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David Kay
Former Head, Iraq Survey Group (ISG)
We have only had three periods in U.S. history since 1776 when we've had to reexamine and readjust almost totally our national security policy. From 1776 to 1914, our basic national security strategy was to keep other powers out of the Western Hemisphere. Sometimes it involved military action, sometimes political action, sometimes cash, as in the Louisiana Purchase or the Seward purchase of Alaska. After 1914, and literally up until 2001, our national security policy recognized the importance initially of the balance of power in Europe and the importance of ensuring that a state hostile to the United States did not become the dominant political power. It was not just Europe, although it was a European-centric policy, and in contest with the Soviet Union generally, it went globally.
We're now without a good name, struggling with a national security challenge which says that the enemy may be within us. We no longer have the luxury of distance, of continental detachment, and we don't really know exactly who we're struggling against. Too often, I think, in the U.S. this discussion has taken the form of worries about terrorism, worries about weapons of mass destruction, both of which are important, but are actually tactics for the fundamental problem, and I think we need, before we start thinking of a "war on," to identify the root causes that are changing our national security posture today and changing the threats that we face in the world.
Failed States
The first is vulnerable societies or failed states. There are, if you take UN data, data from any number of private NGOs, 50 to 70 vulnerable or actually failed. These cut across the world: states like North Korea, unable to perform economically; although it has immense weapons, it is actually a failed societal organization. Zimbabwe in Africa. Pakistan. Iraq was, at the time of Operation Iraqi Freedom, a failed state. We didn't recognize that and military action would have probably taken a different form if we had fully realized that.
Why these states fail is important to understand. Some of these reasons we understand, others we are still grappling with understanding. Clearly, part of the issue is demography. In Western Europe and in the United States, roughly 17 percent of the population is under 15; in Iraq, 62 percent of the population is under the age of 15. In the Middle East as a whole, it's about 50 percent under 15; under 24, it rises to 62 percent.
Take a country like Yemen. Yemen is a small state with virtually no economy (unless drug smuggling is an economy, which it is for some states); it will have at mid-century the largest population in the Middle East, about 105 million people, without ever having had a public education system, a public health system, any form of a recognized economy - unemployment is the recognized economy - and struggling with over half of its population being under the age of 15. Is there any surprise that, as you go through Al Qaeda ranks and other ranks today of terrorist groups, you find a large proportion of Yemenis?
Sudan is another example of huge demographic pressure. Sudan will be the third largest country in the Middle East at mid-century. But there are other issues as well. Some are economic. Most of the 50 to 70 states are states that have a single dependable source of income: either a single crop, raw material or natural resource like oil. It's very hard to manage an economy like that, threatened with huge cycles of income disparity created by the very nature of a single-crop or single-income society. Some of these often go in ways that we don't recognize because of the lag in our memory. The best example is Saudi Arabia.
Today, if someone says Saudi Arabia, the image that crops up in your mind is exaggerated wealth or building mansions, importing everything, flying around the world - the Arabian Nights sort of image. How many people realize that the per capita income of Saudi Arabia today is one-half of what it was in 1972? Their sons and daughters (I should not be politically correct, let me say in Saudi Arabia it's sons) look at their fathers, uncles, elder brothers - they had a life that they know they will not have. The social pressures that that cause as tremendous economic flux riven a society.
Nigeria is much the same way. Oil brought tremendous wealth, but oil comes and goes, price-wise. Unfortunately, this year it's going the wrong way for us - that's very good for countries like Nigeria. But the social pressures are tremendous.
Other things take place in many of these failed states: a failure of social integration as they confront the external world. I'm particularly unhappy with much of the analysis which would drive us to a war of civilizations: It's Islam against us, we're into a hopeless war, the only alternative is with Islam. The real war with Islam is internal to these countries. As some countries where Islam is the dominant religion make the transition to a modern society, a modern economy and a modern world - and others don't make the transition - their struggle of an internal civil war takes the form, very often because of government policy, of an external civil war against others.
Another common theme is past conflict. The easiest predictor for which states are going to be failed states are those that have had coups, civil wars, revolutions in the past. A poster child for that has to be in our own hemisphere: Haiti has been a failed state forever. One has to think when it was not a failed state. We are facing a growing tide of those states whose failure - and we too easily get involved in tactics because we don't ask the question of when fundamental changes like that are taking place in the world, what difference does it make to us as Americans? Unless they are threatening us, we can ignore it. That is a great weakness in our national security policy and one that we must address.
At one level, most of these states will at one time or the other become humanitarian disasters. As you look at the Sudan today - which most of us don't look at; it's not on the nightly news; it's not something that concerns us - it is a tragedy of immense dimensions, yet we choose to ignore it. Sometimes these will cause migratory fluxes. If you live in Florida, Haiti is important to you because it can be a source of migration as Haiti fails once again. Much of Western Europe has that concern about failures in Asia, the Middle East and North Africa. It also should be a concern to us because in the world we live in, where communication is easy, where people move, those become the seedbeds of future armed conflict that can indeed threaten us.
In a city like San Francisco, even in Washington, you could track which state is failing by which ethnic restaurant is in vogue. That's the good side. The bad side - our neighbors, many of them, come from those states and they're good people seeking a better life. But if some of their group, because of what is going on at home, pick up arms, decide to challenge the United States, it is going to come home to us yet again. It's a threat to democracy - a society that is based on pluralism, freedom of association, diversity, freedom of choice. We've got to worry, if Pogo is right, "I have met the enemy, and he is us," how we adapt to that national security threat. It's vital for other reasons as well: some of these countries sit astride natural resources that are immensely important to the U.S. That's particularly true of oil but it's also true of other commodities.
Two Future Sources of Conflict Let me hit two other sources of international conflict that we're going to face in the future in a way that we haven't faced in the past and barely recognize. First, is conflict over natural resources. Here the poster child is going to be oil and water. We're about to see in regions in the world - you've already got conflict, but moving to major conflict as water becomes a scarce resource that decides how countries are going to live. The Middle East is a classic example of that, but there are examples of that in Africa and in Asia as well.
Oil - barely now, you're getting public recognition of the implications of the Chinese getting wealthy. If the Chinese become like Californians and Texans - and God help them if they get Hummers - you're talking about a demand on global petroleum that becomes a political strain, and we've got to deal with that.
A third so often pushes states into the failed category: transnational issues. Some are health-related crises - AIDS, SARS, emerging diseases. You saw, last year, with the SARS crisis, the world picking on China, on Hong Kong - You're not doing enough about it. We're going to close down tourism, we're going to shut down flights - and the reaction. There is a tremendous danger of those issues having an impact that pushes a state over into a failed category, as well as becoming a source of conflict itself. The one that hasn't hit us - except if you look at very few examples, Mad Cow disease, foot and mouth disease - but in the next decade likely to be more emergent: agricultural diseases. We have created a worldwide system of agriculture which is extraordinarily vulnerable to new emerging diseases that can ripple through the system with tremendous speed. If that starts, the finger pointing... You allowed it to start there, you Canadians... California is great, you never have bad weather, but those of us who live in the rest of the country, it's the Canadians who send the cold fronts against us, and I sometimes wonder why we haven't had a war on Canadians. We've got a war on poverty, war on terrorism, war on cancer - we might as well go about something that makes my life at least four months of the year unpleasant and deal with the Canadians. If the Canadians, the Brits, you name it, don't deal with Mad Cow disease, don't deal with foot and mouth disease, don't deal with the latest crop disease to run through the winter wheat crop - those will cause conflict, and we are more vulnerable now to that than we ever have been because of the nature of the global economy.
Let me add in that category one that most politicians, particularly in Washington, but occasionally even in California, want to look the other way on: climate change. Global climate change has the potential of both pushing countries that are marginally viable into the category of failed states, as well as becoming Who's responsible for this? and becoming sources of political conflict among states themselves. As Americans, the largest consumers of resources in the world, we ought to recognize our own vulnerability to be picked on for, I think, good reason.
Tactics
It used to be said, at least when I started life in Washington, a good humanitarian disaster would get you from the U.S. Congress maybe $5 million. Inflation has taken that up to a larger sum, but there is a limit to it. What has changed are principally two things: access to weapons of mass destruction, or weapons of great destructive power, mass casualties as opposed to mass destruction; as well as the openness of the United States to the world. Let me start by giving you an example of why weapons of mass destruction, mass casualties, are more available today than ever before, and give it to you as a personal biography of a very interesting individual.
The individual who is responsible for more proliferation of nuclear technology and missile technology than any other single individual around the world; born in Bhopal, India, in 1935, when India was a British colony. Immigrated with his parents in the early '50s to Pakistan after Pakistan and India were split. In the early '60s went to Europe on a government fellowship to get an engineering degree, did very well, went to work for a private consortium of three states that produced enriched uranium in Europe, and was one of those fantastic workers that you love to have working for you unless you're the treasurer of a company. That is, this is an individual who worked late every night, worked late on weekends, took work home - the ideal person to have on your team - then, after the Indian nuclear explosion, he went back to Pakistan and within two years had a Pakistan uranium enrichment program, and by 1989-1990 was offering to states around the world to sell them a complete package that included not only a uranium enrichment program but also a weapon design as well as missile technology. This is A.Q. Khan.
It's a fantastic personal story but also a story that emphasizes our vulnerability. We're an open world; people can come to our educational institutions. We try not to discriminate; we try to be open to students, to allow them to participate. We generally try to facilitate them staying on to work in our enterprises. We value their work, we profit by it, our economy would be extraordinarily different, for the worse, if we didn't do that, and yet that capability can transfer in a miraculous period: Pakistan, a failed state, having nuclear technology capability.
A.Q. Khan's model seems to have been, before it existed, Amazon.com. Take what he did with Libya. Libya, you want to have a nuclear weapon? You need to enrich uranium. I'll sell you the manufacturing capability to do that part. Oh, you can't manufacture it here? Not a problem, we'll set up a subsidiary plant in Malaysia, they'll produce the parts and we'll have them delivered here. Oh, you have a problem: FedEx doesn't deliver? That's all right, I have friends in the Pakistani air force that will fly it out to Dubai and will move it into the shipping lanes and move it to you. It, in many ways, is the model of a modern entrepreneur, except for, at $100 million a pop. he was offering some of the most destructive technology that man has yet produced.
Most of this destructive technology that we still think about as being modern is actually 60, 70, 80, 90 years old. Most of the chemical weapons technology dates back to World War I and World War II. Frankly, if you want to make nerve gas, there are Internet sites that tell you how to do it, and the ingredients are in any agricultural co-op to do a pretty good nerve gas knock-off. Anthrax came very close, with a very small amount, to closing down the postal system and essentially closing down governmental Washington. That technology is now well over 60 years old. Most of it is commercially available. So the technology has just become available, and the Internet as a means of propagating that technology has become more powerful.
My favorite group of people who were willing to help Iraq during the late 1990s extend their missile program were a group from Russia. They spent six months in Baghdad working on the Iraqi missile program, went back home, continued to work on the program, sending the Iraqis, using the Internet, updates on what they ought to do, reviewing their plans, helping them if they needed parts.
Not Your Father's Terrorists
We've become a society that depends on and is open to the world. It's living up really to the fundamental values of the founding of this country: diversity, freedom of association, independence, willingness to keep the government out and let people get on with their act. If you look at how Ford Motor Company, Macy's, how any large enterprise deals today with just-in-time delivery, outsourcing things to the world, integrating them here, moving them around, it really means we are more vulnerable in a fundamental way than ever before. You almost wish for the world in which you had to worry about missiles flying over our horizon or a fleet of aircraft, or not that far back in history, ships showing up off the shores of California, a fleet - that fleet is here, it lives in San Jose, in Oakland, in the Berkeley hills. There is no longer a boundary that separates us from the rest of the world.
Let me hit, just briefly, the issue of terrorism. Lyndon Johnson first introduced "war" into large use in the War on Poverty. We have to have a "war" on everything, so we have a war on terrorism, without understanding the roots of terrorism and why terrorism has emerged. Terrorism has been around for a long time, but terrorism was a means for an objective. Take my classic terrorist group, the IRA: Get the British out of Northern Ireland, you don't want to destroy Britain and you certainly don't want to destroy Northern Ireland; you want to change the political class, and in general that is what terrorism has been about, changing the rulers and putting our guys in power. That's not what terrorism is about now. Terrorism is about what I've called the culture of death. I die, therefore I am. The willingness for ultimate sacrifice to obtain some lofty goal in the hereafter. These terrorists are different in another way. Most of our image of terrorists is of young, hopeless men. It's interesting if you read the biography of the 9/11 terrorists or the biography of those who carried out the Madrid bombing; these are not young, hopeless people. They are mostly middle aged, they often came to where they are in life with fellowships, they studied at very good universities. Atta is a classic example; he could have been an urban planner in Germany. The mastermind of the Madrid bombing also came from North Africa, studied architecture. (There may be something about urban planning, I don't know, as a key insight.) These are people who had many of the same possibilities. They also were not single; they had families, wives, children, and yet they were willing to sacrifice themselves for a different goal. They also have capabilities that terrorists have never been able to have, although they may have wanted them in the past. So there are some fundamental changes going on in the world of terrorism.
With regard to targets, what you think are their targets probably are not; we should realize that the military is not the target of terrorism. We like to think of a world that is symmetrical: You go up against our best and we'll beat you. The terrorists, because of what they are trying to accomplish, are seeking symbolic targets, large numbers of casualties. I talked recently to several real estate groups, and when I reel off the symbolic targets - these are vulnerable targets to terrorists.
But let me go back to what I started. These are tactics and you've got to address root causes. There is simply not enough money in the American economy if all you can do is defend and improve your defenses, because you have to win every day against terrorists and you don't know when they are attacking. While defense is important, we really have to learn a lesson to think about what people who in fact want to do harm to us are about, why they have reached that position in life and how we can change it.
This gets me to the last thing: the intelligence capabilities we have or need. We have an intelligence capability that was ideally designed and worked fairly well against the Soviet Union, a large continental target, 12-13 time zones. It was opposing us militarily, so it needed to build and move large numbers of anything. It had to communicate across huge distances, so the opportunity of learning what they were saying, what they were thinking about, was huge. It was a denied territory, hard to get to, but it was an immense target. Think about what you're going up against today: denied networks, denied minds, small groups, where capabilities are not the thing that are at issue; it's their intention, their plans, what are they going to do tomorrow, what are they going to do next week? For that sort of service we had designed, during the Cold War, 14 named intelligence agencies in the U.S. Ninety percent of the money for them is in the Department of Defense budget, and none of them do human penetration. We're out of that game. We decided to do technology because Americans do technology better than anyone in the world, and when you're going against the Soviets, technology was a great answer. But we now face a situation where the intelligence apparatus that helped us win the Cold War - and it wasn't all that good at the time, but that's for another talk - is in fact completely inadequate for what we've done here. So the real challenge today is redesigning that intelligence capability in order to have a national security strategy that is adequate for dealing with the threats that we face.
Anyone who believes the Department of Defense is the appropriate mechanism to deal with failed states has neither seen the Department of Defense or a failed state. We have tremendous comparative advantages, so this should not be a real brain twister for the United States. Take almost any country in the world that has an education system that is practically nonexistent or rudimentary. Unless you have the wealth of Abu Dhabi, going out and building a Cal Berkeley is nonsense, but there is an American model that works very well that we don't talk about: the community college system. The community college system in the United States is a tremendous integrator of people from various economic and national stratas. I live in Washington, which is the forefront of a lot of immigrants. I cannot tell you how many people we end up meeting who are temporarily plumbers, construction operators, who actually are not uneducated, they happen to be uncredentialed for American society. They may be a doctor, plumber, something else in El Salvador or someplace around the world. They are working on menial jobs while going to community colleges at night to get those credentials to integrate. The same thing is true of poverty, of social integration. We have so much to bring to dealing with that, and it is in the national security basket if we stop and think about it. We cannot do it if we only think about what is the next war we are going to wage, whether it be a war on terrorism, a war on Islam, a war et cetera, and you name your topic. We need to design an intelligence capability that helps us focus on where the problems are, and we need to think about a national security strategy that brings the full tools of America and our values and our capabilities to bear to change the world rather than simply worry about defending it after the attack has occurred.
