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On SECDEF Robert Gates doing Q&A in Pakistan: Attackerman and Duck of Minerva (Vikash Yadav)

The Depth Of Official Pakistani Anger At Us

Simple and plain: the Obama administration has to do something about Pakistan’s legitimate security fears emanating from India. As Gates points out, it’s completely absurd to argue that the U.S. has had a policy of “propping up” formerly-Soviet-allied India, but it doesn’t matter at this point (yes, yes, you guys who are big on “narrative”; score one for you). The Pakistanis believe that the lack of U.S. hectoring directed at India is part of a concerted policy of supporting India at Pakistan’s expense. Consequently, pushing the Pakistani military into Waziristan, to fight fellow Pakistanis, is easily misconstrued as weakening Pakistan for India’s sake.

There were good arguments for not stuffing the India relationship into Richard Holbrooke’s pillbox of headaches. India is too big a relationship to reduce to just a security issue. And for much of last year, the U.S. was waiting for India to elect a new government. But if we mean what we say about security, diplomacy, politics and development being interrelated and mutually supportive/corrosive, then it’s time to broker a real India-Pakistan peace process. Unless we want Gates’ next appearance at the Islamabad NDU to go even worse.

Gates Grilled at Pakistan’s National Defense University

The Defense Department has pulled from its website the transcript of the Q and A session last month between Secretary of Defense Gates and Pakistani military officers.  The frank talk was apparently a bit heated. At one point, one of the Pakistani military officers asked Secretary Gates point blank: “Are you with us or against us?”The transcript reveals a deep level of distrust between the US and the Pakistani military.  It also shows that some junior officers of the Pakistani military do not take ownership of their government’s current offensives against militants in the North West Frontier Province and the Federally Administered Tribal Areas of Pakistan.

Yadav has posted the entire transcript.

Count me as someone who thinks the single most effective move the US could do in the War on Terror is to bomb ISI headquarters with a few 30,000 lb superbombs  shortly after everyone arrived at work. Yes, I know that’s completely non-serious – I’m venting my irritation.

The second best moved be reducing our footprint in Afghanistan to what can be sustained via air from the ‘Stans and cutting off all aid to Pakistan. Every last dime. Our dollars are paying for the IEDs and bullets that kill our soldiers but shhhhhhhhhh….we’re not supposed to talk about that in polite company. That part is serious. We can live without Islamabad. Really, we can. We’ll do just fine. And they’re the bad actors who make a lousy neighborhood a whole lot worse. That Pakistan has legitimate security concerns is true – let’s tighten the screws on those and see if that helps induce a more cooperative attitude as eight and a half years of bribery has been counterproductive.

SECDEF Gates has an unenviable task. Pakistan, or at least an autonomous part of its military, is our enemy in Afghanistan and have been since 2001. Let’s accept that reality and revise our policies accordingly. Being an enemy of the United States ought to come with some costs rather than aid packages.

Very, very busy but the following two items struck me as useful advice for sharpening our mental edges.

First, John Robb linked to a series of posts by Eric Drexler of Metamodern. Al of them were good but I particularly liked the following one:

How to Understand Everything (and why)

….Formal education in science and engineering centers on teaching facts and problem-solving skills in a series of narrow topics. It is true that a few topics, although narrow in content, have such broad application that they are themselves integrative: These include (at a bare minimum) substantial chunks of mathematics and the basics of classical mechanics and electromagnetism, with the basics of thermodynamics and quantum mechanics close behind.

….To avoid blunders and absurdities, to recognize cross-disciplinary opportunities, and to make sense of new ideas, requires knowledge of at least the outlines of every field that might be relevant to the topics of interest. By knowing the outlines of a field, I mean knowing the answers, to some reasonable approximation, to questions like these:

What are the physical phenomena?
What are their magnitudes?
What are their preconditions?
How well are they understood?
How well can they be modeled?
What do they make possible?
What do they forbid?

And even more fundamental than these are questions of knowledge about knowledge:

What is known today?
What are the gaps in what I know?
When would I need to know more to solve a problem?
How could I find it?

It takes far less knowledge to recognize a problem than to solve it, yet in key respects, that bit of knowledge is more important: With recognition, a problem may be avoided, or solved, or an idea abandoned. Without recognition, a hidden problem may invalidate the labor of an hour, or a lifetime. Lack of a little knowledge can be a dangerous thing.

Secondly, reading through Richard Nisbett’s Intelligence and How to Get It: Why Schools and Cultures Count ( see this monster, two-part, book review by James McCormick at Chicago Boyz), the intriguing findings of the “Venezuela Project” run by none other than the late Richard Herrnstein of Bell Curve fame. Nisbett writes (74-75):

Herrnstein and his coworkers devised a very advanced set of materials geared to teaching seventh-graders fundamental concepts of problem solving that were not targeted to any particular subject matter. In effect they, they tried to make the children smarter by giving them handy implements for their intellectual tool kits.

What were those non-subject specific, cognitive skills?

• Basics of Classification
• Hypothesis Testing
• Discovery of Properties of Ordered Dimensions
• Analogies
• Simple Propositions
• Principles of Logic
• Constructing and Evaluating Complex Arguments
• Weighing opportunity costs vs. probability of success for a goal
• Evaluating credibility and relevance of data

I would have added metaphors, pattern-recognition and intuitive thinking games but it was a fine set of skills and the results were remarkable, according to Nisbett:

The instruction resulted in big changes in children’s ability to solve problems that the new skills were designed to improve….for language comprehension, .62 SD [ standard deviation]; for learning how to represent ‘”problem spaces,” .46 SD; for decision making, .77 SD; for inventive thinking, .50 SD. In short, general problem solving skills can be taught, and taught moreover in a brief period of time.

In psychometric terms, for a 13 year old, these scores represent phenomenal improvements in cognitive performance and indicate the plasticity of some aspects of measured intelligence. Why have such activities not become commonplace in public schools? Or universities?

Why indeed?

Matt Armstrong delivers an on-target op-ed in Foreign Policy:

Censoring the Voice of America

Earlier this year, a community radio station in Minneapolis asked Voice of America (VOA) for permission to retransmit its news coverage on the increasingly volatile situation in Somalia. The VOA audio files it requested were freely available online without copyright or any licensing requirements. The radio station’s intentions were simple enough: Producers hoped to offer an informative, Somali-language alternative to the terrorist propaganda that is streaming into Minneapolis, where the United States’ largest Somali community resides. Over the last year or more, al-Shabab, an al Qaeda linked Somali militia, has successfully recruited two dozen or more Somali-Americans to return home and fight. The radio station was grasping for a remedy.

It all seemed straightforward enough until VOA turned down the request for the Somali-language programming. In the United States, airing a program produced by a U.S. public diplomacy radio or television station such as VOA is illegal. Oddly, though, airing similar programs produced by foreign governments — or even terrorist groups — is not. As a result, the same professional journalists, editors, and public diplomacy officers whom we trust to inform and engage the world are considered more threatening to Americans than terrorist propaganda — like the stuff pouring into Minneapolis.

Read the rest here.

Amen, brother!

One of my most thoughtful blogfriends, Dave Schuler, is worried about the downstream cultural effects of a creeping cognitive reliance on visual media:. A selection from different posts on the subject by Dave:

“I Can Read a Passage in a Book 20 Times and It Doesn’t Click”

More On Visualcy

The Visual Imagery Society

The old methods of handbook and lecture don’t work anymore-the new crop of trainers can’t learn that way. They need visual training-simulations and hands-on. The performance of the new trainees was characterized in the feature as “improving”. No word on whether it’s come up to the standard of their old-fashioned literate predecessors

Not only are the arguments not subject to logical refutation, logical refutation may not be comprehended by those for whom visualcy is the primary communication modality.

What I find most concerning about this trend is that developments in government paralleled the transition from oral to literate societies. Divine and semi-divine chiefs and monarchs were replaced by representative government. Is bureaucracy the analogue in government of visual imagery as a dominant communication modality? Chaos? Autocracy? The only notable developments I’ve seen over the last couple of decades are an increasing tendency in the Western democracies towards bureaucracy as the operative form of government and a greater tendency to follow charismatic chiefs, the societal modality that John W. Campbell characterized as “barbarism”.

I’ll conclude this speculation with questions rather than answers.

• Is visual imagery overtaking the written word as the dominant form of communication, especially for communicating new knowledge?
• If so, what are the cognitive implications of the change?
• What are the social and political implications of the change in cognitive behavior?

As it happens, I have another thoughtful blogfriend, Dave Davison, who is a foursquare enthusiast for emergent visualcy technology. Davison was, if I recall correctly, involved in the development of some of the ambient devices on which Schuler opined.  A few representative posts from Davison:

MuralCasting – Improving ROA (Return on attention) -corrected 2.8.08

Logic + Emotion: Developing an Experience Strategy in 4 Parts

Too many ripples in the pond?

The problem with “visualcy”, as I interpret Schuler’s posts, is if it were to become a successor and replacement for the Western culture of  “literacy” that stretches back, with sporadic interruptions, to classical Greece. Visualcy, in the hands ( or eyes) of someone who has never learned to think logically or coherently in a textual format, is a dangerous thing as it powerfully lulls them into a false sense of comprehension. Visualcy, used by someone with the requisite analytical cognitive skills, would be a powerful tool for efficient data compression, synthesis and communication. From personal experience, I can attest that well constructed visual models can be a gateway to understanding for some of my students.

The underlying problem to this discussion is that too large a segment of our population never become truly literate as they pass through our public education system – they are disjointed “scanners” of words rather than readers who habitually fall prey to the maxim of “Garbage in, Garbage out”. What non-emotionally driven thinking they attempt based on information from a  text is often from significant misunderstanding; and if they do not have the good fortune to have teachers who can engage them with mathematics, they might never pick up logical reasoning at all.  Math instruction, I am convinced, despite my own struggles with that subject, is one of the “thin blue lines” holding our civilization together.

What to do ? The attractiveness of visual imagery would appear to be a neurological constant of our brain structure and the potential of visual analytics as field can hardly be ignored so our fallback must be attention to fundamentals. Education has to be a process that ends for the great majority in minds that are trained to think critically and creatively. We are maxing out our legislative strategies on societal and institutional accountability here and will have to contemplate greater emphasis on student and parental responsibility for the education of children than we have so far been willing to countenance.

Herman Kahn was the “shock jock” of America’s Cold War nuclear strategists, who used irreverence and comedic gesture to hook America into deep thinking about the implications of thermonuclear war (something the editors of Scientific American, his bitterest critics, have yet to forgive Kahn). Wiggins at Opposed Systems Design recently pointed to a fantastic post on Kahn by a fellow Wohlstetterian blogger, Robert Zarate , “Kahn and Mann’s “Ten Common Pitfalls” (1957)”. Zarate commented:

Less known, though, are Kahn’s reports and memos, many of which are available on the RAND Corporation’s website. In my mind, one stands out:

Herman Kahn and Irwin Mann, Ten Common Pitfalls, RM-1937 (Santa Monica, CA: RAND Corporation, July 17, 1957).

This research memorandum (hence its designation as “RM-1937”) was intended to be a very preliminary draft of a chapter in Kahn and Mann’s planned, but never completed, book, Military Planning in an Uncertain World. RM-1937 offers the book’s provisional table of contents.

Ten Common Pitalls examines a series of methodological problems that often hamper or distort the work of policy analysts. Kahn and Mann’s examination, however, is intended to be descriptive rather than analytical. In the introduction, they write that they hope RM-1937 will serve “as a sort of checklist” for analysts, or at least alert them “to the things to look for in an analysis.” As a bonus, the research memorandum illustrated (literally) each pitfall with a drawing by Kahn. These drawing, reproduced below, are quite humorous and give a sparkling sense of Kahn’s own wit and personality.

It’s interesting to me that both Kahn and John Boyd ( see the current Roundtable on Science, Strategy and War at Chicago Boyz) were intrigued by the implications of systemic, deep uncertainty, on military strategy and human cognition, with Kahn preceding Boyd in that regard by approximately a decade and a half. Both men frustrated and amazed their peers and were dedicated briefers who evolved their thinking through study, reflection, presentation and discussion who had difficulty getting their ideas into a final book format. Kahn less so than Boyd, as he is best known for On Thermonuclear War but there are many “unfinished symphonies” in Kahn’s intellectual legacy; important ideas, arguments and projections that were never developed to their full potential.