Monthly Archives: November 2014

Spiderman on Net Neutrality.

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There are three parties to the “net neutrality” debate. There are Internet Content Consumers (ICCs, individuals and businesses); Internet Content Providers (IPCs); and Internet Service Providers (ISPs). Since the ISPs connect the ICCs with the ICPs, they’re the subject of proposed regulations.

Unlike the public highways, the Internet is private property. To what degree is it legitimate for government to regulate private property? Should the Internet be treated like a utility or like normal company selling goods or services? A utility bills a customer for how much of the service or good that s/he consumes. It does not distinguish between customers, nor is it involved in competition with other providers, nor does it inquire into what purpose s/he uses the service or good.[1] A normal company competes with other companies for customers by offering new and attractive products at as low a price as possible. Which of these business forms does the Internet most closely resemble?

The Obama Administration argues that the Internet is like electricity, a utility. The President professes to fear (or serves as the mouthpiece for ICPs who fear) that ISPs will be able to “restrict the best access or pick winners and losers in the online marketplace.”

Internet Content Providers are not all equal in that some of them (Netflix, Hulu) require a lot more bandwidth than do many others. Internet Service Providers want to be able to charge these customers a different price than they charge other users. They analogize on-line content to cable television content. Being able to charge differential rates has led to an explosion of widely desired content in cable television (HBO for example). The same will happen with on-line content.

Internet Content Consumers and Internet Content Providers both hate this idea. Customers see the ISPs as positioning themselves to gouge money out of consumers by forcing them to pay for “packages” that include content that they don’t want or to pay premium prices for content that they do want. ICPs see the ISPs forging alliances with whoever has the deepest pockets, while squeezing anyone who doesn’t have great wealth yet out of the “fast lane” and into a “slow lane.”

On the other hand, differential pricing and “congestion” pricing are both well-established practices in business, government, and education. The toll on the bridge over the Delaware-Chesapeake Canal goes up on the week-end; colleges discount their price to students by providing different amounts of financial aid to different students; stores have sales.

The Internet is one of the engines of the future growth of the American economy. The Internet is not a “mature” industry or technology. Therefore the single most important issue is to decide what policy best encourages productive investment in and maximum expansion of the Internet. ISPs picking and choosing between customers sounds like a prescription for favoring established interests over new interests in a segment of the economy that is undergoing rapid development, innovation, and change. Ponderous—and perhaps politicized or paralyzed—government regulation sounds like a prescription for driving away badly-needed investment.

“One gives you cancer and the other stunts your growth.” You choose.

Neil Irwin, “A Super-Simple Way to Understand Net Neutrality,” NYT, 11 November 2014.

Eduardo Porter, “The Pitfalls of Net Neutrality,” NYT, 12 November 2014.

[1] I wonder if this is actually true in some place like Humboldt Country, CA, where there are a ton of grow houses?

 

What We Learned From the Report of the 911 Commission X

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In the mid- to late-Eighties, Khadr Abu Hoshar, a Palestinian terrorist resident in Jordan, was recruiting young men who had been through the Afghan training camps. In 1996 Abu Hoshar was imprisoned for a time by the Jordanians. By 1998 he had been released and was back to his old tricks. During 1998 he and a group of 15 fellow terrorists worked up an ambitious plan for attacks. During 1999 he got in contact with some Islamic terrorist jihadis in Afghanistan who had some sort of ties to OBL. They were providing technical advice and training to Abu Hoshar’s group. (pp. 252-253.)

Abu Hoshar’s security practices had not improved during his stretch in a Jordanian prison, however, because the Jordanian intelligence service spiked his phone and kept his whole group under observation. On 30 November 1999 the Jordanians intercepted a conversation between Abu Hoshar and Abu Zubaydah, the Afghan with connections to OBL, which seemed to herald an imminent attack. They rolled up all but one of the group, turned the screws on the prisoners until they got a bunch of intelligence in short order, and told the Americans what was up. (pp. 252-253.)

The CIA situated this report in a larger context during the first few days of December 1999 by reporting the possibility of a planned series of attacks by OBL at the “millennium,” some of which might involve weapons of mass destruction. (pp. 253-254.) Various efforts were made to hinder any such attacks by various means: by diplomacy (the Taliban were threatened, the Paks were cozened); by disruption in cooperation with friendly intelligence services; by loosening the leash on CIA operations. (pp. 254-255.) In December 1999 the leader of the Northern Alliance offered to plaster al Qaeda’s training camp at Derunta with rockets. Again, the CIA thought that this would violate a ban on assassinations, so they waved him off. (p. 270-271.)

Canada was awash in terrorists and aspiring terrorists in the late Nineties. Ahmed Ressam, a Moroccan petty criminal who had managed to find refuge in Canada in 1994, was recruited in 1998 by another jihadi then resident in Canada. Ressam spent part of 1998 training an Afghanistan terrorist camp. Here he joined a group of other Algerian jihadis who had been recruited for anti-American terrorist action. Back in Canada in the first half of 1999, Ressam received assistance from three other Algerians who were hiding out in Canada from French authorities, who wanted to talk to them about some stuff that had happened in France. By December 1999 he was in Vancouver, BC, preparing to enter the United States to attack LAX. (p. 255.)

On 14 December 1999 Ressam behaved oddly when attempting to enter the United States at Port Angeles, Washington, and was arrested. (p. 257.) The Ressam arrest coming on top of the report of the Jordanian plot caused great alarm in Washington. The FBI started tapping numerous telephones under FISA warrants. Richard Clarke’s office warned that “Foreign terrorist sleeper cells are present in the US and attacks in the US are likely.” Clarke also asked Berger rhetorically “Is there a threat to civilian aircraft?” (pp. 258-259.) In late December 1999 the US received a report from a foreign intelligence service that OBL planned to bomb several transatlantic flights. (p. 259.)

What We Learned From the Report of the 911 Commission IX.

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In February 1999, there seems to have been no confusion among the NSC and CIA people about what they wanted to accomplish: they prepared to use intelligence about Bin Laden visiting a desert hunting camp favored by some important people from the United Arab Emirates to launch another cruise missile strike (and tough luck for any Emiratis who happened to be present). The report seems to me to suggest that Clarke first blocked this strike because he saw the UAE as America’s ally in the fight against terrorism, then in March 1999 basically exposed to the Emiratis the CIA’s knowledge that the campers welcomed Bin Laden. The camp immediately folded up and Bin Laden never passed through there again. (p. 202.)

In February 1999 Tenet persuaded President Clinton to allow the CIA to try to recruit the Northern Alliance to capture or kill Bin Laden. The Northern Alliance leader showed little enthusiasm for capturing an enemy and, besides, the Northern Alliance had no ready access to the areas where Bin Laden was located. (pp. 203-204.)

In May 1999 the CIA thought it had a 50-50 chance of nailing Bin Laden in Kandahar, but they had just botched the targeting of a “smart bomb” in Belgrade and had hit the Chinese embassy. Naturally a little touchy about accuracy, Tenet seems to have backed away when it looked like everyone was getting ready to John-the-Baptist him if the attack did not succeed. (pp. 205-206.)

The rest of 1999 got frittered away trying to come up with a plan to get Bin Laden in Afghanistan. Nothing emerged. However, in 1999, and again in 2000, a group of Americans from different agencies traveled to Saudi Arabia in an effort to sort out the source of al Qaeda’s money. To their surprise they discovered that Bin Laden was not financing operations out of a vast private fortune—as had long been the assumption. Belatedly, they discovered that Bin Laden had rebuilt the “Golden Chain” of donations. How to penetrate, let alone destroy, that network remained a mystery to the CIA. (p. 268.)

These developments really left the US with no option but to try to disrupt any offensive operations outside of Afghanistan. What were they doing on this front during 1998-2001? For one thing, the National Security Agency kept watch on the communications of known terrorists.

Real trouble was at hand. In 1994 a group of Algerian terrorists had hijacked a jet, possibly with the intention of crashing it into the Eiffel Tower. Later in 1994, Ramzi Yousef, then based in the Philippines, plotted to bomb twelve US airliners flying over the Pacific. (p. 90.) This plot was broken up. In early 1995, Ramzi Yousef’s accomplice in the Manila airlines plot told interrogators that the two men had discussed crashing a plane into CIA HQ. Khalid Sheik Mohammed had adopted this plan.

In mid-1996 KSM had pitched OBL on a plan to crash airliners into American buildings. (pp. 214-215.) OBL did not commit and KSM seems to have doubted that OBL was serious about attacking the Americans.

Then the embassy bombings persuaded KSM that OBL was serious about attacking the United States. He renewed his proposal for al Qaeda support for the “planes operation.” In March or April 1999, OBL agreed to support the plan. (pp. 216, 223.)

Thus, during 1999 both the Americans and al Qaeda were searching for ways to get at one another to deadly effect. Of the two, al Qaeda operated with fewer restraints and more imagination.

Week End Update I.

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In Western Civilization there is a deeply ingrained dread of human inventiveness. Witness the stories of Prometheus (fire) and Icarus (flight). Former reporter and novelist Dan Fesperman applies this lesson to contemporary drone warfare in a novel grounded in facts. The plot centers on a drone attack gone-awry in Afghanistan. A dozen civilians are killed and others are gravely wounded. Darwin Cole, the controller who fired the “Hellfire” missile on orders from some mysterious above, comes apart at the seams after the attack. Booted from the Air Force, abandoned by his wife and children, and seeking solace in the proverbial bottle, Cole is approached by a team of journalists. They’re snuffling after a war-crimes story wrapped in a war-profiteering story hidden inside a corporations-own-America story. Having escaped the proverbial bottle, Darwin Cole soon encounters the proverbial scientist-tortured-by-guilt. This scientist, Nelson Sharpe, provides the means to voice Fesperson’s research into drone technology: it isn’t that complicated, it’s readily available to whoever wants to use it, and governments can’t control it any better than they control firearms or drugs. Islamist fanatics, Mexican drug lords, Montana militias, and private military companies all can—and will–seize this terrible technology. Then they’ll hire a bunch of pimply gamers to fly the things—probably from Arkansas trailer parks converted from meth labs, instead of from “secret” command posts in Nevada.[1] http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=myhnAZFR1po

Well, probably. However, the next story to consider is that of likely counter-measures. On the one hand, one can envision hordes of little fighter-drones circling in constant Combat Air Patrol over sensitive sites, unnoticed by the people below until there is a sudden flash of light in the sky as some approaching danger—or flock of seagulls—is eliminated. On the other hand, one can envision a further expansion of the “requirements” lists submitted to the NSA. Anyone who expresses an interest in unmanned aerial vehicles on-line should expect to have his or her name added to a watch list. So, you might look at Dan Fesperman, Unmanned (Knopf, 2014).

 

For good and ill, the United States military isn’t what it once was. The end of the Cold War led to big cuts in forces. Contractors took over many support functions, then spread into providing security services. For budget reasons, they’re here to stay. However, their mis-steps attract a lot of bad press. So the question becomes how to harness the contractors for the benefits they provide while limiting the damage they can do. One approach has been to try to create international norms for the use and behavior of private military contractors. In September 2008 the United States and sixteen other countries signed a pledge to require companies to “comply with international humanitarian or human rights law.” A 2010 document asked private military contractors to follow well-defined standards of behavior, to maintain transparency, and to be held accountable for their actions. The number of companies that have “taken the pledge”—as my Welsh grandmother used to say of temperance oaths—is a good measure of the spread of private military contractors as a form of business. Seven hundred as of 2013. Most are small companies that sub-contract work from the big boys: Xe (the re-labeled Blackwater), DynCorp, and Aegis.

If private military contractors are a business, will “regulation” prove successful? In any event, Ann Hagedorn, The Invisible Soldiers (Simon and Schuster, 2014), provides a lot of interesting information on the private contractors.

[1] This is probably bad news for any out-of-work airlines pilots who sign on the fly drug shipments into the United States. One more career avenue closed off.

Colleges Bobbing for French Fries.

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Education has always been a commodity like any other. Sellers set the price at what the market will bear. Calling colleges and universities “not-for-profit” hides from this reality. The only difference between Chrysler and a college is that colleges have no shareholders or proprietors.[1] Therefore, increased revenue goes directly to the employees. The reverse is also true. In a period of revenue constraint, the costs are taken out of the hide of the employees.

Suzanne Mettler has argued that the political gridlock in Washington has kept federal aid, like Pell grants, from rising enough to keep an increasing burden for tuition from falling on ordinary families. At the state level, the requirement to balance budgets and a widespread hostility to taxes has intersected rising costs for Medicaid and prisons to force cuts to state aid to public institutions.[2] Access to college is becoming a privilege of wealth instead of motor of American prosperity.

Barton Swaim isn’t buying it.[3] First, he sees a huge expansion of the scale and activities on the part of colleges and universities since the mid-1980s. “Departments and schools have multiplied, lavishly expensive student facilities and high-tech research centers have gone up even during recessions, well-paid administrators have multiplied like locusts, and federal grant-money has poured in at ever-increasing rates.” Why has this happened? “When government pays the bills, prices always go up.” Sellers charge what the market will be bear. Second, Swaim argues that the supposed recent “cuts” in state-funding for education are usually presented in terms of a falling share of state budgets, rather than as inflation-adjusted real dollars. (Swaim himself doesn’t bother to give any figures to support his alternative interpretation.) Implicitly, what is needed is some market discipline. Third, Swaim’s interpretation fits into the narrative of the unforeseen—and disastrous–consequences of liberal good intentions. Mettler, he says, “is right that American higher education is no longer the force of equality and opportunity that predominantly liberal policy makers intended it to be. What she misses is that those policy makers are to blame.”

What does Swaim get right and what does he get wrong? First, he’s right about the fact of the huge expansion in activities since the mid-1980s. He’s just wrong about the cause of it. Simply put, there are too many colleges and universities relative to the demand for them. They compete by multiplying academic program to reflect the latest fad, degrading academic standards, engaging in an amenities arms race, and multiplying recruitment and support staffs (i.e. administrators). We need a shake-out.

Second, he’s wrong on the cuts-in-state-financing-causing-tuition-increases issue. Tuition at public school has spiked much more than has tuition at private ones. This is the product of cuts in state aid. (See: “College costs: the old eat the young,” 27 September 2014.)

Third, he misses (or dodges) the chance to talk about the equivalent unforeseen—and disastrous–consequences of conservative good intentions. The war on drugs and the conversion of tax cuts from a rational policy choice into a primitive fetish (of the religious, rather than the sexual sort[4]) have been just as much exploding cigars as anything liberals have advocated.

[1] On the other hand, when is the last time you heard of a student recall? Jus sayin.

[2] Suzanne Mettler, Degrees of Inequality (Basic Books, 2014).

[3] Swaim, review of Mettler, Degrees of Inequality, WSJ, 14 March 2014.

[4] Although I suppose that someone could work up a funny patter on the parallels with BDSM. If that’s how you roll.

The International Trade in Jobs and Workers

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It is an article of faith among most economists and businessmen that barriers to trade between nations create inefficiencies and lower standards of living.[1] What kinds of barriers to trade exist? Tariffs are taxes on imported goods that raise the sales price to a level that makes the import uncompetitive with a domestic product. Government subsidies (payments) to domestic producers of some goods allow them to hold down prices compared to imports. Government regulations and standards for goods which vary from one country to another can force adaptation costs onto foreign producers, thus raising the price of their goods to a point where it isn’t worth the trouble to sell in a foreign market. The effect of these barriers is to reduce competition, efficiency, and specialization, while raising the cost of living for consumers.

So, trade barriers are bad. In 1994 businessmen won passage of the international treaty called the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA). This treaty abolished tariffs and other barriers to trade on 70 percent of the goods produced and consumed in Mexico, the United States, and Canada. What is the up-side of this agreement? Trade between Mexico and the US tripled during the decade and a half after passage of the treaty; Canadian exports also tripled. What is the down-side of the agreement? Wages haven’t gone up in either Mexico or the US.

In the United States the response to NAFTA is ambivalent. The normal line of development in an advanced economy is that low-wage foreign competitors in low-skill sectors take jobs from the advanced economy, while the advanced economy creates jobs in high-skill and high-wage sectors. That is one of the things that seem to be happening in the United States. By 2008, three million American manufacturing jobs had been lost since the passage of NAFTA. This doesn’t count the many more jobs lost during the “Great Recession.” On the other hand, more jobs were created in those years than in the fourteen years before passage of the treaty. Similarly, highly-mechanized North American farming is far more productive and cheaper than is much Mexican farming, so agricultural exports to Mexico have also greatly increased. However, neither American politicians nor American media have been very good about pointing out the realities of the situation. Job-loss and displacement normally gets a lot more media attention than does job creation. “If it bleeds, it leads.” Those three million manufacturing jobs that went up in smoke since 1994? Mostly they went to China and India, not to Mexico.

In Mexico the response has been profoundly hostile. Mexicans dislike NAFTA by about two-to-one. Why is that? About forty percent of Mexicans still live in poverty. Small and inefficient Mexican farms have been unable to compete with low-cost imports from North America, so many Mexican farmers have been driven to the wall. There was been a huge increase in illegal immigration to the United States, until the “Great Recession” hit. Eight million of the twelve million Mexican illegal immigrants in the United States have come since the passage of NAFTA. Is NAFTA solely or even principally to blame for the flood of illegal immigrants? Not necessarily. One Mexican observer argues that the upper classes have creamed off all the rewards of expanded trade. This has kept the benefits of increased trade from flowing downward in society through higher taxes on the well-off, better services for ordinary people, and higher wages for most workers.

This raises the possibility that the Mexican upper-class is intentionally exporting much of its population to the United States in order to defend an inequitable social order at home.

[1] “Coming to terms with NAFTA,” The Week, 30 May 2008, p. 13.

What God abandoned these defended

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Soldiers who fight for pay, rather than for a cause, are generally seen as disreputable. For example, American Patriots hated Hessian “mercenaries.” In contrast, idealists who go to war eventually command a degree of respect. One recent estimate has been that 16,000 Islamist enthusiasts have flocked to the black banner of ISIS. Clearly, ISIS represents a cause worth fighting for in the minds of many young Muslims, just as did the Spanish Republic in the 1930s for many young leftists.

In 1992 the American military began spinning-off many of its logistical and support functions to private contractors. (See: Cry of the Halliburton.) The recent wars in Afghanistan and Iraq led to a huge increase in the number of contractors in the combat areas: at their peak 155,000 in Iraq and 207,000 in Afghanistan. These numbers equaled or exceeded the number of US troops present. About as many contractors have been killed in the two wars (6,800) as have US military personnel (6,838). The use of the contractors has raised several concerns.[1]

On the one hand, there is the venerable anxiety over “waste, fraud, and abuse” (WFA).  The US paid out $200 billion for “contractors.” In 2008 Congress created a Commission on Wartime Contracting to search out WFA. Inevitably, it found many instances of over-billing and under-performance. Its estimates of spending lost to waste or fraud range between one-seventh and almost one-third of money spent, depending on what they were looking at.[2]

On the other hand, there have been concerns over unjustified violence visited on civilian populations by armed contractors. The case of Blackwater guards who shot-up Baghdad’s Nisour Square in 2007, killing 17 Iraqi civilians, has led to the conviction of one guard for murder and three others for manslaughter.

Still, contractors may be used in the current unpleasantness in Iraq and Syria. President Obama has pledged that there aren’t going to be American combat troops in Iraq. However, no one in the American government wants to totally cede the ground to Iranian advisors either. Using security contractors might offer a way to square this circle. Many of them are veterans of the US or other military forces. They could train Syrian “moderates” (to the extent that anyone can find some) and Kurdish immoderates. They could even be grouped into small combat units to directly engage ISIS forces. Backed up by US air strikes, they might make a useful contribution to the war without a name.

Contractors offer an attractive solution to several sorts of problems. First, having contractors handle logistics, maintenance, and other support functions allows the US military to concentrate its troops on war-fighting. The number of contractors can be expanded and contracted rapidly to meet the circumstance. The alternative would be to maintain a permanent large force of regular troops to handle these missions in both wartime and in peace time.

Second, nobody but their families care if they get killed. Their wounded don’t go to Walter Reed Hospital. They don’t get veterans benefits. The names of their dead don’t get printed in agate type at the bottom of an inside column in the New York Times and their faces don’t get broadcast in respectful silence on the PBS NewsHour. There isn’t going to be a Monument to the Fallen Contractor on the Washington Mall anytime soon.

[1] “Paid boots on the ground,” The Week, 14 November 2014, p. 11.

[2] The Iraq War cost at least $1.1 trillion and the long-term price may run as high as $3 trillion. Since the war itself offers an example of WFA, I’m not sure that getting nickel-and-dimed by private contractors should be our first area of concern.  See: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Financial_cost_of_the_Iraq_War

 

Cry of the Halliburton

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In January 1919 came a huge oil strike at Burke-Burnett, Texas. Soon afterward, Erle Halliburton founded a company to provide services and supplies to oil companies. As the oil industry spread from the United States to foreign countries in Latin America, the Middle East and Africa, Halliburton extended its operations. In 1962 Halliburton merged with Brown and Root, a big Texas construction company. Soon thereafter, the company started doing a booming business with the United States government. In 1992, near the end of the presidency of George H. W. Bush, the Defense Department began spinning off many of its logistical and support functions to private contractors. The argument ran that private industry could achieve greater efficiency and flexibility than could a huge federal bureaucracy like the Defense Department, which needed to concentrate on its own specialty—waging war.

During the presidency of Bill Clinton Halliburton’s business dealings with the American and foreign governments, and with oil companies zoomed upward. Halliburton earned $5.7 billion in 1995 and $12 billion in 2000. The company’s business with the United States government grew still more as a result of the second Iraq War. By 2007 the company’s revenues topped $22 billion. Halliburton’s oilfield services division gained the contract for repairing Iraq’s badly damaged and deteriorated oil industry; its logistics and construction division provides all sorts of services to American troops.

What sort of controversies surround Halliburton? First, it has been accused any number of times of over-charging the United States government. In one particularly embarrassing case, it charged the government for 42,000 meals delivered to US forces in Iraq when it had only delivered 14,000. “Oops, my bad,” said Halliburton. Second, people complain that the company was awarded no-bid contracts by the government, so they have no incentive to hold down prices. Both the Defense Department and Halliburton have countered that there are only a few companies in the world that could handle the work. Halliburton has long experience in this work and employs 100,000 people in 120 countries around the globe. Furthermore, not all of the equivalent companies are American. The work was not going to go to a French, Chinese, or Russian company under any circumstances. It was going to go to Halliburton, they argue, so why waste time with bidding when the need was urgent?

Third, the company has long cultivated strong political connections. Brown and Root had always supported Lyndon Johnson when he was the Senator from Texas and they reaped the benefit, say critics, when Johnson became president. Later, in 1992, the Secretary of Defense who initiated the shift to using private contractors to support Defense Department operations abroad was Dick Cheney. In 1995 Halliburton named Cheney as Chief Executive Officer (CEO). He remained CEO until 2000, when he left to become Vice President. Subsequently, Cheney was a proponent of war with Iraq and Halliburton has reaped the benefits described above.

In a large sense, Halliburton may be a symbol for a number of controversial developments. First, there is the issue of the “revolving door” as people cycle between companies that seek government contracts and the government agencies that award those contracts. Second, there is the whole issue of the uneven distribution of benefits in American society. Cheney made $45 million while at Halliburton and Halliburton’s stock quadrupled in value after 2003 while most people’s incomes stagnated.

Pakiban I.

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Public schools are—or should be—a big issue for Pakistan. The country is very poor. It isn’t a major oil producer, nor does it have much in the way of other natural resources. Other countries in similar circumstances, like South Korea, have created a competitive advantage by investing heavily in improved “human capital.” That means public education. You build up from the primary schools to secondary schools to technical training schools to universities. Furthermore, developing countries can’t afford to ignore any segment of the school-age population in this drive for prosperity. As was the case with the American and European public schools systems created in the 19th Century, girls and boys both have to go to school. Education is only part of the solution to national and individual poverty, but it is a vital part.

Pakistan needs such a basic school system: about one-quarter of its population is aged between 5 and 16 years old. It doesn’t have one.[1]

Almost half of the school age population doesn’t go to school at all. Almost all of the children not in school are girls. The law says that they are supposed to go to school. But imams and parents say that girls should not go to school. The government doesn’t bother or doesn’t dare to enforce the law.

Test scores for primary school students matter most in a country building up its schools from the bottom. In Pakistan, about half of 10 year-olds score at the level of 6 year-olds in language mastery, at the level of 7 year-olds in arithmetic. How do you make only one year or two years of progress in five years of school?

You turn the schools into a political machine, that’s how. Right from the establishment of independence in 1947, Pakistan has botched its public school system. The school system has always been under-financed relative to needs. Then much of the funding has been diverted into the pockets of crooked politicians and their bureaucratic clients. Half of public primary schools have no electricity. Forty percent have no working toilets. A third have no drinking water.

Jobs as school teachers became a plum awarded to political supporters and nephews. Usually the teacher’s salary goes to the man who got him the job, while the teacher sells off whatever school resources fall into his grasp and takes another job. So, Pakistan has schoolrooms with students, but without teachers or books or desks. In the 1970s and 1980s the national government played to a rising religious tide by “Islamizing” the school curriculum.

Everyone knows that the schools are a disaster. Malala Yousafzai was campaigning against the many failings of the school system when she came to the attention of the Taliban. Many powerful people have a vested interest in the disaster continuing. Is it fair to ask if the government of Pakistan put the Taliban up to shooting Malala Yousafzai so that it wouldn’t have to do the work itself?

Pakistan isn’t the only developing country with a disdain for public education or for school girls. Aravind Adiga’s novel of contemporary India, The White Tiger, scalded Indian opinion exactly because it told so many truths about the country, the schools included. The kidnapping of hundreds of school-girls by the Nigerian Islamist movement Bozo Haram[2] is telling about the attitude of Islamists. The slack response of the Nigerian government is even more telling about the attitude of an elite pre-occupied with stealing oil revenues.

It’s worth comparing these places with Japan, China, South Korea, and even Turkey.

[1] Mosharraf Zaidi, “How Pakistan Fails Its Children,” NYT, 15 October 2014.

 

[2] Yes, I know, but did you ever see that guy on television?

What We Learned From the Report of the 9/11 Commission VII.

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What was more important in 1998, fending off a nuclear war on the Indian sub-continent or working out on Pakistan to get it to pressure the religious fanatics running Afghanistan to evict a co-religionist who hated Americans? After Pakistan had tested a nuclear weapon in May 1998, the Congress had slapped heavy sanctions on the impoverished, unstable country. This left American diplomacy with little leverage in the effort to apply pressure on the Taliban. Now Pakistan’s relations with India were at an apparent breaking point because of the struggle over Kashmir. Most American diplomats involved in South Asia policy-making preferred to downplay the terrorism issue until the possibility of nuclear war had been contained. Diplomacy got nowhere by the end of 1999. (pp. 177-185.)

 

Covert Action.

After the August 1998 embassy bombings, President Clinton signed a Memorandum of Notification that instructed the CIA to attempt to capture Osama Bin Laden, but authorized the use of deadly force only for self-defense. (pp. 185, 192.) By Christmas 1998 Berger, Tenet, and Clinton purportedly had all come around to favor killing Bin Laden if he could not be captured; Clinton approved a new Memorandum of Notification to this effect. (p. 193.) However, this memo referred only to the tribal fighters in touch with the CIA, it was circulated only to a handful of people at the highest level of government, Clinton greatly diluted a similar proposed agreement with the Northern Alliance, and no CIA officials ever got the idea that Clinton seriously desired to kill—rather than capture for trial—Osama Bin Laden.

While the “sissies in striped pants” at State were doing their thing to no visible effect, the CIA and the FBI were busy busting up Al Qaeda operations overseas. During August and September 1998 al Qaeda people were arrested in Britain, Italy, Germany, and Azerbaijan.

The Afghan tribal fighters seemed to provide valuable intelligence on the location of Bin Laden, although no one in Langley thought that their purported efforts to kill Bin Laden were very credible. [NB: Reading between the lines, it appears that the tribals were milking the CIA for money and were not going to kill the goose that laid the golden eggs by killing or capturing OBL.]

In October, November, and December 1998 concern that al Qaeda meant to launch a terrorist attack within the United States led to various alerts and to discussion of an attempt to hit Bin Laden in Kandahar, but the decision-makers choked on the latter option—much to the annoyance of lower level officials.[1] Lieutenant General William Boykin, a snake-eater from way back and subsequently the Deputy Undersecretary of Defense for Intelligence, later said of this time that “opportunities were missed because of an unwillingness to take risks and a lack of vision and understanding.” (quoted, p. 199.)

[1] This lower-ranks frustration with the caution of the upper-ranks is similar to the later improvisation of a response to the 9/11 hijackings. This emerges as one of the key factors in understanding American vulnerability to attack. The Federal government appears to recruit and promote cautious, consensus-oriented CYA people.