The Royal Wedding And British Cool

Ok, I admit it, I watched the Royal Wedding, most of it at least, on Friday. Really, how could you not, how often do you get to see historic events unfold live before your eyes? And before you think that the Wedding was just so much fluff and nonsense, it was hard not to be affected by the responses of the British people who seemed genuinely moved by the experience. One British man interviewed by CNN said that with all of the problems with the global economy and the conflicts brewing throughout the North Africa/Middle East region, the British “needed this”: a day to come together as a nation and celebrate a joyous event (the British government even declared Wedding Day a national holiday).

But more than just an excuse for a day off from work and a national party, the Royal Wedding showed that it was cool to be British. While Great Britain is often derided as a land of bad food and even worse dentistry, the Royal Wedding was a chance to show England as a land of high fashion and cool design: from the gorgeous gowns worn by Kate Middleton and her sister Pippa, to outfits worn by guests like the Beckhams (we'll overlook the rather odd headgear of Princesses Beatrix and Eugenia...), to the classic 1969 Aston Martin DB6 Volante MKII roadster that Will and Kate used to leave Buckingham Palace (a car converted to run on E85 ethanol in a nod to today's spirit of Eco-consciousness). The words suave and debonair come to mind. At the same time, this modern display of high fashion was paired with a sense of pomp and history done in a way that only the British seem able to pull off – the wedding party was accompanied by a platoon of mounted cavalry, their polished helmets gleaming in the sun, while the ancient Westminster Abbey had it's interior filled with trees, giving the vaulted room the feeling of a medieval glade.

All in all it was an example of British suave worthy of a Sean Connery-era James Bond flick, and it was enough to make being British seem very cool.

More On The End Of OBL

While the world continues to try to digest the news of the death of Osama bin Laden, speculation is naturally falling on what will become of his terrorist baby, al-Qaeda. Over at the Global Public Square, Fareed Zakaria is arguing, perhaps optimistically, that bin Laden's death with also be the death knell for al-Qaeda – that stripped of their spiritual head the organization will become adrift and will eventually burn itself out. On CBS during their Sunday night coverage, Lara Logan (and it's great to see her back to work) wondered if bin Laden had been betrayed by a member of his inner circle, or at least by one of their respective underlings, and if so what impact it would have on al-Qaeda as a whole?

That made me think of the mafia here in the United States. In their heyday during Prohibition in the 1920s and 30s, the idea of omerta (“silence”) was strong – if you were picked up by the police or the feds, you didn't talk about the mafia's operations or members, “this thing of ours” to quote Tony Soprano. But the idea of omerta began to fade as the years went on, particularly after anti-racketeering laws were passed that basically meant that even if you were a low-level foot soldier you could face the same kind of charges - and jail time - that would be awaiting The Boss if he ever got arrested. More mobsters started to talk when they were inevitably arrested, which sent more mobsters to jail and seriously undermined the effectiveness of the whole criminal enterprise. The leaders of the mafia families became more and more insulated out of fear of being betrayed by one of their colleagues (think about how nervous Tony Soprano always seemed), and worried more about finding the “rats” within their organizations than in actually engaging in money-making activities, which left them less able to manage their criminal empires, which in turn became less and less effective.

Could then a similar thing happen to al-Qaeda and it's frachises? Bin Laden himself had apparently not only withdrawn from the active operational role he played pre-9/11, but in these last few years he seemed to have become a hermit, holed up in a sprawling, barb-wire encircled “mansion” in Abbottabad, Pakistan. Now that even these precautions seem not to have helped keep him safe, will the leaders of al-Qaeda's franchises – the Pakistan operation, al-Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula (Yemen, mostly), al-Qaeda in the Maghreb (North Africa) – isolate themselves further? The best part, from an anti-terror perspective, is that bin Laden doesn't even have to have been betrayed by a follower, the other leaders in al-Qaeda only have to believe that he was and they will act accordingly.

This likely isn't the end of al-Qaeda, just like the arrests of a number of capos hasn't been the end of the mafia in America, but it will likely lead to a far less effective organization and one that is even less capable of pulling off a major 9/11-style (or London or Mumbai for that matter) attack in the future.

Obama Gets Osama

Even though the media coverage of the death of Osama bin Laden has been wall-to-wall, ESPN of all places ran it on their bottom-of-the-screen score ticker, I still felt like I should throw in a few of my own comments this morning. First is that along with giving credit to the SEALs team that carried out the operation on Sunday, credit also has to go to the Obama Administration for their careful handling of the intelligence leading up to the raid. I thought this graphic posed by several friends on Facebook this morning was pretty hilarious:



The raid came after six months of dedicated intelligence work that had narrowed bin Laden's likely whereabouts from a region in Pakistan to a specific mansion in the city of Abbottabad. The administration handled this analysis the way that covert intelligence should be handled – quietly, smartly and without fanfare. Unfortunately the same can't be said for some Congressional staffers who apparently leaked news of bin Laden's death in the hour ahead of the President's official announcement last night after their respective bosses had received courtesy calls from members of the administration to give them a heads-up about the soon-to-be breaking news. It shows again how Congress today, sadly, is more interested in self-promotion than in actually doing anything useful for the country. Those leaking staffers should all be fired. Today.

Other thoughts. I wasn't surprised that bin Laden was caught living in a city rather than hoping from cave to cave like a mountain goat. Ever since former Bosnian Serb president and indicted war criminal Radovan Karadzic was captured after years on the run living a fairly public life in Belgrade, Serbia where he had reinvented himself as some kind of alternative medicine guru, I thought the cave-hopping scenario for bin Laden was pretty unlikely.

Bin Laden's death does provide some valuable lessons to any others who find themselves the target of a global manhunt. First is not to live in a mansion owned by a pair of unemployed brothers; one reason why intelligence officials scrutinized the bin Laden compound was that it was built in 2005 supposedly for $1 million, yet its owners of record were unemployed and apparently lacking assets of their own. Blending in is also important. Analysts were further tipped off by the fact that this million-dollar home lacked Internet or phone service, something you think you would add if you were going to spend seven-figures on building a house. And they burned their trash unlike everyone else in the neighborhood who just used the curb-side refuse pick-up; perhaps bin Laden should have invested in a good quality paper-shredder instead if he was that worried about security.

I also have to admit that the mission leaves me feeling conflicted about Guantanamo Bay. I've been critical of the “eternal imprisonment” of some at Guantanamo Bay. Last week's Wikileaks story that US officials believe roughly ¾ of the prisoners there haven't actually done anything to warrant being locked up forever, but that they're being kept in prison “just in case” didn't do anything to improve my opinion of the place. Yet the intelligence chain that led to the death of bin Laden apparently started four years ago from intel gathered from a Gitmo prisoner about a trusted bin Laden courier, who happened to be one of the owners of the Abbottabad mansion. It does make you at least have to take another look at the utility of the place.

Finally, the death of bin Laden provides a great opportunity for the United States to declare victory and come home from Afghanistan once and for all (ironically this is the eight-year anniversary of George W. Bush's infamous “Mission Accomplished” speech on Iraq). The United States didn't go to Afghanistan to build democracy or fight for women's rights or to build schools or any of the other myriad of reasons that have become attached to the Afghan War. Or mission was simple: capture or kill Osama bin Laden and dismantle al-Qaeda in Afghanistan. The capture or kill part has now been accomplished, and the fact that he was hiding out in Pakistan in the first place is pretty clear indication that al-Qaeda no longer exists in Afghanistan at least as a viable force. If this isn't victory I don't know what is.

The Real Price Of Oil...

There's an incredibly thought-provoking piece out now from Time.com's military-focused blog Battleland on United States policy in the Persian Gulf. It talks about an analysis put together last year by Roger Stern, an economic geographer at Princeton University, who, after an exhaustive study, calculated the cost of the United States' military presence in the Gulf from 1975-2010 - a cost he puts at a whopping $8 trillion. Yes, that's trillion with a “T”. According to those calculations, the United States now spends as much each year ensuring that the oil from the Persian Gulf keeps flowing as it did in fighting the Cold War. And to make matters worse, Stern argues that it is not money well spent.

US policy towards the Gulf boils down to this: Thanks to the bottleneck created by the Straits of Hormuz, a military force could conceivably block the narrow shipping channels, cutting off the supply of oil and sending the world into an oil-fueled economic shock; therefore we must maintain a robust presence in the region to ensure that this does not happen (the US Navy's Fifth Fleet is currently based in the Gulf kingdom of Bahrain). Stern thinks this is nonsense. While it is conceivably possible that the Straits of Hormuz could be blocked by strategically sinking a few very large ships, the states of the Persian Gulf are too reliant on oil exports to ever do this, and countries outside of the Gulf (like China) are too dependent on oil imports ever to do it either.

History shows that Stern is probably right. Iran and Iraq spent eight years in the 1980s engaged in a brutal war with each other that featured, among other things, ballistic missile strikes on each others cities, the use of chemical weapons and suicide attacks carried out by children on the Iranian side. Yet neither the Iranians or Iraqis ever seriously tried to shut down the Straits of Hormuz, and oil prices were not only largely stable during the period of the war, they were also at near historic lows. If the Straits weren't shut down during that conflict, it is hard to imagine when they ever would be.

Yet much of current US foreign policy is built around just this scenario. Stern argues that this leaves the US overfocused on the Middle East while ignoring strategic threats in other parts of the world – say from China. I absolutely agree with him, especially since this is a point I've been arguing here for some time now. Consider for a moment that by the middle of this decade the United States will likely get as much oil from Africa as from the Persian Gulf, yet our investment/interest in Africa pales in comparison to our focus on the Mid-East. Unfortunately for as compelling as Stern's arguments are, they're not likely to change the minds of many decision-makers in Washington; his report originally came out in April 2010, a full year ago, to little public notice.

The Last Typewriter

It was a simple enough story: News that the world's last typewriter manufacturer, Godrej & Boyce of Mumbai, India, had ceased production of the once ubiquitous office appliance, but sadly it turned into yet another example of today's sloppy journalism. I saw the story last night on NBC's Nightly News with Brian Williams. As the owner of a 1940's-vintage manual typewriter (which needs a new ribbon), the story struck me as another example of good, historic technology being surpassed by something more modern, yet perhaps not as good (and here see the recent demise of Kodachrome film for a prime example).

Williams' piece was a brief drop-in near the end of the newscast, so I went looking for more information and found this story from the Seattle Post-Intelligencer, and that's where the sloppy reporting comes in. Godrej & Boyce were in fact the last manufacturers of typewriters in the world and did halt production of their last model – in 2009. But Williams, and others who picked up the story, portrayed it as though Godrej & Boyce just stopped production, the Nightly News even featured an obituary-style graphic that listed the typewriter's death date as “2011”. How this information hit the news now, and not two years ago, is that Godrej & Boyce announced they only had 500 typewriters left in inventory - from the stock they stopped producing in 2009.

It only took me about three minutes on the Internet to glean this particular piece of information. One would hope that with their vast resources, NBC could exercise the same level of due diligence. As for Godrej & Boyce – which as recently as the mid-2000's still cranked out 10,000 typewrites per year – one of the last “new” typewriters can be had for 12,000 rupees, about $270, shipping not included. And as for me, I think I'll try to scare up a new ribbon for my Remington.

As Somalia Crumbles

The international community's three-year effort to end piracy off the coast of Somalia is a waste of time; that was basically the message presented by the Foreign Minister of Somalia's Transitional Federal Government (TFG), Mohammed Abdulahi Omar Asharq, to an anti-piracy conference in Dubai on Monday. “The race between the pirates and the world is being won by the pirates,” Asharq told attendees at the conference, adding that, “it is ... clear that piracy can only be uprooted on land, where it grows and persists.”

Asharq is echoing a sentiment expressed by a number of military and piracy experts over the past few years (despite what Donald Trump may think): that so long as Somalia exists as a lawless state without a functioning national economy, the lure of the big money to be made capturing and ransoming ships along with the ability for pirates to operate from several port cities along the long Somali coast, piracy will continue in a big way in the Indian Ocean and Gulf of Aden. But international anti-piracy efforts have concentrated almost solely on intercepting pirates at sea, not trying to bring order and security to pirate ports like Haradheere and Eyl. The attempt of restoring a national government to Somalia, the TFG, is woefully underfunded and militarily only supported by a mission of African Union peacekeeping troops drawn from a handful of nations. The military of the TFG/AU mission spends most of its time fighting against the al-Shabaab Islamic insurgency, leaving them unable to provide security in the port cities and rout out the pirates.

And indications are that there won't be a boost to the TFG coming anytime soon. Last week the region of Azania (also known as Jubaland) announced their break from the central government in Mogadishu, announcing that they had become a semi-autonomous region and naming their own president. This would make Azania/Jubaland the second semi-autonomous region in Somalia, along with Somaliland in the far north, which considers itself an independent nation, even if no one else in the world does. The new president of Azania/Jubaland announced his intention to battle the militants of al-Shabaab, though Foreign Policy notes that Azania/Jubaland may be less a case of people striving for self-determination and more a case of one country meddling in their neighbor's affairs. Kenya is said to be the driving force behind the creation of Azania/Jubaland. The Kenyans have become concerned about al-Shabaab spreading south from Somalia, creating Azania/Jubaland then could be a convenient way for them to send their troops in to battle al-Shabaab without formally invading Somalia.

Looting In The Land Of Honest Men

News out of Africa lately has been dominated by coverage from Libya, but it's worth noting the unrest that is occurring in some of the other parts of the continent as well, like the recent reports coming out of the landlocked and often overlooked country of Burkina Faso, where an army “mutiny” that started last week is showing signs of spreading across the country. Soldiers began protesting last Thursday in the capital, Ouagadougo; those protests turned violent, with dozens of people reported injured in street fighting. The soldiers then were said to have gone on a looting rampage of shops in the capital, perhaps an ironic action in a country whose name loosely translates to “the land of honest men” (Burkina Faso was formerly known as Upper Volta). The motivation for the protests seems somewhat unclear with one government spokesman quoted by Reuters as saying “we don't know what they want,” after soldiers began firing their weapons into the air last Thursday. The soldiers' action may simply be following an outbreak of public protests against the regime of President Blaise Compaore, who has ruled the country since 1987, the BBC is also saying that the protests by the army could be fueled in part by unpaid housing allowances as well as anger that the members of the military aren't paid as well as the members of the elite presidential guard.

The BBC is also reporting that as of Monday military protests had spread to three of Burkina Faso's other major cities and that members of the presidential guard apparently joined in on the protests in Ouagadougo. While Burkina Faso may not have the international importance of Libya, it is still worth noting what's going on in this corner of Africa as well.

Weird Atmospheric Science

You might remember this story from last year about “Geoengineering”, an attempt, essentially, to hack the global climate. Well there's now another mad scientist-style idea floating around out there to fight global warming, and while this one won't have the Matrix-style affect on the skies that Geoengineering would, there's also a good chance that this plan could make global warming worse, instead of better.

The plan, as presented to the European Geosciences Union and reported by the BBC is simple enough in theory: Specially designed ships will sail to precise parts of the world's oceans where stratocumulus clouds are in short supply, the ships will then pump tiny droplets of seawater into the atmosphere to promote cloud growth to reflect more sunlight back into space, thus cooling the Earth. Simple enough, right? Well, in theory, yes, but it turns out that clouds are complex things and that the wrong size droplets could actually reduce cloud cover, rather than increase it. And fewer clouds would mean more sunlight would reach the Earth's surface, warming the globe rather than cooling it. Plus other scientists say that the plan drastically underestimates the amount of seawater that would need to be pumped into the atmosphere to achieve the desired effect in the first place.

Of course another way to fight global warming would be to reduce the amount of greenhouse gas emissions pumped into the atmosphere in the first place. Just sayin'....

Karzai Family Values

Afghan President Hamid Karzai is engaging in another war of words with Western officials active in his country, this time over the management of Afghanistan's financial sector. Last September, Kabul Bank, the country's largest private lender and the institution that handles government and military payrolls for Afghanistan, nearly collapsed. The Kabul Bank wasn't done in by the global recession and credit crunch, but rather by good, old-fashioned mismanagement: Bank insiders used a series of fraudulent loans to suck close to a billion dollars out of the bank, nearly its entire asset base. Western firms including PriceWaterhouseCoopers and Deloitte were suppose to be providing consulting services and oversight for Afghanistan's fledgling financial sector, so Karzai is now slamming the foreigners for not seeing the collapse of Kabul Bank coming and taking steps to prevent it. Of course it is worth noting here that Kabul Bank's third-largest shareholder was a man named Mahmoud Karzai, and before you ask, yes, he is the brother of Hamid Karzai.

So President Karzai's complaint boils down to this: The Western companies overseeing the Kabul Bank should have kept the Karzai family from ripping it off.

Once again I find myself asking, “is this guy serious?” in relation to Hamid Karzai (here it might be worth while brushing up on the activities of his other brother, Ahmed Wali). “Hundreds of millions of dollars have been paid to these individuals and organizations to help the banking system of the country and they failed in their task,” Pres. Karzai said on Monday. It is almost tempting to say that he has a point; USAID, the US government agency that oversees foreign aid ended their contract with Deloitte in March because Deloitte's inspectors at Kabul Bank failed to see all of the bogus loans being written that led to the institution's near collapse. But of you go back a little further to the original stories surrounding the September banking crisis, reports at the time said that Mahmoud Karzai and other Afghan officials at the bank actively opposed moves suggested by the consultants, such as adopting Western-style accounting standards at the bank and refused to allow an independent audit of the bank's books. In essence, Deloitte was asked to oversee a bank without access to its inner workings, a situation that seemed doomed to failure.

Karzai's critique of the Western agencies involved with his country's economic sector follow a recent pattern of behavior with him, which has been basically to launch a series of scathing attacks against the foreign forces (both military and civilian) active in his country. One could say that it is nothing more than a transparent ploy to shift attention away from his own corrupt and ineffective government and try to put the blame for his country's problems elsewhere. During Monday's address, Karzai promised that “whoever was involved in leading the bank into crisis, all those people will be brought to justice.” Somehow I doubt that Mahmoud Karzai will be among those people.

Arab League Doubles Down

While Secretary of State Hillary Clinton and UN Ambassador Susan Rice are said to have led the charge within the American government to intervene for humanitarian grounds in Libya, the act that seems to have spurred the global community to action was the Arab League's call for a no-fly zone. Within a few days of the Arab League's announcement, which amounted to their symbolically turning their backs on one of their more famous members, Col. Moammar Gadhafi, aircraft from the United States, Great Britain and France were patrolling the skies over Libya.

Now the Arab League is calling for another no-fly zone, this time over the Gaza Strip. That call is spurred by an increase in fighting between the Gazans and Israel over the past week, which has seen rocket attacks launched from Gaza met by Israeli airstrikes. So far the casualty totals are one wounded in Israel and 19 dead in Gaza. That statistic has the Arab League calling Israel's actions “brutal” and asking that the UN Security Council “consider the Israeli aggression in the Gaza Strip on an urgent basis to stop its siege and impose a no-fly rule on the Israeli military to protect civilians in the Gaza Strip,” according to the League's formal statement. Not surprisingly, the Israelis responded by telling the Arab League that instead of UN resolutions, they should focus on getting the folks in Gaza to stop launching missiles into Israel.

The Arab League's call for a no-fly zone over Gaza won't fly (forgive the pun) if for no other reason than a resolution authorizing it will be vetoed by the United States within the Security Council as are any resolutions that are perceived to interfere with Israel's security stance. But the fact that the Arab League is publicly calling for a no-fly zone in the first place is yet one more bit of tension in an already tense region. Meanwhile, both the Gazans and the Israelis say they are willing to abide by a cease-fire, so long as the other side stops shooting first. As to why there has been a flare up in attacks between Israel and Gaza after a period of relative calm (relative to the region at least), a couple of factors are likely at play: a recent attempt at rapprochement between the Hamas-led government in Gaza and the Palestinian Authority government in the West Bank, as well as Palestine's potential unilateral declaration of statehood that could happen later this year, both factor that would drastically change the current Israel-Palestine equation.