed 17 Iraqis. Military coordination of contractor convoys will include operations of not only Blackwater, formerly known as Blackwater USA, but also those of dozens of other private firms that guard American diplomats, aid workers and reconstruction crews.
What the article doesn't say is how control is being transferred and what, exactly, "military coordination" is going to actually mean. Prior to this announcement the (currently leader-less) State Department Bureau of Diplomatic Security — which manages embassy security details all over the world, and which oversaw the Blackwater contract since control over the non-military aspects of the Iraq mission was transferred to State from Rumsfeld's CPA in 2004 — had already, in response to the Blackwater incident, proposed some fixes. They include the "establishment of a 'go team' of embassy security officials to 'proceed as soon as possible to the scene of any weapons discharge to gather information and material and provide an analysis of what happened and why, and prepare a report'", as well as "[a board to] review all incidents involving contractor use of deadly force, injury, death or serious property damage and recommend to the ambassador whether force was justified", among other ideas like cultural training and increased compensation for Iraqi families who suffer from contractors' mishaps. To what extent any of these measures will be implemented under the DOD's watch is not at all clear from the Times article. But R.J. Hillhouse at The Spy Who Billed Me reminds us that the Pentagon actually already has its own system for overseeing the activities of most of its contractors — which is, hire another contractor to do it for them:
Department of Defense security contractors are already coordinated through a single, DoD entity, the Regional Operations Centers which track movement of security convoys to make sure they and the military don't trip over one another. Most likely this existing mechanism will be expanded to monitor Blackwater, Triple Canopy and DynCorp convoys for the Department of State and this would raise some interesting questions since its known that BW and TC also provide security services to the CIA under this contract.
The US Regional Cooperation Offices are outsourced through a recently renewed $475 million contract to the British firm Aegis. Aegis is run by the infamous old-school mercenary, Tim Spicer.
I recommend reading the full Washington Post story linked in Hillhouse's post above, but essentially one of the responsibilities included in the Aegis contract is conducting regular threat briefings for and tracking the movement of DOD contractors. Why is the US military outsourcing the oversight of its outsourcing? Probably because the military's procurement and contracting officer corps is overstretched and under-prepared for the task at hand as it is:
I do think unity of effort is a key aspect of a counterinsurgency campaign (John Nagl makes points along these lines in Learning to Eat Soup with a Knife, as I recall), so to that extent having all the guns rolling under one command makes sense; and it's one of the realities of our day that the United States seems to increasingly hand these kinds of responsibilities to its military rather than its diplomatic services (on this subject see, among others, a recent WhirledView post, Andrew Bacevich's New American Militarism, and Dana Priest's The Mission). I agree with the Mountainrunner article I linked above that problems with Blackwater in Iraq really reflect more the failings of its contracting customer, which is to say the US State Department and more broadly the US government as a whole. If State doesn't recognize the damage being done to US-Iraqi relations by hard-rolling contractor convoys, it's really not Blackwater's business to hold back just for the sake of the broader national mission, which is not what they are being paid for, unless its client demand that of it. State and other US government agencies are presumably being paid to execute a coherent campaign to fight off the Iraqi insurgency and rebuild the country, and their failure to rein in contractors (potentially even when that means greater risk to US diplomats and others serving there) has been detrimental to our mission in Iraq. But it's pretty evident that the Pentagon has not exactly covered itself in glory in the area of contractor oversight either.An independent panel has sharply criticized the Army for failing to train enough experienced contracting officers, deploy them quickly to war zones like Iraq and Afghanistan and ensure that they properly manage billions of dollars in contracts to supply American troops in the field, according to officials briefed on its findings.
In a wide-ranging report to be made public on Thursday, the panel said these and other shortcomings had contributed to an environment in Iraq and Kuwait that allowed waste, fraud and other corruption to take hold and flourish. ...
[T]he six-member panel, appointed in August by Army Secretary Pete Geren, levels a stinging indictment of how the Army oversees $4 billion a year in contracts for food, water, shelter and other supplies to sustain United States forces in Iraq, Kuwait and Afghanistan. The panel also blames senior Army leaders for not responding more swiftly to the problems, despite warning signs like severe shortages of contracting officers in the field. “The Iraq-Kuwait-Afghanistan contracting problems have created a crisis,” the report states.
Congress and investigating agencies like the Government Accountability Office have in recent months assailed the Army for what they have described as a war-zone procurement system in disarray. ...
The panel’s report, which runs about 100 pages including supporting documents, recommends increasing the number of Army contracting officers by about 25 percent, or 1,400, in coming years. It urges the department to improve training and to start young officers in the procurement corps soon after they join the Army, not after seven or eight years of other duties, as is common now.
The panel argues that the procurement corps, now dominated by civilians who balk at being sent to a war zone, must be trained to be an expeditionary force, just as Army combat forces train to deploy quickly for yearlong tours to Iraq,
If Secretary Gates and General Petraeus are going to take their new power over State's security details and the recommendations of this contracting panel and try to forge some kind of coherent program of oversight for the many private firms to whom the US government has devolved portions of its responsibilities in Iraq, then maybe we will see a more coherent strategic effort. But switching one Department for another on Blackwater's billing invoices is not going to be enough.*
P.S., to whoever's got the keys to the site — can we get a "Private Military Companies" category going? Or maybe "Privatization" under the "Issues" category, and "Contractors" under the "Organizations", whatever works best.
* Ok, possibly Blackwater still sends its bills to State under this new arrangement, I don't really know. Maybe they have direct deposit. It's mostly beside the point.
Via Kings of War, Mother Jones magazine is currently featuring a massive batch of interviews, from a number of interesting thinkers, on the moral, logistical, and political implications of an exit from Iraq. Petraeus aides like Nagl and McMaster, critical observers like Cordesman and Brzezinski, and many, many others are all there to add to your Sunday reading pile and mine.
I've only skimmed the surface thus far, but this response seems depressingly apt:
"We put the Iraqis in this mess and now we're bailing on them. I don't know how you deal with that. Obviously we've got an enormous moral responsibility for making this mess with no plan to fix it, and just kind of dithering as it gets worse and worse. There's no way to get that balance sheet right." —Colonel T.X. Hammes (usmc, retired), counterinsurgency expert
Bad timing for my recent stopover in Boston means I missed hearing this in person, but Professor Andrew Bacevich's lecture last week at Boston University, "Illusions of Managing History: The Enduring Relevance of Reinhold Niebuhr", is available for listening online. I recall the Niebuhr section in the "Ideas on American Foreign Policy" course I took with him as being somewhat inscrutable at the time, but Bacevich's lecture touches on a number of themes also present in much of his recent writing. From the BU Today writeup:
Bacevich, a conservative thinker who has become a harsh Iraq war critic, said Niebuhr stressed that history is not a simple narrative of good battling evil, and with American leadership, eventually triumphing around the world. Instead, Niehbuhr emphasized “the indecipherability of history” and warned of “the false allure of simple solutions.” And, said Bacevich, referencing the Bush administration’s push for invading Iraq in 2003, such an allure was particularly dangerous when the solution reached for was a military one.
“Egged on by pundits and policy analysts, [they] persuaded themselves that American power, adroitly employed, could transform the Greater Middle East,” said Bacevich. “The paths of progress,” he continued, quoting Niebuhr, “have turned out to be more devious and unpredictable than the putative managers of history could understand.” Bacevich warned also that a continuing failure to heed Niebuhr’s admonitions would tempt “further catastrophes.” And he didn’t point fingers only at Washington. In the final minutes of his lecture, Bacevich examined the struggle in Iraq from a cultural point of view. Specifically, he said, it was the American expectation for ever-greater material abundance that has led to an inherently expansionist foreign policy, such as our addiction to foreign oil and the bloody entanglements needed to ensure an unfettered supply of the fuel.
The current war in Iraq, Bacevich argued, was debased not just by delusional and arrogant foreign policy leadership, but by “the moral dissonance generated by sending soldiers off to fight for freedom in distant lands when freedom at home appears increasingly to have become a synonym for profligacy, conspicuous consumption, and frivolous self-absorption.”
The latter section particularly echoes arguments made by William Appleman Williams and Charles Beard, two historians whose work Bacevich cites in his book, The New American Militarism. I'll have to see if I can't dig up my notes from senior year to see what additional points we might have covered then on Neibuhr — I think the reading itself was a handout, as I don't spot The Irony of American History on my current shelves (which I am now reunited with after two years away in Japan). The follow-up Q&A session at Bacevich's talk, unfortunately, is not included in this audio, so I'm left wondering how the debate went afterwards.
Otherwise unrelated but continuing with the where-are-my-former-professors-now theme a little bit further, Professor Husain Haqqani, current director of BU's Center for International Relations, testified before the House Armed Services Committee on Pakistan recently: here is Video Part One and Video Part Two (Windows streaming formats). I've yet to watch the videos fully for lack of a good connection, but his prepared testimony can be read here (.pdf).
[x-posted]
Pakistani General Pervez Musharaff's bad summer just got worse:
A long-simmering standoff between the government and a radical mosque in the heart of the Pakistani capital exploded into a vicious street clash on Tuesday, with a dozen dead and more than 100 others injured.
For over 15 hours, paramilitary forces and bandanna-clad Islamic fighters manning positions in the Red Mosque traded automatic-weapons fire. At least three female students at a religious school affiliated with the mosque were killed, as were an army ranger and a Pakistani photographer who was caught in the crossfire.
The leaders of the Red Mosque (Lal Masjid), brothers Maulana Abdul Aziz and Abdur Rashid Ghazi, have been in open opposition to Musharaff's rule for some time now, demanding the immediate introduction of sharia law and issuing fatwas against the Pakistani government and its ministers. Students at the associated madrassah seminary have been carrying out vigilante attacks throughout the capital, and the government had intended to shut the mosque down along with others it says were built on illegally-seized government-owned land. Aryn Baker, a reporter with TIME Magazine, was at the mosque conducting an interview on the broader subject of Islam in Pakistan when the clash began and brings a first-person recounting of the mosque occupants' fervor under fire.
For the past six months the clerics of the Red Mosque madrassah complex, which houses about 7,000 students, have openly defied the government, calling for the establishment of Islamic law throughout the country. Students and teachers from both the men's and women's schools have embarked on a vigilante anti-vice campaign in the capital, shutting down video and music shops for being un-Islamic. Twice now, the female students have abducted alleged prostitutes, saying that if the government doesn't cleanse the capital of sin, they will. "A man goes to medical school and becomes a doctor," says [interpreter and student Umma] Aman. "We go to a madrassah, so we must practice Islam. But the government is not letting us. How can we just sit down and allow this to happen? We must act on God's will, not our own desires."
At the moment it's not clear whether Pakistani forces will attempt to storm the mosque or whether some negotiated stand-down can be reached. Musharaff's position is already tenuous since his dismissal of former Supreme Court Justice Iftikhar Mohammed Chaudhry in March, which has brought widespread protests from lawyers, journalists whose reporting was being baldly censored, and opposition parties, prompting many observers to mark his days as numbered.
Writers like Stephen Cohen and Husain Haqqani, among others, have argued that Musharaff enjoys continued US patronage under the "There Is No Alternative" banner; that only a Pakistan under the firm grip of its military establishment can keep the Islamist movements from grasping control of the state's nuclear trigger. As Ahmed Rashid writes in his Post op-ed,
Musharraf promised the international community that he would purge pro-Taliban elements from his security services and convinced the Bush administration that his philosophy of "enlightened moderation" was the only way to fend off Islamic extremism. But Pakistan today is the center of global Islamic terrorism, with Osama bin Laden and Taliban leader Mohammad Omar probably living here.
Instead of confronting this threat, the army has focused on keeping Musharraf in power -- negotiating with extremists, letting radical Islamic students set up a base in Islamabad and so forth. Meanwhile, to spook the West into continuing to support him, Musharraf continues to grossly exaggerate the strength of the Islamic parties that he warns might take over his nuclear-armed country.
The question of whether to govern as an Islamic state, as opposed to merely a state for Muslims, has been a continually contentious one through Pakistan's troubled history, as Cohen's The Idea of Pakistan elaborates at book length and as the supporters of the Red Mosque demonstrate today. But it's worth recalling that the MMA coalition of Islamist parties has only enjoyed limited electoral success; this, together with the widespread public protests in support of Justice Chaudhry, may suggest that moderate Pakistani civil society isn't totally gone yet. Ungoverned tribal border zones, crime and drug trafficking, collapsing educational infrastructure, separatist movements in Baluchistan and the Pahstun tribal areas; all these forces and more combine to threaten Pakistani national integrity, bringing a #12 rank on Foreign Policy's index of Failed States.
An unelected autocrat like Pervez Musharaff is not going to be able to hold it together forever. Instead, observers like Rashid conclude, "the United States would be far safer if it pushed for a truly representative Pakistani government that could marginalize the jihadists, rather than placing all its eggs in Musharraf's basket." This summer isn't over yet.
Warning: nothing about the Middle East here! Well, not much. Radio Open Source has just done a show based on a topic I suggested a month or two back. The issue is China's rise: how is its growing energy resource consumption shaping its presence in developing countries in Africa, Latin America, and the Middle East, and what implications that has for U.S. foreign policy. The conversation takes a number of interesting tacks beyond my initial topic proposal, and features commentary from Thomas Barnett and others.
This was my comment on the show:
I wasn't able to listen to the show live (time zone differences pretty much rule that out) but I've heard it now. Very interesting discussion, ranging over quite a broad range (I wrote a senior term paper on the Uyghurs, so they're a bit of an interest of mine as well). Glad to see I was able to squeak in my question before it went to air.
For me the two most interesting points raised during the program were Thomas Barnett's suggestion that given China's mercantalist program of relatively shallow, extractive relations with countries in L.America, Africa, and the M.East, and their limited ability to spawn broader economic development, they will increasingly be seen in those countries as the negative face of globalization. A number of the China/Africa articles I've collected in my bookmarks suggest such reactions are already beginning, particularly in cases where cheap imported Chinese labor is supplanting locals.
Equally important I thought was John Pomfret's response to my question, where he suggested that the Chinese global ruleset (to use a Barnett-esque turn of phrase) was essentially undefined, outside the basic bottom-line business of business. I would subscribe to Dr. Barnett's later comment, where he says that we have come to the conclusion that dictatorships are not viable long-term solutions for development; that's actually part of the reason why a rival "Beijing Consensus" cocerns me, since I think a country with as many unaddressed internal weaknesses as China (whose long- or even mid-term stability I am unassured of) is not a particularly good model for world-wide emulation, at least as long as it retains its current autocratic and form.
Suggestions for August are open, so if you'd like to see Christopher Lydon and his future guests tackle another topic of interest to you, do drop them a note.
[x-posted]
Ok, well Eric and the Armchair Generalist have beat me to the punch on the Army's new counterinsurgency doctrine, but if I may risk a bit of redundancy, I'd like to finish off this draft on the subject that I've been kicking around for about the past week. It's long-ish, so I'll put it behind a break.
Ok, so I know we're supposed to knock it off with the pining for Harry Truman, but... still.
Earlier today, Republicans defeated a Democratic proposal for an investigation into waste and fraud in military contracts. The proposal, made by Senator Byron L. Dorgan of North Dakota, called for a panel like the one led by Harry Truman when he was a Senator, which uncovered many abuses in military spending during World War II. It failed by a 52-to-44 vote....
In urging defeat of Mr. Dorgan's proposal, also offered as an amendment to the military spending bill, [Armed Services Chair Sen. John] Warner said that supposed abuses like those cited ... could be investigated by the Homeland Security and Government Affairs Committee, by various inspectors general or by the Government Accountability Office, without setting up a Truman-style panel.
The vote on the Dorgan amendment followed party lines almost exactly, with Senator Lincoln Chafee of Rhode Island the only Republican to vote yes; no Democrat voted against it.
As for stories like this, well, it's probably just a coincidence, right?
Custer Battles is the only CPA-era whistleblower case to go to trial, but a slew of evidence has now emerged pointing to widespread waste, fraud, abuse, and negligence in the awarding and oversight of Iraq reconstruction contracts. Stuart W. Bowen Jr., the Special Inspector General for Iraq Reconstruction, wrote in a report that the authority's "less than adequate" financial controls left "no assurance" that $8.8 billion in seized Iraqi funds was used properly. But the Bush administration and its allies have blocked most other high-profile efforts to gather more information about further instances of abuse. The administration has invoked an obscure part of the False Claims Act to prevent all but one of more than 50 whistleblower suits brought by employees of U.S. contractors in Iraq from moving forward to trial. And the Republican Congress has held only cursory hearings on the contracting process.Or then again, maybe not.
Peter W. Singer, Brookings fellow and author of Corporate Warriors, has a book out detailing the emergence of another new kind of non-traditional conflict actor: child soldiers. A quick read at just over 200 pages (excluding the notes and appendices), like his previous work, Children at War functions as more of a broad backgrounder than a detailed policy prospectus. As someone with only a passing awareness of the phenomenon prior to checking out the book (although Singer points out that child soldiers can be found in conflicts around the world, from Palestinian suicide bombers to Colombian rebels to the fourteen-year old Afghan sniper who inflicted the first U.S. combat casualty in the War on Terror, Africa still remains the global epicenter for the use of children in war, and a gap in my studies thus far), I found it to be an interesting summation of the various factors that contribute to and result from what Singer describes as the "child soldier doctrine". Two articles from last year by Singer and a recent online chat at the Post do a pretty good job of covering his major points, if you'd rather not tackle it book-length.
The spread of this doctrine can have profound affects on the conduct of wars, as Singer elaborates:
As a new source of fighters, children multiply the potential military capacities of groups that choose to adopt the child soldier doctrine. This eases the difficulties groups often face in force generation, thus increasing the likelihood of rebellions and wars. Children's recruitment also allows a proliferation of armed opposition groups with weakened or nonviable ideological bases, which would have prevented their survival just a few decades ago. Moreover, the way in which child soldiers are used means that those conflicts are inherently "messier," featuring atrocities and attacks on civilians. At the same time, child soldier group leaders consider children's lives cheaper. Subsequently, they deploy their recruits on the battlefield in a manner that leaders to a higher casualty ratio.The ultimate result is that, when children are present, violent conflicts tend to be easier to start, harder to end, and greater in loss of life. They also lay the groundwork for conflict recurrence in following generations.
Singer identifies widespread social disruption born of disease, poverty, and state failure, together with the proliferation of inexpensive and comparatively simple small arms, as underlying causes of the child soldier phenomenon: the former provides the pool from which child soldiers are drawn, and the latter enables them to fight despite their having not yet reached maturity or (generally) receiving much in the way of training. On the demand side, as noted in the quote above, the use of child soldiers — unpaid and poorly equipped, frequently 'recruited' through abduction, and bound to their commanders through traumatizing abuse and raw intimidation — lowers the barriers to entry for "conflict entrepreneurs", who are less interested in seizing political control of a state or maintaining a popular ideology than in exploiting chaos and conflict to profit from commodity and criminal trades.
Given these incentives for conflict actors unconcerned with the rest of the world's moral approbation — the soon-to-be-tried Charles Taylor, for example — is what can be done about it. The last several chapters of the book attempt to address this question, looking at prevention (a challenge, since as Singer asks rhetorically, "how can one shame the shame-less?"; while international law is fairly unanimous in condemning the use of child soldiers, enforcement and prosecution remains spotty), rehabilitation (a long and complex process of demobilization, counseling, and gradual social integration), and also the unenviable task of crafting a combat doctrine for armies confronting child soldiers in war, where your enemy is capable of both wielding an AK-47 to deadly effect and evoking sympathy as a young victim of abuse. Units that come into conflict with child soldiers invariably suffer serious blows to their fighting morale, with higher rates of post-traumatic stress disorder and clinical depression. The use of non-lethal weapons, firing for shock effect, and the targeting of adult leaders offers some solutions for commanders that can minimize enemy casualties while still reducing their threat to friendly forces.
Singer outlines some potential long-term solutions in the first of the above-linked articles, points which are repeated at greater length in the book:
* Increasing investment to head off regional conflicts and outbreaks of disease, including the AIDS pandemic.
* Offering greater aid to special at-risk groups such as refugees and orphans.
* Making the recruitment of children a war crime and prosecuting offenders in international criminal tribunals.
* Reducing profits by sanctioning any firms or regimes that trade with child-soldier groups (including even American firms, such as those that traded with the Liberian and Sudanese governments).
* Providing increased aid to programs which seek to demobilize and rehabilitate former child soldiers.
* Helping to curb the spread of illegal small arms to rebel and terrorist groups who bring children into the realm of war.
"In each of these areas," Singer concludes, "U.S. action has fallen woefully short." It's an ugly, disheartening, immensely challenging issue to confront, but Singer's book makes a clear case that unless we attempt do so, the theft and exploitation of the childhood of tens of thousands will continue largely unabated, with serious consequences for both the conduct of war and the endurance of peace throughout the world.
[x-posted]
As part of its ongoing five-part series on life in rural China, NPR had a story the other day that should serve as a reminder that the US isn't the only one with migration issues these days. In China's case, though, it's not international but rather internal borders that poor rural laborers are crossing, in the search for the kinds of jobs that might allow them to achieve the standard of living the past two decades of development has brought to many of their coastal-dwelling countrymen. Men and women like Wu Dexiu, profiled in the NPR piece, are major components in the engine behind that development, as they leave behind home and family to join the 'floating population' of low-paid migrant workers filling factory and construction jobs in the big cities.
The book I was given to read on this topic back in college, Strangers in the City, is currently sitting on my bookshelf back in America, but I do have a copy of China's Minorities on the Move here with me, which, while focusing specifically on the travels of non-Han Chinese minority groups, also contains some information relevant to the broader phenomenon of the floating population.
Increasing productivity of farmland has brought about a large rural labor surplus, and economic development remains by and large concentrated in the coastal provinces, creating disparities of wealth that provide strong incentive for rural-to-urban internal migration. As Robyn Iredale and Fei Guo write in their introductory overview in China's Minorities on the Move,
Mobile rural and other populations are voting with their feet to seek out the superior opportunity structures and social advantages that urban and richer rural areas provide. Wide spatial variations have emerged in China in the process of economic reform, partly as a result of the government's economic policies and its emphasis on developing the east coast.
The quasi-legal status of these migrants comes from the lingering legacy of the PRC's hukou system. Together with the danwei (work unit) and Food Ticket systems, hukou permits effectively halted individual mobility by tying food, housing, work, and basic social services like healthcare and education to one's official place of residence. The hukou system was implemented to control urbanization following the rural collectivization process and the famines of Great Leap Forward, in which poor rural Chinese fled the countryside to the cities in search of food and jobs. Having recently visited Bangladesh's capital of Dhaka, I can begin to appreciate on an anecdotal level the effects of runaway urbanization in an impoverished country, with overcrowding and pollution posing a heavy strain on the state's already limited ability to deliver services to its citizenry. (The serious challenges presented to CCP rule by China's deteriorating environment is something I intend to write on separately soon, having just finished Elizabeth Economy's excellent book on the subject, The River Runs Black.)
Attempts like the hukou system to freeze the urbanization process carry with them their own costs and challenges, though, and its gradual breakdown has reopened many of the issues it was set up to forestall. "Urban residents", China's Minorities on the Move notes,
Rather characteristically of the PRC's reforms to date, the emergence of private markets for housing and employment has opened new opportunities for social mobility, while the legal framework for accomodating that mobile population continues to lag behind. Education and other government services still remain tied to one's official place of residency, resulting in situations like Mrs. Wu's, whose teenage daughters continue to live in their home village with their grandparents, seeing their mother and father at best only three times in a year.have come to enjoy social welfare, security, health care, pensions, housing, and other social infrastructure provisions that are far superior to those in rural areas. ... Increased access to information and better communication now means that rural people are becoming very conscious of the inferiority of services that they are able to access, and many leave for urban areas where they hope to improve their quality of life.
The PRC has sought to shed many features of its welfare state, devolving considerable enforcement and governance responsibilities from the central state bureaucracy to local-level authorities, but the persistent disparities of living standards between rural and urban China and the state's lagging ability to provide for the needs of a mobile population will require deft handling on the part of CCP leaders if they are to ever bridge this gap.
Although it has yet to resolve the disconnect between the hukou legacy of stationary social services provision and its newly mobile labor force, the CCP does appear to be using slightly less blunt tools of leverage in its effort to cope with migrant flows these days. According to this piece from UPenn's Wharton School (via YaleGlobal), the government's recent increases in farming subsidy incentives combined with the persistently low wages offered to migrant laborers — the article notes that, on top of the absence of a social safety net, "[s]ome studies indicate that in the last 12 years, migrant workers in the Pearl River Delta have seen their monthly salaries go up only 68 yuan. If inflation is taken into account, migrant workers' income has actually declined" — may have been enough to prompt a slowdown (and maybe even some reverse flows) in the number of individuals seeking work in the cities, enough that many coastal factories are actually starting to see persistent labor shortages.
In January 2004, the first year of the labor shortage, the government issued new rules to extend the land contract time for farmers in order to improve productivity. Many migrant workers then left their jobs in cities and went back to their villages. Also that year, farmers received additional subsidies from the central government because of a short supply of grains. Over the past three years, the central government has stepped up its efforts to help farmers by lowering taxes and improving their incomes. [-- Although note that in reducing these taxes, the government is also reducing a major source of revenue for local governments; check out this Jamestown Federation brief for more on the problems this causes - mc] All those measures have helped narrow the income gap between farmers and migrant workers. As a result, says Zhong [Naiyi, a researcher at Shanghai Institute for International Studies], "it pays better to stay with" farming.
The article suggests that this process has the potential to challenge China's status as a low-cost manufacturer — which could threaten the country's rapid economic growth (and the Communist Party's legitimacy, which is now closely tied to it) should its workforce fail to make the transition to more value-added processes. But the rural labor surplus remains massive: something on the order of 150-200 million people. It's hard to imagine that farming can possibly absorb all of them, no matter what kind of incentives the government tries. Should urban worker wages rise, as the Wharton piece suggests they eventually will should coastal manufacturers continue to face local hiring shortfalls, I would expect the short-term attraction of government-subsidized farming to diminish and the movement towards the cities to renew — which, if the Chinese economy begins shifting away from labor-intensive sweatshop manufacturing to more human capital-intensive higher value services, only promises to compound existing labor surplus problems.
[x-posted]
Being detached from American society for an extended period of time makes it hard for me to easily evaluate news like this, as heavily mediated as my impressions of life back in the States right now are, but I think cyberpunk SF author (and oddly-slow-and-deliberate-public-speaker for a writer of such fast-paced, intricate works) William Gibson is definitely on to something regarding the question of why U.S. public opinion might be ambivalent about the Bush administration's NSA programs despite their Orwellian overtones, dubiously usefulness, and tenuous constitutionality.
Speaking on Radio Open Source, Gibson says:
I've been watching with keen interest since the first NSA scandal surfaced. I've noticed on the Internet that there aren't many people who're really shocked about this. I think that what's going is that our popular culture, our real sort of 'dirt-ball street culture' teaches us from childhood that the CIA is listening to all of our telephone calls and reading all of our email anyway.
And I constantly see that as a response in sort of the 'lower discourse' of the Internet, people saying, "Oh, they're doing it anyway." In some way our culture believes that, and it's a real problem, because evidently they haven't been doing it anyway, and now that they've started, we really need to pay attention and muster some kind of viable political response, but it's very hard to get some people on board because they think it's a fait acompli.
This is something I've run into in conversations as well myself, the most recent instance being a debate with some JETs here about the various allegations contained in John Perkins' book Confessions of an Economic Hit Man, in which the author purports to have been hired by a mysterious woman working for the NSA for the purpose of tricking/bribing/threatening the leaders of developing countries into taking on massive debt in order to fund infrastructure projects that enrich his American corporate masters... or something along those lines. I have yet to read the book and found his appearance on Radio Open Source less than thoroughly convincing, but Perkins' apparently misinformed or otherwise willfully misleading account of just what the NSA actually does namely signals intelligence and technical surveillance, not covert operations, assassinations, or James Bond auditions should already be a big red flag in regards to his credibility.
People who get their knowledge of intelligence operations solely from Hollywood — who surely must be happy to have a new, even more super-secret agency to supplant the old CIA clichés — might be forgiven for thinking this is nothing out of the ordinary, though, which as Gibson says poses problems when you're trying to make the case that the President and his administration have overstepped the bounds of normal and acceptable practice.
[x-posted]
You know, I'm a big fan of near-future cyberpunk-ish dystopian science fiction a la Neuromancer or Snow Crash, but I do generally like to keep the emphasis on the fiction part. Maybe that's why stuff like this tends to make me a little uneasy:
If the Federal Emergency Management Agency approves the [St. Bernard, Lousiana] sheriff's department's proposal, which would cost $70 million over three years, up to 100 DynCorp employees would be deputized to be make arrests, carry weapons, and dress in the St. Bernard Parish Sheriff's Department khaki and black uniforms. ...But while the plan is for the DynCorp employees to eat and live with the other deputies in the same trailer camp, the hired guns would earn "significantly more" than the $18,000 annual salary of an entry-level deputy and the $30,000-a-year