Technology is neutral

I have been writing a lot about the internet lately, primarily as a result of Secretary Clinton’s speech last week on internet freedom. It’s important to recall, however, that technology is typically neutral. Whether it is good or bad for democracy is a function of who uses it and for what purposes. Recent violence in Nigeria makes this clear:

Text messages that urged people to murder and then burn their victims’ bodies helped stoke inter-religious violence in central Nigeria that killed hundreds of people last week, police and rights activists said overnight.

Rights activists have identified at least 145 texts that circulated on mobile phones in the central city of Jos, the epicentre of four days of Muslim-Christian clashes that authorities said killed 326 people.

“The messages helped escalate the violence in Jos in that some of them instructed people on how to kill, dispose of and burn bodies,” said leading rights activist Shehu Sani.

The texts were aimed at “spreading rumours and inflaming tensions”, said Mr Sani, who heads a coalition of 32 Nigerian civil and human rights groups called the Civil Rights Congress.

One of the messages seen by AFP read: “War, war, war. Stand up … and defend yourselves. Kill before they kill you. Slaughter before they slaughter you. Dump them in a pit before they dump you.”

Moreover, this is not an isolated incident. For example, people used SMS’s for similar purposes following Kenya’s flawed election in 2007.

Operationalizing Internet Freedom

The State Department seems to be taking internet freedom quite seriously. The Department’s Bureau of Democracy, Human Rights, and Labor is asking for proposals for the following programs:

Mobile technology: DRL seeks proposals that support innovative technologies designed to operationally defeat or circumvent censorship and/or surveillance of all forms of content related to independent news, democracy, and human rights that is created, shared or stored on mobile devices in repressive environments…

Mobile technology/education and outreach: DRL seeks proposals that support training and networking of potential users of mobile circumvention technology that would support the promotion of democracy and human rights in repressive environments.

Protecting privacy in the documentation of human rights crises: DRL seeks proposals that support the development of technology and best practices to protect users from surveillance in documenting human rights and other abuses as they occur or in the promotion of independent news and information through the use of mobile technology or other new media tools.

Promoting organizational information security: DRL seeks proposals that promote the implementation of effective information security policies and practices amongst individual activists and civil society organizations promoting democracy and human rights.

I wonder if I could apply for funding to develop software to get around this surveillance? I am guessing the good folks at the State Department would not find this amusing. In fact, I bet if I did this, the FBI would probably want me to come on down for an informational interview. Oh well, foolish consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds, isn’t it?

Outbidding the Taliban

The Washington Post reports that US strategy in Afghanistan includes bribing Taliban foot-soldiers not to fight:

Britain and Japan have agreed to head an international fund, expected to total up to $500 million over the next five years, as part of a broad plan to help lure Taliban fighters away from the insurgency with the promise of jobs, protection against retaliation, and the removal of their names from lists of U.S. and NATO targets.

Bernard Finel focuses on the likely futility of this approach:

…what is the long-term here?  You out-compete the Taliban financially for the loyalty of apolitical fighters. Then what? The reality is that this creates a durable political economy that supports violence and warfare. There is going to be an entire class of people whose well-being depends on continued payments, and who have the ability to extort more money simply by turning back to violence. This is the institutionalization of an extortion scheme.

Exactly. This is going to turn into a game where people join the Taliban just so they can get a payment not to fight. In fact, one would probably only need to threaten to join the Taliban to get into the program. This is going to create an endless supply of people who want handouts.

Moreover, the whole program seems rather pointless. People will only join the program if they believe the US and its allies will be able to defeat the Taliban. If they do not, they have very little incentive to join it. Since the success of the program directly hinges on whether people believe the US can win, why start it? Why not spend the time and money trying to win the war?

I can see some logic of the program because it is likely to weaken the Taliban in the short-term by making it difficult for them to recruit. If it was in the context of a broader, coherent, and credible strategy to defeat the Taliban, I suppose I could support it. But as this article demonstrates, its not clear this is the strategy and even if it were, Pakistan’s opposition to it means the likelihood of defeating the Taliban is very low. On the other hand, if our policy is to negotiate with “moderate” Taliban (whatever that means), it seems to me we do not need the jobs program. In fact, using the lure of jobs might give the Taliban an incentive to negotiate.

I agree with Les Gelb:

McChrystal and the others’ hope is that the United States will be able to outbid the Taliban leadership for the services of some of these fighters. It’s also clear that neither President Karzai nor the Americans will know if this gambit will work until it is tried, and until they see that these fighters do not return to the Taliban’s fold in six months’ to a year’s time.

(Deep sigh) It’s quite sad that 8 years into this war we are still trying to find out what works and what does not. Extrapolating from this means that the US is more likely to defeat the Taliban (or negotiate a successful end to the war) by luck than by strategy.

Why do we have to please the markets?

Paul Krugman picks up on one of my frustrations:

Gah. I hate, hate, hate it when people say that we have to do something, not on its merits, but because otherwise we would damage market confidence. Nobody really knows how the markets will react; the right thing, always, is to pursue policies that look right on the substance.

I agree with Paul. This line of reasoning grates on me as well, like someone dragging rusty nails over a chalkboard. When I worked at the Federal Reserve and the Treasury Department, and while in graduate school, I heard this line of reasoning all the time. It always dove me crazy and I have blown up twice.

Once it was at the IMF. I was in a meeting about how to deal with Ukraine’s exploding deficit and one of my colleagues said it was important to pursue pension reform because that would reassure the markets. I went a little crazy. It was the middle of winter and people were freezing in Ukraine. I think I shouted something like “Who are these markets? Why do we have to please them? Old people in Kiev are freezing and you want to give them less money for their heating bills so we can please the markets. What kind of sense does that make?” Everyone looked at me like I was a little nuts.

The second time happened in graduate school. One of my classmates was obsessed with this type of logic as well: any policy that made markets happy was by definition a good one, according to him. He was making a presentation on his research and he must have said investor confidence one too many times for me to swallow. I blurted out something like “So what I am hearing from you is that it’s better to wreck the lives of the people you govern than provide useful public services, if that’s what the markets want. As long as we’re at it, why don’t we get rid of democracy altogether and let markets choose our government?”

The comments to Krugman’s post have been equally as humorous and cathartic.  Here is a selection:

People who claim markets are rational would appear slightly more credible if they didn’t in the same breath advocate treating the markets as one would treat a very grouchy, very rabid dog.

“The Market” is not some ancient god to whom we must sacrifice our judgment or fear their wrath and ill omens. Nor is it like a child we must shelter from the harsh realities of the world lest we hurt its feelings.

Amen. Let’s not upset those market confidence spirits.

There is almost an element of blackmail in these utterances as if you say something a little negative and the markets will tank and you are to blame for all the dwindling 401Ks.

One suspects that the “markets” might be very unhappy if Congress enacted good regulatory controls, or unemployment payments were extended to those not presently covered, or taxes imposed on excessive bonuses. But that doesn’t mean they shouldn’t be done.

What about the slave markets? We don’t want to disrupt those either??? It’s not because one sells something that it is a good thing.

Thank you, Paul. I am glad to know I am not alone.

Does the US have an Afghanistan policy?

President Obama from his West Point speech on Afghanistan, December 1, 2009:

Al Qaeda’s base of operations was in Afghanistan, where they were harbored by the Taliban – a ruthless, repressive and radical movement…

Gradually, the Taliban has begun to control additional swaths of territory in Afghanistan, while engaging in increasingly brazen and devastating attacks of terrorism against the Pakistani people…

Commanders in Afghanistan repeatedly asked for support to deal with the reemergence of the Taliban, but these reinforcements did not arrive. And that’s why, shortly after taking office, I approved a longstanding request for more troops. After consultations with our allies, I then announced a strategy recognizing the fundamental connection between our war effort in Afghanistan and the extremist safe havens in Pakistan…

We must reverse the Taliban’s momentum and deny it the ability to overthrow the government…

…we will pursue a military strategy that will break the Taliban’s momentum…

This is pretty clear. The Taliban is a threat and Obama made clear the US is going to fight them. I thus found Dexter Filkins’s article in yesterday’s New York Times quite surprising:

For weeks, reports have swirled around the capital of back-channel discussions between the Afghan government and the [Taliban] leadership council known as the Quetta Shura, so called for its supposed base in Quetta, Pakistan…

“We have been passing a lot of messages,” said Abdul Salam Zaeef, a former Taliban ambassador who now lives in Kabul. He is one of the principal conduits for getting notes to the Taliban leadership…

The only way to peace, the Afghan and American officials believe, is through a political settlement – that is, some arrangement for sharing power – that all sides can live with.

Now, to be clear, I am neither for nor against negotiating with the Taliban. What amazes me is that less than two months after Obama made his West Point speech on Afghanistan following months of careful and extensive deliberation on it, the administration seems to have changed its mind. This makes me wonder whether it has any policy at all.