Diplomacy & Crisis News

White House spokesman Josh Earnest weighed in on New England Patriot’s quarterback Tom Brady’s suspension Tuesday, reminding the American megastar that he’s a role model to “people around the world.” Turns out many of those people are very, very unhappy with NFL commissioner Roger Goodell.

To those uninitiated on the intricacies of the scandal dominating the American sports scene and widely known as Deflategate or Ballghazi: Brady is an Ugg-shilling celebrity who’s won five Super Bowls with the Patriots (his most recent title came this year), earns a $8 million annual salary, and is married to supermodel Gisele Bündchen, just three of the factors that lead American football fans outside of New England to generally despise him. This week, Goodell suspended him for four games for playing with footballs that weren’t properly inflated. Hence, Deflategate.

Goodell, who is also disliked by many NFL fans for inconsistent punishments, a hefty 2013 salary of $44 million, and general corporate buffoonery on behalf of the league, also slapped the Patriots with a million dollar fine and took away some of the team’s future draft picks.

As the rest of the football world celebrates, Patriots fans are incensed over the punishment, which they deem too harsh, and this outrage isn’t limited to American shores. As Earnest suggested, there are Patriot fans around the world. From the looks of things online, they’re as outraged as their American counterparts.

A group called Dutch Patriots Fans, which is registered as an official fan club on the Patriot’s website (all of the groups mentioned below are registered with the team, a loose affiliation that does not suggest any financial backing from the club), fired off a series of tweets condemning Goodell and and backing their embattled number 12. Check one out below:

#NoBradyNoBanner

— Dutch Patriots Fans (@DutchPatriots) May 12, 2015

The group followed also retweeted a series of images expressing support for Brady, who, up to this point, is defiant in face of the punishment.

The UKPatriots, a group based in United Kingdom, also took to media to express their outrage, rounding up all the hashtags being used to back Brady.

#TimeToUnite #FreeTomBrady #NoBradyNoBanner #UKPatriots @Patriots

— UKPatriots (@UKPatriots) May 12, 2015

Then came this from a group called Patriots Sweden:

Oproportionerligt. #FreeBrady

— Patriots Sweden (@PatriotsSweden) May 12, 2015

Translation: Disproportionate.

The Patriots España, a group based in Spain, calls the Well’s investigation a witch hunt in the tweet below (they condemned Goodell with harsher tweets that aren’t safe for a family Web site):

La sanción es desproporcionada,demuestra lo adentro que la tienen. Por muchas cazas de brujas que hagan volveremos a ganar!!! #FireGoodell

— Patriots España (@PatsESP) May 11, 2015

They then retweeted this image:

@PatsESP #FireGoodell #FreeBrady #NoBradyNoBanner #ZonaRojaNFL #NFLesp #FSylosabes pic.twitter.com/a51zm5nXpz

— Flying Elvis (@ElvisFlying) May 12, 2015

The Hungarian Patriots Fan Club isn’t happy either and posted this picture in support of their QB.

Goodell often likes to say the NFL is a global game, a notion many American fans scoff at. But at the very least, these tweets show some football sentiments are universal — strong feelings about Tom Brady, one way or the other.

Photo Credit: Billie Weiss/Getty Images

(Own report) - German military experts have initiated a debate on NATO's nuclear rearmament. The Western war alliance has "become more important" through the Ukraine crisis, wrote a high-ranking specialist of the Federal Academy for Security Policy (BAKS) in Berlin in a recently published discussion paper. In this context, "nuclear deterrence" must again become a topic of discussion. The "entire deterrence package" must put be on the agenda, not only nuclear arms in general, but also Europe-based US nuclear weapons - not least of all, those stored in Germany. Beyond the threat of nuclear war, the danger of a further barbarization of future wars is looming in the wake of the regeneration of the West. A former head of the Policy Planning Staff of the German Defense Ministry is proposing that Berlin consider procuring depleted uranium munitions for the Bundeswehr to combat Russian tanks. Depleted uranium is extremely destructive, even after their battlefield use. In Iraq for example, where NATO countries used these weapons, vast areas are contaminated still today.

New Zealanders are pretty irked by the revelation that their government used taxpayer money to air-freight nearly 1,000 sheep to Saudi Arabia.

The sheep shipment was part of a $4.4 million deal (6 million New Zealand dollars) to set up a New Zealand-sponsored “agribusiness service hub and demonstration farm” in eastern Saudi Arabia. The New Zealand government says the scheme is an important investment for its country, where sheep famously outnumber people six-to-one, and where the meat trade with Saudi Arabia is worth millions.

But many are blasting it as a move to mollify the powerful Saudi businessman who owns the farm where the sheep have been sent, and who also has invested deeply in New Zealand’s own sheep industry.

New Zealand announced a general ban on shipments of live farm animals in 2004, amid outrage from animal rights groups over livestock packed into “reeking, squalid” ships and a shipping disaster in which more than 5,000 sheep died on an Australian vessel en route to Saudi Arabia.

The ban left Saudi tycoon Hamood Al Ali al-Khalaf sheep-hungry and angry over the loss of business.

Skeptical Kiwis see the new sheep delivery as undue compensation for the well-connected al-Khalaf at a time when New Zealand is trying to cement a free trade deal in the Gulf. New Zealand jetted the sheep to Saudi Arabia late last year, but the scheme is just now making news after Prime Minister John Key’s recent visit to the Gulf to negotiate the trade deal.

Further fueling the anger is the revelation, from New Zealand television network TVNZ, that al-Khalaf also was the buyer of the animals that died in the 2004 sheep disaster.

“If this is the man who was behind the lamb deaths that led to the ban on live sheep in the first place then [Prime Minister] John Key and [Trade Minister] Tim Groser have just made fools of themselves at the taxpayer’s expense,” opposition trade spokesman David Parker told TVNZ.

New Zealand’s Primary Industries Minister Nathan Guy has called the scheme “a sound investment” – and one that can eventually “help us land the free trade agreement.” The government says the 2004 shipping disaster was why the sheep traveled by plane this time around.

Halal meat orders from Muslim have long brought New Zealand, as well as Australia, lots of business. But many Kiwis’ response to the latest deal is: “Baa, humbug!”

Bethany Clarke/Getty Images for Wool Week

Researchers funded by the World Bank arrived at a wildly unorthodox and unexpectedly effective strategy for preventing HIV in the African nation of Lesotho: A lottery program that offered participants an opportunity to win cash on the condition that they tested negative for sexually transmitted infections.

The lotteries led to a 21.4 percent reduction in HIV incidence among participants over a two-year period, and a reduction of more than 60 percent among participants identified as “risk-loving individuals” — those who were identified at the study’s start as people who enjoyed risky behavior.

“We are the first to find a significant reduction in HIV incidence though behavioral intervention,” Professor Martina Björkman Nyqvist of the Stockholm School of Economics, a lead researcher on the project, told Foreign Policy.

In Lesotho — a small, mountainous country of 2.1 million that is completely surrounded by South Africa — some 43 percent of the population lives on less than $1.25 a day and 23 percent of adults are infected with HIV. Among young people the infection rate is even higher, with 41 percent of people between the ages of 30 and 34 are infected with the disease.

Researchers worked with 3,029 volunteers in 29 villages across the country to see whether the opportunity to enter a lottery in exchange for a clean test result might lower these infection rates. Participants testing negative for curable sexually transmitted infections were entered automatically to win cash prizes of either $50 or $100. While the study focused on HIV, the lottery was tied to other STIs, so that HIV-positive individuals, for whom safe behavior is paramount, could also participate. All participants, including members of the control group, received in-kind rewards for participation.

The lotteries were most successful among risk seekers, identified through “the perceived value of a risky gamble.” “As risky sexual behavior, which is responsible for the vast majority of new HIV infections, also involves a risky gamble, lottery programs may better target those at higher risk of getting infected by HIV,” the authors wrote in a World Bank working paper published in March.

In a country with a low life expectancy, the consequences of sexual risk-taking can seem distant and the rewards immediate, Nyqvist said. The lotteries were designed to rebalance that psychological equation.

“Broadly, it has been popular in the past decade or so within international development to look at conditional cash transfer programs, and these have been found to have big effects when it comes to school attendance, health checkups, these kind of things,” Nyqvist said, referring to programs that offer small payments in reward for compliance with a set of criteria. The Lesotho program takes that line of thinking and adds a twist: Higher risk, higher reward.

“The perceived return from participating in a lottery may also be higher than the return from an incentive program that pays the expected return with certainty,” Nyqvist and her co-authors wrote.

But the researchers sounded a note of caution about applying these findings to other countries. “The results are really big, amazingly big,” Nyqvist said. “But the results apply to Lesotho. To conclude that this has external validity, we would need to replicate the lotteries elsewhere.” One condition she identified as specific to the region was the unusually high levels of infection.

The conventional wisdom on HIV/AIDS prevention argues that fighting the infection requires making condoms more widely available, improving accessibility to antiretroviral drug regimes, and educating the public about the virus and how it spreads. This latest findings do not necessarily dispute that thinking, but point to a new, simple, and cheap approach.

Chris Jackson/Getty Images

 

 

 

Senate Democrats stalled President Barack Obama’s trade agenda Tuesday, bucking his ambitious plans to increase U.S. exports in favor of labor unions and tougher protections for overseas workers.

In a 52-45 vote, the Senate failed to get enough votes to open debate on so-called “fast-track” legislation that sought to speed approval of the 12-nation Trade Promotion Authority without last-minute congressional meddling. Instead, Tuesday’s vote — which fell short because it lacked support among Obama’s fellow Democrats — potentially creates a new stumbling block for ongoing negotiations with Pacific Rim countries grappling with the most aggressive trade agreement in decades.

Democrats who oppose the Trans-Pacific Partnership have pushed for added enforcement measures in the deal to protect against potentially unfair advantages, such as currency manipulation in Japan or poor labor laws in Vietnam.

“Free trade can be good for the United States, but only if it is done right — leveling the playing field for all workers; protecting workers’ rights, human rights, and the environment; and addressing serious imbalances including currency manipulation,” Sen. Ben Cardin (D-Md.) said in a statement after he voted against the motion to begin debating the bill.

Now, the White House and Republicans may have to agree to add some of those provisions in order to get the “fast track” bill out of the Senate. But that might not go over well with the rest of Washington’s negotiating partners. Adding requirements that could be seen as chiding other countries may undermine U.S. trade officials’ ability to deliver a deal.

Another major criticism from opponents is that the negotiations haven’t been subject to public view.

“The president is asking us to vote to grease the skids on a trade deal that has largely been negotiated but that is still held in secret,” Senator Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.) said in an interview with NPR news before the vote.

The trade agreement, along with another European pact, are both part of the Obama administration’s ambitious agenda to lower barriers for U.S. companies abroad and increase exports. But trade negotiations have faced stiff opposition from unions, many liberal lawmakers, and some Americans who associate trade pacts with job losses that happened across the country as globalization spurred outsourcing over the past few decades. Vocal opponents have argued that another trade pact will again leave U.S. workers worse off.

“The reason this went badly for them is that enough senators listened to the folks back home who have been telling them that they don’t want to make it easier to ship jobs overseas,” said Jason Stanford, spokesman for the Coalition to Stop Fast Track.

The trade negotiations have gotten the support from Hollywood and other big industries. Music moguls and movie-makers are hoping the deal will include beefed-up copyright protection that could prove lucrative for the struggling industry. Other industrial giants, from consumer products companies to Wall Street banks, also see the TPP’s intellectual property provisions as key selling points in a regional trade pact that could bring together an estimated $27 trillion worth of economic activity.

The Trans-Pacific Partnership, in particular, is seen as a key piece of the Obama administration’s rebalancing to the Asia-Pacific region. U.S. Defense Secretary Ashton Carter said last month that the trade pact is worth as much to U.S. prospects in the region as a new aircraft carrier. Analysts have recently called for Washington to promote ambitious trade deals with partners and allies in Asia, while excluding China, to strengthen America’s ability to push back against Beijing’s growing financial and military might.

Natalie Behring/Getty Images

Enthusiasm for reforming our democracies has been gaining momentum. From the pages of Foreign Policy to the colorful criticisms of comedian Russell Brand, it is evident that a long-overdue public conversation on this topic is finally getting started.

There is no lack of proposals. For example, in their recent Foreign Policy piece, John Boik and colleagues focus on decentralized, emergent, tech-driven solutions such as participatory budgeting, local currency systems, and open government. They are confident that such innovations have a good chance of “spreading virally” and bringing about major change. Internet-based solutions, in particular, have captured our collective imagination. From Pia Mancini’s blockbuster TED presentation to New Scientist‘s recent coverage of “digital democracy,” we’re eager to believe that smartphone apps and novel online platforms hold the key to reinventing our way of governance. This seems only natural: after all, the same technologies have already radically reconfigured large swaths of our daily lives.

To put it bluntly, I believe that focusing on innovations of this sort is a dangerous distraction. Sure, empowering citizens at the local level and through trendy new technologies — and the greater public involvement in policy-making this promises — are positive developments. But we must remember that the bulk of political power still lies in the hands of the professional politicians that govern our nations. Being able to affect how things are run in our neighborhood is great, but how much of a victory is that if we have so little control over our national governments? Similarly, technology that lets us “crowd-source” writing legislation is fine, but how much good will this do us if the political class continues to have the final say on what actually becomes law?Instead of letting ourselves become distracted by the glitter of the local and the technological, we should focus on reclaiming some real political power at the top levels of government. The question is: how might we do so?

As described in my book, Rebooting Democracy: A Citizen’s Guide to Reinventing Politics, a number of extraordinarily encouraging experiments along these lines have taken place in British Columbia, Oregon, and elsewhere over the last decade. What they all have in common is citizen deliberation: the use of large panels of randomly selected citizens to carefully reflect and decide on complex policy matters, a practice which dates back to ancient Greece. Expanding on this experience could usher in a fundamental change to the nature of government.

The idea of involving ordinary citizens in real-world policy-making will come as a shock to many, but skepticism invariably dissipates as people come to understand how citizen deliberation works in practice. A panel of randomly-selected participants carries out in-depth study and analysis of the issue at hand, including consultations with policy-makers, interest groups, scientific experts and others. They deliberate, at length and with the assistance of skilled facilitators, about the available policy choices and their possible impact. The process has nothing in common with the rowdy scenes and uninformed shouting matches that characterized, for example, the town hall meetings on healthcare reform in the United States.

A commonly voiced concern is whether ordinary citizens have what it takes — are they smart enough to address complex policy issues? Here, too, doubts prove unfounded. Stanford Professor James Fishkin, one of the world’s foremost experts on citizen deliberation, writes that “the public is very smart if you give them a chance. If people think their voice actually matters, they’ll do the hard work, really study, … ask the experts smart questions and then make tough decisions. When they hear the experts disagreeing, they’re forced to think for themselves. About 70% change their minds in the process.” He assures that “citizens can become better informed and master the most complex issues of state government if they are given the chance.”

The promise of citizen deliberation is that it could free policy-making from the well-known biases that plague professional politicians. Ordinary citizens, chosen at random, can act in what they perceive to be the true public interest, free from the pressures of facing reelection. The role of money in politics and the dangers of hyper-partisanship are increasingly obvious in today’s politics, but letting ordinary citizens make policy avoids these pitfalls — they must neither cater to the interests of those who funded their campaign nor hew to the party line. They don’t have to worry about how necessary-but-unpopular measures will adversely impact their popularity. Perhaps just as importantly, they will be truly representative of the general population, in the sense that such a citizen panel, by virtue of being drawn at random, will tend to mirror the entire citizenry in terms of gender, age, occupation, socio-economic background and political attitudes — very much unlike the privileged political class that currently rules us.

But perhaps the most exciting aspect is that none of this is idle, academic speculation. Recent experiences show how well citizen deliberation works in practice. In 2004, a randomly-chosen panel of 160 citizens was tasked by the government of the Canadian province of British Columbia with reforming the province’s electoral system. After drawing on the input of a wide variety of experts, consulting the public, and deliberating at length, the British Columbia Citizens’ Assembly on Electoral Reform ended up suggesting a type of electoral system that, in the words of Professor David Farrell, a renowned expert on electoral systems, “politicians, given a choice, would probably least like to see introduced but which voters, given a choice, should choose.” The assembly’s proposal was later approved by 58 percent of the popular vote in a referendum, yet regrettably failed to meet the strict requirements imposed by the provincial government for its results to be considered binding and, for that reason, has yet to be implemented.

Similarly encouraging results are reported from the U.S. state of Oregon. Since 2010, citizen deliberation has been used to assist Oregon voters in state-wide ballot initiatives. In a process known as the “Citizen Initiative Review,” a panel of about 25 randomly chosen Oregonians is tasked with carefully researching and deliberating on the ballot measure up for a vote. At the end of this process, an accessible and highly informative set of “key findings”, as well as an indication of how many panelists ultimately supported and opposed the proposed measure, are presented as a “citizens’ statement” in the pamphlet that voters receive in the mail before a ballot. Research confirms that this citizens’ statement not only makes voters better-informed, but also has a substantial influence on the voting behavior of those who read it.

As these examples make evident, gradually incorporating citizen deliberation into our political institutions holds huge promise. By having a representative microcosm of the general population directly engage in thoughtful, informed policy-making, we have a mechanism that powerfully sidesteps the biases of the traditional political class while also avoiding the unreflective and uninformed behavior that plagues nearly all forms of direct democracy — including the increasingly popular digital ones.

Crucially, and by virtue of the random sampling at the heart of the process, citizen deliberation is also immune to another big problem that afflicts most proposals for more grassroots styles of democracy: self-selection. Whenever participation — whether on- or offline — is open to the public at large, those who take the time and effort to make themselves heard will invariably tend be those who feel most strongly about the topic at hand. (This often means that they also espouse the most extreme views.) Citizen deliberation, on the other hand, ensures that the public voice that emerges from the process is indicative of what the whole population would think about that topic, if only it had the time and resources to carefully deliberate.

So, how might citizen deliberation be used to bring about major changes to our political systems? The most promising proposal, which repeatedly appears in the work of academics and democratic reformers alike, is to create a “citizens’ chamber” in our parliaments. Think for a moment about the tremendous potential demonstrated by the experiments in both British Columbia and Oregon over the last decade: if ad hoc citizen panels work so well, why not try to tap into this source of reasoned, public-spirited decision-making on a more permanent basis? This citizens’ chamber could supervise the work of the elected political class, ensuring that professional politicians did not betray the trust of those they represent. When a sufficiently large majority of the citizens’ chamber deemed that to be the case, it would have the power either to veto the decisions made by elected officials or at least submit them to a popular vote. This is the true potential of citizen deliberation as a way to radically transform our way of doing politics.

Given our political system’s current crisis of legitimacy, we have before us a unique opportunity to truly democratize our way of doing politics. The technology we should be excited about is one that actually dates back 2,500 years. Digital democracy, as well as the other modern developments discussed earlier, promise to give the public a better chance of making itself heard by the political class. Yet, as was already evident to the ancient Athenians, only citizen deliberation can ensure that the public will speak in a way that is, not only empowered, but at the same time representative, reasoned and well-informed.

Photo Credit: Andrew Burton/Getty Images

In March, as the eastern Ukrainian town of Debaltseve suffered heavy fighting despite a recent ceasefire agreement, journalist Nastya Stanko made a disturbing report: “People from Debaltseve told us that the army from NATO, the Polish army, and the U.S. army were all in Debaltseve,” wrote Stanko, a co-founder of independent Ukrainian broadcaster Hromadske.tv. “These people believed that if they were evacuated, they would be killed. So they wouldn’t come out of their basements.” These residents believed what they had seen on Russian television broadcasts. Employing World War II references that trigger traumatic memories, these broadcasts propagate a narrative that paints the popularly elected regime in Ukraine as a Western-backed, ultra-nationalist, fascist junta, conducting pogroms against the Russian-speaking population of eastern and southern Ukraine.

For Ukrainians and observers of the crisis, the Kremlin’s steady campaign of misinformation is a cause of serious concern. Michael Weiss and Peter Pomerantsev have convincingly argued that the Kremlin “weaponizes” information by disseminating outlandish lies, seeking to sow confusion and manipulate public opinion. Initiatives in Europe and the U.S. seek to counter the influence of RT, the well-funded Russian international TV channel that has proven a highly effective disseminator of Kremlin propaganda, with expanded Russian-language reporting from government-run broadcasters such as Voice of America. The Ukrainian Ministry of Information recently announced plans to respond to RT’s international broadcasts with a channel they will call Ukraine Tomorrow. They also plan to combat Russia’s online trolling campaigns with its own “iArmy,” all on the ministry’s modest annual budget of $184,000. By comparison, RT’s 2015 budget is roughly $247 million.

The western and Ukrainian approaches — even if they were adequately resourced — are not the right ones. Fighting propaganda head-on with counter-propaganda is not just unrealistic, but also deeply flawed. My colleague Katya Myasnikova from Ukraine’s Independent Association of Broadcasters memorably likened it to “treating cancer with tuberculosis.” It’s a dirty fight that takes the low ground and has proven highly ineffective at changing minds and winning trust. Instead, fighting propaganda with counter-propaganda only breeds despair, cynicism, and confusion among the target populations.

The people of eastern Ukraine’s Donbass region — those bunkered in their basements in Debaltseve as well as the over one million displaced — are ill-suited as targets for a western PR offensive and the hyper-patriotic messages of the Ukrainian media. What they urgently need instead is factual and highly practical information — “news you can use,” as one U.S. publication once referred to it — that will make an immediate difference in their lives. Rather than fighting Russia’s media spin doctors with bombastic “messaging” from the west or from Kyiv, we should concentrate instead on supporting excellent local journalism and furthering the distribution of objective news and information. This includes detailed reporting on ways to keep people safe, fed, clothed, sheltered, connected with families and friends, and how to rebuild their lives. There are already media outlets stepping up to this challenge in Ukraine, and we should be supporting them.

These informational needs of Ukraine’s war-torn eastern communities are detailed in Internews’ rapid response report, “Ukraine: Trapped in a Propaganda War. Abandoned. Frustrated. Stigmatized.” This report suggests that humanitarian information about where to get much-needed fundamental resources is the most immediate need for these populations. Beyond this immediate information, these people need to regain a sense of agency –which can only be supported by well-targeted, objective information. While propaganda and endless conspiracy theories erodes people’s right to know, diminishing their dignity and respect, the reporting of locally relevant information can be a powerful first step toward rebuilding trust among these disaffected communities — trust in both the Ukrainian government and in quality media as a reliable source of information.

Long before hostilities erupted in the east, Ukrainians had only a wavering trust in media. Major broadcast media outlets were controlled by oligarchs or political interests and served as instruments through which they waged their political and economic vendettas. After the Maidan revolution was followed quickly by Russia’s annexation of Crimea and the rise of pro-Russian separatists in the Donbass, moderate voices could be — and often were — characterized as anti-patriotic. Today, Ukraine’s national media focus largely on covering the war, following “patriotic” editorial policies that dedicate little time or attention to the humanitarian crisis and its consequences.

In the rebel-held territories, media freedom has been all but dismantled, as most of the region’s journalists have fled and separatists have asserted strict control over information resources. They have launched at least four new TV stations and a host of radio stations broadcasting programming ranging from traditional Cossack songs to talk shows on which guests debate the finer points of Russian Orthodoxy — clearly an ideological project. They have allowed few Ukrainian journalists to enter the areas under their control. As a result, neither Ukraine’s national nor its local media have been able to function effectively as a public service media for the east.

That is not to say that there are no media outlets in Ukraine doing the right thing. Moderate voices such as the online Hromadske.tv, the Hromadske radio network, and its affiliates in Kyiv, the Donbass, and Zaporizhzhya are standing up to the challenge. Almost all of these outlets are new players that emerged from the grassroots during the Euromaidan revolution. They belong to the journalists and activists themselves, rather than to oligarchs or the state, and their focus is on local rather than national news. They are not only covering the conflict, but giving those affected by it a voice, allowing genuine and important grievances to be aired, and demanding accountability from the government.

It is unfortunate that most of these outlets are online-only and that their reach among the elderly and the poor — two of the groups most dramatically affected by the conflict — is limited. Helping these outlets spread their message and diversify the way they deliver it — and not fighting Russian lies with lies of our own — is one way Ukraine and the West can win the information war.

The photo shows the filming of the show DebatePro on First National, a state-run Ukrainian television station.
Photo Credit: Internews

The disappearance of a U.S. Marine helicopter in Nepal shows just how fraught relief efforts in the country, ravaged by a recent earthquake and a series of powerful aftershocks, can be for foreign militaries and aid organizations trying to dig the Nepalese people out of the rubble.

The Pentagon confirmed Tuesday that a Marine UH-1 Huey, conducting relief work near Charikot, Nepal, is missing. Six Marines and two Nepalese Army soldiers were onboard. In a statement, the Defense Department said emergency personnel are responding to the alert.

The Marines’ efforts are part of a larger push to get aid to Nepal, which has been devastated by an April 25 7.8 magnitude earthquake that left buildings in ruin, climbers on Mount Everest scrambling to survive an avalanche, and some Nepalese running into the streets in search of safety. A series of aftershocks, including one Tuesday, only added to the devastation. According to official estimates, 8,151 are now dead.

The Pentagon operation is part of a broader effort by American relief organizations, as well as U.S.-based climbing companies that charge hikers tens of thousands of dollars to attempt to scale Everest, the highest peak in the world. Captain Randy Bittinger, a spokesman for the Fairfax County Fire and Rescue Department in suburban Virginia, told FP recently that an emergency response team from his department — including 57 of task force workers and six canine handlers — was dispatched to Nepal to assist U.S. efforts there.

Gordon Janow, director of programs at Alpine Ascents International, a Seattle-based company that hosts ascents to Everest’s peak, said his organization donated food and medical supplies already in Nepal to rescue efforts.

“We’ve got a host of supplies at Base Camp from the expeditions,” he said. “A lot of people walked out [of Everest base camp] and a lot of people who needed help got evacuated.”

Other countries, including India and China, are also sending relief workers and supplies to Nepal. The government in Kathmandu, rotted by years of corruption, is struggling to adequately respond to the scale of the disaster, the worst earthquake in Nepal since 1934.

The Defense Department calls its efforts in Nepal “Operation Sahayogi Haat.” According to a recent news release, a team of 300 and a series of military aircraft are conducting relief operations there, working with USAID to deliver 50 tons of relief supplies and transport people out of disaster zones. The service members involved in the operation are stationed at the U.S. military base at Okinawa, Japan.

Photo Credit: Roberto Schmidt/AFP

 

South Asia, home to one-fifth of the world’s population and growing fast, has undergone major democratic transitions in the past decade. Today, all the countries in the region are governed by democratic systems. With Nepal’s successful toppling of its monarchy a decade ago and Pakistan’s transition to democracy from military rule, the portents have never been so encouraging. Similarly, Afghanistan, the victim of perennial conflict, is also moving towards democratic governance and reform. These developments are ground-breaking given the turbulent history of the region.

Yet, on one vital test of democracy — freedom of the press — the region is lagging. Between 2013 and 2015, South Asia remained one of the most repressed regions for journalists. According to Reporters without Borders, which publishes a press freedom annual index ranking 180 countries based on the freedom granted to members of the press, countries in South Asia rank discouragingly low.

Most of the countries in South Asia have scores in the bottom two tiers on the press freedom index. In the 2015 index, South Asian countries remained fairly stagnant from previous years: Pakistan ranked at 159th place; Bangladesh was ranked 146th; Sri Lanka was ranked 165th; and the Maldives was ranked at 112th place.

The working environment for journalists somewhat improved in India, Nepal, and Afghanistan. India’s ranking improved from 140th place in 2014 to 136th in 2015, Nepal improved its ranking to 105th place from 120th place, and Afghanistan showed some improvement by earning 122nd place in 2015, up from 128th place.

Media freedoms are under attack in most countries in the region. Ahmede Hussain, head of The Daily Star Books in Bangladesh, in an interview with the author said: “In the last few years, three television channels have been banned and the editor of the right wing Daily Amar Desh [My Country] was imprisoned.” Hussain added: “Senior leaders of the ruling party quite openly threaten, sometimes in the parliament, to take action against the independent media for running reports that do not run in their favor.” At least four bloggers in Bangladesh were killed during the last two years for their views on the country, with the latest occurring just yesterday, and impunity persists despite nationwide protests.

The situation in Sri Lanka is even more worrisome. During 2014, the government pressed the media to not report the violence against Muslims in the country’s southwest. Those who ventured to cover the sectarian clashes had their equipment destroyed or were physically attacked. Furthermore, the government-supported paramilitary groups were accused of murdering a newspaper journalist, Aiyathurai Nadesan, in Batticaloa. On the positive side, the newly-elected president, Maithripala Sirisena, promised to end repression in his January 2015 acceptance speech, hopefully reversing some of the past trends.

Pakistan remains most inexplicable. Despite the explosion of private media in the past decade, press freedoms have drastically reversed since the beginning of the decade. In 2002, Pakistan ranked 119th but dropped to 150th place only two years later. In a recent interview, Pakistan’s prominent journalist Hamid Mir (who took six bullets to his body last year for highlighting human rights abuses) said: “I am still under threat. I am using a bulletproof vehicle these days and move with private guards… I am not touching some sensitive issues these days.” Two private television channels were suspended in 2014 for bringing national institutions into disrepute and dozens of journalists faced threats to their lives, especially in conflict zones such as the southwestern province of Balochistan and the tribal regions bordering Afghanistan. Mir’s conclusion is worth noting, he said: “Pakistani media are losing their freedom very fast… If media will lose their freedom, then there will be no democracy and if there will be no democracy it will be difficult for the state of Pakistan to survive.”

In the Maldives, journalists brave high-handed tactics by state authorities and violent gangs. Last August, a local journalist, Ahmed Rilwan Abdulla, was abducted by unknown persons, and remains missing.

While India has much to celebrate on the evolution of its democratic system, recent press trends are disconcerting. Journalists in India face multiple pressure points. Sumit Galhotra of the Committee to Protect Journalists told the author: “The state has been clamping down on media freedoms and engaging in flagrant censorship. The Modi government’s recent ban on Al Jazeera and documentaries like India’s Daughter are prime examples.” At the same time, Galhotra said: “Journalists are being threatened and silenced by various non-state actors that include religious and political groups, criminal elements, and corporate houses.”

For the world’s largest democracy, it is disconcerting to hear senior investigative journalists saying that big businesses handing out legal notices has become standard practice in the country.

In Nepal, journalists continue to face peculiar hurdles. While the recent conviction and sentencing of the mastermind in journalist Uma Singh’s murder marks a step in the right direction towards addressing the culture of impunity, Nepal still has a long way to go in fostering a safe and secure environment for journalists. Not unlike other countries, self-censorship is rife.

While the situation in Afghanistan may be improving (Afghanistan is up six spots from last year), challenges to journalists remain. Last year, local and foreign journalists came under attack while covering the presidential elections while foreign journalists were shot by a police officer in Khost.

The majority of South Asians are young, below the age of 30, participating in communications revolution via new media. Digital freedoms have also come under threat in recent years, despite low levels of internet penetration. In Bangladesh, the government arrested a shopkeeper for lampooning the country’s leadership on Facebook, and in Pakistan, a parliamentary committee has approved a draconian draft bill that will curtail online freedoms. In India, the Supreme Court in March struck down a clause of the Information Technology Act that made publishing offensive online material punishable by three years in jail but upheld the government’s right to block websites after following due procedure.

None of the countries in the region are ranked as “free” by the global watchdog Freedom House. Only India, Nepal, and the Maldives are categorized partly free, while the remaining is placed in the “not free” category. (Civil and political liberties and media freedoms are inherent to Freedom House rankings.)

Democracy is not limited to elections, nor does the existence of a parliament ensure citizens’ freedoms. The right to information is central to a democratic polity and muzzling of freedoms of the press endangers the region’s democratic gains made in recent years. International rights groups need to work closely with their local counterparts in tracking the abuses and alerting the international community as authoritarian forces struggle with the aspirations of a young, restive population that seeks more transparency.

AAMIR QURESHI/AFP/Getty Images

 

On an otherwise ordinary night in May 2011, Robert Childs realized his friend, Abu Khalid Abdul-Latif, might be on the verge of becoming a terrorist. The two men, who attended a Seattle mosque together, ate fried chicken at Abdul-Latif’s small apartment with his wife and young son. Afterward, Abdul-Latif walked Childs to the dimly lit parking lot outside his building, where his guest’s orange 1979 Chevy Suburban was sitting. There, he posed a startling question: Could Childs help him get some guns?

Abdul-Latif said he wanted to carry out an attack inspired by the 2009 shooting at Fort Hood, in which Army Maj. Nidal Malik Hasan killed 13 people. But unlike Hasan, who acted alone, he was looking for associates. “I already have a guy that wants to do it, if you want to come in with it,” Childs recalls Abdul-Latif saying.

A skinny white man with close-cropped brown hair, Childs, then 35, had previously boasted to Abdul-Latif about his skill with guns. His father had been a Marine, and Childs had trained with pistols and rifles at a military boarding school. By contrast, 33-year-old Abdul-Latif, who kept his black scalp shaved and beard full, had limited experience with firearms. He’d once held up a 7-Eleven with two plastic toy guns and had served three years in prison for the robbery.

Hoping to drive away quickly, Childs told me, “I didn’t give him a yes or no that night.” He wasn’t going to help his friend, but he was worried about the startling request nonetheless. What if Abdul-Latif committed a crime with guns he got elsewhere? Could Childs be implicated for not informing police about their conversation? A convicted rapist and child molester, Childs had already served three stints behind bars—a total of nine years. Recently released, he was trying to turn over a new leaf.

Childs set up a meeting with Samuel DeJesus, a detective with the Seattle Police Department (SPD) and told him about the encounter. According to Childs, DeJesus asked him whether he would help authorities build a case against Abdul-Latif. “What do you want in return?” DeJesus added. “I wanted my whole record wiped off,” Childs recollects. The SPD, he claims, gave him the impression it could make that happen. (DeJesus declined to comment for this article.)

Within a matter of days, the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) entered the picture. Abdul-Latif had popped up on the bureau’s radar after he posted several videos on YouTube that April and May, showing him criticizing Western society and insisting that peace could never be made with non-Muslims. When the FBI learned about Childs’s information, a result of the SPD’s involvement in a joint homeland security effort with the bureau, agents met with him and said they would be working on the case. Childs was happy to oblige the power move. “If you can’t trust the FBI,” he reasoned, “who can you trust?” And so he became part of the FBI’s post-9/11 counterterrorism apparatus; comprising more than 15,000 informants, it is the largest domestic spying network in U.S. history.

Childs began wearing recording equipment when he met with Abdul-Latif. On June 14, 2011, the FBI gave him a cache of weapons—a grenade, assault rifles, and handguns—that he showed to Abdul-Latif in the back of a car. Childs demonstrated how to switch out magazines and chamber a round. When Childs removed the grenade from a duffel bag, Abdul-Latif seemed amazed. “For real?” he asked, according to an FBI affidavit. “If you throw it, it will blow up?” Pull out the pin, Childs explained—then throw.

A week later, on the evening of June 22, Childs, Abdul-Latif, and a third man, Walli Mujahidh, met at a chop shop to discuss plans to storm the Seattle Military Entrance Processing Station, where fresh-faced Army enlistees report to duty for the first time. (“They are being sent to the front lines to kill our brothers and sisters,” Abdul-Latif had said a few days earlier in a conversation caught on Childs’s recording device.) As Childs was showing his companions how to use FBI-provided M16 assault rifles, the bureau pounced: Agents threw a stun grenade and stormed the room. Abdul-Latif and Mujahidh were arrested.

Although he wasn’t named publicly, Childs was immediately held up as an American hero. “But for the courage of the cooperating witness, and the efforts of multiple agencies working long and intense hours,” Laura Laughlin, the special agent in charge of the FBI’s Seattle office, said in a news release the day after the operation, “the subjects might have been able to carry out their brutal plan.”

Today, Abdul-Latif and Mujahidh are serving 18 and 17 years, respectively, for conspiracy to murder officers and agents of the United States and conspiracy to use weapons of mass destruction. But serious questions have emerged about whether, had it not been for the FBI’s efforts, the two ever would have gotten their hands on the means to commit serious crimes. According to local media and the men’s attorneys, Abdul-Latif had a history of mental problems and attempting suicide. Not long before the bust, he had filed for bankruptcy protection. Mujahidh was a penniless drifter diagnosed with schizoaffective disorder and bipolar tendencies who had done 12 stays at psychiatric hospitals. In other words, they were arguably among the “fragile human beings” whom, according to Karen Greenberg of the Center on National Security at Fordham University’s School of Law, the FBI often targets in stings.

Meanwhile, Childs’s “courage” has been all but forgotten. He says he was paid handsomely for luring Abdul-Latif and Mujahidh, but his criminal record was never expunged. He now lives more than 3,000 miles from Seattle, in Key West, Florida; he is homeless, riding a bicycle around town and sleeping in a secluded spot of mangrove forest near U.S. Highway 1. “I feel just as much a victim of the FBI as Abdul-Latif,” Childs says, smoking a cigarette one afternoon in March 2015 at an outdoor table at a pizza restaurant. He wears a state-provided ankle monitor—a tangible reminder that he is a sex offender.

In the domestic war on terror, the front lines are often manned by unsettled—or unsettling—figures like Childs, criminals and hustlers commissioned by the FBI to pursue equally problematic or susceptible targets. And while the informants hope that their assignments will put money in their pockets, erase their troubled pasts, or both, in many cases the bureau cuts off contact when operations are over.

To protect the homeland, in other words, the FBI exploits bad guys to catch what it claims are worse ones. It’s a dirty 21st-century spy game aptly summarized by a popular saying at the bureau: “To catch the devil, you have to go to hell.”

 

After the intelligencE failures of 9/11, the White House told the FBI that there should never be another attack on U.S. soil. The bureau’s mission was to find the terrorists before they struck. Al Qaeda, in turn, knew it wouldn’t be easy to again send actors into the United States to launch a coordinated attack. Instead, it moved to what FBI officials describe as a “franchise model”: using online avenues to encourage young Muslims in the West to commit violence. Law enforcement officials view the Fort Hood shooting as a realization of this model. Prior to the attack, Hasan had exchanged emails with Anwar al-
Awlaki, the U.S.-born cleric known for posting videos on YouTube advocating violence against America and for masterminding al Qaeda’s slickly designed online magazine, Inspire. (Awlaki was killed in a 2011 drone strike in Yemen.)

Concerns about franchise operations have made American-bred “lone wolf” terrorists the FBI’s new focus. Agents want to catch them just as they make the leap from sympathizer to potential attacker, so the bureau has recruited informants to infiltrate Muslim communities nationwide. Their task: gather information on men who seem interested in violence. Critics, however, allege the intelligence net has been cast even wider. In 2011, the American Civil Liberties Union brought suit against the FBI for instructing an informant in Southern California “not to target any particular individuals they believed were involved in criminal activity, but to gather as much information as possible on members of the Muslim community, and to focus on people who were more devout in their religious practice.”

In many cases, the FBI has directed informants to pose as terrorists and to provide both the means—weapons, for instance—and opportunities for targets to participate in plots. Arrests often follow: According to Human Rights Watch, nearly half of the more than 500 terrorism-related cases brought in federal courts between Sept. 11, 2011, and July 2014 involved informants, and about 30 percent placed informants in roles where they actively helped foment terrorism schemes.

Rights activists have accused the FBI of using informants to manufacture terrorists in order to demonstrate the bureau’s effectiveness and justify its $3.3 billion annual counterterrorism budget. Human Rights Watch has noted that investigations “have targeted individuals who do not appear to have been involved in terrorist plotting or financing at the time the government began to investigate them” and that some efforts have been aimed at “particularly vulnerable individuals (including people with intellectual and mental disabilities and the indigent).”

Among these individuals is James Cromitie, a broke Wal-Mart employee with a history of mental problems whom an FBI informant offered $250,000 to bomb synagogues and shoot down military supply planes in New York. Another informant convinced Rezwan Ferdaus, a young American of Bangladeshi background, to engage in a plot to bomb the Capitol. When he was arrested, Ferdaus was being treated for mental illness. FBI agents tracking Sami Osmakac—a Kosovo-born man with schizoaffective disorder now serving 40 years for planning attacks in Tampa, Florida—were caught on record describing him as a “retarded fool” whose aspirations to commit violence were “wishy-washy.”

The FBI isn’t just taking advantage of its targets’ vulnerabilities, however. It is also capitalizing on informants’ weaknesses and, in many cases, turning a blind eye to their own crimes. When he started working for the bureau, Shahed Hussain, the informant in the Cromitie case, had been convicted of fraud for providing driver’s licenses to illegal U.S. residents and was trying to avoid deportation to Pakistan, where he faced a murder charge. Hussain was paid $98,000 for spying and was also spared an indictment for bankruptcy fraud. The informant in the Ferdaus case, identified in court records only as “Khalil,” had a heroin habit and was caught 
shoplifting while wearing a wire. The man who spied on Osmakac, a Palestinian-
American named Abdul Raouf Dabus, was facing foreclosure proceedings on his business and house in Florida when he worked for the FBI and was paid $20,000.

Other informants have included fraud artists, drug dealers, and a bodybuilder turned con man. A 2013 USA Today investigation found that the FBI allowed informants to break the law 5,658 times in a single calendar year. “It’s the irony of informants,” says James Wedick, a former FBI supervisory agent. “You can’t trust these guys.… But when we put these informants in front of judges and juries, we simply say, ‘You can trust him. He’s with us.’”

With his rocky criminal past, Childs fit right in among this inauspicious FBI crew.

 

Robert Childs was born in Indianapolis in 1976 to Jackie, a nurse, and Robert Sr., who had served in Vietnam. The two separated shortly after their son was born, and Childs lived with his father and stepmother, Mary Fleenor. According to both Fleenor and Childs, Robert Sr. was abusive. “He had beat me so bad, I could not sit down,” Childs recalls of one encounter with his father.

At 16, Childs set out on his own, winding up in California, where he says he earned his GED diploma. He later hitchhiked to the town of Issaquah, Washington. But he wasn’t there for long before getting into trouble: In October 1994, a woman contacted the police, alleging that Childs had raped her 14-year-old daughter. According to a statement made by the victim, Childs met the girl at a local arcade, went home with her, and forced himself on her while repeating the words, “It’ll be all right.” Childs was convicted and spent six months in jail, followed by a year on probation.

A second offense occurred not long after. In 1996, Childs, who by then was 20, met a 15-year-old girl at a mall in Seattle. According to police, the pair went to a park and fondled each other. The girl’s mother filed a report, and Childs later pleaded guilty to child molestation.

Back in prison, Childs befriended a white Muslim inmate and decided to convert. “[Islam] made sense to me at the time,” he says. He studied the Quran relentlessly: “When I do something, I go full blow.” He also admits to adopting a militant religious attitude. He avoided associating with anyone who wasn’t Muslim, and he and his new friends discussed atrocities committed against Muslims around the world, particularly in Chechnya, where Islamic fighters were resisting Russian control.

After he was released in 1998, Childs settled in Seattle and married a woman named Jo. He says he started a cleaning business and acquired clients that included a car dealership, dentist, and culinary school. Childs didn’t have employees, but he brought people on as independent contractors if he had more work than he could handle.

Sometimes, Childs gave jobs to Abu Khalid Abdul-Latif, whom he says he knew because the two men’s wives were friendly. Abdul-Latif didn’t have cleaning experience, but it didn’t matter: He was a Muslim. “It was about keeping business and money within the community,” Childs says.

In February 2007, Childs’s marriage was falling apart, and he decided to fulfill a long-held desire to fight for Islam. Being a mujahid, he believed, was the “highest plane” he could reach. Childs says he sold his business to Abdul-Latif and headed toward Chechnya, by way of Turkey. He wound up in the Turkish city of Malatya, where (to his surprise) he became friends with a German Christian missionary named Tilman Geske. But in April 2007, he says, tragedy struck: Geske and two other missionaries were tortured and killed by five Muslim men. According to media that covered the incident, a note left at the scene of the crime read, “This should serve as a lesson to the enemies of our religion. We did it for our country.”

Childs was distraught. He was no longer interested in fighting in Chechnya or anywhere else. “Do I want to be this person?” Childs considered. “Do I want to be known as a killer?”

When he returned to the United States, Jo was living in California, so Childs followed her there in hopes of repairing their marriage. But he was arrested for failing to register as a sex offender and spent three more years behind bars. Afterward, he made his way back to Seattle, where he started working at a dive shop. Although his religious fervor had waned, Childs attended a local mosque—and it was there, one day in early 2011, that he ran into his old friend Abdul-Latif.

Childs says his first meeting with the FBI took place in an industrial area of south Seattle, where police kept and maintained fleet cars. “The FBI interviewed me, questioned me about Abdul-Latif and his motives,” Childs says. When a deal to have his criminal record expunged came up, he claims “nothing was made out to be any different” from what it had been in his earlier conversation with the SPD’s DeJesus.

According to Childs, however, DeJesus approached him privately and urged him not to trust the bureau. The detective said the agents were interested in what the case could do for them, not in holding up their end of any bargain. “This case is what they call a career-maker,” Childs remembers DeJesus saying.

Childs dismissed the warning and recorded many hours of conversations with Abdul-Latif from June 6 to June 22, 2011. “If we gonna die, we gotta die taking some kafirs with us,” Abdul-
Latif said at one point, referring to non-Muslims. Once Mujahidh, a friend of Abdul-Latif, was in the mix, Childs recorded him too. At dinner on June 21, Mujahidh asked about the plot to attack the military processing center: “So we are going in and killing everybody?” Childs said they would only kill anyone “in green” or with a military haircut. “This is my way of getting rid of sins, man,” Mujahidh said, according to government documents. “I got so many of ’em.”

Before the FBI raid, Childs told Abdul-Latif and Mujahidh that the site—the chop shop—was owned by a Muslim. He says that officials placed a Quran on a table inside the facility to make the story a little more believable.

After the arrests, Childs says he was congratulated on a job well done and was told to wait in an interrogation room at a Seattle law enforcement office. He recollects FBI agents coming in to give him updates—for instance, “Mujahidh is singing like a bird.” Childs was excited but also scared: “I do remember asking very specifically, ‘Nobody’s gonna know it was me, right?’”

Less than a week later, Childs says the FBI called him to set up a meeting. Agents picked him up at home and, inside a sedan with tinted windows, told him there was nothing they could do about his record. “You should be happy you did this as a citizen,” he recalls them saying. “That should be reward enough.” Childs claims DeJesus pressured the bureau to do better. At a subsequent meeting, agents told him they could offer money. Childs says they agreed on $100,000; a sentencing memorandum compiled by Abdul-Latif’s defense counsel describes Childs’s payoff as being approximately this amount. (The FBI declined to comment, citing a “longstanding policy of not commenting on sources, methods and techniques.”)

Childs says he wound up receiving $90,000 in installments over several months. But it quickly disappeared. A friend stole about $30,000 of the money, Childs claims, and he dropped another $20,000 on a boat and even more on a new Ford Excursion in which he installed expensive stereo equipment. “I got carried away,” he admits.

At the same time, Childs says he kept working as an informant with the SPD. He was gathering information on local anti-war protesters until one day his name and mug shot appeared in the Seattle Times, associated with the Abdul-Latif case. He suspects FBI agents leaked it because the money issue had made his relationship with the bureau tense.

“All of a sudden, my name goes everywhere,” Childs recalls. With information about his sex offenses in the news, he felt that the “hero” part of his identity went “completely out the window.”

 

Childs isn’t the first informant to feel abandoned by the FBI. Mohamed Alanssi, a Yemeni national, helped agents investigate Brooklyn’s hawaladars—underground Muslim money brokers—and Sheikh Mohammed Ali Hassan al-Moayad, who the bureau believed was raising funds for al Qaeda in New York. On Nov. 15, 2004, Alanssi faxed letters to the FBI in New York and to the Washington Post. He said his handler would not let him travel to Yemen to see his sick wife, and that he feared testifying as an informant would endanger his family. “Why you don’t care about my life and my family’s life?” Alanssi wrote in one of the letters. That afternoon, dressed in a suit soaked with gasoline, Alanssi set himself on fire outside the gates of the White House. Secret Service agents put out the flames, but not before 30 percent of his body had been burned.

In another case, Craig Monteilh—the bodybuilder turned con man, and the informant in the American Civil Liberties Union’s 2011 case—spent months spying on mosques while pretending to be a convert to Islam named Farouk al-Aziz. In December 2007, police in Irvine, California, charged him with stealing $157,000 from two women as part of a scam to buy and sell human growth hormone. Monteilh later claimed FBI agents instructed him to plead guilty in order to protect his cover; in exchange, the charges would eventually be removed from his record. In a 2010 lawsuit against the FBI, however, Monteilh alleged that the bureau reneged on its promises. He later dropped the suit after agreeing to what he terms a “confidential settlement.”

The FBI often seems quick to wash its hands of trouble that informants cause or allegations they raise. But no matter how murky or embarrassing an informant’s involvement in a case is, it rarely hampers an agent’s or handler’s career. Steve Tidwell, who supervised Monteilh’s operation, retired from the bureau and is now a managing director for former FBI Director Louis Freeh’s private security firm. There’s also former agent Ali Soufan, whose book about 9/11 and al Qaeda, The Black Banners, was a New York Times best-seller. Today, he runs a multinational private security company. One of the informants Soufan supervised was Saeed Torres, the subject of a new documentary, (T)ERROR, which won a Special Jury Award at the 2015 Sundance Film Festival. The movie depicts Torres, a former Black Panther and convict, as destitute and angry after being involved in sting operations that some critics have described as entrapment.

In one scene, Torres tells the filmmakers, “The government will use you, and they will drop your ass like a hot motherfuckin’ stone.”

 

After being exposed in the newspaper, Childs decided he couldn’t stay in the Pacific Northwest. He headed east, stopping briefly in Indianapolis to visit his stepmother, and then kept going until he reached Key West in October 2013. He rented a room and landed bartending gigs. In July 2014, however, the manager of a local Johnny Rockets restaurant told police that Childs, a former employee, had 
rung up five transactions totaling $863.11 on a stolen American Express card. Officers quickly realized Childs was a sex offender who hadn’t registered since arriving in Florida. When they arrested him, according to a police report, Childs claimed “he was hiding from a previous case he worked with detectives in Seattle, Wash.”

After learning of Childs’s arrest, DeJesus petitioned authorities to offer leniency. “For all intents and purposes, Robert Childs was a hero,” DeJesus wrote in an email to prosecutors, obtained from Florida authorities through an information request. Ultimately, Childs pleaded guilty to credit card fraud and no contest to failing to register as a sex offender. He agreed to be designated a “sexual predator,” was given time served, and got out of jail this January.

By then, his name had gotten around Key West—a small, gossipy town—and the room he’d been renting was no longer available. He says none of the bars on Duval Street, Key West’s main drag, would hire him. He claimed his address as under a highway overpass and started going to a Burger King almost daily to charge his ankle monitor.

When he began working for the FBI, Childs thought he was saddling up with white knights. That is no longer the case. “They get people who are vulnerable and desperate,” Childs says of the bureau’s informant program. “We are led to believe we can trust the FBI. I 
have no trust for them.… The public shouldn’t either.”

There’s no doubt that Amos Yee’s depiction of Singapore’s late founder Lee Kuan Yew in carnal embrace with former British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher is somewhat lewd. The Singaporean teenager’s creation, which pastes Lee and Thatcher’s faces onto a women’s health website’s line drawing of what might be called an energetic sex position, falls far outside of usual Singaporean political discourse, which is hemmed in by severe sedition, defamation, and obscenity laws.

On Tuesday, a Singaporean court convicted Yee on obscenity charges related to that drawing and a series of statements that the court deemed offensive to Christians. Yee is now on probation and will be subject to a sentencing hearing in June. He still could face three years in prison.

A closing statement filed by Yee’s lawyers argued that the dirty Lee-Thatcher picture “is not a pornographic image, either calculated to (or in fact tending to) arouse the Likely Viewers of the Image or turn them toward trying this particular sex position.”

After Lee’s death in March, Singapore entered a period of national mourning that the 16-year-old Yee challenged with a gleeful video published four days after the former premier’s death. In the video, titled “Lee Kuan Yew Is Finally Dead!” Yee compares the dead leader to Jesus and says both men were “power-hungry and malicious but deceive others into thinking that they are compassionate and kind.”

On Monday, Judge Jasvender Kaur said Yee’s online activities should meet the “strongest possible disapproval and condemnation.” But due to his young age, he will be released on probation for $7,500 in bail on the condition that he take down his offending posts.

Yee’s case has emerged as a symbol of Singapore’s harsh restrictions on freedom of speech, but in his home country, Yee remains a controversial figure whom many Singaporeans believe deserves punishment.

Why would people want to support amos yee? Insulting a religion is not free speech

— Hani (هانى) (@allesandria) May 12, 2015

I'm not encouraging people to attack Amos Yee..but…okla I feel he deserves it still..at least once.

— ED.shiliang (@shilianglim) April 30, 2015

On Monday, a Singaporean court sentenced Neo Gim Huah, a 49-year-old man offended by Yee’s pranks, to three weeks in jail after he slapped the teenager at one of his court appearances.

Others think the foul-mouthed teenager with the scratchy voice has captured something fundamental – and troubling – about Singaporean culture’s hive-mindedness and narrow ideas of what’s acceptable.

All this petty persecution of AmosYee really shows how immature and inexperienced the SG public, media and govt are in handling free speech.

— yt (@wanderwegg) May 7, 2015

After his conviction, Yee told reporters that he was “conflicted.” “I don’t know if I should celebrate my release or mourn my sentence,” he said.

ROSLAN RAHMAN/AFP/Getty Images

In the Athens of 450 B.C.E., Euripides, Aeschylus, and Sophocles wrote plays in which the devastating outcomes were the consequence of the very character of its protagonists. Today, Greece is living a similar tragedy, because the people have inflicted it on themselves. The drama may seem endless — a succession of similar and recurrent meetings and market jitters — but the noose is tightening on the Greek government: It managed to make Tuesday’s $840 million debt payment only by forcing hospitals, universities, and local governments to deposit their cash with the central bank. The government may not have the money to pay salaries and pensions this month; meanwhile, another $1.2 billion debt comes due next month.

Greek Prime Minister Alexis Tsipras is hinting that the kind of austerity creditors demand would require a referendum. German Finance Minister Wolfgang Schäuble encourages that approach, since it would force Greeks to make an up-or-down choice about whether they are willing to make the changes necessary to remain in the Eurozone.

The Greek people don’t want to ditch the euro, but they also don’t want to continue the painful austerity that is necessary for Greece to remain part of the currency union. The narrative is taking hold that Greeks are uniquely irresponsible: tax cheats and budget cookers who deserve their suffering. The recklessness of Finance Minister Yanis Varoufakis seems to personify the critique. But what is surprising about the Greek default drama is actually not that their politics have turned populist, but that the society has held up so well in the extreme circumstances it has endured the past five years: GDP has contracted by more than 25 percent since 2010 and unemployment is higher than in the United States during the Great Depression.

The economics for Greece are daunting. The government is indebted to the tune of $376 billion. That’s nearly twice the country’s gross domestic product. They’ve already been bailed out twice by the European Union; preventing a market rout required the head of the European Central Bank (ECB) to commit the EU to do “anything necessary” to preserve the currency. In the longer term, the Greek government will almost surely require a fresh infusion of up to $50 billion. And Greece owes another $1.5 billion in June. Athens is hoping that the ECB will hand over the profits made from the Greek debt it holds — in essence, asking bond holders to have taken risk for no gain. That the ECB is even considering this option demonstrates how much Europeans want to keep the currency union intact.

The problem is that no one wants to trade with Athens. The Greek government was only able to lure $2.2 million in securities purchases this month. The European Central Bank will no longer accept Greek government bonds as collateral in lending. Neither the International Monetary Fund (IMF) nor the EU will unlock further assistance without the Greek government committing to reforms it was elected to repudiate. Absent a policy reversal that creditors have adamantly ruled out, Greece will be in default.

Default is looming less for economic than political reasons. Greece’s government was elected making promises on which it cannot deliver, and Tsipras seems to lack the political skill to bring along the public for what is necessary. As economist Thomas Sowell wrote of the sub-prime housing crisis in the United States, it’s not economics that created the problem, but politics. Money has been rushing out of Greece because of political uncertainty about whether the government can pay its debts and whether it will find accommodation with its creditors. But it’s not about economic fundamentals at this point. It’s the antics of the Syriza politicians that have so aggravated its creditors (who are now almost exclusively the IMF, the ECB, and other European governments) and market makers (analysts and potential investors).

Syriza mistakenly believed it could extort better terms from other European governments by loudly proclaiming itself to be tribunes of the people. But other EU governments got elected, too, and they are likewise accountable to voters who are unmoved by Greece’s problems. Syriza also wrongly thought it could foster debtor country solidarity — an uprising by Italy, Spain, Portugal, Cyprus (and maybe even France) against Teutonic austerity. That failed miserably: there might not be warm, fuzzy feelings toward Berlin these days, but many Europeans have endured stringent austerity measures since the 2008 financial crisis and believe Greeks have been living beyond their means. The governments of those countries, and the German keystone of the EU, are in no mood to be lectured to by Syriza’s left-wing academics who’ve never had to put together a budget.

Greece had a primary surplus when Syriza took office — that is, tax receipts were sufficient to operate the government if debt were excused; now even outright default wouldn’t make Greece solvent. The government would still need to borrow money to pay salaries and pensions. And if Athens defaults, who would lend it the money to get back on its feet? Either Greece will be bailed out again by the EU or it will have to return to markets for financing — at even more prohibitive rates. Default would also further constrict revenues due to general economic disruption and reduced tax payments. So even if the Greek government defaults in the next few months, Greece’s troubles won’t end.

The tragedy of all this is that Greece had been through the worst of its austerity and realignment. Economic growth was turning up at the end of 2014. Bond issuances were selling at manageable long-term interest rates. And the European Central Bank had effectively deterred markets’ predatory instinct to pick apart a common currency with uncommon risk ratios. If only Greeks had been a little more patient; if only their establishment politicians had a little more credibility with the public to argue that the worst was over. Perhaps then Syriza wouldn’t have been elected and the Greek tragedy we are likely to see play out would have been averted.

TOBIAS SCHWARZ/AFP/Getty Images

Secretary of State John Kerry met with Russian President Vladimir Putin and Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov in Sochi Tuesday with tensions between Russia and the United States at their highest levels in decades because of Washington’s anger over Russia’s military intervention into Ukraine and Moscow’s anger at perceived Western meddling in its affairs.

Lavrov decided the best way to break the ice was with potatoes.

To open the meeting, the first time Kerry has visited Russia since the start of the Ukraine conflict last year, Lavrov presented Kerry with sacks of potatoes and tomatoes, mimicking Kerry’s gesture in 2014, when the secretary presented Lavrov with two Idaho potatoes during a meeting in Paris. A spokesman for Putin called their meeting, and the presentation of the spuds, a “positive step” in U.S-Russian relations.

But it’s also an ironic choice of a gift that didn’t come cheap, given that Western sanctions have caused the price of potatoes in Russia, a staple of its diet, to rise by 25 percent in the past year. The gift is also a not-too-subtle reminder that Russia has banned produce from Europe and the United States in response to the sanctions.

Whether Lavrov’s gift leads to a thaw in relations between Washington and Moscow remains to be seen, but diplomacy — even of the potato variety — is better than the alternative.

Photo Credit: Jim Watson/AFP

The formation of a narrow right-wing government in Israel has triggered a tsunami of speculation that the cold war brewing between Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and U.S. President Barack Obama is bound to get a lot colder.

Supporters of Israel, primarily in the pro-Israeli Jewish community in the United States, worry greatly that a second-term U.S. president freed from the constraints of reelection pressures, and already angry and frustrated with Netanyahu’s behavior, will take him to the woodshed and pressure Netanyahu on settlements, and, if necessary, add America’s support to the growing campaign for Palestinian statehood at the U.N. Critics eagerly anticipate and hope for the whipping. After all, given the history of tensions in the relationship, isn’t a worsening of ties inevitable? In the last 20 months of the Obama administration aren’t we going to see a collision between a willful U.S. president and a tough-talking prime minister playing games on Palestinian statehood and presiding over a coalition of Haredis and right-wing Zionists?

Not so fast. I don’t doubt the mistrust and animus on each side. Nor do I trivialize the divide that separates Obama and Netanyahu on a variety of issues. At the same time, I’m not all that sure that the expected confrontation is as inevitable as it might appear — at least for much of 2015. And here’s why.

Selling the Iran deal and the double whammy

Governing is about choosing. And right now the Obama administration’s main priority is negotiating, selling and implementing the Iran deal. The last thing the president wants or needs now is to open a second front with Israel on either Iran or the Palestinian issue. What’s more is that once the deal is concluded we’ll be entering a fairly prolonged period where implementation of the deal will be key. Congress and every 2016 presidential candidate will be watching like hawks to see if the administration has been snookered by Iran. And so will the Saudis and Israelis. The process of reassuring the Gulf Arabs will ramp up into high gear at this week’s Camp David summit. So there will have to be an Israeli piece of the reassurance package as well. The actual conclusion of a U.S.-Iran deal will be huge news, create piles of broken crockery in the U.S.-Israeli relationship, and to secure formal Congressional buy-in will require more than just a set of “just get over it” talking points for Israel. This is likely to take the form of more military hardware and intelligence cooperation. Nor should we rule out — even with the White House’s recent cold-shoulder policy — an Obama-Netanyahu meeting.

Then there’s the separate but very much related question of selling more military hardware to the Gulf States. It’s the cruelest of ironies for the prime minister that not only is he getting an Iran deal he hates; he’s also going to be faced with the prospects of more arms for the Arabs. And this is the double whammy that will likely require the administration to use more honey on the Israelis and less vinegar, most likely in the form of enhanced military cooperation, intelligence sharing, and the transfer of sophisticated aircraft like the F35 (which the United States has already authorized). It really will be tough for the president to shower the Arabs with hugs, kisses, sophisticated weapons and presidential summits and leave the Israelis out in the cold. Politically it creates a terrible optic and really does impose limits on the White House’s cold war with Netanyahu – ultimately setting up constraints on how far and fast this White House will be able to push the Israelis on any number of issues from settlement activity to pressuring Jerusalem at the U.N., and ultimately on a two state solution. In going for the Iran deal, the Obama administration may well have hung a closed for the season sign on any prospects of a Palestinian one, already a long shot.

A national unity government?

Hope springs eternal. And the Obama administration will react very carefully to the new Israeli government until it’s unmistakably clear that it won’t evolve into one that offers the prospects of a better relationship with Israel, some movement on the peace process, or the prime minister takes some action that Washington feels warrants a blast.

The reaction to last week’s announcement of additional housing units in a Jerusalem neighborhood that has previously drawn a severe reaction from the administration, this time only elicited a ho-hum expression of concern and disappointment. A national unity government with Isaac Herzog on balance doesn’t seem likely. But neither Obama nor Netanyahu has any stake in intensifying their food fight until that idea either is put to rest or comes to fruition.

If it’s the latter, then much of the tension will diffuse from the U.S.-Israeli relationship as Israel puts on a kinder and gentler face. If as is more likely, Netanyahu manages to expand his government by getting Avigdor Lieberman or others to join, Washington will have to calibrate how it wants to react based on what might be more provocative Israeli actions, for example on settlements.

Why fight without a purpose?

I’ve argued many times that American presidents face two kinds of fights with Israeli prime ministers: productive ones and unproductive ones. The former means that pressure, tension, and political capital expended is worthwhile because you actually get a result — a peace agreement or Israeli cooperation on some big issue like a peace conference at Madrid in 1991 that justifies the political pain at home.

The other kind of fight is one in which you try to make a point rather than a difference; in the end, you get all the downsides and none of the benefits. And the Obama administration has become a master of the unproductive fight. Whether it’s over settlements or Netanyahu’s comments about Palestinian statehood, the administration makes statements that alienate the Israelis and the pro-Israeli community in the United States without achieving anything of consequence. The president is unwilling or unable to apply real pressure, so he uses words. And that only undermines U.S. credibility in the Middle East and internationally without any sustainable gains.

It may well be that for any number of reasons — including the need to sell the Iranian deal, and pressure from Democrats and the pro-Israeli community — that the administration has begun to dial down its public fight. There appears to be more adult supervision in handling the U.S.-Israeli relationship in the White House. And it makes sense, particularly in the aftermath of Netanyahu’s reelection. The president may be frustrated. But he can’t afford to create the impression that he doesn’t accept the results of a democratic election. Pressure with purpose at a time when it might actually achieve something makes sense. A policy based on frustration, disappointment, and anger doesn’t.

The peace process

Assuming the Iran deal gets done and is actually implemented, the remaining area of prospective tension between Washington and Jerusalem is the Palestinian issue. The administration has intimated that it may find it difficult to defend Israel in international fora without an Israeli commitment to a two state solution. There almost certainly be continuing tension over settlement construction as there has been in the past. But a major confrontation over a non-existent peace process? Or a big row over a peace plan that’s just a thought experiment or fantasy in someone’s mind? What would be the point? The Palestinians are headed for more activity designed to pressure Israel in the international community, including the International Criminal Court. But it seems highly unlikely that the Obama administration will ride that train. Even Democrats who don’t like Netanyahu’s policies toward the Palestinians won’t buy on to that.

There is the possibility — and the administration has intimated it now several times — of trying to get a U.N. Security Council (UNSC) resolution to embody the elements of Palestinian statehood. The French are seized with this idea, as are the Arabs. But is this worth a fight? What will it achieve? Could the Americans even buy on to a draft that the Arabs and Palestinians would support. Even if they could, what’s the point?

Far better, though still flawed, from an American negotiator’s perspective, would be a possible scenario where an effort is made on the part of Obama to outline a solution to the Israeli-Palestinian problem, much in the way President Bill Clinton did in December 2000 shortly before he left office. This way Secretary Kerry or some future Secretary of State  wouldn’t compromise U.S. bridging proposals, make them radioactive by embodying them in a UNSC resolution, and create the impression that the United States was no longer the key mediator. The other downside of a UNSC resolution is that  would bind its successor with an internationalized negotiating framework that might strip a future U.S. negotiator of flexibility. Netanyahu would object to this kind of action too. But it wouldn’t expose the administration to critics inside Congress who will argue that the president was endorsing an imposed solution and shifting the focus from bilateral or even trilateral negotiations to negotiations to international arena. Since neither a UNSC resolution of the Obama parameters will have much of an effect on the ground, the administration should choose a route that best protects it credibility at home.

The next 20 months will not be easy ones in the U.S.-Israeli relationship. But they won’t necessarily lead to an escalation or a qualitatively different level of dysfunction than we’ve seen in the Netanyahu-Obama soap opera so far. Netanyahu’s goal is to outlast this president and wait for a friendlier one — any Republican would fit that bill; and so would the election of Hillary Clinton whose street cred with the Israeli public and the pro-Israeli community in the US is better than Obama’s and who has already made clear in her memoir Hard Choices that she believes unproductive fights with the Israelis get you nowhere. Netanyahu has no desire for a major fight now; he’ll have his hands full managing his government. If Netanyahu again intervenes in U.S. politics and makes a concerted effort to sink the Iran agreement or engages in a frenzy of settlement activity that goes beyond anything we’ve seen, relations could worsen.

But even if they do, how bad could things realy get? The administration isn’t going to sanction Israel, cut off aid, or unilaterally impose Palestinian statehood. Despite Obama’s frustration (and even anger) with Netanyahu, Israel will remain a close ally in a region where America has few stable friends and where even America’s partners and certainly its enemies are behaving far worse than Israel.

Anyone pining for a major meltdown in U.S.-Israeli relations ought to take a deep breath and lie down until the longing passes. And that goes as well for anyone looking for a much-improved U.S.-Israeli partnership. Indeed, the latter is unlikely to come only when you have a different Israeli prime minister in Jerusalem and another president in the White House.

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via Twitter (World Bank)

Maroš Šefčovič, the European Commission’s vice president in charge of energy, has been hitting the old Silk Road in search of new gas supply contracts that would break Gazprom’s hold on the European market. Emerging from a meeting held in the Turkmen capital with representatives from Turkmenistan, Turkey and Azerbaijan, Šefčovič confidently said that the union would start importing Caspian natural gas through its long-touted Southern Gas Corridor network of pipelines by 2019. The fact that the officials also discussed the prospect of building pipeline through Iran “since diplomatic relations with Iran are developing positively” is yet another startling reminder of just how badly Europe wants to break free from Russia’s natural gas supplies.

But can the EU’s gamble pay off?

On paper, Turkmenistan would be a great match for Europe’s energy woes. To begin with, the Central Asian country sits on the world’s fourth largest gas reserve and owns the world’s second largest gas field. Historically, thanks to some perverse pipeline politics that forced the country to export the bulk of its natural gas to Russia, Turkmenistan had been one of Gazprom’s largest suppliers of gas. That is, until 2009, when the Russians unilaterally announced that they will gradually phase out gas imports from Central Asian countries (in 2015, Gazprom will buy only 4 billion cubic meters, down from 45 bcm six years ago). As a result, Ashgabat turned to China and the EU to offset the lost revenues. After Turkmen officials revealed their desire to supply Europe with 10 to 30 bcm per year, Brussels listened and quickly dispatched Šefčovič to Ashgabat.

What’s more, sealing a deal with Turkmenistan to send part of its gas to Europe would be a boon not only for the Union’s energy security but also for Ukraine’s own trials and tribulations with Russia. In late March, Poroshenko signaled his interest in resuming inexpensive gas imports from Turkmenistan, as a way to sidestep Gazprom’s whimsical pricing policy.

Kyiv’s energy policy used to be prescribed by the gas prices demanded by Gazprom, a price curve that ebbed and flowed in lockstep with Ukraine’s falling in and out of Moscow’s grace. Up until 2009, thanks to a contract signed by RosUkrEnergo’s Dmitry Firtash, Kyiv enjoyed the lowest gas prices in its history by relying on a mix of cheaper Turkmen and Russian gas. The agreement, revolutionary at the time because it was the first time Turkmen gas would make its way directly to Europe, was shredded when Firtash’s political opponent and former gas trader, Yulia Tymoshenko cut out RosUkrEnergo from the equation and signed instead a 10-year agreement with Gazprom. Because of its variable pricing technique that saw prices rise four-fold in the span of a few years, the 2009 deal proved to be a complete mess for Kyiv. Prime Minister Arseniy Yatseniuk announced that his government is now seeking a hair-raising $16 billion in damages from Gazprom before an arbitration court in Stockholm.

Today, the prospect of importing Turkmen gas to Ukraine is trickier than it is for the EU, mostly because Kyiv needs Gazprom’s pipeline network for its transport. However, Ukraine’s rightfully combative stance with Russia makes the prospect of negotiating a deal with Gazprom a tough sell. Firtash, riding high after being cleared of graft charges by an Austrian court, in what the judge deemed to be a politically motivated trial mounted at Washington’s behest, could however end the deadlock given his long-standing business connection in both Moscow and Ashgabat.

With both Brussels and Kyiv courting Ashgabat, we are now witnessing the birth of a new energy architecture in Europe that will have long lasting impacts on Russia’s capacity to use its energy weapon for political games. Unlike its ho-hum predecessor, Jean Claude Juncker’s Commission has deftly navigated the testy waters laid at its doorstep by Moscow’s aggression in Ukraine. EU Competition Commissioner Margrethe Vestager leveled a €10 billion anti-trust case against Gazprom for unfair pricing in several Central and Eastern European countries. The move is part of the Union’s Third Energy Package that wants to bolster competition in EU energy markets through a process of unbundling, or separating pipeline ownership from gas producing companies. A win for the Commission’s litigators would deal a mortal blow to Gazprom’s bottom line and would force the company to rethink its business plan. Even if the company reached an agreement with Ankara on May 7 for the building of a pipeline across the Black Sea to Turkey, the feasibility of the project has been severely questioned.

Against this backdrop, Šefčovič’s and Poroshenko’s forays in Turkmenistan seem to indicate that the tide is turning against Gazprom’s old ways of doing business. The unprecedented fall in oil prices (Gazprom’s gas prices are pegged to the barrel) and the tumble of the ruble have shaved 86 percent off the company’s net profits in 2014, a trend that will continue unless the gas company adapts its European business model in order to respect European laws. In the medium term, the message is clear: Gazprom’s can no longer claim to be indispensable in Europe.

The picture of President George W. Bush leading an aged Saudi King Abdullah by the hand through the gardens of his Texas ranch in 2005 has become both iconic and symbolic of the U.S.-Saudi relationship. For over 40 years, the United States has walked hand-in-hand with Saudi Arabia through the thicket of Middle Eastern crises.

On May 14, at Camp David, another bucolic presidential setting, President Barack Obama is convening a special summit with Saudi Arabia and its Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC) partners to begin a new phase in their relationship. But, for the first time, it appears there will be less hand-holding and more tough talk. The United States will use the summit to hear the GCC’s concerns about Iran, but will likely explain frankly to the Arab monarchies that there will be no new U.S.-GCC defense pact or blanket security assurances from the United States. If the president delivers the right messages to whomever shows up at the summit, the U.S.-GCC relationship has the potential to become more productive than ever before.

The Saudis are clearly angry about this approach. On Sunday, they announced that King Salman, the new Saudi king who took power in January, will remain in Riyadh, sending the crown prince to Camp David in his stead. (In the end, only two GCC heads of state — from Kuwait and Qatar — will attend.) Such petulance is a common negotiating tactic in these circumstances. It often produces the desired ripples in the American media to the effect that U.S. influence in the region is waning and the Saudi-American relationship is in trouble.

In part, the media’s focus is warranted. President Obama has implied that the purpose of this summit is to assuage the concerns of those countries most worried about the Iranian nuclear deal. Reassuring partners under such circumstances is a natural and normal reaction. It is certainly the traditional U.S. response to placating irritated and frightened allies. There is pressure within the government to cook up “deliverables” for the summit that might make the Saudis and their GCC partners feel loved by the United States.

But as the decision of most GCC leaders not to attend indicates, there is not much on the table that will reassure them. And that’s fine. It would be wrong to make reassurance the centerpiece of this summit — for three fundamental reasons.

First, Saudi Arabia and its GCC partners are not formal treaty allies of the United States and, moreover, they often do not act as friends. The United States is a multi-ethnic, multi-confessional democracy committed to universal human rights. Saudi Arabia is an authoritarian monarchy committed to maintaining a society based on harsh political repression, religious intolerance, and a fundamentalist interpretation of Islam at odds with universally recognized human rights. Some GCC countries are in fact often the source of both the ideology and the money that supports Islamist terrorism around the world. And GCC interests and U.S. interests increasingly diverge over issues such as Iran, Syria, the need for internal reforms in the Gulf states, and how to deal with the regional threat of political Islam. The United States, Saudi Arabia, and its GCC partners can and do cooperate on a selective basis, but their relationship with the United States will necessarily remain transactional — more a long series of one-night stands than a committed relationship.

Second, America’s commitment to Saudi and GCC security is not and should not be absolute. Since the mid-1970s, the United States and the Gulf Arab countries have been allies on a variety of security issues. But this has been based on a hard-nosed bargain: “The United States will protect you against external threats to your security and you will support America’s goals and interests in the region and help stabilize global energy markets.” Over time, this bargain has allowed the Arab states to foist their regional security responsibilities onto the United States — and then blame America when things go wrong. Regardless of the rhetoric from both sides, the Arab states get the better end of the bargain. And they need it more than the United States does. This is particularly true now that the global energy market has diversified and is less subject to volatile price spikes. Yet paradoxically, even though Gulf states’ dependence on the U.S. security guarantee and changes in energy markets should increase Washington’s leverage, American officials often convince themselves that they need to change U.S. policy more than Persian Gulf partners need to change theirs. To paraphrase former President Bill Clinton, every now and then we have to remind ourselves who the superpower is in the relationship.

Third, Washington’s never-ending reassurances over the years have created an unhealthy dependence on the United States, instead of encouraging the Gulf countries to become more independent, capable, and to stand up on their own feet when it comes to providing for their own security from external aggression. Nature abhors a vacuum, and so does the United States government. The collective weakness of the GCC states has created a security deficit in the region. It is long past time for the GCC states to produce more security than they consume. As Obama has noted, “the biggest threats that [Sunni Arab States] face may not be coming from Iran invading. It’s going to be from dissatisfaction inside their own countries.” U.S. reassurances to protect these countries against external attack distract from their problems at home that include a growing population of disaffected youth, chronically high levels of unemployment, and poor human rights records. Instead, the United States should be leaning on them more heavily to enact domestic reforms.

As the GCC states become more independent, the United States will not always like the solutions they come up with to deal with regional security issues, such as the ongoing civil war in Yemen or whatever crisis might arise next. At times, U.S. officials will need to seek difficult compromises. But in most circumstances Gulf state ownership of their problems — and the solutions — will lead to better outcomes than American-led efforts, particularly military intervention.

Iran will continue to harbor ambitions for regional domination and pursue policies that pose a serious threat to U.S. interests in the Middle East. The Iran nuclear deal, if successful, will nonetheless allow the United States to begin to recast its bargain with the GCC countries, because it will remove the principal direct threat to U.S. interests from Iran. The United States will be able to insist that the GCC states assume greater responsibility for their own security — and that means the United States will be able to avoid direct military interventions in messy Middle Eastern civil wars. The willingness of Saudi Arabia to seek its own solution to instability in Yemen and the Arab League’s decision to form a joint Arab military force are positive signs of increased burden-sharing from the Gulf.

The long-term goal is not to get into bed with Iran. Rather, it is to use the relationship with Iran to get out of bed with Saudi Arabia. The United States will increase its diplomatic leverage with the GCC states if they know that Washington is playing the field. The GCC needs to understand that the U.S. goal in the Persian Gulf is to maintain a regional balance, not to allow them to emerge victorious in their struggle with Iran.

This week’s GCC summit is the perfect venue to deliver these messages. It is an opportunity for the president to demand more responsible behavior and greater cooperation from Gulf leaders instead of again reassuring them of an undying American commitment to their security. In the end, this will make for a scratchier summit, but a much more realistic, and therefore more productive, relationship between the United States and the GCC states. Hand-holding is nice, but in international relations at least, promiscuity also has its advantages.

JIM WATSON/AFP/Getty Images

Former baseball player (and eminent public intellectual) Yogi Berra famously warned, “It’s tough to make predictions, especially about the future.” Yet trying to anticipate the future is a big part of foreign policymaking: leaders (and pundits) must try to interpret trends and anticipate events, so that they can devise policies that will avert disaster and maybe even make things better.

But Berra is still right: predicting the future ain’t easy. In a recent class at the Kennedy School, I reminded my first year students about some key features of the world of 1978, which was my first year in grad school. In 1978, the Soviet Union and Warsaw Pact were still intact and formidable. The white apartheid government ruled South Africa and the Shah of Iran still sat on the Peacock Throne. People could smoke on airplanes, in restaurants, and in most public places. There was no Euro, no worldwide web, no email, no cellphones, no digital streaming services, and even the compact disc was still unknown. Japan’s economy was going like gangbusters, and China’s per capita income was a mere $165 per annum. How many of us could have foreseen that each of these conditions — and many others — would be dramatically transformed over the next few decades?

But to say that predicting the future is hard is not to say it is impossible. In fact, we can anticipate some features of the future with a high degree of confidence.

If asked to describe the world of 2050, for example, I’d argue that there are some important elements that are easy to forecast — with a suitable margin for error — and other areas where it is nearly impossible.

At the “more certain” end of the spectrum is population. Although fertility and death rates do fluctuate over time (and not always predictably), demographic models can take these shifts into account and we can be pretty confident about the size of world’s population in 2050 and the populations of individual countries. Barring unlikely “black swan” events (a huge pandemic, large-scale nuclear war, etc.), we know that China and India will have at least a billion people apiece, and we know the U.S. population will be around 400 million. We also know the populations in Germany, Russia, and Japan are going to be smaller, and that the median ages of these populations will rise significantly. Pronatalist policies could alter these numbers a bit, but population growth is hard to change quickly and this is one area where our beliefs about 2050 are likely to be pretty accurate.

What else can we know with high confidence? Well, in 2050 the world will still be divided into territorial states and the number of states will be higher than it is today. We’ve gone from roughly 50 states in 1945 to nearly 200 today, and pressures for self-determination show little sign of decreasing. By contrast, there doesn’t seem to be much pressure for merging or combining states or constructing new multi-national empires, and occasional steps in that direction (such as the union of North and South Yemen) haven’t fared well in recent years. The EU is probably the most important example of a nascent political union, but it is still largely an association of proud national states and is experiencing serious centrifugal forces these days.

To say that states will remain central and that their number is likely to rise is not to say that every one of these states will be around in 2050. It’s easy to imagine a different set of states emerging from the current turmoil in the Middle East, for example, my point is simply that we aren’t likely to see a significant reduction in the overall number.

The economic weight of different countries is pretty predictable too, at least over a span of a few decades. China’s dramatic rise is a partial exception to this rule, but most of the major economic powers in today’s world are the same countries that have been major economic players for a long time. GNP is not as easy to predict as demography, because some states do take off and others run into trouble, but we still know an awful lot about the international economic landscape of 2050.

To be specific, it is highly likely (if not quite certain) that the United States, China, Japan, India, Brazil, Russia, and the EU will be major economic players in 2050, and the states that have high per capita incomes at present will almost certainly have high per capita incomes 35 years from now. Similarly, although a few emerging economies will do well in the decades ahead, most of today’s poorer countries will still be relatively poor in 2050 (even if they are a lot better off than they are today). We know that Outer Mongolia or Burundi are going to become Singapore by 2050, and Singapore isn’t going to turn into Somalia. States whose wealth is based entirely on natural resources such as oil and gas are something of a special case (i.e., their fortunes could decline rapidly if their particular commodity falls in price), but we still know a lot about who the key economic players are likely to be in the middle of this century. Short answer: the same states that are key players today.

Other features of 2050 are much harder to forecast, however, because they reflect explicit policy decisions and could shift quickly in response to events. For example, the alliances forged during the long Cold War have been around a long time and have proven to be remarkably durable, but can we really be confident NATO or America’s Asian alliances will still be around and still be meaningful thirty-five years down the road? If Russian power continues to decline and the United States focuses more and more attention on Asia, NATO will be increasingly irrelevant. And I’ve suggested before, it’s hard to imagine NATO playing an active role in a future U.S. effort to balance China.

Alliance dynamics in Asia will be increasingly complicated and hard to predict, so one can hardly rule out some pretty dramatic shifts there too. I’d bet on a balancing coalition to address China’s rising power, but its emergence and cohesion are far from certain. And if Chinese power continues to rise, can one entirely rule out the formation of closer security ties between Beijing and some countries in the — dare we say it? — Western hemisphere? I don’t think so. Nor is hard to imagine significant realignments in the Middle East, especially if Iran eventually gets out of the penalty box and becomes a more active and accepted player. I’m not saying that any or all of these things will occur, of course; my point is that international alignments are subject to change and it is harder to know what diplomatic constellations will exist in 2050 than it is to predict either population or economic clout.

What about the level of violence? Global violence has been declining since World War II, leading scholars such as Steven Pinker, John Mueller, and Joshua Goldstein to describe war as increasingly rare and even “obsolescent.” It would be nice if that trend continued until 2050, but the past few years have seen a sharp uptick in the number and virulence of global conflicts and a future Sino-American security competition might fuel any number of other tensions. I’d keep my fingers crossed hoping Pinker and Co. are right, but I’d keep my powder dry too.

Another area we cannot easily forecast is the normative and ideological environment that will exist 35 years hence. Thirty-five years ago, Marxism-Leninism still commanded loyalty and respect among millions of people. Twenty-plus years ago, the “Washington Consensus” was supposedly sweeping the globe. Since then, various forms of Islamic extremism have become powerful currents within a number of societies. Global norms on privacy, human rights, corporate social responsibility, the role of women, assassination, the death penalty, and a number of other topics are all in flux as well, and it is hard to predict which side will win these debates or to anticipate what new movements may unexpectedly emerge. I mean: who would have predicted the gay marriage movement 30 years ago?

What is least certain about the world of 2050? As we cast our gaze forward, the greatest uncertainties lie in the realm of science and technology. The advance of scientific and technical knowledge has accelerated steadily over the past several centuries, and we simply have no idea exactly what sorts of things we will be able to do just a few decades from now. Driverless cars? Customized fetal DNA? Gene therapy to eliminate disease? Digital devices enabled not by moving a mouse or a touch screen but simply by thinking? Growing new organs in a lab and then transplanting them? We can predict some technological developments with a degree of confidence (e.g., computers will be faster and cheaper, energy usage will be more efficient, some diseases will be cured, etc.) but future discoveries (or serendipitous combinations of them) will create possibilities no one is even imagining today. At the same time, some developments predicted decades ago never materialized (like everyone else, I’ve given up hoping for my flying car). If one is trying to envision the world of 2050, it is the technological frontier where our crystal ball is cloudiest.

And let’s not forget the “black swans”: those seemingly random natural or man-made events that could shift the course of world politics in unexpected directions. A mass pandemic, a nuclear terrorist incident, an even bigger financial panic, or a catastrophic drought might have profound effects in many places, alter global discourse in key ways, and make many of our other forecasts look silly. And by their very nature, such events are hard to anticipate even if we know what their baseline probabilities might be.

The bottom line is that there’s a lot we do know about the world of 2050, and a lot that we don’t. Unfortunately, one other thing we know is that the human beings that will have to grapple with that world will still be deeply flawed and the political and social institutions that will be wrestling with these changes will still fall rather short of perfection. Our descendants will have plenty to do, and they may even look back on the current troubled state of world affairs with a certain degree of nostalgia, thinking that their forebears had it pretty good, even if we didn’t have flying cars.

GIUSEPPE CACACE/AFP/Getty Images

UN soldiers provide water at a refugee camp in South Sudan. Photograph: Yna/EPA

Why it’s Time for the West to Lead a Rewrite of the International Security Playbook

Is a re-think of the Western-led international security enterprise needed to respond to a set of interrelated trends that have little to do with conflict between great states and far more to do with dysfunction within fragile states? The candid observer of global security trends might be inclined to respond in the affirmative given the mounting evidence that the West’s responses to vexing security challenges, especially those affecting fragile states, have yielded little positive results. In fact, in many instances, they have made matters worse.

Off-focus in an Age of Persistent Disruption

National security is the practice of protecting the state and its citizens against an assortment of threats through mixed-response statecraft, specifically, using the tools of diplomacy, defense and foreign aid. Conventional wisdom holds that the dominant and potentially most consequential threats to North America and Europe are bellicose nuclear armed rogue states like North Korea and Russia under Vladimir Putin, and of course, nuclear weapons aspirants like Iran. However, a national security orthodoxy centered on “rogues” and expressed in a grand strategy based on cold war logic is well off the mark given that today’s security landscape continues to be shaped to a far greater degree by the drivers of trends like mass migration, terrorism, and climate change than by great powers neo-colonialism.

Further, the West’s well-resourced military enterprise – led by the United States – cannot begin to mitigate, much less resolve, the root causes of the most consequential drivers of 21st century insecurity. In an era where great states conflict is most likely to be fought using the mechanism of finance and trade (e.g., sanctions) vs with destroyer squadrons and Army divisions, the convergence of political dysfunction, underdevelopment, and extremist ideologies, most now be recognized as the premier threat to international peace and stability.

An obsession with readily definable, deterable and trackable “rogues” is counter-productive in an era that is increasingly being defined by trends that have little to do with Putin and Khatami and everything to do with imploding states across the across the Middle East and North Africa (MENA). The toxic forces circulating within, and emanating from, failing states like Somalia, Sudan Yemen, Eritrea, Syria, Iraq, et al., continues to spill across regional borders, and increasingly into the West’s own bowls of prosperity in the forms of terror and mass migration, spiking angst, or at the very least, deep concern, from Albania to Sweden.

Fragile States Spillage – A New Normal

The up until recently under-reported exodus of Western, Northern and Eastern African youth from their tumultuous homelands into Libya (itself a failed state), and across the Mediterranean sea, is an example of fragile states spillage that has the potential to cause chronic social and economic pain across Western Europe. Many Southern European nations with their already sky-high unemployment rates, dismal growth numbers and stressed welfare systems are not prepared to absorb hundreds of thousands of young, low-skilled migrants. Given the worsening conditions across the MENA — to include the deepening desperation — the waves of migrants will be persistent and perhaps even more intense in the years to come.

There is even concern that violent extremist individuals might be mixed in with legitimate African refugees on any of the numerous illegally-operated ferries making the crossing.  The specter of stowaway terrorists amid persistent waves of unskilled foreigners landing penniless and hungry at Europe’s doorway is a stiff wind in the sails of European xenophobia generally, but islamophobia more specifically. One British columnist, in response to the migration crisis, called for “gunboats” to be used on refugees – and referred to the migrants as a “plague of feral humans.” Though this is hardly a representative sentiment of the vast majority of Europeans it does underscore the potential for a nationalistic backlash that could lead to minor or major political reordering across some of the most affected nations.

Fragile states spillage has precipitated a revolution in geo-security affairs that has come as a surprise to national security practitioners. Here, many now find that they are increasingly planning more foreign humanitarian assistance operations than war-fighting operations. But although each of the human insecurity-linked trends are by themselves problematic, some are more concerning than others due to the sheer scope of the problems and their exceedingly long resolution timelines. But perhaps the trend of most concern – one that is the most underappreciated and underreported – is one that should be the easiest to understand and most important to mitigate.

Young boys are usually recruited from within the locality, lured by money and a sense of purpose in fighting for the community [Al Jazeera Media Network & Reuters]

The Raw Materials of Terror

The youth bulge is a stage of development where a country reduces infant mortality but birthrates stay the same or increase. It is a trend that is compounding instability over large swathes of the MENA. In Sub-Saharan and North Africa about 40 percent of the population is under the age of fifteen, and almost 70 percent is under thirty years old. It’s not surprising, then, that there exists a tremendous imbalance between young men in need of meaningful employment and available jobs. Frustrated youth don’t have productive options to choose from, so many are compelled to leave their home countries, join a local illicit network (e.g., gangs), pledge to a terror group or resort to petty crime (the gateway to not-so-petty crime) to satisfy their unmet needs. The net outcome is that before age twenty, many young men become national liabilities versus national assets.

Boys with unmet psychological, spiritual and physical needs across the MENA are ripe for recruitment into violent religio-political groups like Al-Shabab, Boko Haram, and the Islamic State in Iraq and Syria. But this is not the narrative that the architects of the counterterrorism fight want to hear. It causes no small amount of dissonance to learn that the foot soldiers of terror (really, at-risk youth whose communities and countries have failed them) are not innately evil and that most are even be redeemable. However, the itch to be seen as doing something (normally that “something” is lethal) must be scratched in order to appease a fearful public which is largely not aware of the key ingredients of which the transnational “terrorism” concoction is composed.

The youth bulge and other drivers of national instability and insecurity cannot be responded to with the West’s security apparatus. There’s no denying that a robust set of traditional military and intelligence capabilities is needed to deter great states aggression as well as to eliminate bad guys who are imminent threats, however, hard power should be the lesser applied compound in the prescription designed to cure terrorism. Developmental and national capacity building goods and processes  (often referred to as soft power) aimed at improving affected population’s human security represent a way forward that is likely to achieve the best security results over the long term.

President Obama in his 2015 National Security Strategy (NSS) stated, “The use of force is not, however, the only tool at our disposal, and it is not the principal means of U.S. engagement abroad, nor always the most effective for the challenges we face.” Though the administration persistently promises that hard power is not the “principal means of U.S. engagement abroad,” one could be forgiven for being skeptical of this pronouncement after even a cursory review of the national security balance sheet.

Uncle Sam’s military expenditures come in at over twelve times the spending of diplomacy and foreign humanitarian and development programs (more precisely, $610 billion to $50 billion). Surely, the U.S. administration and Congress can do a better job of adjusting spending priorities so that there is a more reasonable balance between hard power spending and the soft power tools that can effectively address the drivers of expanding insecurity in key parts of the world.

A Smarter Approach

Smart Power is a concept first introduced by Joseph Nye (former Assistant Secretary of Defense under President Clinton) and centers on investing in alliances and institution building as a means to enhance stability and achieve sustainable security outcomes. When practiced wisely, it is inspired by American core values and informed by scholarly analysis of observable trends versus biases towards a familiar set of threats and trends. Nye shared in a Huffington Post article in 2007 that, “Though the Pentagon is the best trained and best resourced arm of the government, there are limits to what hard power can achieve on its own. Promoting democracy, human rights and development of civil society are not best handled with the barrel of a gun.”

For smart power to gain traction, conventional notions of national security must yield to a far broader, nuanced and fact-fueled understanding of threats to international security. New goals, doctrines and strategies together would form the basis of a new international security orthodoxy, which brings closer to its center human security concerns. The premise that international security can be preserved principally with conventional war prowess must be discredited and more balanced and sensible framework for understanding (and responding to) security threats be brought to the fore. A policy of strategic patience which resists reflexive kinetic responses and is expressed principally through conflict resolution and development efforts must be sold to the American public as the most prudent way forward.

Lastly, President Obama’s NSS states that the solution to the fragile states challenge “rests in bolstering the capacity of regional organizations, and the United Nation system, to help resolve disputes, build resilience to crises and shocks, strengthen governance, end extreme poverty.” Such an approach (clearly not yet fully implemented) is smart power manifest, where victories are harder to quantify, take a long time to achieve, but are ultimately more effective than costly and controversial approaches like the target lists centric counterterrorism program. It’s time for the international security playbook to be revamped so that a human security centered smart power approach becomes America’s grand strategy for leading the world into an increasingly tumultuous 21st century.

 

By Maj. Gen. David Fastabend, U.S. Army (Ret.)
Best Defense book reviewer

A book release with a more promising premise is hard to imagine: the inside story on the military’s elite Joint Special Operations Task Force adaptation in the War on Terror, reversing the outcome from failure to success. Moreover, the lessons learned from that experience can be applied to the leadership and management of any organization struggling to address the dynamic, complex environments of our globalized lives.

Up front, Stan McChrystal offers a vital caveat that all readers ignore at their peril: Team of Teams is not a war story. This is a leadership story and a management story, masterfully crafted and compellingly delivered by McChrystal with the assistance of two former Navy SEALs — David Silverman and Chris Fussell — and Tantum Collins, a Yale graduate currently studying at Cambridge.

The text is a tour de force of management theory over the past century. Beginning with Taylor’s work on efficiency and the foundation of scientific management, the authors establish the underpinnings of most legacy military and business organizations. Next there is a thorough treatment of complexity, carefully distinguishing it from mere complication, and how this phenomenon defeats most adherents to scientific management. The next transition is to resilience thinking, adaptability, and the important distinctions between team thinking and command thinking. Finally, there are key observations on how modern technology enables shared consciousness, greater transparency of decision-making and devolution of decision-making authority to lower levels. Anecdotes and vignettes mined from the authors’ military experiences and management studies weave through and connect the argument.

Team of Teams offers explicit and substantive prescriptions for what ails modern organizations. The argument is that the benefits of small, effective teams can be scaled up significantly through a network approach built on transparent decision-making and an “eyes-on / hands-off” devolution of decision authority to the lowest practical levels. The recommendations include the physical co-location of key stakeholder representatives and robust attention to liaison representation where that is not possible. Technology can be leveraged for large scale communication of context and intent to the “team of teams.” Most importantly, there is a unifying emphasis throughout on the human dimension of organizational behavior and culture.

GEN McChrystal argues compellingly that this is no “zero-defects” approach, and that leaders in a complex environment must be content with a 70% solution. I suspect Stan was significantly “hands-off” in his authorship role here, because 70% is how I would score the military perspective of Team of Teams. Granted — it is not a war story — but most military officers picking up this text will utter a short prayer: “Please God, don’t let this be about how SOF won the war. And if SOF has to win the war, please don’t let it be about how only the SEALs did it.”

Alas, such prayers go largely unanswered. There is no mention of the 160,000 non-SOF military members that shared the Iraqi battle space with JSOTF, or their complementary role as the admittedly non-cool, non-special team in the team of teams. Although there is grudging acknowledgement that there are non-Navy SOF elements, the SEALs overwhelm the narrative with extensive accounts of BUDS training, etc. In a world where the SEALs are painfully over-exposed, this will generate some anti-bodies in more experienced military readers. Such readers will also not find co-location of the joint and inter-governmental battle-staff, attention to LNO assignments, or extensive televideo conferencing of daily O&I meetings as ground-breaking innovations, as these have been standard practice in the conventional forces at least back to Army operations in Bosnia in the mid-90s.

In spite of the scope of this text as a management treatise, intriguing questions go unanswered. The enemy is portrayed as being superiorly adaptive and resilient, with scant explanation of how they achieved that. The role of their ideology as a substitute for directive command and control is unexplored. Although decision authority can be decentralized in an “eyes on / hands off” environment, accountability can not be decentralized — is this risk always acceptable? How does one navigate the treacherous tensions between authority and accountability?

Finally, the elephant in the room is that for all this adaptation and innovation the enemy they defeated has forced the evacuation of the old JSOTF base of operations at Balad, Iraq. Strategy still eats organization and process for breakfast. This omission of context particularly frustrates me because I witnessed GEN McChrystal’s personal and vital role in recognizing the Sunni revolt in Anbar Province and setting the strategic conditions in place that enabled a temporary window of stability in Iraq. The book would be improved if this exemplary, self-effacing leader was more hands-on in explaining the role of effective strategy — in the absence of which even teams of teams will flounder.

Notwithstanding these quibbles, Team of Teams slashes useful trails through the jungle of complexity that bewilders most modern organizations. It is a story worthy of a careful read and even more careful reflection.

David Fastabend is a retired Army officer who served as Multinational Forces Iraq C3 in 2006-2007 and Director of Strategy, Plans and Policy for the Army Staff 2007-2009.

By Gautam Mukunda
Best Defense book reviewer

Team of Teams, by General Stanley McChrystal, Tantum Collins, David Silverman, and Chris Fussell, is essentially two books.

One is a Gladwell-esque attempt to relate a variety of stories, most familiar but some new, that are meant to illuminate different aspects of both the history of management thought and of the authors’ solution to the problem of how to make large bureaucratic organizations flexible and adaptive enough to succeed in the modern world.

The other is a description of how McChrystal and his team radically improved the performance of the Joint Special Operations Command (JSOC) in Iraq by transforming it from a rigid hierarchic structure to, in their term, a “team of teams.” JSOC’s new structure and method of operating allowed it to integrate intelligence more effectively and plan and launch operations much more quickly than it ever could have before, resulting in a series of (temporary) triumphs, culminating in the killing of Abu Musab Al-Zarqawi, the leader of al Qaeda in Iraq.

Team of Teams has some significant weaknesses, but its description of how a remarkably gifted leader transformed an organization in the most challenging of circumstances both adds to our understanding of the Iraq War and is likely to be helpful and occasionally inspiring for executives. It may be particularly useful for business leaders who are unlikely to read the academic research that has come to very similar conclusions, but who might instead be drawn to a story of organizational transformation under literal, not metaphoric, fire.

Many large organizations today struggle with exactly the problem McChrystal and his co-authors identify: the need to be far more agile, adaptable, responsive to information from the environment, and able to learn and innovate quickly in response to new, unanticipated, and rapidly-evolving threats than they would have had to be a generation ago. The solutions they identify, of breaking down organizational silos, building personal ties between members of different units within the organization to enable information flow and cooperation, and minimizing or eliminating leaders’ tendency to micromanage subordinates in favor of empowering people to make their own decisions whenever possible, are familiar, but also useful, powerful, and likely to be implementable by business leaders.

Team of Teams’ strongest effect is that it leaves me enormously impressed by McChrystal’s abilities. Few leaders could have stepped back from the war effort in Iraq and rethought some of the most basic assumptions about how the military should operate. Even fewer could have countered the tendency to throw more resources at the problem or optimize current processes instead of reinventing the organization wholesale. Even more impressive, of course, is that after McChrystal and his team diagnosed the problem they faced, they were able to successfully implement this radically new approach in extraordinarily difficult circumstances.

Teams of Teams’ most useful aspects for executives are likely its concrete examples of how McChrystal and his team reformed JSOC, with analogues of many of those approaches available to business leaders. Their solutions may not be new, but few people can claim to have implemented such ideas so successfully or in such adverse conditions. Team of Teams’ suggestions are far from complete but they are, without question, useful, interesting, and often thought-provoking.

Team of Teams is far from flawless. It does not explain, for example, which circumstances that make its preferred organizational form preferable to traditional ones, or describe the advantages of the old form over the new one. It could have been strengthened by engaging more deeply with the management literature on the organizational forms it describes, particularly the work of Michael Tushman on ambidextrous organizations and Ranjay Gulati on disrupting organizational silos. It does not engage with the differences between militaries and businesses, nor does it offer advice to leaders with authority less absolute than McChrystal’s was on how to win over opponents.

The book also stumbles when its attention shifts from the military in general and Iraq in particular. Its stories of Frederick Taylor pioneering scientific management, for example, may be interesting to readers unfamiliar with them, but they are likely to be old for many, and they tend to distract from the book’s primary goal of explaining a different model of management. In some cases the authors’ relative unfamiliarity with business shows — their attribution of the financial crisis to a lack of supervision of junior employees in Wall Street firms by senior managers, for example, shallowly (and arguably mistakenly) analyzes a complex event of surpassing importance.

It also has a small number of factual and editorial errors. But these should not impede anyone from reading Team of Teams or taking its ideas about management seriously.

Despite its weaknesses, Team of Teams is valuable. Its most important advice for leaders, however, is likely to be the hardest for them to take. Information technology enables leaders to monitor their organization with unprecedented immediacy and fidelity. McChrystal and his co-authors acutely observe that this is a double-edged sword. Such transparency can be a huge asset when it allows leaders to learn about what their followers are doing, and when it allows followers to observe leaders and get general guidance from them. When it is used to enable leaders to micro-manage their followers instead, this transparency is an organizational bane. McChrystal’s description of his personal struggle with his controlling instincts (instincts shared by most leaders) is therefore likely to be particularly valuable to other leaders struggling to make the same organizational transformation.

Gautam Mukunda is an Assistant Professor at Harvard Business School and the author of Indispensable: When Leaders Really Matter. He has published on leadership, military innovation, and the security and economic implications of advances in synthetic biology.

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