Previous IFPA-Fletcher Conferences
The 34th IFPA-Fletcher
Conference on
National Security Strategy and Policy:
Security Planning
and Military Transformation
December
2-3, 2003
U.S. Chamber of
Commerce Building
Lafayette Square, 1615 H Street, NW
Washington, D.C.
Address by Mr. Mansoor Ijaz, Chairman, Crescent Investment Management
Introduction by Dr. Robert L. Pfaltzgraff, Jr., President, IFPA
Dr. Pfaltzgraff: Let me introduce now our next speaker, who is Mansoor Ijaz. He is Chairman of Crescent Investment Management. He appears regularly in a variety of financial and political news programs, and this is where I first saw him, on one of the news channels, in fact, I believe the Fox news channel, several weeks ago. And he also writes op-eds, and I happened to be reading one of his op-eds in the Financial Times, also several weeks ago, having to do with terrorism and maritime issues with regard to the choke points of the world. And I got in touch with him, and invited him to join this panel. He is one who has played a prominent part in developing a framework for a cease fire between Indian security forces and Kashmir separatists in Kashmir in 2000. He has written, as I've said, about the potential for maritime choke point terrorists' WMD use, which brought him to my attention, and therefore I thought that, given the nature of this conference, we ought to have him on this panel, and he agreed. So, Mansoor, it's a great pleasure to welcome you here.
Mr. Ijaz: Thank you very much, Dr. Pfaltzgraff. And, again, to all of our co-panelists, it's a very distinguished honor to be with all of you today. Some of the comments that have been made so far really get to the heart of the type of asymmetries that we're going to have to learn how to deal with as we combat the type of terrorism that we're dealing with over the next several decades. I don't think this is something that's going to go away for quite a long time. What I want to try and do today is lay out for you at least one person's view of, what is the type of asymmetry that we're dealing with? What type of threat are we really faced with? Are these people that are a passing phenomenon, or are they for real? To lay out a little bit about the way in which they look from the inside of their organizational apparatus and their thinking processes, at how to attack the fundamental structures by which we live throughout the world, and then to give you the example of the maritime threat that I've uncovered that I think we need to pay a heck of a lot more attention to than we are right now.
As Dr. Pfaltzgraff told you, I've been involved with, and have seen from the inside, a lot of the operations of what I call radical fundamentalist Islamist groups all over the world. I started in the Sudan in 1996, when we negotiated the offer to get the terrorism data out of that country. This was just after the first offer was made by the government to turn bin Laden over. And we've spent a lot of time trying to analyze what the mindset of these people are. And I think frankly that we are maybe two or three steps behind where their thinking process is. And what I hope to do today is to bring you a little bit up to speed in terms of where at least my view of their thinking process is, so that we can get on with trying to develop strategies that can combat that.
If you think about al-Qaeda today in the post-9/11 environment-- Prior to 9/11, you could say it was a hardened organization. It had a very carefully set up leadership structure. They could communicate through normal channels of communication. They used the normal banking system. They used what we call the unofficial banking system, called the havala system, to move resources from one part of the world to the other. But today, you cannot define al-Qaeda in the same way. Al-Qaeda today is a virus. Think of it as a software program that can-- If you look at every table in this room, and imagine that each table in this room is a terrorist cell operating in a different country around the world, al-Qaeda is like a software overlay on all of these cells now. They provide tactical support through that virus overlay. They provide financial support through that virus overlay.
And to some extent, although not to the greatest extent that you would imagine, they also provide instruction capacities, which is why my colleague Bob Kaplan's comments are so important for us to understand. As al-Qaeda was, shall we say, bombed to smithereens out of the mountains of Afghanistan, it flattened out as an organizational apparatus. It has no real hierarchy in that sense anymore. And that is why, for us to be able to combat this capacity that they've got, we've got to do exactly the same thing internally, in our systems as well.
Now, there are three major types of terrorist threats that the-- I'm not going to refer to it as al-Qaeda anymore in this discussion, because they are relevant, but again, it's a viral overlay. And so whether you're Islamic jihad, or Jamas Lamia, or Lushcray Itayaba (?), or whatever group you want to call yourself, it's essentially what I call a global terrorism enterprise. So if I refer to this, if I may, as the global terrorist enterprise, they essentially engage in three types of terrorist threats today, each with a different level of planning, a different time frame over which that planning is done, and the type of thinking that is going into what it is that they have in mind to achieve.
And let me be very clear, before I lay all of those three out, that the ultimate objective of this global terrorist enterprise that is run primarily by Islamist mindsets, is to essentially take the world economic infrastructure-- They are here, and we, the Western world, are up here. We know how we worked to get here; we know what we did, we opened our economies; we're a free society; we educate ourselves; we live in a state where church and state are separated; none of which they understand-- and they seek to equalize, according to their laws of God, whatever they conceive God to be, to equalize not by struggling to rise up to us, but by essentially trying to destroy whatever we have built, and bring us down to them. That's the fundamental objective that this global terrorist enterprise has today.
Now, they hope to achieve that objective by engaging in three different types of terrorist threats, the first of which is what I define as nuisance terrorism. Nuisance terrorism is the type of terrorism like we've seen in the last, let's say, six or seven months becoming increasingly more obvious, whether it's in Iraq, or it's in Turkey, or it's in Saudi Arabia, or it's in Indonesia, or wherever it might be. It's soft targets, sometimes a hard target. They got to the British Consul General, and the British Embassy in Turkey. There are hard targets that they try to achieve, but basically it's in countries where they know they can operate either with impunity or near impunity. And the purpose of that is to keep us engaged, keep all of our assets, our intelligence assets, our military assets, our thinking processes, our political combustion chambers, if you will, that they create by doing these things, whether it's for the Turkish prime minister or the Saudi crown prince or the Iraqi CPA authorities, or whoever it might be. They keep us engaged at all times by doing what I call this nuisance terrorism. It takes maybe on the average of one week to three months to plan these types of attacks. They are sometimes quite damaging in their impact, but generally speaking it's more of a nuisance than it is anything else.
Then there is the symbolic terrorism, and sometimes nuisance terrorism crosses over a little bit into the symbolic terrorism as well. But nothing has crossed over to the level of the symbolism that was defined by the attacks against the United States on September 11. Those attacks were designed, yes, to kill people. But they were mostly designed as a symbolic attack against our institutions, our pillars, if you will, that define what Western society and the power of the Western economy, if I may put it that way, is all about, defense and economy. Now, there was a second attempt made at a symbolic terrorist attack, but they weren't successful in that, and that was the organization of the ricin poison network in Europe last year, which, in my judgment, probably did not succeed in a number of different ways, because it was not conceived in a time and a place that was organized enough to be able to really have the impact that they wanted it to have. And then, once we uncovered one, then it was the sloppiness of one cell leaving their airplane tickets and fingerprints and laptop computers and everything else floating around that uncovered and dismantled the entire network before we began the engagement in Iraq. Had we not uncovered that, I can assure you that there would have been mass death in Europe, and the symbolism of that would have lived in infamy, as they say.
Then we get to what I think is the most dangerous form of terrorist planning that is going on, and it is-- Sorry, one point about symbolic terrorism. Generally speaking, my judgment is that it takes somewhere between one and two years of fairly detailed planning to be able to pull those types of attacks off. They require much more substantial financial resources, because you have to maintain cell structures for quite a long time. And you have to be able to give them the capacity to be able to move around as well, which inevitably then invites the need for state sponsorship somewhere along the way. And we know that some of that state sponsorship is still going on.
Now, the most dangerous type of capacity that we're dealing with right now is what I refer to as structural terrorist threats. Structural terrorist threats are those threats that are geared towards and aimed at squarely dismantling or damaging significant segments of the global economy. And they would prefer to do it in the strongest countries, where they now have the weakest presence: the United States; many of the European allies that we have, the United Kingdom. But it doesn't mean that they're not trying. And since September 11, they're having so much difficulty getting us from the inside-- meaning, no serious terrorist threat or attack has taken place on the soil of any of these very well developed, Westernized countries-- they are now looking actively at how they can do it from outside. How can they damage the economies from outside?
And what I want to emphasize here is that no one should walk away from this room-- There are a lot of smart people in this room. But I want you to walk away with one critical assessment from the asymmetry that I talk about. These people that are planning structural threats against us, they are as smart, if not smarter, than everyone in this room. They have figured out our way of life. They have understood how our economies operate. They have spent decades dismantling, unraveling, getting educated inside our system, only to go back into their environments and assume their positions within the leadership and responsibility hierarchy of who they are. So, we cannot underestimate the enemy that we've got. The minute we do that, we're finished. As a society, the minute we underestimate this particular enemy, we're finished.
And there's one very simple reason for that. Each one of these individuals who are part of the global terrorist enterprise have what I call the God complex. They basically believe that God anointed them each as individual saviors of whatever warped view of their religious beliefs that they have. I've spent a lot of time in southeast Asia, in the Middle East, in Pakistan, in Arab countries, quietly sitting for weeks or months at a time. Last year, I spent two months. I grew a long beard, wore my silvarcamise (?), and just looked like an ordinary hack, if you will, from one of the local al-Qaeda cells, and spent a lot of time just sitting quietly in the mosques and listening to what they're talking about, trying to understand where their mindset is, how deeply the planning is in fact going on. And I can assure you that they understand us much better than we think they do.
Now, in the structural planning, probably we're talking about somewhere between two and five years to fully plan something out. And it requires a much larger magnitude of resources, which is why we still have a chance to be able to counteract this threat. Because in reality, they have not yet really been able to sustain the funding that they needed, because we really disrupted their funding capacities in the post-9/11 environment. But they're getting it back up and running. And the longer the big guys, people like bin Laden and Imaza Wahiri (?) and Saddam, and all of these other-- the top layer of this global terrorist enterprise stay out on the loose, the more we have to worry that they're going to get away with being able to actually do something. Because it enables those who want to support them to be regenerated, and get their philosophical and theological sustenance, if I may put it that way, back in place.
Now, the other thing that has changed within this terrorist enterprise is the fact that the senior leadership is now only responsible for planning the structural threats. They are not responsible for worrying about some guy who wants to hijack an airplane, or wants to go blow up a synagogue in the middle of Tel Aviv or Ankara or Istanbul. That's not what they're worried about. They're only worried about the big structural threats that we're talking about. In a sense, you can say that the 9/11 hijackers have now been moved to the second and even third tier, again, to play in that realm of symbolic and nuisance terrorism. And while we're all engaged in trying to prevent those attacks, they're out there-- You know, they say the old magician's trick. Watch what I'm doing over here while I'm actually changing something over here. These guys are masters of that kind of deception.
Now, the example that I'd like to give you is what I described in my Financial Times op-ed piece that Dr. Pfaltzgraff referred to. And that is what I define as the maritime threat from this terrorist enterprise. There are five principal choke points in the global economy, seafaring economy. They are the Panama Canal, the Suez Canal, the Straits of Hormuz, the Straits of Gibraltar, and the Straits of Malaga in southeast Asia. Of those, the Suez Canal and the Panama Canal represent the most difficult problems, because they are very well defined channels that can only permit ships of a certain size to be able to go through. And so if something were to go wrong in one of those canals, you would have a real problem on your hands. Keep in mind that something close to 80% of the 6 billion tons of traded cargo around the world every year is transported by ship. And of that, roughly 75% at one point or another passes through one of these global choke points, which means about 60% of everything that gets traded around the world, every year, is passing through one of these five choke points that I've described
Now, it doesn't take a lot of imagination to figure out what would happen if a group of terrorist people got control of a liquefied petroleum gas tanker, or another type of large vessel, and instead of taking it into a harbor and blowing it up in a harbor-- yes, that would cause a lot of disruption-- you take it into the canal and blow the canal up. Remember, we never thought that they would convert airplanes into flying missiles. I ask everyone in this room to think carefully about the fact that they can convert a ship into a floating bomb. And I'm talking about a big bomb, not a small bomb.
Now, imagine for a moment further, that these terrorists got their hands on uranium waste material from North Korea or Iran, or maybe even Pakistan, from sympathetic elements inside the Pakistani framework. Each of these countries have indigenous uranium sources, so they don't need to go and take the uranium off the market somewhere else. They could just use it there. Now you've got the potential for creating one of the world's largest dirty bombs. And I don't need to tell you that even if you sink the ship right where it sits, the psychological impact that is created by that, the changes to insurance rates, freight rates, the ways that you ship things from one point to another, the use of different types of existing mechanisms, air freight and so forth, it changes the entire dynamic of the global economy.
And one of the reasons that I raised this op-ed piece to the level that I did, and persuaded the editors at the Financial Times to give it the play that they did was because this is in fact the planning that is going on as we speak. And one of the things that I've seen as a pattern-- and I think Bob Kaplan would agree with me on this-- as a pattern of the way the terrorists operate, is that these terrorists, the minute you expose what their planning is, they go to the next plan. They cannot afford to allow any of the cells sitting around the world to be compromised, because they don't think in quarterly results. They think in 10- and 20-year time frames. They're about destroying our way of life, and they don't care how long that takes, how much they have to use to get that done, or what type of resources they have to bring to bear. If it ain't this generation, it will be the next generation. That's the way they think. And as long as they think that way, we can't allow ourselves to think in quarterly results alone.
Now, it's not just the choke points that we have to worry about. It's also oil installations right here in the Gulf of Mexico. Because you may or may not know some of the data that is behind what I'm saying right now. Over the last six months, on at least half a dozen occasions, we've had now people board large tankers, and just-- these are pirates, now, in the southeast Asian seas-- and simply take control of the tankers to learn how to drive them. They're not taking anything off the boats. They're not taking the crews. They're not doing anything. They're just learning how to drive them. We've had tugboats stolen. Why do you need tugboats? What's the purpose? To close in maneuver, if you're in a harbor somewhere, if you wanted to do something. We've had divers, people with deep sea diving expertise, kidnapped off of southeast Asian resort islands, and taken as hostages, and going out and actually teaching Abu Saif, among others, Abu Saif terrorists, how to do deep sea diving going down, but not learning how to decompress coming up. What does that tell you?
Off the Mississippi coast, we've got something-- I got the numbers this morning. Seven hundred and fifty billion cubic feet of gas reserves, and 160 billion barrels of oil. It's not small. We've got a lot of work going on off the coast. Can you imagine if they were to go down and blow up the well heads?
What do we do about these types of threats? The expertise assembled in this room is certainly greater than anything I've got. But I would suggest to you that we need to do three things. We need to use our technology, which is much, much more substantial that anyone gives credit for. We need to share that technology with our allies in a way that does not compromise our national security internally, but makes sure that our allies have the capacity to be able to help us, because we can't be everywhere, all the time. It's just not possible.
The second thing that we need to do is, as Secretary Hoehn said, is to respond by essentially creating joint command and control structures in the front-line fields. This is perhaps the most important thing that the Secretary said. And finally, I think what we need to do here is figure out a mechanism by which the United States Coast Guard and the United States naval capacity is dispersed around the world to, firsthand, infiltrate, with our intelligence capabilities. One of the smartest things that Bob Kaplan said was, "Where are our Urdu speakers, our Pushtu speakers, people who speak in Indonesian, in the Filipino local language, that are infiltrating these organizations, getting inside the shipping industry, getting inside other places where we're worried about these types of threats, and getting us firsthand, raw data about what precisely they're planning on doing?" Without doing these three things, I think we are going to have great difficulties, because they are so far ahead of us, in terms of their planning stages, that we need to really now get on with the job of combating this threat. Thank you very, very much.
Dr. Pfaltzgraff: Thank you very much, Mansoor. And again, I think you can
understand why I invited our latest speaker to this panel.
Questions and Answers
Dr. Pfaltzgraff: We're still missing Mansoor Ijaz, but I think we should begin the discussion. Let me just give you the basic ground rules. Please keep your question brief. We're looking for questions. If there's a statement you need to make, make the statement, but make it brief. Secondly, please identify yourself. And thirdly, please wait for the microphone after you're recognized for the question. So, who would like to be the first questioner? Who would like to go first? Yes, right here.
Audience: I'm Ed Rowney (?), your former friendly arms controller. My question, I guess, is mostly to Bob Kaplan, but maybe to some others. And that has to do with this mindset-- Maybe the other speakers can chime in on this. Why is it that the leaders of the Islamic faith, the mullahs, don't recognize that this extremist group could possibly bring about their downfall? Why don't they speak out against them, and excommunicate them? Why the timidity of the mullahs?
Robert Kaplan: The Middle East is a laboratory of pure power politics. Soft power is not very well understood. Remember that we operate in a world of legality, of laws, and regulations, where if you have a fight with someone else, you have courts to resume to. But in the Middle East, though there are laws on the books, in all these societies, it's driven by pure power and intimidation of one sort or another. And if some of these others, more moderate groups, thought that they had the power to overcome the others, they might in fact operate that way.
But there is another thing. As Mansoor said, al-Qaeda and its spin-off viruses is the most dynamic element today in Middle East society. You know, it doesn't require country clearances, travel orders. It doesn't have to write CONOPs. It's not totally snarled in bureaucratic paperwork the way the postindustrial age West has become, or with big organizations, the way we have become. You know, it's the ultimate postindustrial kind of centerless corporation. It's run on an informal basis, and we think of informal, medieval institutions as backward. In fact, they're far forward than us, because the most effective power is informal power and influence. And these people have really developed a very dynamic, centerless cluster of organizations that conveys itself, that conveys its power.
And there's something else. Islam is the best of the three religions for poor people. If you're poor, and downtrodden, Islam is an austere voice. It's a religion that's willing to fight. It's a simple message. It's kind of like early Christianity was in the second and third centuries of Rome. If you read about the various Christian cults who rose up against Roman rule in Tunisia and what is today western Algeria, you'll see a great similarity between them and some of the radical Islamic cults.
And then there's something else, and then I'll push it on to the other panelists. If you look at a map, and you look at these towns, and these tribal agencies of Pakistan, like Parachinar, Miramshan (?), Wizeristan (?), they look like small towns, and they were, 10 or 15 years ago. But when you get there, they're slums. They're inner city slums, with narrow warrens, five, six stories, many families packed in tight. The regime in Pakistan has done nothing for them. As one of them said to me, "We don't care if it's Noar Sharif (?), Benazir Bhutto, Musharraf, whether it's democrat, it's an army coup. It makes no difference. The people in Islamabad hate us. We're not really part of the country." And the radical mullahs are the ones who say, "Stand up and fight."
Dr. Pfaltzgraff: I think that Mansoor Ijaz would like to comment on this question as well, and any other member of the panel is welcome to do so. But Mansoor, you in particular
Mr. Ijaz: I think the way I would put it to you, very simply, is that the rulers are afraid of the monsters that they created. They created the monsters by suppressing the natural capacity. Who is bin Laden, at the end of the day? What is the phenomenon of this man? He basically wanted to combat and rise up against his fascist father, and he couldn't do that. Then he wanted to rise up against the state, and the state was in such a state of affairs that he wasn't able to do that. And so he said, "Let me go and strike out at those who support my state." And when the state stripped him of his citizenship, they stripped him of his dignity, and that caused even more-- It's what I call the trampling of the ego. In the infamous memo that many of you know about, that I wrote to Sandy Berger (?) in 1996, I said to him, "Sandy, we cannot achieve anything in the Islamic world by trampling the egos of their downtrodden. If we do not do more to raise them up, their disaffected up, they will surely come to our shores to tear us down."
In the end, it comes down to a war of not intellects, not minds. It's a war of what's going on in your heart. Because every human being's heart beats the same way. And these leaders have not provided for their people. And then on top of that, they've taken orders from us. That's the perception, at least over there. We've got to stop making them give orders, and they've got to start providing for their people. Otherwise, that large, silent majority that exists in the Muslim world will never rise up against these fanatics and contain them from within, and that is the only ultimate long-term solution that we ought to be trying to get at, because nothing else will work.
Dr. Pfaltzgraff: Anyone else on that question? In that case, let's go to our next questioner, the gentleman right back here. And then this next one will be back there. So, let's start right here.
Audience: Wooston Lee (?) from the Department of Defense. My question is mainly to Mr. Hoehn and Mr. Kaplan. I was wondering if you felt the last presentation, regarding the creation of a two-division structure, was a viable option, given what you have observed thus far, and the work you're doing on transformation.
Andrew Hoehn: I think it would be a mistake to think that transformation is only about the major combat elements of our defense establishment and war fighting structure. In fact, what I hear from this panel, and frankly, what we have been thinking increasingly, is that the type of challenges that we're going to see in the years and decades to come are going to be more in terms of the low end asymmetries that you heard the panelists talk about, and the high end asymmetries that you heard Professor Bracken speak of, and frankly, somewhat less of the traditional kinds of warfare that we are both skilled at, but frankly have dominated. And hence, that's why we see war fighting moving more to the ends of the spectrum, and away from the middle.
So, in light of that, the work that Hans Binnendijk has been doing, and others, in terms of thinking through what kinds of organizations, what kind of structure, what kind of training, what kind of doctrine do we need to deal with the challenges are exactly the right ones. And so, I applaud the initiative that he has put forth. And I think he would be the first to admit that it isn't so much whether that specific option is the one that gets adopted. I think the real issue here is, do we have within our armed forces the capacity to deal with the problems of stabilization and reconstruction? And I think what I take from his proposal is that there is a deficiency in this realm, and that we need to be looking to build some viable alternatives. And he is offering one. Whether it's that one or something similar, or even something quite different that addresses that set of problems, that's the real issue here, is, do we have the capacity, the capability, if you will, to deal with that problem set, and to do so in the most effective ways that we can.
Dr. Pfaltzgraff: I wanted to give Bob Kaplan the next opportunity on that question, but I think, Hans, you ought to have the last word on this question as well, since it's your proposal that is being discussed. So, let's go with Bob next.
Robert Kaplan: Let me answer that with an example that I was speaking to Secretary Hoehn about. We have this issue about tribal militias in Afghanistan. You know, our policy is to build up a national army there, and the tribal militias are an impediment in that. They're more warlord-focused. But when you actually get to Afghanistan, and you speak to the majors, and the lower ranking officers, and you go out, you find that in some parts of the country, supporting the ANA (?) is right, but in other parts, if you withheld support and weapons for the tribal militias, the Army special forces fire bases might even be overrun. It varies from one locale within a province to another. Therefore, these are not issues, I wouldn't even want Washington discussing, let alone deciding upon. These are issues that I wouldn't want decisions made at anything higher than the lieutenant colonel or the battalion level in the area.
And the problem is that Washington tends to identify the problems correctly, but it often deals with it by creating a new organization. And I think future is just cutting away vast amounts of organization here, and having much more people at the NCO level spending more time in Monterey at the language institute, and spending their whole lives in places like western Nepal, and the Horn of Africa, and places like that. It's like Secretary Hoehn said. Get more people out to the edges, and give them increasing autonomy. Because if not, if we don't watch out, we'll be like Gulliver, tied up by the Lilliputians.
Hans Binnenidjk: If this proposal focuses primarily on organization, and one tends to think of it that way, two divisions, then probably that's the wrong way to present it. I think this is much more about training. It's much more about the synergies that are created by bringing together various kinds of units. It's not intended to create a lot of layers. It's certainly not intended to put this problem back into Washington's lap. It is trying to do, on the ground, what we ought to be doing, but better, because we pull together these capabilities, and create these synergies.
Now, what is the viability of this? I think much will depend on the Army. The Army is going to resist this. Why? Because they think it's going to cut into one or two of their 10 fighting divisions. And if it does, it would be a mistake. I don't envision this as replacing an Army division. The analysis that we did indicates that most of these capabilities are around, and it's again a question of reorganization. You can do that in a way that you don't cut into the existing 10-division structure of the Army.
Now, I think, finally, what is likely to happen is that rather than the large structure that we suggested, where we'll be going, at least in the next several years, is that smaller groups will be created along this pattern, but not the division size groups. And they will be more deployable, more modular. That's not a bad starting place.
Dr. Pfaltzgraff: Unless there's anyone else on the panel who would like to comment, let's move on to the next question. There was a hand back here that I had said we would recognize. Yes, please, right there.
Audience: Jeremy Harrington (?). I'm a first-year student at the Fletcher School. I'd like to ask a question about the role and the performance of the intelligence community in illuminating the context of security planning, particularly the issues raised by the panel of the threat of non-state-armed groups. I'd be interested in Mr. Kaplan's observations, from his experiences being embedded at the grassroots level, what observations he has on what the intelligence community needs to do differently. And I'd also be interested in the views of Mr. Ijaz, in particular. Thank you.
Dr. Pfaltzgraff: That's a question for a conference in itself, actually. But it's very important, and we'd like to get your reactions to it. Bob?
Robert Kaplan: One of the challenges I face as a journalist is, I often know where our intelligence people are by where I'm not permitted to go, or what fire bases I'm not permitted to visit. So I actually don't know as much about that as I would like to. There was one fire base I wanted to visit-- I won't say where-- where I was told, "No, you can't go there, because the OGAs, the other government agencies, i.e. the intelligence, owns that fire base, not the Green Berets." So, there's a lot going on that, frankly, I don't know about. But I think I would emphasize-- And this is what people in the intelligence community will always tell you, I think. We Americans are very good at signals intelligence, on the technological aspects of it. But where it falls down, where we really have to depend on friendly foreign intelligence agencies, is on human beings who can ferret out intentions, who have embedded into groups for long periods of time, overseas. And that, I think, is the great challenge. It's a big challenge in Iraq. It's a big challenge in Afghanistan, in Yemen, in many different places.
And I'll give you an example. Mansoor spoke earlier about the danger of international shipping. Well, one of the best opportunities for terrorists-- and this was written about in my magazine, The Atlantic Monthly, in a cover story, was about piracy of big tankers, and how much piracy there is, and how a number of tankers are actually run by ghost crews, because the real crew was killed at the high seas, and it's now being run by a ghost crew. And this is like a perfect petri dish for groups like al-Qaeda to take advantage of. And this is really where the rubber meets the road, where so much technological intelligence will be less helpful than two or three human beings who know exotic languages, who are in place, and who are with the right people.
Mr. Ijaz: I think all that I'll add to that is that we have to ask ourselves in this country, why is it that we are not willing to resurrect what the CIA's great capacity was during the Cold War? Why is it that we're not willing to do that? What has happened to the ethos of this society that we're not willing to take the risk to go out and protect ourselves by engaging our own citizens? I mean, I do this out of a sense of moral obligation to my fellow countrymen, because this country gave me more than anyone in the world could ever imagine you could get as an opportunity. I was born and raised in this country, educated in the best institutions, worked on a farm, worked as a busboy in a delicatessen, and have the opportunity to give back something to society. But there's not that many of us around that speak different languages, and understand the cultural identities that you have to understand to be able to get inside these organizations.
Until we as a nation are willing to ask that hard question, and ask our political leaders to answer it, and then give the directive to our intelligence apparatus to go out and do it, I think there's very little chance that we're going to be able to infiltrate to the extent we need to to be able to diffuse the threats from inside.
Dr. Pfaltzgraff: I would ask any other member of the panel to comment on this question as well, if you would like to do so. I would simply say that, given the diversity of this country, it seems to me puzzling that we haven't been able to do what Mansoor is talking about. I shouldn't depart from my role as moderator here, but it seems to me, with a country with the diversity that we have in it, we ought to be able to tap into people who have loyalties to this country, as you pointed out here, who would help us to improve that human part of the intelligence picture. But that's just my own personal opinion.
Anyone else on this panel who would like to talk about that? Then, let's go on to one or two more questions. And what I'd like you to do is to ask your question very briefly, because we're going to have to end the panel at 11:45 promptly. So, one quick question over here. Dick, I can see you back there. You have that.
Audience: ...[inaudible] semantics point of order with Robert Kaplan. I think you're giving the term CONOPs a bad rap. CONOPs, in its simplest form, tells what the relationships are between, who the players are, and what the mission is. And it's not doctrine, and it's not prescriptive, and it doesn't tell you what range, and what weapon, and what circuitry to use. We've never done it as well as the Brits, who have boiled it down to "Stop the Bismarck," or "Sink the armada." But I think if you get the CONOPs right-- and we're making tremendous efforts to get the joint CONOPs done first-- you will cover all those points that you made, that the NCOs can make decisions from advance bases, and the colonels can stay in Leavenworth, and be available for reach-back. But I think you're talking about doctrine, not about CONOPs.
Robert Kaplan: Can I respond?
Dr. Pfaltzgraff: Yes, please, a brief response, Bob.
Robert Kaplan: That briefs well, but the reality is that the document is used for people at the higher levels to dilute, to play around with, to change the mission. And the ultimate result, every day, on the ground in Afghanistan, is that permission is given to hit compounds, to search various mud-walled forts, 72 or 96 hours later than they should, and the result is dry holes, rather than bull's-eyes. It's another method that gives control higher up, which goes completely against the trend I think we have to go in.
Dr. Pfaltzgraff: We have time for one or two more. Right back here. Yes, please. If you could stand up so they can see you when they bring you the mike.
Audience: Yes. Vivek Dubay (?) from Los Alamos National Lab. This is mainly a question for Professor Bracken. There's been a lot of talk about organizational transformation, but implicit and inherent to that is cultural transformation within the defense business and the national security business. Can you offer additional insights from the business world as to how successful companies have time and time reinvented themselves? How can we accelerate the rate of cultural change to get to the transformation we need to get to?
Paul Bracken: I think it's a mistake to look at technological transformation, and then people will say, "But we have to change the organization. There's too much focus on technology." Just for example, in this last go-round, I think the whole distinction between technical intelligence and human intelligence is 20, 30 years out of date. So to get to your point, the question, I think we have to think of strategies in terms of congruences, alignment, so that when you change your personnel system, and your culture and your people, you have to see if it matches your technology, if it matches your strategy.
And if you look at the great, really pioneering works in organization theory done years ago, like Joan Woodward's (?) Industrial Organizations, her whole point is that managers need to think in terms of these alignments. I changed my technology. Did I change the culture? Because if you only change one, you're not going to get the payoff. But if you look at it in a holistic way, which I think we know a lot better how to do from the late 1990s-- I mean, there's this view that bureaucracies don't change. Well, look at AT&T. Look at Enron. They were big bureaucracies, and they went under dramatic change. Oh, you said you wanted successful change? That's a different thing. That's a harder thing. But we have examples of that too. We have a wider range of experiences we can absorb.
And one of the things I believe, is that the DOD and the services need to do kind of an executive program, pooling the experiences of Hewlett Packard, and JetBlue, and IBM, and Enron and AT&T, for these alignments and congruences. When they changed the technology, did they change the people?
Dr. Pfaltzgraff: Well, unfortunately, time has run out. I wish this panel could go on for another hour, frankly. There's so much to talk about here. I think we have looked at these issues in holistic fashion, to use a point that was just made by Paul Bracken. I think that we have covered an immense amount of the security landscape. We have certainly seen at least various parts of the anatomy, or at least touched various parts of the anatomy of the elephant, using the proverbial blind person/elephant metaphor here. I think as a result of this, we have learned a great deal about the context of national security within which we must plan, and within which we must think about and carry out the complex tasks of transformation. So, on our collective behalf, I would like to express our thanks to this panel for an outstanding opening session, and for helping us to think through many of the issues that we will be dealing with as we proceed to this afternoon and to tomorrow.