Two good essays in the last few days reflect on America’s overreaction to terrorism. Ted Koppel, who in addition to having amazing hair, is one of this country’s most under-appreciated journalists. He writes:

Perhaps bin Laden foresaw some of these outcomes when he launched his 9/11 operation from Taliban-secured bases in Afghanistan. Since nations targeted by terrorist groups routinely abandon some of their cherished principles, he may also have foreseen something along the lines of Abu Ghraib, “black sites,” extraordinary rendition and even the prison at Guantanamo Bay. But in these and many other developments, bin Laden needed our unwitting collaboration, and we have provided it — more than $1 trillion spent on two wars, more than 5,000 of our troops killed, tens of thousands of Iraqis and Afghans dead. Our military is so overstretched that defense contracting — for everything from interrogation to security to the gathering of intelligence — is one of our few growth industries. …

If bin Laden did not foresee all this, then he quickly came to understand it. In a 2004 video message, he boasted about leading America on the path to self-destruction. “All we have to do is send two mujaheddin . . . to raise a small piece of cloth on which is written ‘al-Qaeda’ in order to make the generals race there, to cause America to suffer human, economic and political losses.”

Fareed Zakaria, whose hair is less awesome but still pretty good, brings up the same issue:

This campaign to spread a sense of imminent danger has fueled a climate of fear and anger. It has created suspicions about U.S. Muslims — who are more assimilated than in any other country in the world. Ironically, this is precisely the intent of terrorism. Bin Laden knew he could never weaken America directly, even if he blew up a dozen buildings or ships. But he could provoke an overreaction by which America weakened itself.

Both are spot on and quickly shift the question to how to avoid overreacting.  Since much of the overreaction is born from political posturing (witness Pete Hoekstra’s bizarre comments in the wake of the Christmas Day attempt), it’s going to be tough.  How is any leader supposed to dismiss a charge that he’s not doing enough to keep the country safe?

Part of the solution is understanding the terrorist threat, and how successful our defensive measures will realistically be.  Zakaria’s column again hits the mark:  “[We] are not 100 percent safe, nor will we ever be. Open societies and modern technology combine to create a permanent danger.”

And while it is possible to contain the threat, permanently eliminating it is a long term project that must address terrorism’s root causes.  Beginning that national dialogue is a key to promote this understanding, which in turn, will calibrate more measured responses to terrorism.

I remember the feeling I had when first visiting Pearl Harbor, and again years later when flying into Manhattan just after September 11, 2001. There’s an eerie quietness about the ships buried underwater, and I still see the faces of people I met in the World Trade Center.

We were warned about those attacks. We may not have known the exact details, but in retrospect, we could have done more – much more – to prevent them. Today, we face a similar threat in cyberspace.
While we don’t know the exact details, we know something is coming, and the devastation could be far more deadly.

A cyber attack – by terrorists or a state – could look like sudden power outages, scrambled data in financial systems, air traffic accidents, water contamination, and mass media propaganda about all of the above. All of this can be done on computers from halfway across the globe. We’ve already seen examples of it – tests, so to speak – in other countries and within smaller networks. In 2008, Russian hackers took down Georgian government websites in an effort to throw off the administration during turf conflicts. Hundreds of Lithuanian servers went down earlier in the year in a Distributed Denial of Service (DDOS) attack also by Russian hackers flexing their muscles in protest of the law banning public display of Soviet era artifacts. According to U.S. government sources, other countries have seen attacks on their power grids.

The nightmare scenario could involve air strikes with no warning systems enabled, missiles arriving from unknown origins. Dirty bombs could get through port security as logic bombs crush the remaining networks. Meanwhile, with financial systems crippled and damaged infrastructure, panic would ensue and local governments would be ill-equipped to deal with so many simultaneous problems. We could find ourselves with multiple major cities suffering from Katrina-like aftermaths – massive numbers of homeless, injured, without power or resources, while looters take to the streets.

Though no terrorist organization is yet known to have this capacity, most experts say we have less than five years before the first major cyber attack on U.S. soil. In a recent meeting with Senator Kirsten Gillibrand , she told a group of bloggers she thought five years would be a generous timeline. We know hacker cells operating in Russia and China already have the skills and the tools necessary, as do some in the Middle East. Terrorists may be next.

Over the past year, the Obama administration and the Pentagon have begun to take the issue more seriously, appointing a new White House Cyber Security Advisor and establishing the U.S. Cyber Command. While this marks a dramatic improvement, it is far from enough. We know logic bombs have already been placed into critical networks but what we don’t know is: when will they explode? And who put them there?

Fortunately, some members of Congress are working to address the situation. Both S. 1438, Fostering a Global Response to Cyber Attacks Act (Gillibrand) and S. 3193, International Cyberspace and Cybersecurity Coordination Act of 2010 (Kerry) address the international coordination necessary to seek and obstruct attackers. This is an important step in both preventing attacks and bringing the perpetrators to justice, although another more aggressive strategy of pre-emptive reactions to attacker stands on shaky legal ground.

We also must ready our military Cyber Command. Captain Daryl Hancock of the U.S. Fleet CYBERCOM (U.S. Navy 10th Fleet) spoke about their progress at the International Conference on Cyber Security recently, emphasizing they will be operational on schedule for next month. Still, we need more resources to manage future threats. H.R. 4061, The Cybersecurity Enhancement Act of 2010 (Lipinsky) and S. 773, The Cybersecurity Act of 2009 (Rockefeller & Snowe), attempt to address this, but training thousands of people to act as first responders to cyber attacks that could come in a variety of forms takes time and resources.

Since the Internet resides on a network of nodes owned and operated by a wide range of entities, our security rests in the hands of many people. Developing a nationwide attitude of awareness and preparation will reduce the likelihood that a large-scale cyber attack will have lasting consequences like the disasters of the past. We have the opportunity now to reduce the possible destruction that could result from these attacks. It’s in our hands, and in the hands of those who represent us.

Photo credit: The Egglepant

This Saturday is the 9th anniversary of 9/11. Normally, I’d try to commemorate that horrible, epochal day as best as I can here at home. But this Saturday, I’ll instead be stepping off a plane in Dubai, along with several dozen other Americans, on the way to Kabul for a USAID-sponsored mission to monitor elections for the wolesi jirga, Afghanistan’s lower house of Parliament. Friends and family, equally freaked out by the prospect of me, a lawyer, heading into a war zone, keep asking me how I feel about this mission.

Bittersweet, I tell them. I have too many friends who have served–are serving–in Afghanistan to be either blithe about the mission’s dangers or self-congratulatory about the ultimate significance of election-monitoring. Arthur, a Marine who served in heavy combat in the south two years ago. William, an Army captain on his third tour, working on intelligence in the east. Drew, a soldier who suffered devastating injuries in an IED attack, only to volunteer for a second tour. All helping to get this fledgling democracy out of the nest.

But there’s enthusiasm, as well, for elections and national security have always been mingled for me. On September 11, 2001, I was a student at the University of Virginia School of Law. After classes were canceled, we watched from a lecture room, horrified, as the towers burned. I was an impressionable “1L” law student, reading through classic texts like Oliver Wendell Holmes’ The Common Law. It was terribly clear to me that Al Qaeda was attacking precisely what we were studying–a system that elevated laws above theology, process over power.

Two months later, I traveled to Alexandria, Virginia, to serve as a member of the “election protection” team for the gubernatorial campaign of Mark Warner. I think we all felt, in some small way, that by ensuring that our local election system functioned freely and fairly, we were at least shoring up the mortar between the blocks that mightier men had laid.

In 2000, the nation witnessed gross incompetence, malfeasance, and corruption in Florida’s election system, from the “butterfly ballot” design to illegitimate purging of the voter rolls. National Democratic lawyers vowed never again, and “election protection” programs were born. Along with New Jersey, Virginia had the nation’s only off-year elections the next year, and so hundreds of lawyers and law students were trained in electoral law and farmed out to precincts across Virginia, to help voters and election officials ensure that elections ran smoothly and fairly.

In the Warner campaign’s election day “boiler room,” I handled a regional desk, fielding calls about complaints and helping our staff and volunteers resolve them. The victories were small but certain. A police cruiser was sitting outside an urban precinct in Henrico County, potentially intimidating voters; we called the sheriff’s office and had the car moved. A voter was improperly turned away for lacking ID in a rural county; we got them to go back and cast a provisional ballot.

Ever since then, when Election Day comes around, I always find myself working on election protection in Virginia. In 2004, I coordinated the Kerry campaign’s statewide program in Virginia, helping to recruit and train over 800 lawyers statewide, and resolving hundreds of incidents. In 2008, interest surged, and thousands of lawyers and law students volunteered in Virginia. This year, I’m again on the Democratic Party of Virginia’s election protection steering committee.

Ever since that awful autumn in 2001, election protection has become inextricably entwined in my mind with the broader goal of ensuring our nation’s security. Years after the 2001 experience, I found myself writing a book arguing that we could not promote democracy abroad unless we understood the essential importance of constitutionalism–the culture of civic republican values we all shoulder.

These goals are today lighting our nation’s path through the wilds of Afghanistan. It’s curious that democracy would be the central front in the war on terror. But it is. We are not after only security in Afghanistan. We are not only decapitating Al Qaeda. We partner with plenty of authoritarian regimes around the world that militate against terrorists. In Afghanistan, we have wanted more. We have wanted democracy, and we have plowed blood and treasure into building it.

The key question in Afghanistan is how the last eight years can prove a solid foundation for building democracy. As a lawyer, I frequently counsel clients on the difference between strategy and tactics. Strategy originally was a military term, the notion of using crippling force to deliver commanding victories. But in civilian contexts, strategy often requires a more nuanced and holistic iteration.

Such is the case with civil society and democracy in Afghanistan. Political scientists often describe the “consolidation” of immature democracies into mature ones. Today Afghanistan faces life-threatening expansions of the same questions we encounter in our election protection programs. This year in Afghanistan, almost a thousand precincts out of the 6,500 originally announced have already been closed due to security concerns. And compared with the 2009 parliamentary elections, many precincts will be less democratic. Nangahar, for instance, in the east, will have 128 fewer precincts open. Kandahar will have 32 fewer.

Candidates and their workers are being openly attacked, intimidated, and harassed. Three candidates have been killed by the Taliban. In the west, several workers for one candidate were kidnapped. In recent days, the Taliban has told candidates in Parwan province that they will cut off the fingers of anyone who votes for them. Women candidates are openly threatened.

Yet there are signs of progress. When you look at the photos of candidates available at this USAID website, all of whom have “electoral signs” for the illiterate to vote by, you cannot help but be moved by their bravery, their ordinariness, the hope in their eyes. The famously violent Helmand Province will have 22 more precincts open than last year. Hundreds of female candidates are running for office. In the cities and the rural provinces, candidates are openly campaigning with cell-phone messages, posters, and paid media.

Constitutionalism–a civic culture where ordinary citizens commit to their role in strengthening democracy and the rule of law–is one of America’s proudest gifts to the world. Thomas Jefferson once asserted that America’s republicanism was to be found “Not in the constitution, but merely in the spirit of the people.” The spirit of Afghanistan’s people for their democracy appears to be at a tipping-point: bright, but flickering, like a candle in wind.

The strategic question is how to help them tend their own flame. In a country where three quarters of the citizens are illiterate; where lines of authority usually run through tribes to an elder; where the geography and topography are severely carved up by mountains and valleys, and where both corruption and courage are cultural mores, can Afghans themselves consolidate a constitutional democracy?

The answer, I believe, is yes. But the more important question is how. These are practical questions, not ideological ones, and they’re what we should all be looking to help answer as we observe these elections. After so many years, it’s facts we need, not rhetoric, in service of strategy, not just tactics. Like Henrico County in Virginia, Afghanis must continue to turn the metaphorical police cruisers away from their precincts. As we are still learning, even in the United States, elections must always be protected.

Photo credit: Canada in Afghanistan’s Photostream

On September 11, 2001, I had just arrived in Bucharest for dissertation research. I was conducting an interview when the planes hit. As I ran around the city, trying to find a television with news in English to learn what was happening, a Turkish worker noticed my Jewish visage, stopped me in the street, and told me that the Jews had done it. The conspiracy theory only gained ground. A week later, as I walked to Bucharest’s old synagogue for Rosh Hashana services, I was harassed for the terrorist attack multiple times by passers-by.

Again it is Rosh Hashana, and again, September 11 looms – this time, with the backdrop of Koran-burning and anger at plans for a mosque.  As we step into a new year, I wonder what, if anything, has been learned. Prejudice against Muslims has grown in America.  We even have our own bin Laden – a Florida pastor who has decided that God wants him to burn the holy book of the Islamic “infidels.”

Did I just say that – comparing a pastor ekeing out a living selling furniture on e-bay, to the mastermind terrorist?  Yes. The pastor knows that his act will bring about the deaths of scores, if not hundreds or thousands, in sectarian violence from Afghanistan to Africa. The ripple effects will be felt in violence against Christian missionaries who have lived among the Afghan people for decades. It will be seen in violence against Christian communities living along the violent belt that marks the split between Christian and Muslim Africa. And it will be felt by the innocent Muslims who are caught in the inevitable backlash.

Twenty years ago, this would not have happened. A pastor leading a flock of fifty could indeed have decided to burn Korans – but no one would have known, outside, perhaps, of his townspeople. The internet’s ability to super-empower individuals, to spread YouTube videos to millions instantaneously, to fan the flames of a 24 hour news cycle hungry for controversy, has allowed a single man with the tiniest of pulpits to receive direct messages from the President of the United States and the General in charge of a distant theater of war. It is the same phenomenon that allowed Osama bin Laden to gain an international following while camped in Sudan, Afghanistan, and the borderlands of Pakistan.

The new media reality is not something we yet know how to handle. How can a country be responsible for every action of every person within its borders – when a single ideologue can catch fire and affect the deepest fibers of our foreign policy?  How can our leaders communicate when the same words are heard in radically different ways by voters at home and listeners abroad – and yet both listen to the same speeches?

But at least we, as a foreign policy community, are talking about what to do in this new media reality. There are other cultural shifts we are not acknowledging. One of the most significant is that we are living through another period of worldwide religious revival. Across all major religions, numbers are growing, and intensity of belief is deepening. The anomie and confusion of modern life pushes some to slow food and organic gardening, others to deepen their faith and intensify their search for a higher order. The effects of this spiritual revival are being felt in country after country, from America to Turkey. This deepening of faith causes fights within religions as much as between them. Ironically, if there is a clash of civilizations, Jones, the Florida pastor, and bin Laden would actually have more in common than the moderates within both Islam and Christianity.

But there is a crucial difference. Christian pastors from around the world have denounced Jones, loudly. He has received personal calls from the heads of other Christian groups—as well as the head of the former church he founded in Germany —  asking him not to desecrate the Koran. Our countries’ political leaders have spoken against his actions in the most public of fora – and so have those within his faith. There are terrific Muslim organizations that also condemn violence within their religion. They need to be helped by those within their faith. They need to be joined by politicians and others within Islam, who are the only ones with standing to effectively speak against the violence in their own ranks. The difference in tone and denunciation between Jones and bin Laden is striking – and disturbing, nine years after 9/11.

As a Jew, I have my own tribe, my own faith and beliefs. But as a Jew with a particularly Jewish-looking mug, I know enough to be worried by increasing religiosity that is married to increasing intolerance. The internet is super-empowering the world’s most intolerant leaders, and as the current religious revival continues, this trend is only going to get worse. It is going to continue to be a particular problem in Islam, until moderates feel strongly enough to speak out just as unequivocally and publicly as Christians are condemning Jones. It’s time we, as a foreign policy community, look this reality in the eye, and address it directly.

Photo credit: rutty’s photostream

The Iraq War ended on August 31st. Did anyone notice?

You can be forgiven if you didn’t. Wars of the 21st century aren’t really marked with start and end dates. Such are the battlefields of counter-insurgency and of the struggle against terrorism.

But August 31st was still an important day. It did, in fact, begin a New Dawn — the name of the new American operation in Iraq.

The 50,000 US troops that are still in Iraq today, and tens of thousands more embassy staff, civilian officials, and security contractors are, beginning on September 1, 2010, part of Operation New Dawn. That is still quite a presence, but the change in terminology is more than symbolic.

We are still fighting battles in Iraq, and the Iraqi people are still bearing the brunt of the struggle to bring peace and stability to their country. But now U.S. forces are solely trainers and advisors.

But a more important role is not reflected in such titles. Simply having a U.S. presence brings peace to many Iraqis, and causes the more nefarious actors to proceed with caution. This is critical as the various factions continue to develop their ability to work together within the political system, and not outside of it.

But Iraqis are on a deadline. Unless Iraq requests a renegotiation of the Security Framework Agreement, all U.S. forces are required to leave Iraq by December 31, 2011. Yes, the embassy staff and an unknown number of private security contractors will remain, but the calming – and I do mean calming – influence of U.S. military forces will be gone.

Once the Iraqis finally form a new government from the elections that were held in March, our nation must be prepared to consider – at the request of the Iraqi government – a continued presence of U.S. military forces. Somewhere around 15-20,000 will likely be required to continue to help professionalize the Iraqi Army, the Iraqi Police, and the officials that provide guidance and oversight to the Iraqi Security Forces.

Regardless of a potential Iraqi request for a continued U.S. military presence, we must expand the relationships between the American and the Iraqi peoples. It is not the military presence that builds the strongest lasting relationships, it is the person to person contact. That’s why the U.S. State Department must expand cultural and professional exchange programs, as they did to the newly emerging democracies of Eastern Europe following the Cold War. Doing so is not only in the best interests of the Iraqi people, but is also in the best interests of the United States. If Iraq is isolated, among other things, Iran’s influence is likely to increase.

Specifically, the State Department should support independent groups such as Sister Cities International in their efforts to facilitate vibrant cultural and educational programs between U.S. and Iraqi communities. To continue the professionalization of Iraqi Police, the State Department should facilitate the partnership of law enforcement agencies in the United States with those in Iraq.

This is hardly a new concept: Such efforts between the militaries of Eastern Europe and U.S. State National Guards are similar in scope and have been an unqualified success. Similar programs have been successful for nearly 20 years, helping developing countries with technical skills, human rights, and strengthened civilian oversight.

Given the many lives and the amount of money that the United States sacrificed during Operation Iraqi Freedom, we should make these small but crucial investments in Operation New Dawn.

Joe Rice is a Colonel in the US Army Reserve and has served four tours in Iraq. The views reflected are his own.