"Obama: Yup, We're At War In Pakistan"

Wired's Danger Room blog reports:

Perhaps you were wondering whether or not the U.S. was really at war in Pakistan, as well as Afghanistan. Well, President Obama just put those questions to rest.

With everyone from Hillary Clinton to Robert Gates to General David Petraeus at his side, Obama announced this morning "a comprehensive, new strategy for Afghanistan and Pakistan." Not Afghanistan, with an occasional cross-border drone strike. Afghanistan and Pakistan.

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I highly recommend reading Danger Room on a regular basis. The writers there provide some of the best reporting on military issues that I've ever found.

"Guantanamo State Of Mind"

Jacob Sullum writes for Reason:

In January 2002, the Pentagon began imprisoning men it described as “very hard cases”—“the worst of the worst” terrorists in American custody—at the U.S. Naval Base in Guantanamo Bay, Cuba. During the next seven years it released more than 500 of them. “What’s left,” Vice President Dick Cheney declared in the final week of the Bush administration, “is the hard core.” That was a few days before the Pentagon released half a dozen more.

Unless the Bush administration recklessly loosed hundreds of hardened terrorists on the world, its initial descriptions of the detainees were mistaken. That pattern of error reinforces the argument against allowing the executive branch to wield the unchallengeable authority it asserted at Guantanamo.

As President Obama proceeds with his plan to close the prison, he should recognize that Guantanamo is not so much a place as a state of mind. It’s an attitude that says: We know who the bad guys are, and we’re not about to let anyone endanger national security by second-guessing us.

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Cato Takes Cheney To Task On Security

From the Cato Institute:

Recently former Vice President Dick Cheney had the audacity to claim the Obama administration, by reversing President George W. Bush's policy on the harsh interrogation of terrorist suspects, has endangered American lives and opened our country to another terrorist attack. Americans would be best served by ignoring the baseless accusations of the former vice president.

Today, if America is as vulnerable as Cheney claims, the reasons are that the interrogation methods he defends have become a major recruiting tool for terrorists, and that he and his ilk diverted America's resources away from those who attacked us on 9/11 by invading a country that did not. Regrettably, the war in Iraq was a costly distraction for which we are now paying in Afghanistan and Pakistan.

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Prominent Iowa blogger and paradigmatic GOP hack Ted Sporer would do well to pay less attention to Fox News and more to the Cato Institute. As would any Republican activist or politician who actually cares about ideas and the truth. But that's a pretty small fraction of them at this point--because the base is not reality-based.

Ted Sporer Gets Off On Torture, Militarism

Here's what Sporer had to say about the following video:

Some one needs to discuss the consequences of the childlike approach to national security by which the Obama Adminstration [sic] is imperilling the United States.

I recommend that this windbag, who seems to be pretty representative of the average Iowa Republican activist at this point, read up on the torture methods Cheney advocates before defending them as a wise national security strategy. Unless of course he doesn't mind coming across as an ignorant fascist.

Update:

Andrew Sullivan continues to do his part to keep the heat on the vicious former vice president:

What people forget about Cheney is his rank incompetence - which he covers up with fear-mongering and sadism. Very few things have enraged me as much recently - not even the thieves and con-artists at AIG - as that disgraceful, repellent, and deeply dishonest CNN interview Cheney gave last Sunday. Truly a low-point in that man's gutter-level conduct of public office.

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Rampant Drug Violence As A Good Sign? Seriously?

Andrew Sullivan points to an absurd paragraph from the Wall Street Journal:

U.S. law-enforcement officials—as well as some of their counterparts in Mexico—say the explosion in violence indicates progress in the war on drugs as organizations under pressure are clashing “If the drug effort were failing there would be no violence,” a senior U.S. official said Wednesday. There is violence “because these guys are flailing. We're taking these guys out. The worst thing you could do is stop now.”

The Cato Institute offers a sane response to the government's tired propaganda:

While U.S. leaders have focused on actual or illusory security threats in distant regions, there is a troubling security problem brewing much closer to home. Violence in Mexico, mostly related to the trade in illegal drugs, has risen sharply in recent years and shows signs of becoming even worse. That violence involves turf fights among the various drug-trafficking organizations as they seek to control access to the lucrative U.S. market. To an increasing extent, the violence also entails fighting between drug traffickers and Mexican military and police forces.

The carnage has already reached the point that the U.S. State Department has issued travel alerts for Americans traveling in Mexico. U.S. tourism to cities on Mexico’s border with the United States, where the bloodshed has been the worst, has dropped sharply. Even more troubling, the violence is spilling across the border into communities in the southwestern United States.

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And John Robb goes even further with his quite literal warnings about the barbarians gathering at our gates.

The best way to protect America's national security is to legalize, regulate, and tax most currently illegal drugs. Doing so is the most feasible strategy for bankrupting the dangerous global guerrillas who are becoming ever more aggressive in asserting themselves in Mexico and the United States. And if we don't undercut their power base, they will undercut ours.

Cheney Attacks Obama For Following The Law

CNN reports:

The Obama administration's new policies on Guantanamo Bay prison and the treatment of detainees makes it more likely a terrorist attack against the United States will succeed, former Vice President Dick Cheney said Tuesday.

In an interview with Politico, the former vice president issued a stringent defense of the Bush administration's record on the war on terror, and said he worries the President Obama has already made the country more vulnerable.

“When we get people who are more concerned about reading the rights to an Al Qaeda terrorist than they are with protecting the United States against people who are absolutely committed to do anything they can to kill Americans, then I worry,” Cheney said in the interview published Wednesday.

Obama should ignore this, but Holder should get the ball rolling on a criminal investigation into Bush officials' illegal actions. Cheney is obviously trying to goad Obama into a war of words to make any future prosecution look like personal retribution. But this shouldn't be about Cheney or Obama. It should be about the law. Torture is torture. Period.

Update:

Andrew Sullivan shows how America's torture practices under Bush are having serious consequences for our country's relationship with the UK.

Update II:

More from Sullivan, this time on Cheney's inexcusable behavior.

Update III:

Sullivan links to Spencer Ackerman's thorough take down of the nonsense Cheney continues to spew.

Mexico: The Canary In The Coal Mine?

Continuing with the line of thinking from my earlier post "Re: Was Ayn Rand Right All Along?"...

The global economic/political/social situation looks increasingly bleak.

The Washington Post reports:

The world economy is deteriorating more quickly than leading economists predicted only weeks ago, with Britain yesterday becoming the latest nation to surprise analysts with the depth of its economic pain.

Britain posted its worst quarterly contraction since 1980 on the heels of sharper than expected slowdowns reported from Germany to China to South Korea. The grim data, analysts said, underscores how the burst of the biggest credit bubble in history is seeping into the real economies around the world, silencing construction cranes, bankrupting businesses and throwing millions of people out of work.

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And Joel Kurtzman writes for the Wall Street Journal (via Thomas Barnett):

Mexico is now in the midst of a vicious drug war. Police officers are being bribed and, especially near the United States border, gunned down. Kidnappings and extortion are common place. And, most alarming of all, a new Pentagon study concludes that Mexico is at risk of becoming a failed state. Defense planners liken the situation to that of Pakistan, where wholesale collapse of civil government is possible.

One center of the violence is Tijuana, where last year more than 600 people were killed in drug violence. Many were shot with assault rifles in the streets and left there to die. Some were killed in dance clubs in front of witnesses too scared to talk.

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Barnett comments:

The danger that Latin America once again becomes an active arena for U.S. military involvement (we are always somewhat involved, I'm talking about where the public's sense of intervention is activated by events and magnitude) looms for two reasons: the global downturn eventually reaches there (despite the political bravado down there) and the drug violence is distinctly heating up.

Point being: the auto-pilot quality of the past decade isn't likely to work. Neither subject (pushing more economic inclusiveness with trade agreements and figuring out an alternative path to the dysfunctional (certainly for Mexico) drug war) are ones Obama would gladly tackle in the near-term, and yet, events may force him to do so.

John Robb brings up the highly problematic situation in Mexico in two recent posts that are both highly instructive and disturbing.

Regarding how Mexico's unraveling relates to the problems most other nation states are having, Robb writes:

Diving into military theory (again).

A core dynamic behind the emergence of the nation-state was it's ability to run a successful protection business (aka racket). A system that has been growing since the treaties of Westphalia in the 1600s. The protection business is relatively simple:

1. It is a monopoly. It has exclusive ownership over the use of violence. As a monopoly, it must crush all internal competitors.
2. It defends its monopoly from outside interests -- as in warfare with nation-state and non-state competitors.
3. It charges the customers (individuals and businesses) within its geographical areas of control for this service. This isn't optional. Customers presumably benefit from this protection.

...

The protection formula broke down in the latter half of the 20th Century as the nation-state became more complex. Key elements of this breakdown include...

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So what should you take away from all this?

First, in the short-term we need to end the drug war ASAP unless we're okay with the strong possibility of having to deal with a failed stated on our southern border within the next several years--to a certain extent we already are, but things could easily get much worse. Second, we need to brace ourselves for a long and wild ride. The world seems set to change radically over the coming decades. We all need to start thinking about what we can do to help ourselves through these difficult times as opposed to just standing around hoping our failing nation-states will save us. Because they won't.

Society's Future Immune System: Technology

Armed with nothing but standard black-market weapons and consumer electronics, a small group of dedicated attackers was recently able to shut down Mumbai, India, for several days. And, disturbingly, there's little reason to think the same thing couldn't happen in an American city.

Civilian police forces aren't trained or equipped to deal with such brazen commando-style raids, and trying to change that would be pointless. There simply aren't enough resources available to militarize our cities to that extent. Not to mention that doing so could have dire long-term consequences for civil liberties and democracy.

So what should we do instead? The best place to start is to look at what happened in Mumbai.

Long before the Indian authorities had any idea what was happening, average citizens stepped up and worked to save hundreds of lives. One man, working in a train station that was attacked, saw a way for many of the people there to escape through an exit at the opposite end of the station from where the gunmen had entered. Rather than fleeing immediately, this man risked his own life to get on the station's loudspeakers and tell the frightened crowd where to go. Also, in one of the hotels that came under siege, the staff shepherded numerous guests to safety through a series of service corridors and rooms only they knew about.

The Mumbai attack also decisively proved the usefulness of social media in disbursing vital information efficiently. Just as modest service employees were able to act more quickly and possibly save more lives than trained security forces, citizen journalists were able to get the word out much faster than the mainstream media. As the assault on the city was unfolding, people there and around the world could follow the latest developments in real time on Twitter, a micro-blogging service that allows people to send and receive short messages on their cell phones or computers. The wire services that used to break news were left in the dust.

Importantly, all of these amazing organic responses to the horror in Mumbai happened without any planning whatsoever. This is key, because being able to respond dynamically to unexpected threats is the only effective way to minimize the harm potentially unpredictable attacks can cause.

As technology continues to become simultaneously more powerful, cheaper, and easier to use, radical groups are going to be able to pull off increasingly destructive strikes. Electronics such as satellite phones and GPS units allowed the 10 or so men who brought Mumbai to its knees to coordinate with each other more effectively than even elite militaries could until quite recently. And given the rapid advances in desktop manufacturing, within the next decade or two, malevolent individuals will likely be able to produce deadly weapons such as automatic firearms and explosives for themselves using abundantly available materials.

Rather than faithfully entrusting our collective security to increasingly outdated bureaucracies that process information and act too slowly to respond effectively to rapidly emerging new threats, our society must focus on becoming more connected, flexible, and resilient.

Thankfully, technology's relentless advance provides us with just as many tools for good as for ill. For example, cell phones and other mobile devices provide the perfect infrastructure to build on. Soon, it will be technically and economically feasible to integrate sensors into such devices that could detect radiation, dangerous chemicals, and other hazards. Combined with a system that would allow people to share information such as the locations and activities of armed attackers with law enforcement as well as each other, such a network of smart devices could act like a city's immune system. As soon as harmful intruders are detected, information about what they are doing and where they are going could quickly be disseminated throughout the entire population. This would allow people to be sufficiently informed to get out of harm's way even in the heat of a chaotic and unexpected crisis.

No matter what, extremists who desire to sow widespread panic and destruction will keep using cutting-edge technology to achieve their goals. Governments around the world need to embrace that same technology in order to facilitate more dynamic responses to such aggressive actions. And if they fail to do so, private citizens will need to come together and do it for ourselves.

(Cross-posted at the DI's main site.)

Those who find these ideas interesting would probably also want to check out these sites, from which I obtained much of the background information for this column:
- Global Guerrillas
- Wired: Danger Room
- Wired: Threat Level
- Responsible Nanotechnology
- Kurzweil AI
- The FASTforward Blog