The World is Flat – And has issues…

Recently a friend of mine gave me the audio CD for “The World is Flat” by Thomas Friedman -- totally worth listening to or reading for anyone who has not. My friends and I most definitely live in the middle of the transition to the flat world – just a couple of weeks ago I was sitting on the Spanish Steps in Rome at 3am while the locals sang and one the phone to our CEO who was driving in down town LA and trading emails with the executive assistant for CinemaNow Japan who was sitting at a restaurant beside our VP Corporate Development in Tokyo – if not flat most definitely connected!

Beyond connected like Friedman we study and deploy outsourcing and make believe that supply chain management, and workflow software are major forces that is changing the way this world lives. Like Friedman we see significant issues around intellectual property and wrestle with this every day.

Many of these topics we will address in further detail over the coming weeks, but one is worth digging into a little more now. In a global world divisions are becoming clearer along ideological lines rather than purely geopolitical lines. One of the things I have definitely noticed in this latest conflict in the middle east is the number of countries in the middle east who have expressed frustration over Hezbollah’s behavior. Gone is the blanket notion (at least publicly for now) of them all wanting Isreal erased from the face of the earth.

It seems to me that while the last Century saw the sunset of Pax Britannica and the birth of the postwar American Empire, or as Charles Maier once called it, “the empire that dare not speak its name,” this new Century is not about borders but ideas.

There have been a few people that have tried to talk through the issues this brings up including Robert Kaplan in his book Warrior Politics – Why Leadership Demands a Pagan Ethos and Gloablization and Its Discontents Josheph E. Stinglitz but a book review by Kaplan caught my eye, “The Tribal Way of War”

“While the U.S. spends billions of dollars on high-tech defense systems the dime-a-dozen kidnapper and suicide bomber have emerged as the most strategic weapons of war. While the U.S. ties itself in legal knots over war’s parameters, international law has increasingly less bearing on those whom we fight. And while U.S. commanders declare “force protection” as their highest priority, enemy commanders want more martyrs. Its seems the more advanced we become, the more at a loss we are in the 21^st century battlefield.

In “Insurgents, Terrorists, and Militias,” Richard H Shultz Jr. and Andrea J. Dew, both of Tufts’s Fletcher School, have produced a wise and cogent briefing book about who our enemies are and how to anticipate their tactics. The problem, they state early, is that the Pentagon – the product of rational, science-based Western culture – relies on objective quantification for its analysis. But the authors ask, what if there is nothing to quantify? What if the enemy is merely an organic part of the landscape, revealing itself only at the moment of attack? Then, all we can do is study the “idiosyncratic” human landscapes and use anthropology to improve our intelligence assessments.

Forget Karl von Clausewitz’s dictum that war is the last resort and dictated by the actions and requirements of a state and its army. Forget Hugo Grotius’s notion that war should be circumscribed by a law of nations. The authors reminds us, paraphrasing the anthropologist Harry Turney-High: “Tribal and clan chieftains did not employ was as a cold-blooded and calculated policy instrument…Rather, it was fought for a host of social-psychological purposes and desires, which included… honor, glory, revenge, vengeance, and vendetta.” With such motives, torture and beheadings are part of the normal ritual of war.

Mr. Shultz and Ms. Dew don’t stereotype tribes and outlines that each tribal culture is unique, each will fight its own way; it is knowing what a culture is capable of once it feels threatened. Thus the heart of the book is case studies.

The Somali way of war – startling the to U.S. Army Rangers in Mogaishu in 1993 – emerged from Somalia’s late-19^th-century Dervish movement, on which the country’s top warlord, Mohammed Farah Aidid, based his strategy. What the West viewed as fanaticism was the Somali proclivity for judging a man’s character by his religious conviction and ability to fight without limits. Somalis viewed the West’s aversion to killing woman and children as a weakness they could exploit by using innocents as human shields. Clearly, the West must think beyond its moral code to anticipate its enemy’s tactics.

Chechnya is the best example of how traditional warrior cultures defy globalization, where cowardice is among the worst transgressions and a dagger the most prized possession. In Chechnya, the authors note that Sufi proclivity for asceticism and mysticism: the former providing the mental discipline for overcoming physical hardships and the latter for sustaining morale. Moreover, the Chechens’ decentralized, clan-based structure- and their tradition of raiding – determined their guerrilla style, which has resulted in lethal hit-and-run tactics by small units on large, Russian forces in the Grozny.

It’s all in the local history. As one Afghan elder said in the early 1800s: “We are content with discord, we are content with blood,” but “we will never be content with a master.” In the late 1900s, an Afghan mujahedeen commander explained why the Soviet Union lost a war: His men intended to fight to the last man, while the Russians didn’t.

As for Iraq, the authors write: “Things could have turned out differently… The traditional Iraq way of war; and how Iraq fits into the larger global jihad, could be been deduced by U.S. planners” for the sake of a better military result. Saddam expanded his military by tribalizing it. He incorporated Sunni clan networks into his bureaucracy. Thus if his army disintegrated, the result would be a congeries of Bedouin-like raiding parties, each with a tight social network.

Our global culture – which relishes convenience and instant gratification – finds it difficult to cope with such warriors. And what if a warrior commands a modernizing nation, as Iran’s Mahmoud Ahmedinjad does? The U.S. is accustomed to adversarial states with rational goals, like China. While China may constitute a greater threat to American world leadership that Iran, China is a traditional power. The U.S. will have a military competition with them, but it is unlikely they would ever fight. Yet the danger of the 21^st-century is states whose leaders may simply like to fight rather than negotiate.

Then, what should we do? The authors quote Sun Tzu, the fourth-century B.C. Chinese theorist of war: “Know your enemy.”

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This piece reminds me of two commonly held points of view that drive me nuts from both my Left and Right wing friends, let me deal with each POV quickly.

My Right Wing Friends: I will never forget my young friends from Texas who told me once that “that we won in Mogadishu” after watching Black Hawk Down point to the kill ratio as evidence of that. Now admittedly, and thankfully, not all my right wing friends are stupid enough to say something like that… However that said I did feel compelled to point out that the moment a bullet is fired we have lost. That even taking purely his use of numbers never would never be enough US troops to eliminate the number of people around the world who would gladly pick up a gun if they perceived the US was interfering in their affairs. And finally (and somewhat in disagreement with Kaplan) I think there are some very basic human reactions involved in conflict, the book Black Hawk Down gives some great accounts of why some people picked up guns and shot at the US troops – because their perception was the US was shooting at them and killing their family members!

My Left Wing Friends: It seems to me that many of my left wing friends have the saying now of “the US never does anything about Africa, the only reason they are involved in the middle east is because of oil.”  That may be true, but breaking that down into two logical pieces (a) what precisely should we do in Africa (Mogadishu is a great example of that and (b) yes we have an energy issue that needs to be addressed but there is more at stake in the Middle East than just the oil at this point.

Thus I would say that probably the global issues that face is in Africa, Korea and in the Middle East are probably all as equally challenging and the solution is probably closer to being consistent between them than we may think.