India Needs a Joint Chiefs | The Diplomat

India is investing billions in arms. But without a coherent organizational structure, it will never become an effective war fighting machine.

India is an aspiring super power, and one of the largest arms importers in the world. But this month, following the defense procurement corruption exposé by Army Chief Gen. V.K. Singhand the hullabaloo over supposed troop movements near Delhi, it seems that India isn’t ready either to effectively absorb the battle-ready equipment being imported, or even command it properly.

At the center of the debate has been a heated discussion over whether India should have a unified command system under which the chiefs of the Army, Navy and Air Force, could operate coherently and to mutual benefit. But the debate should be even louder than it is now.

Our strategic and super power ambitions are manifest in all three armed forces: the Air Force, which is in the process of one of the largest arms deals ever in the acquisition of the Medium Multi-Role Combat Aircraft (MMRCA); the Navywhich has developed so-called blue water capabilities far beyond coastal defense; and the Army, which is raising two strike corps capable of offensive operations into Tibet and for possible use against China. Yet we still don’t have the necessary organizational structure to wield such massive fire power as a coherent force, one that can either repel external aggressors or project India’s power overseas.

The reasons are many, but the most problematic one is the archaic World War II defense institutions around which our armed forces are organized. They were adapted from the needs of a colonial power, whose main concern was the subjugation of the indigenous population, and not designed to repel external aggressors. There has been little or no change since then. Post-Kargil conflict in 1999 to 2000, the Kargil Review committee headed by noted strategist R.K. Subrahmanyam also recommended a unified command. This organization needs to be restructured and updated, and the quickest way to start is to have a Joint Chiefs of Defense Staff to co-ordinate and synergize operations and equipment.

In war, the application of maximum combat power at decisive periods influences the outcome of battle. Maximum combat power, however, isn’t simply the sum of the forces used – it’s the product of synergies generated by using arms and services coherently. Today, the three services are autonomous, and any synergy that does exist is pure chance. Examples are the lack of, or minimal use of, the Air Force in 1962 against the Chinese and in 1999 during the Kargil incursion by Pakistan. In both instances, the Indian Air Force resisted the use of air power on various grounds, hurting India’s war effort. In 1962, air power wasn’t used at all, while in 1999, the Air Force came in many days too late, perhaps on the orders of the civilian government in New Delhi.

India doesn’t follow an integrated command system during peace or in times of combat, so each armed force prosecutes war as they see appropriate (and possibly in a manner where they get the most glory). There have been very few instances when the combat power of one force was deployed under a commander of another (the Andaman Command is a notable exception).  

Weasel Zippers » Blog Archive » Colombia's top diplomat demands ...

Sentinel says:

April 27, 2012 at 9:51 am

New World Encyclopedia;

“The city’s history includes its role as a center for the Spanish Inquisition and as a major slave market……….Colombia’s notoriety for illicit drug production, kidnappings, and murder required efforts to foster stability. To achieve this, Colombia increased its military strength and police presence throughout the country…….The remains of extensive Spanish fortifications dating from its colonial days have earned it status as a UNESCO World Heritage Site of cultural importance.”

Apologize to you for what? If you think your city is some cultural and virginal landmark; you are sadly mistaken. Even though I personally think the SS agents were some dumb motherfuckers and shouldn’t have conducted themselves as they did, your city is still a shithole.

Time for a Fresh Start with Taiwan | The Diplomat

Britain should rethink its support for the one-China policy, argues Lord Richard Faulkner. China should drop its claims to the island.

I have the privilege of co-chairing the British-Taiwanese all-party parliamentary group, the membership of which has grown steadily to almost 100 lawmakers across all parties in Britain’s House of Commons.

There are two reasons for the group’s popularity. The first is the hard work of the staff at the Taipei Representative Office, in recent months by Ambassador Lyu-shun Shen and up until last December, by his much-loved predecessor Katharine Chang. They undertake their responsibilities with charm and distinction and in the face of a number of difficulties that aren’t encountered by the diplomatic staff of other foreign missions in London.

The second reason why our all-party group does well is because of the very real sense of admiration felt by a growing number of our parliamentarians for Taiwan and its people. A great number of us believe that Taiwan deserves better of us in the U.K. than current British and EU government rules allow for.

What can our parliamentarians do to improve relations between Britain and Taiwan? A great deal actually. On a practical level, we do our best to ensure that visiting political VIPs from Taiwan have an opportunity to come to Parliament and meet MPs and peers.

We are delighted when Ambassador Shen tells us that this minister or that party leader is coming to Britain, and we will always try to ensure that some of us are available to meet them, sometimes in a formal meeting in a Lords or Commons committee room, sometimes over lunch, tea or dinner in the Palace of Westminster.

Occasionally we receive word that a visiting dignitary has fallen foul of the U.K. Border Agency and has had difficulty in obtaining a visa. Where it’s necessary and appropriate, we’ll seek to intercede and obtain a satisfactory outcome, as we did last September in the case of a senior government minister coming to Britain to take part in an important legal conference in Cambridge.

In addition to receiving Taiwanese visitors here, we also arrange for British parliamentarians to visit Taiwan. Generally there are two outward delegations each year, each consisting of up to a dozen MPs and peers. These visits are possible because of the generosity of the Taiwanese government, and are an important element in the process of ensuring that our parliamentarians understand the country better. The program that is arranged for us is first class, and nearly always includes a meeting with the President and a number of senior ministers.

Our other major role as friends of Taiwan in Parliament is to raise issues that are roadblocks on the way to establishing a proper normal relationship with this country, or prevent Taiwan from participating fully in world organisations in ways which would benefit all of us. A perfect example of that was Taiwan’s involvement with the World Health Organization. The case for Taiwan was overwhelming because of the very significant contribution it has made over the years to world health issues, such as the SARS epidemic and earthquake relief.

We campaigned vigorously on that for years, and finally, in May 2009, Taiwan was granted observer status at the World Health Assembly.

Another success was the granting of the visa waiver scheme for Taiwanese visitors to Britain. On 3 March, 2009, the U.K. granted visa-exemption to Taiwan passport holders for six months. We were followed by Ireland and New Zealand, and Taiwan has offered similar rights to British passport-holders. There’s no evidence that this has created any problems in any of the countries involved, and the visa waiver scheme is being extended to other countries.

Now we also support the cal for Taiwan to be admitted to the International Civil Aviation Organisation, and to the U.N. Framework Convention on Climate Change.

If a visitor arrived from outer space and examined the various relationships between Britain and Taiwan – in financial services, in industrial investment by British companies in Taiwan and by Taiwanese companies here, in the provision of places for Taiwanese students at British universities, in collaborating on tackling financial crime and terrorism, in combating disease, coping with national disasters, and so much more – that visitor would come to the conclusion that here were two friendly countries working together closely in virtually every area that mattered.

But life isn’t quite like that. I well recall an exchange in the House of Lords back in January 2003, on a question from me about WHO membership. The veteran Liberal Democrat, Lord Avebury, asked Baroness Amos, then a foreign office minister, whether she couldthink of any of the attributes of a sovereign state that Taiwan lacks.

Her reply was: “My Lords, the noble Lord will be aware that we do not recognise Taiwan. The majority of countries in the U.N. also do not recognise Taiwan.”

Can U.S. “Manage” Other Nations? | Flashpoints - The Diplomat

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What’s in a word? Quite a lot, sometimes. Exhibit A: “management.” U.S. officials and pundits oftentimes talk about “managing” China’s rise to great power. Are they guilty of hubris – the outrageous arrogance that the Greeks of classical antiquity insisted goes before a fall? To what extent may one nation oversee another’s rise to great power?

Good question. One of my department’s gray-haired eminences raised it during a recent faculty meeting. His point of departure was a famous – or was it infamous? – Pentagon memorandum compiled in 1992 under the supervision of Undersecretary of Defense Paul Wolfowitz. Written shortly after the Soviet Union’s demise and leaked to the press, the draft Defense Planning Guidance enjoined the United States to “endeavor to prevent any hostile power from dominating a region whose resources would, under consolidated control, be sufficient to generate global power. These regions include Western Europe, East Asia, the territory of the former Soviet Union and Southwest Asia.”

The language in which the Pentagon document was phrased set the foreign-policy community atwitter. Sen. Robert C. Byrd pronounced it “myopic, shallow and disappointing.” For Sen. Joseph R. Biden Jr. the memo represented “literally a Pax Americana.” Biden prophesied that “It won’t work. You can be the world superpower and still be unable to maintain peace throughout the world.” Today, though, the idea that the United States should supervise the emergence of China, India, or some other new contender occasions scarcely a murmur. It may now be woven into the assumptions protagonists bring to strategic debates. It’s an axiom we no longer think to question.

Exhibit B: in a recent column for private intelligence firm Stratfor, Robert Kaplan applauds the Obama administration’s much-heralded “pivot” to Asia for helping Washington manage China’s ascent. Kaplan offers a workmanlike vision of international management. The United States acts as a superintendent of the Asian order it inherited through its conquest of imperial Japan. “China,” he writes, “is an altogether dynamic society that is naturally expanding its military and economic reach in the Indo-Pacific region.” But “the rise of any new great power needs to be managed.”

This is especially true in Asia, maintains Kaplan, because new sea powers are taking shape there while old ones reinvent their seagoing forces to cope with new, more stressful realities. India, Vietnam, Malaysia, Singapore, and Australia entertain seafaring ambitions of their own, while established powers Japan and South Korea are outfitting their sea and air forces with the latest technological wizardry. For Kaplan, this adds up to an arms race that distorts the regional maritime order. As the overseer of navigational freedoms, the United States must pivot to the “Indo-Pacific” region lest disequilibrium degenerate into something far worse.

The truth quotient is significant in both of these arguments. Nor are they irreconcilable. As Kaplan contends, it behooves the leading power in any system – in this case America, the keeper of the international maritime order – to try to adjust the system gracefully to the rightful demands and interests of new entrants into that order. A wrenching transition is apt to give rise to conflict – perhaps violent conflict. To expect the international system to be self-administering in times of flux is to expect too much.

And while the Wolfowitz memo could have been more artfully worded, it mostly cleaves to U.S. diplomatic traditions. For at least the past century, two axioms of U.S. statecraft have held that Washington must preserve access to important regions, and that it must do so while preventing any overweening power from gaining control of Europe, Asia, or, worse still, the entire Eurasian landmass. At the turn from the 19th to the 20th centuries, Secretary of State John Hay circulated an “Open Door” diplomatic note imploring the imperial powers not to partition China or shut rivals out of the Asia trade. Statesmen like Theodore Roosevelt fretted that the Kaiser’s Germany, having built the world’s finest army, might conquer the British Isles – and thereby gain command of the world’s preeminent navy, Britain’s Royal Navy. Such developments could constitute a direct threat to the Western Hemisphere – triggering defensive reflexes in Washington. For the Roosevelts of the world, it made sense to essay some preventive management.

Yet there are two reasons policymakers and pundits should beware of the terms they use. First, introspection helps forestall self-defeating behavior. A word used in policy discussions can speak volumes about the assumptions held by the user. And, once accepted as workaday parlance, it tends to short-circuit introspection about those assumptions. It never hurts, and can often help, to reexamine the language used in discourses about weighty matters like war and peace. Otherwise leaders may set the wrong priorities, misallocate resources trying to achieve those priorities, or give needless offense in foreign capitals. Worst of all, they may retard their intellectual nimbleness. Conceptual laggards fare poorly in times of change.

Second, the term management is bound to grate on foreign sensibilities. Even benign management has a whiff of coercion about it, as anyone who’s worked in a bureaucratic institution knows. For the United States to claim the right to set the terms of a fellow sovereign nation’s ascent to great power sounds presumptuous. Similarly, Robert Kaplan has called attention to the U.S. military’s “Unified Command Plan,” which allocates responsibility for every region on the face of the earth to a U.S. combatant command. Does this mean Washington asserts universal dominion? Not at all. Still, such seemingly innocuous command arrangements may rankle with important audiences overseas. Words have unintended consequences.

While humility remains a virtue, finally, it’s worth noting that many foreign policy scholars and wonks have a reciprocal tendency to define all forms of persuasion, beyond simple talk, as coercive. Thinkers of such leanings deplore the routine give-and-take of international negotiation – for example, offering an interlocutor inducements in exchange for certain concessions – as strong-arm tactics. As the world’s preponderant diplomatic, economic, and military power, the United States has a special responsibility to avoid appearing haughty toward other sovereign states. That’s a different thing entirely from abandoning the time-honored practice of horse-trading. Whether this is “management” or simple negotiation, carrots and the occasional stick remain the tools of the trade.

James Holmes is an associate professor of strategy at the US Naval War College and co-editor of Strategy in the Second Nuclear Age, forthcoming from Georgetown University Press. The views voiced here are his alone.

Vietnam to Target Social Media | ASEAN Beat - The Diplomat

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For popular Western internet companies with large user bases in Vietnam, new online regulations could seriously test business practices and corporate consciences. Driven by worries of an Arab spring, the communist government in Hanoi is planning to introduce rules in June requiring Google, Facebook and other companies providing “online social networking platforms” to locate their Vietnam-related operations entirely inside the country and follow local censorship laws.

Vietnamese authorities have for years been wary of the increased political space available online, where netizens can essentially access and publish information as they wish. Dozens of prominent bloggers are currently in jail for so-called anti-state propaganda and other national security charges. Beyond these most vocal critics are an estimated 30 million internet users in Vietnam – a full third of the population – engaging in various forms of online expression and association.

By operating “offshore,” Google, for example, has been relatively immune from pressure to restrict search results queried by users in Vietnam. Similarly, Facebook, with over 3 million Vietnamese users, doesn’t limit the interactions of these users to everyone else on the massive social network.

To be sure, the Vietnamese authorities have tried to block access to outside websites, most notably Facebook. But with a little knowledge of circumvention and a taste for civil disobedience, many Vietnamese netizens have quickly bypassed the firewalls and actively participated in social networking, creating a virtual civil society online.

The draft policy, which was obtained by Viet Tan, is titled “Decree on the Management, Provision, Use of Internet Services and Information Content Online.” Like many government directives in Vietnam, much of the language in this document is vague and ill-defined, offering multiple interpretations and possible arbitrary implementation by authorities.

What’s clear is the Internet management policy forbids a wide range of activities online such as “abusing the Internet” to oppose the socialist government, “exposing government secrets” and “spreading slanderous information” harmful to organizations and individuals. The draconian language essentially makes it illegal to post anything online critical of the Vietnamese communist party and state, its policies or leaders.

While previous internet regulations in Vietnam contained similar prohibitions, the new policy goes further on implementation by specifically requiring foreign companies to assist authorities police the internet. Western firms would be directly responsible to Hanoi's Information and Communications Ministry, which oversees censorship and the Public Security Ministry, which routinely arrests bloggers and other activists.

To ensure companies such as Google and Facebook fall under Vietnamese law, the new decree requires these companies to open a local office and furnish the names and contacts details of their corporate officials.

Most worrying, the soon-to-be-issued decree appears to require foreign internet companies to house their data centers in Vietnam. Operating as censors and not technologists, the drafters of the regulation have probably not thought through the ramifications.

Companies spend a lot of resources to decide where to locate their data centers. Mandating foreign enterprises to relocate data centers or even individual servers to Vietnam harms businesses by causing logistical and technical challenges. At worst, it would discourage companies from operating in Vietnam to begin with, leaving end users with less choice.

Speaking on similar restrictions in China in 2010, Google public policy director Robert Boorstin summed up the problem: “censorship is a trade barrier.” 

By entering into negotiations for the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP) with the United States and other countries, Vietnam is ostensibly committed to trade liberalization and commercial best practices. Politically driven regulations would set the country backward and not be consistent with free trade.

Aiding censorship also poses thorny moral dilemmas for companies. Yahoo has had to apologize and financially compensate Chinese dissidents who were arrested partly due to the private user information that the company turned over to Chinese security police.

To its credit, Yahoo has made amends by enacting a global business and human rights program. Probably because of its reluctance to again compromise the safety and privacy of its users, Yahoo was recently criticized by Vietnamese state media for sticking to international norms even though it maintains an in-country office, the only major Western internet company to do so.

Speaking to a government newspaper on April 9, an official from the Information and Communications Ministry highlighted Yahoo’s perceived noncompliance to argue why stricter internet management policies are required. This follows threats from authorities to tax Western internet companies that attract Vietnam-based users.

When it comes to online censorship, the interests of the human rights community and companies in the information and communications technology sector are clearly aligned. These key stakeholders should continue to impress on the Vietnam authorities the political and economic consequences of internet censorship.

As stated by Google’s Boorstin: “The premise is simple. In addition to infringing human rights, governments that block the free flow of information on the Internet are also blocking trade and economic growth.”

Duy Hoang is a U.S.-based leader of Viet Tan, an unsanctioned pro-democracy political party in Vietnam.

The Trouble With India's Military | The Diplomat

The letter by India’s Army chief last month blasting the state of the armed forces reflected a troubling reality – India’s regional military power aspirations are in danger.

Last month, India’s Parliament was up in arms over the leak of a supposedly top secret letter written by Army Chief Gen. V.K. Singh to Prime Minister Manmohan Singh. In typical Indian fashion, the uproar – partly spontaneous, partly orchestrated – was at first more about the leak of a highly confidential letter than the critical shortages of weapons and equipment that were pointed to.

Among the problems Singh pointed to were the claim that the Army’s entire fleet of tanks is “devoid of critical ammunition to defeat enemy tanks,”the suggestion that the country’s air defense were “97 percent obsolete,” and criticism that the Elite Special Forces was “woefully short” of “essential weapons.”

After the initial din died down, however, the import of the Army Chief’s letter gradually dawned on lawmakers asked the government and the Army to explain why the shortages haven’t been addressed. Indeed, the shortages are all the more baffling because India’s Defense Ministry reported it had spent its full quota of funds in each of the last three financial years, while the Stockholm-based International Peace Research Institute (SIPRI) said recently that between 2006 and 2010, India ranked first in terms of arms imports.

So why all these shortfalls?

The answer lies in the convoluted and often excruciatingly slow acquisition process that exists within the Defense Ministry. By even some conservative estimates, it can take anywhere between three and five years for a proposal mooted by a service headquarters to come to fruition. This snail’s pace has been noted by lawmakers in the past.

The Standing Committee on Defense (2008-09), a cross-party body of lawmakers, said in its report: “In the opinion of the Committee, the present state of affairs in the Ministry is clearly indicative of lack of seriousness towards timely finalization of plans, which ultimately leads to adverse bearing on modernization process in the armed forces.”

In his first interview on assuming office on April 1, 2010, Singh told me bluntly: “Our biggest challenge is how to remove our hollowness in terms of deficiencies in various fields, and the second one is modernization. Both need to be addressed (as a) priority so that whatever the Army requires that makes it battle worthy is there.

“When I talk of ‘hollowness,’ it is when you authorize something, but it may not be there because over a period of time, the procurement (process has) delayed acquisition,” he said, adding that such delays inevitably mean that some of the equipment is obsolete by the time it is available for combat units. 

Two years on, and it’s clear that despite the voicing of such concerns, even the day-to-day requirements of many combat units are at dangerously low levels. Singh wrote first to Defense Minister A.K. Antony and then to the prime minister to highlight this fact.

But it shouldn’t have taken a letter from Singh to make clear shortcomings that were already obvious to many. Numerous commentators and analysts had already pointed out the sorry state of India’s air defenses and artillery. Gurmeet Kanwal, until recently director of the Army’s think tank, the Centre for Land Warfare Studies, has written:

“Sadly, the Indian Army has almost completely missed the ongoing Revolution in Military Affairs…The Corps of Army Air Defense is also faced with serious problems of obsolescence. The vintage L-70 40 mm AD gun system, the four-barreled ZSU-23-4 Schilka AD gun system, the SAM-6 (Kvadrat) and the SAM-8 OSA-AK have all seen better days and need to be urgently replaced by more responsive modern AD systems that are capable of defeating current and future threats.”

One of the key reasons for the military shortfalls has simply been the duplication of effort in processing a procurement proposal at both the Service Headquarters and the Defense Ministry, since the two aren’t integrated at the functional level.  As a result, files are typically initiated and processed at the service headquarters before undergoing the same process at the ministry. 

What Did China Know? | Flashpoints - The Diplomat

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China has good reasons for supporting North Korea: Pyongyang’s implosion would be an almighty headache, with potentially millions of half-starved refugees pouring across the border looking for Beijing to solve their problems. China’s policy, understandably, is to keep the North’s humanitarian horrors on the far side of the Yalu River.

Beijing therefore turns a blind eye to the cross-border black-market activities that keep the North Korean economy on life support, despite their drain on China’s own resources. It plays its tired part in boosting the North Korean leader’s status, doing what it can to help stave off regime collapse by hosting the Kims in Beijing and offering quotable assurances of solidarity. It also jumps, with impressive patience, through the diplomatic hoops of having constantly to fight North Korea’s losing corner at the United Nations and other international forums.

But when it comes to last week’s revelation that China may be supplying North Korea with technology in contravention of U.N. sanctions, the rationale is much less obvious. It was reported by Jane’s Defence Weekly that a new transporter erector launcher (TEL) system debuted by North Korea at a recent military parade looked suspiciously like a known Chinese system. Following the report, the U.S. government, among others, admitted that they, too, had noticed the similarity. The U.N. Security Council committee whose job it is to monitor these sanctions – a job, some have noted, that it doesn’t seem terribly good at – is reportedly investigating.

China denies busting the sanctions, but analysts sound convinced that North Korea’s new TEL is Chinese, or at least of Chinese design. Supplying North Korea with road-mobile missile technology isn’t about to make the country less prone to collapse. So why would China do it?

First, let’s consider the costs. China’s relations with South Korea are already strained, with maritime disputes having already placed the two countries at loggerheads. Proof that China was helping Pyongyang with military systems that could really hurt the South would be disastrous for Beijing’s relations with Seoul.

Secondly, giving TELs to North Korea is the kind of act that feeds into the caricature of a crafty China that openly preaches harmony while quietly sowing mischief. Whatever the truth behind the TEL story, China has an image problem when it comes to this sort of thing (the arms shipment to Robert Mugabe in the midst of Zimbabwe’s bloody political crisis in 2008 also springs to mind).

So, there are several possible explanations. Perhaps China’s leaders had no idea that it was happening. Mid-level officials and companies can’t always be trusted to stick to the Party line, and often that’s tolerated as a fact of life in a vast country. In this case, the firm believed to have sold a chassis for the launcher – perhaps to a front company – denies that it has trade links with North Korea. Still, it becomes a problem when the miscalculations of arms company executives or local military commanders become a source of very public embarrassment to the central government.

Alternatively, Pyongyang’s TEL with Chinese characteristics might not be Chinese at all.

Confirmation of the weapon system’s origin may emerge once the United Nations has had time to pore over the pictures and make its inquiries. But the episode will at the very least have reminded China’s leaders that it’s all too easy to be guilty by association when you have associates of North Korea’s calibre.

Canada's Head Fake Asia Policy? | The Diplomat

Is Canada doing its own pivot toward the Asia-Pacific? It will need to focus more on Southeast Asia if it is serious about one.

While the United States has made a self-declared “pivot” toward Asia, Canada’s current Asia policy can perhaps best be described as a “head fake.” In basketball terminology, a pivot is a move in a new direction, while one foot remains firmly planted on the floor; this is an apt metaphor for the renewed interest of the U.S. in Asia as at the same time it remains committed to its existing relationships in the Western Hemisphere and Europe. A head fake on the other hand, is an indication of a change in direction, but in fact no change normally takes place. It’s a passing moment, a tactic to draw attention, while the main thrust of movement lies in another direction.

Canada has been “head faking” a lot in Asia recently. Whether this is more than a tactical move remains to be seen. Canada remains highly committed to getting early entry into the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP) trade talks, and has now been able to secure Peruvian and Chilean endorsement, along with support from Malaysia. However, the deal maker or deal breaker for Canadian entry remains the United States, and during the recent meeting in Washington between Prime Minister Stephen Harper and U.S. President Barack Obama, the president was careful to couch his support for Canadian participation in very general terms while repeating the caveats about all participants needing to make changes to meet the standards set for the agreement. New Zealand also remains a key stumbling block. Canadian Trade Minister Ed Fast had a chance to meet with his New Zealand counterpart, Tim Groser, at the G-20 Trade Ministers meeting in Mexico, but Groser and New Zealand have been firm on the need for Canada’s antiquated dairy supply management system to be reformed. Harper has said that Canada is prepared to be ambitious and put all issues on the table, but in the same breath, for domestic political purposes, has stressed that Canada will defend its interests, including in individual sectors.

While the TPP remains very much a work in progress for Canada, another prong of what could be an Asian strategy has been stuck in limbo. Canada needs to reach out to the Association of Southeast Asian Nations and re-establish the credibility that it once had with that organization. Recent developments in Burma provided an opportune moment to do just that, but after showing an interest in Burmese developments through a visit by Foreign Minister John Baird just prior to the recent by-elections, Canada stood by while other partners of ASEAN moved to announce suspension of sanctions. Only after the U.S., the U.K., Australia, Japan and the EU had announced their moves to relax sanctions did Canada make its move, on April 24. Canada missed the chance to move early and show leadership on the issue, but it was better to move now to join the international consensus than to continue to lag. Baird’s earlier visit was starting to look increasingly like a head fake, not a policy, but the recent move puts Canada back in the game by removing most sanctions, including those pertaining to exports, imports, financial services and investment.

If Canada is going to actually put in place an Asia-Pacific strategy, and there are some good policy reasons to suggest that this the moment to do so, then it will have to take a more holistic approach than just trying to sign up for trade agreements with as many Asian economies as possible. Energy economics and politics suggest that opening alternate markets across the Pacific for western Canadian bitumen and gas is a smart, if long-term move. It won’t be without its domestic challenges for Harper, given opposition to new pipelines and tankers from environmental and aboriginal groups, among others. But recent reforms to the environmental review process announced in Ottawa suggest that at the end of the day, the pipelines and tanker terminals will be built.

However, an Asia strategy will need more than trade agreements and tankers – it will also require a “whole of government” approach encompassing diplomacy, foreign aid, military commitment, immigration policy and cultural and educational exchanges and understanding.

The Asian team is waiting to see if Canada’s recent moves represent a pivot, with a real intention to change direction, or just another head fake. Only time will tell.

Hugh L. Stephens is Executive in Residence at the Asia Pacific Foundation of Canada, in Vancouver, with 35 years of government and business experience in Asia. He is also principal of Trans-Pacific Connections (www.tpconnections.com).

Police Release Mexican Diplomat Accused Of Drunken Driving ...

File photo of police. (credit: Getty Images)

ATLANTA (AP) — Police in an Atlanta suburb say they released a Mexican diplomat accused of drunken driving without holding him in jail after they learned of his government position.

Mariano Saynez Ruiz Duran had a blood-alcohol level of 0.126 and had been clocked at 91 mph on Georgia 400 early Friday morning, a Roswell police report states.

He was released after police learned that he’s a vice consular at the Mexican Consulate General’s Atlanta office, Roswell police Lt. James McGee said.

Officers confirmed he has partial immunity from law enforcement actions after calling the U.S. Department of State, according to the police report.

It wasn’t known whether the 39-year-old north Fulton County resident has an attorney, and a home phone number for him could not be located.

Duran’s wife drove him away, and police would not have allowed him to drive himself because of public safety concerns, McGee said.

The officers who released him were following protocol that’s followed when diplomats and others are stopped, McGee said.

The diplomat was given citations accusing him of drunken driving and speeding, Roswell police Officer Lisa Holland told WSB-TV, which first reported the case.

“It’s going to be up to higher authorities as to what they’re going to do about the charges,” McGee told The Associated Press early Wednesday. “It’s going to be up to them at this point what they want to work out.”

(© Copyright 2012 The Associated Press. All Rights Reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten or redistributed.)

Kyrgyzstan: Russian Diplomat Sheds More Light on Bilateral Spat ...

Economics, not politics is prompting Russia to get tough with Kyrgyzstan, a top Russian diplomat based in Bishkek tells EurasiaNet.org. At the same time, the diplomat blamed the Kyrgyz government for delays in a hydropower deal, asserting that officials in Bishkek were politicizing the issue.

Russian-Kyrgyz relations have hit some turbulence in recent months, with the Kremlin showing signs of obvious frustration with Kyrgyzstan’s efforts to obtain foreign aid from Moscow without offering much in the way of diplomatic loyalty in return. Amid rising tension, the two states are now haggling over terms of two large-scale strategic investments, one involving construction of a large hydropower facility on the Naryn River known as Kambarata-1, the other concerning at the Dastan torpedo factory.

Originally, Kambarata-1 was envisioned as a 1.9-gigawatt facility, but EurasiaNet.org has learned that Inter RAO, one of the prospective Russian backers of the project, is pushing to scale the facility’s annual generating capacity back to roughly 800-900 megawatts. In addition, Russia now wants to obtain 75 percent shares in both Kambarata and Dastan. Previously, Moscow was prepared to settle for less-than-majority shares in both ventures.

Kyrgyz leaders show no signs of giving in to what they believe to be Russian pressure tactics. Kyrgyz Prime Minister Omurbek Babanov stated in an interview with the Kommersant business daily on April 16 that Russia “is not fulfilling its obligations.”

The Russian stance is rooted mainly in fiscal realities, insisted Evgeny Terekhin, who serves as minister-counselor at the Russian Embassy in Bishkek.

“When everyone says ‘this big Russian bear is going to swallow small Kirgizia,’ it is not the full story,” Terekhin said. Both Kambarata and Dastan are intertwined with efforts to settle Kyrgyzstan’s debts to Russia. Part of the Kambarata deal, for example, involves a write-down of $180 million in Kyrgyz debt.

Terekhin asserted that Kyrgyz political leaders and local media are misrepresenting the terms of the Kambarata deal, which include a give-back of 25 percent of Russian owned shares to Kyrgyzstan once Kambarata-1 becomes profitable. Thus, ultimately Russia and Kyrgyzstan would end up with a 50-50 arrangement, he said.

“These negotiations have been going on for rather a long time. It’s a long story,” said Terekhin.

Uncertainty about the hydropower project’s profit point appears to be a significant factor in prompting Russian companies to want to scale back its scope. Energy insiders say the smaller version of the plant would be more economically viable and profitable over the long term. At the same time, insiders add that Kyrgyz officials are infatuated with the larger scale project, and are resisting Inter RAO’s new engineering proposals.

For Russia, the primary concern regarding Kambarata-1, along with another hydropower venture on the Naryn River, is limiting risk, the Russian diplomat stressed. “The position of our energy companies is simple. Both projects are rather expensive. One is estimated to be about $2 billion and the second between $4 billion and $5 billion,” Terekhin said. “The only investment by the Kyrgyz side would be represented by the water stream and river bank.”

“That is why they [Russian companies] ask for 75 percent [of Kambarata],” continued Terekhin. “But, as I have mentioned, this is not the full story. The full story is that they're asking for 75 percent of shares only for the period of repayment for this project. As soon as the expenditures are covered by the income from the sale of electric energy, the two parties return to 50-50 division of the shares.”

Terekhin suggested domestic political factors were limiting Kyrgyzstan’s negotiating flexibility. “It's not a secret to anybody that a wave of nationalism is rising up here [in Kyrgystan] and it would be difficult for anybody to withstand the pressure of this wave be it a president, or even the Lord himself,” Terekhin said.

“Everybody now is trying to play the role of the best patriot of his country, to be a better Catholic than the Pope,” he added. “I think that sooner or later this wave of emotion will go down and more calm and cold calculations will overcome. I think simply we - both parties - have to wait a little bit.”

Editor's note: 

Deirdre Tynan is a Bishkek-based reporter specializing in Central Asian affairs.

The Future is Now | Flashpoints - The Diplomat

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The U.S. isn’t “returning” to the Asia-Pacific, it never left in the first place. Here, in the world’s most strategically and economically dynamic region, China is already demonstrating great potential to undermine American strategic interests and the efficacy of the global sys­tem – and is doing so in practice. Though Beijing and Washington have considerable shared interests and potential for cooperation, the most difficult period for them to achieve “competitive coexistence” may already have begun. Assuming that high-intensity kinetic conflict can be avoided – fortunately, a highly likely prospect – China’s greatest challenge to U.S. interests and the global system might thus be the already unfolding strategic competition, friction, pres­suring, and occasional crises in the three “Near Seas” (the Yellow, East China, and South China Seas).

China is already a world-class military power – but not in the ways that many have charged. Beijing’s “blue water” naval expansion beyond the Second Island Chain, which isn’t proceeding at the highest level, does not pose a serious problem for Washington. Indeed, as a growing great power, it is only natural for China to develop an increasing pres­ence in this realm, and in many respects it should be welcomed.

The United States has and will continue to have many viable options to address any problems that might emerge in this area, at least with respect to a high intensity kinetic conflict. For instance, Chinese forces themselves are highly vulnerable to precisely the same types of “asymmetric” approaches (e.g., mis­sile attacks) that they can employ to great effect closer to China’s shores. In fact, there’s substantial room for cooperation beyond the Near Seas. This potential may even be said to be growing, as China’s overseas in­terests and capabilities increase, thereby allowing it to contribute in unprecedented ways. In this area, which covers the vast majority of the globe, Beijing appears to be cautiously open to Washington’s ideas about “defense of the global system” – which offer excellent opportunities for “free riding” off U.S.-led public goods provision.

The problem is that in the Near Seas themselves, and possibly beyond them over time, Beijing is work­ing to carve out a sphere of strategic influence with­in which freedom of navigation and other important international system-sustaining norms do not apply. Indeed, China already has some ability to engage in anti-access/area denial (A2/AD) operations within the Near Seas/First Island Chain and their immediate approaches, assisted in part by the land-based Second Artillery Force; as well as longer-range precision strikes and global cyber activities. This A2/AD challenge threatens U.S. naval platforms, but is far more than just a Chinese navy-based threat.

The U.S. military has many options to prevent the People’s Liberation Army from paralyzing its forces, yet it will fail if it continues business as usual. It could already be difficult to handle kinetically with current American approaches, and the situation appears to be worsening rapidly. The U.S. may not have years to develop new countermeasures and prepare to address the most difficult aspects of the problem; in a sense, “the future is now.”

Andrew S. Erickson is an Associate Professor in the Strategic Research Department at the U.S. Naval War College and a core founding member of the department’s China Maritime Studies Institute.This entry is based on remarks made at Harvard University during The Diplomat's Pivot to the Pacific panel.

Image credit: U.S. Navy

Taiwan's Pointless Toe Treading? | The Diplomat

The Republic of China maintains sweeping claims to the South China Sea. But is it needlessly alienating much-needed potential friends?

If only Taiwan’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs could rack up allies as quickly as its scandals or neighbor alienating territorial claims.

A statement released by the ministry this month – the ninth such missive in the past 18 months – called for competing nations to respect the “Republic of China’s unwavering sovereignty over the South China Sea.”

The Republic of China – Taiwan’s official name since Chiang Kai-shek’s battered forces cemented control of the island following their civil war loss to Mao Zedong’s troops – claims about 3.5 million square kilometers  of the oil and gas-rich body of water based on “historical evidence” that Chinese fishermen once plied its waters and trade routes and desolate outcrops were established.

Taipei makes its claim under the United Nations Convention on the Law of the Sea (UNCLOS), which would be fine if it was a party to UNCLOS, or any other U.N. body or agreement. But the Republic of China was expelled from the United Nations in 1971, when the General Assembly recognized “the Peoples’ Republic of China as the only legitimate representative of China to the United Nations.”

While Beijing’s oft-criticized “nine-dotted line” claim has been ridiculed by its Association of Southeast Asian Nation neighbors, Taiwan’s virtually identical declaration has been hammered as “frivolous” and “out of touch with Asia’s diplomatic reality.”

“I wish they would shut up. There isn’t a single Asian country that even recognizes them. How are they relevant?” asks one Southeast Asian diplomat, who spoke on condition of anonymity. “They lost their war 65 years ago and they still act like they are a great power. You would think show some humility where these frivolous claims are concerned. Discretion being the better part of valor, and all that.”

Critics of Taiwan’s handling of the situation say Taipei should duplicate its position on its other constitutionally enshrined and often bizarre Asian land claims – by ignoring them. 

Taiwan’s 1947 Constitution, written while Chiang Kai-sheik still had a Chinese capital, makes territorial land claims in all or part of 10 countries, including independent Mongolia, Tibet, and parts of India, Burma, Russia, Afghanistan and Pakistan. But those claims are never prosecuted by Taipei, and are only still enshrined in the Constitution because Beijing views any amendment to Taiwan’s territorial claims as a step towards independence and away from its “One China Policy.”

Both the U.S. and China are keen to retain the “status quo.” The U.S. State Department, in particular, is keen to maintain stability in the Taiwan Strait by minimizing moves by Taipei that the Middle Kingdom views as provocative.

“I don’t think they have a choice. If Taiwan starts walking away from elements in the Constitution, then it’s like pulling at a thread and where would it stop,” says Douglas Paal, a former director of the American Institute in Taiwan, which works as a de facto U.S. embassy in lieu of formal diplomatic ties with the island republic.

While walking away from Taiwan’s constitutional bind is one thing, observers say that Taipei’s pursuance of a claim it knows it can’t win at the expense of ruffling regional feathers  is quite another.  

“They are working with China on this because our claim backs up Beijing’s.  It’s this arrogance of a grand ultra-nationalist vision. But I would argue that if you want to use claims like this as potential bargaining chip in negotiations with China then there should be some credibility to them,” says Michael Kau, a former Vice Minister of Foreign Affairs under the independence leaning Democratic Progressive Party. “This idea of treating this huge body of water as ours by right of dubious historical claims, it’s not only not credible, it’s crazy.”

John Brown: U.S. Diplomat Peter Van Buren Speaks About ...

Exclusive Interview: U.S. Diplomat Peter Van Buren speaks about American Public Diplomacy

Public Diplomacy (PD) is a hard term to define. Some say it's just a euphemism for propaganda. The Department of State's definition is "engaging, informing, and influencing key international audiences." For some traditionally minded diplomats and commentators, the term "public diplomacy" is an oxymoron (true diplomacy, they argue, is practiced behind closed doors, not in public). How would you define PD?

Any communications strategy, from advertising to propaganda to social media to whatever you want to call it, plays second to reality -- actions really do speak louder than words. So as long as deaths in wedding parties from misplaced drone attacks, atrocities by soldiers and videos of Abu Ghraib exist, you are not going to fool anyone regardless of how many tweets you send out. In an age of increasingly prevalent media, the usual bullshit of the Secretary standing up in Geneva proclaiming support for human rights while people in their own countries see the U.S. overtly supporting nasty autocrats will dominate mind space. Here's a graphic (not my work) that illustrates the point.

Look at the outcome of the Haditha massacre in Iraq: 24 unarmed Iraqis were slaughtered by an out-of-control group of Marines in 2005, and now, seven years later, the case is finally concluded and no one is going to jail. You can Tweet and Facebook until the end of time, but that story will resonate for even longer within the Arab world.

The Haditha outcome also illustrates the point of relevancy. While most FSOs and almost all of the American public are probably ignorant about what happened in Haditha, the incident is well known among politically minded Iraqis. On the day when everyone there was talking about the guiltless conclusion, U.S. Embassy Baghdad PD was bleating happily about jazz and some art exhibit. The appearance -- to Iraqis -- was one of trying to change the topic, change the channel, to distract from the real issue of the day.

So whatever PD is, it can only be less effective than what the U.S. is actually doing.

Edward R. Murrow, the famed newsman and Director of the United States Information Agency during the Kennedy administration, is often quoted as saying that public diplomacy, as regards the formulation of policy, should be seriously taken into consideration at the take-off, not at the crash landing. More bluntly, you can't put lipstick on a pig. What is your view on the relationship between public diplomacy and policy?

See above.

As you know, the above-mentioned United States Information Agency (1953-1999), which handled public diplomacy during the Cold War, was consolidated into the State Department a few years after the collapse of Russian communism, thereby reflecting a historical pattern of the USG abolishing its "propaganda" (anti-propaganda?) agencies (e.g., the Committee on Public Information [1917-1919], the Office of War Information [1942-1945]) when a global conflict is over. Nostalgic USIA veterans tend to regret the dissolution of "their" independent agency, a relatively small organization (by Washington standards) giving its overseas officers considerable flexibility to act, on behalf of U.S. national interests, as they saw fit according general policy guidelines and local conditions (as an ex-USIA senior official told me over lunch not long ago, "we got away with murder"). Not amused by such declarations of independence (often unspoken), strait-laced State Department employees referred to USIA as "Useless," a play of words on USIA's overseas designation, USIS (United States Information Service). What's your take on PD now being, bureaucratically, a State function? Does it make PD more manageable and streamlined?

You can see the themes of relevancy and credibility running through this interview.

State Department output, what we say out loud, is characterized by caution above all else, a weird play on the Hippocratic Oath. But the "safest" things to say (we urge all sides to reconsider, Mistakes were made) have little value outside Foggy Bottom. A bit of vitality is needed, and PD lacks that now. In what foreign country do people routinely turn to a PD news source? Anything that flows into the State Department gets filtered out into the equivalent of "male pale and Yale," usually three days after the story has moved off the front pages. Safe, for sure, but also irrelevant. Often, irrelevant by choice if not by policy.

For example, to enflame my ulcer, I just flipped over to Twitter. Several Embassies are tweeting "Happy Earth Day" in unison, obviously a central command meme of the day from Washington. So what? Nothing wrong with Earth Day, but so what? Is the U.S. not still the world's predominant carbon fuels burner? What is the specific goal of sending Happy Earth Day tweets out in English to whomever?

Alec Ross, State's alleged social media king, tweets today, "97 years ago today, modern chemical weapons 1st used in war. German troops released chlorine gas on the front lines at Ypres, killing 5,000," with no link or explanation. I am not even sure what the point of that is, never mind how it might play into any of the national goals of the U.S.. Alec tweets out these odd "fun facts" regularly, to what point I do not know.

The lack of content, of vitality, also means that State only practices half of the social media equation. I see little evidence of interactivity, though people do try and break through the screen and ask visa questions, usually very specific to a person/case type questions because they cannot get them answered from inundated Consular sections. Posts crow over how many people watched or viewed something, but very rarely entertain true interactivity. I am sure they are afraid of it, afraid of saying anything that hasn't been cleared by several layers above them. That may be great for career security (the goal) but it does little to really put social media to use. Just the opposite, really.

The invasion and occupation of Iraq is considered by many a public-diplomacy disaster. Your own book on your one-year Foreign-Service experience (2009-2010) in that country has, as part of its title, "How I Helped Lose the Battle for the Hearts and Minds of the Iraqi People." For those who have not had the opportunity to read your admirable volume, where/how did U.S. PD go so wrong in Iraq? Is it possible to say that America did, on occasion, do certain things right in its attempts to remake (in its own image) the cradle of civilization?

My experience with PD in Iraq was all propaganda all the time. PD's conception of PRT work was simply to over promote any small thing we did that wasn't a complete failure. If we dug a well, not necessarily a bad thing, the headline was "Bringing Water to Mesopotamia." Every PRT project had to include an interview with some Hollywood backlot Iraqi praising the United States, because as we know only White People can help the Brown Skinned of the world. PD didn't even try to balance or nuance a story; they wrote entirely for themselves and their bosses and Washington. People in Iraq certainly knew the truth, living it 24/7 in a world without water, electricity or sewers or schools, so who was PD trying to fool if not themselves? I wrote about this in more detail here and included a PD video piece so your readers can see for themselves what their tax dollars paid for.

The new social media, some argue, are redefining public diplomacy, with the buzzword "public diplomacy 2.0," coined during the Bush administration, still quite à la mode inside the beltway. Senior Advisor for Innovation to Secretary of State Hillary Clinton Alec Ross, according to a twitterer attending his recent talk at American University, stated that "I don't think of myself as a public diplomacy official. I think ... public diplomacy is more old-school American propaganda." In your view, how important/effective are the social media as a tool for the State Department to engage (a favorite word of the current administration) "key international audiences"?

To begin, you must have a goal -- sell soap, get people to switch from Coke to Pepsi, turn out to vote, stop joining al Qaeda, something you can use to know if you have succeeded and completed what you started out to do. Social media as practiced by the Department is amateur hour. A bunch of people led by the State Department's oldest living teenager Alec Ross think they understand media because they are banging away and getting weirdly excited by numbers. Success seems to be measured in how many followers an Ambassador has. Yet no one is interested in looking into the substance of social media. When I comment on interactive Embassy web pages or State Twitter accounts on my own blog at wemeantwell.com, what I see are desperate people trying to get a Visa question answered. They have no outlet to ask such questions because Consular sections are under siege, so they bombard social media. When I do see some questioners try and aim for more substantive topics, the replies from State are canned official language, statements that are "clearable" only because they are content-free or simply ape the party line.

So what is social media as practiced by State able to accomplish? You'd think given its emphasis and the money spent that someone would be interested in a Return on Investment study, a way to map out what was accomplished. But State does not work that way -- it is all about the "doing" and not about the "getting done." Social media as practiced is just another flim-flam, foisted on State this round by another short-timer political appointee whose connections to the Secretary mean he can do no wrong. Or, perhaps more honestly, no one has the guts to question his pronouncements. Anyone who has been at work in Foggy Bottom for more than a few years can recall similar flim-flams when faxes and email were going to reduce the need for overseas personnel (we can do it all from Washington!), or web home pages or video conferencing. All can be useful tools, but you have got to have a goal and you have got to measure your way toward that goal. Otherwise it is just flavor of the month stuff. Didn't we have virtual embassies for awhile in some 3-D online world game thing?

The USG-supported Broadcasting Board of Governors, which (according to its homepage) became "the independent entity responsible for all U.S. Government and government-sponsored, non-military, international broadcasting on October 1, 1999" (e.g., Voice of America, Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty, Radio Sawa) and whose mission is "to inform, engage, and connect people around the world in support of freedom and democracy," is under considerable criticism these days for management failures and for intending to cut back on staff and programs. Based on your foreign-service experience of over two decades, what do you think is the reaction of overseas audiences to USG -supported broadcasting such as Voice of America? Are such broadcasts still necessary for U.S. national interests in an age when information is becoming more and more readily available? In a broader sense, can a journalist, in your view, be a true, objective master of her trade (and can her reports be trusted as reliable) if her paycheck comes from Uncle Sam (to cite Kim Andrew Elliott, a fast-media guru, "Journalism and public diplomacy are very different, indeed adversarial, endeavors").

Credibility is the key. If you look at the very successful penetrations of American society by foreign "public affairs," you see sources of news and entertainment that are clearly allied with a foreign entity (China Xinhua News, RT.com, al Jazeera, the BBC) and do not try to hide that fact. Yet, at the same time, they are aggressive in presenting a side of news that is missing in America's mainstream media, often pointing out the "other side" to a story or not shying away from reporting U.S. Government mistakes and misjudgments. Their credibility comes not from being pro-Russia, but from tapping into a need in the U.S. for alternative news sources.

People are too sophisticated now, even in the developing world, to be reached via crude propaganda -- America=Good, al Qaeda=Bad. That costs those sources their credibility and thus their audiences. Who cares what U.S. broadcasting into the Arab world has to say, or crap like Radio Marti? Most of the time it is just self-referential: Obama made a speech and PD says "Here's Obama's Speech" in case you missed it elsewhere or really want to plod through 1500 words on Earth Day. No one independently quotes their opinions, no one considers them vital or important the way al Jazeera became simply by filling a real gap in what people wanted to hear.

If the U.S. would try and learn a bit more about what people want, they might find a more ready audience. Instead, our "public diplomacy" programming seems designed more to please our bosses in Washington than to really reach people abroad.

Try it now -- go here and imagine yourself a young, politically charged Iraqi. What is on that page that demands your attention? The Cold War ended years ago and we are still talking about jazz.

The Smith-Mundt Act (1948), the legislation that provides the statutory basis for U.S. public diplomacy, prohibits the State Department from disseminating domestically USG information intended for overseas audiences. Do you think this firewall, in the Internet age, is anachronistic? Or is there something to be said about prohibiting the U.S. government from "propagandizing" the American people? Would you abolish/amend the Smith-Mundt Act (or, since so few Americans know anything about it, simply let it live on, untouched, in its obscurity, letting sleeping dogs lie)?

I think Smith-Mundt died on the vine already, whether it exists as a law still or not. Given both the ubiquity of the web and the fact that almost all of the U.S. public diplomacy spew is in English, I think we already know who the target audience is. For example, all the phony grief that gets expressed every time a new round of terrible atrocity photos emerge from Afghanistan certainly is not fooling the mothers of the dead Afghans; it is designed to make us feel better here at home. The Afghans know exactly what is happening in their homes and villages, even if the U.S. government can get away with calling each atrocity just another act of some bad apples. By the way, how many bad apples does it take before you have a whole pie full of them?

In the how-many-angels-can-dance-on-a-pin tradition, there is quite a lot of talk, among the PD community both outside and inside of academe, about how to measure the results of public diplomacy. Do you think that there is a scientific way to gauge the impact of PD, both short-term and long-term? Or is the practice of public diplomacy, in the words of scholar Frank Ninkovich, essentially "an act of faith" that, in its often-flawed attempts to make our small planet a better world through greater international understanding, cannot be reduced, in well-intentioned efforts to evaluate it, to statistics on a chart or an executive summary on yet another think-tank report?

The old saying, any road will get you there if you don't know where you're going, applies here. If I was allowed back into the building and to ask a question of someone important in Public Affairs, I'd ask this: why isn't your whole "PD" strategy built around sending out messages in bottles dropped into the ocean? Now of course the analogy only goes so far, but just as the message in the bottle strategy can be dismissed with a quick thought experiment (who knows who reads what, and what they do after the read it), can anyone really make a different claim for the State Department's current efforts?

Metrics start with a clear goal, an end state to use the military term, and work backwards from there. One of the core problems with the State Department, and the one that most significantly contributes to the Department's increasing irrelevance in foreign policy, is that State seems just content to "be," to create conditions of its own continued existence. So, if social media is a new cool thing, and Congress will pay for it, then social media it is. What if instead the organization had more concrete goals? Then we could measure back from them. I'll not trouble readers with my own list of foreign policy goals, but if the best you can come up with is something so broad as "engage the public" then you are pretty close to having no real goal at all. Best to throw notes into the ocean and hope for the best.

Bonus: One cheap and easy way for a non-thinker to dismiss these points is to say "Well, sure, it is easy to ask the questions, but where are Van Buren's answers? If he wants metrics, what does he propose?"

Of course that is a silly line of reasoning. Change begins with the questions, the point of asking is to stimulate the search for answers and solutions. It would be easier if all the solutions to all of the PD problems could be laid out in a short interview, but life ain't that way cowboys. Don't dismiss important questions for lack of easy answers. Instead, realize there are higher goals than obedience and career climbing and at least allow room for the Questions and admit the need to look for Answers.

As a starting point, perhaps consider this: When you get a machine that is so immense and so bureaucratic and so career promotion oriented, the mission will be lost and truth and honesty are mere bystanders eventually wrecking any positive mission. The whole concept of institutions and how they are managed and sized needs to be examined big time. The solution, if there is any, is breaking it down into small autonomous offices or missions or programs that link together but are managed separately eliminating an immense hierarchy.

Follow John Brown on Twitter: www.twitter.com/ivante

Tehran Recalls Diplomat Accused Of Groping Girls In Brazil ...

Eric Lach April 24, 2012, 11:56 AM

Iran has summoned home Hekmatollah Ghorbani, its third-ranking diplomat in Brazil, after allegations that he fondled underage girls in a swimming pool at a sports club, AFP reports.

Ramin Mehmanparast, a spokesman for Iran’s Foreign Ministry, told reporters Tuesday that the diplomat “will be dealt with according to the foreign ministry’s disciplinary rules.”

According to AFP, the Brazilian media has reported that Ghorbani is accused of groping at least four girls between the ages of nine and 15 in the incident, which occurred in mid-April.

“People wanted to kill him,” a father of one of the girls told the new website G1.

Brazilian police arrested Ghorbani but he was released under diplomatic immunity. The Iranian embassy in Brasilia defended Ghorbani in a statement calling the incident a “cultural misunderstanding,” a comment which Mehmanparast was asked about Tuesday.

“On principle, we do not accept this person being at a mixed-sex swimming pool, and it is considered a disciplinary violation and therefore he was summoned home at once and we are reviewing his case,” Mehmanparast replied.

Mehmanparast also said the incident was being twisted by some Western and Arab media “for political gain” against Iran.

(h/t GlobalPost)

Image from Shutterstock

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Saudi diplomat could be freed soon - Saudi Arabia - Zawya

Apr 24 2012

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By GHAZANFAR ALI KHAN A Saudi diplomat kidnapped nearly a month ago in the southern Yemeni port city of Aden is in good health while negotiations for his release are at an advanced stage, according to wire reports.

Negotiations are ongoing and should result in the release of Abdullah Al-Khalidi, Saudi Arabia's deputy consul, in less than a week, said an AFP report, without giving details of the talks with kidnappers.

However, Saudi officials preferred not to comment when asked about negotiations with the abductors and possible release of the diplomat. Alauddin Alaskary, deputy foreign minister for protocol affairs, said he was "not aware of any development in the case." He, however, said the Saudi government was fully coordinating with Yemeni security agencies to pursue extensive efforts to release Al-Khalidi. The Saudi diplomat was kidnapped in Aden on March 28.

There were several reports about the reasons behind the kidnapping of Al-Khalidi. Some said the motive behind the abduction was related to a civil marriage dispute between the diplomat and a tribal Yemeni family. Last week, however, Al-Qaeda claimed responsibility for abducting the deputy consul. A Saudi fugitive who made a call to the Saudi Embassy in Sanaa on behalf of Al-Qaeda demanded that all detained members of Al-Qaeda in the Kingdom's jails be released and a ransom paid for the release of Al-Khalidi.

About the health conditions and whereabouts of Al-Khalidi, a Reuters report said the diplomat's life "is not in danger." Sheikh Tareq Al-Fadli, a tribal head in Abyan and a prominent leader of Yemen's southern separatist movement, said he had been mediating with the kidnappers for Al-Khaladi's release. "Things are going well. The man is fine, he is in good health," Fadli told Reuters, adding that he would be released "within the coming hours."

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Iran investigates Brazil diplomat | Odd Onion

24 April 2012
Last updated at 06:30 ET

Iran has recalled the diplomat after the “cultural misunderstanding”

Iran says it has called home a diplomat who is accused of molesting girls at a swimming pool in Brazil and will investigate him.

The official was arrested following the alleged incident in Brasilia, but freed after invoking diplomatic immunity.

A spokesman for Iran’s foreign ministry said the man, named as Hekmatollah Ghorbani, would be “dealt with”.

He added that reporting of the story was intended to damage ties between the two countries.

The diplomat, who has been in his post for two years, was accused of inappropriately touching girls aged between nine and 15 at a private swimming pool in Brasilia last week.

Brazil’s Foreign Minister Antonio Patriota said the allegations were “very worrying” and asked Iran to investigate.

Speaking on Iran’s state news channel, foreign ministry spokesman Ramin Mehmanparast defended the diplomat, who is 51 and married with children, saying the allegations were a result of a “cultural misunderstanding”.

He said western media’s reporting of the alleged incident was being used for “political gain” against Iran.

Iran’s President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad plans to pay an official visit to Brazil in the “near future”, he said.

But Mr Mehmanparast said being at a mixed-sex swimming pool was considered “a disciplinary violation” and that Mr Ghorbani had been “summoned home at once”.

Under Iranian law, men and women of any age are not allowed to share a swimming pool.

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The South China Seasickness | The Diplomat

As China, the Philippines and Vietnam argue over the South China Sea the waters are being over fished and polluted. And conflict could be around the corner.

Many citizens of China, the Philippines and Vietnam won’t have heard of the tiny scraps of land in the South China Sea that their governments compete with one another to claim. Certainly, almost none will ever set eyes on them.

So are places like Scarborough Shoal, the scene of Beijing and Manila’s latest maritime spat this month, really worth all the aggravation? And whose fault is it that these confrontations, which have the potential to start wars – and at the very least to kill fishermen and sailors – keep on happening?

Tiny, uninhabitable islets like Scarborough Shoal have little value per se, but the resources that surround them have plenty. The islets serve as pins in a map, around which governments can draw dotted lines and claim ownership over everything that lies within.

It’s these resources – the food even more, perhaps, than the oil or gas – that make stability in the South China Sea matter.

“The urgency is that these areas are being overfished and polluted, and that’s threatening the food supply of millions of people,” says Carlyle Thayer, an associate professor at the Australian Defence University who closely follows disputes in the South China Sea. “That’s something these countries have to start taking seriously.”

Fishing grounds can, of course, be shared, just as undersea energy reserves can be co-developed. But as Thayer points out, marine environments must be managed, as well as shared. If there’s a perception that fishermen from other countries are abusing resources in disputed waters and endangering livelihoods and food supplies, then that will inevitably trigger an angry response from the other claimants.

So putting an end to the South China Sea disputes is important from a security perspective. But it’s also important from a food security perspective. As things stand, the South China risks a textbook “tragedy of the commons,” the destruction of common resources over which no single authority has control.

In addition, Thayer points out that oil licenses will be granted in the near future, potentially causing further upset. And all this comes as most of the interested parties are investing in their navies and, in China’s case, in paramilitary maritime agencies. “The South China Sea bathtub is being filled up more and more by Chinese control vessels, and by other countries’ patrol vessels and submarines,” he says.

This approaching spike in contestation makes it all the more important that a solution be found now, and the diplomatic activity of the past year suggests that one is attainable. ASEAN has been China’s main interlocutor on South China Sea issues, and Beijing made an important goodwill gesture last November when it put up $475 million to create a China-ASEAN Maritime Co-operation Fund. Several ASEAN-China expert working groups are also now in place.

The key process of 2012 is the drafting of a Code of Conduct (COC) governing behavior in the South China Sea – and envisaged as being more far-reaching than the existing Declaration of Conduct (DOC). Crucially, ASEAN is writing the new code. The association is due to present China with its proposals in July, and Beijing will be under political pressure to accept the ASEAN formula, rather than appear domineering by rejecting the plan. The existing process also excludes the United States, which is to China’s liking. Furthermore, “China has Cambodia in the box seat at the moment [as ASEAN chair],” adds Thayer.

Diplomat offloaded from HK flight for being an unruly passengerâ ...

24-Apr-12, 5:37 AM | Philippine News Agency

OTHER NATIONAL STORIES

• Diplomat offloaded from HK flight for being an unruly passenger‏

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InterAksyon.com
The online news portal of TV5

MANILA, Philippines -- A Chinese-Filipino passenger, who claims to be a diplomat, was offloaded from a Hong Kong-bound Cathay Pacific jetliner at about 12 noon on Monday for refusing to fasten his seat belt and was accused of being an "unruly passenger."

Cabin crew members were said to have verbally warned Francis Chua, aka Ang Biao, to put on his seat belt while the airplane was taxiing for take-off but to no avail.

The crew alerted the pilot, identified as Capt. Brian Hall, and Flight Officer Warren Hayman, who immediately turned around to go back to NAIA Terminal 1.

Chua then left his seat on the lower deck and climbed the spiral staircase to the upper deck of the B747, trying to gain entry to the cockpit, in an apparent attempt to talk to the pilot.

The crew members had to wrestle to prevent Chua from entering the pilot’s domain, according to Cathay Pacific officials.

Upon being offloaded, Chua was brought to the First Police Center for Aviation Security (1st PCAS) where he was investigated.

First PCAS Senior Supt. Manuel Pintado said that Chua violated RA9497, the new anti-terrorism act under the Civil Aviation Authority of the Philippines (CAAP).

Flight CX-900, with 400 passengers and 11 crew members, was delayed by more than 30 minutes and was able to leave for Hong Kong at 2:30 p.m.

The airline filed a report saying: “Chua was an unruly passenger, who would not obey any command from the cabin crew. Verbal warning was given but to no avail. Return to (parking) bay to offload passenger. Passenger was repeatedly asked to fasten seatbelt but he refused and then during the taxi back to bay, he climbed the stairs to the upper deck to gain entry to the cockpit. He was prevented from doing so by cabin crew.”

A check with the internet shows that Chua has been Honorary Consul General to Peru since 2002.

Exclusive Interview with U.S. Diplomat Peter Van Buren on ...

Interview with American Diplomat

1. Public Diplomacy (PD) is a hard term to define. Some say it’s just a euphemism for propaganda. The Department of State’s definition is “engaging, informing, and influencing key international audiences.” For some  traditionally-minded diplomats and commentators, the term “public diplomacy” is an oxymoron (true diplomacy, they argue, is practiced behind closed doors, not in public).  How would you define PD? 

Any communications strategy, from advertising to propaganda to social media to whatever you want to call it, plays second to reality—actions really do speak louder than words. So as long as deaths in wedding parties from misplaced drone attacks, atrocities by soldiers and videos of Abu Ghraib exist, you are not going to fool anyone regardless of how many Tweets you send out. In an age of increasingly prevalent media, the usual bullshit of the Secretary standing up in Geneva proclaiming support for human rights while people in their own countries see the U.S. overtly supporting nasty autocrats will dominate mind space. Here’s a graphic (not my work) that illustrates the point: http://img.photobucket.com/albums/v433/diannaruggles/clintonspeechbrazilflat.jpg

Look at the outcome of the Haditha massacre in Iraq: 24 unarmed Iraqis were slaughtered by an out-of-control group of Marines in 2005, and now, seven years later, the case is finally concluded and no one is going to jail. http://www.google.com/hostednews/ap/article/ALeqM5iXkFhKAP9aytmT_edXqKqudieCiA?docId=65911d11260f4c259827bd68c12f60c1 You can Tweet and Facebook until the end of time, but that story will resonate for even longer within the Arab world.

The Haditha outcome also illustrates the point of relevancy. While most FSOs and almost all of the American public are probably ignorant about what happened in Haditha, the incident is well known among politically-minded Iraqis. On the day when everyone there was talking about the guiltless conclusion, U.S. Embassy Baghdad PD was bleating happily about jazz and some art exhibit. The appearance—to Iraqis—was one of trying to change the topic, change the channel, to distract from the real issue of the day.

So whatever PD is, it can only be less effective than what the U.S. is actually doing.

2. Edward R. Murrow, the famed newsman and Director of the United States Information Agency during the Kennedy administration, is often quoted as saying that public diplomacy, as regards the formulation of policy, should be seriously taken into consideration at the take-off, not at the crash landing. More bluntly, you can’t put lipstick on a pig. What is your view on the relationship between public diplomacy and policy?

See above.

3. As you know, the above-mentioned United States Information Agency (1953-1999), which handled public diplomacy during the Cold War, was consolidated into the State Department a few years after the collapse of Russian communism, thereby reflecting a historical pattern of the USG abolishing its “propaganda” (anti-propaganda?) agencies (e.g., the Committee on Public Information [1917-1919], the Office of War Information [1942-1945]) when a global conflict is over. Nostalgic USIA veterans tend to regret the dissolution of “their” independent agency, a relatively small organization (by Washington standards) giving its overseas officers considerable flexibility to act, on behalf of U.S. national interests, as they saw fit according general policy guidelines and local conditions (as an ex-USIA senior official told me over lunch not long ago, “we got away with murder”). Not amused by such declarations of independence (often unspoken), strait-laced State Department employees referred to USIA as “Useless,” a play of words on USIA’s overseas designation, USIS (United States Information Service). What’s your take on PD now being, bureaucratically, a State function? Does it make PD more manageable and streamlined?

You can see the themes of relevancy and credibility running through this interview.

State Department output, what we say out loud, is characterized by caution above all else, a weird play on the Hippocratic Oath. But the “safest” things to say (We urge all sides to reconsider, Mistakes were made) have little value outside Foggy Bottom. A bit of vitality is needed, and PD lacks that now. In what foreign country do people routinely turn to a PD news source? Anything that flows into the State Department gets filtered out into the equivalent of “male pale and Yale,” usually three days after the story has moved off the front pages. Safe, for sure, but also irrelevant. Often, irrelevant by choice if not by policy.

For example, to enflame my ulcer, I just flipped over to Twitter. Several Embassies are Tweeting “Happy Earth Day” in unison, obviously a central command meme of the day from Washington. So what? Nothing wrong with Earth Day, but so what? Is the U.S. not still the world’s predominant carbon fuels burner? What is the specific goal of sending Happy Earth Day Tweets out in English to whomever?

Alec Ross, State’s alleged social media king, Tweets today “97 years ago today, modern chemical weapons 1st used in war. German troops released chlorine gas on the front lines at Ypres, killing 5,000” with no link or explanation. I am not even sure what the point of that is, never mind how it might play into any of the national goals of the U.S.. Alec Tweets out these odd “fun facts” regularly, to what point I do not know.

The lack of content, of vitality, also means that State only practices half of the social media equation. I see little evidence of interactivity, though people do try and break through the screen and ask visa questions, usually very specific to a person/case type questions because they cannot get them answered from inundated Consular sections. Posts crow over how many people watched or viewed something, but very rarely entertain true interactivity. I am sure they are afraid of it, afraid of saying anything that hasn’t been cleared by several layers above them. That may be great for career security (the goal) but it does little to really put social media to use. Just the opposite, really.

4. The invasion and occupation of Iraq is considered by many a public-diplomacy disaster. Your own book on your one-year Foreign-Service experience (2009-2010) in that country has, as part of its title, “How I Helped Lose the Battle for the Hearts and Minds of the Iraqi People.” For those who have not had the opportunity to read your admirable volume, where/how did U.S. PD go so wrong in Iraq? Is it possible to say that America did, on occasion, do certain things right in its attempts to remake (in its own image) the cradle of civilization?

My experience with PD in Iraq was all propaganda all the time. PD’s conception of PRT work was simply to over promote any small thing we did that wasn’t a complete failure. If we dug a well, not necessarily a bad thing, the headline was “Bringing Water to Mesopotamia.” Every PRT project had to include an interview with some Hollywood backlot Iraqi praising the United States, because as we know only White People can help the Brown Skinned of the world. PD didn’t even try to balance or nuance a story; they wrote entirely for themselves and their bosses and Washington. People in Iraq certainly knew the truth, living it 24/7 in a world without water, electricity or sewers or schools, so who was PD trying to fool if not themselves? I wrote about this in more detail here http://wemeantwell.com/blog/2012/04/02/public-diplomacy-propaganda-for-who/ and included a PD video piece so your readers can see for themselves what their tax dollars paid for.

5. The new social media, some argue, are redefining public diplomacy, with the buzzword “public diplomacy 2.0,” coined during the Bush administration, still quite à la mode inside the beltway.  Senior Advisor for Innovation to Secretary of State Hillary Clinton Alec Ross, according to a twitterer attending his recent talk at American University, stated that “I don’t think of myself as a public diplomacy official. I think  ... public diplomacy is more old-school American propaganda.” In your view, how important/effective are the social media as a tool for the State Department to engage (a favorite word of the current administration) “key international audiences”?

To begin, you must have a goal—sell soap, get people to switch from Coke to Pepsi, turn out to vote, stop joining al Qaeda, something you can use to know if you have succeeded and completed what you started out to do. Social media as practiced by the Department is amateur hour. A bunch of people led by the State Department's oldest living teenager Alec Ross think they understand media because they are banging away and getting weirdly excited by numbers. Success seems to be measured in how many followers an Ambassador has. Yet no one is interested in looking into the substance of social media. When I comment on interactive Embassy web pages or State Twitter accounts on my own blog at wemeantwell.com, what I see are desperate people trying to get a visa question answered. They have no outlet to ask such questions because Consular sections are under siege, so they bombard social media. When I do see some questioners try and aim for more substantive topics, the replies from State are canned official language, statements that are “clearable” only because they are content-free or simply ape the party line.

So what is social media as practiced by State able to accomplish? You’d think given its emphasis and the money spent that someone would be interested in a Return on Investment study, a way to map out what was accomplished. But State does not work that way—it is all about the “doing” and not about the “getting done.” Social media as practiced is just another flim-flam, foisted on State this round by another short-timer political appointee whose connections to the Secretary mean he can do no wrong. Or, perhaps more honestly, no one has the guts to question his pronouncements. Anyone who has been at work in Foggy Bottom for more than a few years can recall similar flim-flams when Faxes and email were going to reduce the need for overseas personnel (we can do it all from Washington!), or web home pages or video conferencing. All can be useful tools, but you have got to have a goal and you have got to measure your way toward that goal. Otherwise it is just flavor of the month stuff. Didn’t we have virtual embassies for awhile in some 3-D online world game thing?

6. The USG-supported Broadcasting Board of Governors,  which (according to its homepage) became “the independent entity responsible for all U.S. Government and government-sponsored, non-military, international broadcasting on October 1, 1999” (e.g., Voice of America, Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty, Radio Sawa) and whose mission is “to inform, engage, and connect people around the world in support of freedom and democracy,” is under considerable criticism these days for management failures and for intending to cut back on staff and programs. Based on your foreign-service experience of over two decades, what do you think is the reaction of overseas audiences to USG –supported broadcasting such as Voice of America? Are such broadcasts still necessary for U.S. national interests in an age when information is becoming more and more readily available? In a broader sense, can a journalist, in your view, be a true, objective master of her trade (and can her reports be trusted as reliable) if her paycheck comes from Uncle Sam (to cite Kim Andrew Elliott, a fast-media guru, "Journalism and public diplomacy are very different, indeed adversarial, endeavors").

Credibility is the key. If you look at the very successful penetrations of American society by foreign “public affairs,” you see sources of news and entertainment that are clearly allied with a foreign entity (China Xinhua News, RT.com, al Jazeera, the BBC) and do not try to hide that fact. Yet, at the same time, they are aggressive in presenting a side of news that is missing in America’s mainstream media, often pointing out the “other side” to a story or not shying away from reporting U.S. Government mistakes and misjudgments. Their credibility comes not from being pro-Russia, but from tapping into a need in the U.S. for alternative news sources.

People are too sophisticated now, even in the developing world, to be reached via crude propaganda—America=Good, al Qaeda=Bad. That costs those sources their credibility and thus their audiences. Who cares what U.S. broadcasting into the Arab world has to say, or crap like Radio Marti? Most of the time it is just self-referential: Obama made a speech and PD says “Here’s Obama’s Speech” in case you missed it elsewhere or really want to plod through 1500 words on Earth Day. No one independently quotes their opinions, no one considers them vital or important the way al Jazeera became simply by filling a real gap in what people wanted to hear.

If the U.S. would try and learn a bit more about what people want, they might find a more ready audience. Instead, our “public diplomacy” programming seems designed more to please our bosses in Washington than to really reach people abroad.

Try it now—go to http://iraq.usembassy.gov/ and imagine yourself a young, politically charged Iraqi. What is on that page that demands your attention? The Cold War ended years ago and we are still talking about jazz.

7. The Smith-Mundt Act (1948), the legislation that provides the statutory basis for U.S. public diplomacy, prohibits the State Department from disseminating domestically USG information intended for overseas audiences. Do you think this firewall, in the Internet age, is anachronistic? Or is there something to be said about prohibiting the U.S. government from “propagandizing” the American people? Would you abolish/amend the Smith-Mundt Act (or, since so few Americans know anything about it, simply let it live on, untouched, in its obscurity, letting sleeping dogs lie)?

I think Smith-Mundt died on the vine already, whether it exists as a law still or not. Given both the ubiquity of the web and the fact that almost all of the U.S. public diplomacy spew is in English, I think we already know who the target audience is. For example, all the phony grief that gets expressed every time a new round of terrible atrocity photos emerge from Afghanistan certainly is not fooling the mothers of the dead Afghans; it is designed to make us feel better here at home. The Afghans know exactly what is happening in their homes and villages, even if the U.S. Government can get away with calling each atrocity just another act of some bad apples. By the way, how many bad apples does it take before you have a whole pie full of them?

8. In the how-many-angels-can-dance-on-a-pin tradition, there is quite a lot of talk, among the PD community both outside and inside of academe, about how to measure the results of public diplomacy. Do you think that there is a scientific way to gauge the impact of PD, both short-term and long-term? Or is the practice of public diplomacy, in the words of scholar Frank Ninkovich, essentially “an act of faith” that, in its often-flawed attempts to make our small planet a better world through greater international understanding, cannot be reduced, in well-intentioned efforts to evaluate it, to statistics on a chart or an executive summary on yet another think-tank report?

The old saying, any road will get you there if you don’t know where you’re going, applies here. If I was allowed back into the building and to ask a question of someone important in Public Affairs, I’d ask this: why isn’t your whole “PD” strategy built around sending out messages in bottles dropped into the ocean? Now of course the analogy only goes so far, but just as the message in the bottle strategy can be dismissed with a quick thought experiment (who knows who reads what, and what they do after the read it), can anyone really make a different claim for the State Department’s current efforts?

Metrics start with a clear goal, an end state to use the military term, and work backwards from there. One of the core problems with the State Department, and the one that most significantly contributes to the Department’s increasing irrelevance in foreign policy, is that State seems just content to “be,” to create conditions of its own continued existence. So, if social media is a new cool thing, and Congress will pay for it, then social media it is. What if instead the organization had more concrete goals? Then we could measure back from them. I’ll not trouble readers with my own list of foreign policy goals, but if the best you can come up with is something so broad as “engage the public” then you are pretty close to having no real goal at all. Best to throw notes into the ocean and hope for the best.

Bonus: One cheap and easy way for a non-thinker to dismiss these points is to say “Well, sure, it is easy to ask the questions, but where are Van Buren’s answers? If he wants metrics, what does he propose?”

Of course that is a silly line of reasoning. Change begins with the questions, the point of asking is to stimulate the search for answers and solutions. It would be easier if all the solutions to all of the PD problems could be laid out in a short interview, but life ain’t that way cowboys. Don’t dismiss important questions for lack of easy answers. Instead, realize there are higher goals than obedience and career climbing and at least allow room for the Questions and admit the need to look for Answers.

As a starting point, perhaps consider this: When you get a machine that is so immense and so bureaucratic and so career promotion oriented, the mission will be lost and truth and honesty are mere bystanders eventually wrecking any positive mission. The whole concept of institutions and how they are managed and sized needs to be examined big time. The solution, if there is any, is breaking it down into small autonomous offices or missions or programs that link together but are managed separately eliminating an immense hierarchy.