Building on my recent post about self-sufficiency and reliance for individual security , I’d like to begin laying out a proposal for the US adopting small decentralized solutions to the problem of border security. This is not so dissimilar from what the US is attempting in Afghanistan.

The Problems:

• The United States government is either unwilling or unable to adequately patrol and secure the nation’s borders.


• A large number of Americans feel that their wish for a secure and better patrolled border is not being met.


• Insecure borders allow easy infiltration of illegal immigrants, organized crime, and terrorists into the United States. It also increases the ease of the smuggling and trafficking of drugs, weapons and people.

The Reaction

• A proliferation of self-organized groups like the Minutemen.


• This has led to:
  

  • Government, media and left wing hysteria that ordinary people would take responsibility for their country into their own hands.
  
  
  • Potential problems and miscommunication with law enforcement.
  
  
  • Potential legal questions.
  
  

Solution:

The solution to this problem is neither more CBP people, bigger government or more centralization. In fact these are surefire ways to make matters worse. The solution lies in harnessing the sizeable numbers of citizens who are willing to volunteer their time, effort, and even assume some risk in order to protect their communities and country. Moreover, the militia, as meant in the Bill of Rights (every adult male with a firearm) has been called up before and in recent history. During WWII, the militia was called up on the West Coast in 1942 to guard against Japanese landings and I believe on the East Coast against German ones but cant find a link on that at the moment.

Read the rest here.

I recently picked up an old friend, a text that I read in the early days of my personal education into realist foreign policy—Henry Kissinger’s Diplomacy —and found myself reflecting for several days on this passage in the first chapter.

Theorists of the balance of power often leave the impression that it is the natural form of international relations. In fact, balance-of-power systems have existed only rarely in human history. The Western Hemisphere has never known one, nor as the territory of contemporary China since the end of the period of warring states, over 2,000 years ago. For the greatest part of humanity and the longest periods of history, empire has been the typical mode of government. Empires have no interest in operating within an international system; they aspire to be the international system. Empires have no need for a balance of power. That is how the United States has conducted its foreign policy in the Americas, and China through most of its history in Asia.

Reading about the 19th and early 20th centuries, I found myself wondering—will a healthy and robust balance of power between the US, China, India, Europe, and possibly Russia and Japan, emerge in the 21st century? Empire, and the balance of power, both work well for preserving international order when they function. When they don’t function, the result is often war and disaster.

I’ve frequently praised Jared Diamond’s Collapse and think it’s an excellent book regarding the challenges posed to sustainable human civilization. And I have read with equal fascination about Questioning Collapse: Human Resilience, Ecological Vulnerability, and the Aftermath of Empire, a book that is the culmination of years of scientific debate on Diamond’s theses.

Reading the reviews of the book in scientific and popular publications are like night and day. The peer-reviewed, scientific journals generally praise the book, commending it as a multi-disciplinary approach to reexamining Diamond’s thesis. Archaeologists, cultural anthropologists, and historians reanalyze and reinterpret Diamond’s case studies and conclusions and have some interesting theories that do not dwell on factual quibbles. These reviews say that none of the authors disagree with Diamond’s claim that understanding past human-environment interactions is important to our future, but they caution that this is not the only issue societies must deal with in order to make civilization sustainable.

The popular reviews say quite the opposite. They fault the book for cheap straw man attacks and misrepresentation of Diamond’s theory and analysis. Popular reviewers also detect jealousy among the scholars who instinctively criticize the multi-disciplinary approach of a birdwatching geographer as he covers history, archaeology, and anthropology. One review on Wikio asks in frustration if you can understand this academic jargon from page 211:

Diamond’s emphasis on the longue duree process is almost Braudellian, in which almost imperceptible structures, changing at glacial speed, provide the foundation for conjunctural movements (such as the Spanish conquest of the Americas) in which events—be they “creative” or prosaic—ride like flecks of foam atop the waves (in Braudel’s metaphor), which themselves are only the surface manifestations (“conjunctures”) of the deep sea (“structure”) and its inexorably powerful currents.

Another reviewer even grimaces that, considering that this is the academic reaction to Collapse, future generations may look back at our own civilization and note that this type of blind ivory tower sophomoric debate was one causal element of our own downfall.

The collection of essays in the book primarily focus on counterquestions to Diamond’s thesis. Who is to say that Norse Greenland didn’t fail because its inhabitants eventually decided that life could be better elsewhere? Or that the Maya abandoning their monumental Classic period religious centers was a political and social shift that was a good decision at the time? The books rejects “historical amnesia” by looking at native Easter Islanders, the Maya of Central America, Native North Americans, and Aboriginal Australians and seeing they have to say about their supposed disappearance of their ancestor civilizations. These people have not vanished, and their accounts should be considered when reviewing the so-called collapsed civilizations, because these societies didn’t die out so much as to change. Yet the popular review of this is that these academic critiques are shallow and incomplete, and they take pains to go in opposition to Diamond, even when that means staking out some undefendable claims.

Diamond’s tome on the topic of the environment and human civilization is perhaps one of the most important books of the decade, a pessimistic wake-up call about resource consumption and the fragile nature of environment. Certainly I had issues with the book as I read it—his chapter in Japan got some basic things wrong, making me think that much of the rest of the book could be wrong as well—yet my longstanding suspicion of academia makes me sympathize with the popular reviews.

Or so says Christopher Hitchens in a compelling piece in Slate on North Korea. Part reminiscence, part reconsidertion, and part book review, Hitchens praises the book The Cleanest Race: How North Koreans See Themselves and Why It Matters, recently written by B.R. Myers, in which Hitchens repeats Myer’s theory that communism in North Korea is dead—its most recent constitution drops all mention of the word and there is no dictatorship of the proletariat. Instead, Pyongyang operates like a textbook fascist totalitarian government, maintained by slave labor, and based on racism and xenophobia. (Ironically, many of the principles may be carried over from Japanese imperialism.)

I think the population’s ignorance about their state of affairs is overblown, and I don’t think that Hitchens’ one racist, xenophobic tour guide is quite as representative of the population as he claims to think, and I think that in the past few years the people of the DPRK have learned that their government is dirt poor compared to their southern neighbor. (The country recently backtracked on its currency devaluation after it unleashed public outrage, a mighty rare occurrance.) But that’s about the only point of optimism in the Korea.

Hitchens’ article is titled A Nation of Racist Dwarfs, and the reason is clear only at the end of the article:

Here are the two most shattering facts about North Korea. First, when viewed by satellite photography at night, it is an area of unrelieved darkness. Barely a scintilla of light is visible even in the capital city. Second, a North Korean is on average six inches shorter than a South Korean. You may care to imagine how much surplus value has been wrung out of such a slave, and for how long, in order to feed and sustain the militarized crime family that completely owns both the country and its people.

But this is what proves Myers right. Unlike previous racist dictatorships, the North Korean one has actually succeeded in producing a sort of new species. Starving and stunted dwarves, living in the dark, kept in perpetual ignorance and fear, brainwashed into the hatred of others, regimented and coerced and inculcated with a death cult: This horror show is in our future, and is so ghastly that our own darling leaders dare not face it and can only peep through their fingers at what is coming.

I think the last line is interesting coming from Hitchens, a left-wing radical who supported advocated invading Iraq on the grounds that the civilized nations of the world will inevitably have to face off against such a tyrant, and that it was better to do so on our terms. He stops short of advocating a strike on North Korea, but the dreaded implication is that we are going to have to deal with the fallout from North Korea’s tragic situation at some point, and the legacy will likely be with us for a century or more.

The “West” tends to forget the fact that Islamic civilisation in Arab Andalusia was at its height many centuries before David Hume and John Locke, Diderot and Immanuel Kant wrote their epochal works.

For two centuries, Arab Andalusia was an incomparable centre of philosophical and scientific scholarship. Muslims, Jews and Christians held critical debates there on all sorts of issues, without fear of religious controversy. The Aristotelian tradition would probably have died out without their work. Dante and Nikolaus Cusanus, Giordano Bruno and Spinoza owe their Islamic teachers just as much as do modern astronomy, logic, optics, mathematics, medicine and not least poetry. As we all know, though, this heyday was not to last.

Hans Magnus Enzensberger

Perhaps one of the most important questions for the future of human society over the next few centuries can be phrased as follows: does the West represent the future of the Middle East, or does the Middle East represent the future of the West?

The modern technology and progress of the secular West and the backwards medieval societies of the Middle East are not static conditions. For centuries, the Islamic world was the center of history, scholarship, science, and religous tolerance, while the West was a rabble of feuding religious kingdoms where art and science were often labelled as heresies. Somehow, through the Protestant Reformation and the Enlightenment, theological institutions lost their supremacy and eventually, a new age of development and discovery began. Meanwhile, the educated, multireligious societies of the Middle East slowly become poorer and degenerated into feuding factions where religious leaders called the shots. That is where things lie today.

The public debate on the topic of asking when will the Middle East modernize assumes the first half of my proposed question is the future—that the West’s enlightened rationalism will inevitably spread to all societies. We also tend to assume that the spread of knowledge, rationalism, technology and social growth would not come at our expense.

Yet is it not possible that, in the future, technological and economic innovation occurs in China, India, and the Middle East, making the West less relevant and poorer? And as the West becomes poorer, unitary religious authorities grow more powerful, such that centuries from now, Christian fundamentalists in the American interior call the shots in their provincial fiefdoms, while enlightened governments in the Middle East are the center of knowledge and power?

Sure, it sounds unlikely looking around the world today. It feels utterly impossible. But that’s essentially what happened to Western civilization about 1500 years ago, as a unified Roman Empire slowly broke up and shattered into countless waring kingdoms where the Pope in Rome manipulated the feuding kingdoms. And this view of the future was more generally discussed in The Illusion of the Progressive Trajectory, in which CA commenters overwhelmingly agreed with me that social progress is not an irreversible trend. What should we say of the benefits of the enlightenment? Which society will benefit in the future from secularism, science and technology?

When thinking about the Islamic world from the perspective of a Westerner, especially as I enjoy my oppulant lifestyle in Dubai and marvel how I live and work in an area that was a dry sand pit a decade ago, I find myself uncomfortable as I wonder to myself: do we represent their future, or do they represent ours?

Quoting from the JOE 2008 Report, Strategic Estimates in the Twentieth Century

1900 - If you had been a strategic analyst for the world’s leading power, you would have been British, looking warily at Britain’s age old enemy: France.

1910 - You would now be allied with France, and the enemy would now be Germany

1920 - Britain and its allies had won World War I, but now the British found themselves engaged in a naval race with its former allies the United States and Japan.

1930 - For the British, naval limitation treaties were in place, the Great Depression had started and defense planning for the next five years assumed a “ten year” rule—no war in ten years. British planners posited the main threats to the Empire as the Soviet Union and Japan, while Germany and Italy were either friendly or no threat.

1936 - A British planner would now posit three great threats: Italy, Japan, and the worst, a resurgent Germany, while little help could be expected from the United States.

1940 - The collapse of France in June left Britain alone in a seemingly hopeless war with Germany and Italy with a Japanese threat looming in the Pacific. America had only recently begun to scramble to rearm its military forces.

1950 - The United States was now the world’s greatest power, the atomic age had dawned, and a “police action” began in June in Korea that was to kill over 36,500 Americans, 58,000 South Koreans, nearly 3,000 Allied soldiers, 215,000 North Koreans, 400,000 Chinese, and 2,000,000 Korean civilians before a cease-fire brought an end to the fighting in 1953. The main opponent in the conflict would be China, America’s ally in the war against Japan.

1960 - Politicians in the United States were focusing on a missile gap that did not exist; massive retaliation would soon give way to flexible response, while a small insurgency in South Vietnam hardly drew American attention.

1970 - The United States was beginning to withdraw from Vietnam, its military forces in shambles. The Soviet Union had just crushed incipient rebellion in the Warsaw Pact. Détente between the Soviets and Americans had begun, while the Chinese were waiting in the wing to create an informal alliance with the United States.

1980 - The Soviets had just invaded Afghanistan, while a theocratic revolution in Iran had overthrown the Shah’s regime. “Desert One”—an attempt to free American hostages in Iran—ended in a humiliating failure, another indication of what pundits were calling “the hollow force.” America was the greatest creditor nation the world had ever seen.

1990 - The Soviet Union collapses. The supposedly hollow force shreds the vaunted Iraqi Army in less than 100 hours. The United States had become the world’s greatest debtor nation. No one outside of the Department of Defense has heard of the internet.

2000 - Warsaw is the capital of a North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) nation. Terrorism is emerging as America’s greatest threat. Biotechnology, robotics, nanotechnology, HD energy, etc. are advancing so fast they are beyond forecasting

2010 – Take the above and plan accordingly! ComingAnarchy readers, in light of the past century, how would you summarize the strategic plan in 2010 and 2020?

Looking at the failed attempt by the “Christmas Bomber” to blow up a plane as he flew from Nigeria to Detroit, what can we say of the US government response eight years after 9/11? Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab was fortunately thwarted by passengers when he lit his pants on fire while he sat in his seat, but why was he allowed on the flight in the first place? His father had alerted the US Embassy in Nigeria of his son’s radicalism six months before the attack. He was already banned from the UK and previously refused a visa, despite being engaged in university studies there. Yet this was not enough to put him on the “no fly” list and to board a flight bound for the United States.

The TSA shouldn’t take the immediate blame—the goofs who fumble around mistaking bananas and shampoo for bombs were not responsible for checking flight boarding at airports in the Netherlands or Nigeria. But why can’t the Department of Homeland Security figure out which radicals should be banned from visiting the United States when it has this type of information? The Christmas Bomber is scary because it shows how all the overlapping layers of terrorist prevention can still easily fail through pure incompetence and systemal information overload.

What’s more, the TSA has announced absurd overreactive measures that no electronic devices, bathroom breaks or anything on laps will be permitted one hour before landing. How this would do anything to stop the Christmas Bomber, or future terrorist attackers, is beyond human comprehension—but fortunately, as I’ve noted before, the TSA runs a blog and in the latest post mindlessly refer to a press statement, refusing to comment on new, random security policies that will be in effect at airports worldwide, and predictably are hit by more than a hundred derisive blog comments . Some favorites:

I am an American Citizen with absolutely no crime history or affiliation with anything illegal. I’ve been traveling world wide for over 40 years. I am on a watch list. Where is Umar’s name on this list? What’s wrong with this picture?

So the TSA is saying methods are different from airport to airport and agent to agent and pilot to pilot because they’re “designed to be unpredictable”?

Why not identify the most effective methods and use them everywhere? Maybe because the security is all for show and will only capture idiots who bring hand grenades and machetes? (And, of course, water, cottage cheese, Gatorade, lotion, shampoo, contact lens solution, hummus. . .) Hmm.

Wondering whether or not an agent will make a passenger take their bulky sweater off or confiscate their peanut butter or be seated certain minutes of a flight isn’t going to thwart the sophisticated terrorist.

Designed to be unpredictable! It’s always been chaos. Way to own it, TSA.

let’s go people: soil yourselves and marinate in it for your final hour of flight…it will save a life! Rigggght.

After a few more incidents the passengers will be anesthetized and naked.

The blog is as much a joke as the TSA is—read about them justifying TSA policy when Britney Spears was reported to go through a checkpoint with a cup of ice, which is apparently permitted under TSA screening policy even if it is in excess of 3.4 fluid ounces. The first of 230 comments reads: “Because no terrorist would ever think to freeze a liquid explosive. But thanks for admitting once again that your policies are nonsense.”

I was perusing the US State Department Travel Warning site and noticed several new travel alerts that have been issued with minimal fanfare or news coverage. The last month has seen a flurry of new warnings that I share below:

Mauritania and Mali (12/02 and 11/19): Foggy Bottom urges “extreme caution” when traveling there due to increased activities by Al Qaeda in the Islamic Maghreb (AQIM), which continues to demonstrate its intent and ability to conduct terrorist attacks against westerners. Three Spanish NGO workers were kidnapped from their vehicle while driving on November 29, on August 8, a suicide bombing near the French Embassy in Nouakchott injured two French guards and one Mauritanian citizen, and on June 23 a private U.S. citizen was shot and killed in an apparent kidnapping attempt by AQIM. Faith-based NGOs and other organizations active in the region, regardless of location, may also be particularly targeted.

Chad (11/23): Violent crime is escalating in eastern Chad near the Sudan and CAR borders, and the level of violence is increasing. Incidents including robbery and carjacking at gunpoint, kidnapping, attempted kidnapping, and murder. Criminal and rebel activity tends to increase during the dry season, which lasts from late September to July, but has nonetheless remained steady through this year. Despite UN peacekeepers, the government remains unstable, and the US embassy is ready to evacuate if rebels approach the capital of N’djamena. Commercial flights are also subject to change when rebel activity intensifies.

Sri Lanka (11/19): Although the civil war appears to have ended, the warning about the risks of travel to Sri Lanka continue due to security concerns and uncleared landmines in the northern area. There are also remnant members of the Tamil Tigers (LTTE), although overall stability in the southern and western areas of the country has improved.

Nepal (11/19): One of ComingAnarchy’s favorite hotspots remains subject to political violence. Protests, demonstrations and disruptions continue to occur, often without advance notice, during which protestors have used violence that includes forcibly closing businesses and damaging private and public property. Curfews can be announced with little or no advance notice. And despite the Maoist peace and participation with the new government, the Young Communist League (YCL), a Maoist affiliate, and other armed groups continue to engage in extortion, abuse, and threats of violence, particularly in rural areas near the India border.

Sometimes, movies inspire thought on public policy, and the film Avatar made me reconsider one outlandish doomsday scenario: how human society should react to an alien invasion.

Arriving with a whimper, not a bang.

Typically, Hollywood films portray alien invasion as either (1) a horde of invisible spies in our midst, or, (2) a sudden attack of overwhelming force. Avatar portrays a third scenario—an alien planet is first colonized by business interests, protected not by a government or state military but by private mercenaries, and who generally use their overwhelming power in reactive mode, which is, objectively, disproportionate and excessive.

The Avatar scenario feels more believable. Throughout human history, conquerors are typically prefaced by scouts, diplomats, and exploratory militant missions, while colonization is typically carried out by independent pioneers or merchant adventurers. Throughout the film, I felt that certain aspects of the plot felt familiar, and that they were taken from the experience of human history, when primitive societies have come into contact with technologically advanced people.

It feels prudent, then, to prepare for an alien invasion not by watching Independence Day and getting pumped for a gung ho, all-or-nothing last stand, but by looking at the experience of wars and empires through history. Consider the experience of some major nations that survived colonization or attempted colonization:

• Alexander’s invasion looks in retrospect like a massive and sudden slaughter, but his was a reactive invasion that only followed after centuries of Persian subjugation of the divided Greek city states. Similarly, in the struggle between Rome v.s. Carthage, the Phoenician superpower held domination over the Mediterranean Sea for centuries and had the power to invade the Italian territory of Rome when tensions flared, and only through steady growth and perseverance did Rome finally win and destroy Carthage. It could take centuries to beat back an alien force, but it may be possible through adoption of new technology over time.
• In India, the corporate interests of London preceded British Imperial authority by playing the various Rajs and warlords of against one another, slowly taking power nationwide when that was easier than propping up a feckless leader, with the population surviving but impoverished. It is possible that an alien invasion could try to play off the major world powers against each other by rewarding some countries with amazing technology in exchange for mining or colonization rights, even of common resources. How could and would the world react if, say, Australia was rewarded with futuristic technologies in exchange for coastal facilities that harvested ocean water?
• In China, colonial interests were able to dominate the coast but found it difficult to penetrate the interior, and benefited by pushing opium on the public, both financially, and in subduing the locals. An alien species could take control of key centers of power and subjugate the population with drugs, food, or entertainment—probably a lot easier than subjugating with force and facing rebellions and sabotage.
• In Japan, when faced with technologically advanced invaders, modernizers pushed out the old government and rapidly modernized by adopting both the methods and technology of the West, later starting its own regional empire. This is the most promising example from world history that shows how we could learn from would-be colonizers or invaders, while remembering that hubris shouldn’t get the better of us. Also, Japan was fortunate that it quickly quashed all rebellions and those loyal to the old order, while Korea, which had the potential to follow Japan’s path, was thwarted by infighting.

Of course, there is much to make us fatalistic or cynical. The Mongols who galloped across Eurasia slaughtered the populations of sieged cities, the colonists in North America and Australia who obliterated the indigenous population with force and disease, and the Moriori who were exterminated without pity by Mauri invaders are just some examples. But I think many examples suggest that an alien invasion would not necessarily be game over for human civilization. Many societies that exist today did so through a social Darwin-esque survival of the fittest. Our own history teaches us much of how to proactively react.

For those still peddling the line that piracy is carried out by poor, starving Africans, victimized by evil European fisherman, this article not only provides evidence to the contrary, but speaks to the advanced nature of it in both a business and social sense.

It is a lucrative business that has drawn financiers from the Somali diaspora and other nations—and now the gangs in Haradheere have set up an exchange to manage their investments.

[...] “Four months ago, during the monsoon rains, we decided to set up this stock exchange. We started with 15 ‘maritime companies’ and now we are hosting 72. Ten of them have so far been successful at hijacking,” Mohammed said. “The shares are open to all and everybody can take part, whether personally at sea or on land by providing cash, weapons or useful materials … we’ve made piracy a community activity.”
[...] “The district gets a percentage of every ransom from ships that have been released, and that goes on public infrastructure, including our hospital and our public schools.”

Reading the article, I almost think I’m reading Global Guerillas. As pirates continue to extend their reach offshore, and Western nations continue to needlessly devise ridiculous non-lethal anti-pirate weapons, despite the fact that the problem of piracy was solved centuries ago with firearms, it would seem naive to believe a few semi-coordinated naval ships unwilling to actually use lethal force will solve the problem. If anything, I’d wager that piracy will actually increase due to the international naval presence as that will drive up the profit margin for successful raids, similar to the failed American War on Drugs where the DEA serves only to maintain and ensure the profitibility of drugs.

Lastly, given a previous Wired article discussion of the international side of the business, this blogger wonders whether such a new “stock exchange” will further internationalize the business past the traditional diaspora connections and secondly, whether this could be an early attempt, or even precedent for similar “black stock exchanges” in other illicit businesses such as drugs, weapons, people and other smuggling for example. If decentralization and internationalization are key driving forces in crime and terrorism, it would seem that “publicly traded criminal enterprise” may be a logical extension. Readers?