Intelligence

So first we expanded our forces in Afghanistan. Then we took on the challenge of prison reform there (ignoring the fact that America's own prison system is a national disgrace). And yesterday we learned that U.S. armed forces are putting suspected Afghan drug dealers on a "kill or capture" list. In other words, we are now extending the "war on drugs" to Afghanistan, ignoring the fact that this "war" (first announced by Richard Nixon four decades ago) hasn't led to victory. The new strategy also ignores some of the obvious lessons of that "war," and places the United States on some pretty dubious moral ground.

A colleague with extensive experience in the field of criminal justice wrote me with the following comment yesterday:

If Obama thinks the Cambridge police 'acted stupidly' by arresting Skip Gates, I wonder what adverb he'd use to describe his own latest police strategy in the War on Drugs in Afghanistan. 'Gee, let’s kill the top drug dealers.' Sounds smart at first glance, but given how lucrative the drug trade is, what do you think will happen after few of the top leaders are bumped off? Answer: others will compete to take their places. Police in the United States are just beginning to admit that their own efforts to remove drug dealers from the street drug markets of the late 1980s may have been the cause of the spike in violence in America's cities in this same period. Why? Because the police operations threw drug markets into chaos, leading to a ruthless competition among those who would take the place of the dealers whom the police were eliminating. In short, this is a formula to escalate the cycle of violence in Afghanistan, not to end it. For anyone who's been awake and watching the many failed strategies in the US war on drugs at home, it just looks stupid.

And that doesn't even get to the legal/ethical questions here. The Obama administration now says they will put someone on the kill list if there are two credible sources plus corroborating information. Sounds to me like a reasonable standard for getting a search warrant, but not for an assassination. Gee, if that proves a legal and ethical standard, we might try it at home in the war on drugs. Sure is cheaper than those long prison sentences, and a far lower evidentiary standard.

And I love the claim by the architects of this policy: 'we just want them to choose legitimacy.' Do they just not see that they are forfeiting the very thing they claim they want? They don’t really give a damn about legitimacy -- defined as a morally defensible position -- they just want the drug dealers to choose our side. This is just like Bush: 'you’re either one of our drug dealers, or one of theirs.' And if you’re the latter, we’re going to kill you."

I would only add that we've had enough trouble waging the war on drugs here at home, where cops understand the local culture reasonably well and speak the relevant languages. Political rivals in Afghanistan are going to start ratting each other out to the Americans, and we aren't going to be very good at sorting out "credible sources" from accusations that spring from other motives. Just look at how many other intelligence errors we've made over the past decade; not because we're incompetent, mind you, but because accurate intelligence in a counterinsurgency war is very difficult to come by and errors are inevitable. But instead of the usual standard that one is "innocent until proven guilty," now simply being accused of being in the drug business is enough to get you killed.

And let's not forget that Afghan drug lords aren't socially isolated individuals: they are embedded in their own tribal and family networks. Killing them won't eliminate the drug problem, but it could easily anger their kinsmen and make efforts to pacify the country even more difficult. I hope my colleague and I are both wrong about this, but I fear this policy is another sign that we simply don’t know what we are doing there.

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I'm a bit puzzled by the flap over revelations that the Bush administration approved a secret CIA program to send assassination teams overseas to kill suspected al Qaeda leaders. I understand the concerns about the absence of Congressional oversight, but three aspects of the case strike me as odd.

First, although the Bush administration should be criticized for not informing Congress, this is one case where key officials seem to have realized that the proposed program wasn't really feasible and decided not to implement it. Because examples of competent national security decision-making by the Bush team were few and far-between, shouldn’t we give them a smidge of credit for NOT sending some unfortunate Jack Bauer on a foolish mission?

Second, for those who are outraged to learn that the United States was planning to assassinate suspected terrorists leader, please explain to me the difference between sending in an assassination team to kill a suspected al Qaeda member, and sending a Predator or Reaper drone into some remote area to do the same thing? The target is just as dead no matter what instrument is used, and as we have already seen on several occasions, the risk to innocent civilians and the danger of various forms of blowback is probably greater when the U.S. uses unmanned drones. Moreover, both responses are essentially extra-judicial executions: the potential targets are suspected of being "enemy combatants" but that hasn't been proven and U.S. intelligence has mis-identified a number of alleged "terrorists" in the past. And then ask yourself how Americans would react if some other country were doing the same thing on U.S. soil.   

So if you're troubled by the idea that the United States was preparing to send hit squads into some foreign country, you ought to be equally troubled by our current policy of taking terrorist suspects out from the air. But I don’t get the impression that the latter program bothers very many people here in the United States, and certainly not the leadership in either party.  As Senator Christopher Bond (R-MO) remarked following the recent revelations, "The Predator strikes have been successful, and I was pleased to see the Obama administration continue them ... This [covert assassination program] was another effort that was trying to accomplish the same objective."

Thucydides had it right: "the strong do what they can, and the weak suffer what they must." The strong also try to convince everyone that they are also more virtuous, even when the evidence for the latter claim is dubious. And on that note, the Times today also has a piece on U.S. air tactics in Afghanistan that reads like a press release straight from CentCom HQ. It reports that the United States is now conducting a "kinder, gentler" air cover policy, in order to avoid civilian casualties. I hope that's true, but I also hope someone remembers this piece the next time we hit a village by mistake.

One last point: the fact that the CIA concluded that the assassination program was unworkable suggests that there is a very large gap between the image of covert action portrayed in American pop culture and the reality on the ground. If you watch 24, Mission Impossible, the various Bourne movies, or even lighter fare like Ocean's 11, they depict a world where smart and exceedingly well-trained experts, equipped with a lot of cool high-tech gadgetry, can perform extraordinary feats of derring-do in far-flung locations. They also portray a world where the U.S. government has enormous real-time surveillance capabilities, vast and swift analytical capacities, and a well-trained set of agents ready to send virtually anywhere to go after virtually anyone (even if someone like Jason Bourne keeps outwitting them).  

If you watched enough of these movies, and didn’t have any other sources of information, it would be easy to believe all sorts of crazy ideas about black helicopters and other loony conspiracies. And it makes me wonder: do such productions lead viewers in the U.S. and abroad to exaggerate what the United States is actually capable of doing? If so, then Americans may expect too much from their national security apparatus, and foreign populations may be too inclined to blame events on nefarious American interference.  

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I want to pay brief tribute to my colleague Ernest May, who passed away earlier this week after a brief illness. Others knew Ernie much better than I did, but he was a splendid colleague during my ten years here at Harvard: always insightful, original, utterly dependable, and a dedicated supplier of collective goods. It was a pleasure to be in his company, and to hear how contemporary events looked to his historian’s eye.

Although I didn’t meet Ernie until the early 1980s, his work shaped my own intellectual development from the very beginning. I read his book "Lessons" of the Past: The Use and Abuse of History in American Foreign Policy in one of the first IR courses I ever took, and its central message -- about the ways that historical interpretations shape (and more often, distort) policymaking -- has resonated with me ever since.   

Together with Richard Neustadt, Ernie refined and expanded these arguments in the prize-winning Thinking In Time: The Uses of History for Decisionmakers.  This book emerged from a classic course that Neustadt and May taught together for many years, and it is a “must-read” for anyone contemplating a career in public service. Among his many other books of international history, my favorite is Strange Victory: Hitler's Conquest of France, a gripping account of the intelligence errors and other strategic blunders that allowed the blitzkrieg to succeed in 1940.  

May was much more than a distinguished and exceptionally productive scholar. He was dean of Harvard College throughout the turbulent 1960s and subsequently served as director of the Kennedy School’s Institute of Politics. Nor was he merely an ivory tower academic; he served as a consultant to the U.S. government in various capacities and as an advisor to the 9/11 Commission. And I can testify to his dedication and skill on a tennis court: I don’t remember who won the one time we played, but I do know it was close and hard-fought (and I was twenty-five years younger!).

May wore his many accomplishments lightly, and never succumbed to the egomania that is an occupational hazard of academic life. I first learnt of his illness when it forced him to miss a dissertation defense; typically, he made sure to send the committee a detailed memo outlining his views on the thesis in question and offering suggestions for improving it. Perhaps the word that sums him up best is "gentleman." We could use more people like him in this business, and he’ll be hard -- nay, impossible -- to replace.

"Empathy" has been in the news lately, mostly in the context of President Obama's Supreme Court nominee. It's a quality that's often in short supply in the conduct of foreign policy, where leaders (and sometimes whole nations) often have a fixed view of certain events and find it hard to believe that anyone might legitimately see things differently. As Condi Rice commented when some European governments didn't support the U.S. invasion of Iraq in 2003, "I'll just put it very bluntly. We simply didn’t understand it."

One reason for this absence of empathy is the human tendency to filter current situations through the prism of the past. One of the more enduring findings in political psychology is that people place more weight on their own experiences than on the experiences of others, even when their own experiences are in fact atypical. According to Robert Jervis's classic Perception and Misperception in International Politics: "if people do not learn enough from what happens to others, they learn too much from what happens to themselves." The salience of first-hand experience in shaping subsequent beliefs is increased if the event happens early in one’s life or career, and if it has important consequences for the individual (or the nation). In other words, we overlearn from big and important events, especially when they happen to us early.

This tendency might explain why different generations tend to have very different views on how the world works. For Americans born and raised during the Cold War (i.e., like me) images of conflict are also accompanied by a certain sense of stability and order. The Cold War begins in the late 1940s, the United States forms a set of alliances to wage it, and then bipolar stability kicks in. There are crises and confrontations and even some peripheral wars in Korea, Indochina, the Middle East, and Afghanistan, but the central strategic balance doesn't change very much and the Soviet Union eventually expires rather quietly. The period 1950-1990 is a monument to the virtues of deterrence, containment, and multilateralism, and a timely warning about the dangers of getting involved in costly quagmires. It is perhaps no accident that people like me tend to see the world as a competitive but ultimately fairly stable and predictable place.

But what if you were born in the early 20th century, and came of age in the turbulent decades after World War I? You would have seen a world where a nation’s fortunes could shift in a matter of weeks or months, and sometimes with swift and terrible effect. You might have seen the Roaring Twenties, followed by the Crash of 1929 and the ensuing Great Depression. You would have seen a prostrate and disarmed Germany rearm itself in less than a decade, defeat France in a few weeks in 1940, and then conquer almost all of Europe and drive deep inside Russia, only to witness this seemingly unstoppable juggernaut be occupied and divided in half a mere three years later. You would also have seen Imperial Japan sweep across the Pacific, only to be occupied and disarmed by 1945. And having watched the Iron Curtain descend and seen Mao's triumph in China, you'd have a healthy respect for how quickly fortunes could shift and you’d be less inclined to take a complacent view of anything. Had I lived through the 1920s, 1930s, and 1940s, I might have been much more hawkish than I turned out to be.

The problem with this sort of generational interpretation is that it can’t account for differences between people who lived through the same events, although it might lead us to ask whether their own personal experiences with key events were different. But even there I suspect there's more to it than just personal experience.

But the real lesson is that the same "events" look very different to different people and to different countries. The U.S-backed contra war in Nicaragua killed some 35,000 Nicaraguans (about 1 percent of the population) but hardly any Americans; is it any wonder Nicaraguans remember it differently than Americans do? Similarly, 9/11 means one thing to U.S. citizens, but something different to Europeans, Central Asians, or people in different parts of the Middle East. The current war in Afghanistan and Pakistan is experienced differently by an Al Qaeda leader facing a Predator attack, by the CIA "pilot" operating the drone from a remote location, by a Pakistani or Afghan civilian who is attacked by mistake, by refugees now fleeing the fighting in the Swat Valley, and by the politicians in the United States, Afghanistan, or Pakistan who have to deal with the consequences.  And not only do different individuals and different societies experience the same events in radically different ways, they then conduct their own discourse about these events (occasionally fertilized by ideas and commentary from outside) and eventually generate unique narratives about them.  

Understanding how things look to others doesn't necessarily eliminate conflict -- especially when basic interests are fundamentally at odds -- but it makes us much less likely to misinterpret another's position and makes spirals of exaggerated or mistaken hostility less likely.  

To take an obvious example, many Americans think of Iran as an aggressive, unpredictable country led by a set of aggressive, fanatically religious clerics. That tendency probably increases if you watch a lot of FOX News or listen to talk radio. From this perspective, Iran's nuclear program and its support for extremist groups like Hamas or Hezbollah is evidence of aggressive ambitions, perhaps of the very worst sort. 

But ask yourself how this situation might look to an ordinary Iranian, or even to a member of its ruling elite. To many Iranians, their interest in nuclear technology (and possibly nuclear weapons) is entirely rational and essentially defensive: they have two nuclear neighbors (India and Pakistan), a third nuclear weapons state nearby (Israel), and the world’s most powerful country (the United States) has troops on either side of Iran and has been seeking to overthrow the Iranian government for a number of years now. Plus, various American politicians keep saying that "all options ought to be on the table," and Obama's special envoy to Iran, Dennis Ross, participated in a study group last year that advocated a hardline approach.  It doesn't take a lot of imagination or empathy to figure out why Iran might want a nuclear deterrent: wouldn’t we want the same thing if we were in their position? Similarly, supporting radicals elsewhere in the Middle East keeps the U.S. off-balance and complicates efforts to unite various Arab states against Iran itself. A bit of empathy won't resolve these issues, of course, but it might help us reject the fervent threat-mongering that drove us to launch a foolish war in Iraq and has led others to favor a similar approach to Iran.

So can we train ourselves to “see things as others do?” Here the internet and the blogosphere are potentially transformative tools: you don't have to rely on the New York Times or the Washington Post or your own local newspaper (even if your "local paper" is Le Monde, Die Zeit, or the Daily Star). I can sit here in my office and read the English edition of Ha’aretz, the Pakistani newspaper Dawn, and the online edition of the Yomiuri Shimbun. Or I can read the Guardian, Asia Times, or the Jerusalem Post, and then go to the online Reuters.com and BBC News websites too.  (And don’t forget http://foreignpolicy.com, of course).  Americans would be well served to spend part of each week perusing WatchingAmerica.com, a website that collects and translates media reports from around the world and a variety of political perspectives. When you travel, don’t just watch CNN -- check out the BBC or Al Jazeera, too. Spend some time reading knowledgeable non-Americans like Ahmed Rashid, C. Raja Mohan, Kishore Mahbbubani, or Therese Delpeche. Don't rely just on reports from inside-the-Beltway think tanks in the United States; take a look at the websites of the International Institute of Strategic Studies, the Stockholm International Peace Research Institute, the International Crisis Group, or the growing number of think tanks in the developing world.

To repeat: developing a greater capacity for empathy won't eliminate conflicts of interest between states, and won't always make it possible to resolve the differences that will inevitably arise. But an inability to understand an adversary's perspective (or an ally's, for that matter) is a crippling liability, and there's less excuse for it in our increasingly interconnected age.

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I didn't agree with all of President Obama's speech yesterday (notably his rejection of a investigatory commission and his endorsement of open-ended "preventive detention"), but what a relief it is to watch an American president appeal to our sense of reason instead of our sense of fear.  

The best thing one can say about Cheney's performance is that it was given by an ex-Vice President. Others have dissected the various lies and distortions that filled his speech (what did one expect?), I would only add that there is a track record here. 9/11 occurred on Cheney’s watch, and he helped lead us into two losing wars, at a cost of thousands of dead Americans, tens of thousands wounded, and over a trillion dollars spent, mostly in ways that have improved the strategic position of, oops, ... Iran. Plus, he gets partial credit for an unprecedented decline in America's global image and the worst economic meltdown since the Great Depression. At this point, taking Cheney's recommendations on any issue of public policy is like getting investment help from Bernie Madoff, marital counseling from Donald Trump, or advice on economic development from Robert Mugabe.

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I haven't said anything about President Obama's decision not to release additional photos of detainee abuse, and the related stories suggesting that the Bush administration tortured detainees in large part to find some link between al Qaeda and Saddam Hussein that would justify invading Iraq. But I agree with those who believe the Obama administration can't put this behind us by "walking forward," or trying to sweep it under the rug. And if Jack Goldsmith is correct to say that Obama is keeping most of the elements of the Bush "war on terror" in place, then the president may be inviting more trouble than just the disappointment of MoveOn.org.

First, as I suggested in another context last week, the only way that a country can regain its reputation in the aftermath of serious misconduct is to stop the wrongdoing, express regret for it, and not do it again.  Americans have wondered "why do they hate us?" ever since 9/11, and there is abundant survey and anecdotal evidence confirming that anti-Americanism is mostly a reaction to U.S. policies and not a rejection of American values, culture, or identity. According to the Pew Global Attitudes Survey, for example, "antipathy toward the United States is shaped more by what it does in the international arena than by what it stands for politically and economically." Similarly, the State Department's Advisory Group on Public Diplomacy found that "Arabs and Muslims...support our values but believe our policies do not live up to them." And they wrote that before we knew about Abu Ghraib, waterboarding, or the full extent of the torture regime.

It follows that we aren't going to fuel more anti-Americanism by fully acknowledging and coming to terms with past abuses, because most people already understand what happened under Bush and Cheney. We are talking here about filling in details and holding people accountable. What Obama needs to do is draw a sharp break from these practices, to signal to the world that what happened under his predecessors was an aberration and not "business as usual." The more features of the Bush order that he retains, the more incidents he tries to cover up, and the more people he insulates from exposure or prosecution, the harder it will be to characterize the recent past as a shameful episode that is unrepresentative of America’s true character. Other countries will doubt things have really changed, and with good reason.  

Second, although I'm even more skeptical of "blue-ribbon" commissions than Frank Rich, I've come to believe that a credible commission offers the best way forward at this point. But let's not just populate it with a bipartisan group of the usual Washington insiders and toothless politicos. There's enough evidence to suggest that some powerful Democrats like House Speaker Nancy Pelosi knew what was going on and said nothing, which means that both parties are to some degree implicated in this scandal.  Inside-the-beltway careerists are part of a political culture where mutual back-scratching and excuse-making are well-established norms, and thus a commission dominated by the usual familiar faces is unlikely to produce a serious report and won't have sufficient credibility at home or abroad. The 9/11 Commission or the 2004 Schlesinger Report on DoD detention procedures (undertaken in response to Abu Ghraib) are cases in point: although both panels produced some useful information and identified certain errors, each pulled a lot of punches too.  

One need only recall the contribution that iconoclastic physicist Richard Feynman made to the presidential commission on the space shuttle Challenger disaster to recognize the value of appointing smart people who are willing to challenge powerful institutions, incumbent leaders, and orthodox thinking. So instead of an investigative commission dominated by well-known Washington insiders, I'd like to see one whose ranks include a substantial number of well-qualified critics and independent thinkers. Along with the usual (yawn) suspects, how about including Kenneth Roth of Human Rights Watch, blogger Glenn Greenwald, conservative law professor Richard Epstein, Congressman (and former presidential candidate) Ron Paul, or former MacArthur Foundation president Adelle Simmons?

Last point: we also need to reflect on the connection between U.S. grand strategy and these sorry episodes. It is tempting to blame this whole problem on the misguided machinations of Bush, Cheney, and their minions, who took advantage of the post-9/11 climate of fear to implement a torture regime, but that convenient explanation is a bit too simple. In fact, this sort of abuse is likely to be repeated as long as the United States maintains a highly interventionist foreign and military policy. If the United States continues to send military forces and lethal armed drones to attack people in far-flung lands, some of the people we kill will be innocent civilians -- thereby fomenting greater hatred of the United States -- and the people we are going after will try to hit us back. Our enemies will use our actions to recruit sympathizers -- just as Osama bin Laden did -- and every time some terrorist group gets lucky and get through, the U.S. government will be tempted to adopt even harsher measures to try to stop the next attack.  Not only does this cycle threaten civil liberties here at home, but it tends to embroil us in social engineering projects in societies that we do not understand (see under: Iraq, Afghanistan, Pakistan, Somalia, etc.). We can also be confident that other potential rivals are secretly thrilled to see us squandering lots of blood and treasure on lengthy occupations and open-ended counterinsurgency operations.

Unfortunately, history also shows that prolonged occupations and counterinsurgencies always lead to significant abuses. It is the nature of the beast. This is what happened to Britain in the Boer War, Belgium in its central African empire, France in Indochina and Algeria, Russia in Afghanistan and Chechnya, Israel in Lebanon, Gaza, and the West Bank, and the United States in Iraq. The United States may not be as heavy-handed as some earlier imperial powers, although our treatment of native Americans was horrible and our handling of Japanese-Americans in World War II is a dark stain on our past. The key point is that the idea of a purely benevolent "empire" is a contradiction in terms and we are fooling ourselves if we think we can run one.

Bottom line: if you don't like Abu Ghraib, Gitmo, waterboarding, etc., the best way to make the problem go away for good is to get out of the business of occupying and trying to govern other countries.

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FP colleague Laura Rozen has a nice rundown of the latest tea-leaf reading on the Harman affair. Needless to say, there's plenty we still don’t know about the whole business, and I'm not confident that the just-announced House Select Committee on Intelligence investigation will uncover anything juicy. But here are the two things I'd most like to know:

1. After saying she'd "waddle in" to the AIPAC trial business, did Harman actually do anything? She says no, but that's what you'd expect at this point. Nonetheless, it is entirely possible that she had second thoughts after the conversation and proceeded to do exactly nothing to help Rosen and Weissman. Let's see if the other shoe drops on this one. 

2. Who is Mr. X (the person on the other end of the line)? The object of the wiretap was presumably under investigation for being in cahoots with Israeli intelligence (i.e., they've been described in news stories as a "suspected Israeli agent," but Marc Ambinder also reported that the person in question was a U.S. citizen. So who was it? Inquiring minds want to know.

With all due respect to Andrew Sullivan (whose talents as a blogger I envy), the Harman incident doesn’t need much comment from me.

For those of you coming in late: Jeff Stein at Congressional Quarterly has a bombshell story that the NSA monitored a 2005 conversation between Rep. Jane Harman and a suspected "Israeli agent," in which Harmon allegedly said she would "waddle in" to the ongoing AIPAC espionage case to get the charges reduced in exchange for AIPAC's help in helping her retain her influential position on the Intel Commmittee. Stein also reports that Attorney General Alberto Gonzalez later quashed a DOJ investigation into this incident in order to secure Harman's support for the Bush administration's warrantless wiretapping program.

If true, this incident is another vivid reminder of the problems created by the "special relationship," to include the web of connections between pro-Israel lobbyists, politicians who are beholden to them, and (allegedly) Israeli intelligence. One might say the similar things about the illegal payments that American businessman Morris Talansky allegedly made to former Israeli PM Ehud Olmert: It just ain’t healthy when influential people start engaging in a lot of backroom deals and under-the-table interference in another country’s domestic politics, and when the political clout of these individuals (or groups) makes politicians reluctant to speak honestly about it.

As you’d expect, some of Israel's defenders are already arguing that there’s nothing to the story, but I’m not buying that spin (or Harman’s own denials) until we know more. Certainly the story has a lot of prima facie plausibility, given that we know that: 1) Harman wanted to keep her spot on the Intel committee; 2) Alberto Gonzalez was ethically challenged; 3) Harman did back the warrantless surveillance program; 4) groups like AIPAC have a lot of clout and could easily intervene on Harman’s behalf; and 5) politicians are in the business of doing favors for powerful interest groups. So it's easy to imagine Harman telling the alleged "Israeli agent" (who may have been an American) that she'd make a call and see what she could do, without actually promising results. But we don't know for sure what Harmon actually said, or if she subsequently did anything, or if Gonzalez did in fact quash the investigation for the reasons Stein suggests.

Philip Weiss and Adam Horowitz have a good rundown of the different angles over at Mondoweiss, but I want more facts. What did Harmon actually say, and did she in fact “waddle in” to the AIPAC espionage affair? In a perfect world, where government agencies were genuinely accountable, we’d get a full transcript of the phone call -- including the identity of the person with whom Harmon was speaking -- but don’t expect the NSA to cough that up anytime soon, especially if it was part of a potential criminal investigation.

Stein deserves full points for bringing the story to light; let’s see if the rest of the media can do its job and fill in the details. And oh yes, let’s also see if the Obama administration’s commitment to “transparency” in government includes influential Democrats in Congress.

P.S.: Whatever the ramifications of this story for U.S.-Israeli relations, the revelation that the NSA was monitoring phone calls by a member of the Permanent Committee on Intelligence -- even if she was not in fact the object of the investigation -- gives me the willies. But as Glenn Greenwald notes, given that Harmon was a prominent defender of warrantless surveillance, there’s a certain amount of poetic justice in the entire sorry episode.