Karzai has already cast his lot with Pakistan

Subtitle of Guardian piece (via WPR Media Roundup) says it all:

Afghanistan's former head of intelligence says President Hamid Karzai is increasingly looking to Pakistan to end insurgency

Even with the evolution of our tactics, it's hard to blame Karzai for the choice. Obama gives him all indication of bailing before 2012, and the rushed effort in the south seems increasingly bogged down thanks to a very patient and brutal response from the Taliban.

There's been no effective regionalization of the solution set, leaving Pakistan the looming large neighbor of note, so what else do we expect of Karzai?

He's covering his bets.

Don't call it an "offensive"

NYT story that emphasizes the surge in the south is far more civilian than portrayed in the press:

The prospect of a robust military push in Kandahar Province, which had been widely expected to begin this month, has evolved into a strategy that puts civilian reconstruction efforts first and relegates military action to a supportive role.

The strategy, Afghan, American and NATO civilian and military officials said in interviews, was adopted because of opposition to military action from an unsympathetic local population and Afghan officials here and in Kabul.

There are also concerns that a frontal military approach has not worked as well as hoped in a much smaller area in Marja, in neighboring Helmand Province.

The goal that American planners originally outlined — often in briefings in which reporters agreed not to quote officials by name — emphasized the importance of a military offensive devised to bring all of the populous and Taliban-dominated south under effective control by the end of this summer. That would leave another year to consolidate gains before President Obama’s July 2011 deadline to begin withdrawing combat troops.

In fact, there has been little new fighting in Kandahar so far, and the very word “offensive” has been banished.

“We cannot say the term offensive for Kandahar,” said the Afghan National Army officer in charge here, Gen. Sher Mohammad Zazai. “It is actually a partnership operation.”

The commander of NATO forces in southern Afghanistan, Maj. Gen. Nick Carter, insisted that there never was a planned offensive. “The media have chosen to use the term offensive,” he said. Instead, he said, “we have certainly talked about a military uplift, but there has been no military use of the term offensive.”

Whatever it is called, it is not happening this month. Views vary widely as to just when the military part will start. General Zazai says it will begin in July but take a break for Ramadan in mid-August and resume in mid-September. A person close to Tooryalai Wesa, the governor of Kandahar, says it will not commence until winter, or at least not until harvests end in October. He spoke on the condition of anonymity because he was not authorized to talk to the press.

American officials, on the other hand, say it has already begun, not with a bang, but with a steady increase of experts from the United States Embassy and NATO and aid workers — a “civilian surge” — accompanied by a quiet increase in American troops to provide security for them. The Americans strongly deny that they planned an offensive they are now backing away from.

Whereas in Marja the plan was to carry out a military assault to oust the Taliban, followed by rapid delivery of government services, in Kandahar the approach is now the opposite. Civilian aid workers, protected by an increased military force, will try to provide those services first, before any major military action.

“This is not going to be a door-to-door military campaign,” said one American civilian official, who requested anonymity in line with his agency’s policy. “You’ll see more Afghan National Police checkpoints, but it’s not going to be an aggressive military campaign. They’ve looked at it and realized it wouldn’t work.”

That is some serious learning being applied.  Gratifying to see.

With all the reports coming back either glass-half-full or half-empty, it is hard to gain any comprehensive sense of what's possible, but you get the distinct feeling that both sides are pulling out all stops--just on opposite sides of the kinetic/non-kinetic divide (i.e., they kill civilians and we lead with them).

NorKo: breaking point for masses, yes, but not for Kim clan

North Korean border with China:  guess which side is China's.

NYT story that does the usual with scant interview-based info from recent escapees:

Like many North Koreans, the construction worker lived in penury. His state employer had not paid him for so long that he had forgotten his salary. Indeed, he paid his boss to be listed as a dummy worker so that he could leave his work site. Then he and his wife could scrape out a living selling small bags of detergent on the black market.

It hardly seemed that life could get worse. And then, one Saturday afternoon last November, his sister burst into his apartment in Chongjin with shocking news: the North Korean government had decided to drastically devalue the nation’s currency. The family’s life savings, about $1,560, had been reduced to about $30.

Last month the construction worker sat in a safe house in this bustling northern Chinese city, lamenting years of useless sacrifice. Vegetables for his parents, his wife’s asthma medicine, the navy track suit his 15-year-old daughter craved — all were forsworn on the theory that, even in North Korea, the future was worth saving for.

“Ai!” he exclaimed, cursing between sobs. “How we worked to save that money! Thinking about it makes me go crazy.”

North Koreans are used to struggle and heartbreak. But the Nov. 30 currency devaluation, apparently an attempt to prop up a foundering state-run economy, was for some the worst disaster since a famine that killed hundreds of thousands in the mid-1990s.

Interviews in the past month with eight North Koreans who recently left their country — a prison escapee, illegal traders, people in temporary exile to find work in China, the traveling wife of an official in the ruling Workers’ Party — paint a haunting portrait of desperation inside North Korea, a nation of 24 million people, and of growing resentment toward its erratic leader, Kim Jong-il.

What seems missing — for now, at least — is social instability. Widespread hardship, popular anger over the currency revaluation and growing political uncertainty as Mr. Kim seeks to install his third son as his successor have not hardened into noticeable resistance against the government.

NorKo remains an amazing experiment in pushing captive masses past the limits of human endurance.  It is the closest thing to a country-as-concentration-camp as the world has ever seen.

Chart of the day: Misery index returns

Bloomberg Businessweek chart, that presents a nice bookend feel to the 1990s/2010s.

But before you lapse into thinking it was all a mirage, be grateful that only four of those years saw us up above 9% combined for unemployment and inflation. Globalization has been one tumultuous ride for all concerned, and our ride has been relatively smooth compared to the rest of the planet.

For comparison's sake, remember that the misery index ran much higher in the 1970s--when it lived and breathed between 10 and 20 percent.

See the 60-year-slide for some appreciation--from this child of the 1960s who came of age in those tense times (economically-speaking, far more tense than the 1960s).

My point?  Don't sign yourself up just yet to the Most Suffering Generation list.

Hollowing out Afghanistan's local government

The governor of Kandahar--staying alive

NYT story that reminds us of the Taliban's grim determination to kill however many necessary to thwart any nation-building by NATO:

The Taliban have been stepping up a campaign of assassinations in recent months against officials and anyone else associated with local government in an attempt to undermine counterinsurgency operations in the south.

Government assassinations are nothing new as a Taliban tactic, but now the Taliban are taking aim at officials who are much more low-level, who often do not have the sort of bodyguards or other protection that top leaders do. Some of the victims have only the slimmest connections to the authorities. The most egregious example came Wednesday in Helmand Province, where according to Afghan officials the insurgents executed a 7-year-old boy as an informant.

As the coalition concentrates on trying to build up the Afghan government in the southern province of Kandahar, a big part of that strategy depends on recruiting capable Afghan government officials who can speed delivery of aid and services to undercut support for the Taliban. The insurgents have just as busily been trying to undermine that approach, by killing local officials and intimidating others into leaving their posts.

“They read the papers; they know what we are doing,” said a NATO official here, who spoke on condition of anonymity in line with his government’s policy. “It’s very much game on between the coalition and the Taliban.”

The assassinations have been effective in slowing recruitment of government officials, he said. “Am I going to live through the workweek? No one should have to ask that question.”

Just since March, according to reports compiled by The New York Times from the police, military sources, witnesses and local government officials, there have been at least 11 assassinations in Kandahar, mostly of low-level officials. These reports, which are not complete, do not include police officers or other officials killed in more indiscriminate attacks, like suicide bombings.

In John Robb's formulation, the Taliban are proving quite effective at "hollowing out" the local government, keeping Kabul's reach limited to the capital city--a classic failed-state situation.  Doesn't mean they will ever effectively rule the country, but they can prevent outsiders from trying to encourage the same with non-Taliban leadership/governance.

And that won't change any time soon, it would seem--unless overwhelming economic presence is achieved by regional elements.

And that's where the discovery of mineral wealth can be a game-accelerator. 

The parish festival: the face-painter goes incognito

The guy who always helps me face paint likes to do himself up big-time. He's not all there, but he's a sweet man. Bit of a sci-fi nut.

Deep Reads: Ayn Rand's "The Fountainhead" (1943)

I actually watched  the movie first on video, sometime in the early 1990s, and found it intriguing enough for its iconoclastic view of human creativity, but it really didn't connect.

Then my first-born was diagnosed with an advanced-stage cancer at two years of age, and after a few months of heavy drinking, I recomposed myself as father and re-engaged the subsequent battle more fully (as my wife had to step back due to her pregnancy).  During that epic year, I got ahold of the book and read it like my life depended on it.

I won't tell you I'm a Howard Roark or anything. I will just say that this book, along with a couple of others, really saved my life back then.

Upon reading it, I also knew that someday I would write fiction.

I guess the book's primary impact was that it made me feel proud to be me, no matter who didn't understand what being me was all about.

Toward that end, I was reborn as a writer and thinker from Emily's long struggle, beginning with "The Emily Updates" that I currently am reworking with Warren for eventual publication.

Movie of My Week: Moulin Rouge (2001)

I love all Baz Luhrmann movies like I love all Danny Boyle movies, although I will confess that I have yet to see "Australia"--his homeland epic. Vonne was so impressed with "Moulin Rouge" that she subsequently went to see Luhrman's Broadway staging of the opera "La boheme," which thrilled her to no end.

I just re-watched this with my older daughter and my mom, who got up about ten minutes into the viewing and said, "I thought this was the one with Jose Ferrer!" and then stomped out.  My daughter Em loves the movie so much she can sing almost the entire soundtrack, which I can find annoying in the home theater.

Anyway, what I love:

• I love Jim Broadbent in the ringmaster role; I smile every second he's on screen;
• I think this was the one that Nicole Kidman should have won her Oscar for; she was perfect here;
• I like Ewan McGregor in almost all things (the great Boyle-Luhrmann bridge!), but found him especially appealing here--to include his heartfelt singing.
• But most of all, I loved how Luhrmann re-imagines the modern musical as a sampler of recent songs and I especially loved all his cinematographic trickery here; he is a showman of the highest order--Sergei Diaghilev caliber.

I hope the guy never gets bored with film.

Kim's leadership shuffle in NorKo: the regent selected

WSJ story on recent leadership shake-up in NorKo that's clearly designed to clear the path for the third generation in the Kim dynasty.

Kim moved his brother-in-law Jang Song Taek into the #2 spot. He will apparently act as idiot son #3's sherpa in the planned upward glidepath to the top spot upon Kim Jong-Il's death.  Jang is 64 years old, and is believed to be the #3 son's top supporter.

Brief Reminder: A booming export market for the SysAdmin (1970s-1990s)

Old PNM-era slide (and pre-PNM, actually, so used probably 2001-2004) where I showed the rise in combined contingency response days for the four services.  For the 1970s, I exclude the obvious war in Vietnam (mega-contingency, I guess), then show how the rise in the 1980s was Mideast-centric, and then show how Iraq, Yugoslavia, Somalia and Haiti account for all the subsequent elevation in the 1990s.

Naturally, the 2000s then left the chart in terms of overall volume.

Point of the slide: showing the growing global market for SysAdmin-type operations.

Blast from my past: PNM's "New Rules for a New Crisis"

[NOTE:  As I slowly rebuild old pages from the old site, I will use this weekly feature for that purpose.]

Deleted Scene #22

Chapter Five: The New Ordering Principle

The Missing Section Entitled: "New Rules for a New Crisis"

Commentary: This twenty-second "deleted scene" was the originally planned third section of the chapter (coming after "The Rise of System Perturbations" and before "The Greater Inclusive"), which Mark Warren cut simply to reduce the size of the chapter. My sense was that he felt the chapter already had more than enough theoretical material and did not need this long detour on rule sets. I include the section here because I really do like the material quite a bit, even as tough as it is to lay out before the reader without lapsing into theoreticalspeak. Plus, this section was my sole capture from the one workshop I ran for the Office of Force Transformation during my stint there, so I feel like the bits of wisdom I pulled from that effort (and all those big brains that attended) should find a home somewhere!

I should note who were the attendees at that workshop in March of 2002. Here's the list:

1) Arthur Cebrowski, Office of Force Transformation
2) John Garstka, Joint Chiefs of Staff C4 Directorate 
3) Stuart Umpleby, George Washington University 
4) Douglass Carmichael, Big Mind Media 
5) John Petersen, The Arlington Institute 
6) David Gordon, National Intelligence Council 
7) Stephen Schlaikjer, Political Advisor to Chief of Naval Operations 
8) Shane Deichman, JFCOM 
9) Ahmed Hashim, Naval War College 
10) Daniel Pipes, Middle East Forum/N.Y. Post 
11) Jeff Cares, Alidade Consulting 
12) Richard Landes, Center for Millennial Studies 
13) Kori Schake, National Defense University 
14) Joshua Epstein, Brookings Institution 
15) Mitzi Wertheim, The CNA Corporation 
16) Tony Pryor, International Resources Group 
17) Hank Gaffney, Center for Strategic Studies 
18) Yaneer Bar-Yam, New England Complex Systems Institute 
19) Lee Buchanan, consultant 
20) Bill Halal, George Washington University 
21) Adam Siegel, Northrop Grumman 
22) Cdr. John Dickman, CNO Strategic Studies Group 
23) John Landry, National Intelligence Council 
24) Jerry Hultin, Stevens Institute of Technology

Here is the agenda of the workshop:

AGENDA FOR 19 MARCH SYSTEM PERTURBATIONS WORKSHOP

0730-0800
Check-in and continental breakfast

0800-0900
Barnett briefs the System Perturbation slide package

0900-0915
GroupSystems warm-up
INSTRUCTIONS: The scenario is this: you are asked by the Mayor of New York City to pen a paragraph on the significance of 9/11 for inclusion in a time capsule to be buried beneath the permanent memorial being erected at Ground Zero in lower Manhattan. In the next 5 minutes please enter your thoughts on the laptop in front of you. At the end of five minutes, you will be encouraged to read the entries of others and enter additional comments on those texts.

0915-1000
SESSION I: Does 9/11 serve as existence proof for the concept of System Perturbations as a identifiable category of international crisis?
INSTRUCTIONS: After some introductory slides on this notion, you will be asked to participated in a GroupSystems brainstorming activity of approximately 5-7 minutes, answering the question, "Please give us examples of System Perturbations in history and explain what each example tells us about this concept." Following that activity, Dr. Barnett will lead a discussion on this question for approximately 30 minutes. At the end of that discussion, you will be asked another GroupSystems brainstorming question, "What are the lasting perturbations to the global system from 9/11?" You will be asked to enter your ideas into 6 separate "buckets": 

1.  Economics
2.  Politics
3.  Technology
4.  Environment
5.  Cultural/media
6.  Security.

1000-1015
Coffee break

1015-1100
SESSION II: Can/should System Perturbations serve as a new ordering principle for U.S. national security?
INSTRUCTIONS: After some introductory slides on potential outcome scenarios for the Global War on Terrorism (GWOT), you will be asked to participated in a GroupSystems brainstorming activity of approximately 5-7 minutes, answering the question, "Give us your description of the defining global conflict paradigm for the next 10-to-20 years." You will be given four, admittedly overlapping "buckets" to choose from in terms of placing your entry:

1.  Division by competency/success
2.  Division by culture/civilization
3.  Division by great power-led camps
4.  Division by ideology.

Following that activity, Dr. Barnett will lead a discussion on this question for approximately 30 minutes. At the end of that discussion, you will be asked another GroupSystems brainstorming question, "What are the new rule sets that emerge as a result of 9/11 and the ongoing GWOT?"You will be asked to enter your ideas into 3 separate "buckets":

1.  Security within our borders
2.  Security at our borders
3.  Security beyond our borders.

1100-1200
SESSION III: Who are the dominant crisis trigger agents in the current global era?
INSTRUCTIONS: After some introductory slides on potential downstream institutional consequences for DoD as a result of 9/11 and the GWOT, you will be asked to participated in a GroupSystems brainstorming activity of approximately 5-7 minutes, answering the question, "What will future enemies of the U.S. learn from 9/11 and the GWOT?" You will be given three "buckets" to choose from in terms of placing your entry:

1.  Super-empowered individuals
2.  Transnational networks
3.  Nation-states.

Following that activity, Dr. Barnett will lead a discussion on this question for approximately 40 minutes. At the end of that discussion, you will be asked another GroupSystems brainstorming question, "What are the long-term institutional ramifications of the home game/away game dichotomy?" You will be asked to enter your ideas into 3 separate "buckets":

1.  A future Department of Homeland Security will someday rival DoD in importance
2.  DoD will remain the predominant national security player in all spheres
3.  DoD will bifurcate into a classic warfighting force and a constabulary force

 (Back to the pre-WWII future).

1200-1300 Lunch break (served in the conference room)

1300-1500
SESSIONS IV-IX: Building the System Perturbation model piece by piece
INSTRUCTIONS: After some review slides on the six proposed categories of the System Perturbation, you will be asked to participate in 6 sequential 20-minute sessions exploring each category. Each 20-minute session will begin with a 5-minute GroupSystems brainstorming activity where you will be asked to offer new or better definitions, examples, analogies, etc. for the category. Following that, you will participate in a facilitated discussion for 15 minutes before moving on to the next category. The six proposed categories are:

1.  Agents
2.  Triggers
3.  Medium
4.  Transmission
5.  Barriers
6.  Consequences.

1500-1515 Coffee break

1515-1645
SESSIONS X-XII: What is to be done by whom?
INSTRUCTIONS: After some introductory slides on the concept of burden-sharing and new linkages with regard to System Perturbations, you will be asked to participate in 3 sequential 30-minute sessions exploring three broad questions:

1.  In responding to future System Perturbations, how much responsibility falls to DoD versus the rest of the US Government?
2.  How much falls to the public sector versus the private sector?
3.  How much falls to the United States versus the rest of the world?

Each 30-minute session will begin with a quick GroupSystems vote, followed by approximately 20 minutes of facilitated discussion, and ending with another GroupSystems brainstorming activity where you will be asked to suggest useful steps the US Government could take in the coming years to meet the challenges associated with future System Perturbations such as 9/11.

1645-1700
SESSION XIII: The Elevator Drill
INSTRUCTIONS: You will be given an opportunity for one last comment, the scenario for which will be revealed at this time.

1700
ADJOURN

Here are the slides that resulted from the workshop:

Finally, here is the deleted scene itself ….

Deleted Scene: Barnett's Rules on System Perturbations

[TEXT BEGINS]

Since I am constantly going on about "rules," it only seems fitting that, along with this definition of a new crisis type, I offer some rule sets regarding how it unfolds and what are good strategies to deal with it. Truth be told, what I will offer here are more observations than rules, but in keeping with my rule that no audience likes a wishy-washy visionary ("Oh, I dunno, it could sort of be like that"), let me display the usual arrogance of the grand strategist and pretend what I am about to tell you are hard rules.

How did I come about these rules? I did the usual thing one does in my business: I held a workshop and invited all my friends, plus some newbies to shake things up. You invite your friends because you want a good conversation, and because you know what they are capable of in terms of big ideas. These are the people that will not fight your ideas and premises tooth and nail because you have a reputation with them. But you do not want a lovefest. Although I always say my workshops are all about making me smarter, you do not want to go overboard in that arena, like it is some communist party congress and your brilliant observations are constantly interrupted by [stormy applause]. No, you want some agitators in the group, or some people who will, by their very nature, anger plenty of others in the room.

The agitators need to be serious experts in the field you are stealing from. I say "stealing from," because I do not pretend to generate original thought, by and large. As my mentor Art Cebrowski likes to describe me, I am a true synthesist, which is a polite way of saying I never really come up with any ideas of my own. But Art is right: I basically weave ideas and concepts together from other sources, other fields, other cultures. I am a concept arbitrager, who learned this skill less from any one field of study than from simply learning a number of languages over the course of my life (French, Russian, German, and Romanian). Can I speak any of them today? Not really. But what I can do almost instinctively is learn new languages quickly -- I mean really plunge into a field and come back out with enough terminology and understanding to manage a dangerous version of its spoken language. I say "dangerous" because, inevitably, my use of that language angers the purists, which is my snotty way of saying people truly expert in the field. That gets me back to the agitators.

I invited a few people truly conversant in complexity and chaos theory to the workshop, knowing that my use of System Perturbation would offend their sensibilities. I mean, they already have loads of fairly firm rules about their ideas, and both these terms (system and perturbation) have specific meanings to them. I wanted to respect their expertise, but only up to a point, because I am engaging in conceptual arbitrage here -- moving concepts from one field to another. Since my field, political science, is essentially a bastard science with almost no good rule sets, it is hard to offend anyone in my neck of the woods. But when I start talking System Perturbations and using words like medium, transmission, etc., I invariably anger the complexity guys, because they believe that, by using their tools, you really can explain the world and how it works -- almost from A to Z. Of course, most of their computer models tend to zero out human emotions, reducing everything to rational choices by rational people, but since I have never really visited their world of rational people always acting rationally, I think I can only do so much damage with a few of their concepts.

Now, the rules I will present here really are not based on complexity or chaos theory, but based on observations I arrived at after listening to a bunch of social scientists discuss the concept of System Perturbation as a new definition of security crisis, with a smattering of complexity theory types in the room to goad and taunt them about their lack of true expertise in the subject-matter. Naturally, I conducted such a deviously designed workshop inside the Beltway, which such behavior is considered quite normal.

What I got from the workshop was a ton of disparate ideas about how vertical and horizontal scenarios play out among vertical and horizontal political systems. That was the weird thing about this workshop: I introduced the concept of vertical and horizontal scenarios and pretty soon everyone in the room was talking about vertical and horizontal societies or political systems. I like those phrases better than "authoritarian" and "democratic," because those phrases come with so much baggage and are so all-inclusive, whereas my workshop participants seemed to use the phrases vertical system and horizontal system with far greater freedom. For example, both China and Russia could be described as having far more horizontal economic systems than political systems, meaning their economies are increasingly built more around ties among firms and among individuals thanbetween the political leadership and firms, or the more vertically arranged patterns of authority and activity under past communist rule. Their political systems may still be quite vertically arrayed, from top to bottom, but their economic systems are far more horizontal.

You might ask, Why not just call them authoritarian market economies? Clearly I could do just that, but I prefer referring to vertical and horizontal systems because, that way, I can talk about how different aspects (i.e., economic versus political, or social versus security) of China might respond to a System Perturbation differently. I think China's economy and society are more horizontal in form than vertical, but I believe the Communist Party and People's Liberation Army remain extremely vertical in form, so a System Perturbation hitting China hits different sectors differently. Why is that important? Well, here I go back to the dinosaurs and mammals notion: a System Perturbation may disrupt or destroy different aspects of different systems across China. For example, SARS was more challenging for the political leadership than for the economy, which in the end proved awfully resilient whereas the Party looked awfully stiff. The mass media displayed a surprising amount of horizontal form, whereas the military assumed its usual stonewall stance. You get the idea. I just want more flexible concepts because I am still fumbling my way around this new strategic concept.

Before I give you the rules, let me spin out this description of vertical and horizontal systems a bit more by offering a series of examples. I will say horizontal systems tend to be replete with elites, meaning they possess multiple types of powerful people: political, business, military, technology, mass media, cultural icons and heroes, and so on. Vertical systems, on the other hand, really only have one elite -- the political leadership. You can tell you are in a vertical system when the political leader is also the military leader, is also the richer landowner, is also guiding hand of the economy, and so on. In vertical systems, you have to join the government to have power and wealth, but in horizontal systems, you typically have to leave the government to get wealth.

A second difference I have touched upon before: horizontal systems rotate leaderships with routine regularity, while vertical systems tend to have permanent leaderships. As such, horizontal systems tend to feature market-dominated economies, while vertical systems tend to feature state-dominated economies.

A third package of differences concerns the nature of communications and dialogue. In the horizontal system, you tend to see universal networks, where everyone can connect up to everyone else. This facilitates a question-based dialogue, where basically all subjects are on the table. The government in a horizontal system tends not to make any effort to steer that discourse, but only to deal with downstream behavior that may result. You want to yell "fire" in a crowded theater and people get hurt in the resulting stampede? Well then, you are going to be in trouble.

Vertical systems are just the opposite on communication. Their networks tend to be drill-down networks, or connectivity that runs from the leader to the led. Instead of letting any and all conversations occur, vertical systems typically feature upstream content control, because the dialogues that are permissible are severely restricted in terms of taboos. In short, it is a world of "don't go there, girlfriend!" I use the feminine here with purpose, since far more of the taboos involve women and restrict their behavior. What do young Iranian women do overwhelmingly when they get on the Internet? They race to Yahoo chat rooms to discuss sex, dating and marriage? Why do they have to go to such effort? These subjects are not discussable in public Iranian society under the mullahs. So what do you talk about in a country like Iran? You mostly talk about what you cannot talk about. That is what I did in the Soviet Union when I lived there briefly: I had lots of conversations with Russians where we talked about all the subjects you could not talk about. We did not actually discuss those subjects, we just talking about Russians' inability to talk about them. Vertical systems are a sort of strange, Seinfeldian universe in that way: all of your conversations really are about nothing.

Now that I have explained my terminology, let me lay out the five questions I seek to answer with these rules:

1) Who's really in charge during a System Perturbation? For example, is the agent which triggers the vertical shock really running the show?

2) What's really at risk during a System Perturbation? Are all systems equally at risk of disruption and crisis?

3) Where are the boundaries of a System Perturbation? Where do these horizontal waves tend to dissipate? What are the natural barriers to transmission?

4) When do we gain the upper hand in a System Perturbation? Which is another way of saying, How do you come out on top after one?

5) How do we deal with other states during a System Perturbation? Who naturally tend to be our friends and who are our natural enemies?

Let me assigns three rules to each of those five questions, starting with question 1 and working my way down.

Who's really in charge during a System Perturbation? 

Rule #1: Super-empowered individuals may rule vertical scenarios, but nation-states still rule horizontal scenarios. I got this one from a senior personal aide to the Secretary of Defense, who made the observation during a brief I gave him and a slew of his colleagues. His point was simple: a terrorist like Osama bin Laden can put together the people, money, and logistics to hijack three planes and fly them into buildings, but that vertical shock will trigger significant long-term responses from the threatened nation-states. The responses from these states are true horizontal scenarios that stretch on for years, like the global war on terrorism. A serious campaign like that takes an enormous amount of resources, which really only nation-states can muster. So, a super-empowered individual like Bin Laden can certainly pull off a "heist" here and there, but the "police" are able to spend years hunting him down. As my old boss Art Cebrowski likes to say, the terrorist has few resources, but lots of will, whereas the state tends to have lots of resources, but difficulty maintaining will, or vigilance. So it is a cat-and-mouse sort of game over the long run: he has to be shifty, we have to be relentless.

Rule #2: Vertical scenarios choose us, but we choose horizontal scenarios. This concept stems from an observation made by an historian of millenarian movements, or groups with apocalyptic agendas. Richard Landes of Boston University says, look back through any nation's history and you will find defining moments, or what he calls "chosen trauma." These events shape the ethos of the society because people there have chosen to mark them as key turning points in their collective history. In the United States, our chosen trauma include the Boston Tea Party, the Battle of Gettysburg, the attack on Pearl Harbor, and now 9/11. Not every bad thing that happens triggers this response. America could have chosen to respond to the 1993 bombing of the World Trade Center to launch a global war on terrorism, but we did not. In general, a chosen trauma can be summarized by the phrase, "Remember the ______!" So Americans "Remember the Alamo!" and "Remember the Maine!" But we do not really chose to remember Columbine or Oklahoma City in the same way. The point of this rule is simply to remind us that we have the ability to say no to responding to a vertical scenario, and that when we do decide to respond, like with a global war on terrorism, that is not a choice forced upon us, but one we make freely -- thus signifying control. It is one of those things we all learned in kindergarten: anyone can hurl an insult or a rock, but you only have to fight when you want to.

Rule #3: Once the vertical scenario plays itself out, control reverts back to nation-states, so long as they stay on the offensive. You could say this one also comes from the Office of the Secretary of Defense, because that has been the basic philosophy they have advocated in America's global war on terrorism. In other words, once the dust cleared after 9/11, it was America's task to keep hounding Bin Laden and Al Qaeda until they are completely destroyed as a threat. Our enemy's goal is clear: they need to keep hitting us with vertical shocks that cumulatively depress our stock of rules, our collective sense of individual security, and our belief in the stability of our system. A vertical shock like 9/11 immediately creates a sense of rule-set void: people are thinking, "We are clearly short of the right rules because if we had had them, this disaster never would have happened in this way." If an Al Qaeda can maintain a certain frequency of shocks, America never really fills that void back in with new rules, because we would be constantly scrambling to understand -- yet again -- "how something like this could happen?" But if we maintain a constant pressure on the enemy, those vertical shocks are few and far between, allowing us to fill in any voids created by our original sense of shock and horror. This is the essential difference between America and Israel since 9/11: we have never been hit again, but Israel keeps suffering the vertical shocks of suicide bombings, thus Israeli society suffers systematic brutalization and thus responds more brutally with time. My point: you take the offensive, you limit the need for brutality in your response. You get the bad stuff over as quickly as possible.

What's really at risk in a System Perturbation?

Rule #4: In response to System Perturbations, horizontal systems tighten up vertically, but vertical systems tighten up horizontally? After 9/11, a horizontal system like the United States will tighten up its rule sets by forging more comprehensive cooperation between local, state and federal agencies, or along vertical lines of authority. Horizontal systems like the U.S. naturally fear that their distributedness is their weakness, when in reality, it is their strength. But tightening up along vertical lines only makes sense, sort of defense-in-depth philosophy that is more logical than, say, states coming together per se. In a vertical system you tend to see the opposite sort of response: when the Great Leader finds his rule under attack, he starts reining everyone in because he is never quite sure who to trust. So you see crackdowns on untrustworthy groups and more palace guards. That was basically Saddam Hussein's tack across the nineties after the U.S. booted Iraq out of Kuwait: he kept creating new, ever more trustworthy troops to surround him, and he put those troops under his most trusted relatives. More generally in response to 9/11, we saw plenty of vertical political systems around the world use the excuse of the global war on terrorism to target dissidents, separatists, and the like, reclassifying everyone as a terrorist and seeking the U.S.'s blessing for that designation. So what is at risk here is basically the civil rights of citizens the world over, because a vertical shock can easily send even the most horizontal systems over the top in their search for security.

Rule #5: Vertical scenarios scare horizontal systems more, while horizontal scenarios scare vertical systems more. People living in horizontal systems typically enjoy significantly larger amounts of freedom, and so it is easier to slap a vertical scenario like a terrorist attack on an open society than a closed one. Naturally, people living in more horizontal systems understand that vulnerability and fear vertical scenarios, or the bolt-from-the-blue, far more than horizontal scenarios, or some slow-developing problem against which you can mobilize your network of resources. 9/11 really shocked America, even though the death total was fairly small when you compare it, say, to deaths from car accidents each year (40 to 50 thousand), but those death unfold in small increments, spread out across the land, whereas 9/11's victims died all at once. Plus, Americans understand the risks of driving; we know those rule sets. But 9/11 triggered the response of "People just shouldn't have to die that way," meaning it offended our sense of rules regarding warfare. Bolts-from-the-blue like 9/11 tend to haunt U.S. strategic planners, because we know there is little we can do to prevent an enemy from getting that first sucker-punch in on America, whereas in a long, knockdown drag-out fight, we are very confident that we will prevail. Vertical systems tend to fear horizontal scenarios more, say, like the slow build-up of resistance to rule. Soviet Russia went nuts over individual dissidents like Andrei Sakharov, because they feared he would slowly "poison" the minds of an entire generation, making both rule and reform impossible. They were right to be afraid. Similarly, the political leadership in China runs scared when a Falun Gong movement develops secretly on its own, using the network connectivity of the Internet to spread its gospel. When several thousand Falun Gong disciples showed up one morning on Tianammen Square, what was frightening to the Chinese leadership was less their non-violent protest than the their obvious self-organizing capabilities. So if horizontal systems fear political assassinations, vertical systems live more in fear of grass roots movements. 

Rule #6: Vertical scenarios harm vertical systems more, while horizontal scenarios harm horizontal systems more. This rule simply says that Rule #5 is basically wrong, despite what people in both systems tend to believe. In reality, vertical strikes can do little damage to truly distributed systems. If someone wipes out the White House, Congress and the Supreme Court one afternoon, nothing would really change in our country in terms of our ability to maintain rule. Yes, it would be a huge shock, but it would not be hard to replace all those leaders rather quickly. I could find you 535 ex-senators and representatives living within a ten-mile radius of the Capitol itself who could easily step back into rule, tell me how hard it would be to find nine lawyers in Washington who think they are smart enough to sit on the Supreme Court! But even beyond those facile examples lies the reality that we have 50 "farm teams" around the country, each complete with their own set of executives, supreme courts, and legislative branches. You if you wipe out our national leadership you do not really kill our capacity for leadership, because we have got more political leaders than we can count! What really stresses out horizontal systems like the U.S. are the horizontal scenarios that never seem to end, like a Great Depression, which really only ended when the vertical shock of Pearl Harbor put the country on another pathway. In contrast, vertical systems like Saddam Hussein's regime can really be dismembered quite profoundly simply by taking out the leadership. Remember the "most wanted" deck of cards? That said we really needed to nail only about 50 bad actors in Iraq and we would have eliminated the bulk of the Baath party rule.

Where are the boundaries in System Perturbations?

Rule #7: Vertical scenarios are always preceded by horizontal scenarios that generated the preconditions for system shock. This one I definitely stole from the complexity guys. Their basic point is that no vertical shock occurs in a vacuum. With 9/11, there were a host of horizontal scenarios on our side that led to all that lax security and our government's downplaying the threat from Al Qaeda. So looking for that one "smoking gun" is always an illusion, despite the fact that we always pretend to ourselves that we have really found one, like the FBI "Phoenix Memo." To believe that one little memo should have turned the tides on all those long-term horizontal scenarios is just fantasy. You cannot turn conventional wisdom on its head without a serious shock. On Al Qaeda's side, 9/11 was the culmination of a slow build-up of capabilities and demonstrated strikes over the years. This group did not appear out of nowhere, nor did their grievances.

Rule #8: Vertical scenarios are invariable followed by horizontal scenarios that generate preconditions for future shocks. This one sort of says, "Be careful what you wish for." Japan attacks Pearl Harbor and hopes it will shock the U.S. into rapid defeatism. Instead, we respond with the Pacific Campaign, or a methodical dismantling of Japan's empire. Hitler thought Germany might conquer Russia with the same blitzkrieg that overwhelmed Poland and France, and he got the Battle of Stalingrad and the Siege of Leningrad instead. Al Qaeda thought America would be shocked into isolation after 9/11, and got a Bush Adminstration hell-bent on transforming the Middle East. Of course, as part of that transformation, we invaded Iraq and toppled Saddam Hussein's regime. That was the "big bang" America put on the Middle East as a whole. But that vertical shock invariably creates its own horizontal scenarios like leaving tens of thousands of U.S. troops trapped in Iraq for the long haul, pulling in jihadists from all over the world to try and kill the "infidels," and forcing the U.S. into an accommodation with the UN it had long sought to avoid regarding postwar Iraq. What new vertical shock comes out of that maelstrom of horizontal scenarios? Good question.

Rule #9: The potential for conflict is maximized when states with differing rule sets are forced into collaboration/collision/clashes. This rule basically defines America's dilemma in pursuing this global war on terrorism: we will constantly be getting into bed with countries whose rule sets do not go well with our own, like Egypt, Saudi Arabia, or even Syria. How does America cooperate with essentially non-democratic states to spread democracy? Then again, if you want converts, you better work among the sinners, yes? But even tougher questions abound in response to 9/11. You could say, for example, that in pursuing this war on terror, America is basically adopting the Israeli approach of an-eye-for-an-eye, which is problematic for most Americans. Israel may, for religious and cultural reasons, be comfortable with that Old Testament approach, but America is basically a New Testament-style democracy, where the "golden rule" of "do unto others as you would have them do unto you" drives most of our rule sets. As I stated earlier, I think the Core-Gap division forces some genuine bifurcation in our security rule sets, and yet, there is no pasting over the reality that this war on terror will cause very profound rule set clashes within America itself.

When do we gain the upper hand in System Perturbations?

Rule #10: A strong offensive strategy can force a certain amount of structure on the most asymmetrical of enemies. Because I believe state-on-state wars are fundamentally a thing of the past, I have strong expectations that the enemies -- whatever form they take -- will be both fairly distributed in their organizational structure and seek to wage war on us in the most asymmetrical means. This enemy could be an Al Qaeda, or a SARS, or an anti-American intifada in Iraq. In these situations, defensive strategies inevitably fail, because all the initiative is left to your enemy. Some might say, "But if you cut off one head of the Hydra, then ten more with appear!" But to be perfectly blunt, I hate arguments that take you down the path of saying in effect: "Whatever we do, let's not piss off the terrorists." If you don't take the fight to the enemy, the enemy brings the fight to you, so we can do this in Manhattan or in Iraq -- and I prefer Iraq. You can counter with, "But what all those soldiers dying in Iraq?" Those lives are no more, nor any less precious than the almost 3,000 we lost on 9/11. But the big difference is that there are soldiers, not civilians. Taking the fight to the enemy forces that enemy to adapt himself to whatever offensive strategy you pursue. If you shoot on sight, then he will hide. If you track him across networks, then he will have to stay mostly off-grid. If you plant yourself in Iraq and Afghanistan, then you will fight him in Iraq and Afghanistan, not New York and Washington.

Rule #11: Our individual plays unfold with utmost speed, but in ignoring any "game clock," we remember that our strength is our inevitability. America's strategic tempo in this global war on terrorism must be deliberate, not rash. We need to line up allies before we strike, not be forced to bribe them afterwards. We want to make clear every time we act, what rule sets we are upholding or proposing. In sum, it is a "rash" U.S. military establishment the advanced world fears most: reckless, trigger-happy, and prone to unilateralism. An inevitable military Leviathan, on the other hand, is what the global system needs most: decisive in its power projection, precise in its targeted effects, and thorough in its multilateralism. So while we will strike with amazing speed, and coordinate our operations with eye toward rapidly dominating any enemy we take on, our strategic choices must be made with great care. Living in an interconnected world, America must understand that almost any time it intervenes militarily overseas, it sets off a series of horizontal scenarios both good and bad. The rest of the Core will invariably have to live with all those resulting scenarios, so they cannot just be forewarned, these countries must be consulted, enlisted, and convinced to the best of our abilities, and that takes effort up front. So tactical and operational speed are doubleplusgood because they save our soldier's lives¸ but strategic speed is fundamentally bad because of its negative effect on the global security rule sets we seek to enhance with every intervention we undertake.

Rule #12: Our efforts to dissipate horizontal scenarios will invariably trigger unintended consequences that take on a life of their own. In the Y2K scenarios, we called this the "Iatrogenic Zone." Iatrogenic refers to "unexpected side-effects that result from treatment by a physician." People who own computers know this one instinctively, whether they realize it or not. Iatrogenic is when you try to download this nice little program from the web to fix this itsy-bitsy problem on your computer, and three hours later you are looking at a complete wipe of your hard drive for your troubles. America's occupation of post-Saddam Iraq places the global war on terrorism in the Iatrogenic Zone. The USA Patriot Act, in many critics' minds, places the Justice Department squarely in the Iatrogenic Zone, where they fear the new powers to fight terrorism will represent a cure worse than the disease. But again, while I cite this rule I see no need to slavishly submit to its logic. All "slippery slope" arguments end up pushing you toward inaction versus action, defense versus offense, and disparate tactics instead of real strategy, so you do not want to go too far with this one.

How do we deal with other states during System Perturbations? 

Rule #13: There is no statute of limitations on cultural blowback, so avoid providing future foes with chosen trauma. Middle East experts will tell you 9/11 is twenty years of blowback from Afghanistan and the mujaheddin we supported there, half a century of blowback from the creation of the state of Israel, and even eight centuries of blowback from the Crusades. Like in your marriage, no "past sins" are ever forgotten, so it is crucial that in our responses to any System Perturbation, we do not simply plant a host of new historical grievances in the hearts of those we hope ultimately win over and integrate into the Core. This is, of course, the great danger of the Big Bang strategy of toppling Saddam Hussein's regime. My Muslim colleagues from that part of the world have told me repeatedly that, immediately following 9/11, America had the chance to win over not just a small percentage of the Muslim world, but a very large one -- depending on its response. These same friends tell me now that that share of potentially winnable Muslims is far smaller, and far more difficult to win, precisely because we have provided them with a newchosen trauma. What is our solution now? As Thomas Friedman likes to argue, America's best hope now is to do whatever it takes to make Iraq a beacon of freedom and progressive change in the Middle East. In effect, we need to turn that chosen trauma into a chosen triumph -- not ours, mind you, but the Iraqi people's.

Rule #14: In response to vertical scenarios, horizontal systems naturally come together, as do vertical systems. This one we saw in spades following 9/11, as the world's free states rushed to our support and joined our substantial multinational coalition that toppled the Taliban's rule in Afghanistan. Horizontal systems naturally saw a common threat in the attacks, meaning something that could just as easily happen to them. But vertical systems, in general, saw something very different in 9/11. First, since many such states are not our friends, they saw America receiving her comeuppances for past sins. Second, since a few of these states have long been identified as state sponsors of terrorist groups, they knew they could soon be on receiving end of any general U.S. response. Of course, when President Bush identifies an "axis of evil" by name, then the U.S. simply drives this countries even closer together, furthering their collective disconnectedness from the rest of the world. I do not see anything wrong with that, because I believe in calling a spade a spade. It is just that once you generate such a list, expectations are immediately raised about what you intend to do about that list, so follow-through is crucial. In that way, you could say that the "axis of evil" is a self-declared "domino theory" for the global war on terrorism: America sets itself up for having to deal with the entire lot to demonstrate significant milestones in the war. Is this an aggressive approach to shrinking the Gap? You bet.

Rule #15: Transitional states are forced to choose during System Perturbations, and their choices reveal which direction they are truly heading. By this I mean that the world is full of states trapped somewhere between truly vertical and horizontal system status -- China, Russia, Iran, to name a few. For these states, a System Perturbation represents a real moment of truth: to which "side" do they move? This is what Thomas Friedman describes as the choice between the "Lexus world" and the "olive tree world," and it is what I call the choice between the Core and the Gap, or -- most fundamentally -- a choice between connectedness and disconnectedness. I think we learned plenty about Russia, China, India, and several other New Core members following 9/11. In the case of those three countries, despite the fact that the Pentagon had more than a few nasty things to say about each prior to 9/11, all came down firmly on the U.S. side following this huge loss in our security. They chose. How did Iran choose? Saudi Arabia? Here I fear we are talking about states moving in the wrong direction, although there are better signs from Riyadh following the fall of Saddam Hussein. With SARS, China clearly had a choice to make, and it did so clearly, again reinforcing the perception that the nation is moving deeper into the Core. With our Big Bang in Iraq, America has forced a lot of countries to choose all over again, and we will know the outcomes according to the uniforms that ultimately appear in any UN-sponsored peacekeeping force for Iraq.

* * *

One of the main reasons why I think we are far enough along in our understanding of System Perturbations to start identifying some of the rule sets is because 9/11 was not just an existence proof for the concept, it started a whole new discussion on -- even a whole new lexicon for describing -- the nature of system-level security crises. Look at how the phrase "9/11" has become a touchstone for shocks that remake rule sets. The Chinese have repeatedly referred to SARS as "our 9/11." Australia suffers a great loss of life due to terrorist strike against its citizens touring in Bali, the biggest number of Australians killed in one hostile act since World War II, and they refer to it as "our 9/11." India's Parliament is bombed by terrorists, and many Indiana refer to it as "our 9/11." Russia is confronted by terrorists holding a theater full of hostages in Moscow, and its tragic outcome is described by many Russians as "our 9/11." In each instance, people are talking about security suddenly revealed as inadequate, rule sets suddenly sent into flux, and political systems deeply perturbed.

Understanding how System Perturbations unfold is crucial, in my mind, for understanding war within the context of everything else. This understanding is not only good for helping us stabilize the Core progressively over time, but also in shrinking the Gap, a process that is likely to be regularly punctuated by significant System Perturbations perpetrated by the United States itself, the most revolutionary country the world has ever known. To that end, the Pentagon needs to rethink its ordering principle, as does the entirety of the U.S. national security establishment. The wars we wage and the peace we win across the 21st century will be shaped decisively by how America comes to define crisis in the age of globalization.

[TEXT ENDS]

The blog strikes again!

Just our luck:  a longtime reader with the exact Ethiopian experience we're looking for--Sidamo.

She and her husband are willing to talk to us tomorrow.

Detail freak that I am, I am eager for the data dump.

Long live the blog!

Our frustration with Iran is borne of our obsession with nukes

WAPO story.

A year ago, Iran was on its way to becoming a pariah state. Dozens of governments accused Iranian leaders of stealing the presidential election and condemned the brutal crackdown on protesters that followed. The country faced sanctions and international scorn over its controversial nuclear program.

Now, even as the U.N. Security Council prepares to impose its fourth round of sanctions on Iran with a vote slated for Wednesday, Tehran is demonstrating remarkable resilience, insulating some of its most crucial industries from U.S.-backed financial restrictions and building a formidable diplomatic network that should help it withstand some of the pressure from the West. Iranian leaders are meeting politicians in world capitals from Tokyo to Brussels. They are also signing game-changing energy deals, increasing their economic self-sufficiency and even gaining seats on international bodies.

Iran's ability to navigate such a perilous diplomatic course, analysts say, reflects both Iranian savvy and U.S. shortcomings as up-and-coming global players attempt to challenge U.S. supremacy, and look to Iran as a useful instrument.

Honestly, the first word out of my mouth at reading the opening paras of the piece was "bullshit"--at least regarding the line of America's "shortcomings as up-and-coming global players attempt to challenge U.S. supremacy, and look to Iran as a useful instrument."

I do think the Iranians are savvy, and that we shoot ourselves in the foot every time we reduce them to some caricature of irrational religious nutcases.  I see Ahmadinejad as a very clever fellow, who piously led his Revolutionary Guards right into a successful and impressively bloodless military putsch, effectively giving the president his goal of a party-based dictatorship that supplants the theocracy in too many ways to count. His veterans of the Iran-Iraq war feel they've earned their dictatorship, and all the economic earnings that go with it. In that way, they remind me plenty of Brezhnev's grubby, unimaginative crew.  And like Brezhnev's bunch, they know full well that getting nuclear weapons is a huge credentializing signpost.

I stipulate all that.

I also stipulate that rising great powers, when forced to by our singular obsession with nukes, will take advantage of Iran's equally laser-like focus on nuclear weapons.  But none of these powers want Iran in that position, don't kid yourselves, because it does nothing for them and rising great powers tend to be about as unsentimental and ungenerous as they come about potential rivals.

What drives this whole show more than anything else is our insistence that damn near everything in our foreign policy agenda take a back seat to the all-crucial goal of preventing that which will not be prevented.  We made/make our effort in Iraq take a backseat to it.  Ditto for Afghanistan.  Ditto for our lackluster attempts in recent years to do anything about the Palestinians. We hold a good chunk of our relationships with a host of crucial rising great powers hostage to this dynamic--all of this to no avail.

In the end, we'll be forced down the path that was always there: we'll simply greet Iran's achievement with a clear promise to liquidate the entire place if they ever choose to be so stupid as to launch one of those missiles or expect that some bomb passed to others will not be traced back to them.

And then we let those jackasses live with their "amazing, world-changing achievement" that will earn them nothing.

Or we can continue pretending that all this effort has real meaning and impact, when neither is true.

I've said it before and I will repeat it endlessly: there is nothing magical or unprecedented about a "Shiite bomb." They work like all the rest. We have the only history of using them.

We shouldn't forget that now, much less go all wobbly over such a peon power. If Russia was revealed by history and globalization as just Upper Volta with nukes, what exactly does that make Iran?

And don't tell me the oil and gas make it different, or the religious ideology. This is all about power; when we imagine otherwise we insult everybody's intelligence.

Turkey steps into the breach left by our lack of strategic imagination

World Bulletin piece via Our Man in Kabul.

Turkish Foreign Minister Ahmet Davutoglu said Monday the tripartite mechanism between Turkey, Afghanistan and Pakistan would make efforts to hold the Istanbul Forum meeting, one that involves businesspeople of the three countries, in Kabul, Afghanistan. 

Davutoglu held a tripartite meeting with Afghan Foreign Minister Zalmay Rassoul and Pakistani Foreign Minister Shah Mehmood Qureshi at Ciragan Palace in Istanbul as part of the Third Summit of Heads of State and Government of the Conference on Interaction and Confidence-building Measures in Asia (CICA). 

Speaking at a press conference following the tripartite meeting, Davutoglu said that they wanted to contribute to the "normalization process" in Afghanistan by showing that Kabul was not a city in which only security meetings took place but also a city in which economic meetings could take place. 

Turkey will indeed try our patience in its regional ambitions, but there is far more positive force than negative friction created by this push, so I say, bring it on in spades!

Regional powers stepping in to let Afghanistan know it's not on its own once NATO leaves is a very good thing. The more those signals are sent, especially from nations with established reputations of defending their regional interests vigorously, the faster we move the Taliban to a sense of inevitability--as in, the world is coming and it's never leaving, so get used to it.

A post-American Wal-Mart

Chart comes from Wal-Mart itself.

The top of the pyramid is crammed with stores, the bottom awaits, and the middle is filling up fast.  I will never forget my first time in a gigantic, 6-floor Wal-Mart in Nanchang, Jiangxi, China, and the fabulous escalators for carts!

A WAPO story that explores, from within via interviews, how Wal-Mart sees its future growth lying overwhelmingly beyond US borders.

The opening says it all:

The company that began as a five-and-dime in rural northwest Arkansas opened its annual shareholder meeting last week with Bollywood-style dancers, Asian balancing acts and Brazilian martial artists representing some of the 14 foreign countries in which Wal-Mart operates. Last year, its international division topped $100 billion in sales for the first time and this year it is expected to surpass the United States in number of stores.

This is the next phase of Wal-Mart domination. It built its business in small towns and suburbs across the United States, but now international sales are growing at almost nine times the rate of domestic sales.

Wal-Mart already was facing stalled growth at home after saturating the market, and that has been exacerbated by the weak labor market and high gas prices, which have battered the chain's core customers and depressed sales. That means the company has become increasingly reliant on the appetites of international shoppers to pick up the slack and drive growth, mirroring a broader global shift in purchasing power.

"The U.S. consumer is tired," said Dean Junkans, chief investment officer for PNC Wealth Management. "I think it's very possible that you can kind of have the global consumer kind of take the baton."

But dethroning the American shopper can be a risky proposition, as no one country has the replacements quite ready.

Have no doubt, Wal-Mart's arrival is even more of a socio-economic revolution in developing markets than it was/is in rural American markets: all of the local mom-and-pops either adapt to their newfound niche, somehow winning customer loyalty in ways that justify the higher prices, or they are gone.

And Wal-Mart's penchant for revolutionizing the local landscape extends far beyond the competition.  There's all the suppliers, shippers, the local ag industry--damn near everything is impacted even if only peripherally.  Just the experience of working for Wal-Mart will change the attitudes of local labor.  Even just working with Wal-Mart will alter how governments view their roles and responsibilities.

So yeah, this is a sign of globalization's next phase, and it likely to be just as tumultuous or more so than the recent decade.

The demographic explanation for the Eurozone's woes

NYT biz-page profile of yet another economist "doomster" who correctly called the recent woes. Naturally, the man is now considered a seer of the highest order, but the fellow, Edward Hugh, seems to be taking it well enough.

And I say that with some empathy: whenever I was introduced in years past as somebody who "foresaw 9/11," I felt that sort of hype was completely misplaced.  I foresaw types of things happening, and if you line up enough "bad" predictions, I guarantee you, you'll eventually become a celebrated seer--for a bit. But once you start lapping that crap up, you're finished as a thinker and you just start chasing celebrity, something Hugh seems bemusedly detached from as a life goal.

His main point is a simple one, which is why it's so robust: a eurozone that combined aging saver societies with demographically younger, credit-friendly populations was doomed to have a rough marriage. It's almost the globalization-integration equivalent of the stingy old rich guy marrying the spendthrift younger wife, except this "marriage" didn't come with the sanctity of political integration. So go figure, when the first credit crisis hits, these two sides turn on each other--the microcosm being nasty old frugal Angela Merkel shaking her finger at those crazy young Greeks and Irish and Spainairds!

Very cool and transmittable concept.

Rest of the story is how he's a suitably hot blogger with a--now--almost cliched unconventional career path. The stirring victory of the non-conformist!

But note how he's hard up for money. 

Good to have the day job, and that old PhD sometimes proves handy in that regard.

My point: a lot of us monkeys all over the planet banging away in our blogs, hoping this stay-at-home venue brings us great riches. And yeah, get enough monkeys and enough typewriters and somebody will bang out "War and Peace" on a regular basis. You just can't count on that as a viable career path.

The New Core not doing what they're told!

I want you to frickin' behave!Pair of NYT articles about "pliable ally" Turkey now playing "thorn" and China's PLA types being all blunt in their criticism of U.S. foreign policy and perceived meddling (always, the Taiwan thing!).

Naturally, the NYT frets: these are signs of America's diminished power.

Boo hoo! say I.  Integrating rising great powers into a stable system ain't for sissies or whiners or the self-doubting types.

The fear and the reality:

Turkey is seen increasingly in Washington as “running around the region doing things that are at cross-purposes to what the big powers in the region want,” said Steven A. Cook, a scholar with the Council on Foreign Relations. The question being asked, he said, is “How do we keep the Turks in their lane?”

From Turkey’s perspective, however, it is simply finding its footing in its own backyard, a troubled region that has been in turmoil for years, in part as a result of American policy making. Turkey has also been frustrated in its longstanding desire to join the European Union.

“The Americans, no matter what they say, cannot get used to a new world where regional powers want to have a say in regional and global politics,” said Soli Ozel, a professor of international relations at Bilgi University in Istanbul. “This is our neighborhood, and we don’t want trouble. The Americans create havoc, and we are left holding the bag.”

Turkey’s rise as a regional power may seem sudden, but it has been evolving for years, since the end of the cold war, when the world was a simple alignment of black and white and Turkey, a Muslim democracy founded in 1923, was a junior partner in the American camp.

Twenty years later, the map has been redrawn.

Washington does want everybody in their lane all right; it's a very old habit born of a superpower rivalry.  And now, there are so many types in DC who are desperate to recast China's rise in the same manner.  So when China doesn't start being more American right quick, we get nervous.  And those fears expand that much more when previous strategic employees like Turkey start acting like they think they're actual partners--as in people who balance each other's interests instead of just obeying!

Turkish foreign minister Ahmet Davutoglu seems to have a head on his shoulders:

“Economic interdependence is the best way to achieve peace,” he said at his home in Ankara last weekend. “In the 1990s we had severe tension all around us, and Turkey paid a huge bill because of that. Now we want to establish a peaceful order around us.”

Nations sharing economic interdependencies do get meddlesome in their neighbors's affairs.  For a long time, the biggest dependencies for most nations were bilateral ones with the US or a former colonial power. Nowadays, these interlocking relationships are all over the place, so rising powers are taking all sort of cues from all sorts of players, meaning America's voice, while awfully important, no longer drowns out everybody else's.

And so we better get used to being lectured to by powers who expect to do their sharing of lecturing--in addition to the usual receiving of lectures from us.

As for Chinese flag officers getting more forceful in public and closed-door sessions with US officials, understand two things (and no, I don't direct the following rant particularly at the general who made the forceful comments in front of Gates at the recent Asian security gathering, because his comments struck me as pretty routine in their grievance airing):

First, way too many of these guys are political and economic retrogrades, like they are most everywhere else on the planet (yes, there's been huge, beyond-evolutionary improvement in our ranks these past two decades but I do remember the Cold War dinosaurs well). Yes, they know their own business well enough, but almost to a man, these guys have no normal-world experience outside a life lived exclusively in the military. Put a mike in front of them and they will make some of the stupidest economic and political statements you've ever heard.  We've gotten used to a whole new generation of flag officers in the West who are so smooth in these circumstances that they sound like PR machines (minus any ideological DNA), but these skills don't yet exist in places like China, where they will utter the most foolishly bold comments with little sense as to how they are perceived (or what bullshit they're spouting).  And even when they speak in more military terms, their lack of awareness of any connectivity between their dreams of warfare and that big old world of economics out there is just stunning.  They will brag on all sorts of capabilities with almost no understanding of the real-world limits of those capabilities. They're blowhards--pure and simple.

And yeah, our experts and our media tend to lap it up big-time: "Oh my God! Did that Chinese general just say/write that!"). Why? The usual self-serving reasons.

Second, also understand that Chinese general have almost no experience in international or bilateral venues. Most of these guys have been kept under wraps for their entire careers. When I've spoken at military conferences in recent years, it's not unusual to find out that such-and-such an event was only the first or second time the PLA has ever participated, so the experience base just isn't there. These guys therefore tend to be a strange combo of loose cannons and overly-scripted.  The more we interact with them and the more they interact with the world, this experience gap will fade, and I've met plenty of mid-level PLA officers (my age) who impress the hell out of me for their superbly sophisticated minds and better skills at expressing themselves, so we won't be waiting for long.

Per the embedded link above to the WAPO story about a Chinese navy admiral voicing the opinion that all that's good in US-Chinese relations is due to them and all that's bad is due to America, I have no doubt that this sort of blunt one-sided is truly thrilling for Chinese officials to witness.  They do feel like they're doing all they can and they do harbor significant--and hardly irrational--fears that America will inevitable make them its primary enemy--just out of habit.  We will witness plenty such, getting-it-off-their-chest bravado in coming years, and we should take it stride--just like the Brits did with us a century ago.  The Chinese have--quite frankly--no idea what they're getting themselves into with assuming more of a global leadership role.  So let their arrogance lead them into situations that their wisdom will eventually rescue them from.  You can't force socialization on this scale; the Chinese will be who they imagine themselves to be for as long as possible, refusing to change--again, just like we acted for a very long time (arguably, the Chinese will have no such luxury in this rapidly evolving globalization era). 

Primary point of this admittedly snotty rant: don't get wrapped around the hype.  Countries, just like people, grow into roles. Whether they're "ancient civilizations" or not, their current rise puts them in unfamiliar territory, and no, there ain't no ancient Chinese secrets for what lies ahead.  Everybody is making it up as they go along, because a global landscape with multiple rising, prosperous, and strangely peaceful great powers is completely unprecedented.

But it was bought with your US tax dollars, so show some pride and act--as they say in the NFL--like you've been in the great-powers' endzone before.  As always: play up to potential and not down to the competition, but respect the competition.

The terrific strains caused by a rising car culture in emerging economies

NYT story on rising traffic fatalities in India, where, like China, the car culture explodes.

It is a little-known truth that when you travel in the Gap or in New Core pillars even, the biggest danger you face is not illness or bad water-food or terrorism.  The most likely route to death is a car accident.

This totally corresponds to all the travel I've done in my life (almost forty countries in all, about 2/3rds New Core/Gap): the illnesses and the security stuff were nothing to the routine dangers of automobile travel.

And yeah, I think of that as we contemplate our travels around Ethiopia in coming weeks (thanks for that third donated otoscope, though!).

But India's got it bad:

India overtook China to top the world in road fatalities in 2006 and has continued to pull steadily ahead, despite a heavily agrarian population, fewer people than China and far fewer cars than many Western countries.

See, the Chinese can't be #1 in everything!

But it's not just a size-matters argument, because a lot of New Core/emerging economies are seeing car fatalities level off or even decline as they upgrade fleets and roads and technology, but not India:

While road deaths in many other big emerging markets have declined or stabilized in recent years, even as vehicle sales jumped, in India, fatalities are skyrocketing — up 40 percent in five years to more than 118,000 in 2008, the last figure available.

The World Health Org says India's government is slow to wake up to the issue, but even hearing that is kind of amazing to me:  the notion that rising India needs to focus more government attention on such prosaic things when, of course, it could be waging resource wars across the planet, right?

Ah, the details of globalization's advance.

Certain biases don't help:  new car drivers seems to despise motorcyclists, pedestrians, etc. (not exactly an Asia-specific bias, I might add); helmet laws for motorcyclists are only for men, as women are apparently expendable; etc.  But if you've spent any time being driven or driving in places like China and India, you're probably like me and have to squint a lot so as to not flinch constantly at all the close calls with those not wearing wrap-around steel. 

So as the BRIC continue to balloon their domestic car fleets, expect these tensions to rise, triggering greater government responses.

The world stands at the bottom of a very steep curve.  About a century to get the first billion cars; maybe 1/4 that to get the second!

Chart of the day: under-five global deaths since 1970

Economist article on public health citing what one Aussie expert calls "undoubtedly the biggest advance in mortality measurement in four decades!"  

This guy, Alan Lopez of Queensland U, presented a study on infant death trends in Washington in late May (later published by Lancet), and the Economist readily excused his hyperbole, because it's a stunning trend.

As the Economist chart showed, everybody was tracking the incredible decline over the past four decades.  What Lopez's work showed was that they were all underestimating the drop.

Setting aside methodological controversies that naturally ensue, along with the fear of charities that such revisions rob them of donations, the real point of this chart is the overwhelming agreement on the curve, with only minor disagreements (to the layman, that is) regarding degrees of steepness.  

You want to sell me that crap that says globalization is bad for the weakest and the poorest on this planet?  Well, infant mortality is a great measure, and there seems to be an amazing correlation between globalization's explosive spread since the early 1970s (when this globalized world was truly born) and the cutting in half--in absolute terms--of infant mortality globally--EVEN AS THE WORLD POPULATION ALMOST DOUBLED FROM 3.6B TO 6.6B!

So factoring in the population growth, babies today are really roughly four times more likely to make to five than those born in 1970.

Put that in your pipe and smoke it.

Choosing my girls over the Global Forum

Original generic-but-copyrighted photo found here (not the international adoption agency we're using).  

I blanked out the faces lest anyone think I was posting actual pictures of the two girls we're adopting, because there are hugely strict privacy rules involved.  So consider the shot, which is beautiful (alas, not as beautiful as the two girls we're adopting!), as a placeholder until the legal proceedings are completed later this month.

Well, Monday afternoon we got word that our referred case now has a court date in Addis Ababa in late June. Although I had long considered the odds of that date interfering with the Time/CNN/Fortune Global Forum to be quite low, it managed to force an untenable choice:  I could make the court date but would miss the long trek south by car to first meet them in person.  Absent the meeting, a whole different visa pathway would ensue.

That's the technical issue.  

The personal issue would have been not being with my spouse on such an important trip deep in the middle of Africa. Remembering what it was to go to Nanchang and meet Vonne Mei alongside Vonne, I decided I simply could not miss this moment in my life as a husband and father.  The Global Forum would have been fabulous, and very good for my career, but lying on my deathbed decades from now, I won't be saying, "If only I got that one extra fab speaking gig!"  I'll be remembering beautiful moments like the first time I laid my eyes on my African daughters.

So an easy decision to make, if hard to execute.  This is only the second gig in about 15 years that I've ever cancelled (the other being over kidney stones--another birth-like process!), and I have gone on stage no matter what through more sinus infections and migraines than I can count (thank God those days are over). But again, you're not who you say you are, you're what you actually do or choose to be through your actions, and I choose husband-father when push comes to shove simply because I dig those roles so much more than my career.

Details:

• Thanks again to the three individuals who sent us otoscopes from Amazon.  If you want to help us out with donations, there's still plenty of time before we take the second/bringing-them-home trip in July/August. See the FAQ page for details on how to send us donations.
• I will be building up the blog queue for the duration of the trip, so it'll be a bit more latent than usual (understanding that this is not a breaking-news blog). I will not attempt to keep the usual frequency of posts, because there is just too much to do in the few days before we leave.  I will have my biz manager Jenn handle approving comments while I'm gone, because the access over there will be spotty and I don't want to spend my days there working the blog.
• I will try to tweet here and there, understanding that any pics will be generic travel photos and I won't be sharing any details on the girls or our time with them.
• I will likely make a trip post when I get back, although that too may be awfully generic for privacy issues.

That's all I can think of for now.  We are gearing up mightily, as we leave in a matter of days now.