Arms and influence

Discovering Japan

I'm on a business trip for the next few days, so I'll be posting sporadically. I promise to return with souvenirs for everyone.

Thanks for the gift, but...

An important rule of counterinsurgency is, Gifts that the recipient does not want, or does not need, will never win "hearts and minds."

Case in point: a $38 million accounting system for the Iraqi government, which for the last year, no one in the Finance Ministry is using. Obviously, the Finance Ministry needs accounting. However, it wasn't necessarily ready for state-of-the-art accounting software. Or, perhaps, the problem was the fashion in which American contractors and officials delivered this system, which failed to convince Finance Ministry's employees that this particular system would work for them.

Either way, $38 million is a lot of money to waste learning a basic lesson about "hearts and minds."

The missing WMD report

Armchair Generalist asks an important question: Now that the Democrats control Congress, where's the second half of the WMD report?

Friday follies: Halloween and Lovecraft

Since we're rapidly approaching Halloween, I thought I'd say a few words about H.P. Lovecraft and the Cthulhu mythos. Whatever you think of Lovecraft as a writer, you have to give him credit for two major accomplishments. First, he conceived of horror fiction in an entirely original way. Instead of ghosts, werewolves, and vampires, Lovecraft's stories featured antagonists that resembled nothing from Western folklore. They inhabited a world somewhere between horror and science fiction, in which god-like beings plot the destruction of the world when "the stars are right," while in Antarctica, biologically-engineered creatures that killed their alien creators still lurk.

By cutting free of the conventions of horror fiction, Lovecraft frightens his readers at a more cerebral level. The monsters may be horrible to look at (often indescribably so), but it's the back story that really sticks it to you. The monsters you see are just the front-line troops of a cosmic conspiracy in which the odds are stacked heavily against human beings. Yikes!

Lovecraft also spawned an entire sub-genre of horror fiction. Dozens of writers have contributed to the "Mythos." It's a hoot to see how the more successful authors have kept the Mythos fresh and interesting.
For Lovecraft newbies and veterans alike, you may enjoy the following videos. The first is an interview with Neil Gaiman, in which he describes the lure of things Lovecraftian. The other is the only movie that ever "got" the Mythos. As Gaiman explains, it's hard to successfully film the Mythos, but this five minute flick comes awfully darn close.

The waste list, part I

The Department of Homeland Security’s terrorist watch list is practically useless. Now bulging at 755,000 names, 20,000 new records names are added to the Terrorist Screening Database (TSDB) each month. With the 1,000,000 mark close at hand, the watch list is now unreliable.

The signal-to-noise ratio is enormous, since terrorist organizations are very small. Al Qaeda in 2001 had only 200 members. Larger terrorist organizations, such as Hezbollah, may only have a few thousand “fighters,” many of whom are soldiers and militia, not terrorists. Just so that we don’t forget the threat of domestic terrorism, only a handful of people were responsible for the horrific Oklahoma City bombing, the most lethal act of terrorism in the United States before the 9/11 attacks. Tragically, for every new Mohammed Atta on the list, there are hundreds of people who should not be included at all, and only confuse efforts to deal with any real terrorist threats.

The problems with the list are infuriating on many levels, not least of which is that they are preventable. The challenges of building the watch list are the same “information management” problems that private corporations face every day. Through a combination  of widely-available software, technical veterans who have experience solving the problems, and a generous amount of leadership and urgency, corporations clean up their databases of “mission critical” information far more quickly and successfully. Since the terrorist watch list is at least as important as the customer data for AT&T and Cingular, the American public should be demanding an answer to the question, “What the hell happened?”

Making a list
The terrorist watch list is, to use a tired but accurate phrase, “the first line of defense” in counterterrorism. The Atta cell succeeded because its opponent, the US government, failed to put together a complete picture of its activities (or, in some cases, even its existence). Those who did have key pieces of information either did not recognize their significance, or lacked the ability to get the right people to act on it.

To avoid future terrorist attacks, the watch list is the critical product of knowing who are terrorist leaders and operatives, where they are, and what they are doing. To avoid another 9/11, we don’t necessarily need to broaden the federal government’s license to eavesdrop (which can create a different form of information overload), or invade any more countries. We do need key decision-makers to recognize that this person who learned how to fly a plane, but not how to land, has a real connection to that person, who belongs to an organization that tried to crash an airliner into the Eiffel Tower.

Checking it twice
The watch list is, obviously, stuffed with “false positives,” people who should not have been identified as terrorists. They’re on the list for a variety of reasons: they have names similar to real terrorists; they have some glancing social, professional, or familial connection to a suspected terrorist; someone falsely accused them of being a member of a terrorist organization, or “linked” to it in some vague fashion. These errors feed off each other: people connected to a person falsely accused of being a terrorist fall under the same cloud of suspicion.

Tragically, the list has also omitted people who should have been on it. During the tedious review of just 2,686 records, workers from the FBI’s new Terrorist Screening Center found eight people who should have been flagged as high risk. (They also found 2,118 who should never have been on the list in the first place.) Twenty terrorists were missing from a key report generated for the decision-makers who need to act immediately on any possible terrorist threat. The risk of “omission by confusion” is high, since the decision-makers who receive the list are naturally skeptical of it.

Who’s naughty or nice?
So why is the list a mess? One of the main problems is the novelty of having a single list.
The 9/11 attacks demonstrated, in the worst possible way, that the era of data Balkanization, in which every government agency maintained separate information needed to combat terrorism, had to come to an end. The FAA, FBI, NSA, and other agencies might still have their separate databases, which were needed for more than just identifying and tracking suspected terrorists. At a minimum, these agencies needed to contribute their pieces of the counterterrorism puzzle to someone who would assemble it, and make sure that the right people were looking at it.

That responsibility fell to the Justice Department. In 2003, George W. Bush directed Attorney General to “establish an organization to consolidate the Government's approach to terrorism screening and provide for the appropriate and lawful use of Terrorist Information in screening processes.” Confusingly, the Department of Homeland Security also had a role, to “develop guidelines to govern the use of such information to support State, local, territorial, and tribal screening processes, and private sector screening processes that have a substantial bearing on homeland security.”

Something obviously went very, very wrong with this arrangement. Six years after the 9/11 attacks, the US government has not built a single, reliable database of suspected terrorists. While we spend billions of dollars each month in Iraq, the real “first line of defense” has collapsed.

NEXT: How private corporations handle information management challenges faster and better than the US government.

When you have real alliances...

...You can actually get NATO to escalate the effort in Afghanistan, even though the war isn't terribly popular in Germany and other parts of Europe. (Some good news, at least.)

Hard to argue with him

Turkey's prime minister, Recep Tayyip, doesn't find it hard to justify military strikes against the PKK in Iraq:

"The ball is in our court now, and we will have to do what is necessary on our own if those who have the responsibility do not take action," Erdogan said in Bucharest, Romania's capital, during a joint news conference with Romanian Prime Minister Calin Popescu Tariceanu.

That's the diplomatic way of saying, "Watching the PKK slip over the Iraqi border after killing 17 of our soldiers was the last straw. If the US and Iraq won't deal with the PKK, we will."

Given the level of provocation--years of PKK terror attacks into Turkey--the Turkish military response is restrained. At a time when the Turks might be out for blood, the Turkish military has, so far, only used artillery and air strikes, and very limited ground forces, against suspected PKK positions. Turkey could have gone a lot farther in trying to deal with the PKK--and still might, if the US and Iraq fail to respond.

Fruits not fried

Glad to hear that Matt (of Fruits and Votes, a political science professor at UCSD) and family have escaped the San Diego fires. In fact, Matt is so OK that he's blogging about baseball.

P.S. Who created the entry for Fruits and Votes in Wikipedia? I have to create my own now...

Alone again, naturally

Perhaps the most important feature of the new sanctions against Iran is their solitary nature. Once again, the Bush Administration takes an aggressive, confrontational stance without anyone standing side-by-side with the United States.

Under the circumstances, you'd expect someone--the Europeans, the UN, even some Middle Eastern countries--to be joining the United States in putting more pressure on the Iranian regime. Other nations are within more immediate range of any Iranian missiles; suitcase bombs are more easily smuggled into Greece or Saudi Arabia than the United States.

It's equally surprising to see the Administration willing to stand alone, if President Bush believes that there's any hope that sanctions might work. Unilateral economic punishment makes it harder for some financial institutions to do business with Iran. Other banks will undoubtedly replace them. Many Iranian assets may be ensnared for a while, but unless the Iranian regime was foolish enough to put all its money in Wells Fargo accounts, it's hardly a fatal blow.

These sanctions do have one immediate political effect: they give Khamenei, Ahmenidijad, and their ilk the opportunity to take the tired but effective anti-American rhetoric for yet another ride. That's especially easy to do, given that the United States is the only country implementing these sanctions. In the short term, at least, these sanctions help them more than hurt anyone in Iran who deserves the moniker "enemy of the United States." Average Iranians are sick of Ahmenidijad, whom many consider a clown, and Khamenei, who is the face of the Iran of 1980s, a time Iranians are eager to leave behind. Why then is the Administration, yet again, giving the Khameneis and Ahmenidijads new political capital?

The attempt to separate sanctions against the Revolutionary Guard and the Quds Force sounds, in theory, like the sort of distinction one should make. After all, the target for any potential economic hardship is not the Iranian public, but their execrable leaders. Unfortunately, the reality of economic sanctions is, as we know from past experience with Iraq, a lot messier.

Diplomats may have learned how to avoid the mistakes of the Iraqi sanctions, but that doesn't mean new techniques will be surgically precise. After all, the Revolutionary Guard is involved in many enterprises in Iraq, which in tun employ or serve a lot of people.

But maybe these sanctions aren't serious, so we don't have to dissect them carefully. Perhaps they're the result of an Administration who is frustrated with Iran, to the point where people close to the President feel that they have to support some action.

However, this is exactly the wrong time to be underscoring the isolation of the United States. Over 30 years ago, our allies stood on the sidelines as the United States struggled to extricate itself from "America's War" in Southeast Asia. While the US lost prestige and influence because of the Vietnam War, it slowly regained it. Other issues of joint concern, such as the Soviet threat and trouble in the Middle East, quickly occupied the US and its allies. Most of the bridges burned were rebuilt.

Today, we have another "America's War" in Iraq. In contrast, rather than build bridges, the Bush Administration continues to show how its ready to plunge into dangerous waters with little idea how to reach the other side.

More importantly, in the 1970s, the US only lost credibility because of the Vietnam misadventure. There were no great economic stakes, and none of the regional powers in Southeast Asia on the cusp of gaining nuclear weapons. Unfortunately, Iran is wholly unlike North Vietnam in those regards.

The face of the enemy

Stephen Colbert's hates bears; I hate raccoons. Trash-eating little bastards with sharp teeth and almost human-like hands.

Last night, three of them infiltrated our kitchen. Fortunately, they made so much noise breaking into the house that I woke up right away. Bright lights and foot-stomping convinced them to vacate the premises. They managed to rip open a bag of cat food, but that's as bad as it got.

It's my fault for not closing the garage door firmly enough. Still, they had to push it open, feel daring enough to enter the garage, and then go through the cat door connecting the kitchen to the garage. They have cojones, I'll admit. Tiny, shrivelled, trash-smeared cojones.