The Middle Kingdom’s New Export Focus 04/15/2012
Posted by Vaughn in Economics, Global.Tags: China, Trade Deficit
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Photo Credit: Bloomberg Business Week
CHINA has been feeling its oats: They’re a bit impressed with their stature, and they have been flexing their trade muscles as a result of it, for many years. (Not to mention, they are also flexing their political and military muscles — most recently in Syria — and [reportedly] with cyber attacks against American government and business networks.) And, in their mind, why wouldn’t they? They’re obviously on the rise; what with one billion-plus people, a growing middle-class, a workforce that has consistently been favored by American big-biz over stateside labor, because of China’s much lower wage requirements, an expansive economic boom, their leading status in global exports and the fact that China already owns many American companies. What’s America’s recourse in addressing this, as it’s very much a threat to the country’s economic security? There hasn’t been much, so far. Diplomacy is required, because of that last and greatest factor: that the United States is somewhat economically indebted to the nation and China is an important American trade partner.
The Atlantic via Bloomberg Business Week reports on a new sector for China in their growing portfolio of power and influence across global markets: heavy industry. There has been a shift from the light exports and techonological consumer goods that have been examined of late for the workers’ rights issues, most recently in regards to Apple and Foxconn, and other small goods that have led to Wal-Mart becoming responsible for much of the American trade deficit, among other things — such as perhaps a business environment that has facilitated this — towards heavy industry. According to the Bloomberg data (top) China has been steadily increasing their heavy goods sector for the last three years, producing and exporting much higher numbers of construction equipment, trains, ships and cars; showing an especially strong increase; in fact, showing its greatest positive slope since about 2009.
Sany Group, a construction equipment company profiled in the Bloomberg article — and who are part of a corps of Chinese companies that rank in the top ten globally in the heavy industries sector — has an ambitious goal that is reachable; to lift their heavy industry exports to one-fifth of their total revenue over the next five years. Currently it represents only five percent of Sany’s $16 billion dollars in revenues. Sany and other companies will be assisted by $2.5 billion dollars provided by the government to modernize their facilities in order to meet this ramp-up. Rising labor costs which have increased by 15 percent annually since 2005 and the appreciation of currency, are making it tougher for China’s production model, originally based on cheap labor and smaller goods, and this has led many of the nation’s companies to shut down and move to Bangladesh, Cambodia and Vietnam. This move towards the “heavy” is their response, their Plan B, and it is in full execution.
The Chinese controlled 41 percent of the global ship market in 2011. And the amount of China’s heavy industry exports — of which two-thirds is machinery, according to Bloomberg — has grown from 29 percent in 2001, to 38.7 percent last year, according to the Beijing-based economics consultant, GK Dragonomics. Said Andrew Baston of GK Dragonomics, in Bloomberg Business Week‘s “China’s Export Machine Goes High-End” article:
‘They are making different products with higher technology, things they can charge more money for,’ says Andrew Batson, GK Dragonomics’ research director, who estimates that the new industries can help lift China’s share of global exports from 10 percent now to 15 percent by 2020. ‘The typical Chinese exporter is not a shoe factory in Guangdong anymore. Instead it is some kind of equipment or machinery maker.’
Read “China Takes Aim at the Profitable Heart of U.S. Manufacturing at The Atlantic [Here]
Read “China’s Export Machine Goes High-End” at Bloomberg Businessweek [Here]
Whom Shall Lead the World Bank? 04/04/2012
Posted by Vaughn in Economics, Global.Tags: Ngozi Onkojo-Iweala, World Bank
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Photo Credit: The Economist
THE UNITED STATES and President Obama have their man: an academic, a physician and public policy guy, Jim Yong Kim. Kim is the president of Dartmouth and the chair of Global Health and Social Medicine at perhaps “The Ivy League College,” Harvard. So why is The Economist and The Financial Times pushing for an underdog and an outsider to Western power circles (in some sense) to be the new head of the World Bank? Ngozi Onkojo-Iweala has won the endorsement of several African nations and two well-respected publications for the soon to be filled post ahead of Jim Yong Kim and Columbia’s former finance minister and respected economist José Antonio Ocampo.
Onkojo-Iweala is Nigeria’s two-term finance minister who provided transparency in a corrupted market, and while what she accomplished wasn’t a complete “wiping” of the crony culture that plagues the nation (it ranked 143 out of 182 nations in Transparency International’s Corruption Perceptions Index 2011); it is a rather significant accomplishment considering the level of corruption that endemically has yoked the country. Ngozi also earned rave reviews as the Managing Director of the World Bank from 2007-2011, holds a Ph.D in regional economic development from Massachusetts Institute of Technology and led the Paris Club negotiations of a reschedule of Nigeria’s debt.
She has plenty of recent and relevant experience, post global financial crisis, and so it seems she’d be the best fit of the three, since Columbia’s José Antonio Ocampo’s last stint as finance minister was for a shorter span (1996-98), with a shaky record, where he oversaw a deficit expansion. The United States’ choice is also well-regarded and is a great humanitarian dedicated to effecting progress on these interrelated issues of education, health and development, but he hasn’t the level of experience in any comparable manner to Okonjo-Iweala — since his experience lies mostly with positions in academe — or positions which are limited in scope compared to the one he has just become a candidate for. As the Economist notes:
Mr Kim, the head of a university in New England, has done a lot of good things in his life, but the closest he has come to running a global body was as head of HIV/AIDS at the World Health Organisation—not a post requiring tough choices between, say, infrastructure, health and education. He pioneered trials of aid programmes before they became fashionable and set up an outfit called Partners in Health which does fine work in Haiti and Peru. But this is a charity, not a development bank. Had Mr Obama not nominated him, he would be on no one’s shortlist to lead the World Bank. (Indeed he is a far worse example of Western arrogance than Christine Lagarde, whom the Europeans shoehorned into the IMF job last year: the French finance minister plainly had the CV for the job.)
Nonetheless, America’s influence on this matter does loom rather large since it is still the world’s leading economy and historically the head of the World Bank has been American, and so to not take John Yong Kim as a serious prospect is folly. And not only that, the position — while it is about handling a financial institution committed to development in a straight sense — its larger goal is going to be influenced by two things Mr. Kim knows rather well: education and health. These factor immensely in development, and not just the attracting of foreign capital, because development is also about securing human capital. As The Financial Times published:
This newspaper has acknowledged that, were Mr Kim to be selected, he could be a good choice. His background in health fits well with the Bank’s broader development goals, while his managerial record at the World Health Organisation shows that he could be effective at implementing these aims.
This newspaper has acknowledged that, were Mr Kim to be selected, he could be a good choice. His background in health fits well with the Bank’s broader development goals, while his managerial record at the World Health Organisation shows that he could be effective at implementing these aims.
But the Bank needs more than this. Its new leader should have a command of macroeconomics, the respect of leaders of both the funding and the funded countries, and the management skills to implement his or her vision. These requirements make Ms Okonjo-Iweala the best person for the role.
Ms Okonjo-Iweala has real-world experience of policy-making in one of the most challenging developing countries. Her experience in tackling corruption would be helpful in the battle against the misuse of Bank funds. While her record as a finance minister is not flawless, her reforming drive has earned her credibility with the international community. That, and her charismatic personality, should help her to rally support for the Bank.
But unlike Ms. Okonjo-Iweala, who has shown a commitment to growth in her nation — and importantly a poor nation at that, dealing with many of the very same issues she’d be addressing in the other nations in her bailiwick if she assumes the job — Mr. Kim has some issues in proving that he is a full-hearted supporter of actual economic development, at least to some; since he once wrote in a book entitled Dying for Growth “the quest for growth in GDP and corporate profits has in fact worsened the lives of millions of men and women.” While I understand what he in fact is saying about the darker aspects of growth, regardless of whether someone of a believed academic anti-business conspiracy or a belief in a uniformed philosophy by those in the academy to slag big-biz; such things simply do not go over well with the very businesses he would attempt to court to bring development to these beleaguered nations. The Economist is not so understanding about this point, however:
Were Mr Kim hoping to lead Occupy Wall Street, such views would be unremarkable. But the purposes of the World Bank, according to its articles of agreement, are “to promote private foreign investment…[and to] encourage international investment for the development of the productive resources of members.” The Bank promotes growth because growth helps the poor. If Mr Kim disagrees, he should stick to medicine.
Further, for purely meritocratic reasonings it would be rather safe to assume that the transition on the job for Ngozi Onkonjo-Iweala and the consistent and symbolic message that the World Bank would send in placing a well-credentialed woman in the position who has experience on these matters, would be logical, especially considering that a trope of development has been the notion that development’s frontline resides with women. That is not to say that placing other candidates in the post wouldn’t be logical, however. What the right answer is, I’m not particularly sure, but there are only two actual candidates it seems, with Mr. Ocampo being on the outside. On the one, the record of Ngozi Onkonjo-Iweala should not be overlooked and it seems high time that not just a woman, but a candidate whose life is intimately connected to the experience and struggles of the developing nations ascends to the post.
On the other hand, development of these nations needs not just relevant experience, but big ideas and an understanding of global health issues and the education challenges at a very complex and expertise level that would only be met by Jim Yong Kim’s life’s work, who holds an incalculable level of relevant experience in the area. I’d assume, it would be best if both candidates skill sets could be utilized as both are needed, in an ideal situation. But if merit wins, as it should, and which is the safe call, The Economist is correct; Nagozi Onkonjo-Iweala should be the next president of the World Bank. But merit (as defined by just well-chronicled experience) has some blind spots, and in that regard Ngozi Onkonjo-Iweala should still look to utilize Jim Yong Kim, if she does become the president; and make him an indispensable tool to achieve the goal of lifting these nations’ lots.
Read “Hats Off to Ngozi” at The Economist [Here]
Read “The Right Leader for the World Bank” at The Financial Times [Here]
Read “Why Ngozi Okonjo-Iweala Wants to Run the World Bank” at The New York Times [Here]
Fukushima: From the West Wing 03/26/2012
Posted by Vaughn in Global, Policy.Tags: Crisis Management, Fukushima Disaster
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Photo Credit: Foreign Affairs
OF THE MOST harrowing stories from last year, the terrible series of events behind the Japanese earthquake that led to a cataclysmic tsunami, which then led to an unforeseen overwhelm of the emergency safety system at three of the six nuclear reactors at the Fukushima Daichi nuclear power plant (after they had miraculously survived the quake), were tops on a rather remarkable list of news events. The tsunami and the subsequent reactor meltdown triggered visions of science fiction’s end-times in our heads; first with images of families being separated by Mother Nature’s angry water-borne hand, live on T.V., and then with news of the degenerating meltdown crisis, radiated food supplies and stories of an unprecedented radioactive plume that dwarfed Chernobyl.
The situation was the worst of the sums of all fears concerning nuclear energy, crises and crisis management. One of the nation’s largest energy company’s operating in the affected prefectures — directly charged with the oversight of Fukushima Daichi, as it belongs to them — Tokyo Power Electric Company (T.E.P.C.O.), had been highly-criticized and second-guessed by the international community (and even by myself on Twitter). What those who were critical believed, it seems, was that there was a decision by the Japanese government to sublimate any potential panic and downplay the severity of the Fukushima Daichi disaster, especially when the official Japanese government advice for its citizens and foreign workers in the areas were found to be quite different than that of the United States government, which prioritized being much more cautious. One of the main points where questions arose was in the benchmarks for minimal safety distance from the reactors for evacuations with the Japanese officials recommending a 12-mile evacuation zone, while American officials recommended a 50-mile zone for its citizens in the area, which included two military bases housing the greatest percentage of the 90,000 Americans in the potentially affected areas.
A recent Foreign Affairs article penned by Jeffrey A. Bader, senior director of the National Security Council, gives us a new view — from within the halls of American power — and he provides some illumination on the matter, a year later. Of his findings and implications, one of the primary is that the handling of information distribution to the outside by the Japanese government should be understood within an expanded context of how many more people the Japanese government had to accommodate in their evacuations — into already densely packed areas — and how that differed from the U.S. Government, since the American government families were much smaller in number, and responsibility dwindled as they left areas affected by the meltdown, by either returning to the United States or to other bases.
We had to decide whether to declare a larger evacuation zone around Fukushima than Japan did. Modeling conducted by the NRC and the DOE indicated that an evacuation zone of 50 miles would be more consistent with U.S. standards than the Japanese zone of 12 miles, so the administration recommended that all U.S. citizens in the 50-mile zone leave. The discrepancy attracted unwelcome attention and subjected the Japanese government to some criticism. Of course it was considerably easier for us to err on the side of caution, since we had almost no Americans in the area and no responsibility to house or take care of them once they departed, whereas the Japanese had several million people there, all of them the government’s responsibility if they moved.
Further, in understanding that there were longer term implications in every decision and information release — as far as their optics politically and their logistical tail (i.e. providing shelter and water for swaths of still unaccounted) — and the dynamic and unprecedented nature of dealing with that rarest medley: an earthquake, a tsunami, a meltdown at a key national nuclear power plant and the possible longer lasting effect of a large radioactive leak; one can understand how the Japanese government may have appeared to be less forthright and timely with its information and response, to the outside, but it was merely attempting to gain a grasp of all of those scenarios it had burning at once, and with accurate details. Comparing the situation to what is known of Bader’s experience in dealing with it through the National Security Council, the inability to accurately measure radiation levels and find applicable models were an issue that had a great effect on the decision-making. According to Bader, even the American government had widely off-base measures.
Because of the unpredictability of the situation at Fukushima, we needed to draw up contingency plans for the evacuation of all Americans from Tokyo and the bases in the event that the situation warranted it. That was normal and proper, although extremely unlikely. But once Pacific Command began planning for a noncombatant evacuation that, in theory, could involve 90,000 people under panicked conditions, the information would inevitably leak.
It leaked quickly. Stories ran in U.S. military media and the Japanese press that suggested that evacuation was a real possibility. I called the chief of naval operations, Admiral Gary Roughead, with whom I had had very good interactions in the past. I told him of my dismay at the way the story was percolating. I said that I was as strongly in favor of protecting American servicemen’s health as anyone, but that we needed a scientific basis for decisions. We also could not be casual about the future of the alliance by allowing for a whimsical decision-making process. Roughead understood. Within an hour, he had called in the defense press and made unequivocal statements to the effect that our forces were not going anywhere, and that evacuation was not in the cards.
These daily crises in response to wildly speculative assessments and reports were testing our patience, not to mention our sleep cycles. We needed a firm scientific basis for decisions. Fortunately, Holdren and the DOE were about to produce one.
Working with Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, Holdren developed a series of models based on plausible worst-case scenarios. They depicted simultaneous meltdowns at one or more reactors and complete drainage of the spent fuel pools at two reactors. The results for such worst-case scenarios, assuming unfavorable wind patterns from the reactor site and a lack of precipitation, suggested that radioactive plumes in excess of EPA standards would not reach within 75 to 100 miles of Tokyo, and that we would have several days’ notice before such a contingency could develop. In other words, there was no plausible scenario in which Tokyo, Yokosuka, or Yokota could be subject to dangerous levels of airborne radiation.
Still, the feeling among some of those watching the disaster unfold via the international 24-hour cable news networks and N.H.K., was that the Japanese government had dropped the ball in many ways. And that may still be true, but the utterly unique crisis had no contextualizing event to glean lessons from, and which is why it was so difficult. Towards the end of the nuclear reactor crisis, it had become so bad that T.E.P.C.O. and the Japanese government were gladly accepting septuagenarian and sexagenarian volunteers to work the plant as they handled the meltdown’s effects. The idea was that any radiation exposure to these older volunteers with experience in the matter, were least likely to be adversely affected by such exposures since their life-spans were presumably towards their end. It was a scary and disturbing thing to hear. As of now the global community has begun to reassess nuclear power as a result, with the European Union ordering a risk assessments of all of its members.
Read “Inside the White House During Fukushima” at Foreign Affairs [Here]
Read “Fukushima’s Fate Inspires Nuclear Safety Rethink” at New Scientist [Here]
View the aftermath of the Fukushima meltdown via Cryptome’s “eyeball” series [Here]
On ‘Drive’ and Los Angeles 03/09/2012
Posted by Vaughn in Art, Editorial, Film, Global, Media.Tags: Drive, Los Angeles, Nicolas Winding Refn
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2011′S DRIVE was as much about the look and feel of modern Los Angeles as it was about a quiet, young stunt driver and part-time mechanic with a good heart, stuck in an inescapable devolving life unwillingly tied to violence and criminal enterprise. The film’s title sequence and soundtrack painted the city romantically and in an emotive, etherial manner reminiscent of the Los Angeles in Ridley Scott’s Blade Runner and the Tokyo of Katsuhiro Otomo in Akira. It was somewhat of a departure from the expected by Danish director Nicolas Winding Refn, which historically has tended to see other directors portray the City of Angels as a festering cesspool, and largely a creation of its Hollywood subterfuge and post-World War II boom development cycle, with a critical mass of sad lives beneath California’s golden sun and haze.
“A Real Hero,” College featuring Electric Youth, Drive
And maybe that is true for the city — possessing a critical mass of sad, broken lives — as it is anywhere, or perhaps a bit more. But overwhelmingly, that has been a pet of and vehicle for directors to transport viewers to a land of broken dreams and terrible misfortune, such as what is currently imagined in Michael Mann’s and H.B.O.’s serial drama of cinematic quality, Luck. (Or the classic Chinatown and the odd, Mulholland Drive.) While all of these films which have Los Angeles as a main character — and not merely as a setting — and a complete environ that influences the story in many ways, tend to deal with the underbelly of life and crime within a rubric and genre known as film noir, unlike them, however, Drive doesn’t seem to fault the city.
Refn skillfully captures its balance of urban and exurban landscapes and nature, even pivoting much of our perception of the main character’s sensitivity on it, by way of his excursion with a potential love interest and her son through the empty concrete canal of the Los Angeles’ river to a secluded brook. Refn also uses the emptiness of the night-time Los Angeles streets; a familiar and relevant scene so apparent to anyone who has driven the city any time after 2 a.m., to show its serenity, before his juxtaposing with adrenalin-dumping scenes.
Further, the soundtrack and musical score, produced by Cliff Martinez, seems to echo much of modern Los Angeles and its love for synthesized music elements, articulated in the younger communities of the city and the dreamy, hazy, pop and nostalgia for the contemporary found in the Angeleno music since even the Beach Boys. The standouts: “A Real Hero” by College featuring Electric Youth (above), “Nightcall” by Kavinsky and Lovefoxxx, and the rest of the score by Martinez, find their way into your bloodstream and imagination, and perfectly yaw-and-pitch the varying moods of the film.
Jeremy Lin and Us 02/22/2012
Posted by Vaughn in Basketball, Editorial, Global, Sport Culture.Tags: Jeremy Lin, New York Knicks
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Photo Credit: Getty Images
And a little child shall lead them…
-Isiah 11:6
A Vessel and Looking-Glass for Our Ideals
WATCHING the accidental fortune that found Jeremy Lin’s personal showcase become a harbinger for the New York Knicks’ own serendipity — following a poor start amid lofty pre-season expectations and injuries to the team’s superstars — has proven to be a screed for the narratives concerning the best of our society, and what we desire to be generally true about opportunity and excellence in America, even as we realize in the back of our minds that all we symbolically project onto Lin’s emergence isn’t necessarily true for all. Nonetheless, Lin does represent many of the tenets of our sociopolitical history, and the ideals we tout as central to the American ethic: He is an example of the hard-working underdog story of Horatio Alger and similar tales told over and over; those about a mother and father or grandparents coming from the old country, to find in one generation their child or grandchild to be a wild success. He is ultimately what debates about immigration are about, in some sense, answering the irrationally xenophobic question, “Will they assimilate?”; resoundingly.
In the personal, sporting context, he is an atomization of 2010′s Butler Bulldogs and 2011′s Virginia Commonwealth University Rams, who impelled us to tune in to March Madness in recent springs — as Lin has, this winter — hoping to see that just once more in the smallest slice of time, that the guys or teams least expected to win, actually win. And regardless of Lin’s ancestry, which has undoubtedly fueled some of the novelty, any modicum of sporting success surfacing from obscurity would have engendered great support and produced a frenzy of this level in New York, because it is the central node city for our media, and that we all happen to love underdogs because of how antithetical their stories are to our reality; and that the expected always happening doesn’t allow for the sense of adventure we all need in our lives. Further, without that “vicariousness,” it would imply many of us are doomed to remain “little guys,” as we mostly are, a reality many cannot stomach. (Hence, striving to be “Facebook Famous” or “Tumblr Famous” or the prominent rise of horribly conceived reality-shows.) His surrounding story is made of the same stuff Hollywood produces in bulk, those things which make grown men shed a tear during Rudy: that of a dogged persistence and an iron-will determination to overcome obstacles both real and those created by the perceptions in the hive-mind of a society (e.g. Asian-American kids from Harvard, just don’t excel at professional basketball), and which become real, because of those who are willing to buy them wholesale.
Lin is not just about the Horatio Alger myth, he is also the personification of the ideas of merit, skill and opportunity dancing together; that underlying belief — skill plus opportunity – being so powerful an agent for the most critical management decisions; from who gains the internship that changes a life, to those who move from middle management to the executive boardroom; it enraptures us all, implying that it is not just Lin, but all of us, are just a shot away from our own true greatness. And, of course, he has become the unifying cultural imprint expressed by the many Asian fans of various national backgrounds and is the embodiment of the pan-Asian-American cultural identity that came about as a product of governmental policies in the latter-half of the 20th Century, which included a diverse body of ethnicities into a uniformly protected class. Lin is about all of those things and Asian stereotypes and stereotypes in general, both positive and negative, which rule our brains in ways that they shouldn’t.
Stereotypes and Us
I grew up the only black kid on a block in Southern California in a military town near Los Angeles. And so my world was diverse, even if my block wasn’t. The best basketball player on that predominantly white, middle-class suburban block where every boy played all sports was a Chinese-American kid, four years my senior named Eric. He was my first in-person exposure to the kind of basketball characteristically played by Michael Jordan and Isiah Thomas that is politically correctly given the euphemism of “playground ball.” (But is cognitively associated to black style.)
Eric’s game was an outgrowth and expression of a style originated in the black community — and what is so well-chronicled in the famed writer John Edgar Wideman’s memoir Hoop Roots; of a fluid and aggressive, improvisational attacking style recognizable to anyone in basketball culture. Eric didn’t have any favored spots nor a schematic program that he played under, unlike many hyper-coached kids. He simply was versatile and did many different things at once. His jumpshot was a streamlined silhouette with a rainbow arc, and because we generally congregated at a house with an eight and a half-foot breakaway rim attached to a garage, he dunked in various ways off the dribble and with alley-oops: sideways with one hand, reverse with two or over the top, often off a dribble. His was a highly-effective and personally expressive game. So it was never a surprise for me to see a Jeremy Lin or Japan’s Yuta Tabuse, years ago, because my experience in the communities I grew up in, in California, and later on a base in Japan; it just wasn’t odd to find many skilled Asian-American basketball players.
This was the 1990s and basketball was still seen as generally a black and (somewhat) white dominated sport, with very little diversity outside of that binary scheme. (The European invasion had just begun.) And within that bifurcation, it was well in the process of becoming even “blacker” than ever, thanks to perceptions, a cultural legacy that began in the 1950s, the demographic influx of urban kids playing and E.S.P.N. selling and popularizing the street game and playground aesthetic creating a self-fulfilling prophecy. By the time I grew up to become a decent basketball player in 7th grade, I’d begun to notice something, though: some of the Asian kids I played against in elementary had begun to stop playing.
There were still plenty of Asian kids on the basketball courts at lunch in middle school, but not as many as there were during elementary. (And I didn’t count myself or another kid who was also black and Asian, by the name of Soweto, and who was then the best of our middle school bunch.) This was an awakening to my own Asian-mixed heritage being subsumed by my ostensible blackness. I “passed,” as they say in the black community, a term usually reserved for those fairer skinned receiving the social benefits of appearing white or “passing” as fully white, and this gave me an opportunity to see my “blackness” and all the social assumptions that came with it, for once, working as a plus.
I don’t know that it was specifically that the Asian kids I had known from elementary school had lost interest; they were just less inclined to play it seemed, because of the social constructs of the game becoming perhaps optically unwelcoming to them. The overarching culture had begun to tell them they were meant to be something different, and maybe they felt less comfortable in a setting where it was falsely believed that they had some biological disadvantage. They still loved the game, I could see. They still wore the hoops’ sneakers and the Hornets, Bulls, Spurs and Lakers’ branded apparel. They just didn’t play at school during the free periods. Possibly, the preponderance of black kids playing the game began to support a particular pernicious stereotype of young black men, and its corollary that is ascribed to Asian men: that of black men being hyper-masculine and possessed of the physical and less of the brain. And so maybe these Asian boys who grew up in the age of Nike marketing and Michael Jordan, adopted that other side of the coin much like their black male counterparts, and had unknowingly limited their experience because of it.
That is all supposition, but what comes out as an effect of whats-proper-for-your-group stuff is a sense of ethnic impostors, whether its underrepresented students at elite universities, minority employees in corporate America or young women in engineering departments and historically male-dominated fields; all of whom are often questioned for just being out of the believed respective norm. Honestly, I could never know why some of the Asian kids I knew stopped playing the game at school, it could be that they didn’t want to get dirty playing on the blacktop. But I assume the weight of the culture had pushed some of them to the sidelines; both the arcing culture outside of ethnicity, but also within Asian society and black-dominated urban culture. It is summed up politely in the idea of conventional wisdom (but also a form of prejudice), I believe, as David Stern, commissioner of the N.B.A., talked about the euphemism, “conventional wisdom,” when asked about Jeremy Lin saying:
The conventional wisdom is that you know everyone who’s going to be coming into your league by the time of the McDonald’s High School All-American game. It’s so much fun to see some unpredictability thrown in, and I hasten to add, it’s been five games only. So we’ll see. I think it’s wonderful.
Stern cuts to the very heart of the matter there, that there is a conventional wisdom in basketball and in our lives in general: of what we can and can’t do because society tells us so by the various subcultures we inhabit, the mindsets that have become set in institutionally, and those things are both internalized individually and externally imposed on people and their social group classifications. They are the same things that tell us constantly, but informally, what scientists should look like or C.E.O.s or doctors or lawyers, or N.B.A. ball players.
And it hurts us all, ultimately, because while stereotypes simplify the world and remove some of the complexity from life; which is why stereotypes and even why the Favorite v. Underdog dialectic exists and develops a social reality, through acceptance by those stereotyped groups and the support of those too lazy to not generalize. While it’s true that it seems that girls and minorities who are not Asian tend to not be attracted to the sciences for study, there was also Marie Curie, Florence Sabin, Benjamin Banneker, David Satcher, or Neal deGrass Tyson. All of whom are seen as exceptions to their gender or race, but if we never lived in a world so hasty to presume, they would never be seen as anything other than exceptional, in the most fundamental sense.
Jeremy Lin
All I can think about in watching all of this alternate universe telling of an infinitesimally short career relegated to the scrap heap of basketball history, before it even began, and has now created the Legend of Lin — a kid who went from wondering whether he was going to make it in the league, to a cat now in the midst of straight-up superstar-levels of fandom and similarly stratospheric play — is how he is also symbolic of the guys I play against at the local university or the park. He represents the kids I grew up with and who stuck it out; guys who played organized ball in obscurity in many times Asian leagues — which are probably a bigger deal than those outside of the Asian community know — but yet their skill was honed and tightened by the toughness on the playgrounds against all comers.
And that’s just how it is you come from what they call “nowhere,” as Lin did. It is because when you are a minority in a sport or society; you are at-once part of that specific society, as well as apart from it. But his road and journey is “somewhere,” it just never particularly fit the basketball orthodoxy in much the way the William’s sisters rise from Compton to dominate a white [and monied] sport such as tennis, never fit prescriptions. For Lin and pro-hoops though, it was the exact opposite, where basketball’s proving ground is actually places like Compton and not a high school in Palo Alto, in the shadows of Stanford; in a town more known for Silicon Valley’s computers and the software engineering industry than it is for high-level prep basketball. And his Palo Alto team won its division’s state championship but, nonetheless, that yielded not many offers to play Division I, big-time, college hoops, which left him deciding to play at Harvard, since choices like Berkeley and Stanford, academic and basketball powerhouses, never came a knocking. And because, obviously, getting an education in economics would be paramount, because “real basketball” — the kind not usually played in the Ivies* — seemed out of the question.
And then it’s getting drafted by his hometown team — Lin’s dream — to then only get cut by them, but not before playing for the out of the league, Reno Big Horns. All that time he kept getting better, kept getting up more jumpers on his own and no one was noticing, but he did end up with the Houston Rockets at the beginning of the year, only to get cut again. The Knicks and the City, the only real American city it seems, was his last stop; a place where they say, “if you can make it here, you can make it anywhere.” And because of all of this, and for the fact that I know Lin’s environments more intimately than I could ever know that enclosure and life of prominent A.A.U. squads and high-schools with Nike contracts and life being recruited by elite hoops universities, who have the same level of scrutiny as the Los Angeles Lakers, he truly means something to me for all of those things about our ideals: That value system that tells us about the freedom in America to become something at the hands of our own skill; if the powers that be are willing, in even the slightest.
I can only think that Lin may be the small breakthrough in the minds for my culture/s, on the court and off the court, since basketball culture in the Asian-American society is quite large and there are many skilled people overlooked for myriad reasonings every single day in our world. It’s all so hard to quantify, but I grew up in Asian communities all of my life, within the intersections Lin has fought from, and I have been as much Asian in a black world of basketball and black in an Asian world overseas, or black in a white and Asian world of the academy, and so I feel a robust kinship, and for me and all of those things I’ve been, there has never been a figure that has coalesced those experiences as Jeremy Lin, in his excellence.
* Princeton Basketball, an Ivy League school, perhaps the Ivy League school, has made many notable runs in the N.C.A.A. Tournament and won it all in 1965. Further, it has provided the basketball community with great contributions, such as the vaunted “Princeton Offense.” Most notably, one of the N.B.A.’s best “50 Greatest” was a Princeton Tiger: former senator and New York Knicks’ star, Bill Bradley.
Mexico’s Drug Cartels Influence Map, 2011 02/10/2012
Posted by Vaughn in Conflict, Global.Tags: Anonymous, Drug Cartels, Drug War, Mexico, STRATFOR
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Photo Credit: STRATFOR
THE GLOBAL INTELLIGENCE firm known as “STRATFOR” — Strategic Forecasting — was thrust into the attention of laymen when the loosely connected “hacktivist” collective known as Anonymous, shut down its site by way of a distributed denial-of-service attack, and subsequently exposed and compromised its list of paid-for-services clients — those who subscribe to STRATFOR’s premium intelligence products — and obtained (reportedly) unencrypted credit card information over the holidays to make several charitable donations.
However ironic the event was (perhaps the leading security company not being very secure), STRATFOR has been at the center of the for-profit security and global intelligence dissemination business for 16 years, and they have provided many of their summary findings to the public and have even been somewhat transparent and “open-source” minded — a software development principle that argues information should be free to all — with a number of their products, much like that of fellow company, RAND Corporation. At the end of last month, (January 24), STRATFOR posted its annual Mexico drug map with cursory analysis of the Mexico Drug War murder victims’ numbers, which has proven to be a thorny issue in regards to accuracy, because of the rate of the killings and the Mexican government’s inability to provide its own official numbers in a timely fashion.
As of the second-last quarter of data for 2011, STRATFOR reports a dip in the overall number of deaths, but it was not enough to produce the slightest glimmer of hope in the most rosy of analyses: From January 2011 to September 2011, 12,900 people died as a result of Mexico’s drug war. That number is less than the figure for 2010, but that clocks in at a still-ghastly 1,400 deaths per month. If that rate per the period of January 2011 to September 2011 holds for the final three months of 2011, it would result in 17,000 total drug-related murders in Mexico, for the year.
There were dips in the well-known, hard-hit cities and regions such as Ciudad Juarez, Chihuahua, where the death toll dropped from 3,111 in 2010 to 1,955 in 2011 (for the months available), yet still, Juarez registered as the country’s deadliest city. There were also significant increases across the nation in regions such as Durango, Durango state, Matamoros Veracruz, Monterrey, Nuevo León state, Veracruz state and Tamaulipas state. The Sinaloa cartel and the Los Zetas faction, the Sinaloa’s former enforcers, have divided the nation’s regions into two respective hemispheres of influence over a turf war with the Sinaloa controlling the west and Los Zetas controlling a majority of Mexico’s eastern region.
View STRATFOR’s Mexico’s Drug Wars Map (Enlarged) [Here]
Simulating Syrian Intervention? 01/11/2012
Posted by Vaughn in Conflict, Defense, Global, Policy, Politics.Tags: Bashar al-Assad, Foreign Policy, Global Security, Syria
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I RECENTLY READ that the Ministry of Defense (M.O.D.), Britain’s equivalent to the Department of Defense, is having an issue with keeping its recruits’ attention. (Not a real surprising story there.) The M.O.D.’s inability to keep the attention of its potential canon fodder is not being blamed on Britain’s deployment to horrific war zones — after all this is in the job description and what these young men have been sold, and have been buying [my own self included, in a smaller sense] for centuries, as a rite of passage — but because M.O.D.’s war simulators were not fully engaging potential grunts into the peaked interest necessary to compel full commitment to the nation’s military defense. Those boys, mostly; they’d probably rather let DICE and Activision virtually teleport them to the pixelized counterparts of the countries that the West are currently entangled with.
Those who game or follow entertainment business news, will know that Activision and DICE are the names attached to two firms who currently control the first-person shooter/combat simulation market with their current Battlefield 3 (part of the Battlefield series) and Modern Warfare 3 (a part of the Modern Warfare behemoth) titles, respectively. The games, to a lesser degree, are a crash-course in urban warfare, general sniper tactics — the latter, particularly online — and the all-out mayhem soldiers should (somewhat) expect in fighting. But this cannot be stressed enough, that this only to a degree. (You’re in a cushy room, for God sakes.) There are none of the tragedies of war, there are no days and weeks spent in terrible weather conditions on patrol, nor the 50-70 pounds of gear, no dying friends, no complicated interactions with locals who may be resistance fighters: No left behind family left to pick up the pieces of a shattered promise to go through life together. The article is important, though, because it tells the novice and those outside of the subculture of combat simulations’ gamers, in general, what this type of gaming has become.
Troops are so used to playing high-quality commercial games set in combat zones that they tend to lose concentration unless the MoD simulations look equally realistic. This has become an important issue at the MoD, which is increasingly turning to digital simulations to help prepare soldiers for duty.
Thousands of troops sent to Afghanistan have been trained on Virtual Battlespace2, a spin-off from a commercial game that can, for instance, test their responses when they come under mortar attack from insurgents.
Though the military stresses that these games only supplement traditional methods, it reflects the way technology is transforming military training. With budgets being squeezed across the MoD, simulations are also a comparatively cheap way of giving troops a “virtual” taste of what they might come up against in a warzone.
- “Ministry of Defence Forced to Update Its War Games for Xbox Generation,” The Guardian
The modern video game experience trumps what many of the advanced militaries of the world can produce in order to train their soldiers for battle, and commercial gaming has unexpectedly become an unofficial augment to government’s official means of recruiting, as war culture products have been, since there has ever been a thing called “culture.” The reason it’s such an uphill slog for governments’ recruiters versus the more realistic vision presented by the gaming industry, particularly those two big-name companies just mentioned, is the profit motive of gaming companies to produce the most realistic experience to date, with each iteration becoming better than the other, as the bar is raised year by year. And as pointed to in the article, the gaming industry as a whole is able to spend more money on perfecting their simulations than the government.
All of this has produced a dialogue between the M.O.D. and private gaming firms to specifically help produce better products for the government. In the United States this has already happened to some degree, when the U.S. Army actually released a game called America’s Army, to decent reviews and sales. So it is quite evident that the military branches of Western governments have a particularly high regard for the ability of games to recruit and to simulate, which is why I didn’t scoff when I read about a video game being used to seriously discuss potential outcomes with a hypothetical military operation in a current hot-spot.
Foreign Policy recently ran a feature article — “The Syrian Invasion” — discussing the outcomes of a game that simulates military intervention in Syria, a nation currently embroiled in a civil uprising that has Syria’s regime and president, Bashar al-Assad, tightening his vice-grip on his slipping power and the melting of his version of law and order. Combat Mission: Shock Force, simulates a fictional 2008 invasion of the country in response to state-sponsored terror. It’s not equivalent to what the Modern Warfare and Battlefield series have become in the culture, but the game is realistic. It primarily focuses on the larger strategic elements of such a war, however, more than the moves of individuals or squads in space, in order to squeeze off rounds and move through tight quarters to meet objectives.
Produced in 2007, the game, as the author of the article says, “shows the hallmarks of considerable research into the forces of the combatants and the capabilities of the weapons they use.” Generally, though, it’s about command and control and the decisions and factors involved in determining the success of such a combat enterprise. The game allows for several options in regards to how one might choose to invade Syria to face a melange of elite forces using the old Iraqi “Republican Guard” tag, fedayeen units and conscripts armed with souped Soviet-Era mechanized weaponry and Kornet missiles. One can go in with the U.S. Marine Expeditionary Brigade, a U.S. Army Stryker light-armored vehicle element or a multi-national coalition led by Germany, comprised of Britain, Canada and the Netherlands.
The results of the simulations varied, but the outcomes and the way in which the battles unfolded was a range with a core theme of N.A.T.O. units attempting to move dug-in Syrian fighters. According to the article’s author, at times it appeared to play out like Iraq at the beginning of the insurgency in 2003 with Syrian forces made up of conscripts and fedayeen fighting with rocket-propelled grenades and machine-guns, and at other times, the fighting looked like Lebanon in 2006 with Syrian commandos ducking-in-and-out using Kornet anti-tank missiles and fighting in a guerrilla style. What was found — as pointed out, in a still somewhat limited simulation system that doesn’t take into account drone intelligence operations assisting Western generals, or the auxiliary forces that would find their way to fight in support of Syria such as Hezbollah – was that military intervention in the country could become a mixed bag, highly dependent on which Syrian military shows up.
If it is the Syrian military that cowardly fires at civilians to squelch dissent and hasn’t fought a real opposing force in 30 years, then there would be some somewhat non-damaging Western losses, from a public perception sense. But if the Alawite-dominated Syrian force that decides it must fight to the end engages, primarily motivated by the consequences of what a loss would mean to their people in a Shia dominated land following a regime change; politically damaging numbers could conceivably be racked up against any Western coalition of fighters. While intervention in Syria hasn’t been prominently discussed, it has been pondered by some, and after the limited handling of Libya, it seems unlikely that a full intervention would ever take place. But if this video game simulation that factors in many of the things generals would have to, tells us anything, it’s probably that doing anything like this could be a courageously stupid coin flip.
Read “The Syrian Invasion” at Foreign Policy [Here]
Scenes: Upon the Demise of Kim Jong-Il 12/29/2011
Posted by Vaughn in Conflict, Defense, Global, Politics.Tags: Global Security, Kim Jong-Il, North Korea, Politics, The Atlantic
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North Koreans have shown extraordinary displays of grief in the days since the death of their leader Kim Jong Il on December 17th. Today marked the start of a two-day funeral ceremony, as thousands of North Koreans lined the snowy streets of Pyongyang to witness the procession of vehicles as it made its way to Kumsusan Memorial Palace. Official North Korean news sources have been declaring Kim Jong Un the “great successor,” but questions about the transition and future governance of the volatile, secretive state continue to make foreign governments wary. South Korean intelligence recently indicated that North Korea has tightened security in cities, put troops on alert and won loyalty pledges from top generals after Kim’s death as it consolidates power behind the anointed heir. Collected here are images — most of them official North Korean releases — of the public mourning in North Korea.
Photo Credit: The Atlantic
THE SUDDEN PASSING OF KIM JONG-IL from a heart attack, removed a longstanding figure from the balance of power in the Pacific; kept it all the same in another, while completely flipping a valued (relative) predictability on its ear, in yet another. While American forces, the State Department and Western intelligence services all suddenly lost the figure that they’ve painstakingly focused so much time and effort on, collecting information looking to understand a hidden, cloistered nation, but were still mostly in the dark about, a face who stared at American military power across from the Demilitarized Zone’s 38th Paralell for five decades, from a land frozen in time (and atmospherics); they now gain his heir, along with a North Korea now worse off than years’ prior and greater uncertainty.
The historic factors of this change are significant, as Kim Jong-Il’s successor and youngest son, Kim Jong-un, becomes the country’s next leader with far less grooming than his father had, and in a world less stable than the one Kim Jong-Il took the nation’s yoke in; way back when the dangers of the world were just comprised mainly of the influence of superpowers. But it is also historic within the context of potential stability: In this crisis for North Korea, there is the slight chance of an opportunity for the West and North Korea to find an alternate path than the one that has been established, even if it is but a small one.
The young Jong-un, a man in his late 20s, inherits this seat of power in one of the very last (ostensibly) communist countries on the planet, and which is suffering from crippling economic stagnation. And perhaps this will practically necessitate an opening of what is known as “The Hermit Kingdom.” (North Koreans are already practicing micro forms of capitalism, following the failure of the Soviet Union in the 1990s leading to starvation, as consequence to the elimination of subsidies for the nation.) How and if Jong-un can navigate out of that economic and diplomatic trench created by years of enmity, or if he even has the inkling to, is another question all together, though. He will undoubtably have an old-guard couturier of handlers that he would have to sway his way.
The situation Jong-un assumes leadership of isn’t easy, either. In the last couple of years, North Korea has been stricken by famine as a result of flooding in the country soaking its grain crops, and this has killed many North Koreans; a morose flashback to the North Korea of Kim Il-Sung and the 1990′s when torrential rains flooded the area and killed millions of people. It has been precarious in North Korea ever since that time, and Jong-un may be well-served by looking to engage the world, even though China already provides a great deal of help. And he, like many others of visibly anti-Western figures, is evidently somewhat open to the West, in the form of America’s soft-power, our culture, much like his father, who reportedly kept a collection of N.B.A. basketball tapes. Jong-un, supposedly, also has an interest in the N.B.A., and particularly Michael Jordan. He was also educated in Switzerland.
Pictures from North Korea and any general, confirmable knowledge about it is somewhat difficult to come by due to its strict rules concerning foreign press. However, the state media broadcast of Kim Jong-Il’s funeral were readily available for all the world, as were photographs of the multitude of saddened North Koreans. The Atlantic‘s In Focus provided some of the best of the lot, covering its circumference with the help of Reuters.
View The Atlantic‘s In Foucs blog’s “North Korea Mourns Kim Jong Il” [Here]
The ‘Paradox of Autocracy’ and the Young 12/16/2011
Posted by Vaughn in Conflict, Global, Politics.Tags: Bloomberg Business Week, Politics, The Great Recession, Youth Unemployment
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Photo Credit: Coverjunkie
IN the midst of the many uprisings of 2011 — from the Arab Spring to the week of the London Riots; the latter leaving those with left-leaning analytical orientations, stretching from Marxists’ conflict perspectives to neo-Marxists and the sociological thought that flows from them, argue were class-rage expressions of our day — several major news magazine titles hit the newsstands displaying covers discussing the world’s disgruntled, unemployed youth, who played the central figure in those disruptions.
During the Arab Spring protests and just months before the London riots, Bloomberg Business Week published “The Kids Are Not Alright” cover in which the lot of the young across the globe was given exegesis in their feature piece,”The Youth Unemployment Bomb.” And it’s no state secret that the future of the youth across the globe, especially in the undemocratic nations, is in jeopardy now; what with dwindled prospects for a good life, employment and the like, and the consequences it may wrought for the future of several nations. In ”The Youth Unemployment Bomb,” Peter Coy analyzes world youth unemployment and its influence upon the unrest seen throughout the globe.
The contentiousness of this current generation has been spurred by a broken promise: the idea that they would work hard to get educated and develop employable skills, and in kind they would be afforded passage through the gates of adulthood and experience lives of substantial contribution to the society. However, when that traditional promissory note has been turned on its ear — as a result of a global recession, poor governance, [and in the Democratic West], lack of market oversights, stagnated and narrowed economies with rigged markets and real wage diminishment over the past three decades — great disruptions occur. This longstanding issue finally reared its head this past year, and it has long been a concern in countries like Libya and Egypt for sometime. (It has also been a recent issue in much of Europe, Japan and the United States, to a degree. Though these nations are far less hampered, because of democracy’s ability to accommodate such expressions of grievance and produce change over time.)
I once linked to a 2008 New York Times’ report from well before the Arab spring – Memo from Cairo: “In the Shadow of a Long Past, Patiently Awaiting the Future” — that made mention of Egypt’s young population’s growing disaffection with the state of the economy and the anxiety it was creating internally for the government. It was but a small element in a story about how the nation was oddly, heavily reliant on tourism, as the pyramids crumbled and tourists’ interest in them waned, and how Mubarak was losing support due to years of a paralyzed economy affecting many of Egypt’s educated young.
By 2011, Mubarak’s contracting support morphed into a tidal wave of young who wanted to take the leader and his phalanx to the scrap heap. What Mubarak was ultimately experiencing in 2011 is known as “the paradox of autocracy,” * a sociological phenomena identified by a University of California at San Diego professor, which explains much of the plight of this educated youth and the challenges governments in Arab Spring states face. It’s also a phenomena that was mentioned in “The Kids Are Not Alright”:
For decades, Mubarak coped with Egypt’s youth unemployment problem by expanding college enrollments. That strategy couldn’t last forever. This past March, scholars Ragui Assaad and Samantha Constant of the Middle East Youth Initiative, a venture of Brookings Institution and the Dubai School of Government, put it bluntly: “In Egypt, educated young people who spend years searching for formal employment, mostly in the public sector, are now forgoing this prospect as the supply of government jobs dries up. Formal private sector employment—quite limited in the first place—is not growing fast enough. … Hence, young people are left with either precarious informal wage employment or expected to simply create a job for themselves in Egypt’s vast informal economy.”
Mubarak gave no sign of knowing how explosive the situation was, but his ministers did state repeatedly that Egypt needed rapid growth to soak up new job-seekers. The country started getting some things right in 2004, when Mubarak appointed a business-minded government under Prime Minister Ahmed Nazif. The nation lowered corporate taxes and import tariffs, privatized telecom, and expanded exports. The economy grew 7 percent annually from 2006 through 2008, dipped below 5 percent in 2009, and was on track for over 5 percent growth this past year, according to the International Monetary Fund.
That was good and bad. While growth is essential for easing social tensions in the long term, it can exacerbate them in the short term in a country such as Egypt. That’s because, former Finance Minister Youssef Boutros-Ghali told BusinessWeek several years ago, the first fruits of growth go to those who are already wealthy.
* The lack of democracy in Egypt and elsewhere in the Middle East—Israel being the exception—makes matters worse. Goldstone, of George Mason, says Mubarak is running afoul of the “paradox of autocracy,” a phrase coined by the late University of California at San Diego sociologist Timothy L. McDaniel. “Any authoritarian ruler who wants to modernize his country has to educate the workforce,” Goldstone says. “But when you educate the workforce you also create people who are not so willing to follow authority. Thus you create this threat of rebellion and disorder.” Democracies are “much better at managing large numbers of highly educated people,” Goldstone notes. Spain’s youth unemployment is even higher than Egypt’s, but young Spaniards aren’t trying to overthrow the government.
Even so, rich democracies ignore youth unemployment at their peril. In the 34 industrialized nations in the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development, at least 16.7 million young people are not employed, in school, or in training, and about 10 million of those aren’t even looking, the OECD said in December 2010. In the most-developed nations, the job market has split between high-paying jobs that many workers aren’t qualified for and low-paying jobs that they can’t live on, says Harry J. Holzer, a public policy professor at Georgetown University and co-author of a new book, Where Are All the Good Jobs Going? Many of the jobs that once paid good wages to high school graduates have been automated or outsourced.
Read “The Youth Unemployment Bomb” at Bloomberg Business Week [Here]
The War in Africa 12/07/2011
Posted by Vaughn in Defense, Global, Journalism.Tags: Africa, Foreign Policy, Global Security, Special Operations
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Photo Credit: Army Times
STARTING with The Nation‘s, Jeremy Scahill, reporting of secret bases used for the War on Terror (I forget that this is now an anachronism, and the conflict is now known as “The Overseas Counterinsurgency Operation“), in Somalia, the new-ish reports of a drone program in the region and President Obama’s recent move to send 1oo special operations soldiers to act as advisers; it is clear that there is a move afoot to focus American efforts on the continent. This, accompanied by the newly established Africa Command (AFRICOM), to oversee counter-terrorism operations in the region, makes this only more obvious. The motivation behind this is partly the rise of al-Shabaab (“Movement of Striving Youth”), an African al-Qaeda affiliate working primarily out of controlled areas in Somalia. (And years of perhaps inchoate policy in regards to terror threats on the continent, however there are some who ask whether the cells in Africa present a clear threat to America.)
When it has come to intelligence, there has simply been a vacuum on the African continent, both those of the technical and human variety. The war in Africa, itself, beyond the War on Terror produces a new reality with regards to the overall global counter-terror effort, as we ramp down in Afghanistan and Iraq and ramp-up elsewhere in what seems like the equivalent of proxy wars, like those of the Cold War, only this time focused on counter-terror. Recently, the Army Times conducted a six-month long, six-part special investigation on the matter in a series called “Secret War in Africa” which began with “The Secret War: Africa Ops May Just Be Starting.”
In “The Secret War: Africa Ops May Just Be Starting” the Army Times tells of a pivotal mission of divergent details and accounts — in the sense of what’s true depends on just who you ask — where two human intelligence (HUMINT) soldiers were taken hostage as either covert operators or as non-covert military personnel, in what may have been a clandestine operation in the Ogaden of Ethipoia. It was the first major incident, that indicated something had changed with our approach.
The two men were on the ground as part of Combined Joint Task Force-Horn of Africa’s intelligence directorate, and were granted permission to go “beyond the wire” to handle, presumably, intel-collection duties. But just how they did that may have been part of the problem, as they reportedly developed a cover story which had them working for the Red Cross and which created a much larger issue when they were eventually approached by Ethiopian troops, and their weapons were found. The two soldiers were detained by the Ethiopian forces who presumed the soldiers to be hostile, particularly after their cover story of working for the Red Cross was upturned by their concealed pistols.
Depending on the conflicting account you choose to believe, the men were held anywhere from 48 hours, according to Major General (Maj. Gen.) Timothy Ghromley the head of Central Command during that time; or about 10 days, according to a senior intelligence officer. The account by Maj. Gen. Ghromley had the men under his charge acting in rogue. According to him, they were not to be operating in a covert manner:
‘They’re completely overt,’ he said. ‘They’re supposed to identify themselves as U.S. service members.’
The account by the intelligence official implies something a bit different, calling it a “clandestine operation.” The men were not in their uniforms, but according to the senior official; if they were detained they’d be able to declare their status as American soldiers, so that in the official’s words, “somebody could get them the hell out of there.” It eventually took the ambassador to Ethiopia, the State Department, and Central Command commander, (now-retired) Admiral William Fallon, to free them. The incident led to African intelligence operations in the specific area to become public and compromised. Everything from notepads, military-related items and papers, was scooped up by the Ethiopian government, according to the State Department. An intelligence official quoted in the Army Times article stated:
‘It was like amateur hour, this team that got rolled up,’ the intelligence official said. ‘There was information that they had that they should not have been carrying … It gave away techniques and procedures that we couldn’t afford to do, because we knew at that time that al-Qaida was building up its capability in Somalia and that was why we were trying damn hard to get into Somalia with really sensitive collection.’
The event which transpired between March 2007 and March 2008, depending on who one talks to (again), may have set the operations back in the horn of Africa for years. That is until now. A quick timeline of events show an escalation between the summer of 2009 to roughly the present:
• On Sept. 14, 2009, a U.S. special operations helicopter raid killed Saleh Ali Saleh Nabhan, a senior al-Qaida in East Africa figure.
• On April 19, 2011, the U.S. captured Somali national and al-Shabaab member Ahmed Abdulkadir Warsame, 25, as he crossed the Gulf of Aden on a ship to Yemen from Somalia. The U.S. held Warsame, who allegedly has links to Yemen’s al-Qaida branch, for two months on a Navy ship before flying him to the U.S.
• On June 7, TFG [Transitional Federal Government] forces killed Harun Fazul, the most-wanted al-Qaida figure in East Africa, when he mistook their roadblock in Mogadishu for an al-Shabaab position.
• On June 23, U.S. drones struck al-Shabaab targets near Kismayo.
• On July 6, there were reports of airstrikes in Lower Juba, the southernmost region of Somalia, according to the website SomaliaReport.com.
• In early August, under increasing military pressure from the TFG [Transitional Federal Government] forces backed up by 9,000 African Union peacekeepers from Uganda and Burundi, al-Shabaab announced its withdrawal from Mogadishu.
• On Sept. 15, there were more airstrikes on an al-Shabaab training camp in Taabta in Lower Juba, according to SomaliaReport.com.
• On Sept. 21, The Washington Post and The Wall Street Journal reported that the U.S. is building a “ring of secret drone bases” including facilities in Ethiopia, the Seychelles and “the Arabian Peninsula.”
• On Sept. 23, airstrikes hit al-Shabaab’s main camp at the Kismayo airport.
• On Oct. 4, an al-Shabaab truck bomb killed an estimated 65 people in Mogadishu.
Read “The Secret War in Africa” series at the Military Times [Here]
