Lethal Autonomous Weapons and the CCW

Today in Geneva the CCW (Convention on Certain Conventional Weapons) Meeting of Experts on Lethal Autonomous Weapons Systems got underway. The primary purpose of the meeting is to develop recommendations regarding potential controls on lethal autonomous weapons system (LAWS) to be considered by the Fifth Review Conference, a regularly scheduled meeting of parties to the CCW that will occur in December 2016.

Lethal autonomous weapons systems are, in effect, robots programmed to kill without direct human guidance. Just as self-driving cars have advanced to the point where no human interaction is required beyond the point of identifying a destination, weapons systems are now at the point where a mission, including the use of weapons, can be programmed by humans and then executed by the machine without further human interaction. Clearly there are many technological, political, legal, and ethical questions to be considered in the face of such an important development.

There is no shortage of scholars, NGOs, IGOs, and governments interested in weighing in on lethal autonomous weapons and their implications. A range of papers and presentations prepared for this week's Meeting of Experts is available on the UNOG (United Nations Office at Geneva) website here. The International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC), a key contributor to international humanitarian law, has weighed in with an argument for preserving human responsibility in decisions to kill. The Campaign to Stop Killer Robots, a project that brings together a number of NGOs including Human Rights Watch and the Pugwash Conferences on Science & World Affairs, has articulated a similar position.

There are many reasons to hope that the Fifth Review Conference in December will be able to make progress toward a ban on fully autonomous lethal weapons systems.

North Korea's "Ghost Ships"

Strange--and tragic--stories out of North Korea are not unusual: the regime's brutality at times overwhelms its secrecy so that credible accounts of starvation, torture, arbitrary execution, and other crimes make their way beyond its tightly sealed borders. But this latest story, even by North Korean standards, is macabre.

The Los Angeles Times reports today that since last November at least fourteen North Korean boats carrying over thirty partially decomposed bodies have floated ashore along Japan's west coast. Initial speculation centered on the possibility that the "ghost ships" were carrying defectors who had tried to escape North Korea on boats instead of attempting the overland crossing into China. But when a Japanese scholar, North Korea expert Satoru Miyamoto, examined photos of the boats, he realized that they had belonged to the military's commercial section. The dead, he believes, were members of the military pressed into service as fishermen in an effort to alleviate North Korea's dire shortage of food. Miyamoto's theory suggests that those found on the boats perished as a consequence of their own inexperience as fishermen--and, no doubt, the pressure of unreasonable demands being made on them.

Last summer, the North Korean government spoke openly about the impact of drought on the country's rice production. UN assistance to North Korea has declined over the course of the last decade as a consequence of the international community's efforts to punish the regime for its nuclear activities.

Remembering Bonhoeffer

On this date in 1945, less than a month before Germany unconditionally surrendered to the Allies, Dietrich Bonhoeffer was executed at the Flossenbürg concentration camp. One of Germany's most famous theologians and best loved pastors, Bonhoeffer had been arrested two years earlier for plotting to assassinate Hitler.

Bonhoeffer said and wrote many things worth remembering, not only for Christians but for all people. Here are a few of his comments on our responsibility to work for justice:

Silence in the face of evil is itself evil: God will not hold us guiltless. Not to speak is to speak. Not to act is to act.

If I see a madman driving a car into a group of innocent bystanders, then I can’t, as a Christian, simply wait for the catastrophe and then comfort the wounded and bury the dead. I must try to wrestle the steering wheel out of the hands of the driver.

We are not to simply bandage the wounds of victims beneath the wheels of injustice, we are to drive a spoke into the wheel itself.

If you board the wrong train, it is no use running along the corridor in the other direction.

The ultimate test of a moral society is the kind of world that it leaves to its children.

Karadžić at the ICTY

Late last week in the presence of victims, journalists, diplomats, and representatives of civil society groups, the International Criminal Tribunal for the Former Yugoslavia (ICTY) delivered guilty verdicts in Radovan Karadžić's trial for war crimes, crimes against humanity, and genocide. From 1992 to 1996, Karadžić was president of the Republika Srpska, or Bosnian Serb Republic. His leadership of the breakaway group spanned the four-year-long siege of Sarajevo and included the massacre at Srebrenica in which 8,000 Bosnian men were killed in the worst crime of its kind in Europe since World War II. Bringing to an end legal proceedings that had first begun with an appearance before the court on July 31, 2008, the ICTY sentenced Karadžić to forty years in prison.

Beginning in April 1992, first the Yugoslav People's Army and later the irregular forces of the Republika Srpska took up positions outside Sarajevo, the capital of Bosnia. Over a period of 1,425 days--a full year longer than the Germans' siege of Leningrad in World War II--Serbian forces lobbed mortar shells into the city from nearby mountains and killed both citizens and soldiers with sniper fire on the streets. Roughly 14,000 people died during the siege (including over 5,000 civilians) and tens of thousands more fled the city. On the night of August 25, 1992, the National and University Library of Bosnia and Herzegovina was destroyed along with most of the two million manuscripts it housed. The library had been targeted by the Serbs for weeks. (For a brief UNESCO video on the National Library's destruction, go here.)

In the period before the massacre at Srebrenica, one of the most dramatic crimes committed under Karadžić's leadership was the shelling of the market in Sarajevo on February 5, 1994. A mortar fired from one of the hills surrounding Sarajevo exploded in a crowded outdoor market killing 68 people. Karadžić responded to the international outcry following the market bombing by claiming that the Bosnians had staged the scene to mislead the media. The bodies, Karadžić alleged, had been taken from the morgue and posed to look like victims of a mortar attack. Only the most ardent supporters of the Bosnian Serbs were fooled by these lies.

Although Sarajevo had been under attack at that point for almost two years, the manner and magnitude of the killing in the market shocked the international community and led to NATO intervention. NATO airstrikes targeted Serb positions surrounding the city and allowed Bosnian military forces to launch an offensive against the forces of the Republika Srpska. Following a ceasefire negotiated in October, the parties agreed to the Dayton Accords, an agreement brokered by the United States, on December 14, 1995. On February 29, 1996, the Bosnians declared the end of the siege as the last Bosnian Serb fighters withdrew.

Before his arrest in 2008, Karadžić managed to hide in plain sight in Serbia's capital, Belgrade. He grew a long white beard, tied his hair in a knot at the top of his head, and assumed the name "Dr. Dragan Dabic." As Dr. Dabic, Karadžić promoted alternative health care, lecturing publicly and even going on television. The government of Serbia for years showed little interest in arresting Karadžić, but pressure from the European Union (no cooperation with the ICTY, no membership in the EU was its message) eventually resulted in both Slobodan Milosevic, the former president of Serbia, and Karadžić being arrested and delivered into the custody of the ICTY.

Law and Diplomacy in the South China Sea

We tend to distinguish, at least for analytical purposes, law, diplomacy, and the use of force as tools for the conduct of foreign policy. Each typically gets a separate chapter in the international relations textbooks and a separate week on the syllabus of the typical introductory IR course. But, as a story by Helene Cooper in today's New York Times illustrates, this can be misleading. In reality, the military may provide the means by which legal claims are asserted, naval officers may be required to engage in diplomacy while on alert, and a ruling by an international arbitration panel may nudge the world toward war.

Cooper's reporting from on board the U.S.S. Chancellorsville (CG 62), a U.S. Navy guided-missile cruiser, recounts the ship's participation in a freedom of navigation (FON) exercise in the South China Sea. Her story, which includes conversations between the Chancellorsville's officers and those on a Chinese ship tailing the Chancellorsville, provides a glimpse of the legal/diplomatic/military confrontations that are taking place with increasing frequency as China attempts to establish a claim to sovereignty over much of the South China Sea even as the United States attempts to rebut that claim.

Today U.S. Deputy Secretary of Defense Robert Work told reporters that the U.S. has told China it will not recognize an air defense identification zone (ADIZ) in the South China Sea should one be declared there. "We have spoken quite plainly to our Chinese counterparts and said that we think an ADIZ would be destabilizing. We would prefer that all of the claims in the South China Sea be handled through mediation and not force or coercion," Work said. Transits through the South China Sea like the one conducted by the Chancellorsville are how the United States backs up its verbal representations to the Chinese.

Lawfare in Cyberspace

Attorney General Loretta Lynch today announced a federal indictment against seven Iranians believed to be responsible for distributed denial of service (DDOS) attacks against several large American financial institutions. The attacks began in December 2011 but became much more intense in December 2012. The indictment also accuses one of the Iranians of hacking into the control system of Bowman Dam in Rye, New York in August and September of 2013, a more worrisome attack because of its potential to threaten lives.

While the indictment does not specifically accuse the Iranian government of being behind the attacks, it does note that the accused "were employed by two Iran-based computer companies, ITSecTeam (ITSEC) and Mersad Company (MERSAD), that performed work on behalf of the Iranian Government, including the Iranian Revolutionary Guard Corps." At the time of the attacks, computer security experts speculated that Iran was retaliating for a series of sophisticated cyberattacks (beginning with Stuxnet but also including Duqu and Flame) most likely engineered by the U.S. and Israeli governments. Those attacks destroyed centrifuges being used to enrich uranium for Iran's nuclear weapons program.

The indictment was brought some time ago by a grand jury in the Southern District of New York but only unsealed today. It is possible the indictment was sealed in order to avoid complicating the negotiations that resulted in the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action last July by which Iran agreed to halt efforts to develop nuclear weapons. January 16, 2016, marked "Implementation Day" when, having verified Iran's compliance with the JCPOA, the other parties to the agreement (the United States and other UN Security Council and European Union states) lifted a variety of sanctions against Iran.

Today's announcement suggests that the United States intends to continue to use legal means to address cyberattacks emanating from state or state-sponsored actors. It follows on an indictment announced in May 2014 of five Chinese military officers affiliated with the 61398 hacker group, a unit of China's People's Liberation Army. Similar uses of the law in conflicts are addressed in a recently published book by Orde F. Kittrie entitled Lawfare: Law as a Weapon of War (Oxford University Press, 2016).

For more on the indictment unsealed today, see this story in the New York Times by David Sanger.

Fair Warning

Donald Trump and Ted Cruz have suggested that torture works. If by "works" they mean that it dehumanizes both the tortured and the torturers, they're right. That, at least, is the conclusion that Eric Fair, who worked as an interrogator for the U.S. Government in Iraq, draws in this op-ed piece published in the New York Times.

Berta Cáceres (1973-2016)

Ilisu (Turkey) . . . Three Gorges (China) . . . Glen Canyon (United States) . . . Itaipu (Brazil/Paraguay) . . . Sardar Sarovar (India). These are some of modern history's most controversial dam projects. Each one promised electrical power, flood control, water for irrigation, and more. But each one also threatened to destroy human communities, wildlife habitats, cultural artifacts, and more.

Add to the list Agua Zarca (Honduras), a planned series of four large dams on the Río Gualcarque. On Thursday the river lost one of its most determined defenders, Berta Cáceres. In a town called "Hope" (La Esperanza), Ms. Cáceres was assassinated by armed men who invaded her home as she slept.

Cáceres was the co-founder of an organization called the Council of Indigenous Peoples of Honduras (Copinh). A member of the Lenca ethnic group--the largest in Honduras--Cáceres led Copinh through years of protests against the plan to dam a river the Lenca deemed sacred. At times, Copinh filed legal challenges and lobbied the government to try to prevent the dams from being built. At other times, protesters physically blocked construction crews from gaining access to work sites. The efforts Cáceres made to try to stop the project gained international recognition last year when she was awarded the prestigious Goldman Environmental Prize. 

Ms. Cáceres, who was 44 at the time of her death, had four children. She had been threatened with rape and death, she had been followed, and several of her supporters had been killed. No suspects had ever been arrested for the killings or for the threats. After a visit in December 2013, the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights noted "a complete absence of the most basic measures to address reports of grave human rights violations in the region." As in Nigeria, Ecuador, Sudan, and Myanmar where oil interests colluded with corrupt governments to violate the rights of indigenous peoples, those supporting the Agua Zarca project in Honduras appear to have turned the government against its own people. Regardless of who actually killed Berta Cáceres, the Honduran government bears responsibility for its failure to protect her and for its failure to pursue justice in the cases of the other peaceful protesters who have been murdered.

For more on the work done by Cáceres and Copinh in an effort to stop the construction of dams on the Río Gualcarque, watch this brief video portrait from the page dedicated to Cáceres on the Goldman Environmental Prize website.

Power Outage

The power is out on my street today. The outage was announced well in advance and the reason for the outage is clear: a Southern California Edison crew is replacing a transformer in a vault beneath the street. But even as Edison upgrades the local network's hardware, the Department of Homeland Security is again warning U.S. power companies about software vulnerabilities.

A cyberattack--as yet unattributed, although Russia is clearly the primary suspect--caused the power outage that affected 225,000 people in Ukraine on December 23, according to investigators in the United States. Hackers stole the credentials of system operators and used their access to the industrial control systems of three regional energy distribution companies to flip breakers and shut off the flow of power. A denial-of-service attack simultaneously blocked phone calls into energy distribution centers (to keep operators from knowing the extent of the outage) and malware prevented those centers from switching to backup power supplies.

The basic design of the attack on Ukraine's power grid, which involved infiltrating a network, mapping it, and gaining control of a supervisory control and data acquisition (SCADA) system, resembles the Stuxnet attack that damaged centrifuges being used in Iran's nuclear weapons program in 2010. Stuxnet is widely believed to have been the work of the U.S. and Israeli governments, although neither has acknowledged responsibility.

The warning distributed by Homeland Security's Industrial Control Systems-Cyber Emergency Response Team follows similar warnings issued by analysts in the private sector. The possibility of taking down a power grid via a cyberattack has long been theorized. Last year, a study co-produced by the University of Cambridge Centre for Risk Studies and insurance giant Lloyd's calculated that a cyberattack on the power grid in the northeastern United States could result in financial losses of a trillion dollars or more. It is worth noting, however, that the attack in Ukraine in December is the first actually to cause a power outage.

No one thinks it will be the last.

Verdun

The centennial commemorations associated with World War I come almost daily, and they are important to note lest we become complacent about the distance humankind has traveled. One hundred years ago this past Sunday, the Battle of Verdun began. Over the course of the next ten months, the German and French armies blasted away at each other in what appears in retrospect to have been one of those set pieces characteristic of the Great War, one in which tens of thousands of troops were killed--perhaps 300,000 altogether--with no significant advantage being gained by either side.

Paul Jankowski, a historian at Brandeis University and the author of a book on the Battle of Verdun, considers the battle's meaning in an essay published over the weekend in the New York Times Sunday Review. The battle, Jankowski concludes, in the end controlled the generals who had hoped to control it. This offers a lesson worth remembering when we hear the intemperate talk of war from presidential candidates who seem to know little about history.

Reviving Torture

On April 28, 2004, the CBS News program 60 Minutes II aired a story revealing in graphic detail--with photos supplied by a U.S. soldier who had chosen to blow the whistle on prisoner abuse--the torture and cruel, inhuman, and degrading treatment of Iraqi captives at the U.S. Army's detention facility at Abu Ghraib. The story led to multiple investigations, the removal of Brig. Gen. Janet Karpinski from her command, and the court-martial of several low-ranking soldiers involved in the mistreatment of prisoners. Those at the highest levels of government denied responsibility, argued that "enhanced interrogation" was not torture and therefore was not illegal, and claimed that getting rough with detainees was necessary to get actionable intelligence for the "war on terror." In November of that same year, President George W. Bush became the first Republican candidate for the presidency since 1988 to win a majority of the popular vote. Respect for human rights was apparently not among the American electorate's priorities at the time.

In the Republican presidential debate in New Hampshire back on February 6, Donald Trump said, "I would bring back waterboarding and I'd bring back a hell of a lot worse than waterboarding." The line won the applause of many of those in the audience, a group older but apparently no wiser with respect to fundamental human rights norms than those who had voted for Bush in 2004.

To be clear, waterboarding is torture. It has been rightly condemned as torture by the United States Government in the past, at least when it was being employed by others. It violates every reasonable construction of the terms of the the 1949 Geneva Conventions and the 1984 Convention on Torture and Other Cruel, Inhuman, or Degrading Treatment or Punishment. Its use is forbidden by the U.S. Army Field Manual. And as a result of an amendment to the National Defense Authorization Act signed by President Obama on November 25, 2015, it is now a clear and unequivocal violation of federal law. The U.S. Constitution, of course, requires the president to "take care that the laws be faithfully executed," whether he or she agrees with those laws or not.

Just days after Trump's embrace of waterboarding and, in the same debate, Ted Cruz's denial that waterboarding is torture, John McCain took to the floor of the Senate to condemn such loose talk. His remarks should be carefully noted by the Republican candidates vying, or so it appears, to be torturer-in-chief.

Ignoring the pleas of human rights groups, President Obama opted not to prosecute--or even investigate--the violations of federal and international law by those in the George W. Bush administration, including Vice President Dick Cheney, who advocated the use of "enhanced interrogation" techniques, including waterboarding. In retrospect, that may have been a mistake. Perhaps it would not now be so easy for some to talk of reviving torture if more had been punished for actually practicing it.

The Fear Factor

At the outset, Seeking Security in an Insecure World develops a definition of "security" that begins with its Latin root, securus, which means "without a care." Insecurity, of course, is the opposite state, a condition characterized by anxiety and fear. There is a part of this opening discussion of security and insecurity in Seeking Security in an Insecure World that is, I think, worth quoting for its relevance to the psychological state of the nation in the aftermath of the massacre in San Bernardino, California last week:

Insecurity reflects the state of the world, but it is also a state of mind. Consequently, the proximity, in both space and time, of a threat can affect its ability to produce insecurity. There also seems to be a "dread" factor in insecurity. Humans often dread the unknown and the uncontrollable event, such as a random bombing, out of all proportion to the actual threat such an event poses. The social dimension of insecurity--the creation and spread of collective fears--adds another element to our understanding of the subjective aspect of insecurity. Not only do the conditions that produce insecurity change over time, collective understandings do as well. Security--and insecurity--are socially constructed.

There have been events--objective conditions--that have prompted feelings of insecurity: the terror attacks in Paris and San Bernardino loom large at present. But human psychology and the way it generates interpretations of these attacks is equally important to our efforts to understand the fear that is driving so much political rhetoric and social discourse lately. Considered objectively (that is, applying reason over and against emotion alone), the threat that terrorism poses is small. Terrorists, after all, fight the way they do because they are weak in comparison to the military and police forces marshaled by developed states. Terrorism is a form of asymmetric warfare, a way of fighting that seeks to avoid the powerful adversary's strengths. Hitting the soft underbelly of a society generally means attacking in ways that violate the collective norms of society--norms against deliberately targeting innocent people, for example--because even strong states, especially if free, expect that law and not force alone will do part of the work of providing security.

Terrorism "works" not by defeating (or evening demonstrating an ability to defeat) the security forces of a state like France or the United States but by getting into the minds of people who can influence the policies of the state. Unable to change the objective aspects of a powerful state's security, terrorists hope to alter the subjective aspects--the psychological terrain--of security. This is why, to terrorists, the victims of an attack are less important than the audience. Victims are chosen randomly; the audience is chosen very deliberately.

If it is true that "security--and insecurity--are socially constructed," then what we are witnessing right now in the United States is a political process--primarily (but not exclusively) the campaign for the Republican presidential nomination--that is actually generating much of our present insecurity. Most people could sense this already, but the point bears emphasis.

Putting the "Wonga Coup" Investors on Trial

The Daily Mail reports that Sir Mark Thatcher, son of the late Margaret Thatcher, is to be the subject of a private prosecution in the United Kingdom for his role in the 2004 coup plot against Equatorial Guinea's dictator, Teodoro Obiang Nguema Mbasogo. Simon Mann, who was captured in Zimbabwe while en route to Equatorial Guinea with sixty mercenaries, will be the prosecution's star witness.

Private prosecutions, possible in some common law systems, involve allegations of criminal conduct brought by an individual or organization rather than the public prosecutor. In some cases (including this case involving the failed "Wonga Coup"), evidence may be developed by private investigators. Obiang has engaged a prominent British human rights attorney, Jason McCue, to present the case. (McCue's profile on TED.com states, "Jason McCue litigates against terrorists, dictators and others who seem above the law, using the legal and judicial system in innovative ways.")

Mann served four years in a Zimbabwean prison before being turned over to Equatorial Guinea for trial. He was convicted and sentenced to a 32-year prison sentence but released after a year and a half. He maintained at his trial and in a memoir published after his return to the United Kingdom that he was the front man for a group of British investors including Thatcher and Ely Calil. Obiang has long been suspected of making a deal with Mann for his release from prison in the expectation that Mann would help him make the case that the British, Spanish, and U.S. governments were behind the coup plot.

Refugees

Those who are looking for absolute security are on the wrong planet. This one has life.

What You Should Be Reading After Paris

In the aftermath of the terrorist attacks in Paris, those with the least intelligent things to say seem to be shouting the loudest. Some are trying to get attention in the still overcrowded field of those running for the Republican presidential nomination. Others have airtime to fill and ratings to worry about. Then there are those who are simply way too inclined to express their deepest fears on social media. The mix is toxic and, in a democracy, it threatens to affect policy in some truly harmful ways.

Let us suppose you would prefer some reasoned analysis over feverish diatribes. Let us suppose further that you value knowledge as much as a high decibel level. What (and whom) should you be reading? Here are a few suggestions:

Will McCants is the author of the recently published book The ISIS Apocalypse: The History, Strategy, and Doomsday Vision of the Islamic State (St. Martin's, 2015) and a fellow of the Center for Middle East Policy at the Brookings Institution. His brief essay for FP ("How the Islamic State Declared War on the World") is a good starting point for understanding what ISIS is. McCants makes the important point that ISIS is not just a terrorist organization. It is a state--and a state-sponsor of terrorism (much as North Korea is a state and a transnational criminal organization, an insight I owe to this excellent monograph). For McCants' view on the warrant for ISIS-style violence in Islam, see this brief piece on the Washington Post's "Acts of Faith" blog.

Robert Pape, professor of international relations at the University of Chicago and co-author (with James K. Feldman) of Cutting the Fuse: The Explosion of Global Suicide Terrorism and How to Stop It, suggests that ISIS attacked Paris because of the role France has played in a successful military campaign against the Islamic State. "The group," Pape writes, "is lashing out against the states that are now posing crippling blows to its dreams of a caliphate in the Middle East." Pape's Boston Globe op-ed is titled "Why Paris? The Answer Can Be Found in Syria and Iraq."

Andrew J. Bacevich, professor emeritus of international relations at Boston University and author of the forthcoming book America's War for the Greater Middle East: A Military History, is more pessimistic about what the U.S. or France can do to defeat Islamic extremism. In this Boston Globe op-ed--"A War the West Cannot Win"--Bacevich argues for a defensive posture that leaves those in the Middle East to sort out their political and religious differences without external involvement. 

Stephen M. Walt, Robert and Renee Belfer Professor of International Affairs at Harvard University, takes the rhetoric about the response to the Paris attacks down several notches in an essay--"Don't Give ISIS What It Wants"--for FP. Walt argues that ISIS has a long-term strategy and that the first priority of the U.S. should be "not to fall into the obvious trap the Islamic State has set." That was my point in yesterday's post.

Daniel Drezner, professor of international relations at the Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy at Tufts University, also urges everyone to "take a deep breath" before acting in the wake of the Paris attacks. His comments on the Washington Post's "PostEverything" blog--"Formulating a Policy Response in Anger Is Probably Not the Best Way to Defeat the Islamic State"--remind us that, among other things, "the Islamic State is not winning in the Middle East."

Olivier Roy, professor at the European University Institute in Florence, Italy, and author of Globalized Islam and Holy Ignorance, offers a helpful overview of the many conflicting state interests in the Middle East in this op-ed for the New York Times titled "The Attacks in Paris Reveal the Strategic Limits of ISIS." One cannot read this piece and come away believing there are simple solutions to the conflict in Syria or the broader problems of the Middle East.

In offering this reading list, I am not endorsing all of the views expressed by these individuals. In fact, one couldn't coherently endorse everything each one says for the simple reason that there are some clear differences of opinion among them. I am suggesting, however, that these brief essays--none will take more than about five minutes to read--are better informed and more carefully reasoned than most of what you will get from the twenty-four hour news networks, the vast wastelands of the Internet just on the other side of click bait, or your Facebook friend Earl who has strong opinions about everything.

Chess Lessons

Experienced chess players understand gambits. Politicians should, too.

What, exactly, is a gambit? In chess, it's an opening--a sequence of moves at the beginning of a game--designed to entice the opponent to make a move that will leave her in a weakened position. Typically, a gambit involves leaving a pawn vulnerable to capture, but in a location on the board that requires the opponent to cede control of the center squares or to make some other tactical concession. A gambit, in other words, involves baiting a trap and waiting for the opponent to walk right into it.

Terrorist attacks should generally be understood as gambits. They are intended to provoke a particular response that the terrorists believe will benefit them, at least in the long run. The response the terrorists desire is probably the one that, for the victim and the wider audience, is the easiest to rationalize and the hardest to resist. As a rule of thumb, if you don't know what the terrorists are trying to goad you into doing, you might be better off not doing anything rather than choosing to follow your gut.

So, what is it that the Islamic State might want? Let's start with an even bigger conflict in the Middle East--one that draws in a variety of powers that are distrustful of one another. Let's add a more visible presence of French, U.S., and Russian military forces. And then let's add an end to the open door for Syrian refugees.

Why might the Islamic State want these things? Because its appeal is based on two things: first, its ability to provide better governance than the weak and corrupt governments of Iraq, Syria, Libya, or parts of Egypt, and, second, its ability to present itself as the best defender of Islam against an implacably hostile West.

Those who have reflexively called for widening the war in Syria and Iraq on the one hand while excluding Syrian refugees from the United States and Western Europe on the other might do well to learn something about gambits.

The Urbanization of Insecurity

Tonight Paris has been the scene of an unspeakable atrocity. As President Obama said just a few hours ago, "This is an attack not just on Paris, it's an attack not just on the people of France, but this is an attack on all of humanity and the universal values that we share." It is also, once again, an attack on a city--one in a growing list of examples of the urbanization of insecurity.

Cities have long been subject to attack. The burning of Washington in 1814 and the destruction of Atlanta in 1864 provide examples familiar to Americans. But prior to the twentieth century, cities were generally targeted at or near the end of a successful military campaign; they were not generally attacked as a desperate tactic of the weak in an attempt to turn the tables on the strong. Urban terrorism, like the aerial bombardment of cities that preceded it (also called "terrorism" by those who experienced it), is a form of asymmetric warfare--a mode of attack that avoids the adversary's strengths and zeroes in on its vulnerabilities, even if such a mode of attack is considered barbaric or "an attack on . . . the universal values that we share."

Consider the pattern that has emerged in recent years.

The terrorist attacks on September 11, 2001, appeared to present a new form of terrorism. After all, roughly nine times more people died in the World Trade Center on 9/11 than had died in the January 1985 Air India bombing over the Irish Sea, which had previously been the deadliest terrorist attack in history. What made the 9/11 attacks different from the many terrorist attacks that had gone before were their sophistication and their manifest intent to kill as many people as possible. But there were precursors to the 9/11 attacks on New York and Washington.

The unsuccessful effort in 1993 to bring down the World Trade Center in retrospect appears to have been a harbinger of things to come. It was an attack intended to inflict mass casualties, as was the 1995 Aum Shinrikyo attack in Tokyo. In the latter case, an apocalyptic Japanese cult calling itself Supreme Truth attempted to spread sarin gas in the Tokyo subway system. The attack, motivated by the group's belief that it was destined to rule Japan, was preceded by a multimillion-dollar effort to manufacture and test biological weapons. Ten times between 1990 and 1995, Aum Shinrikyo attempted to spread biological agents in and around Tokyo. For various reasons (some illustrating the difficulty of working with biological weapons), not a single person was killed in any of these attacks. Consequently, Aum Shinrikyo turned its attention to chemical weapons. In the Tokyo subway attack, twelve people were killed and over a thousand were injured. Still more experienced some form of severe psychological trauma.

An incident similar to the deadliest part of tonight's attack in Paris occurred in Moscow in October of 2002 when fifty Chechen terrorists seized a Moscow theater during a performance, taking approximately 700 hostages. The terrorists, who wired themselves and the building with explosives, demanded that Russia end its war against separatists in Chechnya. At least 129 people died in the theater, most from a toxic gas Russian forces pumped into the building prior to the raid that brought the ordeal to a conclusion.

On the morning of March 11, 2004, ten bombs exploded on commuter trains in downtown Madrid. The detonation of the bombs was a coordinated effort, with all ten exploding within minutes of 8:00 a.m. In addition to the ten bombs that exploded, police located and safely detonated three other bombs. After the attack, it was determined that 191 people died and approximately 1,800 people were injured in the blasts. Initially, the attack was thought to be the work of the Basque separatist group ETA, but it was later found that Islamic extremists, inspired by an al Qaeda call for attacks on Spain, were responsible.

A little over a year later, on July 7, 2005, three bombs exploded in the London Underground while a fourth bomb exploded on one of the city’s iconic red double-decker buses. These explosions all occurred at the height of the city’s morning rush hour, effectively bringing the city to a standstill while rescue crews rushed to help those trapped both above and below ground. After extensive rescue efforts and searches, the final count was fifty-two people dead and more than 950 injured. The attacks, suicide bombings executed by four British men, all of whom had no known terrorist background or affiliation, highlighted the danger cities face not only from foreigners but from their own citizens as well.

On November 26, 2008, the Pakistan-based terrorist organization Lashkar-e-Taiba launched a brutal and carefully planned attack on multiple locations in Mumbai, India. The attack spanned three days as ten gunmen indiscriminately killed Indians and foreigners alike in highly populated areas, including a hospital, a Jewish center, a café, and two hotels. The attackers, all well prepared, continually eluded capture by Indian police and counter-terrorism units. Indeed, in the aftermath of the attacks, there was much controversy over how ten gunmen could cause so much destruction and fight off Indian forces for three days within a single city. Overall, 164 were killed and 308 were injured.

What these cases tell us is that cities are vulnerable--and thus are tempting targets for extremists. While an effective response by well-prepared police or military units can mitigate the impact of urban terrorism, there seems to be little that can be done to prevent attacks like those that have occurred in Paris, Mumbai, London, Madrid, Moscow, and other cities. Governments seeking answers where there are few to be found are likely to use more military force abroad and more electronic surveillance at home. And they will face pressure from their most reactionary citizens to turn away refugees, notwithstanding the fact that refugees, far from being the problem, are themselves fleeing terrorists.

The world's most vibrant and prosperous cities are places of great diversity with the tolerance needed to match and nurture it. They are threatened most by intolerance, whether homegrown in the form of racist policemen or imported in the form of religious extremists. Unfortunately, the very qualities--diversity and tolerance--that make a city like Paris so attractive are also the ones that make it so vulnerable. And this fact, I fear, leaves us little to work with in trying to address the urbanization of insecurity.

Saints . . . and Sinners

In many of the churches of Western Christendom, yesterday was All Saints' Day, or the Feast of All Saints, a day set aside to remember those who have died in Christ. It is ironic, then, that word of Willis Carto's death came yesterday. And it may be perplexing that I would break a long (unintentional) silence on this blog to note his passing. But to note his passing is not to mourn it.

Six months ago, I would not have known who Willis Carto was. But in the course of conducting research at the Reagan Library on the ratification of the Genocide Convention, Heather Odell and I came across a large number of letters sent to the White House (primarily in April 1985) to express opposition to U.S. ratification of the 1948 treaty that defines genocide and obligates states to prevent and punish its commission.

The letters came mostly from people who were members of or were influenced by a right-wing organization called the Liberty Lobby. Willis Carto founded the Liberty Lobby in 1958 as a means of promoting his extremist views. According to his obituary in the New York Times, "Mr. Carto raised funds to finance a right-wing military dictatorship in the United States, campaigned to persuade blacks to voluntarily return to Africa and, most influentially, started newsletters, a journal and conferences of academics and others to deny the scale, and even the existence, of the Holocaust." It is not hard to understand why his organization would have campaigned against ratification of the Genocide Convention. What is hard to understand is why so many Americans would have joined the campaign--the Times notes that there were 400,000 people on the Liberty Lobby's mailing list in the 1980s--and why eleven Republicans in the Senate would have opposed ratification to the bitter end.

Carto's views were, according to his friend Louis T. Byers, "those of a racial nationalist." He magnified his influence by keeping himself and his views out of the limelight and enlisting supporters through appeals to the Constitution (the Genocide Convention would supposedly require the U.S. to turn over its citizens to a World Court in violation of their constitutional rights), to historical objectivity (Carto's Institute for Historical Review and its journal published "scholarly" articles that questioned the accuracy of existing research on the Holocaust), and to American exceptionalism (the Liberty Lobby suggested over and over that America's greatness would be undermined by any form of obeisance to international law). Without understanding the larger narrative represented by the Liberty Lobby and the Institute for Historical Review, many Americans lent their names to Carto's worldview. The same sort of thing happens today when people argue that dominant groups--not racial minorities or women or the poor--are the primary victims of discrimination or that climate change is not happening because there was a harsh winter or, on the basis of a headline or two, that immigration endangers our society.

Of course, it would be wrong to suggest that support for racist organizations is always and only a product of ignorance regarding the larger narrative. After all, there are racists among us and, if we are honest with ourselves, we each harbor our own evil impulses. Carto's life should remind us of what evil impulses look like when given full expression. His obituary is repulsive. But the history of the Liberty Lobby and the Genocide Convention should also remind us that "principled opposition"--to civil rights, to help for refugees, to the right to health care, to conservation of the Earth--may sometimes be, in reality, nothing more than a rationalization of evil.

Deadly Air

Wednesday's catastrophic explosions in the Chinese port city of Tianjin are, understandably, attracting greater attention at present, but new research suggests that day-to-day air quality is a far greater threat to human life than random events like the Tianjin disaster.

A statistical analysis by researchers at Berkeley Earth asserts that air pollution in China is responsible for somewhere between 700,000 and 2,200,000 deaths each year. The midpoint of the estimate--1,600,000 deaths per year--translates to 4,400 deaths per day.

The paper, based on detailed records of air-sampling stations in China and neighboring countries combined with World Health Organization frameworks for estimating mortality associated with the diseases most commonly linked to air pollution, is scheduled to be published in PLOS One on August 20. PLOS One is an online, open-access, peer-reviewed science journal that publishes about 30,000 papers per year.

The Berkeley Earth research suggests that much of Beijing's famed air pollution is produced 200 miles away in the industrial areas of Hebei Province. This means that local efforts to mitigate air pollution in advance of the 2022 Winter Olympics will likely be inadequate in the absence of measures addressing the pollution generated by more distant coal-fired power plants.

More on the Berkeley Earth findings, including maps and data sources, can be found here. The study to be published in PLOS One is available here (PDF).

Deterring Cyber Attacks

The New York Times reports today that President Obama has been weighing a variety of possible responses to the intrusion into Office of Personnel Management computers that was first reported in June. The hack, which has been attributed to China, resulted in the theft of personal information for over twenty million federal employees. Although CIA data was not involved in the breach, some of the information collected may have allowed the Chinese to determine the identity of spies posted to China in the past.

One of the considerations involved in the Obama administration's deliberations--and apparently the reason that certain administration officials were willing to talk to a reporter about ongoing discussions--is the desire to achieve a measure of deterrence by imposing costs on the attackers that are clearly tied to the initial data breach. James R. Clapper, Jr., director of national intelligence, and Admiral Michael S. Rogers, director of the National Security Agency, have both argued that Chinese cyber attacks will keep escalating as long as the United States fails to impose costs on China for the attacks. On the other hand, there is a concern that retaliation, if not carefully calibrated, might prompt escalation rather than restraint.

According to the Times article, the idea of economic sanctions against China has been considered and rejected due to the potential for costly Chinese retaliation against U.S. economic interests. Additionally, the idea of criminal prosecution has apparently been rejected due to the scope and nature of the OPM breach. A recent Congressional Research Service report notes that U.S. policy regarding cyber espionage attempts to distinguish between breaches that involve national security and those that are concerned with economic interests. The former draw a counterintelligence response while the latter are potential subjects for criminal prosecution.

Two years ago, at a "shirt sleeves summit" in Rancho Mirage, California, President Obama tried but failed to get his Chinese counterpart, Xi Jinping, to agree to a framework for the regulation of activities in cyberspace. If the U.S.-Soviet nuclear relationship provides any guidance--and it's not entirely clear that it does--a sense of mutual vulnerability may be necessary to bring the United States and China to the point of being able to cooperate on cyber arms control.