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  • Joshua Foust’s Illiberal Arguments for Drones

    Yemen
    Yemeni activist Farea Al-Muslimi testifies at a Congressional hearing about drones.

    There is nothing likely more diabolically tempting to the human rights activist's mind (as distinct from the peace activist's mind) than the notion that war — which is a given, which is legal, which even has rules — can be made "better" or "more precise" or "more legal" or "less damaging".

    And that's precisely the argument that the diabolical Joshua Foust makes to the policy community and the human rights movement which he always seeks to undermine with his latest apologia for drones, "The Liberal Case for Drones".

    There's even a feel-good sub-headline, "Why human rights advocates should stop worrying about the phantom fear of autonomy". That's a reference to the idea that if machines are coded to go and do things, human agents will lose control over them, i.e. lose their autonomy, and cede it to machines, which thereby become more autonomous even beyond human agency.

    I've written in the past about Foust's immorality on the drones issue here and here and about the problem of so many civilians killed here.

    To extreme groups like CODE PINK, to the legions of facile shallow anti-American re-tweeters, it's easy to put Foust down as doing the evil bidding of the Amerikan war machine and discount his sophisticated arguments –  but they're not his audience and they don't matter to him.

    Foust wants to convince the technocrats in the human rights organizations and liberal press and think tanks to come around to his way of thinking, and he is already successful in some respects. While Human Rights Watch has boldly started a campaign against "Killer Robots" (like Yoshimi!), there are those in the same international law circles who find the Foustian logic compelling; they think that having a cleaner and more precise way to kill people, given that it actually isn't against international law to wage war if you follow humanitarian law, would be a boon for humankind.

    "Lest You Dash Your Foot Against a Stone"

    At one level, this parable is worth invoking because it's about a premise that divine (perfect) agency will work right every time and the right angelic interventions would kick in every time, and at another level it's simply about bad literalist arguments that don't take into the complexity of the divine.

    In the Bible (Luke 4:9-11), Jesus Christ fasts for 40 days and nights, and then Satan tempts him three times. The first time he suggests Jesus turn a stone into a loaf of bread to show off his powers, and Jesus says "man cannot live by bread alone". The second time he shows Him all sorts of earthly kingdoms that could be His if only he would serve the devil, and Jesus dismisses him quoting scripture about serving only the Lord God.

    Then Satan takes Jesus up to the top of the temple and says:

    He will command his angels concerning you,
    to guard you,
    On their hands they will bear you up,
    lest you strike your foot against a stone.

    But this time, Jesus doesn't answer the substance of the temptation either literally or spiritually,  as he did with the first two, but simply says "You should not put the Lord God to the test."

    And what's diabolical about this — like the idea of the perfect, liberal drone — is that it's true that the angels would bear up any falling Jesus — that He could count on, He could go against the laws of nature, or perhaps that would be their fulfillment. But testing spiritual powers in a frivolous and self-destructive manner like this? No, that would be wrong. Jumping in the first place would be a misuse of perfection.

    Knowing that many people, even if they hate drones, dislike religion and find parables annoying, let me be less oblique: this is a story about the uses of perfection — that you don't have to use perfection just because you can, or use it to show off perfection itself. The intellectual temptation that Foust is offering is the lure of perfection which then overshadows the not only commandments like "thou shalt not kill," but precludes an examination of whether a war without the deterrent of war's immediate effects is itself immoral (because it's beyond the reach of the premises of humanitarian law) and a course an examination of intent, effectiveness, and the psychological impact on local people that they simply won't change because somebody's been clever on Twitter.

    "A Just War"

    In our age of scientism, these arguments that are technically right and technically have nothing wrong with them and don't even have a sacred answer (for example, the arguments of "just war" seem to be irrelevant to the liberal drone advocates if they were efficient in ending war) — they are the most persuasive.

    The three reasons most people think to oppose drones are as follows:

    o the program is secretive so you don't know what they're doing, whether they're attacking the right people — it's under the CIA's management;

    o people, even children, are killed accidently and aren't combatants and weren't meant to be targeted

    o the people in these countries where drone attacks take place seem least persuaded of all those in the world that a liberal technocratic solution has been conceived justly to solve their problems — and more insurgents spring up in the wake of those killed by drones.

    But Foust answers all these objections and more, and always diabolically replies that if you don't like the wars in which these robotic machines are used, hey, go and attack the "war on terror" policy at its root and don't blame the messenger.

    Foust will be happy to say that the program should be less secret, or more careful, or even that it doesn't work so well in, oh, Yemen. But he keeps on finding more and more diabolical justifications to which human rights advocates don't have good objections, and peace activists have even less (they just keep saying war is bad for children and other living things, and who could disagree?)

    Jesus could tell the devil that powers shouldn't be tested needlessly "because it's blasphemous" or "you're just trolling me" but he simply says "don't tempt me any more with this stuff because it's not going to work, I won't fall for it". So ultimately, while it may seem pretty thin and not very technically impressive or profound and scholarly, the argument must still be tried that says drones are immoral for all the reasons you can think of if we are to remain human, and not "more than human". Or less.

    Agency and Autonomy: Whose?

    Foust dismisses the arguments about agency — the engines of death are too removed from the people who fire them — by impishly citing examples of weapons such as South Korean guns that can target from two miles away — which nobody protests. Or indeed one could cite all kinds of weapons with computerized systems, and submarine missiles and so on. Even so, two miles is two miles, and a thousand or two thousand or more are, well, awfully far away.

    It's not just about the agency, but the deterrence that you want war to have on the warrior. If they are on the battlefield or in situations where they are wounded or their buddies killed or they see awful scenes, they will want less war, right? Enough of all those atrocities, as they are having in Syria, and people will stop warring on each other, right? Well, no, it doesn't seem so, and there aren't even any drones in Syria. That argument could have been tried in the past, but it works less and less.

    There's nothing magical or extra-terrestrial about robots — they are just the concretization of human will — for now. That's why I say whose autonomy is a good question to ask. So it's just the will of one set of humans against another, and it need not be made special or fetishized any more than computer programs. They can be criticized; they can be stopped; they can be modified with user imput. They have to be. So you can throw overboard some of the technological determinism by going back to the coder and his absence or morals or the buggyness of the code or the poor user experience (those people in countries who don't like the psychological feeling of drones bearing down on them from the sky).

    But that only gets you so far, because like a good solutionist of our time, Foust says the drones are getting better and better, more and more accurate, and they can be made to be more perfect than humans.

    Collateral Immorality and More Than Human

    After all, he says — and here the devil is surely at work — "Collateral Murder" lets us know just how imperfect human beings are when they go about the task of finding an appropriate military target — armed men — and shooting at them without harming civilians. Right? Says Foust:

    It is a curious complaint: A human being did not distinguish between civilians and combatants, apply the Geneva Convention, or determine an appropriate use of force during the infamous 2007 "Collateral Murder" incident in Iraq, when American helicopter pilots mistook a Reuters camera crew for insurgents and fired on them and a civilian van that came to offer medical assistance.

    Of course, using Julian Assange's agitprop (which I totally take apart here) ought to be out of bounds morally all on its own in a debate like this, but such scruples wouldn't stop Foust, although he claims to be a critic of WikiLeaks and claims to have thought Cablegate was harmful.

    The problem with "Collateral Murder," however, is that a journalist chose to be escorted by, or to be in the company of, armed men. Journalists endlessly debate whether this was appropriate, but it is a legitimate debate and it is at the heart of the matter — after all, had they not been, they wouldn't have been killed. It is a battleground, after all. The soldiers in the helicopter in fact rightly picked out armed men — their assumption that another man with a camera on his shoulder and not an RPG wasn't a combatant was wrong, but it wasn't immoral or a war crime. Reuters doesn't call it that; Human Rights Watch doesn't call it that; only the anarchists in WikiLeaks pretend that it is, for political purposes.

    Foust holds out the possibility that in our forthcoming more perfect world, the drones will "just know" that they shouldn't shoot if they see something that they will know better is a camera tripod. Although he never specifies how exactly the more-perfect drones will now be better than error-prone humans (so very Foust!), the only thing I can think of is that the drone will do less shooting if it sees small forms that might be babies, or cameramen's tripods, which their facial-recognition or object-recognition programs will be very good at — better than humans. Or if the drone can see right through the van, and see that the small forms in it are children. Right? So if they can't lock on the target as exact, they just won't shoot, right? But they don't do that now…

    Cyber-Autonomy

    Foust then finds experts to fit his theories. First, if  you were going to use the argument that drones are too autonomous, Foust would say, oh, but autonomy is on a spectrum — Armin Krishnan a political scientist at the University of Texas at El Paso has parsed it all for you.

    If you were going to raise objections about the general tendency of machines to malfunction (which is why you had to simply turn off and turn on again your computer, phone, Xerox machine, etc. today, maybe multiple times), why, that's just not so: Samuel Liles, a Purdue professor specializing in transnational cyberthreats and cyberforensics, discounts your argument, pointing out ""We trust software with less rigor to fly airliners all the time." (In what year do you think they will drop the "cyber" for these phenomena because so little of these things will happen in the real world?)

    Yet airplanes do crash, and they don't kill the wrong people when they take off and land normally. Drones are different; they are meant to kill and do. This is ultimately like those stupid arguments that gun-rights obsessives make about car accidents killing so many more people (although of course, cars mainly drive people to their destinations and people are mainly killed accidently) — or the argument that only four people died in Benghazi but so many more people are killed in fires every day. Yes, these kinds of "persuasive pairing" arguments are ALWAYS stupid at root.

    Says Foust, about the tendency of machines to make mistakes — and maybe these are magnified by death-dealing machines sent from far away:

    The judgment and morality of individual humans certainly isn't perfect. Human decision-making is responsible for some of the worst atrocities of recent conflicts….Yet, machines are not given the same leeway: Rights groups want either perfect performance from machines or a total ban on them.

    Well, why not? Rights groups are trying to stop the inevitable and they should go on trying. The UN is trying to cope — it's already too late as lots of powers have drones now and more of the worst kind of regimes will get them, too.

    Perfect Assassins

    I often wonder why nobody interrupts these kind of arguments of organic morality versus technocratic machinopology by saying: you know, the CIA used to make very carefully targeted assassinations. Instead of sending lots of American troops into a country, where they'd get killed, and the locals would dislike them, and the locals would get killed, they'd just surgically take out one leader, or set things up to take out just one leader, like Patrice Lumumba, and then pull the strings in a government.  Imagine if you were to take this debate and put it back in the 1960s or 1970s:

    The judgment and morality of individual humans certainly isn't perfect.
    Human decision-making is responsible for some of the worst atrocities of
    recent conflicts….Yet, CIA assassins are not given the same leeway: Rights
    groups want either perfect performance from CIA assassins or a total ban on
    them.

    Okay then, back to autonomy…

    The Singularity

    Of course, none of this is without context. We are all going to be living in what Robert Scoble calls the "age of context" soon enough (while he means something more airy about social networks, what it boils down to as far as I can tell is a future where machines do all the learning and remembering for you and serve it up to you through wearables like Google Glass). There's going to be the Singularity, and we shall not all die, but we shall all be changed.

    Before that, comes the Internet of Things where everything will be wired and talk — and listen and watch, too. Perhaps in that bright future, you won't even need drones except as a last resort, because the Internet will find that whenever there is a nexus like "fireworks" or "jihad video on Youtube" or "pressure cooker" or "big black knapsack," the door will lock tight or the car won't even start or road blocks will spring up out of nowhere.

    Until then, there's Yemen.

    Deleted Tweets

    And here where Foust's creepy immorality was really on display recently — and now it isn't.

    I was following his tweets and copious re-tweeters one day in February, when he began sparring nastily (as he always does) with a Yemeni activist namedFarea Al-muslimi whose Twitter handle is @almuslimi 

    I don't know this Yemeni activist's background and I don't know whether he's an extremist or preaches "defensive jihad" but if so, it isn't visible. He appears to be a man who is simply disturbed by the extrajudicial executions the United States is perpetrating in his homeland, and that seems legitimate, whatever his back story might be.

    Al-muslimi gets into a Twit-fight with Foust, who is merrilly going his usual drone-apologetics way and tweets:

    almuslimi Farea Al-muslimi
    @joshuafoust @gregorydjohnsen 8- stop ALL u r dn pollitically in yemen. 9- every place u shot drone, go build hospital/school.

    Some other people chime in and say "stop tweeting from your couch about our country, you dont know anything".

    Foust then savages the guy as if there is something false about the aposition of drone-killings versus school-building simply because the American miltiary does both.

    I remember being appalled at the intensity and viciousness of this exchange and I wanted to copy it and put it up on Storify as a very good example of just how nasty Foust can be — as any of us who have Twit-fought him know for a fact.

    But when I went back through his feed now, it was gone. He deleted the tweets. In fact, he shows only two tweets for all of February. Now, it's possible that there's a glitch on Twitter. But I think they're gone.

    Using Topsy, I can see Al-Muslimi firing off many tweets — the sort of rapid-fire that you do if you are in a debate, not just talking to yourself. There most definitely were answers from Foust, but you can't see them now.

    An indirect evidence of them comes from the fellow cc'd — @gregorydjohnsen — who writes a tweet about how he regrets their fight because "both of them are smart guys" — although Foust was most assuredly nastily to this guy who had the upperhand street-cred wise as it was his country where the drones were falling.

    One of the more poignant things he said was:

    u can't train me on rule of law wth ur right hnd – USAID- & shoot me without a court by ur left hand- drones.

    Well, exactly. Who couldn't put it better? But Foust lobbed off something nasty about false apositives again — now deleted.

    Al-Muslimi then wrote:

    @gregorydjohnsen @joshuafoust joshua, do u knw even wher my village is n the map? plz STOP talking abt wat u have NO idea abt.! 4 truth, …

    This was part of an argument, but it's now erased. We have only MuckRake:

    What journalists are saying about #Yemen on Twitter – Muck Rack

    for those who enjoy these things: @almuslimi & @joshuafoust are currently having a twitter argument abt US counterterrorism policy in #yemen · February 28 …

    Why would Foust erase those tweets? Did he have a change of heart that he was so nasty? But he's nasty in exactly the same way to so many people…

    No, it's merely because suddenly, Al-Muslimi was hot. He actually came from Yemen to the US to testify in Congress. Now, Foust was sucking up and re-tweeting:

    RT @Yemen411: Farea @almuslimi having a moment before he speaks @ the Senate Judiciary hearing on drones in #Yemen http://t.co/gqtMzA4krY

    He even acknowledged that they had "disagreed" but that he was impressed with him.

    Well, Twitter. Whoever looks at past Twitter streams? You can't put your foot in the same stream twice…  And @almuslimi likely doesn't care about this anyway, as he has much larger problems to worry about. I can only say, I saw what you did there…

    Human Rights Drones

    Meanwhile, Foust assures us that drones are veritable instruments of human rights compliance: "In many cases, human rights would actually benefit from more autonomy — fewer mistakes, fewer misfires, and lower casualties overall. "

    Yet I'm not persuaded about the auto-magic way in which we get these precision targets that first depend on HUMINT and even re-checking from the ground.

    And while Foust doesn't concede it or even mention it, it seems to me the precision and human rights capacity could only happen if the machines are programmed not to fire if they get to a house and see that the terrorist target is surrounded by his wife and children. Right? Is that what he means? Because isn't that really the problem, the only way you can get these people more often than not is by attacking them in civilian type of settings because they don't stay on the "battlefield," whatever that is.

    That's why there is a total illusion here, regardless of autonomy and precision — it's not really about the drone itself. It's about the need to be precise *in a civilian setting* and only blow up somebody, say, in a car on a road, not when they reach a farmhouse.

    "It Should Not Be"

    In any event, the technocrats will never be satisfied with emotional answers, but in politics, the psychological matters. Sen. Markey is running for office again, and when the people of Boston let it be known that they didn't want Tamerlan Tsarnaev buried in their state because they had already been convinced he committed the Boston marathon bombing, Markey didn't say, as a good liberal Democrat, "we must be civilized; we must properly bury even our dead enemies"; instead he said "“If the people of Massachusetts do not want that terrorist to be buried
    on our soil, then it should not be.” And that's how it was, he was buried in an unmarked grave in Virginia. There's all kinds of things Markey could have said to try to lead and to educate — he didn't, not on this.

    Ultimately, the arguments of drone apologists are about emotions, too, because they say that the concretized will of one set of people in the form of automated robots should prevail over other sets of people who feel they should not be used and they are immoral. And it's the lack of democracy and due process as much of the emotional and spiritual feeling of revulsion that matter in the political mix of how these weapons will be controlled; overriding those very real considerations and feelings is illiberal, especially when the goal is to prevent the killing of innocents.

    In his testimony, Al-Muslimi speaks to an interesting problem — the lack of knowledge by local farmers as to why some leader is being targeted — they may not associate him with terrorism — and the fact that their own local security chiefs are connected to him and doing business with them. They are angry because they could have been accidently with him when the drone hit; they also feel they could have arrested him and questioned him about his wrong-doing and made a more careful and durable solution. In fact, their own security chiefs in cahoots with the terrorist were the problem — there was a texture and layers to this story that even the smartest drone couldn't figure out; what, it's supposed to hover while people hold a town meeting?

     

     

    Related articles
    Why America Stopped Sending 'Terrorists' To Gitmo And Started Bombing Them
    Pak court declares US drone strikes as illegal
    Drone Strikes Are Winning War in Yemen — for Al-Qaeda
    By Human Rights Alone
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  • Foust Once Against Fails in the Moral Context on Drones

    Drones
    Photo by Debra Sweet

    What's more nauseating: seeing Joshua Foust trying to make hash of the human rights movement again, or seeing all the myrmidons in the Central Asian research business nod and retweet?

    Once again, we're supposed to take cynicism as a substitute for insight, and we're supposed to see penetrating wisdom in the commonplace phenomenon that yeah, people are idealistic and don't ground themselves in RealPolitik — and then the junior analysts of IR can pronounce them as stupid — too stupid to know what they want or know how to get it.

    Oh, this posture that people are poorly informed, sloppy researchers, naive, or confused — instead of simply moral.

    It's like a textbook case of, "Nizi ne mogut, a verkhi ne khotyat," as Lenin cynically said about the pre-revolutionary period and revolution: "Those at the botton can't, and those at the top, won't," i.e. reform, or make revolution. Oh, and that's why they need that advanced guard, that guiding intellectual Party elite, see.

    Here's the thing about film festivals and the drones thing in general — they are emotional, and the topic is emotional, and it's about morality and moral feelings — and that's okay because drones throw up real moral issues of:

    o secrecy

    o claims of precision that are uncheckable due to secrecy

    o fears of greater power due to claims of precision

    Foust always behaves in a magnetic moral context as if all the magnet filings are going in the wrong direction and it's all their fault.

    But there's really nothing wrong with people protesting drones, as such, although both in Pakistan and the US, it is a totemic symbol of American power used in political movements for their own purposes.

    I wonder if Foust really understands that when he hears the facile and ready anti-Americanism and hysteria about drones in Pakistan, and the call to build schools and hospitals instead of throwing drones (as he heard from the Yemen activist that he mercilessly bullied on Twitter the other day), that this is placebo politics — it's a surrogate. In an odd way, for this generation, for these people, this American-hating is a placebo for the critique they really ought to have (and do have, in an inchoate way) for their own oppressive and abusive and kleptocratic governments which are busy helping terrorists in some ways.

    There's this, too: it's just no good telling off Pakistanis and others at a human rights film festival that no, it's not a violation of sovereignty because they were invited in because they weren't part of that voluntary process. And wait, has he no sense of resonance in this region and with history? That's what the Soviets said about the tanks coming into Afghanistan or before that, Prague or Budapest. They were invited in to help save the socialist order.

    Even if there is indeed a world of difference between Soviet tanks and American drones and the inviting process is more, shall we say, fluid, the fact is, Pakistan is not a democracy; people in it did not get to chose; the parliamentary doesn't have power over the military; all this is obvious. Why talk about "inviting" in a setting where clearly some political forces didn't get to participate democratically in that decision, and some feel marginalized by the process?

    Leave aside the issue of whether it would be "good for the country" to have more drones kill more terrorists in an undemocratic way and oh, maybe hasten demoracy that way, as an engineering proposition. The fact is, it doesn't sound like a persuasive argument, and there has to be some sensitivity to this.

    You have to wonder why the organizers invited Foust. Do they like getting lashed?!

    The other day I was talking to a colleague from the establishment human rights movement, so to speak, who was trying earnestly to make the case for drones as in fact a new kind of human rights instrument because it is more and more precise and after all, that's what we should work toward with international humanitarian law (IHL), the laws of war — precision, which means less casualities.

    That struck me as a technocratic argument of the sort we hear about everything now all the time, especially with the Internet.

    But, before that, there was always a debate between whether the proper subject of the human rights movement was even IHL or should stick only to human rights. No one remembers this any more, but it is worth recalling that there were some strong voices saying that the human rights movements should stick to human rights, and not get into the laws of war or crimes because those issues were better parsed by law-enforcers and militaries — and of course the ICRC — because they involved first suppressing what might be an act of conscience opposing war in the first place.

    I kept saying that the remoteness of the control over the missiles was creepy and seemed a matter of conscience. My colleague kept saying, but the weapons are more precise now and don't cause as much collateral damage.

    But here's the thing about all this then: they are secret, and housed in the CIA. And not "just because"; but precisely as a function of their precision. That is, precisely because they are precise, the information about them has to be wrapped up very tight to remain successful. There was just this unfortunate habit of terrorists hanging out in their home compounds with the whole family.

    The other day I was listening to a "progressive" talk radio program dissecting the Rand Paul filibuster and rallying for Obama. One woman called in and spoke fautously of how people who wouldn't agree to Obama's budget should be arrested for "obstruction of justice" — as if that's what it meant. She had the determined and matter-of-fact ire of someone who wasn't quite educated enough to know that the meaning of the phrase wasn't quite what she wanted (and Foust approaches all human rights activists as being like that woman). Yet despite all that, she had an essential point, from her perspective as an Obama voter — if the president won, why can't he do what he wants?

    Then a man called in whose son was a drone pilot. He described his son as "flying the planes" even though he was located in the United States and not physically flying them there. But he said, "But it's still flying the planes". There were people in Afghanistan or Pakistan who did the ground work and scoped out the area, of course. Then the people who "flew the planes" from the US. He said so much expense, care, training and precision! — went into this that it would be "inconceivable" that it would be misused on somebody sitting in a cafe in San Francisco.

    We're told that people who "fly the planes" even from thousands of miles away like this still get post-traumatic stress syndrome from killing people. But really, what's the difference between 30,000 feet up in the air, and 3,000 miles away? You're still looking at an electronic dashboard nowadays and you can't see what you hit? So shouldn't we accept this as "better" because it's more precise?

    Again, the secrecy and housing within the CIA then is the problem — it has less oversight then from Congress, and victims can't be compensated as they are when the military accidently kills them in ordinary bombings.

    A band of eager lawyers and technologists who want to prove that war is "better" because it is more precise now perhaps make a more humane military, if you will, or they make a civil society of sorts that acts perhaps as a brake on military that might want to do things with less precision or expense, let's say. Foust would like to turn the human rights organizations into something like this — appendages of the military with troubled looks on their faces about "going to far" but essentially getting with the program.

    But it shouldn't then be called a human rights movement of conscience — and that's okay to have, because in the face of the technologists, they have to say: but it's secret, so we don't know; but that kid was killed, so we're not sure.

    It's not just the secrecy — itself dictated by that very precision. It's then the psychological and political impact on other countries. Sure, corrupt governments whip up anti-American sentiment and weak oppositions faced with vicious persecution and even death convert their positions into anti-American placebos. But ordinary people, too, then begin to get caught up in the sense of feeling helpless and pinned by stronger, more precise, more deadly force out there.

    We saw what resonance the #StandwithPaul stuff had on Twitter and even in the real world, and how people could somehow come to see that maybe, really, they could be sitting in a cafe in San Francisco, and…

    If that much agitation could come just from the *thought* of such a situation, and the reality of only two cases of American citizens, imagine if you were in a setting where thousands of people were killed that way, and you didn't know if maybe hundreds of them weren't militants but were just kids or women and old men. Such it's a psychological situation, if nothing else, and one meriting sympathy.

    Foust could only sniff:

    A similar mindset afflicted the panel on Afghanistan, where outrage overpowered reason. Jawed Taiman’s documentary
    about Afghans’ views of the future was done very well, but the audience
    was raucous and bordered at times on hostile. Panelists and audience
    members alike blamed everything on America, on Pakistan, or on the
    military. Most said that Afghanistan would be just fine once the
    foreigners leave – a conclusion many Afghans don’t share.

    Really? But the link is to a New York Times article about "strivers" and a budding "middle class" — certainly a thin concept in Afghanistan where most people are poor. Those people have not been better off with NATO troops there for the last ten years; it just didn't work in a lot of places. That's not to suggest the Taliban and company are better, but the reason we're leaving is that we have to concede it didn't work.

    And then a Twitter exchange:

    Gartenstein-Ross
    ‏@DaveedGR

    Very good column by @joshuafoust: "The strange politics of human rights conferences." http://to.pbs.org/ZdlvNz

    Gartenstein-Ross
    ‏@DaveedGR

    CatherineFitzpatrick
    ‏@catfitz

    @DaveedGR @joshuafoust What is it that makes the human rights movement so loathsome to you guys? Is it the call to conscience?

    @catfitz @joshuafoust When a problem set is complex, I think pretending that it's not (even when one's intentions are good) is harmful.

    CatherineFitzpatrick
    ‏@catfitz

    @DaveedGR @joshuafoust Oh, come now. Those pple aren't pretending the problem isn't complex; they are sifting out the moral angle they wish

    CatherineFitzpatrick
    ‏@catfitz

    @DaveedGR As always with @joshuafoust its a genre problem and a refusal to accept separation of powers and pluralism in civil society

    CatherineFitzpatrick
    ‏@catfitz

    @DaveedGR @joshuafoust Everybody, every last drone-injured child, has to be as gripped by complexity as the president's closet aide.

    CatherineFitzpatrick
    ‏@catfitz

    @DaveedGR @joshuafoust Nobody can take the moral ground simply; it is always viewed as a "luxury" by those not in power. That's nonsense tho

    I always come back to that Bonfire of the Vanities insight:

    Where is the poet who has sung of that most lacerating of all human emotions, the cut that never heals — male humiliation?

    While precision should in theory make the ordinary man more secure that he won't be caught up in a mass conflagration and the enemy is only going to target the bad guys very selectively, the government can exploit the "eye in the sky" fears that come with that precision.

    Then the precision perhaps might be the very trigger of his immense feeling of helplessness and therefore greater anger.

    This is about culture, and psychology and group dynamics, and I have a feeling that even the "human terrain" expert Joshua Foust isn't really good at navigating these things because the RealPolitik is too captivating. Who wouldn't want to be the president's aide instead of the injured child?

     

     

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  • All I Want from Progs is Some Perspective

    All I ask of "progressives" is a little…perspective. A little balance, at the very least!

    I'm not like Joshua Foust. I don't justify drones in any way. I have grave misgivings about how moral it is to be battling by remote control as if you were in a video game like this. I'm not persuaded that the supposed good done from drones — taking out various terrorist leaders who are known to attack US troops (and that's why I don't put "suspects" coyly around the term) — outdoes the harm. The harm is turning the population against you if you have too much "collateral damage" — or any, especially if it's children.I haven't been persuaded, like a lot of people, that the good achieved in curbing terrorism has been outweighed by the wrongs perpetrated against the innocents and the incitement of anger and hatred in the population.

    But hey, let's get a little perspective on this, shall we? I don't even mean the perspective that might come from examining the actual terrorists killed and examining their actual bad deeds — something that the press should do more of than it does.

    I mean the perspective that comes from looking at other bad things in the region, and seeing what they're about, too, which, like Iraq, comes from admitting that the overwhelming majority of civilians are killed not by US troops or NATO troops but by the Taliban and its allies, i.e. terrorists.

    Yesterday, I had to watch as all the liberal youth shared around with each other hundreds of thousands of times a picture taken with Instagram of a child's head in the sights of a sniper's gun. The child wasn't killed; it was just a picture of a sniper showing a child in his sights. This picture, whose provenance was said to be somewhere else online (which I couldn't find, using Google image search), was posted by a young IDF soldier. And so lefties like Jillian York @jilliancyork who has openly advocated a "one-state solution" that would involve obviously diluting the Israeli population deliberately and changing the nature of its society, were part of what spread this picture around (she has something like 26,000 followers around the world). Her comment? To put in scare quotes "the most humane army in the world". I don't know who says this or whether its an IDF motto, but I think we'd have to concede that by contrast to lots of other things in the world, including the US military, the IDF is more careful – it has gotten so through vast experience — about trying to avoid the killing of civilians.

    So today, we read all the stories of 90 Shi'a Pakistanis killed by Islamist terrorists who don't like their brand of Islam.  That's just one day. Ninety people! People who were so angry that they refused to bury their dead in protest. Imagine, for Muslims whose religious ritual demands that they bury the dead quickly. Then, the pictures of Western news services of wailing people clinging to dead bodies with the headline "Letting Go," as if they need therapy, and a recognition of the Western-devised stages of grief, instead of continuing their outrage at the abnormality of losing civilians in this fashion, due to terrorism.

    And none of those hundreds of thousands of Twitterers who could cluck in indignation at an Israeli soldier putting up an indecent and vicious picture of a sniper with a child in his sights could find it in their hearts to protest the mass murder of these 90 — from one day. And there are incidents like that constantly, which is why the numbers of civilians killed by terrorists in the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan and Libya are so much greater than by any Western troops involved. Not to mention the 60,000 or more killed in Syria, many children. Never one-tenth of the rage about *that*, sponsored by Russia, in contrast with the fueld outrage of the BDS movement over Israel.

    So along comes the New York Times, which in its quest for readership and clicks and revenue is now putting up cartoons and interactive thingies to try to attract the Internet children upon whom their future relies. The NYT would never have published such a crude, propagandistic screed in its pages as journalism or even an op-ed piece, but the lure of interactivity and visuals let them put up Drew Carie's clever anti-drone propaganda.

    Propaganda, because he crudely portrays a KGB agent as gleefully gloating over the US "becoming not like itself" — which of course only distracts from the fact that among the clients for drones in the world is Vladimir Putin, a real KGB agent who is really in power, not just in a cartoon. And so on.

    Propaganda, because not only does he create a one-sided if funny cartoon without any sense of context about the rest of the world, he actually has the nerve to cite Zamyatin's We — a work of literature protesting the Soviet Union — and make it somehow morally equivalent to the United States. 

    Propaganda — because to the extent the US has become like Jeremy's Panopticon, it's more due to Google than the NSA.

    Propaganda — because in fact, as the cartoon shows, forces opposed the use of drones in Seattle and stopped them.

    My response below, in the NYT comments.

    ***

    By making his fictional character as a KGB
    man gleeful that America has become like his own agency, ostensibly from
    the Cold War, he handily distracts from the fact that the real dangers
    from drones will not come from America, which is a liberal democratic
    state under the rule of law with a free press, but from Russia, which
    still has an actual KGB agent as its leader, or China or other
    authoritarian states that jail cartoonists like Drew Christie instead of
    publishing them in a leading newspaper. It creates hysterical
    self-absorption by the "progressives" who fuel their fantasy that
    America is the greatest evil in the world.

    Putting the focus on
    the government's surveillance also has the function of distracting from
    Google and Facebook other Big IT companies that do far more surveillance
    of us, with our avid and enthusiastic participation, than any
    government drone, and with far less recourse to due process. Google is
    making an unmanned car and will be able to further scrape data from your
    every movement once you start using it, and nobody is caring about
    that, only big scary Obama drones or Seattle drones. I'm all for
    watching those, as they shouldn't be run by the CIA and innocent people
    have been killed by them and their families cannot even be compensated
    because they are in a secret program.

    As usual, there is no
    perspective on the left. Obama kills two US citizens deemed to be
    terrorists; in Pakistan in just one day, 90 Muslims were killed by their
    fellow Muslims.

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  • More on the Immorality of Drones and Evil Robots

    Yoshimi Battles the Pink Robots by The Flaming Lips

    Joshua Foust, the former defense contractor who now serves as a non-senior analyst at John Kerry's American Security Project, has yet another piece published on the liberal PBS site about why the Obama Administration should continue to feel good about drones.

    It's in response to a report by Human Rights Watch called appropriately Losing Humanity.

    The premise is basically — oh, you civilians and peaceniks filled with FUD (Fear, Uncertainty and Doubt as the geeks called it)! You just don't get it and you just aren't cool because you can't realize how efficient drones are and don't realize how much we already use robotic stuff. Silly you, and stupid you! And smart me!

    My answer:

    The reason a lot of science fiction is scary is not because it's about machines, but because it's about people — people against other people, and not under a shared sense of the rule of law.

    The computer code that runs the killing machines is made by humans and is a concretization of their will, not something uncontrollable or entirely automatic and escaped from their control.

    More importantly, the decisions about where to deploy the machines that involve targets drawn from Panatir data-dredging, or heat-seeking missiles or counter-mortar systems are made by humans. Before drones are deployed, humans sometimes have to do things like call up leaders of countries and seek their intelligence and their clearance. So, in the first place, nothing that is portrayed here as automatic is in fact as automatic as Foust strangely makes it seem, because it's in a context and a system where humans do make decisions about the very theaters of war in the first place.

    Yet precisely because in our time, the weapons are far more automated, and in the case of drones, there is a greater acceleration and precision — and therefore ease and seeming moral comfort — in their use, we have to look at the moral dimension. Foust seems content if drones just don't miss very often or don't have much collateral damage. But if they get so easy to use, won't the temptation be to do more killing with them and make them more automatic? Where will it stop and who will be authorized to make the judgement call?

    There's also the question of whether it's really the case that drones *are* so precise, given how many reports there are from human rights groups and local lawyers about non-combatants, including children, who are hit. These victims can't seek compensation, as their counterparts killed by regular US or NATO actions with more traditional weapons can, because drones are in a secret program run by the CIA, and not the military. This is apparently because of the need to keep them secret, apparently particularly from the governments of Pakistan and Afghanistan.

    So this raises questions of governance, as to whether we can morally retain these weapons as secret and unaccountable, and whether we should put them under the regular armed forces' leadership.

    More automation can in fact decouple the moral imperative from the results of the action of weapons particularly because of the acceleration and capacity for devastation.

    Foust has a curious coda to yet another unconscionable piece in defense of drones as efficient war-machines — he posits the idea that a less active role by people — i.e. less compunction about use and nature of targets and consequences — could somehow be a goal, and that more automation need not diminish our values. How?

    In fact, if these programs reflect our values, they would have to become less secret, and attacks less common. Foust has already stripped away the moral context by pretending to find all kinds of "good" uses of "automation" that in fact a) aren't automation as he claims because of the prior choices about war in the first place, and theaters of war, and targets and b) have more unintended consequences than he prepares to admit.

    As Foust notes, the Pentagon released a directive on "appropriate levels of human judgement," but Foust seems to think the radiant future can contain more automated processes if we can just all agree on our priorities.

    There's nothing wrong with a cultural heritage that seems autonomous robots as deadly; they are. Pentagon planners and the CIA don't wish to kill civilians who are not combatants. Yet they do. They do because the targets often tend to have their families around them and the military can't wait until they get into the clear. That's the crux of the problem.

    There's a strange notion that raising any moral questions about killing machines, as Human Rights Watch has done, is motivated by "fear". It seems simply to be more motivated by morality, and also the practical sense that machines don't have consciences, and code never renders human interaction as perfectly as real life.

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  • Pakistani Clerics to Demonstrate Against Killings of Polio Vaccine Workers

    We learned the other day of the awful acts of the Taliban once again in killing health workers who were merely trying to vaccinate little children in Afghanistan.

    The toll is now up to 9 persons killed for doing their jobs.

    The UN Secretary General Ban Ki-moon has suspended the vaccination program and denounced the killings.

    But what we don't always hear — the news can get drowned out — is that Pakistani clerics are denouncing this outrageous act by the Taliban, which is supposed to have some kind of religious basis (but is more about security insanity gone among, as the Taliban believes the CIA is using health workers to spy on them, due to the fact that the CIA allegedly obtained a doctor's cooperation in hunting bin Ladn.)

    So here's what some Pakistani clerics are doing to respond:

    An alliance of
    Pakistani clerics will hold demonstrations across the country against
    the killings of polio eradication campaign workers, leaders said on
    Thursday, as the death toll from attacks this week rose to nine.

    Tahir Ashrafi, who heads the moderate Pakistan
    Ulema Council, said that 24,000 mosques associated with his
    organization would preach against the killings of health workers during
    Friday prayers.

    "Neither Pakistani
    customs nor Islam would allow or endorse this. Far from doing something
    wrong, these girls are martyrs for Islam because they were doing a
    service to humanity and Islam," he said.

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  • Heart of Darkness in Pakistan

    Gates Foundation Polio
    Women and children wait for vaccinations in Afghanistan.  Gates Foundation, 2011

    A terrible atrocity in Pakistan today:

    Gunmen shot dead five women working on U.N.-backed polio vaccination
    efforts in two different Pakistani cities on Tuesday, officials said, a
    major setback for a campaign that international health officials
    consider vital to contain the crippling disease but which Taliban insurgents say is a cover for espionage.

    Not only the Taliban, but some elements of the Pakistani government, have been on this kick about distrusting doctors and health workers since  a doctor was accused of cooperating with the CIA to help zero in on Osama bin Ladn and assassinate him. That doctor, Dr. Shakil Afridi, is now in prison and being mistreated, and there have been campaigns to try to get him released.

    Humanitarian organizations are usually so careful about not cooperating with the sides in conflicts, particularly the states (I feel they are less careful with rebels), that it's an unfounded charge to claim that polio vaccinations are a cover for spying. What's to spy on, anyway, poor villages eking out a subsistence? Situations with malnourished kids, abused mothers and drug-addicted fathers? Is the secret that there is no secret?

    I'm also reminded of the Heart of Darkness — and Apocalypse Now, which is adapted on it. There's this monologue:

    Kurtz:
    I've seen horrors… horrors that you've seen. But you have no right to
    call me a murderer. You have a right to kill me. You have a right to do
    that… but you have no right to judge me. It's impossible for words to
    describe what is necessary to those who do not know what horror means.
    Horror… Horror has a face… and you must make a friend of horror.
    Horror and moral terror are your friends. If they are not, then they are
    enemies to be feared. They are truly enemies!

    I remember when I was
    with Special Forces… seems a thousand centuries ago. We went into a
    camp to inoculate some children. We left the camp after we had
    inoculated the children for polio, and this old man came running after
    us and he was crying. He couldn't see. We went back there, and they had
    come and hacked off every inoculated arm. There they were in a pile. A
    pile of little arms. And I remember… I… I… I cried, I wept like
    some grandmother. I wanted to tear my teeth out; I didn't know what I
    wanted to do! And I want to remember it. I never want to forget it… I
    never want to forget. And then I realized… like I was shot… like I
    was shot with a diamond… a diamond bullet right through my forehead.
    And I thought, my God… the genius of that! The genius! The will to do
    that! Perfect, genuine, complete, crystalline, pure. And then I realized
    they were stronger than we, because they could stand that these were
    not monsters, these were men… trained cadres. These men who fought
    with their hearts, who had families, who had children, who were filled
    with love… but they had the strength… the strength… to do that. If
    I had ten divisions of those men, our troubles here would be over very
    quickly. You have to have men who are moral… and at the same time who
    are able to utilize their primordial instincts to kill without
    feeling… without passion… without judgment… without judgment!
    Because it's judgment that defeats us.

    The UN released a tepid statement:

    "We call on the leaders of the affected communities and everyone
    concerned to do their utmost to protect health workers and create a
    secure environment so that we can meet the health needs of the children
    of Pakistan."

    But the dyanamics here aren't about people "doing their utmost". The humanitarians should pull out. They should stop creating the semblance of normalcy. That puts the onus on the government of Pakistan and the Taliban to realize their isolation and lack of resources. It doesn't do the children any good if they are vaccinated, but then their tiny arms pile up — or even the bodies of their helpers, some barely past childhood themselves, pile up:

    The women who were killed Tuesday — three of whom were teenagers — were
    all shot in the head at close range. Four of them were gunned down in
    the southern port city of Karachi,
    and the fifth in a village outside the northwest city of Peshawar. Two
    men who were working alongside the women were also critically wounded in
    Karachi.

    Two women were gunned down as they literally gave the drops to children.

    A man was also executed earlier who had helped with the polio vaccination.

    This is a terrible situation — 56 new cases of polio were registered in Pakistan. It has begun to reappear again in India, Tajikistan and elsewhere in Central Asia.

    So do you risk not innoculating children because five people are gunned down? There is conflicting information about whether the program is suspended or not — the UN needs to clear that up ASAP and in fact, the program should be at least temporarily suspended. Nobody should be supplying the Tailban with fresh victims to make their point.

    The Taliban are like the men described by Kurtz in the Heart of Darkness, who had a heart of darkness himself. They were absolutely ruthless — as he realized with diamond-like clarity — and in fact really were fighting for ideals, even their families.

    So leave them with that and let them contemplate and take the consequences for their brutality, I say.

    Just in case you want to think about sanctions instead of in fact softening the sanctions regime as the UN is busy doing now:

    Pakistani Taliban spokesman Ahsanullah Ahsan claimed responsibility for both attacks by telephone to The Associated Press.


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  • “I Have a Drone”

    If watch this Obama "99 Problems" Jay-Z parody, you'll never forget that catchy bit at the end, where first Martin Luther King says "I have a dream," then Obama is set up to say "I have a drone."

    Today the Daily Mail has a sensational piece posted with bloody pictures of drone victims, talking about how CIA chiefs "face arrest" over their drone misfires.

    The Mail on Sunday today reveals shocking new evidence of the full horrific impact of US drone attacks in Pakistan.

    A damning dossier assembled from exhaustive research into  the strikes’ targets sets out in heartbreaking detail the deaths of teachers, students and Pakistani policemen. It also describes how bereaved relatives are forced to gather their loved ones’ dismembered body parts in the aftermath of strikes.

    The Telegraph is a little more sedate in explaining that the lawyer I heard speak in New York at the UN Church Center, Shahid Akbar, is suing on behalf of his clients.

    The son of a Pakistani man killed in a strike in Waziristan last year has brought an action against the Foreign Office in an attempt to make it state publicly whether it provides intelligence to the United States for drone attacks.

    Warfare. Lawfare?

    I do believe that drones as I've written are essentially immoral because of the removal and distance from the target and because of the apparently high level of collateral damage, despite the claims of precision.

    To be sure, this new round of actions and articles is based on the same information we've had for months, estimating the roughly "400-800" civilians that may have been killed in the 3,000 strikes — and there is no new sources to corroborate this information. That means that critics pounce on this scarcity of sources, and that even when prestigious individuals like Columbia law students write reports asking questions about drones, if they don't use anything but this one source, they are opening themselves up to Faustian jousting.

    Having heard Akbar speak and having asked him a number of questions, I have no reason not to take what he is saying at face value. He himself was precise in his reporting, and stuck to the story of his clients, not exaggerating, and not indulging in the rhetoric and politics of his sponsors on the US speaking tour, CODE PINK.  When I asked him how many people were injured, as opposed to killed, and was there a higher number as there are with land mines, he matter-of-factly acknowledged that no, drones are more precise and therefore injure less people, and kill their targets — the issue is that there often other people near them like family members.

    Today Suzanne Nossel, the Executive Director of Amnesty International USA put out an urgent e-mail alert regarding drones in connection with the presidential elections, in the hope that either or both candidates would mention them in the debates tonight:

    There are many things we don't know about U.S. drone policy, for
    example, the government's rules of engagement for drone attacks. Drone
    missions and strategy operate under a shroud of secrecy. But what we do
    know is scary — the deliberate killing of individuals deemed by the
    U.S. government to be terrorism suspects, far from any recognized
    battlefield and without charge or trial, raises grave concerns that the
    U.S. is committing extrajudicial executions in violation of
    international human rights law.

    Tell the Obama administration to come clean about its drone policy and put an end to unlawful killings with drones.

    This is an interesting development; Nossel, who formerly served in the Obama Administration in the international organizations department of the State Department, working on the UN Human Rights Council in particular, has been accused by leftists of somehow being tied to Obama's drone policy merely by being in the Administration.

    This is unfair, as Nossel worked for two years in human rights, not in the Pentagon and was unrelated to drones. Even so, the mere presence in the evil Amerikan imperialist power is enough to set off these haters.

    Amnesty — which decides policies like this at its London HQ, not in the US — has decided that killing people extrajudicially in a war without a trial is itself a human rights crime.

    That's definitely a topic for debate, as the counterfactual for these human rights groups is that in fact, war isn't illegal; it just has to be fought by rules. Those rules include not killing civilians. It's odd — would Amnesty accept a uniformed soldier killing another uniformed soldier in a war, say, over an invasion of a country, or an unprovoked attack, but it would not accept that same state killing a terrorist not in uniform, a non-state actor, who had launched that attack hosted from a country?

    This is part of that whole school of thinking — for which Obama is famous — of conceiving of terrorism as a crime, an offense in the criminal code, a police matter, and not a matter of warfare.

    In any event, the operative point here is the shroud of secrecy. Victims of mistakes by US military air attacks get compensation from the US. But drone victims don't — because the program is secret. So at a minimum the program should not be run by the CIA — since when is the CIA engaged in massive, direct armed warfare, as distinct from intelligence gathering — and the occasional extradicial assassination for which it usually faces reproaches? I will let people like Scott Horton or Ken Anderson figuire out what is legal and illegal here about the CIA, but it seems that secret programs that target people abroad — and then miss — are fraught with problems and violations of human rights.

    Akbar noted that he does not take up the cases of militants injured by drones or of relatives seeking compensation for militants killed by drones — although he believes someone should defend them. Yet he also described how hard it was to tell who the militants were — making that seem like NATO's problem, not his, i.e. they make mistakes because they can't tell a 15-year-old boy or a male who just happens to be at a militant's home apart from an armed militant. But yet he makes the claim that he can distinguish militants enough not to accept them as clients. Well, there it is.

    What I think is key here is focusing on victims, because focusing on militants is a hall of mirrors. First identifying who really is a victim, as distinct from a combatant, and then focusing on justice for them — and prevention of new ones. And even if you can't tell who the militants are per se, you can tell a 7-year-old whose legs are blown off, or an unarmed 15-year-old whose eye is lost, from an armed adult.

    The cynics and the pragmatists trying to be useful to the Administration and get positions with power , like Joshua Foust or Christine Fair, either get all meta and say that the real problem is government itself and its whole architecture of wars, or get all concern-troll and say that drones are regrettably necessary in a situation where ground troops invading areas like the tribal territories would lead to huge numbers of civilian and military casualties.

    I think it's more than fine to keep asking questions about deadly drones, just like nuclear bombs, and keep demanding an end to secrecy and justice for victims.

    And that's what CODE PINK has been doing, of course, but in a very one-sided fashion, as has been noted by a number of people — certainly more on social media these days than in the old days, when the one-sided pro-Soviet nature of these groups would go virtually unchallenged except for a handful of faith groups and conscientious objectors.

    Meredith Tax of the Center for Secular Space is bravely trying to fight this one-sidedness on her blog and at Open Democracy, and maintain a critique both of the US drone program and its alarming impact in Pakistan, but also condemn the Taliban, and Pakistan's support of it.

    Brave, because to post on Open Democracy means to be endlessly nettled by British Islamists who drive away any liberal human rights writer there who criticizes anything about fundamentalist Islam as somehow in the pay of that evil Amerika I mentioned. (It isn't even that they are what drives you away; what drives you away is the bad faith of the moderators and the refusal of people to counter the haters.)e

    I see that infamous cantloginas_Momo — who is the evidently banned Momo back on an alt that the moderators can't see their way clear to banning — is still trying to bedevil people trying to be even-handed like Meredith. I remember years ago wasting time on him. Time justified only if there are young people looking over his shoulder who may still be reached with reason.

    And that's why I don't go to Open Democracy much anymore — I know that you will face anonymous ankle-biters like Momo who just endlessly heckle and harass, and few people come to defense of the liberal values that supposedly OD represents. OD also tilts to the left, and just isn't my thing. It's a shame, as there aren't very many sites that cover human rights, and cover it without the really leftist bias of Democracy Now. OD is critical of Russia, which the American left seldom takes on.

    The discussion among feminists — pro and con regarding CODE PINK and charges of one-sidedness — is far more interesting and productive than the one dominated by Momo as per usual at OD. So join in here.

     

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  • Does Western Support of Activists like Malala Help or Hurt?

    Candelight vigil in Karachi for Malala. Video by The Telegraph.

    Yesterday Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty had a Facebook chat on Pakistan and the case of Malala Yousafzai, the 14-year-old girl shot and seriously wounded by the Taliban because she campaigned for girl's education.

    I asked this:

    when
    Western states or NGOs give prizes to activists like Malala, when the
    US ambassador meets with her or when an NGO awards her an honor, does
    this help or hurt by making her a target?

    And the answer was:

    RFE/RL Frud
    Bezhan answers: Frud Bezhan I think these prizes help raise awareness
    of these individuals and help bring their voices, and in many cases,
    their plight to the world's attention. I think individuals like Malala
    realize the inherent dangers of exposing
    themselves to the international media. But I think by speaking up and
    entering the international stage they can tell their stories and perhaps
    instigate change. Unfortunately, what we have witnessed with Malala is
    that there is a price, at least in that region, for standing up for and
    safeguarding the ideals you stand for.

    I knew the answer to the question already, in a way, because I've always heard activists advocate publicity for themselves and their cause, and solidarity, and that they would be the judge as to the risks involved.

    Yet when it comes to Pakistan, the risks are so high, I wondered really if that advice stood. It seems it does. It was always good advice in the Soviet-style countries but they didn't resort to violence as much; when the non-state actors came on the scene capable of murdering journalists and human rights defenders, and when we began to deal with deadly suppression of countries like Iran, I wondered if the same rules did appply. I felt I had to ask and hear it from those in the region in their own words.

    Not everyone agrees. Amna Buttar is a human rights activist who left her career as a doctor
    in the United States to work with Benazir Bhutto in Pakistan. She writes in the Times "Room for Discussion":

    We need to keep our attention fixed on the women and children of
    Pakistan. They don't need special envoys, drones, or even foreign aid.
    What they need is for ordinary citizens of the world to see them through
    a new lens. What Pakistanis need is compassion. Ordinary citizens of
    the world have to make Malala and others feel their sympathy for them.

    Well, how can we really help without special envoys and aid — is it really enough merely to hold a sympathy candlelight vigil? And what's the plan to get rid of the Taliban anyway, if it doesn't include drones?

    Still, I think there is likely a balance and some lines of risk regarding how close the West embraces the dissidents of Pakistan. I was mindful of a haunting post at Skateistan about the Afghan children who used to hang around near the American base and do skating. Six of them were killed in a Taliban suicide bombing near the ISAF base; four of them were in the Skateistan program. The suicide bomber himself was a child of 12 or 13. I keep seeing the image of Khorshid,  the defiant 14-year-old girl in the red sneakers and skating helmet.

    The Taliban claimed they didn't kill children and didn't aim at children but targeted the ISAF base which they said was a CIA station. Yet they did kill the children. There's been enormous — and cunning — ideological spin from the Taliban and Islamist supporters and lefty anti-Western agitators on this — even claiming Malala was supposedly injured by a drone. She wasn't. She was shot by the Taliban.

    Did the "adoption" of these children and fraternization in fact put them at risk? It seemed so, at least indirectly. I recently read a thoughtful blog called Hot Milk for Breakfast by a man who worked in Afghanistan  for three years — one of the best I've read in a long time. He blogged about the Skateistan kids being killed, and mused on the subject of whether we bring help or harm by our proximity — he knew these children, and worried about them being near the ISAF base. Here's another sad blog of a worker in Afghanistan.

    I might have gone on worrying about whether the West was helping or harming someone like Malala, but then so many outpourings of sentiment and demonstrations of sympathy began occurring in Pakistan itself.

    This surprised me, because I was used to seeing such dissent against the Taliban rather mutely expressed, if at all, and lots of politically-correct anti-sentiment, at least staged by the government, with little or no criticism of the Taliban.

    The rally organized by Imran Khan was typical of this one-sided political agitation, and I felt CODE PINK walked right into this  — one of the leftist movements in the US that never seemed to grow beyond Port Huron on their obsession with anti-American and anti-Israel campaigning. I asked on Twitter whether CODE PINK was going to rise to the occasion while they were on a march of solidarity with the Pakistani people over the drones issue whether they'd condemn this shooting.

    Interestingly, they did about two days later. They may have felt pressure to do so — critiques of the Taliban aren't part of their repetoire.

    This blog by Jahanzaib Haque illustrates the political pressures in Pakistan — in this case the Taliban supporters began to demand "equal time" and "equality" of treatment on other cases.

    Will Malala Yousafzai's Shooting Be Pakistan's Rosa Parks Moment? asked Mahawish Rezvi. She writes:

    The country's anger is not only directed towards the gunman – though it
    has spurred a massive hunt for those responsible for the shooting, with
    news breaking on Friday that police had arrested
    four suspects in the Swat Valley, where the attack occurred, and had
    identified a mastermind, who remained at large. The fury is also
    directed towards the Taliban as an organization that would mastermind
    such an attack, and that has said it would hurt Malala again if she
    survives. More than 50 Islamic scholars affiliated with the Sunni
    Ittehad Council (SIC) have issued a joint fatwa calling the attack
    un-Islamic. Political party leader Ataf Hussain, from the powerful
    Muttahida Qaumi Movement (MQM), appealed to his supporters to not attend
    prayers led by any cleric that does not condemn the attack.

    When was the last time you heard of 50 Sunni scholars issuing a fatway *against* violent attacks?!

    There is talk that this case will galvanize an internal Pakistani movement to unite more to oppose the Taliban. I have to wonder how that will fare. If the powerful intelligence agencies themselves support the Taliban, how much can ordinary people oppose this?

    Yet even the Taliban is mindful of its image and perhaps will "evolve"? There are some who think they can, and aren't the same Taliban of 2001, and that they have even been forced to concede the existence of girl's schools.

    The moral opposition to drones emphasized by CODE PINK is one that I share, although I disavow the radical nature of their acts and one-sidedness. I always live in hope that a better left will appear that will not be attached to Marxism and anti-Westernism and "enemy of my enemy is my friend". This month they traveled to Pakistan to demonstrate with a political leader against drones, but then got blocked from moving into the tribal areas anyway.

    It's creepy to me how those in think thanks (like the non-senior fellow Joshua Foust, leading the pack in drone apologetics) or universities, like Christine Fair, my nemesis, can coldly take the Administration's side on this, all the way making it appear as if this isn't the conservative or neocon view, but the smart, cool "progressive" think to do.  What do you call the political stance of these people who so scorn the right but adopt pro-Administration, pro-Russian, etc. positions?  If "neoliberal" wasn't already taken as the Marxists' favourite adjective to describe evil Amerikan capitalism, could they be called neo-liberals? Or Democratic hawks? I'm going to ponder this.

    Fair, in a discussion in The New York Times makes a number of brainy observations to try to knock down reporting by journalists or human rights advocates, but she has no more information than they do. She says that the NGOs, like those who wrote the report Living Under Drones, are using local NGO numbers — and they are. I do believe that the Pakistani lawyer who traveled in the US and made a number of presentations has real clients and real cases including real dead or injured kids. To be sure, CODE PINK then exploits his more tethered information and exaggerates it.

    Fair notes:

    The Central Intelligence Agency and Pakistan’s intelligence agency and
    military have revealed little about actual targets and outcomes, so we
    cannot assess whether the people they were trying to kill were “drone
    worthy.”

    But then she goes on — in that vacuum of information! — to blast those trying to nevertheless work with this issue:

    Most journalism relies on dubious Pakistani reports that exaggerate
    innocent civilian casualties and discount terrorist fatalities. There
    are few efforts to independently verify “first-hand accounts,” which are
    always assumed to be true.

    How were they supposed to do that when the CIA is secretive?! And how are they supposed to conduct independent verifications, in a place where the Taliban shoots 14-year-old girls and suicide bombers kill kids? Look, I have a better idea rather than sending NGO investigators into harm's way: let the CIA be willing to take compensation claims and they can research their bona fides. After all, the US military pays compensation for their "collateral damage". Why can't the CIA in the drones program?

    Fair claims that drones are needed because there are no police, just a lot of militias and fighters, and that to have ground operations would risk more troops. OK, but one also has to examine whether repeated drone strikes that may be killing hundreds of innocent people could also start to really backfire in the "hearts and minds" department.

    The US finds the outpouring of Pakistani support for Malala the "silver lining" in this tragedy — and I would have to say that it outpaces drones in terms of winning support, although it comes at a terrible price, Malala's injuries and the insecurity of all the other girls trying to get educated. She has been flown to the UK for further treatment.

    The outpouring of sympathy in Pakistan isn't just an RFE/RL report, the national media has also reported it.

     

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  • Karimov is Worried About Life After 2014: Would the US Prop Him Up or Leave Him Military Equipment?

    Karimov gov uz
    President Karimov looking chipper in Khorezm. Or at least, after studio retouches. Photo by gov.uz.

    Uzbekistan's President Islam Karimov is worried about what will happen after US and NATO troops are withdrawn from Afghanistan by 2014.

    At least, we think he is, but the statement only appears to have been aired on Uzbek-language television and translated by BBC October 11:

    Uzbek President Islom Karimov has
    said his country needs to prepare itself for possible security
    challenges as NATO plans to leave neighbouring Afghanistan in 2014.

    He was speaking on his tour of the northwestern region of Xorazm on 9
    October, in remarks broadcast on Uzbek TV the following day. The
    remarks came in a special TV broadcast detailing the president's visit
    to the region.

    "We need to be prepared. The
    departure of the US troops tomorrow will bring unrest to Afghanistan.
    This will bring us unrest with all sorts of disasters coming close to
    our doorstep. We must not forget the events we went through in the 1990s
    and the 2000s.
    When we say Uzbekistan looks to the future, not just today, this means
    we should build a strong army, one that is second to none. We must give
    this a thought too," the president said, as he spoke to heads of local
    farms.

    But the full text of his speech on the Foreign Ministry and other government websites doesn't contain any remarks about Afghanistan. Instead, the speech is filled up with those sort of fun facts that Soviet-style dictators love to dazzle poor farmers with — "Currently, 88 percent of general schools in the region are outfitted with gyms, compared to the 63 percent back in 2003" or "96,300 young men and women in Khorezm region are currently pursuing
    knowledge and grasping [sic] modern vocations at the ninety-one academic
    lyceums and professional colleges." No doubt to keep their minds off jihad

    There's also a small business boom, the president claims — and who knows, maybe some of them might have a chance to get lucrative contracts from US businesses eager to supply the NDN (but not likely, as they would have to be government approved and probably go to the First Family's cronies in big state corporations).  Who does get lucky from the US government-sponsored "Industry Days"?  As you can see from this slide show on surface contracts in the CENTCOM region, the US military wants to use "locally procured goods". How is that working out? Where could we find this information?

    No doubt Karimov *is* worried about what will happen in 2014, but given all the attacks on NATO by the Taliban and their allies, and the "green on blue" attacks and such, how is the US going to get out, well, gracefully? The GLOC  (ground line of communications) appears to have been restored from Pakistan but of course with lots of protest from parliament (i.e. government proxies), complaints that NATO caused millions of dollars of damage to Pakistani roads, and a view that Islamabad "surrendered" by accepting apologies finally from a civilian and not a military leader, and not even taking fees (after the US complaining about "price-gouging").

    Even though the US and Pakistan have a deal signed through 2015, that doesn't mean the NDN won't go away because Pakistan has showed it can shut off the spigot, and security issues obviously remain. 

    So one can't rule out the idea — although the speculation has subsided — that NATO might need to leave heavy equipment in the neighbouring stans.

    There was some flurry of commentary when Uzbekistan opted out of the Russian-led Collective Security Treaty Organization (CSTO) that it was preparing itself mentally and legally to cooperate with NATO — and even restoration of the US base.

    Certainly that's the frank position of regional analysts like Kazakhstan's Murat Lamulin:

    The forthcoming withdrawal of the Western coalition troops from
    Afghanistan and possible deployment of weapons and, probably, U.S.
    operating bases on the territory of some Central Asian countries is
    creating a new situation in the region. It is in this context that one
    should probably view Tashkent’s decision to “suspend” its membership in
    the Collective Security Treaty Organization, announced in late June this
    year. The CSTO Charter prohibits the deployment of third countries’
    military bases on the territories of the allied countries. Uzbekistan’s
    withdrawal removes legal barriers for it to host any military hardware
    of NATO, including weapons that NATO forces would like to leave on their
    way from Afghanistan.

    This piece on a Russian media-sponsored site just makes common sense — if the US faces problems as it withdraws from Afghanistan or experiences problems again with Pakistan, and if Uzbekistan is worried about defense, then it is fast, cheap and easy for the US to leave these heavy lethal vehicles in Uzbekistan — although of course there's the obstacle that the NDN agreements provide only for non-lethal deliveries. (I wonder if there is a loophole here — the agreements were for equipment going in — what about equipment coming out? The agreement was signed with the stans last June to take the equipment out.)

    Of course, Karimov is all about playing the great powers off against each other in classic fashion. Even though ultimately Karimov pulled out of the CSTO in late June, when he met with Putin in early June, the two leaders said NATO's withdrawal would mean they would step up their own cooperation, uznews.net reported.

    The Uzbek president stressed that the withdrawal of foreign military
    personnel from Afghanistan before a competent army is set up may
    destabilise the country and the region as a whole.


    “If this problem is not resolved, if it is not fully exposed as it truly
    is, I think many things will unravel later, and we will simply miss the
    moment,” Karimov said.

    “This directly concerns the security of the Russian Federation itself.
    Cooperation with our Uzbekistani partners is extremely important for
    us,” the Russian president told a news conference

    But as uznews.net pointed out, "On the same day when the Uzbek and Russian presidents met, Nato in
    Brussels stroke a deal with Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan and Uzbekistan on the
    transit of military freight from Afghanistan, UzDaily.uz website has
    reported." 

    There's also discussion that the US might sell weapons to Uzbekistan (It seems much more likely that they'd just leave military equipment behind in Uzbekistan). Columbia University's Alexander Cooley has suggested in The New York Times that the US would sell weapons to Tashkent:

    Most controversially of all, NATO and the Central Asian states are still
    negotiating over the potential transfer of military equipment, used by
    coalition forces in Afghanistan, to Central Asian governments’ security
    services, which have a bloody human rights record.


    In January, the Obama administration lifted a ban on foreign military
    sales to Uzbekistan, on national security grounds, to allow for sales of
    counterterrorism equipment. American officials insist that such future
    transfers will include only nonlethal items, but the Uzbek government
    has long sought items like armored personnel carriers, helicopters and
    drones, which could be used to suppress protests.

    Joshua Foust naturally finds this a "conspiracy" to even entertain this idea:

    There is no basis in US law, official US policy, or anything US
    officials have said about their plans for the regime, that indicate even
    a distant interest in selling weapons to Tashkent.

    So what? Laws get changed — as we saw the law change last year barring military aid to Uzbekistan due to the Andijan massacre in 2005 and its appalling human rights record. Exigencies exist, emergencies happen, whatever.  Foust notes that the Uzbeks start high and negotiate down and that Cooley is just reporting rumors from his trips to Uzbekistan.

    At least Cooley travels to the region, unlike Foust, and what he reports tracks with what regional analysts are saying.  I can't imagine why anyone would be so adamant about the US *not* doing this, and in such a fury to slam colleagues in the field for reporting the matter-of-fact horse-trading likely going on. What's this really about? Often these rampages of Foust's seem to be only about trying to position himself as a quotable expert to get more media attention and possibly some kind of better job than "fellow" at ASP — in Obama II's State Department where Sen. John Kerry or some other comrade could be secretary of state.

    The venerable Walter Pincus speaks up against doing business with tyrants and quotes former CENTCOM head Adm. William Fallon:

    “We would envision, and this is already with the agreement of the
    Afghan government, that this place would be the enduring facility . . .
    within that country by which we would provide continuing support to
    that nation, and hopefully be able to use that facility for other things
    in the region.”

    Pincus concludes: "Let’s hope those “other things” don’t include military operations to
    keep in power Washington’s current “allies,” such as the current rulers
    in Kazakhstan and Turkmenistan." 

    And sudden Foust tut kak tut  — blasting Pincus for his "curious bit of hand-wringing" and supposed exaggeration. Foust converts Pincus' legitimate concern about helping to keep these tyrants in power — especially given already-existing efforts that bolst them, with this:   "where on earth would he get the impression that anyone in Washington
    wants to defend Nazarbayev or Berdimuhamedov against a coup?

    But there's a difference between the US siding with Berdymukhamedov or Nararbayev or Karimov in a coup where they faced challenges from, say, insiders in the security of military sectors or oligarchs — and the US helping these regimes fight off terrorists that might or might not be actual Islamist terrorists.  The US would probably not mix in if, say, Russia-based Uzbek tycoon Alisher Usmanov decided he wanted to replace Karimov — that would be fighting the Kremlin, too. But if some band of terrorists with the Islamic Movement of Uzbekistan and Afghan police or Taliban launched some raid to destabilize Karimov, sure, the existing US special forces who already advise Tashkent and have a closer relationship now with the Karimov government might intervene in a pinch — we don't know. We can't be sure. There's nothing wrong with pointing up this scenario as one of the many bad things to come after 2014.

     


    The US Army helped build the railway to Mazar-e-Sharif to ship supplies to NATO troops in Afghanistan. Video by American Forces Network Afghanistan.

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  • State Gets a Bit More Starchy on Turkmenistan

    Dragon Oil 1 gov tm
    Dragon Oil rig in Caspian. Photo by Turkmenistan Golden Age 2012.

    State Department officials are usually very circumspect when it comes to Turkmenistan, a gas-rich and freedom-poor authoritarian Central Asian nation on the Caspian Sea. Turkmenistan is far more closed than Uzbekistan — there are hardly any human rights activists or opposition figures there. Hence virtually no one for lonely foreign officials to visit, when they might get a few hours free from their minders, and have nothing to do but rattle around in the huge white marble city in the "dictator chic" genre, with broad avenues and desert-dry air.

    So that's why it's news when all of a sudden, in testimony to the US Congress, Robert O. Blake, Jr., Assistant Secretary of State for South and Central Asian Affairs, whose statements are generally as bland as canned pears, suddenly puts the phrases "pipeline" and "human rights" and "transparency" all into one paragraph:

    The recent signing of gas sales and purchase agreements between Turkmenistan, Pakistan and India enables the Turkmenistan-Afghanistan-Pakistan-India pipeline to move to the commercial phase. This project is one example of the potential Turkmenistan has to be a leader in the economic prosperity of the region. We encourage Turkmenistan to build clear and transparent mechanisms for investment in its country.

    In order to realize its potential, Turkmenistan must make significant steps to fulfill its international obligations on human rights. The United States consistently raises concerns about respect for human rights at every appropriate opportunity and we have offered assistance to help advance space for civil society and building democratic systems.

    That's exceptional, because in recent years, the US has been so eager to court the hard-to-get President Gurbanguly Berdymukhamedov and line up some business with him, especially for American oil companies, that they have tended to keep any comments about human rights to carefully-choreographed private discussions. To be sure, this was a hearing of the House Foreign Affairs Committee Subcommittee on Europe and Eurasia, where officials can expect a little more questioning than usual, but still, the rhetoric seems more edgy than in the past.

    So, why is this happening now?

    Well, for one, the US has been persisting in trying to work with the Turkmens now for the more than six years Berdymukhamedov has been in power, and has precious little to show for it. If anything, despite finally installing a new ambassador after a five-year hiatus, holding special business exhibitions and promotions, offering help and training and educational opportunities, the Americans have at times been kicked in the teeth. Peace Corps members with visas and air tickets in hand have been suddenly delayed and gradually their numbers whittled down to little or nothing. Students ready to leave at the airport for exchange programs are pulled off programs.  Chevron and others are seemingly promised an offshore drilling permit, then never get any — and they'd rather be onshore anyway. US officials work overtime trying to fix these situations up, and it's all kind of mysterious. Now why do the Turkmens do that? After all, we are paying them top dollar to use their country as a re-fueling station for planes bound to supply NATO troops in Afghanistan with non-lethal equipment.

    What's up? Perhaps the "multi-vector policy" that rotates so widely from China to Iran to Qatar to Austria to Belarus to England and seems so affable with so many other countries with so many high-level meetings has its saw-toothed edge? Nothing shows you're independent like bashing America! The pudgy dictator has had 249 meetings with foreign dignitaries in the last year! Ok, 317. Alright, I don't know how many exactly but — a lot, and somewhere in the miles of turgid Turkmen wire copy you can find this exact number.

    So because they aren't getting anywhere despite being silent on human rights for all this time, perhaps US officials have decided that they should be a little more forward-leaning. It's a shame that human rights could be seen as a club in that respect, but that is how it's done.

    There could be another reason — Blake and others may be expecting increased NGO protests as the Asian Bank for Development takes the Turkmen-Afghanistan-Pakistan-Indian (TAPI) pipeline out for its road show this fall to various world capitals, in search of oil majors to help build the project and take on the financing and security headaches that will abound. So pre-emptively, so to speak, State has indicated that they realize there are human rights and "transparency" problems. That's for sure — no one can really be sure just how much money Berdymukhamedov has his hands on — and it all seems to come through his hands — and how much he parts with to try to better his fellow citizens' lot — as distinct from building lots of white palaces.

    Nothing gets NGOs agitated like "the extractive industry" — it easily exemplifies everything they hate about capitalism and commerce, and even if they are not anti-business, they can get behind concern for the environment which is never misplaced when it comes to drilling and pipelines.

    Berdy also seems aware of this protest wave that may crest on his country, and talks up a good story about how pipelines under the sea are less dangerous than those above ground. I don't know how much people want to test those theories in a region that is prone to earthquakes, spills, sabotage (remember the April 2009 explosion?), terrorism and even wars — and of course those vague "shortcomings in performance of work" for which hundreds of officials have been dismissed in the Era of Revival and now the Era of Happiness and Stability.

    Of course, as I'm pointing out, the wrath of NGOs is somewhat misplaced on Turkmenistan, when the American companies which they love best to hate aren't even able to drill an inch into the karakum. China has already spent more than $8 billion building a pipeline out of Turkmenistan to China, and not a single demonstration, newsletter, poster, or even email appeared from the usual Western environmental groups. We have no idea what that very rapidly-build pipeline did to the environment or areas or people in Turkmenistan, and that's not only because it's a closed society, but because nobody cared to chase the Chinese National Petroleum Company — it just doesn't get the juices flowing like US petroleum corporations. In fact, the major Western environmental organizations tend to ignore Central Asia because it's hard to get information.

    The exception is a small adovcacy and research organization called Crude Accountability which has Russian-speakers and a network of colleagues in the region and who have persisted in getting the story of environmental damage and oppression in Central Asian countries. You seldom hear of Greenpeace trying any of its "direct action" protests on ships around Russian and its allies — maybe that's because when local chapters of Greenpeace simply try to hold a rally to protest against Arctic drilling, 23 people are arrested.

    So snarkiness of the predictable adversarial culture really seems misplaced, when a company like Chevron — which in fact has been there all along and isn't "stealing in like a thief" — hasn't even got a deal.  And then there's this — what I always ask people spouting the usual hysteria on forums: what do you cook your breakfast with every morning, firewood? Pipelines exists in a lot of places of the world where protests no longer appear (Alaska) although it might if something goes wrong again (Alaska). We'd all like to live in a world of outdoor solar-powered offices and computers and Burning Man camp-outs like Philip Rosedale, but we're not there yet.

    So it's good to start early and often to hammer on the problem of "lack of transparency," but realistically, it's not going to go anywhere in Turkmenistan until the society experiences much greater changes than have been in the offing since 2006 when past dictator Saparmurat Niyazov died. The Turkmens have figured out (from paying attention to NGOs but not allowing them in their own country) to play the transparency game, and have turned the tables on Chevron and others as I've written, sulking about their supposed lack of transparency for not parting with proprietary technological secrets that no company would part with (say, how about more from the Turkmen side regarding those Gaffney, Clines Associates estimates of the reserves, eh?)

    Turkmenistan is a very hard nut to crack — and nut-cracking in general hasn't gone so well for the US in Central Asia. The US ambassador has actually accomplished a fair amount on his watch, quietly getting some political prisoners freed or getting them family visits and trying to solve the students' cases and keep a positive momentum for both educational exchange and business. There's a theory that trade is a tide that raises all boats. I've never seen that happen in any country in the world. It's claimed for China and Kazakhstan, but we only see continued problems with everything from media suppression to environmental hazards to murders — business doesn't auto-magically install democracy any more than a USAID project does.

    I really don't have a recipe for Turkmenistan other than that more people need to try to go there and report what they see, and more efforts have to be made to get the word out about what happens there, and to pay more attention to those who already get many stories out, such as Chronicles of Turkmenistan. To the extent possible, NGOs should try to follow the TAPI story to see if their interest and efforts to get more information might be some deterrence on the usual bribes and slush funds that abound around things like this.

    Yet I'm skeptical that TAPI will start getting built any time soon, or that Western companies will even be involved in it, and the X marked on the map where the backhoes are going to appear may be right at the Turkmen border, not inside Turkmenistan, as Ashgabat continually repeats the refrain that they will "sell their gas at the border," and Europeans and others are taking them more at their word since the collapse of the ambitious Nabucco project.

    In any event, the gas-hungry rapidly-developing countries of China and India aren't going to care a whole lot about what Westerners tell them about how they should avoid all the things that Westerners take for granted like gas-guzzling personal cars and invest instead on environmental protection and mass transport. What any environmental campaign has to start with, however, is a newsletter — a newsletter that nobody is yet able to publish in Ashgabat.

     

     

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