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Which would be a cool title if there ever was one.

Except it is not a title but a metaphor being used by Jeff Carr of Intelfusion in a thought provoking post at O’Reilly Radar:

Loki’s Net – The National Security Risks of Gov 2.0 and the Social Web

…Here’s an updated version of an old Trickster tale that I think is particularly relevant to the topic of this post–the national security risks associated with a more open Government in general and social software in particular.

 Loki, the Norse God of mischief and mayhem, had taken to the mountains for refuge after angering the other Gods with his latest antics. The first thing he did was build a house with four doors; one on every side so that he could see in all directions. With his Intrusion Detection System in place, Loki spent the rest of his time playing in the water as a salmon, leaping waterfalls and negotiating mountain streams.

One morning, Loki sat by a fire and considered how the gods might capture him. Since he spent much of his time as a fish, Loki grabbed some linen string and fashioned a fishing net of a size and weight sufficient to snare him. Unfortunately, just as he finished, the other Gods rushed in. Loki threw the net into the fire, transformed into a salmon, and swam away. Acting quickly, the Gods extracted the ashes of the net from the fire and, from the remnants, rebuilt Loki’s net, eventually ensnaring him in it.

Like Loki, we construct through our Twitter posts, Facebook Wall entries and LinkedIn profiles our own unique “net” that sets us up for a social engineering exploit, a financial crime, or an act of espionage.

The Trickster archetype aptly frames this discussion about the risks and benefits of bringing Government into a Web 2.0 world because the classic Trickster is neither good nor bad, but encompasses elements of both. Too often, the debate surrounding Gov 2.0 becomes polarizing. Critics are frequently grouped together as Gov 1.0 thinkers struggling against a 2.0 world, while advocates sometimes embrace Gov 2.0 as a holy quest, refusing to acknowledge any significant risks whatsoever.

I cannot emphasize enough that the surest way to slow our progress toward a more technologically open Government is to try to craft this debate in dualistic terms. Indigenous Trickster tales teach us that a more valuable approach is to substitute utility for morality. Loki and  Coyote (a famous Trickster in Native American lore) both understand how to trap a fish because they have swum as fish. Hyde writes in his book Trickster Makes This World that “nothing counters cunning like more cunning. Coyote’s wits are sharp precisely because he has met other wits.”

Read the rest here.

Galrahn, writing at USNI Blog about my recent post on Mexico, raised an important question: “Are Weak States a worse outcome from the perspective of U.S. national security than a Failed State?”. Galrahn comes down squarely against the “muddling through” of a weak state:

Failed States Are Worse Than Weak States

….My point would be this: there is no value in the cartels overthrowing the Mexican government because its existence helps them more than its absence helps them.

But this is my larger point. There are currently zero, none, nada 4GW/COIN/Whatever military solutions for failed states; our emerging 4GW/COIN/Whatever doctrines, strategies, and theories only apply for weak states that have legitimate governments that can be supported. Failed states are problems that can be handled, even in an ugly way, by conventional military forces. The danger to US strategic interests is not failed states, as is often claimed, rather the real danger to US strategic interests always comes from weak states.

The ugly truth is, failed states allow for freedom of action by military forces without consequence; weak states do not allow such freedom of military action. Afghanistan before 9/11 was a weak state, not a failed state, thus Al Qaeda operated under the state governance of the Taliban and had top cover to carry out its evil agenda. In Somalia, pirates operate in a failed state, and as a failed state the west has taken military action, including cruise missiles, hostage rescue attempts with special forces, and other military activities without consequence against targets as they have been identified. The danger Somalia poses in the future to US strategic interests is not that Somalia continues as a failed state, rather if it were to become a weak state with a recognized legitimate government strong enough to say, eliminate the pirate threat while still being too weak to prevent the training and development of terrorist cells.

….but because it is a weak state, we face serious and complex diplomatic obsticles in taking freedom of action, even along our own national border. In a failed state, we could do what needed to be done to take out the bad guys. As a weak state, we are far more limited in options, and must account for the legitimate governments perspective a lot more than we would if Mexico was a failed state.

Zenpundit may or may not be right regarding the threat posed by Mexico, but if he believes Mexico as a failed state is more dangerous than a Mexico as a weak state, he is mistaken.

Read the whole post here.

I found Galrahn’s argument to be very intriguing. There’s the issue of Mexico specifically in his post and then Weak States being worse than Failed States as a general rule. First, Mexico:

The thought experiment I penned previously aside, Mexico is not yet a Failed State and I hope it does not become one – though I would not wager a mortgage payment on it staying away from catastrophic failure. Mexico is definitely, in my view, already a Weak State suddenly resisting the process of being “hollowed out”, slowly, by vicious drug cartels. I wish President Calderon well in his efforts to crush the narco networks, but just as America cannot avoid admitting that our drug laws are impacting Mexico severely, let’s not let the fact that Mexico’s ruling oligarchy has also brought this disaster on themselves with their self-aggrandizingly corrupt political economy escape comment.

The crony-capitalist-politico ruling class in Mexico ruthlessly squeezes their poor but ambitious countrymen to emigrate and is too greedy to even invest properly in the very security services that keeps their own state apparatus afloat. Mexico is not a poor country, their GDP is in the same league as that of Australia, India or the Netherlands. Mexico can afford to pay for a professional police, a functioning judiciary and a larger Army at a minimum. On a more reasonable level, Mexico can also afford basic public education and core public services for it’s citizens and could liberalize it’s economy further to stimulate entrepreneurship. They choose not to do so. An elite that stubbornly refuses to reform, even in the interest of self-preservation, is not a group likely to make statesmanlike decisions in the Cartel War.

If Mexico fails, really fails on the order of Lebanon in the 1980’s or Somalia since the 1990’s, Galrahn is correct that the U.S. military would, in the last analysis, have a free hand to do things in Mexico that could not be remotely contemplated today. However the  second and third order effects of a Failed State Mexico are calamitous enough that I’d prefer to skip enjoying that kind of “free hand”. Unless Mexicans have something in their DNA that makes them different from Iraqis, Afghans, Cambodians or Kosovar Albanians, extreme levels of violence in one area will cause them to move to areas of relative safety in another place. Internal displacement will precede external displacement. Elite flight will precede the flight of the masses.

That brings us to the general question of, is a Failed State better or worse than a Weak State whose tattered shreds of international legitimacy prevent robust foreign intervention? I am going to “punt” by inclining toward judging on a case-by-case basis. “Failed State Botswana” is not likely to impact the world very much nor is “Functional State Congo” going to look very good next to anything except Congo as the Failed State that it is. Now “Failed State China” or “Failed State Russia”, that has consequences that are the stuff of nightmares.

What do you say? Which is worse: Weak State or Failed State?

ADDENDUM:

SWJ Blog links to a Washington Post series on the Cartel War

My previous post stirred some interest in the blogosphere on the issue of Mexico being in danger of becoming a “Failed State” and prompted others to respond with Mexico related analysis of their own. Here are some that caught my eye:

           POINT – Mexico is a Failed State or at least in some danger of becoming so:

Threatswatch.org (Fraser) Los Zetas and the Denial of Mexico’s Failed State Status

The softening of words and the aversion to stating the obvious by the Administration simply obliterates the reality that President Felipe Calderón of Mexico “leads” a country dominated by the cartels and not governed by the federal government. The transparent denial of the recent Joint Operating Environment report is troubling at best.

To better understand just how close to the precipice he is, it might be worthwhile to take another look at the organization (and movement) of Los Zetas. As a reminder, Los Zetas are a paramilitary group tied to the Gulf Cartel. Their origins and their evolution from being deserters from the Mexican special forces to a criminal organization is chronicled in a report from International Relations and Security Network

….With each of the original members training at least another ten, they grew to over 300 strong by 2003. In just the first quarter of 2009, Los Zetas (the organization) has been linked to a death threat against the president of Guatemala, the hand grenade tossed in Pharr, Texas and various other criminal acts. The ranks of Los Zetas has grown, and strikingly, they have broken ranks with the Gulf Cartel. Over time however, and with the deaths of some of the original Zetas, they have morphed into an organization. This is a very important distinction to note.

RBO – Are Afghanistan, Pakistan, Mexico ‘failed states’? If so, then what?

….In particular there is recent debate as to whether Mexico is/is not a failed state. If it is, then we ask whether its “failed” status is on a par with such other failed states as Pakistan and Afghanistan? – Even though there are those who do not subscribe to the notion that either of them is a failed state.

As always, let’s start at the beginning. What is a failed state?

In the simplest of definitions, a failed state is one that has a “shattered social and political structure.”

Writing December 1999 for the International Review of the Red Cross, Daniel Thürer, J.D. (right), Professor of International Law, European Law, Constitutional Law and Administrative Law at the University of Zurich, said

Failing States are invariably the product of a collapse of the power structures providing political support for law and order, a process generally triggered and accompanied by “anarchic” forms of internal violence.

Dr. Thürer wrote that former Secretary-General of the United Nations, Boutros Boutros-Ghali, described this situation in the following way (emphasis added):

A feature of such conflicts is the collapse of state institutions, especially the police and judiciary, with resulting paralysis of governance, a breakdown of law and order, and general banditry and chaos. Not only are the functions of government suspended, but its assets are destroyed or looted and experienced officials are killed or flee the country. This is rarely the case in inter-state wars. It means that international intervention must extend beyond military and humanitarian tasks and must include the promotion of international reconciliation and the re-establishment of effective government. States in which institutions and law and order have totally or partially collapsed under the pressure and amidst the confusion of erupting violence, yet which subsist as a ghostly presence on the world map, are now commonly referred to as “failed States” or “Etats sans gouvernement”.

Jay Fraser, who has been watching developments in Mexico for some time, drills down on the most violent and fastest evolving faction among the cartel groups in Mexico. Procrustes concentrates on the “Failed State” concept and examines how conditions in Mexico compare to academic yardsticks and the case studies of Afghanistan and Pakistan, two countries that inevitably crop up in discussions of failed and failing states.

          COUNTERPOINT – Mexico is not a failing state or has greater resilience than experts are acknowledging:

Apropos Two Theories – Why Mexico may NOT fall apart – and a way to think about it

I’ve never seen so many American analysts and journalists sounding alarms about Mexico – most for good reasons, others for their own agendas. And it’s true, parts of Mexico have turned awfully violent, barely governable. Government controls have weakened, and security trends are adverse. Domestic terrorism and insurgency are not presently the problem; it’s the extreme crime and corruption, driven by the drug cartels and other criminal gangs.

….Yet, I’m struck that long-time American experts who specialize on Mexico are not providing counter-arguments. A few Mexicans are, lately Enrique Krauze. But no Americans I know of (though I’ve not searched exhaustively).Shouldn’t analysts and journalists who specialize on Mexico be doing a better job of wondering whether and why the growing alarmism may be wrong – again?When I worked as a specialist on Mexico, I experienced three or four periods when Mexico seemed to be on the verge of instability, in particular:

• In 1968, at the time of the student uprising and its military suppression (I was then a graduate student studying in Mexico City).
• During 1984-8, when a few U.S. government analysts claimed that Mexico was about to collapse due to multiple economic, political, and other crises.
• In 1994-5, when the Zapatista uprising raised new specters of widespread insurgency, if not terrorism.
  

Each time Mexico remained stable and recovered. And it did so mostly for reasons that American analysts had not understood or anticipated well at the time – including American experts on Mexico who did not buy into the alarmism.In these three instances, the key stabilizing factor turned out to be some kind of social or organizational network that American analysts were barely aware of:

• In 1968, it was intra-elite networking that revolved around the mysterious camarilla system (or so I think, though I was just a grad student then).
• In the mid 1980s, it was familial and other social networks that cushioned the effects of unemployment and other economic displacements.
• In 1994, it was the roles played by newly-formed networks of human-rights and other activist NGOs, first in calming the Zapatista scene, later in monitoring the 1994 presidential election campaign.

Conditions in Mexico look worse than ever this time around – much worse, not just along the U.S. border, but everywhere that the drug cartels are powerful. So I’m not suggesting optimism, but rather a search for additional factors that may moderate the equations of gloom.What might keep Mexico from disintegrating this time? My guesstimate is that networks will be the decisive factor again. And the networks that will matter most this time are:

1. Informal intra-elite social networks that reflects what’s left of the old camarilla dynamic.
2. Cross-border organizational networks for U.S.-Mexico security (military, police, intel) cooperation

David Ronfeldt, for new readers here, is a major “edge” thinker in the national security field at RAND and is a co-author (with John Arquilla) of the influential “classic”,  Networks and Netwars: The Future of Terror, Crime, and Militancy , which sits on my shelf about two feet from me as I type this. As it happens, Ronfeldt also specialized in Mexican and Latin American security as an analyst during the Cold War which gives means that his caveats are worth careful consideration. Frankly, we are all better off if Ronfeldt is correct and the “alarmists” are wrong, though I think the grim state of affairs south of the Rio Grande is deterring most Mexico experts  from going out on a limb to make positive predictions.

John Robb has been thinking about tribes. So has David Ronfeldt. So has Seth Godin.

Why?

John Robb  writes:

If you are like most people in the ‘developed world,’ you don’t have any experience in a true tribal organization.  Tribal organizations were crushed in the last couple of Centuries due to pressures from the nation-state that saw them as competitors and the marketplace that saw them as impediments.  All we have now it is a moderately strong nuclear family (weakened via modern economics that forces familial diasporas), a weak extended family, a loose collection of friends (a social circle), a tenuous corporate affiliation, and a tangential relationship with a remote nation-state.  That, for many of us, is proving to be insufficient as a means of withstanding the pressures of the chaotic and harsh modern environment.

The advantage of tribal structures in my view, compared to hierarchies, markets and networks discussed by Ronfeldt revolves around the certainty of mutual trust as a psychological motivator, especially vis-a-vis “outsiders”.  Loyalty to all members of the tribe ( primary loyalty) is paramount which is not the case in hierarchies ( loyalty flows upward, downward not so much), markets ( nonexistent) or networks (potentially  non-reciprocal loyalty to hub). As such, tribes function very well at the base of Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs which means they are good insurance for physical survival. It does not matter if the tribe is one of blood or cultural heritage or artificial political, religious or military brotherhood. Militiaman, monk or gang member is irrelevant; what matters is the establishment of unreserved mutual trust as a core of personal identity.

The implicit trust present within the tribe and the flexible sense of authority gives individual tribesmen room for individual initiative to react, knowing “the tribe has their back”. They are a more centralized unit of power than a network but more fluid and mobile than a hierarchy. A tribe is a safety net or a bodyguard. Great enterprises require something else as an organizational form but behind a great enterprise should be at least some kind of life preserver.

Addendum:

Col. Pat Lang – “ How to Work With Tribesmen“

I am sometimes asked ” What is the point of twitter?” by people who sign up and are bewildered by the flurry of seemingly disconnected “tweets”.  Even Dave Davison, a longtime investor in and enthusiast of media platforms has asked what is the “Return on Attention” with twitter ?

All social networking is not created equal. My usual answer based upon my own usage has been that twitter will make sense for you if you have an established network of people with whom you have a reason to be in frequent contact and a common set of interests. I have that on twitter with a sizable national security/mil/foreign policy/4GW/IC informal “twittersphere”. If you don’t have that kind of network at least in latent form when you sign up on twitter, its going to be very hard to build one from scratch by following strangers based on random tweets.

As it turns out, research has begun to validate my empirical observation. In social networking platforms there is your formal network but inside it is the real, “hidden” network with which you actually interact:

From Complexity Digest – “Social networks that matter: Twitter under the microscope” (PDF) by Bernardo A. Huberman, Daniel M. Romero and Fang Wu

“….This implies the existence of two different networks: a very dense one made up of followers and followees, and a sparser and simpler network of actual friends. The latter proves to be a more inuential network in driving Twitter usage since users with many actual friends tend to post more updates than users with few actual friends. On the other hand, users with many followers or followees post updates more infrequently than those with few followers or followees.”

What does this mean ? 

First, it means that if the IC or military or law enforcement are worried about terrorists or criminals using twitter or Facebook for nefarious purposes, the bad guys will not be able to conceal their cells amidst a large list of nominal “friends” because their manic activity stands out like neon lights against the passivity of the non-members of the network.

Secondly, I’m not certain if this research scales with “celebrity” figures on a platform with huge numbers of followers like Robert Scoble ( Scobleizer  50, 362) or the designer Guy Kawasaki ( guykawasaki  52, 506). These people are deep influencers well outside any realistic circle of actual friends and are followed in part because of their pre-existing status earned in other domains or media.

That said, it’s an interesting concept to think of social media networks having a surface and a hidden or inner network where the real action takes place and what causes transactional movement to occur between the two.

UPDATE:

A related post by Drew – Enabling the Power of Social Networks in the IC