by Alex Evans | Feb 5, 2008 | Influence and networks, Off topic
Those of our readers in public service will be delighted to hear of a new project designed especially for you: Wikileaks. The short version is explained on the site’s homepage:
Have documents the world needs to see? We protect your identity while maximizing political impact.
The site’s page on how the submissions process works elaborates thus:
Wikileaks accepts classified, censored or otherwise restricted material of political, diplomatic or ethical significance. Wikileaks does not accept rumor, opinion or other kinds of first hand reporting or material that is already publicly available.
All staff who deal with sources are accredited journalists or lawyers. All submissions establish a journalist-source relationship. Online submissions are routed via Sweden and Belgium which have first rate journalist-source shield laws. Wikileaks records no source identifying information and there are a number of submission mechanisms available to deal with even the most sensitive national security information.
Wikileaks has a history breaking major stories (in the Guardian, New York Times, CNN, Reuters, etc), protecting sources (no source has ever been exposed) and press freedoms (all censorship attempts, from the Pentagon to London law firms have failed).
So, the $64 trillion question: have they had any good dirt? Well, here are a few examples. Make up your own mind as to the quality of the leak – and indeed whether the information should have been leaked in the first place…
- A classified US report intelligence report on the battle for Fallujah in 2004, which is said to “show the U.S. military believes it lost control over information about what was happening in the town, leading to political pressure that ended its April 2004 offensive with control being handed to Sunni insurgents”. The report itself says, “The outcome of a purely military contest in Fallujah was always a foregone conclusion — coalition victory. But Fallujah was not simply a military action, it was a political and informational battle. … The effects of media coverage, enemy information operations, and the fragility of the political environment conspired to force a halt to U.S. military operations”;
- The full ‘Camp Delta Standard Operating Procedure’ (large pdf), which apparently directly contradicts the US’s stated claim that “even though the [Guantanamo] detainees are not entitled to POW privileges, they will be provided many POW privileges as a matter of policy… The International Committee of the Red Cross has visited and will continue to be able to visit the detainees privately”. Documents leaked to Wikileak reveal that some detainees are classified as being permitted “No Access: No contact of any kind with ICRC. This includes delivery of ICRC mail.”; and
- A 2,000 page breakdown of the entire US order of battle in Iraq, detailing full equipment registers for all US units in Iraq, as well as detainee operations and, apparently, demonstration that “the US has almost certainly violated the Chemical Weapons Convention”
Still, given the site’s cloak-and-dagger role, you’d have thought that they might have come up with something a bit more, well, subtle as a URL for the page where it all happens than ‘https://secure.wikileaks.org/wiki/Special:Leak‘. Mmm, that wouldn’t stand out at all on your browsing history.
by Charlie Edwards | Feb 1, 2008 | Cooperation and coherence, Influence and networks
Some of the presentations today have been excellent but have highlighted the desperate need for alternative approaches to some of the problems governments are facing in weak and failing states. But the stomach for taking risks inside of governments has disappeared. We need to bring back the imagination and resourcefulness of the 1970s and early 80s.
It may have become fashionable in policy circles to talk of red teaming, the “structured, iterative process executed by trained, educated and practiced team members that provides commanders an independent capability to continuously challenge plans, operations, concepts, organizations and capabilities in the context of the operational environment and from our partners’ and adversaries’ perspectives.” But we don’t do it.
As Lord Butler noted in his review of intelligence on WMD, ‘well developed imagination at all stages of the intelligence process is required to overcome preconceptions. There is a case for encouraging it by providing for structured challenge, with established methods and procedures, often described as a ‘Devil’s advocate’ or a ‘red teaming’ approach. This may also assist in countering another danger: when problems are many and diverse, on any one of them the number of experts can be dangerously small, and individual, possibly idiosyncratic, views may pass unchallenged..
At times of uncertainty and criticism the response is usually to bunker down, keep information tightly controlled and react react react…. But everything we have seen in Iraq, Afghanistan and elsewhere has shown we need to do the opposite. We need individuals who have a license to be awkward, and in doing so help all of us tackle the complex problems of today and tomorrow.
by Charlie Edwards | Jan 30, 2008 | Cooperation and coherence, Influence and networks, UK
I’ve got an article in this month’s World Today, Chatham House’s monthly magazine. It’s about the UK’s approach to national security. Here’s a taster:
British Governments have rarely taken a strategic approach to national security, preferring instead to focus separately on issues of defence, foreign affairs,development and intelligence. Invariably, this has led to narrow strategies, which have centred on individual Whitehall departments, or created new agencies and units to meet emerging security challenges.
In the wake of September 11 2001 for instance, the Security Service MI5 moved away from managing a portfolio of risks, which included organised crime, to focus almost entirely on the threat from international terrorism. Nearly all the service’s work on organised crime was passed to the Serious Organised Crime Agency, an amalgamation of a number of different organisations including the National Crime Squad and National Criminal Intelligence Service, which was established by the Serious Organised Crime and Police Bill of 2005.
Current operations, policy decisions and legislation also prevent the government from taking a strategic approach. At present most of the Ministry of Defence’s time and resources are devoted to operations in Afghanistan and Iraq, while the new Office for Security and Counter-Terrorism, based in the Home Office, focuses on counter terrorism, rather than wider security issues, as originally envisaged by the former Home Secretary John Reid.
Most important of all, an institutional bias is alive and well in Westminster, Whitehall and beyond. Instead of discussing the global risks to Britain, recent debate on national security has focused on the roles of government institutions rather than the problems that need to be solved. Some commentators have lamented the decline of the Foreign Office, while others have questioned the increase in spending on development aid at a time when savings have to be found in the defence budget. It is a depressing cycle of claim and counter claim which smacks of short-termism and a lack of leadership across government.
by Alex Evans | Jan 30, 2008 | Conflict and security, Middle East and North Africa
Michael Totten‘s still pottering around Iraq and the Middle East, blogging as he goes. This week he’s in Fallujah, looking at police reform:
I sat down with Captain Stewart Glenn and his executive officer Lieutenant Chuck Miller at India Company’s train station FOB.
“The Marines were the catalyst for providing security,” Captain Glenn said. “But without guys like Colonel Faisal, Captain Jamal, and some of the leaders of the Iraqi Police, this never would have happened. The Marines had the idea of hiring a neighborhood watch, professionalizing the Iraqi Police, providing barriers so they have actual precincts which they can police. Instead of having a centralized station that goes out, they have small precincts now, which is also pretty common in the States. The idea came from the Marines, but the Iraqi Police took it, ran with it, and made it work.”
Fallujah’s current policing model did come from the Marines, and it’s based loosely on the American idea of community policing. Mayor Tom Potter — of my hometown Portland, Oregon — is credited by many for coming up with this method when he was our chief of police. When police officers live and work in their own neighborhoods, have relationships with key neighbors, and patrol small beats on foot as well as anonymously in police cars, trust and community cooperation with law enforcement increases.
by Richard Gowan | Jan 26, 2008 | Conflict and security, Europe and Central Asia, Middle East and North Africa
British journalist Jonathan Steele has been getting a good deal of coverage for Defeat, his account of the Iraq war (if nothing else, he deserves a prize for finding an even pithier title for an Iraq book than Fiasco by Thomas Ricks). While I’m all for picking over the bones of US and UK decision-making in 2002-3, I grow more and more concerned that this sort of retrospective analysis distracts readers/voters from wondering what we should actually do in Iraq now, and what options may open up after the U.S. elections. The absence of serious debate about Iraq among the Democrats – and most Republicans bar McCain – was well-described by Noah Feldman in the NYT Magazine earlier this month:
What if the United States were at war during a presidential election — and none of the candidates wanted to talk about it? Iraq has become the great disappearing issue of the early primary season, and if nothing fundamental changes on the ground there — a probable result of current policy — the war may disappear even more completely in the new year.The reasons for Iraq’s political eclipse begin with the unfortunate fact that candidates strive to create feel-good associations, and the war is a certain downer. The film studios could barely get a Middle East movie to break even in the past 12 months (”In the Valley of Elah,” anyone?), and the political image makers have apparently taken note.
“How true,” I thought on reading this over a pint of the excellent Brooklyn Winter Ale in, suitably, Brooklyn. But, after lingering by Lake Geneva for a week, I’m struck by the extent to which Iraq is now simply off the European agenda in a way that is still quite hard to imagine in the US. And that is worrying because, as Feldman acutely observes in the American context, the glimmer of stability offered by the Surge means that there is a real debate to be had about whether it’s time for another go at statebuilding in Iraq:
According to one view, the United States cannot shape the local players into a cohesive order regardless of Iraq’s level of killing. The best we can do is calm the worst of the violence, leave and let the Iraqis sort things out for themselves.An alternative view presumes that state-building has failed so far in Iraq because of the violence. Once the bloodletting has decreased and there are credible negotiators on all sides, a stable Iraq is just barely possible, even if it will never be an exemplar of democracy.
Now, that’s mainly an issue for the Iraqis and Americans, but I don’t think that EU governments (whether pro- or anti-war back in the day) can really ignore it either. As I’ve just pointed out in a new piece that’s both available from EU Observer and on the ECFR website, a renewed decline in Iraq’s fortunes would undo European efforts on Turkey, Iran, Lebanon, maybe even Palestine – so ignoring it isn’t really an option. (Charles Grant has just made a similar argument in a new CER pamphlet). Here’s the nub of my argument, which could be summed up as “start thinking really hard”:
Rather than passively wait to see who’ll be driving Middle East policy in Washington in 2009, EU governments should use the next twelve months as an opportunity to iron out their differences and develop new options on Iraq.Whoever enters the White House next year, the incoming administration will probably make charting a new course on Iraq the central priority for their first hundred days. If the EU is still trying to work out where it stands at that stage, it will find it’s irrelevant soon enough. If it has a package of ideas about what it can contribute – even if it is relatively limited – its initiative is likely to be welcomed, getting relations with the new administration off to a good start.To start outlining what such a package should look like, European governments should now agree to put their differences to one side, and appoint a senior political figure (or maybe two, one originally against the war, one for it) to lead a small “EU Options Team”: a brains-trust of European officials and experts on Iraq, tasked with laying out a menu of potential plans for coordinated EU policies from 2009 on.To ensure that these aren’t just abstract term papers, the Team should have a cell based in Iraq – in part modelled on the EU police and civilian planning teams that have been developing policy in Kosovo since 2006. And to give the Team a sense of immediate relevance, its political chief(s) should also be directly involved in trying to sort out the dysfunctions of EU aid to Iraq.
To be quite honest, even this level of hatchet-burying and deep thinking may still be beyond the EU, but hope springs eternal. My argument is also meant to be an invitation for those who still think we have some obligations and interests in Iraq to offer new ideas – if you go the ECFR version of the piece, you can add a comment, and I’d be a happy junior public intellectual if any Dashboard readers had constructive thoughts to add there.
