Three Sigma Systems

In today/s NYT Economix, Princeton economics professor. Uwe E. Reinhardt, demonstrates that the economist’s beloved idea of”efficiency” is more capable of creating misery for the greatest number of people than happiness.

“Efficiency is the seemingly value-free standard economists use when they make the case for particular policies — say, free trade, more liberal immigration policies, cap-and-trade policies on environmental pollution, the all-volunteer army or congestion tolls. The concept of efficiency is used to justify a reliance on free-market principles, rather than the government, to organize the health care sector, or to make recommendations on taxation, government spending and monetary policy.”

If your read his article carefully, you will see that his explanation drives a stake through the heart of the vampirish beliefs that are driving us toward ruination.

I have on previous occasions discussed what I call the myth of efficiency. The so-called “science” of economics is built upon the idea that human beings will seek out the most “efficient” means to fullfil their needs and desires — to achieve maximum happiness. In other words, economists begin with the assumption that individual actors will seek to minimize their investment of personal resources and maximize their return. From this we get the notion that all human behavior is driven by a natural “profit motive”.

Challenging the economist’s view of the human drive for “efficiency” is a difficult proposition if only because you and I see day-in and day-out, that most, if not all, of the people we deal with seem to act in exactly that way. The evidence of our senses tells us that others can only be trusted to do what they believe will produce for them, the greatest gain. So pervasive is our belief in the economist’s blood-sucking axiom of human behavior, that it is often extended to include our relations with those closest to us. We regard our spouse with cautious suspicion. We expect that our children will engage in duplicity to get what they want. We lay awake at night wondering which child our parents most favored.

And, given the evidence of our senses, are we not required to respond in kind?

“What a world, what a world”,  said the Wicked Witch of the East.

The question we need to ask ourselves is if  ”efficient”  blood-sucking is the way of the world as it “is” or if it is the way of the world as we “make it”?

A world of people seeking the greatest efficiency, which Reinhardt casts in terms seeking optimums, tends to produce misery in greater proportions because those who suck more blood must do so at a cost to others, and in doing so, successful blood-suckers acquire a vested interest in perpetuating the myth of efficiency that keeps them sucking large.

Perpetuating the myth is not as difficult as it sounds. For the religiously minded, God’s grace will do. For those who prefer science, the discipline of economics seems “logical”. And for those who prefer more practical reasons, differentials in reward and remuneration — doggie bon-bons — are powerful myth-sustaining incentives.

Wait a minute, you say, doesn’t the fact that differential rewards motivate belief  prove of the economist’s theory?

No more nor less than than the observation that dependence on a daily regime of heroin drives a person to the happiness of  self-annihilation.

It is no surprise that we see vampires everywhere about us. From the day our children are born, we hover over them in training and judgement, lest they be weaker than other vampires. Then we send them off to schools in which the blood-letting is reinforced by grading on a curve. We pit children against children and children against teachers. And once school is out, we divide workers against workers and workers against bosses and neighbors against neighbors. All the world is made a blood-bath of suckers and suckees.

All of this self-made reality seems to us, the natural order of things, and we cleave to it as if it was the word of God Herself. Until that is, we actually need to address tasks of deadly importance.

When we train our young to fight our wars, in which we want to suck the blood of others, or keep others from sucking our blood, we happily do a turn about. We train those who will engage in the most difficult and deadly of enterprises to work together. We teach them that each depends on the others. We teach them to trust one another and to trust those assigned to coordinate and lead. An army of vampires who devour one another just won’t cut it!

So now we find a very different idea of efficiency in which mutual trust and collaboration take precedence over individual self interest.

So it stands to reason that if we can create armies of selfless fighters to tackle the greatest of challenges, then the economist’s vampirish “instincts”, if they exist at all, do not determine our modes of behavior after all. It seems that our human nature is what we chose to make it.

(Now that I think about it, the movie “Daybreakers” was quite clever.)

Theory underlies ALL human experience including every seemingly raw observation or assertion of true fact. Theory is the vehicle of all conscious experience.

Simply put, theory-making consists of setting forth an assertion, no matter how trivial or grand, in which we claim “If this, then that”. In other words, theory is prediction.

My theory of consciousness is that it is rooted in our genetic predisposition to construct theory (Darwinian). The structure of theory is narrative. Theory is “story” that we tell to, among, and with others, real and imagined, as in our imagined “selves”.

The construction of narrative (i.e. theory), is no more mysterious than the behavior of birds gathering twigs and bits of string to shape into a nest in which they will thereafter reside, along with their developing offspring.  Instead of twigs and string, we gather up our self-created vocal and gestural material and shape it into symbolic-narrative nests of varying utility, in which we reside, and without which we are not and cannot be conscious.

Every conscious being comes into existence in the context of theory shared by others as narrative, and thereafter in continuous interaction with others and the substantive world at large. It is in this complex ongoing interaction of story-tellers predicting their way through the world that theory comes to be accepted and taken-for-granted. Theory that comes to be taken-for-granted (e.g. Self-evident or “proven”) forms the foundation for the edifice of subsequent theory we construct continually.

We cannot extricate ourselves from theory — we cannot be conscious of ourselves from outside our narrative nests. I think of this as a “belief barrier” that we can only overcome by practices designed to give-up self-awareness (i.e. Non-consciousness). OOOOM!

In the business of formal theory-making that we call modern science, the predictions made — the “if this then that” stories told — can never be proven for the simple reason that in prediction, the totality of all possible future outcomes is unknowable. A theory can be falsified by one disconfirming outcome, but never proven.

But as we approach the belief-barrier, the falsification of theory that forms the foundations of our consciousness threatens our very conception of the socially constructed self. To actually break the belief-barrier would be to descend into incoherent madness — a bird’s nest distorted into useless form —rather than sublimely pure awareness. An individual bird of a nesting species who, for whatever reason, becomes incapable of building a functional nest, is incapable of surviving, and so too for the conscious creature who becomes incapable of constructing a narrative nest.

This helps us to understand why down here, near the belief-barrier, theory often stands despite repeated falsifications in practice. The coherence of our symbolic narrative nest is of paramount importance and evidence-be-damned, such coherence must be sustained at all costs, lest the story-teller be plunged into incoherent, suicidal, madness.

The boundaries of theory-making down near the belief-barrier are circumscribed by what “works” as prediction, more or less, but also by the symbolic material itself. Like twigs and string, the structure of “if this, then that”, prescribes a form that is self-limiting and self-bounding, but infinitely variable within those limits.

In consciousness, we cannot overcome the belief-barrier but we can characterize it. In doing so, we can eschew illusions of truth and proof that restrict our ability to improve the form of our nest with purpose and intention, while sustaining our nest’s functional coherence.

I believe that the process of theory-making down near the belief-barrier is universal in nature and can be both described and explained as a whole. These essential elements transcend the variety of forms regarded as “proven” that continue to confound our inquiry.

People often ask why the work of W. E. Deming and his mentor, Walter Shewhart, figure so promintenlty in my thinking about the nature of human endeavor and the human enterprise as a whole. My answer is that these two men recognized that the human faculty for predicting the future is what sets we humans apart from all other creatures. Prediction is the bread and butter of our existence and the quality of our predictions determines whether we live or die. Deming and Shewhart understood that our principal aim in acting must be to reduce variation, and thereby, increase predictability.

Our penchant for prediction is more than a hobby, it is a genetically hardwired obsession that causes us to imagine patterns, cycles, and rhythms in all events related to our activities. To our minds, the regularities of events, real and imagined, are the keys to predictions by which we organize our actions along useful lines. We call these patterns “systems”.

Based on this understanding, Deming and Shewhart both concerned themselves with methods for recognizing useful and meaningful patterns and, given our limited powers, for reducing the variability of those patterns in order to enhance our ability to predict the outcomes of our activities.

Two articles in todays NYT deserve our attention. Both deal with instances in which we, who rely on predictability for our survival, have by our own misguided actions, increased variability and thereby reduced predictability.

In Weather Chaos, a Case for Global Warming

Double Dip? A Tipping Point May Be Near

Everything varies, but it is not the direction of change that matters most but rather, the range of change that threatens our survival as a species.

Over the years I have had ongoing discussion with my friend and colleague, John S. Dowd about Israel’s plight in the Middle East. He argues that Israel’s miliary responses to the threats that surround her are only making her situation worse as world opinion increasingly sides with the plight of the Palestinians. I argue that Israeli concessions and accommodations with various national, tribal, and extra-legal interests will never appease all or even most of her adversaries, at least some of who who will never relent until the Jews are “driven into the sea”.

I contend that, at its root, of the Israeli conundrum is not about Middle East real estate. It is about the historical events, predominantly European, that led to the creation of Israel itself. It is about a 2000 year history of anti-Semitism in which the Jew was cast as the “other”. This protracted real-world passion play provided the impetus and legitimacy for the ongoing exclusion and brutalization of Jews in Diaspora throughout the Christian world and culminated amid the ashes of the Holocaust and creation of the Jewish state of Israel. The Jews and the state of Israel are not just one more case of the illogical or problematic drawing of national boundaries by which one group gains more and another group gains less. The creation of the state of Israel was a Christian attempt  to compartmentalize the real consequences of the Jew’s role as “other” in the mythic narrative of Christianity.

John sent me a link to a series of conversations between Christopher Hitchens, the noted atheist-intellectual, and Atlantic Magazine writer, Jeff Goldberg. Hitchens’ facile thought process succeeds in making some key points that have been particulary difficult for me. If you are interested in the process by which consciousness is constructed as well as the problems of the Middle East, you should find it interesting. Note that the interview is published in segments so you will need to click additional links to hear them all.

My reply to John after viewing the interviews, follows the video link.

John,

Interesting (and a bit gut wrenching). On the whole I have not been a great fan of Hitchens, if only because his arguments, with which I tend to agree, leave off where I begin. Read more…

NYT, August 2, 2010 – “F.B.I., Challenging Use of Seal, Gets Back a Primer on the Law”
The bureau wrote a letter in July to the Wikimedia Foundation, the parent organization of Wikipedia, demanding that it take down an image of the F.B.I. seal accompanying an article on the bureau, and threatened litigation: “Failure to comply may result in further legal action.”

What sets human beings apart from all other creatures is their penchant for investing inanimate things with transcendent power. In the early going the behavior of prehistoric man was shaped by animistic beliefs in which symbolic power was vested in the things of nature. Inspired by cautionary tales about the consequences of hubris, told and retold generation after generation, mountains, plants and animals, the clouds and the stars, where all vested with the powers of prediction, retribution, and forgiveness. These symbols served to shape man’s relation with nature into a moral whole that actually worked!

Incessantly innovative, it did not take a very big leap for animistic man to begin manufacturing his own transcendent symbols. These man-made symbols were also vested with power, but not the power of the natural world, but rather the power of men. Man’s MANufacturing of symbols marked the beginning of history, in which symbolic artifacts came to signify, legitimize and sanction differentials between human beings.

The symbolic power of manufactured artifacts — shamanic trinkets, totems, religious paraphernalia, badges, cash money, numbered accounts, and WMDs for example —  does not reside in the real and practical use of these artifacts, powerful though such use may be, but in imagined meanings experienced as inhering in these objects.  Once such objects become vested with meaning, their intrinsic meanings convey power to those who are able to possess and monopolize them. By this means, their possessors become able to exert dominion over others merely by displaying such objects. It stands to reason that if these manufactured symbolic objects can be readily reproduced by unauthorized agents, the system by which possessors exercise power and control over others is in serous danger of collapse.

The great revolution of the 21st Century is the ability to reproduce symbolic artifacts with great accuracy and ease, and to disseminate them at little cost. This is why for example, the U.S. Treasury has gone to such great lengths to protect the powers vested in our currency against high quality copying machines — an exercise in futility as Bernie Madoff proved and Goldman-Sachs continues to prove. It is likely that, in our digital age, the horses have already left the barn. Today the symbolic artifacts that embody power are readily counterfeited.  A fake Rolex and a fancy car purchased on no-down-payment credit can open locked doors. Need the powers of a Ph.D degree? Try here. Want to wield the priest’s cross? Go here. Want to flaunt the emblem of a United States Senator? Talk to Mr. Green. Need to instill fear and loathing with an FBI badge? Go here.

For better or worse, the legitimized power that resides in manufactured artifcats is fast becoming obsoleted into meaningless gibberish by technology. In a new age of constant con, the symbolic power that is generated by virtue of shared meanings invested in manufactured artifacts, can no longer be trusted. Perhaps we are in need of a new paradigm by which to organize our relations. Maybe there is a way to move forward towards a system of shared-meanings vested on our creative powers rather than in mystical objects of our own manufacture.  Such a system would not be built upon our belief in the power of our artifacts but upon the power of our responsible relations with others. This idea is not really all that novel.

“There lives more faith in honest doubt, believe me, than in half the creeds.”
Alfred Lord Tennyson

The difference between science-based and faith-based approaches to explaining the world is one of degree rather than category. The scientific method is undeniably powerful but we should always remind ourselves that it is in fact, faith-based.

The faith-based nature of scientific inquiry is instantly apparent to us when when we consider the familiar axiom that although a theory can be disproved, it can never be proven. As we move forward in the process of constructing knowledge, the explanatory edifices built by those who profess to follow the discipline of scientific method, are based upon belief that is deemed to be increased by degrees with each experimental or experiential confirmation of predicted outcomes. It is of practical rather than metaphysical consequence that all “scientific” belief is falsifiable and therefore always conditional, but this methodology of negation in no way obviates nor diminishes the seminal role of belief in all “scientific” assertion!

If we take a bit of “time” to consider the implications of this well accepted but often overlooked axiom of scientific inquiry, those of us who want to explain consciousness scientifically must grapple with the nature of belief itself. Our intentions, the questions we ask, the efficacy of our investigations, and the measurements we make, are all bounded by the circumstances of our existence and the narrative by which we make sense of our circumstances.

So we can say that scientific inquiry is efficacious in terms of our circumstances, aims and intentions, but we must also recognize that what we “discover” (better said, what we “construct”) will vary with the circumstances, aims and intentions that constitute our socially constructed, faith-based reality narrative.

We construct our world as intentional actors, based upon our belief by degrees in our theories tested in terms of the efficacy of our actions as causal agents. The tautologies of mathematics notwithstanding, the strength of the scientific method lies in pragmatic falsification of theory but that process is in itself, subject to the conditions of belief that bound our inquiry and govern our assertions.

At some point in all scientific reduction, we will always encounter an impenetrable belief-barrier that constitutes the fundament of our consciousness in which we always tell the story of how I, you, and we are, were, and will become.

See my post: “The Blinding Stupidity of Unconditional Belief“

Jeffery Rosen has written a stunningly thought provoking article in the NYT Magazine: “The Web Means the End of Forgetting“. He wrestles with the nature of human memory and the construction of self. Lest you think that such concerns have little importance in the conduct of your everyday affairs, consider Rosen’s observation that…

According to a recent survey by Microsoft, 75 percent of U.S. recruiters and human-resource professionals report that their companies require them to do online research about candidates, and many use a range of sites when scrutinizing applicants.

Rosen toys with the idea that as we tread the Web each of us leaves behind a trail of digitally fossilized footprints. Our trail, so fossilized, will inevitably be used by others who wish to decipher our habits and thoughts, to corner and categorize us for their own purposes.

What might others make the trail we leave behind? How will this or that record of moments past — a picture, a written paragraph, a voice or video recording — be used by anonymous hunters browsing the Internet with the aim to decode and classify us?

How fearfully discreet should we be, lest we become defined and damned by a digitally fossilized artifact created in some unguarded moment and interpreted by those with their own agenda?

A search of the Web reveals an ancient snapshot, originally taken in 79 AD Pompeii. It was captured by the superheated ash from Mount Vesuvius. The indelible image captured presents us with one frozen moment in the lives of two citizens of Pompeii. Is their ungouarded moment sweet or obscene? What conclusions might a human resources specialist draw regarding the character of these two people? Should they be hired?

Recently, my son, a young journalist, wrote an interesting story for the Santa Cruz Sentinel: “Despite significant health challenges, 15-year-old Santa Cruzan Tess Dunn finds herself rocking out ...”

The Online Etymology Dictionary explains the origins of the concept of “disease” a follows:

disease

early 14c., “discomfort,” from O.Fr. desaise, from des- “without, away” (see dis-) + aise “ease” (see ease). Sense of “sickness, illness” first recorded late 14c.; the word still sometimes was used in its lit. sense early 17c. Related: Diseased.

Early 14c., “discomfort,” from O.Fr. desaise, from des- “without, away” (see dis-) + aise “ease” (see ease). Sense of “sickness, illness” first recorded late 14c.; the word still sometimes was used in its lit. sense early 17c. Related: Diseased.

NYT, July 13, 2010 – “Rules Seek to Expand Diagnosis of Alzheimer’s“:

If the guidelines are adopted in the fall, as expected, some experts predict a two to threefold increase in the number of people with Alzheimer’s disease.

The new guidelines include criteria for three stages of the disease: preclinical disease, mild cognitive impairment due to Alzheimer’s disease and, lastly, Alzheimer’s dementia.

Under the new guidelines, for the first time, diagnoses will aim to identify the disease as it is developing by using results from so-called biomarkers — tests like brain scans, M.R.I. scans and spinal taps that reveal telltale brain changes.

The changes could also help drug companies that are, for the first time, developing new drugs to try to attack the disease earlier. So far, there are no drugs that alter the course of the disease.

The trick to unraveling this con is to follow the money. In this case you, the mark, begin getting fleeced out of your most precious assets —  your money and your sense of well-being — upon being diagnosed with “preclinical” Alzheimer’s as much as 10 years before you lose your keys!

Doctors, MRI manufacturers and operators, drug companies, and snake oil salesmen get richer.

You and other preclinical sufferers like you, get poorer, even as you begin a pill-popping life as a prisoner condemned to an ignominious death without possibility of pardon.

This con is actually a variation of the oldest con in the book. In the ultimate diagnosis of preclinical disease, the day you are born you are sinful and you must spend the rest of your life in the shadow of your incipient affliction. Although there is no cure for your sinful nature, strong doses of the palliatives dispensed by high priests, along with ample tithing, can mitigate your misery and self-loathing.

At the root of the problem with our health care system is a treatment centered diagnostic terrorism that does more to create diseases and profits than enable human health and well-being.

See “Use a brain scanner, go to jail!“

See also: “That Uneasy Feeling“

CNN Money.com, June 26, 2010, Consumer Confidence News:

“Economists pay close attention to measures of consumer confidence as a proxy for consumer spending, which drives the bulk of the U.S. economy.

Wikipedia, Confidence Trick (Game):

A confidence trick or confidence game (also known as a bunko, con, flim flam, gaffle, grift, hustle, scam, scheme, swindle or bamboozle) is an attempt to defraud a person or group by gaining their confidence. The victim is known as the mark, the trickster is called a confidence man, con man, confidence trickster, or con artist, and any accomplices are known as shills. Confidence men or women exploit human characteristics such as greed and dishonesty, and have victimized individuals from all walks of life.

Shills, also known as accomplices, help manipulate the mark into accepting the con man’s plan. In a traditional confidence trick, the mark is led to believe that he will be able to win money or some other prize by doing some task. The accomplices may pretend to be strangers who have benefited from performing the task in the past.

CNN Money.com, July 7, 2010 Ask the Expert (aka Ask the Shill),

Turning $200,000 into $800,000… [I]nvolves nothing more than some simple math. The kind of gain you’re shooting for requires a 6% annualized return, assuming you’ll reinvest your gains each year and that those gains will also earn 6% a year. ]T]o earn 6% annualized you don’t have to actually get 6% year in and year out. You could earn(?) more in some years and less in others. So, for brevity’s sake, to use an example over a three-year span, earning 10% one year, -2% the following year and 10.5% the next year would also work. The key word here is “potential.” When you invest in stocks and bonds, you may do spectacularly well some years (a 50-50 mix of equities and bonds earned 17.4% in 2009), fare poorly in others (the same blend lost 16.4% in 2008) and get so-so returns in yet other years (4.3% in 2005). You’ll find that you can significantly increase your odds of reaching your goal by investing more aggressively. For example, the odds of having $800,000 in 24 years jump to 31% if you invest 70% in stocks and 30% in bonds, and your upside also climbs significantly. There’s a 10% chance that you’ll have at least $1.3 million.

BLAH, BLAH, BLAH!

How to Beat the Con

A greedy or dishonest mark may attempt to out-cheat the con artist, only to discover that he or she has been manipulated into losing from the very beginning. This is such a general principle in confidence tricks that there is a saying among con men that “you can’t cheat an honest man”.

Those who follow my blog know that it is actually about a theory of knowing — a theory about how our minds come into being and how they work. My position is that mind can only be understood in the context of the whole creature. It cannot be reduced to parts. As I lamented in a blog entry some time ago, one of the most misleading trends in mind research is being fueled by MRI technology. (See “Use a Brain Scanner, Go to Jail“).

Last week’s New Yorker has a fine article on the subject of brain function and human behavior. “A Man of Letters” by Oliver Sachs, discusses research into a form of aphasia called alexia, in which the stroke victim loses the ability to decode written language, although he can still write and can still comprehend language by other means. Although MRIs show that the malady is correlated with damage to a very specific region of the brain, the idea that the decoding of written language is physiologically ensconced in one portion of the brain is problematic. The advent of written language, a cultural invention, is too recent to be explained in terms of brain evolution. So what shall we make of the observed correlation between an area of the brain and decoding writing?

To me, the correlation observation is like saying that legs are necessary for walking and when they are damaged, walking can no longer take place, therefore legs are the cause of walking. Silly, no? But just yesterday I listened to a long NPR piece heralding the discovery of regions of the brain that are correlated with murderous impulses.

We are lost in the funhouse of our inventions. God save us from ourselves!

Merlin is an old time master. He can appear either as an old man with a long gray beard or as a young child, and it’s an important motif that appears in many, many mythologies You see childhood and age are eternal conditions. Between childhood and old age you live in a historically conditioned reality. In mid-life you are doing the jobs of your society. These are all historically conditioned roles, so people in midlife are culture bound. They are bound to their cultures.

The child — and there’s really only one child in the world — is a new and spontaneous living organism. When old age comes, we have done our bumping into this and that and all problems of the world. Our bumpers fall off. Our headlight go out. But looking across the great curve of a lifetime we have infancy and old age …. and so the one who can guide us in terms of transcendent rather than simply historical wisdom, is either the old man or the child.

Transcribed from Joesph Campbell lecture, “Power of Myth, the Grail Legend”

I have just finished reading “Why the Taliban is winning in Afghanistan” in the New Statesman. The article, by William Dalrymple, is the most definitive contemporary analysis of our doomed military enterprise in that far off land, that I have read up to this point.

One element of the story grabbed my attention. The tribal people of Afghanistan look to their gray-beards for insight and direction in their struggles with adversity. The author writes.

“The following morning in Jalalabad, we went to a jirga, or assembly of tribal elders, to which the grey-beards of Gandamak had come under a flag of truce to discuss what had happened the day before.”

I have traveled a great deal of the world, including Afghanistan, and I have come to appreciate the way in which some cultures value the wise counsel of their gray-beards — their Merlins. In our society, the culture-bound calculus of loss and profit has supplanted the transcendent wisdom that comes with age (we only need ask). We tally our winnings in a zero-sum game of profit and loss rather than value the quality of our lives as responsible and honorable members of an enduring community of fellow humans.

When gray-beard Dr. W. E. Deming was asked about methods for becoming successful, he always answered, “By what measure?”

Although I can find no authoritative figures for our NATO solider-to-Muslim kill ratio, one blogger estimates it at least 30 to 1, but probably much higher, he says. These numbers are quite profitable and one would think that our adversaries and their families would be ready to give up the fight, but it seems that our adversaries are using different accounting methods.

Where are our gray-beards when we need them?

Welcome to the funhouse!

It seems to me that we have become so dazed and confused by our own razzle-dazzle that we are now lost in our own funhouse. We are searching for ways to exit the maze but at each turn we find ourselves staring at the reflections of our own folly. The harder we try to get out, the more lost we become.

The Second Law of Thermodynamics reflects the universal observation that unless we put more energy into a system than we take out, the system will become increasingly anarchic, chaotic and cold. We call this “entropy“. Yet we have bought into this idea that it is right that we strive to profit, by which we mean that it is natural and good that each of us seeks to minimize our investment and maximize our return.

Most of us would be quick to spot the con-artist who tries to sell us a perpetual motion machine. For example, we would think twice before investing our hard-earned money in a car that we are told creates more fuel than it uses. But we blithely accept the idea that we can conduct our human affairs by taking more and more out while putting less and less in.

In our striving to get more for less — in other words in our quest for more feel-good “fun” — the system of human enterprise is fast becoming more chaotic and cold. Entropy makes no exceptions. In our quest for a perpetual motion machine, we have become lost in our funhouse.

Funhouse reflections in today’s news:

Economic chaos

Senseless warring

Environmental degradation

Reduction of biodiversity

Unpredictable climate

Militant belief

Poverty amidst wealth

Endemic fear and loathing

Perpetual Motion Machine

Who is the enemy?

So McChrystal is out and Preteaus is in! It looks like Obama and I were on the same wavelength. It was the only tactical maneuver possible under the circumstances, but the strategic problems still loom large, and given our “accomplishments” thus far, they may be intractable. Time, which is required to heal all wounds, is not on our side.

We need to examine the track record or our “accomplishments” if we want to understand how we got into this mess and how we can begin digging out.

1. We lifted the Taliban to power, by way of the Mujahideen as our proxy warriors in our battle with the USSR. We armed them. We trained them. (See “Charlie Wilson’s War” for Hollywood version of this story.)

2. Following the defeat of the Soviet invaders, the Taliban coalesced  and exercised authority throughout Afghanistan and were qute popular with the Afghan people. They restored order, built roads, quashed reliance on opium, and organized and provided schools and other social services, and were supported for several years by the U.S. It is true that they were a bit strict — sort of like towns dominated by fundamentalist Christians in Bible-Belt America — but they did bring order to a people who had been brutalized by the Soviet military machine and thereafter by inter-tribal warfare.

3. Having “achieved” our objectives with respect to the USSR, the US reneged on promises of assistance and squandered away the ties and influence that had been built with the Taliban and the Afghan people in general, for economic rather than ideological reasons. There’s no oil in Afghanistan.

4. Al-Qaida was no more than a blip on the Taliban radar prior to our invasion of Afghanistan. The evidence indicates that the Taliban had little interest and no part in the agenda of Bin Ladin and his small group of jihadists bent on avenging the US presence in the Saudi Arabian holy land during the Gulf War.

5. Had we kept our eye on the al-Qaida ball circa WT Center I (1993) prior to our invasion of Afghanistan, there was very little preventing us from using intelligence and covert ops to systematically undermine them in concert with allies. A few intelligence agents did keep their eye o the ball, and several opportunities to dismantle him and his group out were missed. But both Clinton and Bush II were frying other fish ($$). Surprise, surprise when the 911 attacks actually stung us!

6. During our inglorious post-911 invasion of Afghanistan, which was in itself mostly political posturing designed to appease US public opinion that we “do something” to get the bad guys, we attempted to repeat our anti-Soviet proxy strategy, this time by recruiting the Taliban’s enemies, the “Northern Alliance”, to unseat the Taliban who were supposedly allied with al-Qaida. The narrative of al-Qaida = Taliban was a contrivance of the same sort used in the Iraq invasion that claimed Saddam = al-Qaida. Although these equations were dubious in the extreme, they did provide a justification for “shock and awe”, spending billions and putting American youngsters in harm’s way.

7. As was the case with Iraq, we transmuted the identity of our adversaries from a small group of dangerous radicals into a wider theater of military conflict involving not only the Taliban, but the whole of Afghanistan, Pakistan, and ideologically, Muslim populations throughout the region and the world. To this day, it remains very unclear as to why we are leveling cities made of mud, who we are supposed to be killing and why they need to be dead.

8. From the beginning, we have resorted to using proxies to fight our battles and then we discard the proxies and resort to massive military theater ops designed to use our throw weight to subjugate whole populations while minimizing loss of US lives at the cost of necessary ”collateral” damage. By trying to MAXIMIZE our ROI rather than by optimizing the complex interactions between peoples and cultures, we have failed utterly to understand the true nature of our enemy, and in doing so, we have created exponentially more enemies and made it impossible for us to devise effective methods for confronting the initial threats.

Simply put, our methods, designed to shock and awe the world into submission to our values, our interests, and our rage, have magnified our problems a thousand-fold and even if we come to the realization of our foolishness, we cannot simply change the channel. Nevertheless, pressing on with bigger guns and more massive military ops will only multiply our enemies, intensify their resistance, and dig our hole deeper.

Sadly, along with his predecessors, President Obama has fallen into the trap, laid in large part by the US military that cleaves to Clausewitzian doctrine that eschews intelligence; built upon relationships of shared interest, and espouses military might as the most effective means of extension of political will. Give people a really cool hammer and everything looks like a nail. But the nature of today’s enemies, who though small in number, have the means to turn our own inventions back against us and do us great harm, does not lend itself to this 19th Century doctrine of “a bigger hammer”.

My solution to our problem:

Step one to reversing our problem-amplification system is to withdraw from the situation that makes us “fact-on-the-ground” invaders. Only then can we begin to rebuild the relationships, resources and means needed to address substantive threats posed by enemies who have no clear national alignments or central authority.

We must address a decentralized threat with a decentralized solution.

NOTE: This entry has been updated to more accurately reflect the sequence of events involving our role in arming and supporting the loosely organized alliance of Mujahideen freedom fighters and subsequent rise of the Taliban as a religious-civil authority in the otherwise lawless expanses of Afghanistan. Tip of the hat to John Dowd.

I really hope that Jeff Corriveau, the creator of the comic strip Deflocked, will forgive me for reproducing his strip that ran today in my local paper (Santa Cruz Sentinel). It was just too good to pass up. Depending on your point of view, letting free markets work could have a downside.