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Futurist Jamais Cascio on strategic forecasting:

Futures Thinking: Asking the Question

….”Asking the Question” is the first step in a formal futures thinking project. At first glance, it should be easy–after all, you should know what you’re trying to figure out. Unfortunately, while it may be simple to ask a question, asking the right question is much more challenging It’s easy to ask questions that are too vague, too narrow, or assume the answer; it’s much more difficult to ask a question that can elicit both surprises and useful results.

….It’s a subtle point, but I tend to find it useful to talk about strategic questions in terms of dilemmas, not problems. Problem implies solution–a fix that resolves the question. Dilemmas are more difficult, typically situations where there are no clearly preferable outcomes (or where each likely outcome carries with it some difficult contingent elements). Futures thinking is less useful when trying to come up with a clear single answer to a particular problem, but can be extremely helpful when trying to determine the best response to a dilemma. The difference is that the “best response” may vary depending upon still-unresolved circumstances; futures thinking helps to illuminate possible trigger points for making a decision.

Cascio’s framing of dilemmas is reminiscient of a discussion I had here a while back with Dave Schuler regarding “wicked problems” though dilemmas appear to be more generic a class of difficulties ( all dilemmas are not wicked problems but all wicked problems represent a dilemma). There is a lot of merit to the frame that Cascio is using and it points to the dysfunctionality present in top tier national security decision making.

Pakistan, for example, represents a serious dilemma for the United States.We need to begin, as Cascio suggests, by framing the right questions. A better question than “Is Pakistan an ally?” would be “Is Pakistan our enemy?”

Islamabad is a major state sponsor of terrorist groups, perhaps the largest on earth in that regard. It has a poor record – again one of the world’s worst – on nuclear nonproliferation and nuclear security issues. Pakistan’s civilian elite is amazingly corrupt and it’s thoroughly undemocratic senior officer corps of the Army only moderately less so. Pakistani public opinion borders on delusional with any issue tangentially connected to India and in the main, informed Pakistanis deeply resent it when their own policies of sponsoring terrorism cause other countries to become angry with Pakistan and take any kind of retaliatory action. It’s political system is polarized and unstable.

Yet while Pakistan is deeply hostile to America and cannot “be bought”, their deep corruption means that they can be “rented”. Pakistan is the major and irreplaceable conduit for supplies to US and NATO forces in Afghanistan and the Pakistani military will grudgingly cooperate in providing intelligence for drone attackson the militant terror groups that the ISI aids, directs and trains. Pakistan is ready to sacrifice many pawns but not any chesspiece of significance.

The American elite tend to speak of Pakistan as an “ally”, when the reality is that Pakistan is a sullen and coerced client, and to profess great concern about Pakistan’s “stability. This falsehood permits the illusion of “partnership” with Pakistan and makes it politically easier for the administration of the day to secure appropriations from the Congress for Afghanistan and Pakistan. Unfortunately, this facade creates a mental fog of unwarranted reassurance when clarity is most needed to assess our strategic choices and make any of them with decisiveness. A permanent preference for “muddling through” and crisis management has taken root.

Pakistan’s elite by contrast, tell visiting Secretaries of State how much they hate America and continue to endorse aiding the very violent Islamist groups that are eating away at the authority and legitmacy of the Pakistani state like a horde of termites. The elite regularly exercises its far smaller degree of national power with infinitely greater ruthlessness than its American counterparts, not appearing to care all that much about “stability”. The Pakistanis are willing to play hardball yet the USG shrinks from doing so.

Something does not compute here and that something is us.

ADDENDUM:

Tom Barnett views Karzai as an even worse strategic bet than dealing with Pakistan ( but also thinks our diplomatic play is hamfisted and obtuse), saying the Obama administration should “take advantage of this fiasco“.

By Charles Cameron

Something veeery interesting is breaking in the blogosphere: Leah Farrall is talking with Abu Walid al-Masri.

* 

Leah Farrall blogs with verve and insight. She has been a “senior Counter Terrorism Intelligence Analyst with the Australian Federal
Police and the organization’s al Qaeda subject matter expert” who served as “senior Intelligence Analyst in the AFP’s Jakarta Regional
Cooperation Team (JRCT) in Indonesia and at the AFP’s Forward Operating Post in response to the second Bali bombings”. She’s now working on here PhD thesis on “Al Qaeda and militant salafist jihad”.

One of the leading figures in the interwoven tales of Al Qaida and the Taliban is Abu Walid al-Masri, who also blogs. According to his West Point CTC bio, Abu Walid fought for eleven years as a muj against the Soviets in Khost, Afghanistan, where he “gained a reputation as a skilled and pragmatic strategist and battlefield tactician”. He criticized bin Ladin’s 1991 decision to relocate AlQ to the Sudan, and was an early member of Mullah Omar’s circle. He also served as a reporter for Al-Jazeera, and (as the profile puts it) ended up wearing “several hats: Taliban propagandist, foreign correspondent, and al-Qa’ida trainer and strategist.” He strongly opposed 9/11.

In his early writings, he quoted Lenin, Mao, and Sun Tzu — and his writings have been extensive. Leah writes that in her view:

“….his work (12 books in all plus articles) was the most comprehensive and accurate of all memoirs or first hand accounts of al Qaeda and more broadly the history of Afghanistan since the Soviet invasion. I reached this conclusion after literally spending years and years cross checking his work with other accounts and all manner of sources, from both sides, for use in my thesis…”

And now for the drama:

As Leah notes with understandable excitement, Abu Walid has begun to respond to her blog posts with his own.

Readers of Zenpundit already know the power of multi-blogger conversations, and indeed it was one such conversation that gave rise to the Boyd Roundtable book that Zen himself edited.

This engagement between Leah and Abu Walid takes things a step further — two enemies, one an intel analyst and the other an insurgent strategist, are now holding a debate in public across the blogs.

That’s an interesting conversation to watch in its own right — and I trust Leah will bring Abu Walid’s side of it across into English. It is
also, it seems to me, an historic moment in the use of cyberspace.

*

Postscript:

Leah on Abu Walid responding to her blogging:

Text of Abu Walid’s response in Arabic — Leah notes she hopes to put up an English digest, if not a full translation, shortly:

It’s worth noting that there’s a somewhat similar conversation developing between some UK-based Sunni Salafist supporters of the Baluch action and western analyst-bloggers:

Again, it’s fascinating if you’re interested in web-based discourse, and with a nice Mahdist strand in there to please little old me.

I hope to pick up on that aspect with a post here shortly.

And then there’s blogger friend John Robb, who has recently been emailed by the Nigerian Henry Okah, whom Robb considers “hands down the most innovative and successful guerrilla entrepreneur in the world today”:

If you have visited SWJ Blog today then you have already seen that novelist and blogger Steve Pressfield is running an important paper by SF Major Jim Gant at his Tribes site:

One Tribe At A Time #4: The Full Document at last! 

I’ve been promising for several weeks to have a free downloadable .pdf of One Tribe At A Time. Finally it’s here. My thanks to our readers for their patience. On a personal note, I must say that it gives me great pleasure to offer this document in full, not only because of my great respect for Maj. Jim Gant, who lived and breathed this Tribal Engagement idea for years, but for the piece itself and for the influence I hope it will have within the U.S. military and policymaking community.

One Tribe At A Time is not deathless prose. It’s not a super-pro Beltway think tank piece. What it is, in my opinion, is an idea whose time has come, put forward by an officer who has lived it in the field with his Special Forces team members-and proved it can be done. And an officer, by the way, who is ready this instant to climb aboard a helicopter to go back to Afghanistan and do it again

Here is Major Gant’s PDF:

One Tribe at a Time: A Strategy for Success in Afghanistan

This matters because the Afghanisatan debate has been too much a COIN or CT or COIN/CT Hybrid discussion and this paper puts forward a strategy option based upon decentralization, which given the strongly localist tradition of Afghani politics, should have been on the table from the inception.  The nation-building, NGO, IGO community love to think in terms of “top down” or “capital city outward” but not every country has that kind of political tradition embedded in their national culture.

Is coming.

Ah, I am over a month late on a promised follow up post!

Back in early June, I composed a hyper-ambitious Summer Reading list that I wanted to plough through on those hazy, lazy, dog day afternoons. Here was my list:

THE SUMMER READING LIST:

Military History and Strategy

Wired for War: The Robotics Revolution and Conflict in the 21st Century – PW Singer (Finish, currently reading)
The Anabasis of Cyrus (Agora) – Xenophon
The Accidental Guerrilla: Fighting Small Wars in the Midst of a Big One – David Kilcullen
The Scientific Way of Warfare: Order and Chaos on the Battlefields of Modernity – Antoine Bousquet
The Culture of War – Martin van Creveld
Certain to Win –Chet Richards

Science, Futurism, Networks, Economics and Technology

How the Mind Works – Steven Pinker
Fooled by Randomness: The Hidden Role of Chance in Life and in the Markets – Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Emergence: The Connected Lives of Ants, Brains, Cities, and Software – Steven Johnson
The Singularity Is Near: When Humans Transcend Biology – Ray Kurzweil
The Hyperlinked Society: Questioning Connections in the Digital Age (The New Media World)– Lokman Tsui

Biography

Ho Chi Minh: A Life – William J. Duiker

Philosophy and Intellectual History

The Open Society and Its Enemies, Vol. 1: The Spell of Plato
The Open Society and Its Enemies, Vol. 2: Hegel and Marx – Karl Popper
The Closing of the Western Mind: The Rise of Faith and the Fall of Reason – Charles Freeman

Fiction

Pattern Recognition – William Gibson
On the Road (Penguin Classics) – Jack Kerouac

Pretty impressive, eh? It would be more so if I had actually done it. While I have all of these books on my shelf, I did not get to most of them and was frequently sidetracked by books that were never on the list in the first place. Here’s what I actually read this summer between Memorial Day and Labor Day:

The Books I Really Read Last Summer:

Emergence: The Connected Lives of Ants, Brains, Cities, and Software – Steven Johnson

Wired for War: The Robotics Revolution and Conflict in the 21st Century – PW Singer

The Bloody White Baron: The Extraordinary Story of the Russian Nobleman Who Became the Last Khan of Mongolia by James Palmer

This Is for the Mara Salvatrucha: Inside the MS-13, America’s Most Violent Gang by Samuel Logan

 Horse Soldiers: The Extraordinary Story of a Band of US Soldiers Who Rode to Victory in Afghanistan by Doug Stanton

The War of Art: Break Through the Blocks and Win Your Inner Creative Battles by Steven Pressfield

The Anabasis of Cyrus (Agora) by Xenophon. Translator,  Wayne Ambler

How Rome Fell: Death of a Superpower by Adrian Goldsworthy

The Books I Partially Read Last Summer but Have Yet to Finish:

The Culture of War – Martin van Creveld

 Certain to Win –Chet Richards

The Conquest of Gaul  by Julius Caesar on Kindle

Why didn’t I stick to my reading list ? Looking back, there’s a number of reasons.

Foremost would be a lack of discipline on my part to put in several hours plugging away, each day, without fail. While I can legitimately say that professional and family commitments were not inconsequential last summer, I’m sure if I counted up the time I frittered away online reading blogs, social media sites, PDFs, etc. it most likely exceeded the clock hours spent reading books.

A second reason was review copies. When a publisher or PR firm sends me a review copy, I feel an obligation to read the book in a timely fashion. The authors count on that during the roll-out phase and most recipients of review copies never bother to write two words. I tend to write reviews only for the books I feel confident recommending to ZP readers; I’m not a professional critic nor do I get paid to blog, so I’m not going to waste my limited blogging time slamming an author or nitpicking unless his views come across as nutty or dangerous. Review copies that are not at a level to merit a positive review ( I probably get sent 3 books for every review that you see posted here, and I refuse to accept books outside my core areas of interest. I also get embargoed drafts still in the writing process but cannot, for legal reasons, blog about them) are read and then are shelved or given away.

The final reason probably comes down to age. It’s much harder now to read four or five hours at a stretch; whether that is because the internet is re-wiring my brain, as Nick Carr argues, or that the hectic pace and noisy environment of my life lacks any such extended blocs of quiet time that I enjoyed at age 20, I’m not sure.  Regardless, for me, books are now read in brief snatches of time these days, with an uninterrupted hour of book reading being uncommon, unless it is done after everyone else in the house is asleep. Over time, that means reading fewer books.

A shame.