On Free-Range Kids

There are a lot of uninteresting one-cause blogs out there where strident people exorcise their own demons by beating dead hobbyhorses for the edification of the rest of us. Lenore Skenazy's Free Range Kids isn't one of them. It operates on a pretty simple thesis: American parents are driving themselves crazy with concern and smothering their children with illusory safety, all while America is as safe a place for children as it was in 1970. Quite simply, she's out to change the way Americans raise their kids. This interview with Salon lays out the argument pretty nicely. A few excerpts:

What are the statistics about crimes against children? What is the news that we're not hearing?

The crime rate today is equal to what it was back in 1970. In the '70s and '80s, crime was climbing. It peaked around 1993, and since then it's been going down.

If you were a child in the '70s or the '80s and were allowed to go visit your friend down the block, or ride your bike to the library, or play in the park without your parents accompanying you, your children are no less safe than you were.

But it feels so completely different, and we're told that it's completely different, and frankly, when I tell people that it's the same, nobody believes me. We're living in really safe times, and it's hard to believe.

[...]

Then there are products out there that will prevent [anything] from happening. Here is a helmet your child could wear when she starts to toddle, lest she fall over and split her head open and die, or suffer traumatic brain injury.

Kids have been toddling -- it's a whole stage we actually call toddlerhood -- ever since we started walking upright, which has been a pretty successful experiment for the human species. But now you're supposed to think that it's too dangerous for a kid to do without extra protection and without extra supervision and without this stupid thing you can buy.

There are kneepads that you're supposed to put on your kid because crawling is considered too dangerous for the knees, as if knees weren't built for crawling. That's why they're cute and dimpled and fat.

Everything that we do has a product that we can buy that's supposed to make our kids safer, as if they're born without the requisite accoutrements. Then there is something we can do as parents to be more careful, to be more protective. The assumption behind all of that is that if you are a good parent, you should be protecting your child from 100 percent of anything that could possibly go wrong, and if not, you will be blamed and Larry King will shake his finger at you.

I'm probably one of the few single young men reading Skenazy's blog, but I was a Free-Range Kid, and I'll likely have a couple myself someday. Beyond that, the child-safety hysteria is a microcosm of larger societal forces. It is fed by the same psychological quirk that cripples security planning and counterterrorism, namely that human beings are pretty terrible at internalizing probabilities, and particularly terrible at estimating probabilities of things that scare us. Really, Lenore Skenazy is the Bruce Schneier of child-rearing.

On Jihad

Fantastic interview from PajamasTV, with Walid Shoebat and Kamal Saleem, a pair of reformed terrorists. Please do watch the whole thing.

My first thought is a caveat: I do think these men overstate the immediate threat of terrorist attack. Recognize that they're coming from a very particular background, and even if they've rejected the ideologies of their upbringing, it's clear their default level of paranoia about the world is still set at "Palestinian". So while you take their predictions with a small grain of salt, their observations are pure gold (and you'll see by the end of my thoughts here why terrorist attack in and of itself isn't even the most serious issue).

The issue is at heart a conflict of culture, which is inextricably bound with the issue of religion. Both men blame the comparative decline of Christian chaplaincy in American prisons for the increasing radicalization of Muslim prison proselytes, such as those recently arrested plotting to attack synagogues in the Bronx. Shoebat is perfectly frank: the cure for terrorism is Christ.

"When I heard that, 'offer yourselves as a living sacrifice'... it is easy to die: you blow yourself up, you think you're going to go to Heaven. Now it's more difficult to live for the truth, and to live is to sacrifice... I spoke at the Air Force Academy, and I said that conversion to Christianity is one of the best methods that I've known to change terrorists, the media just went wild with articles that we're proselytizing at the Air Force Academy. We weren't proselytizing at the Air Force Academy, we were saying we need to proselytize to the Muslims."

That of course is an even more distressing proposition, from the mainstream media perspective.

I'm struck by the force of their argument that the "jihad" is about Jew-hatred above all else. It's just not part of the narrative, even though it's blindingly obvious when you look at it. Why did the "Newburgh Four" want to bomb Bronx synagogues, of all targets? Because of "Zionism"? Even if New York Jews did support "Zionism", why on Earth should that motivate American converts? And we should never forget how the butchers of Mumbai devoted a large part of their efforts to tracking down and torturing to death the sole rabbi in a city of 14 million.

All of this fits into the most important point Saleem and Shoebat make, which is to stress the centrality of the "cultural jihad". As the irreplaceable Oriana Fallaci never tired of pointing out, jihadist preachers boast openly that they will use the West's freedoms to destroy it. By claiming every right, demanding every entitlement, and litigating every grievance, they will make for Islam a preeminent position in the culture. And does anyone doubt that they have? As Shoebat points out, could Christopher Hitchens have published A||@h Is Not Great? The film Kingdom of Heaven portrayed the Church as genocidal and the Knights Templar as rapacious beasts, yet the likes of CAIR still claimed offense that the depiction of Salah al-Din was not quite saintly enough. And who could have ever thought that Britain would be mulling the merits of allowing a parallel legal system based on sharia? People have taken positions pro and contra, yet where's the "are you bloody serious?!?" that they're even having the discussion at all?

The cultural jihad is a totally different beast than counterterrorism. Successful terrorist attacks are a mixed blessing in the grand scheme of the jihad, after all, as they risk waking the infidels up to the threat. Many jihadist preachers have earned the coveted label "moderate" by renouncing terrorism not as a great evil, but as counterproductive to the cause. Preaching the cultural jihad, after all, breaks no laws, and if Islamists can breed, bribe, and bully their way to cultural dominance, what need is there for terror? And after sharia is enacted through the success of the cultural jihad, beheading nonbelievers will not be an act of jihad. It will simply be proper rule of law.

In this, as in so many metrics of the decline of the West, the United States is perhaps a generation behind Europe. Perhaps the declaration of the Salafi Emirate of the Netherlands or the Mamlakat al-Wahhabiyyah al-Britaniyyah will wake up the rest of those countries that still stand for Western civilization, but I'm not confident. Terrorism will never be an existential threat to the West. The worst imaginable terrorist scenario -- a mushroom cloud over Manhattan or London or Paris -- would do nothing but strengthen our resolve if we still had any. The success or failure of the cultural jihad will determine the future of the West, and if the jihad wins, we will have only ourselves to blame.

It's Over, Maybe

The LTTE -- better known as the "Tamil Tigers" -- have admitted defeat. Only time will tell if this is truly the end of the conflict. If it is, it will stand both as proof that even a popular, well-funded insurgency can indeed be crushed with conventional brute force, and as a lesson in the human cost of such a victory.

UPDATE: The Christian Science Monitor is reporting that the LTTE leader Prabhakaran is dead. Having no leaders, in addition to holding no territory, reduces the chances that the LTTE will fight on, God willing.

On Failed States, Counterinsurgency, and Nation-building

Here's an interesting piece arguing that failed states are not the existential threat to global order that many leading counterinsurgency theorists assume they are. It's a good point. It's become a truism that failed-state problems will eventually spill outside their borders to threaten US interests, but that claim is supported more by anecdote than by analysis.

Sure, Afghanistan sheltered the 9/11 terrorists, Colombia exported huge quantities of cocaine, and the collapse of tiny Rwanda led to a continental war. So how have we solved these issues? We unseated the Taliban from Afghanistan, so they've moved their terrorist hospitality suites to Pakistan and now Afghanistan exports huge quantities of heroin. Colombia could hardly be considered a failed state these days thanks to Uribe's heroism and smart US support, but still exports only slightly less huge quantities of cocaine. And while we continue to ignore festering conflicts in central Africa, nobody really seems to have an plan for what we should be doing instead.

Conversely, while the overriding perceived threat from failed states is that they might produce international terrorists, the 9/11 plot was financed by supporters in Europe and the Gulf petrocracies, and the terrorists themselves were educated in Europe and got their critical flight instruction in the US. Yes, the Taliban sheltered al-Qaeda during this period, and we quite rightly curb-stomped them for it, but that doesn't prove al-Qaeda couldn't have succesfully attacked us without their safe haven. The terrorists who have attacked Britain have had no need for safe havens in failed states.

None of this is to say that we should abandon the struggling parts of the world to their fate and pull back into isolationism. But the still-infant success of counterinsurgency theory in one part of the world shouldn't delude us into thinking "boots on the ground" will solve all the world's problems, or for that matter that conventional strategic power is obsolete. Development also matters, and freeing trade is the single most important thing the government can do on this front. Military partnerships to strengthen legitimate governments of chronically weak states will pay dividends in the unstable and unpredictable future. And there will always be parts of the world that beg for the old superpower bootprint.

Just Sayin'

You know, there was a time not too long ago when strategists contemplating a strike on declared enemies of the U.S. would not have had to concern themselves overly much that the killing of treasonous American citizens who had joined them would cause a "political nightmare". Just sayin'.

Freedom and Security

The Obama administration continues to double down on the Bush Department of Justice's legal cover for warrantless wiretapping and "sovereign immunity" from prosecution, expanding their scope far beyond that of the previous administration. As I've said before, this is why conservatives ought to have opposed these measures when they were introduced, something I myself am only belatedly realizing. While I might once have considered security justifications to outweigh the encroachment on individual freedoms, I no longer believe they do. Did these measures help keep us safe from terrorist attacks over the last 7 years? Quite possibly. But is that security worth several turns of the ratchet toward Panopticon?

If we have no degree of acceptable risk, if any posited successful attack is presupposed as a negligent "failure" of our intelligence community, what incentive do they have but to seek to know everything about everyone? We failed to "connect the dots" before 9/11, so now our agencies are coached that the "need to share" is as important as the "need to know". But the potential capabilities of a unitary intelligence agency are truly worrying: it takes at most 33 data points to identify a person statistically through mining of open-source data. A nation with a unitary intelligence agency mandated to prevent any conceivable security threat is on a dangerous road to becoming a police state.

And to what end? Should we really be letting the threat of terrorist attack define our society? Nuclear terrorism alone is the one threat toward which we should be putting greatest effort, but we can't seem to get our act together to deal seriously with the world's most dangerous proliferators. Instead, we spend billions on meaningless security theater. John Goekler nails it:

The only things that can truly make us more “secure” are not things. They are the courage to face whatever comes with dignity and intention, and the strong relationships that assure we will face the future together, and find comfort and meaning in doing so.

Imagine, then, what might happen if we simply quit listening to the scaremongers and those who profit from our paranoia. Imagine what the world could look like if we made a conscious choice to live out whatever time we have with courage, compassion, service and joy.

Terrorism is an act of the weak. But so is walking through the airport in our socks.

Bad Bad Bad: 40 Al-Qaeda Members Die of Plague

The UK Telegraph is reporting that 40 members of an al-Qaeda-affiliated terror cell in Algeria have died of the plague. It is not improbable that the living conditions in a terrorist training camp in the Algerian wilds may have led to the disease (plague being endemic in North Africa), but striking 40 at once does seem a bit suspicious. A thought on the supposition that they may have been working with plague as a potential bioweapon: sending infected members to mingle with a target population as "suicide vectors" would be a pretty ineffective dispersal technique, particularly for plague, but it would be chillingly effective as a terror weapon. Remember: actually killing you is just icing on the cake; a terrorist's goal, by definition, is to frighten you into changing your behavior.

On Torture

Security guru Bruce Schneier blogs two pieces on the use of torture. Both begin with the same take on the pragmatic argument: the stories of American abuse of detainees at Abu Ghraib and Guantanamo have been Al-Qaeda in Iraq's most effective recruiting tool. I don't dispute that point, rather the conclusion drawn from it. Here's why: most of what the Muslim world believes about Guantanamo is complete fabrication, and the infamous abuse at Abu Ghraib was a "black swan", perpetrated in the dead of night by a handful of irresponsible lowlifes operating miles outside their job descriptions. Don't get me wrong here: I'm not arguing that there haven't been systematic violation of American principles at both locations. There have been abuses which people ought rightly be upset about, but those aren't the cases that have captured the jihadi imagination — or the U.S. public's, for that matter — and this is the great irony. Abu Ghraib = Lynndie England, and Guantanamo = flushed Korans, even though one was unforeseeable and the other never happened. I'm bringing all of this up to make the point that the number of foreign jihadists flooding to support Al-Qaeda in Iraq has had little to do with any particular torture or abuse of detainees; if Abu Ghraib hadn't happened, they would have made it up, as they have in other cases. So the "pragmatic argument" really doesn't take us anywhere.

Happily, both pieces move to the moral argument, which I find far stronger. And a lot simpler. Whether or not torture is a useful tool in counterterrorism (and the relative safety of such torture-happy places as Egypt attest it can't be wholly discounted) is completely irrelevant. Even if by aschewing torture we're fighting with one hand tied behind our back, it's still the right thing to do. We can still win that fight, and when we have, we will still be America.

Who Will Claim Them?

While the Mumbai attacks were still undergoing, many in the Western media were all too happy to play along with the terrorists' nearly laughable claim to be a "home-grown" Indian group. In the aftermath some subtle links to Pakistan have become evident (such as the terrorists arriving on a boat from Pakistan, making calls to Pakistan during the assault, and, you know, being Pakistanis). Not to say that there aren't serious issues among India's various Muslim populations, and dangerous tensions with the Hindu majority that have long and frequently come to violence, but for some reason the supposition that Indians were responsible for this attack just didn't feel right. Sure enough, the trust that governs the most prestigious of Bombay's Muslim graveyards has refused to bury the bodies of the terrorists:

The men are not true followers of the Islamic faith, according to the influential Muslim Jama Masjid Trust, which runs the 7.5-acre Badakabrastan graveyard in downtown Mumbai. "People who committed this heinous crime cannot be called Muslim," said Hanif Nalkhande, a trustee. "Islam does not permit this sort of barbaric crime."

Sadly, I'm afraid the history of Muhammad's terror war against rival tribes of Arabia doesn't exactly support Ustadh Hanif's sentiment, but it's appreciated all the same.

Reporting or Abetting Terror?

The Australian Courier Mail reports on the extensive use of technology by the Mumbai terror squads:

Amid the arsenal of military hardware, it was the use of humble mobile phones and internet technology that proved a key weapon – one which caught the anti-terrorist forces by surprise. The use of BlackBerrys by the terrorists to monitor international reaction to the atrocities, and to check on the police response via the internet, provided further evidence of the highly organised and sophisticated nature of the attacks. The gunmen were able to trawl the internet for information after cable television feeds to the two luxury hotels and office block were cut by the authorities. The men looked beyond the instant updates of the Indian media to find worldwide reaction to the events in Mumbai, and to keep abreast of the movements of the soldiers sent to stop them.

This makes you stop and ask, Who precisely is served when Western reporters give minute by minute accounts of the locations, strength, and armaments of the counter-terrorist response:

Date: Fri, 28 Nov 2008 04:56:03
After 15 minutes of silence, five commandos in black with heavy-duty body armor have approached the building. Four are carrying assault rifles, and the fifth, possibly their officer, has a radio in his right hand.

Seriously, this is practically a SALUTE report. I guess anyone planning this sort of attack in the future will know that they don't have to bother posting scouts; the media will take care of that for them. How much shorter would the Mumbai siege have been if the terrorists hadn't had intel support from the media? How many lives were ended to support the people's "right to know"? Lets hope municipal authorities take note and immediately bring down the cell networks the next time this sort of attack is attempted.

Something New and Ugly in Bombay

Bill Roggio at the Long War Journal provides some analysis of the Bombay attacks. Interesting stuff, and worrisome. Whether or not Al-Qaeda itself was involved in this massacre, groups that are targeting the United States will see the success of this sort of attack.

A Brutal Reminder

Here's something to be thankful for today: counterterrorism. If there is any real lesson for us from the attacks in Bombay which are just now ending, it is that it could have been us. There's nothing unique about Bombay that made it a good target; this sort of attack could have been successful in any American city. We know they want to, but apparently they haven't been able to. For seven years, what we considered inevitable on September 12 hasn't occurred. This is not by coincidence. For all the pointless waste and excess of the Department of Homeland Security, something is clearly working, and for that I am thankful.

Security Theater

Airport security procedures run by the TSA are a complete joke, and we all know it. It's "security theater", designed to create a perception of security, while being hopelessly indifferent to the real thing. Jeffrey Goldberg proves it (HT Cheryl), traveling around the country intending to raise alarm by carrying tools, weapons, and overtly terrorist literature. All that was ever consficated was a Leatherman and some bottled water. At one stop, during an individual baggage search, Goldberg was found with a full-size Hezbollah flag, purchased from a Hezbollah gift shop in Lebanon.

The officer took the flag and spread it out on the inspection table. She finished her inspection, gave me back my flag, and told me I could go. I said, “That’s a Hezbollah flag.” She said, “Uh-huh.” Not “Uh-huh, I’ve been trained to recognize the symbols of anti-American terror groups, but after careful inspection of your physical person, your behavior, and your last name, I’ve come to the conclusion that you are not a Bekaa Valley–trained threat to the United States commercial aviation system,” but “Uh-huh, I’m going on break, why are you talking to me?”

In a post-9/11 age, it's unlikely terrorists will attempt the same trick. Cockpit doors have been reinforced, and since passengers know the script of airplane hijackings has changed, they will resist, just as passengers on United 93 did. In fact, unless they all had first-class tickets (which would hopefully raise someone's suspicions), I suspect a gang of would-be kamikaze-bombers would have a difficult time even making it to the cockpit door, which they would find to be reinforced and locked.

Of course, terrorists could still try simply to blow planes up midair, as they have long done, but the precautions against this need be no more onerous than the security in place long before 9/11. Bombing a plane is showy, but bombing a train or a rock concert is far easier, and potentially more devastating. Terrorists are, after all, concerned like anyone else with the return on their investment. TSA costs us $7 billion a year which could be going to (still under-staffed and under-trained) offensive counterrorism efforts, rather than passively "securing" our airports. It's well time we started to consider the return on our investment.