zenpundit.com

Interesting news, if “Dog Bites Man” stories can be considered interesting. Not on their surface, of course, but the implications which they contain. A dog biting man story begs the question “Who owns the dog?”. Our story though is not about something as mundane as a dog but of a putative ally, Pakistan.

Report: Pakistani spy agency supports Taliban

ISLAMABAD - Pakistan’s main spy agency continues to arm and train the Taliban and is even represented on the group’s leadership council despite U.S. pressure to sever ties and billions in aid to combat the militants, said a research report released Sunday.

….But the report issued Sunday by the London School of Economics offered one of the strongest cases that assistance to the group is official ISI policy, and even extends to the highest levels of the Pakistani government.

“Pakistan’s apparent involvement in a double-game of this scale could have major geopolitical implications and could even provoke U.S. countermeasures,” said the report, which was based on interviews with Taliban commanders, former Taliban officials, Western diplomats and many others.

Here is a text of the actual report (PDF):

The Sun in The Sky: The Relationship Between The ISI and Afghan Insurgents

I wager the case therein is understated when measured against the actual reality. 

Of course, I am not surprised. a while back, I asked why Pakistan was considered an ally rather than an enemy of the United States:

The horns of our dilemma is that our long time “ally” whom we have hitched ourselves to in a grand war effort against revolutionary Islamist terrorism is not our ally at all, but a co-belligerent with our enemy. By every policy measure that matters that causes the United States - justifiably in my view - to take a tough stance against North Korea and Iran, applies in spades to Islamabad. Yet none dare call Pakistan a rogue state.

It is the elephant in our strategy room - if the elephant was a rabid and schizophrenic trained mastodon, still willing to perform simple tricks for a neverending stream of treats, even as it eyes its trainer and audience with a murderous kind of hatred. That Pakistan’s deeply corrupt elite can be “rented” to defer their ambitions, or to work at cross-purposes with Pakistan’s perceived  “interests”, is not a game-changing event. Instead, it sustains and ramps up the dysfunctional dynamic we find ourselves swimming against.

What is interesting is how broad a consensus view of Pakistani perfidy this is coming to be across the American political spectrum. Let us take two blogfriends of starkly different political coloration as examples, Pundita and Steve Hynd of Newshoggers.com. First Pundita:

Miss Pundita is an inside the Beltway blogger with expertise and interest in the financial-economic and diplomatic nuances of American national security and foreign policy. She is quite conservative, tending, IMHO, to a mix of hard-nosed realism on economic realities and neoconservatism on potential security threats. Here is what she posted on Pakistan:

British report exposes Pakistani regime’s support for Taliban terrorism (UPDATED 2 X)

However, after I finally got to read Waldman’s paper I noticed that his conclusion repeats the canard that if only the Indian Kashmir problem could be solved, this would go a long way to tamping down the Pakistan regime’s murderous rampages. In other words, he’s saying that India bears a big responsibility for the Pakistani regime’s murder and mayhem against NATO troops in Afghanistan.Readers may recall the New York Times (or maybe it was the LA Times; I’d have to check my archives) reporting last year that the CIA station chief in Kabul accused his counterpart in Islamabad of Going Native; i.e., sympathizing far too much with the Pakistani regime’s view of things.

Even Hamid Karzai’s brother noted recently that the CIA had a strange habit of trusting no one but America’s enemies; he was speaking of Pakistan.

So — and pardon my thinking aloud — I’m wondering whether Waldman’s stressing of the Kashmir issue indicates that certain factions in the CIA and/or at State are still hell bent on placating Pakistan’s military/ISI.

As a pertinent aside, it is CIA management that is most unhappy with the DoD and CENTCOM contracting out intel assignments to privately run networks to find the Taliban-AQ targets in Pakistan’s tribal belt who mysteriously always elude Pakistan’s otherwise completely ruthless intelligence apparatus when we have the CIA ask for such tactical intel.  Now for Steve:

Steve Hynd is a founding member of Newshoggers.com and one of its guiding voices. Steve is a Scotsman with a family political background in both the Scottish National Party and Scotland’s Labour Party, which puts Steve comfortably to the Left of Ralph Nader. Here’s what Steve had to say:

Report: Pakistani Intelligence (Still) Supporting Taliban

….Shocking! But only if you hadn’t read about a Spanish report in October 2008, the WaPo’s report on what US officials knew in April of this year, just about everything Afghan and Indian intelligence have ever said about the Taliban, NATO reports back in 2006 and, in fact, every bit of evidence since well before Richard Armitage threatened to bomb Pakistan back to the stone age if it didn’t play ball with Bush’s adventure in Afghanistan.

….America has painted itself into a corner. Unless it is willing to admit that its Afghanistan attempts are failed, failing and will fail then it needs Pakistan at any price to keep the occupation there going. And the domestic political costs of admitting failure are likely too great. Obama and Democrats have used Afghanistan as a shield against Republican accusations of being “soft on terror” and many within the White House and the Democratic establishment don’t want to remove that shield - no matter how much sense it may make strategically and financially - in the run-up to 2012. Republican support for Pakistan’s military has been loud and long and goes back even further. They’d be just as embarassed by an about-face.

The only folks unable to recognize Pakistan’s enmity are those drawing a paycheck from Uncle Sam. Ok, unfair. Many career officials in the military, foreign service and intelligence community, perhaps most, recognize it but this reality is not something their elected officials wish to expend any political capital to address when going along grudgingly with the status quo will not cause any damage to their careers ( Obama administration officials can’t bring themselves to breath the word “Islamist” in public, which is a worrisome sign of ideological overdrive). This is why the US has difficult constructing strategy - leadership requires assumption of risk and unpopular telling of truths before things get better.

What would I recommend? It’s actually pretty simple. Not easy, just simple.

1. Accept that Pakistan, for all intents and purposes, is an enemy of the United States for internal reasons related to domestic politics and regional ambitions and will be for some time. Begin to disengage from Islamabad’s embrace by dialing down the Afghan campaign to a level that can be supported only by air, even if it means dropping COIN for FID advisors, sponsorship of loyalist paramilitaries and selective use of air power.

2. Engage India and China in a strategic entente to contain Pakistan’s penchant for exporting various kinds reckless lunacy, from nuclear weapons technology to Islamist terrorists. Be willing to negotiate with Islamabad but inform them that bad actions - like training terrorists and sending them to the US or India - will be met with a stiff and severe military response against cherished institutions and individuals in the Pakistani state apparatus. 

3. Keep the door open to better elements in Pakistan’s society and be willing to meet positive changes by Pakistan with reciprocal gestures.  Eschew rhetorical demonization of Pakistan, pious public lecturing or empty promises (Pakistanis remember far too many of these) and concentrate on sincere actions, be they carrot or stick.

4. Expect this policy will take a long time to bear fruit and will initially spark much “rent-a-riot” rage in Pakistani streets and “testing” by Pakistan’s shadowy ISI string-pullers. Expect to have our bluff called and be ready to instantly demonstrate the utter seriousness of our change in policy with a response Pakistani leaders will rue. Things will get worse before they get any better.

Strategy involves making choices and giving up fantasies of having one’s cake and eating it too. That Pakistan is our ally in any normal sense of the word is one of those fantasies that is past the time for letting go. Pakistan’s ISI is biting us every day with each flag draped coffin that comes home from Bagram. Opposing every US goal in Afghanistan, taking our bribes does not make Pakistani leaders our friend, much less a reliable ally.

It is time to bite back.

ADDENDUM:

Dr. James Joyner gives a well-considered rebuttal to my sour analysis at The Atlantic Council:

Pakistan: Friend or Foe?

….I share their frustrations but do think it’s more complicated than whether Pakistan is our friend or enemy or the military is fighting the Taliban or helping them.  In both case, it’s a mixed bag.

First, no country is any other country’s friend.  Pakistan is on our side when it serves their interest.  Which, oddly enough, is how we’ve long dealt with Pakistan.

But Safranski is right:  I do think the report calls into question, yet again, who’s running the show in Pakistan.  The answer, generally, has been “The army, of course” but the ISI is theoretically a part of the army, which seems genuinely to be treating the Taliban as a threat.  Pakistani soldiers are killing Taliban forces in great number and dying in the process.

How do we square this circle?

Discover Dr. Joyner’s answer here.

Two items:

RAND emeritus David Ronfeldt called my attention today (thanks David!) to this article by futurist David Brin:

Forgetting our American tradition:The folly of relying exclusively on a professional protector caste

Today we face (but largely ignore) a major historical anomaly. From our nation’s birth all the way until the end of the Vietnam War, America’s chief approach to dealing with danger — both anticipated threats and those that took us by surprise — was to rely upon a robust citizenry to quickly supplement, augment and reinforce the thin veneer of professionals in a relatively small peacetime warrior-protector caste.  Toward this end, society relied primarily upon concepts of robustness and resilience, rather than attempting to anticipate and forestall every conceivable danger. 

This emphasis changed, dramatically, starting with the Second World War, but accelerating after Vietnam. Some reasons for the shift toward professionalism were excellent and even overdue.  Nevertheless, it is clearly long past-time for a little perspective and reflection.

Over the course of the last two decades, while doing “future threats” consultations for DoD, DTRA, NRO, CIA, the Navy, Air Force, etc., I have watched this distinction grow ever-more stark — contrasting an older American reflex that relied on citizen-level resilience vs. the more recent emphasis on anticipation and the surgical removal of threats.  Inexorably, the Protector Class has increasingly come to consider itself wholly separate from the Protected.  In fact, our military, security and intelligence services have reached a point where - even when they engage in self-critical introspection - they seem unable to even ask questions that ponder resilience issues.

Instead, the question always boils down to: “How can we better anticipate, cover, and overcome all conceivable or plausible threat envelopes?”

While this is a worthy and admirable emphasis for protectors to take, it is also profoundly and narrowly overspecialized.  It reflects a counterfactual assumption that, given sufficient funding, these communities can not only anticipate all future shocks, but prepare adequately to deal with them on a strictly in-house basis, through the application of fiercely effective professional action…..

Read the rest here.

Secondly, I wanted to highlight that Don Vandergriff, a student of John Boyd’s strategic philosophy and the pioneer of adaptive leadership training , recently received a glowing mention in Fast Company magazine:

How to Buck the System the Right Way

….What GM is doing is mining the talent of its leaders in the middle. To lead up effectively, there are three characteristics you need to leverage.

Credibility. You must know your stuff especially when you are not the one in charge. When you are seeking to make a case to senior manager, or even to colleagues, what you know must be grounded in reality. At the same time, so often, as is the case at GM, you need to be able to think and act differently. So your track record reinforces your credibility. That is, what you have done before gives credence to what you want to do in the future.

Influence. Knowing how to persuade others is critical for someone seeking to effect change. If you do not have line authority, how else but through influence can you succeed? Your influence is based on credibility, but also on your proven ability to get things done. Sometimes persuasion comes down to an ability to sweet talk the higher ups as well as put a bit of muscle on colleagues (nicely of course) in order push your initiative through.

Respect. Mavericks, which GM said it was looking for, may not always be the most easiest people to get along with on a daily basis. After all, they are ones seeking to buck the system. But mavericks who succeed are ones who have the best interests of the organization at heart and in time earn the respect of thier colleagues.

One maverick I know who has been pushing to change the way the U.S. Army trains and promotes its officer corps is Don Vandergriff. A former Army major and twice named ROTC instructor of the year while at Georgetown, Vandergriff has tirelessly badgered the Army’s senior leadership to institute changes that would recognize and promote officers who knew how to lead from the middle.

And now, after more than a decade of his writing and teaching, it is paying off. West Point has become the latest but perhaps the most prestigious Army institution to teach principles of adaptive decision making that Don developed. Many of Don’s students have implemented such lessons successfully under combat situations in Iraq and Afghanistan.

Read the rest here. 

Don’s methods excel at getting students to think creatively under the constraints of limited information, situational uncertainty and time pressure ( making the cognitive effect somewhat akin to the effects produced by the Socratic method and complex game playing).

ADDENDUM:

This would also be a suitable post to remind readers that Dr. Chet Richards has moved his blogging operations to a new site, Fast Transients.

Adjust your favorites and blogrolls accordingly.

From John Robb:

JOURNAL: Mexico’s Mercado of Violence Heats Up

Open source warfare often combines market-based functions to accelerate its innovation rates and expand its operations beyond the primary players.  These markets, or bazaars (as I called them) are very efficient.  For example: the price of violence plummets as the number of entrants increases and the capacity for violence improves as the market’s participants specialize and hone their skills.  

Usually, the military/law enforcement response to the surge in the sophistication and quantity of violence is to assume some outside source of training or support rather than something that is the natural byproduct of rapid marketplace development.  

So, it’s no surprise with the growing availability of the street/prison gangs (Barrio Azteca and the Artistic Assassins) as sources of cheap, violent labor the marketplace is heating up. Note the excellent quotes below from a WaPo article on the growth of the market for contract killings: 

From Joseph Fouche at The Committee of Public Safety:

Containing Mexico

….Mexico, showing more concern for its sovereignty than their northern neighbor, has launched a brave if thus far futile attempt to win control of its territory from large and powerful narco-traffickers. Large parts of Mexico are in disorder and large parts of Mexico threaten to descend into chaos. The Mexican Army has been brought in to take over from Mexico’s corrupt local and federal police. The well-armed and well-equippednarcotraficantes have counterattacked against the police and even the Mexican Army. The government is riddled with gang informants and corrupt officials. An already uninspiring government has pulled off the unique trick of becoming even more uninspiring.

In the long run, I believe the Mexican state will win. Colombia was in a similar pickle ten years ago but eventually found enough institutional resilience to fight back and win control of most of its territory. But the road back is long and, in the meantime, Mexico’s troubles will inevitably leak north, involving and corrupting American law enforcement even more than it already is, drawing entrepreneurs on both sides of the border to profit from America and Mexico’s shared misery, and applying negative pressures on Mexican residents in the United States to cooperate with the narcotraficantes. ¿O plata o plomo? (silver or lead?) the Colombian drug gangs used to ask their victims. Profit or death, a choice will be put to many Mexican Americans in the years ahead, or as Mexico’s own Porfirio Diaz put it, ¿Pan o palo? (bread or a beating?). Illegal immigration, perhaps deliberately induced by Mexican drug gangs in an ironic echo of the strategy of  Mexico’s incumbent elites, will destabilize American local governments and drain their resources. Violence in Mexican communities in America will increase and inevitably spill over to non-Mexicans. Political correctness and diplomatic niceties will paralyze American responses.

The historical significance of the War in Iraq will be revealed: COIN on American streets. Containment, if it can be described as such, will occur house by house, block by block, city by city, state by state. The traditional American response to crisis, the inspired muddle, will produce more corruption of American institutions and society, already weakened by the last round of containment….

The news trickling out of Haiti is apocalyptic. The president of Haiti is homeless. Hundreds of thousands may be dead. The Haitian state, rickety and corrupt at the best of times, has collapsed along with the government buildings. Gangs of machete-wielding looters rule the capital city as supplies of food and clean water run dangerously low. The magnitude of the disaster may exceed the capacity of even the U.S. to respond unilaterally.

A humanitarian crisis of epic proportions is brewing and anything short of a speedy and massive response in the next 48 hours and a restoration of order in Haiti will inevitably draw comparisons between Haiti and New Orleans under Bush.

The Genius of the Beast: A Radical Re-Vision of Capitalism by Howard Bloom

Reviewed by J. Scott Shipman

Mr. Bloom may have a modern-day classic in his third book, The Genius of the Beast, A Radical Re-Vision of Capitalism. Bloom delivers a tour-de-force with obvious and not-so-obvious evidence supporting the power of capitalism to deliver a better quality of life, a better world, and he does so with passion and vigor. 

The Beast is a very quotable book and Bloom’s voice has a messianic quality. From the beginning he admits that his book is “designed to give you pleasure.” In my estimation he succeeds on multiple levels, but I must admit as a newcomer to Bloom’s writing, I was scratching my head during the first portion when he used phrases like “transcendence engine,” “secular genesis machine,” and “evolutionary search engine” which to my way of thinking smacked of new-age hype but I pressed-on and am glad I did. Bloom’s successful use of these “metaphors” (which will probably find their way into our language) helped him to explain the crisis facing Western Culture and his common sense solutions. He writes:

“Our civilization is under attack. But many of us don’t want to defend it. Why? There’s a void in our sense of meaning. We’ve been told that the “the Western system” is one in which the rich stoke artificial needs to suck money, blood, and spirit from the rest of us. We’ve been told that the barons of industry work overtime to turn us from sensitive humans into consumers–mindless buyers listlessly watching TV while growing obese on the artificial flavors, chemical preservatives, and the cheap sugars of junk food. And some of that it is true.

But the problem does not lie in the turbines of the Western way of life–it does not lie in industrialism, capitalism, pluralism, free speech, and democracy. The problem lies in the lens through which we see.”

The Beast is delivered in 78 bite-sized chapters (with 82 pages of notes) in prose accessible to the average reader. However, the large number of small chapters doesn’t scrimp on content; Bloom sets the stage with a review the phenomena of economic booms and crashes through the lens of manic-depressive economies of the past and present. He offers evidence that even without a World Wide Web and the modern notion of globalization, our current situation is not unique and economies have suffered worse crashes than our recent 2007/08 meltdown. 

Bloom contends  “emotional flows” have powered our past and will power our future, but until now, we have not had the tools or the awareness to “bring them into view.” The Beast, in Bloom’s words, “attempts to show you how and why.”

Like the great John Boyd, Bloom, a scientist-turned-rock band promoter, is a consilient thinker—he weaves the theory of evolution, neurology, entomology, bacteriology, public policy, economics, and crowd-psychology (just to name a few) into an uplifting view of capitalism and how we interact within our culture, and the importance of staying on the edge of exploration. Importantly, he lays bare the truth about Marxism, demonstrating that Marx was what he complained of: a capitalist peddling a murderous utopian view of the world that led to at least 80M deaths in the twentieth century. Contrary to what many modern critics of capitalism would have us believe, Bloom asserts that where “Religions and ideologies promise to raise the poor and the oppressed. But only The Western system {capitalism} delivers on that promise century after century.” And he backs up his assertion with facts.

Bloom’s clear-eyed enthusiasm for Western culture does not spare the reader the excesses and tragedies of capitalism; he leaves no stone unturned in his critical assessments or in his heart-felt endorsements. He provides not only reasons for hope, but proven tools and methods to get things done and for the right reasons. Bloom used competitive and cooperative examples in nature (birds, bees, and fish) to explain our environment and culture and made for excellent examples of what works and does not work in nature. Bloom takes Plato to task for “what he didn’t tell us,” how capitalism created the alphabet, why “flash isn’t frivolous,” the importance of vanity, and how as a scientist in the business world he used two rules of science he learned as a kid that were invaluable to his success:

“(1) The truth at any price including the price of your life, and (2) look at things right under your nose as if you’ve never seen them before, then proceed from there.” 

For some, Bloom’s descriptions of his success may smack of immodesty, but given the passion flowing from each page, it is difficult to fault him for saying essentially, “Hey, this isn’t just theory! I’ve tried it and it works and you can do it, too!”

Blooms “transcendence engine” revs into high-gear as he walks the reader from Marco Polo, to Prince Henry The Navigator, to Christopher Columbus, and how “the world is fed using Mesoamerican agrotechnology;” and how none of this would have been possible without dreamers dreaming and then acting, and searching…exploring.

The insanity of reliance on pure reason is laid bare; he states plainly “reason without intuition is cripple.” Leaders and would-be leaders could take a lesson from Bloom’s guidance to use our “instrument of empathy” (which is something literally “right under our nose”) to find emotions within that are attuned to the people you want to serve. He encourages the deliberate act of “learning” more about our customers in order to “learn to care about them more deeply.” He used a lovely analogy in the form of Edna St. Vincent Millay’s masterpiece “Renascence” to illustrate the depth of truly knowing those we serve: “It said that to see the infinite in every grain of sand, you have to feel all the pains, the pleasures, the extremes, and the day-to-day emotions of every conceivable sort of person sharing this planet with you, of every living human being.” In our narcissistic age, this appeal may have an odd ring, but history and Bloom offer examples of how “learning” about customers works, and Bloom doesn’t mean the institutional research as much as the personal benefits of having first-hand knowledge and empathy for those we serve. (His observations on focus groups were spot-on as well.) 

Bloom wraps up with a genuinely passionate entreaty that may sound odd without more background, but inspiring and thought-provoking just the same:

“Help others grow selfish on behalf of others, too. Ask what your fixations and your private passions can contribute to the lives of others. Get fervent about it. Crusade! If it’s a better art-directed envelope for the mail room, one that will light up the people who find it in their mail box, if it’s a service that will give your customers the honest sense that you care for their security, no matter what it is, do it! Forget the horse-pucky about lean and mean. Meanness is punished in the long run by the capitalist system. It’s socked by a dive in long range profits and in long-range value, long-range capitalization. It’s rocked by the hatred of meanness makers generate. Profit, value, and longevity come from caring, not from ruthless savagery. You are here—at your job forty or sixty hours a week—not to plunder but to please. You are here to give eight hours of meaning to those you work for, to those who work for you, and most of all to your public, to your audience, to the tens of millions or hundreds of millions who you would like to reach and bring into your fold.”

Those are big numbers, but he’s right—even in our small world; we’re ambassadors for something bigger—-so the “crusade!” comment seems appropriate.

Get this book and read it. Bloom’s assessments are thoughtful and inspiring. Thank you, Howard Bloom, you have bridged generations and thoughts and tied together facts that otherwise would have gone unnoticed.

About the Reviewer:

Based in the suburbs of Washington, DC, Scott is the father of three, the husband of one, former submarine sailor and arms control inspector, and the founder of a boutique consulting firm specializing in strategic thought leadership.  As an admirer of the late Colonel John Boyd, Scott’s passion centers around a presentation titled  “To Be, or To DO: A Challenge To Action With Integrity.” Scott is pleased, but not surprised that Boyd has so many devotees and is glad to have found Zen and Co.