The beginning of the end in Afghanistan

The US is now shifting its forces to urban areas in Afghanistan. This is not the end of the beginning, this is the beginning of the end.

By this I do not mean to say that redeploying forces must always be a loss, or is leading to defeat. Neither is true. However, the war in Afghanistan, and indeed the foundation of major conflict in Afghanistan for the past 40 or 50 years, is fundamentally based on a split between the rural population, and the urban population.

So long as this clash of cultures is so large, it is questionable whether Afghanistan could be controlled, as a geographic entity, even if the urban population were a majority. Since the rural population is the majority however, a withdrawal from the rural areas means that the Taliban has captured the crucial territory in Afghanistan.

The US and international forces, like the Soviets before them, have regarded girls schools and movie theaters as being bolts of modernity for a modern state. In fact, ANY cultural modernization, however virtuous, that takes place in urban but not rural areas, is a nail in the coffin of the urban government.

If the Taliban constitutes the 'native' faction in the rural and tribal areas, then the war itself will become in addition to a religious crusade, and a war against foreign occupation, also a tribal war.

The Pashtun tribesmen are THE crucial faction, and if they are united against you, you lose Afghanistan.

The political machinations of the Pentagon being what they are, the generals in charge are asking for more troops, in order to "win". In fact, strictly speaking, they are quite correct that they can win with enough troops. The detail being left out, is that Genghis Khan, Alexander the Great, and Julius Caesar have nothing on these bold fellows, provided sufficient numbers of soldiers are provided.

This is not to say that US commanders are incompetent; neither the Mongols or Alexander the Great had much luck in the region, but US political dialog generally requires that American military officers bark patriotically about victory under all circumstances.

At least so far as most of the US military's brass is concerned, the job of the politicians in charge is to look at the size of the bill, and the price in blood to be paid, and call off the game before the losses add up. There are now more Americans fighting in Afghanistan when you include 'contractors' than there were Soviets at the height of their misadventure. Time to hit the road.

The freaky thing is that this Afghanistan adventure is malfunctioning badly enough so that Joe Biden, of all people, can see the problem and is the LEADING advocate of bailing in the Obama administration. I would like to imagine that the sheer brainpower of Obama and Co. has burned through the BS, but when you read the amazingly negative remarks by the Generals in charge of our safari, it seems more likely that the decision makers are getting "foxhole religion". I suspect that the situation is simply bad enough that Biden's characteristic of blurting out anything in his head has made him an advocate of the obvious.

This is probably the last chance for pulling out without having the war be seen as a complete and utter fiasco. The Pakistanis have made sure to maintain their connections with the Taliban for the primary reason that they aren't willing to risk a government in Afghanistan that isn't an ally. There are plenty of secondary reasons as well, not least being many Pakistani's sympathy with the Taliban. What is going to happen this spring, given the clear downward trajectory of the US occupation, is that the Pakistanis are going to either export their highly troublesome religious fanatics, or start packaging them for shipping.

A lot of people in Washington would probably like to drag out a withdrawal, even if they figure that the war is a turkey, but there isn't any way that the US is going to allowed to slowly 'slip off the edge'. If we don't move quick, the Pakistanis are going to push, hoping that the US will kill off as many annoying Pakistani fanatics in Afghanistan as possible. A lot of the old hands at the PSI had made the calculation that the Taliban was coming back at the BEGINNING of the war, and only an idiot would believe anything different now. The thing is, the NON-religious and secular Pakistani officials are going to tend to support the Taliban at this point by sending their armed fanatics, simply because they hope that the US bases will serve as 'roach motels' (they check in, but never check out) for fanatics. The Arab governments played this game with the Soviets, the Pakistanis have done this with India for generations, and there is no earthly way that we are going to be able to convince Pakistan to stop. In fact, there is a fair chance that the Arabs will start up again, if they are not already.

Even if it takes a while for the Pakistanis to arrive, some of our most important anti-Taliban measures are going to explode in our laps, if we are still largely in place by the spring. Many advocates of a continued commitment are advocating that the US pour more effort into training Afghans, to take the place of US troops. This is all very well, but it neglects the questionable loyalty of the new recruits. The Taliban is very happy to have American trained soldiers, as this permits them to understand and counter US combat tactics. Consequently, the Taliban will pay a defecting Afghan soldier a salary larger than he would receive fighting for the government. Afghan warfare is fought by the seasons, and it is very likely that Taliban sympathizers are, as I write this, signing up for Afghan government service, knowing that they will be trained during the winter, and will not have to bear arms against their countrymen. US training should improve the future-Taliban's chances of survival, and collecting a salary during training certainly beats spending the winter in a cave! Come spring however, we can expect many new Afghan soldiers to melt away with the snow.

What the US needs to do now, is to bail out, and do so by cutting some sort of deal that gives us a "chaos" excuse for the eventual collapse. If we do it right, the Pakistanis will want to stop or control a lot of their own Taliban in place, rather than export them as hopeful casualties.

Otherwise, the US will scream about "stopping your crazies" and the Pakistanis will, while shaking us down for equipment, comply somewhat in "taking control" but will leave the door to Afghanistan wide open as THE option of choice for avoiding the thrills of a Pakistani jail. This is such an obvious and well known strategy there that even if the US was somehow able to stop both the central government, and the upper levels of the hard-line intelligence apparatus from using it, thousands of low level officials, soldiers and police would use the scheme for careerist motivations;"well MY district is under control", or to cut down on the chances of being shot or blown up.

Incidentally, I would give fair odds that if the war drags out, we are going to end up seeing some significant tensions with China as a side effect, albeit a very classified side effect (actual reasons for tension hidden). Recall that the Chinese are Pakistan's other major ally, and one that the Chinese cannot afford to lose in any geopolitical sense. Anybody in the Pakistani government that the Americans don't like, is a natural recruit for China. The US has accustomed the political culture of Pakistan to the notion of working with a foreign intelligence service in the CIA. This sort of hidden contact with an ally is regarded more as a political maneuver in Pakistan than as treason and it is likely that the Chinese will take advantage of the situation. With Afghanistan and Pakistan so close, they have every reason to support those Pakistanis who are less affiliated with the US, and frankly even if the US becomes alienated from the Pakistanis altogether, the Chinese win.

Now the Chinese don't actually like Muslim radicals, but Muslim radicals are the largest anti-American faction of note in the world today, and so it makes sense to have them on good terms in a very covert sense. This risk is worth taking for the Chinese for three reasons.

First, KGB type tactics seem like a satisfactory means for the Chinese to deal with foreign terrorists or weirdoes. Using spy tactics is generally going to mean that agents will have to have contact with the targeted group, whether they are terrorists or not. Second, the Uighur separatists, who provide the main risk to China associated with increased terrorist or Muslim extremist activity, are basically under control, so their spies can take more risks. Third, the Americans won't turn over the Uighur's that they have captured, and have Uighur supportive media. This means that the best means for the Chinese to grab dissident Uighurs is to deal with the Muslims that they would run to, rather than to turn to the US, which is nominally in a war with terrorism in general.

I don't think that any of this means that the Chinese will actually take serious Muslim radical supporting steps however. The real reason that there is likely to be tension is that the Americans and signals-intelligence heavy nations tend to believe that people mean what they say. If you think about it, a significant proportion of the words being said at any given point anywhere in the world are likely to be sarcastic, or social lies.

If a Chinese intelligence officer is trying to pick up a Pakistani government official who wants to export the local radicals, one of the most obvious means of sucking up is to say that he is right, flattering him, and encouraging him to do what you can tell he wants to do anyway. The Americans pick this up, and flatter themselves with the notion that one, they are being plotted against, and two, the reason that an unwinnable counterinsurgency is being lost is that someone big is "actually" doing it.

I suspect that most high governmental officials anywhere in the world are used to disbelieving a lot of what is said to them, but signals intelligence allows a person to get 'drunk' on secrets and truths. What you pick up spying isn't magically true.

Incidentally, Chinese intelligence officers are likely to take advantage of the eavesdropping as an additional recruiting tool. If the Chinese say, in communications that they know will be intercepted, that particular figures are either working with them, or simply have particular anti-American attitudes, then the US protective reaction towards those Pakistanis becomes a self-fulfilling prophesy. Tactical gamesmanship of this sort is likely to be seized upon by people looking for a "good" and less humiliating reason for loosing a guerrilla war, and also by the traditionally anti-China faction. Just another potential/likely side-effect when you keep digging your problem deeper. Keep it simple, and bail.

Paparazzi for the state

Here is a rather unhappy development.

At paparazzi schools in South Korea, students are taught how to stalk their prey and get them on film, but it's not the celebrities they're after, just ordinary citizens committing minor crimes.

As the article details, the South Korean government has instituted a set of rewards paid to people informing on the minor infractions of their neighbors, be it smoking in non-smoking areas, to littering. Not only have these measures empowered the busybodies of society, but the rewards are sufficiently large that a new class of professional informers have emerged, the ssu-parazzi (garbage paparazzi) trained at private academies in the techniques of celebrity hunting journalists, and equipped with hidden cameras to catch more media-shy prey.

A global threat?

While most of us, indeed even people with scant sympathy towards wealthy and camera-shy celebrities, are likely to be disgusted by this harassment of the common man or woman, do we all need to be actually concerned by this development? After all, it is not difficult to find abuses of most any sort in some corner of the globe, and Korea has a very long history of oppressive government monitoring. Even in the 15'th, and 17'th centuries, in service of a feudalistic system that bound peasants to the land, Koreans were forced to carry Hopae , identification tags made of metal or wood containing their personal information; a rather noxious combination of the bureaucratic and the medieval.

Without further indication of such a scheme actually in the works, I do not think that it is possible to predict that something so strange as the ssu-parazzi ARE coming to the rest of the world, but the barrier to such a development or other pervasively intrusive monitoring in pursuit of trivial offenses might be lower than you think.

New moralities open doors for new methods of enforcement

In the first place, the motivations behind the use of informants in Korea are not obsolete and decrepit. Iran and Saudi Arabia for example, have morality police that pursue people for petty offenses that generally have little effect on others. While these nations are likely to to remain socially conservative, the necessity for specialized morality police gives the game away. Only a special force could be relied on to take up the chase because the offenses in question are so trivial that the regular police would tend to ignore them. This structure confirms the widely circulated reports that most Saudis and Iranians are not inclined to support social strictures as strict as are now imposed. The sorts of novel oppressions that these nations might now devise are unlikely to spread because so extreme a manifestation of the belief system that supports them is itself decrepit and crumbling.

By contrast, the offenses that South Korean informants are chasing are those connected with widespread emerging moralities. Anti-smoking rules are expanding rapidly, both in the sense that these rules are spreading internationally, and in the sense that their scope is widening. A ban on smoking outdoors would have been unimaginable a generation ago, but today legal proposals are being made that smoking in your own apartment should be forbidden.

Environmentalism has recently taken on a moralistic and quasi-religious tone, with traditional religious authorities jumping on the bandwagon; the Vatican declaring pollution a mortal sin for example.

These new modern sins are what the ssu-parazzi pursue, targeting smokers, littering, and shopkeepers who give away free plastic bags ( apparently forbidden by a regulation designed to prevent waste, and likely related to other pollution-minded plastic bag bans seen throughout the world). When there is a shift in morality, with new taboos emerging, otherwise offensive measures to enforce these taboos begin to seem increasingly reasonable.

The ongoing redefinition of privacy


One of the distinctive features about the most swiftly advancing portions of modern technology (including the Internet) is that these technologies facilitate the documentation of an increasingly large portion of our lives, and enable the gathered information to be arranged into a meaningful and revealing whole.

When a person has a conversation with a person over the phone, walks past a store with surveillance cameras, or makes a purchase, they generate recorded data.

Each of these actions has a ready equivalent going back thousands of years, and each of these actions might have been noted by various people in the past.

A shopkeeper can recognize a person that makes a purchase, or walks by his store, and anyone who had a conversation would leave a memory with the other person in the conversation at least.

Anybody wanting to reconstruct these events however, would either need the cooperation of all of the many people who interacted with an individual, or would need to follow the targeted person while attempting to avoid detection in their surveillance. Either questioning a person's associates or dogging their footsteps would require extraordinary effort, and neither course of action would be practical against the majority of the population.

Increasingly however, information of this type on everyone resides in a few databases. Once entrance to these databases has been obtained, every one's activities are revealed. This obviously has privacy implications, as intrusions that would previously been ruled out due to impracticality, now become a threat to everyday life. A person might instinctively sense that something is immoral, or in this case, intrusive and a violation of privacy, but in defining what is permissible or not, a definition of privacy, and implicit with this, the listing of the boundaries of privacy becomes necessary.

America: legitimization of the parts triggers legitimization of the whole

The US legal response to the development of modern electronic data gathering and storage.
has been limited, with the courts concluding that as long as the individual transactions and bits of data in a database were legally and legitimately obtained, the compilation of this information to create a picture of a person's life is legitimate as well. Accordingly, companies have sprung up to compile all available pieces of information in order to target advertising, provide credit ratings, and the like.

While legal, the pervasive databasing of personal information is not favored by the public. Indeed the awareness of the threat of pervasive surveillance has recently been turned into law with the introduction of anti-stalker laws. However, anti-stalker laws are legally, if not always socially interpreted as being strictly anti-harassment measures, not as recognition to a right to privacy against the threat of cocooning, but bit by bit legal, information gathering.

While the public thus might oppose the pervasive collection of their personal information, this collection remains protected by law, and should this remain true, over time the legal standard is likely to drag the social standards into line behind it.

The boundaries of privacy in the US are thus being drawn as functions of trespass, i.e. nobody can place a camera in your living room without your permission. The ssu-parazzi however (unlike many a paparazzo) , are not distinguished by their trespass into restricted space, but are distinguished by their pervasive monitoring of the public. As there are already many private companies which profit by pervasively monitoring the public, the addition of the fact that the ssu-parazzi report on illegality is not likely to stand out as distinctively offensive if the public comes to accept pervasive monitoring.

Europe: privacy as government access monopoly

In Europe, by contrast, private industry is considerably restricted in their ability to profit by trawling through the data of the public. There are several strands of thought behind European privacy regulations. The strongest would seem to evolve from the fact that particular private facts would be most disruptive were they revealed to particular individuals. In most cases when a person particularly seeks privacy against the knowledge of someone, that someone is not working for the government in an official capacity. Of course most of the things that a person would prefer to remain private would likewise be of little interest or significance to an advertiser or the bank either, meaning that if this logic is accepted fully, then the widespread US commercial data gathering would likewise be of little importance. Such commercial information compilers are much more restricted in Europe however. State information gathering is much less restricted, and other than regulation mandating that the government grant proper permits to itself, there is little to stop security and law enforcement from prying where it will.

At this point it would be common to praise the European privacy protections, and sneer a bit at US distrust of government. Certainly a sneer at the US would be in order, even if the criticism is quite precisely targeted given the fact that virtually no protection against privatized privacy violations has been provided, and to top it off, the US government has lately engaged in pervasive 'trespass' violations of private communication, despite the law.

The real deterioration of privacy in Europe can be seen however, if one tries to project comparable government and private behaviors back in time. Would a European nation in the 18'th or 19'th century have been praised for its protection of privacy if shopkeepers were forbidden from swapping information on sales, so as to target customers, but all such information was required to be submitted to the secret police? Would it have been a triumph of personal privacy if a butcher could not try to listen in on conversations in the pub, or seek out gossip to find out when somebody was having a party (and hence a sales opportunity), BUT the bartender was REQUIRED to take notes on all conversations he overheard, and keep those notes for the convenience of the secret police? Most of Europe requires that the telecom and Internet providers provide this governmental access to private communications and indeed in many cases, requires that the companies keep detailed records of citizen communications for the convenience of the "security services".

One may of course, fuss about terrorism, but the proverbial "bomb-throwing" radical has been around for a long time, and it was a rare government in Europe in the last few hundred years that did not face the threat of invasion, political revolution, or coup, any one of which would threaten more people than any thinly-supported Islamic radical in Europe could today.

In Europe, the boundaries of privacy have been set on the boundary of private action. Governmental actions taken to enforce the law or protect the public against a "security threat" are discounted as serious privacy violations.

Looking at the ssu-parazzi, they are after all, assisting in the enforcement of the law, and while smoking is scarcely a terrorism threat, an enthusiastic public-health campaigner will have little difficulty in claiming that secondhand smoke is an equal problem. Frankly, terrorism (defined as radical or extremist attack on the public, as opposed to actions taken by the state to terrorize the public into obedience) simply does not kill very many people, and while secondhand smoke deaths are not common, nor are the statistics for such a threat of the best stability, the figures being thrown about, such as 40,000 deaths supposedly induced by secondhand smoke though heart disease, are much higher than terrorism deaths.

Littering is perhaps, less of a public health threat, but environmentalists do not seem to have much difficulty in transmuting a particular environmental threat into the survival of life of earth itself.

That the surveillance serve the officially-defined public interest is simply not enough of a protection to preclude pervasive violation of privacy. Custom throughout the world would presently bar the ssu-parazzi and the informant system behind them, but custom has a way of yielding to the defined logic and ethics of society. If we do not wish to face the privacy intrusions of celebrities, and face them without the wealth and power that accrues to their status, then all of us, around the world need to insist on privacy and insist on a logic of rights and freedoms that will secure privacy through the continued evolution of technology.