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KEPEL: ” JIHAD HAS FAILED”

Collounsbury’s favorite Arabist, Gilles Kepel, was in the news recently for his lecture ” The War of Muslim Minds” where he argued that 9/11 represented a tremendous failure for al Qaida because it did not ignite widespread insurgency and provided the neocons with a pretext to attack ME nations. Hat tip to Robert Spencer, who slams Kepel in a post on Jihad Watch.

Kepel does seem to be recycling – at least as I read it third hand – a lot of the popular, leftist, misconceptions about neoconservatism, not unlike what you might hear from Juan Cole on the topic. A good rebuttal to this kind of conspiratorial boilerplate can be found here ( hat tip Milt’s File).

IF ACCURATE, THIS WOULD SEEM TO BE EXTREMELY DUMB

I cannot vouch for this site beyond it being recommended by Counterterrorism Blog but I found this report to be very disturbing. Have to watch and see how it pans out.

MARTIN KRAMER IN THE LION’S DEN

What happens when a critic of ME studies programs is invited to speak by the Center for Contemporary Arab Studies.

FORGING A NEW COUNTERINTELLIGENCE CAPABILITY

The CIA and the newly established Office of the National Counterintelligence Executive (NCIX) just released the new National Counterintelligence Strategy of the United States. Of all the domains that come under the rubric of ” Intelligence” none have been historically more beset by controversy and bureaucratic infighting than Counterintelligence operations.

From the days of the OSS to the CIA CI program under James Jesus Angleton to the Aldrich Ames and Robert Hanssen spy scandals, considerable, even paranoid, CI procedures failed to stem the tide of Soviet penetration of America’s intelligence community. The operational need to practice compartmentalization within the IC to limit the damage caused by Soviet moles combined by CIA – FBI rivalry, left the CI community badly fractured institutionally and to a considerable extent, blind compared to the perspective of their KGB opponents. The fall of the USSR did not result in a relaxation of compartmentalization within the IC to acheive greater CI security, instead security procedures were themselves relaxed in response to the political perception of diminishmed threat. In short, by September 11, 2001 American Counterintelligence had probably reached its nadir.

Fortunately, the Bush administration is taking steps in the right direction with the NCIX, though these steps should be, in my view, a preliminary transition to an institution with a more formidible national CI capability. Policy changes underway include:

• Proactive Posture: The NCIX will seek to disrupt foreign systems – ” neutralize and exploit” in their words – and are correctly viewing the problem as not merely formal intelligence services but also NGO entities like transnational criminal and terror organizations that are now exhibiting intelligence tradecraft. This will force opponents to drain away their relatively more limited resources and get the US ” inside their decision cycle“.

• Recognition of the Importance of Economic Espionage: The Soviets, Romanians and East Germans stole a lot of technology during the Cold War. While troubling, the Soviet bloc was falling so far behind by 1989 that the Russians reached a point where they lacked the ability to even effectively apply the knowledge they had stolen. Their vacumn cleaner approach also left them suceptible to ruinously expensive disinformation programs. Nor could the Soviets use their stolen goods to become stronger commercial rivals of the United States. Today “ 90 countries target sensitive US technologies ” seeking a free ride on our proprietary R&D investments to enhance their market share as much as to develop their military prowess.

• Emphasis on CI Analytical Products: Developing an institutional analytical capability from a counterintelligence perspective that becomes a standard part of the policy maker’s intel consumption will help mitigate the spread of disinformation, manipulation, stovepiping and old-fashioned ” spin. It is a very healthy check and balance and one I would hope is kept separate from being thrown in and watered down in IC consensus documents.

Suggestions for Further Reforms:

Looking at what seems to be a very good start to remediating long-standing, decades-old, institutional culture and operational problems there are some areas that I would like to see aggressively developed. The Bush administration really has only about two years to ram through dramatic CI changes that can stick and take on a life of their own before everyone’s eye shifts to 2008. Priorities must be decided upon so I’ve selected two:

Counter Foreign Strategic Influence in the American Political Process:

One of the useful media contributions during the series of Clinton fundraising scandals was highlighting the degree to which foreign entities, including agents of unfriendly regimes, transnational gangs and various shadowy operators solicited influence in the American political process. Given the preponderant influence in world affairs possessed by the USG and our multiplicity of interests across the globe, a ” stakeholder” mentality has developed in the minds of foreign governments, corporations, political movements where they deem it vital to influence our leaders directly, openly or in secret. None of this is going away and it is going to creep further and further down the ” political food chain” as foreign entities target rising young politicians of both parties for cultivation.

Establish a Foreign Counterintelligence Agency:

What CI needs is an independent and standardized operational capability to ” go on the offensive” abroad in terms of network disruption at their ” source” and to become an institutional center to develop and implement CI tradecraft. NCIX is a major step forward but it lacks ( at least as I am reading it) true operational authorities and to the extent that NCIX can corral,cajorle and coordinate operational teams from the CIA, DIA, FBI and other agencies they are draining away assets from those agencies.

Secondly, as a practical matter establishing a foreign CI agency avoids the hair-raising political brawl over trying to establish a domestic counterpart with the attendent constitutional and legal implications. While we need something on the domestic side of the ledger it is better to work out the kinks overseas and identify some of problems to be avoided before attempting the much more delicate task of fitting CI into an open society.

ADDENDUM: I intended to link to this yesterday but Blogger being Blogger was unusable last night – check out Whirledview’s deconstruction of the Silberman Report.

THE GOP PLAYING THE KETTLE TO PAUL KRUGMAN’S POT

Since this post may irritate my more liberally inclined readers let me first state that Paul Krugman’s point about the ” Flat Earth ” anti-Science faction in the Republican Party being exceptionally damaging to the image of the GOP and national policy is a valid one. Admittedly, there are some highly-placed people in my party who see public virtue or cynical advantage in promoting ignorance and authoritarian social policy. Unless these psuedo-religious wingnuts are reined in by the Karl Rove types or the libertarian wing of the Republican party regains enough of a voice to provide some balance in intraparty debates, I’m pretty sure these jackasses will manage to alienate enough voters within two election cycles to lose at least one house of Congress to the Left. Maybe even the presidency in 2008.

Where Krugman fails is where he usually does,in imagining negative characteristics to be a monopoly of the right side of the spectrum. In “An Aademic Question” Krugman basically argues that conservatism is now intrinsically opposed to scientific thought and that the monolithic domination of American universities by the Left is simply a natural order of things. James Miller at TCS and Lubos Motl have issued rebuttals to Krugman’s more ineptly reasoned points but I wanted to highlight the lacuna that is driving Paul Krugman’s argument.

“Conservatives should be worried by the alienation of the universities; they should at least wonder if some of the fault lies not in the professors, but in themselves. Instead, they’re seeking a Lysenkoist solution that would have politics determine courses’ content.

And it wouldn’t just be a matter of demanding that historians play down the role of slavery in early America, or that economists give the macroeconomic theories of Friedrich Hayek as much respect as those of John Maynard Keynes”

The question is not whether or not Friedrich Hayek should be put on a pedastal on par with Lord Keynes but whether a freshman can graduate from a first rate university without ever hearing Hayek’s name or that of equivalent figures whose ideas and actions have had a deep impact on the affairs of the 20th century. They can and that’s the crux of the problem, an intellectual cleansing of university programs of ideas, thinkers and points of view that most irritate politically active leftists.

Politics have determined the course content at most major universities. Politics have driven out the required canon, instituted grade inflation, established fuzzy ” studies” programs that are often sinecures for race and gender socialists, defunded traditional history fields, established speech codes and put white males at a disadvantage in the hiring process.

It has been politics from one direction up until now. No, students suing professors isn’t the solution but leaving university policy in the hands of people like Paul Krugman isn’t the answer either.