Tactics of rebellion in Egypt

Accounts of the protests that brought down the Mubarak government stressed the role of new internet-based social media, which helped organisers and supporters plan the protests. The critical event in toppling the regime, however, was the initial seizure of Tahrir Square on 25 January – a development in which the social media functioned partly as a decoy. Knowing that the security forces would use violence to break up any attempt to occupy the square, the organizers used social media to plan protests at twenty sites in working-class districts of the city, hoping to strain the security forces by dispersing them to multiple locations, while drawing large crowds that would increase the chance of breaking through security cordons and linking up at Tahrir Square. They planned one additional gathering, in Bulaq al-Daqrur, a working-class neighbourhood close to the centre of the city, with an industrial workforce employed in a nearby cigarette factory and in railway yards. They avoided announcing this gathering over the internet, allowing a crowd of several hundred to gather without the presence of security forces. This was the group that marched to Tahrir, swelling to several thousand along the way, and seized the square, by which time the protest was too large for the armed police force to crush.*

* Footnote: Charles Levinson and Margaret Coker, ‘The Secret Rally that Sparked an Uprising‘, Wall Street Journal, 11 February 2011.

Mitchell, Timothy. Carbon Democracy: Political Power in the Age of Oil. Verso; London. 2013. p. 229

Automated voice impersonation

I’ve written before about some problems with biometric security: it seems convenient to be able to use facial recognition to log in to your computer, until you find your co-workers doing it with colour photocopies of your picture.

Computers aren’t the only context where we use biometrics for identification. “Don’t you recognize my voice?” has been used for decades for authentication over the phone, whether implicitly or explicitly. Now, we’re approaching the day when faking anybody’s voice and having it say anything you like is getting near.

Expect disruption on every level, from teens pranking each other to abusive harassers terrifying victims in new ways to more election-altering political fraud.

Quantum sensors and vulnerable submarines

A recent technology quarterly about new quantum innovations, published in The Economist, referred to a disturbing development in quantum sensor technology:

Military types are interested, too. “You can’t shield gravity,” says David Delpy, who leads the Defence Scientific Advisory Council in Britain’s defence ministry. Improved gravity sensors would be able to spot moving masses under water, such as submarines or torpedoes, which could wipe out the deterrent effect of French and British nuclear submarines.

So much of the present nuclear balance of power (such as it is) depends on ballistic missile submarines being essentially invulnerable by virtue of being impossible to locate. Reportedly, almost no crew members about an American boomer (as subs carrying nuclear missiles are known) know the precise location of the ship, and nobody on land has the information.

If states suddenly feel their subs are vulnerable, it risks two big effects. First, it raises tensions in a crisis. If states fear they will lose their seaborne second strike capability, they may be inclined to launch a nuclear attack earlier. Second, if the safest leg of the nuclear triad (along with bombers and land-based missiles) suddenly seems vulnerable, it’s likely they will assemble and deploy more weapons in more locations, wasting money and raising the risk of accidental or unauthorized use.

As with other emerging nuclear-related technologies like hypersonic weapons, it would be better for everyone if we could agree to prohibit sensors that threaten subs. Alas, states are rarely so cooperative or trusting.

Dictatorships and the coercive dilemma

Coercive institutions are a dictator’s final defense in pursuit of political survival, but also his chief obstacle to achieving that goal. This book argues that autocrats face a coercive dilemma: whether to organize their internal security apparatus to protect against a coup, or to deal with the threat of popular unrest. Because coup-proofing calls for fragmented and socially exclusive organizations, while protecting against popular unrest demands unitary and inclusive ones, autocrats cannot simultaneously maximize their defenses against both threats. When dictators assume power, then, they must (and often do) choose which threat to prioritize. That choice, in turn, has profound consequences for the citizens who live under their rule. A fragmented, exclusive coercive apparatus gives its agents social and material incentives to escalate rather than dampen violence, and also hampers agents from collecting the intelligence necessary to engaged in targeted, discriminate, and pre-emptive repression. A unitary and inclusive apparatus configured to address significant mass unrest, however, has much better intelligence capability vis-a-vis its own citizens, and creates incentives for agents to minimize the use of violence and to rely instead on alternative means of repression, including surveillance and targeted pre-emption. Given its stronger intelligence capability, the mass-oriented coercive apparatus is also better at detecting and responding to changes in the nature of threats than its coup-proofed counterpart, leading to predictable patterns of institutional change that are neither entirely path dependent nor entirely in keeping with the optimization predicted by rational design.

Greitens, Sheena Chestnut. Dictators and Their Secret Police: Coercive Institutions and State Violence. Cambridge University Press. 2016. p. 4-5

Sheena was in the Oxford M.Phil in International Relations program during the same two years as I was, and we both served on the executive of the Oxford University Strategic Studies Group.

Related:

JSOC and al-Qaeda

It is one of history’s little ironies that al-Qaeda itself was set up as a JSOC-like group. The main trainer of al-Qaeda in the years before 9/11 was Ali Mohamed, an Egyptian American army sergeant who had served at Ft. Bragg, the headquarters of JSOC. In the 1980s, Mohamed taught courses on the Middle East and Islam at the Special Warfare Center at the army base. During his leave from the army, he trained al-Qaeda operatives in Afghanistan using Special Forces manuals he had pilfered from Ft. Bragg. His life as an al-Qaeda double agent was not discovered until 1998.

Bergen, Peter L. Manhunt: The Ten-Year Search for Bin Laden from 9/11 to Abbottabad. Crown Publishers; New York. 2012. p. 153

Intentions, outcomes, and rejustifications

This [claim by Al Qaeda military commander Saif al-Adel that Osama bin Laden deliberately provoked the United States into attacking Afghanistan] was a post facto rationalization of Al-Qaeda’s strategic failure. The whole point of the 9/11 attacks had been to get the United States out of the Muslim world, not to provoke it into invading and occupying Afghanistan and overthrowing al-Qaeda’s closest ideological ally, the Taliban. September 11, in fact, resembled Pearl Harbor. Just as the Japanese scored a tremendous tactical victory on December 7, 1941, they also set in motion a chain of events that led to the eventual collapse of Imperial Japan. So, too, the 9/11 attacks set in motion a chain of events that would lead to the destruction of much of al-Qaeda and, eventually, the death of its leader.

Bergen, Peter L. Manhunt: The Ten-Year Search for Bin Laden from 9/11 to Abbottabad. Crown Publishers; New York. 2012. p. 58-9. Emphasis in original.

Graeme Smith on NATO’s war in Afghanistan

For the Afghan government to gain the upper hand, however, the foreign money needs to continue flowing. If salaries aren’t paid, local police could turn into insurgents or bandits. Problems with the pay structure would also threaten the integrity of the Afghan military, possibly breaking a key national institution into feuding factions. Donors have promised to continue supporting the cost of Afghan security forces until 2017, but even the most optimistic projections show the donations shrinking in coming years. The Afghan forces will also require help with air support and logistics, making sure that enough diesel, bullets and other supplies reach the front lines. Just as importantly, they need to refrain from beating people, stealing money and fighting each other. They need to behave in a way that inspires trust.

These are tall orders, but not impossible. Afghan security forces with a healthy budget from foreign donors may succeed in keeping the Taliban at bay. There’s also a risk that parts of the country could fall into anarchy, or break into civil war. I keep thinking about the hairdresser in Kandahar city and the cracked ceiling of his shop, always threatening to collapse. I hope that the United States and its allies feel a sense of responsibility about leaving southern Afghanistan in that kind of peril. In his State of the Union address in early 2013, President Barack Obama predicted “by the end of next year, our war in Afghanistan will be over.” Perhaps the war will be finished for many US troops, but the fight is far from settled. Afghanistan was an unsuccessful laboratory for ideas about how to fix a ruined country. It’s morally unacceptable to claim success in a few limited areas—child mortality, access to education—and walk away. At best, we are leaving behind us an ongoing war. At worst, it’s a looming disaster. This is not an argument in favour of keeping battalions of foreign soldiers in the south, but a plea for continued engagement. Troop surges didn’t work; the mission was a debacle. That should not discourage us. Rather, it should spur our work to repair and mitigate the damage in southern Afghanistan, and inspire a more careful approach to the next international crisis. The soldier who told me that modern civilization cannot tolerate empty spots on the map was probably right: we cannot write “Here be dragons” in the blank spaces, cannot turn away and ignore countries that become dangerous. That kind of neglect always bites us in the ass.

Smith, Graeme. The Dogs Are Eating Them Now: Our War in Afghanistan. Knopf Canada, Toronto. 2013. p. 282-3