They're standing for Edward Snowden, the NSA leaker. In the era of big data, who will stand for all of us? (Ridhard Drew/AP)

Will NSA leaks wake us from our techno-utopian dream?

By Dan Murphy, Staff writer / 06.10.13

Could the leaks about the extent of the National Security Agency's surveillance of US citizens be the death knell of techno-utopianism?

Well, if we're lucky. The notion that the Internet, cellphones, and related digital technologies would set us all free - the definition of "free" generally determined by the political biases of whatever polemicist you happened to be reading -- has been a durable one for years now. Citizens would evade government censors, tweet and Facebook their way to revolution, and forge new, and better, democracies.

Anonymity and encryption would ensure the free flow of information, and people empowered by technology would be the bane of tyrants and government abuse everywhere. Bitcoins would be the new global currency, Wikipedia a new and better global university, and white-hat hackers would be our standard bearers. WikiLeaks would avenge and expose injustice and the global capitalist successes of companies like Google would be evidence that you could do well while not being evil. 

Well, it was a nice fantasy while it lasted.

While it's been clear to some for a while now that the Internet isn't exactly the magic democracy machine it has been cracked up to be (a great place to start in this vein is Evgeny Morozov's 2011 book, The Net Delusion), a rosy glow continues to surround the information age and its potential to remake human societies. 

But the sheer extent of the US government's digital surveillance efforts, revealed by former CIA employee and NSA contractor Edward Snowden to The Guardian and The Washington Post this week, will hopefully bring techno-skepticism to a broader audience. Amid the debates over the legality and constitutionality of the government's PRISM and related programs, whether Mr. Snowden is a whistle-blower or traitor, whether marginally greater safety is worth the intrusion on private citizens' lives, there is one indisputable fact: The US and other governments have more information about the habits of their citizens at their command than at any other time in human history. Orders of magnitude more, and growing every day.

Will they use their new powers for good or ill? Well, the track record of human history doesn't provide much ground for reassurance. And while the discussion that President Obama now says he wants about these issues (after keeping the expanding programs secret for years) may yield more robust laws to protect US citizen privacy, China or Pakistan or Kazakhstan may have different ideas.

That the "Internet" and all that goes with it is simply a technology, a tool, that is value-neutral on its own, should be self-evident. But the opposite case has been peddled by powerful and influential people who have profited handsomely from this new world. 

Case in point is Eric Schmidt of Google. The Internet giant has, according to one of the NSA slides Snowden gave to The Guardian, been feeding information into the PRISM system since Jan. 14, 2009. Though the company denies any knowledge of the program, it uses the same no "direct access to our servers" formulation that's been used by the eight other companies involved.

As PRISM was hoovering data from Google, Mr. Schmidt was penning, with Google Ideas Director Jared Cohen, The New Digital Age, a paean to the transformative power of our new technologies. It contains some doozies. Like: "The collective power of the online world will serve as a tremendous deterrent to potential perpetrators of brutality, corrupt practices and even crimes against humanity" and; "As governments look for ways to persuade ex-combatants to turn in their AK47s, they will find that the prospect of a smart phone might be enough to get started." And, "In the future people won't just back up their data; they'll back up their government."

Mr. Morozov has a typically amusing criticism of the book's apparent argument that everything old is new again (h/t Joshua Foust):

The problem is that you cannot devise new concepts merely by sticking adjectives on old ones. The future depicted in The New Digital Age is just the past qualified with “virtual.” The book is all about virtual kidnappings, virtual hostages, virtual safe houses, virtual soldiers, virtual asylum, virtual statehood, virtual multilateralism, virtual containment, virtual sovereignty, virtual visas, virtual honor killings, virtual apartheid, virtual discrimination, virtual genocide, virtual military, virtual governance, virtual health-insurance plans, virtual juvenile records, and—my favorite—virtual courage. The tricky subject of virtual pregnancies remains unaddressed, but how far away could they be, really?

To be sure, there are caveats. Schmidt and Cohen write of "the importance of a guiding human hand in the new digital age. For all the possibilities that communication technologies represent, their use for good or ill depends solely on people. Forget all the talk about machines taking over. What happens in the future is up to us."

Well, maybe. But while "us" figures out how to control and contain the potential damage of the era of big data, it turns out governments have been happily setting the rules for themselves – with the acquiescence, at least, of the likes of Google.

If we accept The Guardian's account of Google's cooperation with PRISM, it's interesting to note that a company that profits from sorting through mounds of data and helping advertisers target customers doesn't appear to have mounted much of a legal challenge to the government's demand for access to the information on their servers. Contrast that with their successful fight against the Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA) last year, which was framed as a battle for Internet freedom but was also good for the bottom line of content distributors like Google (rather than content producers). 

Mr. Snowden himself appears to allude to a dawning knowledge of the downside of the digital world as part of his inspiration to come forward, exposing himself to serious legal repercussions in the process. He told The Guardian's Glen Greenwald that the NSA is "intent on making every conversation and every form of behavior in the world known to them" and that:

... he once viewed the internet as "the most important invention in all of human history". As an adolescent, he spent days at a time "speaking to people with all sorts of views that I would never have encountered on my own".

But he believed that the value of the internet, along with basic privacy, is being rapidly destroyed by ubiquitous surveillance. "I don't see myself as a hero," he said, "because what I'm doing is self-interested: I don't want to live in a world where there's no privacy and therefore no room for intellectual exploration and creativity."

Once he reached the conclusion that the NSA's surveillance net would soon be irrevocable, he said it was just a matter of time before he chose to act. "What they're doing" poses "an existential threat to democracy", he said.

The Internet, access to information, the ability of people to communicate and share ideas over great distances and tiny costs, are all wonderful things. But they are also creating indelible records of what every wired person thinks and buys, whom they talk to and how often, and all that is inevitably fed into algorithms designed to spew out answers to every question imaginable, from "Is this person in the market for Pampers?" to "Is this person a dangerous subversive?"

The real conversation we need to be having is to how to control and, yes, regulate this awesome power. The efforts of Mr. Snowden may get that discussion under way.

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An aerial view of the NSA's Utah Data Center in Bluffdale, Utah, June 6. The Obama administration is defending the National Security Agency's need to secretly collect Americans' phone records, but critics are calling it a huge over-reach. (Rick Bowmer/AP)

Is the price of 'security' worth it? (+video)

By Dan Murphy, Staff writer / 06.07.13

The revelations of the extent of National Security Agency (NSA) surveillance on US telecommunications this week bring up a chicken and egg problem: Are Americans so safe from terrorist attacks because the surveillance program works, or are they sacrificing privacy so that the government can protect them from a statistically marginal and rare occurrence?

The NSA is very good at electronic surveillance, so good that smart terrorists avoid using phones and the internet to conduct their business. That's one reason that Osama bin Laden stayed alive for so long and why his former number two and current Al Qaeda boss, Ayman al-Zawahiri, remains alive today.

The fact is, domestic terrorism is an exceedingly rare occurrence and miniscule cause of death in the US, notwithstanding the outsized response attacks draw from citizens and politicians. It's very difficult to count alleged terrorist plots that may have been thwarted by the snooping effort, but nevertheless, terrorism has been rare in America throughout the sweep of US history.

President Barack Obama defended the program today. "My assessment and my team’s assessment was that they help us prevent terrorist attacks," he told reporters. "And the modest encroachments on privacy that are involved in getting phone numbers or duration [of calls] without a name attached and not looking at content, that on net it was worth us doing."

Obama also said “you can’t have 100 percent security and also then have 100 percent privacy and zero inconvenience" and “we’re going to have to make some choices as a society.” Both those points are so true as to almost be tautological – though it's simply not possible to have 100 percent security under any circumstances.

America and its politicians have consistently chosen "more security" and "less privacy" in recent years, but the fear of terrorism, and what's being given up in the service of that fear, seem all out of proportion to the actual threat.

In 2011 there were zero domestic US victims of "terrorism." In 2012 there was a single incident of domestic terrorism, when a white supremacist shot and killed six people at a Sikh temple in Wisconsin. This year, there has been a single incident so far, when two Muslim brothers, apparently motivated by hatred of the US and inspired by Al Qaeda-type thinking, murdered 3 people and injured 260 others at the finish line of the Boston Marathon.

The government's spying powers aren't supposed to be turned on US citizens, so the program was irrelevant to the 2011 attack. President Barack Obama says that US residents are also exempt, so presumably the program wasn't relevant to the marathon attack either.

As Micah Zenko wrote last year, a comparable number of Americans were killed by falling televisions as were killed by acts of terrorism in 2011. How bad has terrorism been in recent decades?

In the 1990s, there was an Al Qaeda linked attack on the World Trade Center in 1993 that killed six and the 1995 attack on the Alfred P. Murrah federal building in Oklahoma City, carried out by two militia movement sympathizers, that killed 168. There were a few other minor incidents in the 1990s that brought the decade's toll of deaths from terrorism on US soil to about 180. 

In the 2000s there are only really two terrorist incidents to speak of. The Al Qaeda attack on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon on Sept. 11, 2001 that killed 2,977 people; and Major Nidal Malik Hasan's rampage at Fort Hood Texas in 2009, that claimed 13 lives, for a total of 2,990 for the decade. 

Of course, this is horrific enough. And violence designed to terrorize in search of a political goal is, in fact, something different than crime, or accidents. But a sense of proportion is sorely needed in considering the danger. Stephen Walt wrote a brief post yesterday taking writer Andrew Sullivan to task for saying that the "consequences of its absence" could be "terrible," which I think is spot on:

This claim depends on the belief that jihadism really does pose some sort of horrific threat to American society. This belief is unwarranted, however, provided that dedicated and suicidal jihadists never gain access to nuclear weapons. Conventional terrorism -- even of the sort suffered on 9/11 -- is not a serious threat to the U.S. economy, the American way of life, or even the personal security of the overwhelming majority of Americans, because al Qaeda and its cousins are neither powerful nor skillful enough to do as much damage as they might like. And this would be the case even if the NSA weren't secretly collecting a lot of data about domestic phone traffic. Indeed, as political scientist John Mueller and civil engineer Mark Stewart have shown, post-9/11 terrorist plots have been mostly lame and inept, and Americans are at far greater risk from car accidents, bathtub mishaps, and a host of other undramatic dangers than they are from "jihadi terrorism."

Over 100,000 people died in drunk driving accidents in the US in the 2000s (the decade with the lowest number of drunk driving fatalities in US history; in the 1990s the toll was over 136,000). About 26,000 Americans die from unintentional falls a year, and about 33,000 from accidental poisoning.

Americans don't live in fear of those dangers, nor should they. Excessive, exaggerated fear of terrorism is something that, perhaps, the US will get over as it considers the prices being paid.

Or as James Madison wrote to Thomas Jefferson in 1798:

The management of foreign relations appears to be the most susceptible of abuse, of all the trusts committed to a Government because they can be concealed or disclosed, or disclosed in such parts and at such times as will best suit particular views; and because the body of the people are less capable of judging and are more under the influence of prejudices, on that branch of their affairs, than of any other. Perhaps it is a universal truth that the loss of liberty at home is to be charged to provisions against danger, real or pretended, from abroad.

An order was granted by the secret Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court (headquarters pictured) on April 25 for the National Security Agency to secretly collect the telephone records of millions of US customers of Verizon under a top secret court order, according to the chairwoman of the Senate Intelligence Committee. (Cliff Owen/AP)

NSA's data flood, through the PRISM of US interests and freedom (+video)

By Dan Murphy, Staff writer / 06.07.13

The government has written rules for itself, giving it sweeping, secret powers to spy on the private communications of millions of citizens. Private corporations are compelled to cooperate with the effort and face severe penalties if they disclose what is going on. Some courts theoretically have oversight on all this – but the courts meet in secret and their rulings authorizing spying are likewise secret.

In public, the government acknowledges that some data collection is going on but insists that it's limited, proportional, and most important of all, vital to keeping citizens safe. "Trust us" is the mantra repeated by the people in power.

The above, with its Orwellian overtones, describes the practices of the US government over the past decade, even as it insisted it was a beacon of freedom and criticized the surveillance regimes of other countries. While the general outlines of expanded government surveillance have been known since the Patriot Act was first passed by overwhelming support of the US Congress in Oct. 2001 (98-1 votes in favor in the Senate; 357-66 votes in favor in the House of Representatives), this week the dam on domestic surveillance operations by the secretive National Security Agency (NSA, sometimes jokingly refereed to as "No Such Agency") broke.

On Wednesday, Britain's Guardian newspaper reported a secret warrant that gave the National Security Agency and the FBI full access to the "metadata" of all calls and emails placed over Verizon's network: Though the warrant doesn't allow for eavesdropping, the so-called metadata include what numbers call other numbers, the location of the calls, and their durations. The information is used for pattern analysis, sifting through huge amounts of data to try to determine unusual calling activity that might indicate illegal activity.

On Thursday, The Washington Post (with The Guardian close on its heels) carried another leak revealing that the NSA and FBI "are tapping directly into the central servers of nine leading U.S. Internet companies, extracting audio and video chats, photographs, emails, documents, and connection logs" under a program called PRISM, and that the program "was launched from the ashes of President George W. Bush’s secret program of warrantless domestic surveillance in 2007, after news media disclosures, lawsuits and the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court forced the president to look for new authority."

The companies involved are among America's and the Internet's biggest: "Microsoft, Yahoo, Google, Facebook, PalTalk, AOL, Skype, YouTube and Apple." (PalTalk is a popular instant messaging and chat-room service.)

Is this illegal? No. A variety of laws and executive orders under Presidents Bush and Obama make this all perfectly legal. But privacy advocates see a slippery slope to enhanced government intrusion into privacy, and in that respect, provide an interesting set up to President Obama's meeting new Chinese leader Xi Jinping this weekend in California.

In 2010, Google pulled out of mainland China to great fanfare, saying it wasn't going to put up with the government's mandatory censorship regime. That followed a series of coordinated hacker attacks on its servers that the company said it suspected were designed to compromise Gmail accounts used by Chinese human rights activists. At the time, Secretary of State Hillary Clinton said the US government had "been briefed by Google on these allegations" and that "the ability to operate with confidence in cyberspace is critical in a modern society and economy."

Later that January, Clinton gave a speech on "Internet Freedom" in which she touted the US government's efforts to bring a freer Internet to China, Moldova, Colombia, Lebanon, and Iran, and spoke of the need to balance between looking for terrorists on the Internet and protecting against systematic violations of citizen's privacy:

Now, all societies recognize that free expression has its limits. We do not tolerate those who incite others to violence, such as the agents of al-Qaida who are, at this moment, using the internet to promote the mass murder of innocent people across the world. And hate speech that targets individuals on the basis of their race, religion, ethnicity, gender, or sexual orientation is reprehensible. It is an unfortunate fact that these issues are both growing challenges that the international community must confront together. And we must also grapple with the issue of anonymous speech. Those who use the internet to recruit terrorists or distribute stolen intellectual property cannot divorce their online actions from their real world identities. But these challenges must not become an excuse for governments to systematically violate the rights and privacy of those who use the internet for peaceful political purposes.

In the case of the US government's use of the NSA, there's no evidence at attempts to stifle free speech or misuse of the data collected to harm American citizens or, as yet, any evidence of how many emails have been read or if any have been retained in government databases. There has been no censorship or jailing of journalists or bloggers, as is sadly commonplace in many other countries.

But will evidence of this program be used to level a charge of hypocrisy by countries around the world that are the target of the State Department's Internet freedom initiatives?

That seems a safe bet.

Director of National Intelligence James Clapper told The National Journal that "the NSA does not voyeuristically pore through US citizens e-mails."

The program is generally popular among US senators. Georgia Republican Sen. Saxby Chambliss dismissed the NSA program as "nothing new" and said that "Every member of the United States Senate has been advised of this. To my knowledge there has not been any citizen who has registered a complaint. It has proved meritorious because we have collected significant information on bad guys, but only on bad guys, over the years."

How citizens could complain about something they are unaware of is unclear. And assurances that "only bad guys" have been targeted would probably similar be given by governments like China and Iran when asked about their own surveillance activities.

In an editorial Thursday, The Guardian writes that Obama's decision to back the Bush White House's bill expanding the NSA's ability to monitor US telecommunications may have made political sense as he drove for the presidency in late 2008, but is threatening basic freedoms in the US.

It was a big call. Even so, it seems unlikely that either supporters or critics, or even Mr Obama himself, ever believed that five years later a re-elected President Obama would oversee an administration that stands accused of routinely snooping into the phone records of millions of Americans.

Few Americans believe that they live in a police state; indeed many would be outraged at the suggestion. Yet the everyday fact that the police have the right to monitor the communications of all its citizens – in secret – is a classic hallmark of a state that fears freedom as well as championing it. Ironically, the Guardian's revelations were published 69 years to the day since US and British soldiers launched the D-day invasion of Europe. The young Americans who fought their way up the Normandy beaches rightly believed they were helping free the world from a tyranny. They did not think that they were making it safe for their own rulers to take such sweeping powers as these over their descendants.

America is clearly not living in a police state, though this kind of routine surveillance was unheard of between the mid-1970s and Sept. 11, 2001. How much safer are we thanks to it? Hard to measure. Is that additional safety worth the additional loss of privacy? Also a difficult discussion.

And if the answer to that second question is yes, then there comes a third: "How much additional safety could be accrued by further lowering privacy protections, and when would we say 'enough is enough'?"

These are hard questions. It's an open question whether America's political class will grapple with them in a meaningful way. What's certain is that the world will be watching.

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A Greek flag flutters on the top of the parliament as the moon rises in Athens May 23. (John Kolesidis/Reuters)

IMF admits it got Greece wrong. What does it get right?

By Dan Murphy, Staff writer / 06.06.13

Years ago when I worked at Bloomberg I noticed that the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund seemed to, without fail, overestimate economic growth for their customers in good times, and underestimate coming contractions in bad times.

Since Bloomberg encouraged us to be data driven and rigorous, I proposed we develop some boiler plate for the brief stories about the latest GDP prediction from the lenders (which we slavishly and uncritically turned into stories within minutes of their landing in our fax machines.) Something like: "The World Bank, which has overestimated coming Indonesian GDP growth six consecutive times, today predicted that Indonesia's GDP will rise by 7 percent in 1997."

Over the years current and former employees of both groups have explained that bias is down to the belief inside the financial institutions that their rosy projections can take on a life of their own by inspiring that elusive beast "investor confidence" and unleashing a deluge of cash upon their clients. They see it as a form of benevolent lying.

A senior editor there shut my proposal down as silly, for reasons I could never quite fathom.

Nevertheless, the evidence that these groups get it wrong have been mounting for decades, however, many of us in the press still act surprised when they're wrong, yet again. The latest evidence is the IMF's mea culpa this week over its incorrect assumptions and ineffective prescriptions for Greece in relation to the ultimately $310 billion bailout of the country. It's the latest, and some of the largest, evidence that the oracular powers and financial wisdom of the Bretton Woods institutions aren't what they're cracked up to be.

In short, the IMF austerity program for the country has been a failure, at least from the perspective of the Greek people (the IMF estimates it may have prevented "contagion" from spreading to other countries, which is surely a comfort to all the Greeks out of work).

New IMF report

In the case of Greece, the IMF published a report yesterday that said the Fund had (wait for it...) underestimated the depth of the Greek economic downturn, underestimated the harm to Greek income and employment that would be caused by slashing spending, and overestimated the likelihood that "investor confidence" would return in response to all this and spread its magic pixie dust over the Greek people.

The IMF also admits, obliquely, the extent to which politics and not the best and most honest advice possible, played a role as the Fund worked with the European Central Bank (ECB) and the European Commission to figure out what to do two years ago as Greece teetered on the edge of bankruptcy and an exit from the euro.

"On the positive side, moving ahead with the Greek program gave the euro area time to build a firewall to protect other vulnerable members and averted potentially severe effects on the global economy," the Fund writes. "However, not tackling the public debt problem decisively at the outset or early in the program created uncertainty about the euro area’s capacity to resolve the crisis and likely aggravated the contraction in output. An upfront debt restructuring would have been better for Greece although this was not acceptable to the euro partners."

By debt restructuring, they mean sharp reductions in the amount of money owed by Greece to private and government lenders across Europe. But everybody else wanted to get paid, so the IMF acquiesced. (The European Commission said today that the IMF is wrong about this and that haircuts for lenders before the bailout would have led to "devastating consequences.")

This is far from the first time. In the early 1990s, the IMF warned Argentina against imposing currency controls to deal with a financial crisis. Argentina ignored the IMF, and the Fund later admitted the country's politicians were correct in doing so.

In the middle of that decade, the so-called Asian financial crisis hit much of the region, with capital flight threatening private banks, government coffers, and project finance alike. Thailand and Indonesia accepted IMF loans in exchange for "structural adjustment programs" (government spending cuts, foreign investor friendly legal changes, promises to have fully convertible currencies), while Malaysia, against dire warnings from the IMF, imposed currency controls and sought to stimulate the economy out of the downturn with an expansive government budget. The results? Malaysia weathered the crisis better than its neighbors, with fewer job losses and much less political turmoil.

In 2001, Argentina ran aground financially again and appealed to the IMF for cash. A review by the Fund later found that its projections for Argentina were too rosy at the time, complained that the IMF backed the Argentine government in public even when senior officials in private knew it was pursuing a disastrous course, and undermined its own credibility. The author wrote that "any catalytic role that IMF financing might have had in the past has been put into question, as large-scale IMF support can no longer be seen as signaling policy sustainability."

IMF seal of approval

Yet come 2010, there was an assumption from within the IMF that its seal of approval would breed confidence in investors. It wasn't true then, and it certainly isn't true in the case of Greece now.

That wasn't the only strange assumption the IMF made. On page 5 of another recently released report the Fund writes that it expected that "fiscal consolidation" (government spending cuts and tax increases) and expected productivity gains had authorities expecting "that the crisis would mobilize broad political support for comprehensive structural reforms." What that essentially means is that the IMF and its partners apparently believe that the Greek people, as their economy tanked and employment sank, would rally around policies likely to lead to further short-term unemployment.

Any student of politics, well, anywhere, probably wouldn't make that kind of assumption.

Finally, is the question of whether "austerity" – which used to be called shock therapy sometimes – actually works. The IMF admits in the case of Greece it might have made more sense to provide more cash to the country (though says that was not politically possible, given the reluctance of wealthy European nations like Germany to pony up more) and eased Greece's deficit targets.

But as things deteriorated, the IMF and its European partners instead tightened the fiscal screws. "The scope for increasing flexibility was also limited," the authors write. "The fiscal targets became even more ambitious once the downturn exceeded expectations."

IMF Managing Director Christine Lagarde probably feels awful about the Fund's errors. But at least she has $550,000 compensation package to cheer her up (tax free to boot; IMF and World Bank executive salaries are unburdened by the taxes they're always urging struggling governments like Greece to increase on their citizens.)

Meanwhile, Greece's people are left to ponder whose advice they'll take next, as the country heads through its sixth consecutive year of economic contraction.

Afghan security forces arrive at the site of an explosion in Jalalabad province, May 29. The latest report from the US government's Special Inspector General for Afghanistan Reconstruction (SIGAR) confirms that 15 percent of US casualties in Afghanistan from 'hostile action' came in the form of Afghan police and soldiers turning their guns on their erstwhile allies. (Parwiz/Reuters)

Report confirms high toll from Afghan insider attacks in 2012

By Dan Murphy, Staff writer / 06.06.13

The latest quarterly report from the US government's Special Inspector General for Afghanistan Reconstruction (SIGAR) reports that 15 percent of US casualties in Afghanistan from "hostile action" came in the form of Afghan police and soldiers turning their guns on their erstwhile allies.

While the report prefers the more delicate "Afghans in uniform attacking their Coalition partners," leaving the door open to the chance that some of these attacks are carried out by men in stolen uniforms and not official members of Afghan National Security Forces (ANSF), it's a safe assumption that the vast majority of the perpetrators are just that.

The number of insider attacks (Afghans in uniform attacking their Coalition partners) has been on the rise, from two attacks in 2008 to 46 attacks in 2012. The 2012 attacks resulted in 62 Coalition deaths, 35 of them US personnel. This accounts for more than 11% of all US casualties and 15% of all US casualties resulting from hostile actions in 2012... In addition, insider attacks by ANSF personnel (or individuals posing as ANSF personnel) against other ANSF personnel rose from three in 2008 to 29 in 2012 (through the end of September).

This quarter, insider attacks continued. On March 8, two US soldiers and two Afghan soldiers were killed and 10 US soldiers were wounded in Wardak when an Afghan in uniform opened fire on them. According to media accounts of the incident, Coalition forces quickly returned fire and killed the attacker. This was the third insider attack in 2013. In separate incidents this year, a British soldier was killed on January 7 and a US contractor was killed on March 8.

In addition to insider attacks aimed primarily at US and Coalition forces, insider attacks by Afghan police and soldiers against their colleagues continued this quarter. Notably, 17 US-trained Afghan Local Police (ALP) personnel in Ghazni were killed February 27 after one of their own drugged and shot them, stole their weapons, and fled, according to a media report. The Taliban claimed responsibility for that attack. In an incident on March 21, an ALP member killed five other Afghan police personnel in Badghis.

The good news is that the number of insider or so-called green-on-blue attacks in Afghanistan appears to be well below last year's pace – attributable to better vetting of recruits, the presence of fewer US soldiers, and far more controlled training environments introduced in response to last year's toll.

And it shouldn't be forgotten that the vast majority of Afghan soldiers and police are fighting for little pay, often far from home, against the Taliban, and are bearing the brunt of the casualties. The NATO coalition in Afghanistan reports that Afghan soldier and police averaged 535 deaths a month last year (6,420 for the full year). The foreign coalition's death toll for the year was 402, with 310 of those US troops. 

And troops loyal to the central government are often the victims of traitorous colleagues as well, as SIGAR points out. As the US and other foreign militaries continue their withdrawal from Afghanistan (the current schedule is for foreign forces to be mostly gone by December 2014), Taliban incentives to strike out at Afghan forces, both covertly and overtly, will increase.

The Afghan Local Police (ALP) members that have been used as a sort of gendarmerie in rural Afghanistan are likely to remain a particular target, SIGAR writes.

"The Taliban’s senior leadership considers the ALP the top threat to the insurgency’s ability to control the population and threaten the Afghan government, according to (the US Department of Defense). Insurgents attack ALP units up to 10 times more often than other ANSF components," the report says. "ALP members are recruited locally, recommended by village elders, and assigned to protect their home villages. Because they are a local force, the ALP has demonstrated 'a unique resilience' against infiltration by the Taliban 'as anyone outside the area would be immediately recognized as a foreigner'" the authors write, quoting a Pentagon official.

Iraq risks 'return' to war? Maybe the wrong question.

By Dan Murphy, Staff writer / 06.06.13

May was the most violent month in Iraq since June 2008, with 1,045 people killed. The next most violent month since 2008? This April, with 712 people killed.

Death has stalked Iraqis in the form of car bombs on mosques and markets, assassinations of political figures, and organized massacres of security forces, prompting many to wonder if Iraq could plunge back into another sectarian civil war like the one that raged in the middle of the last decade, and claimed over 3,000 lives a month at its height.

"Systemic violence is ready to explode at any moment if all Iraqi leaders do not engage immediately to pull the country out of this mayhem," UN special representative to Iraq, Martin Kobler, said earlier this month.

While I think that Iraqis are sufficiently horrified at the prospect that it has restrained a surge in the conflict, looked at from a broader perspective than its own recent tragic history. Iraq is currently one of the deadliest conflicts in the world - probably in the top five. Syria at the moment is certainly bloodier. The drug war in Mexico (which some would not consider a war) probably claimed more than 10,000 lives last year. Good numbers on deaths from conflict in Somalia, Sudan, the Democratic Republic of Congo, and Mali are currently hard to come by, but after that it's hard to think of a conflict that would be as or more bloody than Iraq currently is. 

Jay Ulfelder, a political scientist who focuses on civil conflict and instability (and runs an excellent blog), reckons that Iraq is almost certainly currently among the top 10 deadliest conflicts and "very likely top 5"  and estimates it could be near the top with Syria if per capita deaths are taken into account. 

Collecting statistics from war zones is far from an exact science, and combatants have incentives to minimize their own casualties, maximize those of their opponents, and point the finger of blame elsewhere for civilian debts, adding more uncertainty.

Total deaths in the Afghanistan war, for instance, aren't compiled on a regular basis by anyone. Though the United Nations Mission in Afghanistan estimated 2,754 civilian deaths in Afghanistan in 2012 and the well respected Icasualties.org recorded 74 deaths that year for the US-led NATO coalition, deaths among anti-government insurgents and within the Afghan security forces don't appear to be tracked regularly by any outside body. However, an analysis of 2011 deaths by the Congressional Research Service estimated 1,080 deaths that year among Afghan soldiers and police and 3,021 among civilians. That year, 402 members of the US-led coalition were killed. 

In the absence of decent data on deaths within the Taliban and other insurgent groups, let's just make a number up (thoroughly scientific, I know). Let's assume that the 2011 death toll among Afghan civilians and security forces and among the foreign coalition were matched by deaths among insurgents (which is almost certainly an over-count. That would yield a total of 9,000 killed in Afghanistan that year.)

How does Iraq stack up? If the average monthly rate of deaths from conflict there over the past two months held up for a year, that would yield over 10,000 dead. That's of course not likely - violence typically ebbs and flows month to month, and picking the worst two month period over the past five years to extrapolate from almost certainly will end up producing an overestimate. Adding in the death tolls for March (271) and February (220) yields an artificial annual death toll of 6,744. 

The point is that the Iraq of right now could reasonably be considered to be in a type of war, albeit a low-level one with little chance that the current Shiite-led government of Nouri al-Maliki being ousted. Is what's happening now a civil war? I guess it depends on how you define the terms.

In August 2005, I wrote that Iraq was probably already a civil war (a politically unpopular conclusion at the time, with the US eager to portray itself in the mopping up phase after dismantling the Baathist regime of Saddam Hussein):

The academic thumbnail definition of a civil war is a conflict with at least 1,000 battlefield casualties, involving a national government and one or more nonstate actors fighting for power.

While the US has lost 1,862 soldiers, getting an accurate casualty count beyond that is difficult. The Iraqi government and US military say they don't keep figures on Iraqi troops or civilians killed. According to www.iraqbodycount.net, a website run by academics and peace activists, 24,865 Iraqi civilians were killed between March 2003 and March 2005. The report said that US-led forces killed 37 percent of the total.

Obviously things are currently better than that – but not by much. The horrors that Iraqis continue to confront, in a war that the US has largely put out of its mind, continue and remain the country's deepest challenge.

Friends of Egyptian suspects react after hearing the judge's verdict at a court room during a case against foreign non-governmental organisations (NGOs) in Cairo Tuesday. An Egyptian court sentenced at least 15 US citizens in absentia to five years in jail on Tuesday and one American who stood trial was jailed for two years in a case against private foreign groups seeking to promote democracy. (Asmaa Waguih/Reuters)

Egypt to global democracy NGOs: Drop dead

By Dan Murphy, Staff writer / 06.04.13

"Egypt's Muslim Brotherhood sentences Americans to jail for promoting democracy." That's not the headline on this piece because it's not strictly true.

But that's undoubtedly how today's verdict against 43 Egyptians and foreigners associated with international democracy NGOs is going to be seen by large swathes of the US Congress the next time they're asked to re-up Egypt's annual subsidy.

And it also captures the levels of hostility that the Muslim Brotherhood have directed at the sorts of independent organizations that could prove a challenge to their grip on power. While Egypt's judiciary is nominally independent, the Brotherhood has been pushing forward a new NGO law that activists say would gut the ability of watchdog groups to raise money.  

The 46 people were given jail sentences stemming from their involvement with a group of democracy promotion NGOs, two primarily funded by the US State Department. All but one of the Americans were sentenced in absentia, having fled the country after weeks of hiding out in the US Embassy in a wink-and-a-nod deal made with the government of President Mohamed Morsi. The group that fled includes Sam LaHood, the son of President Obama's then Transportation Secretary Ray LaHood.

In all, 13 Egyptians, one German, and one American stood trial, with the balance of those charged outside of the country and generally receiving heavier sentences.

Robert Becker, a National Democratic Institute (NDI) employee, was the lone American to stay behind, arguing that it was hypocritical to urge Egyptians to stand up for a better system and to turn tail at the first sign of trouble. NDI fired Mr. Becker for his decision, and today he was given a 2 year jail sentence.

His specific crime? "Forming an illegal NGO." There was only one problem; NDI had been active in Egypt since 2006, and Becker had been hired by the group in 2011. Ahead of sentencing today, he wrote on his blog that the prosecution felt politically motivated. "The government witnesses for the prosecution never focused their testimony on the actual charges against us, instead using their 15-minutes of 'fame' to complain about the United States."

NDI and the International Republican Institute (IRI) receive most of their funding from the US State Department and are most active in transitional states conducting seminars on political party organization and focusing on building institutions. The court ruled today that they be barred from work in Egypt, along with Freedom House, the International Center for Journalists, and Germany's Konrad Adenauer Foundation.

The message from Egypt under President Morsi is consistently one of distaste for the creation of a vibrant, independent civil society, hardly surprising given the majoritarian views of the Brothers, who have consistently insisted that their winning of the presidency last year entitles them to run Egypt without interference. US Secretary of State John Kerry assailed the verdict today as "contrary to the universal principle of freedom of association and is incompatible with the transition to democracy."

"Democracy" is indeed about far more than voting, and Egypt's government – like those in many other states – appears reluctant to have foreign money poured into efforts to make their political opponents stronger. While Egypt might hold regular, reasonably fair elections going forward, without civil society groups to create strong political alternatives to the Brotherhood and help reform the judiciary and reign in police torture and other abuses, it's unlikely to prosper or have an open society in any meaningful way.

IRI's statement on the verdict captures what's at stake:

As IRI has said since this assault against international and Egyptian nongovernmental organizations began more than a year ago, this was not a ‘legitimate judicial process’ as claimed by Egyptian officials.  This was a politically motivated effort to squash Egypt’s growing civil society, orchestrated through the courts, in part by Mubarak-era hold overs. IRI will pursue all avenues to challenge today’s verdict. Today’s ruling will have a chilling effect on Egyptian civil society and, taken with other recent developments, raises serious questions about Egypt’s commitment to the democratic transition that so many people demanded when they took to the streets in early 2011.

Yusuf al-Qaradawi (l.) and Sen. John McCain (r.) both want to see Syrian President Bashar al-Assad ousted, but their post-Assad visions for Syria differ radically. (Reuters/AP)

An Egyptian preacher and a US senator compete over Syria's future

By Dan Murphy, Staff writer / 06.03.13

Yusuf al-Qaradawi is an Egyptian preacher with close ties to the Muslim Brotherhood that now rules his homeland, has long lived under the protection of the emir of Qatar, and wants his version of Sunni Islam to help redefine the politics of the Arab world.

John McCain is an American senator, a war hero who endured six years as a prisoner of war in Vietnam, and would like to see a vigorous US effort to bring America's vision of democracy to the far corners of the globe.

An odd couple, to be sure. But on the fundamentals of the Syrian civil war, they're on the same page: Syrian President Bashar al-Assad must go, a new government must be formed under the leadership of elements of the currently raging rebellion, and Iran's influence must be wrenched out of Syria. 

But after that is when the trouble starts. Mr. McCain has been a proponent for greater US involvement in the Syrian war and made a brief trip into rebel-held territory there last week. He has argued that President Barack Obama's reticence about US involvement in a civil war that has strong sectarian overtones is undue, and that it's possible for the US to selectively support rebels who back US interests and keep arms out of the hands of Sunni jihadis aligned with Al Qaeda in Iraq – who have emerged as some of the rebellion's most capable fighters.

But his trip to Syria, organized by a DC-based group of exiles lobbying for US involvement, inadvertently illustrated how difficult it is to vet fighters in a far off war, in a cultural and political context that few US officials understand. During his few hours in the country, he posed for a picture with a group of rebel supporters. Two of them were later identified by Beirut's Daily Star (apparently bouncing of a report on Lebanon's Al Jadeed TV, which is sympathetic to Hezbollah) as having been involved in the abduction of a group of 11 Lebanese Shiite pilgrims as they traveled home last year.

McCain disputes that either man was one of the kidnappers or motivated by sectarian hatred. It still appears possible that one of them was. There's no fault on McCain for this – he didn't know who he was meeting, and in rebel encampments in Syria, various people with various agendas are often present. But the incident illustrates how hard it is for outsiders to know who they're dealing with, or who they should trust.

Far more important than who McCain may have briefly met, there's reasonable evidence that weapons that were sent to Syrian fighters in a joint US-Saudi-Jordanian operation ended up within months in the hands of jihadi groups – including Jabhat al-Nusra, which is designated as a terrorist group by the US State Department.

This isn't particularly surprising. In wars like Syria's, with a patchwork of rebel units and little in the way of a central command, weapons are fungible. And while the vision that members of the Free Syrian Army may have for the future of Syria is dramatically at odds with that of Jabhat al-Nusra, they're united in their hatred of Assad's government. An FSA general might promise that US-supplied anti-aircraft missiles, for instance, would never be given to a group the US doesn't like, but a more junior officer fighting to hold on to territory, and cooperating with one of America's proscribed groups, could easily make a different decision in the heat of battle.

And that brings us to Mr. Qaradawi, an influential Sunni preacher who has broad regional reach thanks to his regular television show on Qatar's Al Jazeera.

Qaradawi wants Iran – and its ally, the Lebanese Shiite political movement and army Hezbollah – out of Syria, much as McCain does, though Qarawadi's motivations are far different. He wants a Sunni Islamist political order to replace the current regime, and according to his comments at a rally in Qatar on Friday, views Iran's interests in Syria as sectarian. "Now we know what the Iranians want.... They want continued massacres to kill Sunnis," he said. 

Qaradawi said he wasn't against all Shiites, but said he was ashamed of his past support for Hezbollah (given because they fought Israel) and dubbed the group the "Party of Satan." (Hezbollah means "Party of God.")

"Every Muslim trained to fight and capable of doing that [must] make himself available.... Iran is pushing forward arms and men, so why do we stand idle?," he asked. "How could 100 million Shiites defeat 1.7 billion Sunnis? Only because Sunni Muslims are weak.”

Those totals refer to rough estimates of global number of Sunnis and Shiites, and the import of his meaning was clear: a call for a mandatory jihad in Syria, similar to calls made by other preachers to carry out jihads against the Soviet or US presences in Afghanistan, or the US-led occupation of Iraq.

On Fox and Friends this morning, McCain dismissed worries that US involvement in the war would encourage a spreading of sectarian conflict, arguing that in fact it would be the fastest way to end the war.

"Yes, there are extremists flowing into the country," he said. "But that’s because we’ve done nothing to help the rebels succeed. And yes they have some light weapons, but they need anti-tank weapons and they need anti-air weapons. And thanks to Hezbollah, the Russians, and Iranians, now Bashar al Assad has the initiative on his side."

McCain called on the US to imposed a no-fly zone on the country and to "take out their air assets" and implied that would head off dangerous regional repercussions:

There’s a real threat to [Israel] now, this has spilled over into Lebanon, fighting in Lebanon, Jordan cannot last, the king of Jordan cannot last under this present scenario. Ten percent of their population are refugees. Can you imagine 10 percent of our population being refugees?

The same concerns that we see publicly that we don’t want to get involved in escalation [he said, asked about Obama's reasons for inaction]. The Americans are war-weary there’s no doubt about that, but if we stand by and watch this continue and spread it’s going to become a regional war and we can affect things beneficially. And if we can’t, then I can assure Americans that they are wasting hundreds of billions of tax dollars on national defense."

It's not clear how a US effort to help the rebellion win would necessarily end the refugee crisis – though it might shift its demographics.

Syria's Alawite minority, an offshoot of Shiite Islam that Assad and many of the stalwarts of his regime belong to, make up about 10 percent of Syria's population – about 2.2 million people. Syria's ancient Christian population is also likely to feel threatened after a war won by the country's Sunni majority. (Iraq's Christian population fell by at least a third as a result of jihadi attacks during the Iraq war.)

At any rate, McCain, a leading US hawk, wants the same thing in the short term as Sheikh Qaradawi. But the two men, their two camps, want dramatically different things in the long term for Syria. Which camp is likely to have more influence in a post-Assad Syria?

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High school students chant slogans during a protest at Gezi park, Taksim square in Istanbul, Monday. The latest 'Occupy' protests erupted after a harsh police crackdown on a sit-in protesting the government's plans to destroy Gezi Park in central Istanbul and replace it with a shopping mall. (Thanassis Stavrakis/AP)

'Occupy' is not a good model for change, in Turkey or anywhere else

By Dan Murphy, Staff writer / 06.03.13

Remember Occupy Wall Street? The leaderless "movement" built around anger at income inequality and the power of corporate interests in US politics that faded as winter came to New York and failed to build a coherent political approach to change?

Well, the slogan lives on. The latest protests to receive the "occupy" brand are the Turkish ones that erupted after a harsh police crackdown on a sit-in protesting the government's plans to destroy Gezi Park in central Istanbul and replace it with a shopping mall. Over the weekend, the protests became about far more than Istanbul's dwindling green spaces, with grievances ranging from the heavy-handed leadership of Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan, to concerns about unrestrained capitalism, Islamist-motivated crackdowns on alcohol consumption, and police brutality. Since, #occupygezi has proven one of the most popular hash tags on Twitter.

The grievances are visibly real, and the protests are Turkey's most wide-ranging for decades. But recent history has shown that leaderless protests are far better at illustrating what they don't like than what they want and how to get there. On Friday, when the Gezi Park encampment was attacked and the broader protests started in response, I wrote: "Branding your protest as an 'occupy' is a leading indicator that it won't accomplish much."

This is not a generally-popular sentiment in the Twitterverse. But political change happens elsewhere, and today comes some support from someone who, unlike me, actually knows something about Turkey. Stephanie Soiffer, a PhD candidate in international affairs at Ottawa's Carleton University wrote a master's thesis on "Explaining varying patterns of compliance with human rights law in Turkey." She writes that the "Occupy love-ins degenerated into shantytowns that marred often previously pristine public spaces and that unfortunately, as time wore on, attracted larger and larger proportions of hooligans and extremists" and that she doubts the approach will work to change much in Turkey:

Sitting at my desk in Ottawa, it is unclear to me whether this handle originated somewhere on the web as a very catchy hashtag or whether it was originally promoted by the protestors themselves. Origins aside, Hurriyet is reporting on their English website that presently the protestors are now identifying with the Occupy movement. This pains me since this is not a protest model that will likely lead to a valuable outcome.

Unless something changes soon, Turkey’s Occupy movements (there are now protests in Ankara and Izmir as well) will be just as forgettable. Like the Occupy protests that have already come and gone, the protest in Turkey is directionless and leaderless. Originally, when the protest was very young and still small, it clearly articulated one demand: it wanted the government to not follow through with its plan to mow down the greenery in Gezi Park in order to make room for a shopping mall. Although the movement grew out of dissatisfaction with urbanization it is now believed to represent an increasingly large number of complaints such as Turkey’s autocratic leanings, its movement away from secular policies and practices, abuses of the population’s physical integrity rights, and its limited freedoms of assembly, of the press, and of expression to name but a few. In sum, a movement that began making one focused demand is now demanding all the rights enshrined in the International Bill of Human Rights and all the treaties and covenants it encompasses.

For now, Prime Minister Erdogan is defiant and dismissive of the protesters – unwilling to bend on the determination to destroy Gezi Park, let alone on anything else, and warning that he could swamp the current protesters with far more supporters of his own if it comes to it. And with no political group as yet to channel and prioritize demands, it remains easy, if offensive, for the prime minister to dismiss his critics as a rabble.

Probably the best overview of the state of Turkish politics and how it plays into these protests that I've seen so far was written by Steven Cook and Michael Koplow for Foreign Policy this morning. They explain how Erdogan's Turkey isn't as democratic as it's often portrayed by US officials. While they place most of the blame on Erdogan's ruling AKP, they also write that the opposition has made the ruling party's task far easier.

Under these circumstances, Turkish politics is not necessarily more open than it was a decade ago, when the AKP was pursuing democratic reforms in order to meet the European Union's requirements for membership negotiations. It is just closed in an entirely different way. Turkey has essentially become a one-party state. In this the AKP has received help from Turkey's insipid opposition, which wallows in Turkey's lost insularity and mourns the passing of the hard-line Kemalist elite that had no particular commitment to democracy. Successful democracies provide their citizens with ways in which to express their desires and frustrations beyond periodic elections, and Turkey has failed spectacularly in this regard.

The combination of a feckless opposition and the AKP's heavyhanded tactics have finally come to a head. This episode will not bring down the government, but it will reset Turkish politics in a new direction; the question is whether the AKP will learn some important lessons from the people amassing in the streets or continue to double down on the theory that elections confer upon the government the right to do anything it pleases.