Last year, I traveled Pakistan to speak at a counter-terrorism conference.  I met numerous devout, serious Muslims who decried the senseless violence extremists have brought to their country.  Little did I think that, just a year later, I would be comparing those well-meaning, peaceful Pakistanis with the peaceful, shocked residents of Arizona.  But here we are, a modern first world democracy, confronting the fact that our own internal extremists brook no more dissent than do Pakistan’s and feel no more compunction at shedding the blood of leaders with whom they disagree than do the likes of Mumtaz Qadri (Taseer’s murderer and bodyguard).  In Pakistan, extremists murdered Benazir Bhutto for her  non-extremist beliefs;  in the United States, extremists murdered  Dr. George Tiller for practicing abortion.  Pakistani extremists defy the Koran when they take the lives of other Muslims whose beliefs they do not agree;  American extremists defy their (mostly Christian) beliefs when they take the lives of those whose beliefs they don’t like.

Now we find out that the alleged perpetrator in Arizona is mentally ill.  Does that exonerate him?  Make him any less an extremist?  The vast majority of schizophrenics lead non-violent, if unenviable lives.  Few of them create YouTube channels devoted to anti-government rantings.  So I brand him extreme.  When will we—Americans and Pakistanis alike—act collectively against the overt hostility of our public debate, before it roils itself into outright murder?  We live today in a democracy transmogrified into a killing field, in which those with whom we disagree politically are not only not worthy of our respect, but not worthy of their own lives.  It is already too late to save the first victims.  Will Americans wait until political killing is reaches the heights it has reached in Venezuela, or Pakistan, or Myanmar?

I have spent much of my professional career fighting to end one type of violence: gun violence.  Every day, my work at ShotSpotter helps save lives, solve gun-related crimes, and take criminals off the street who would otherwise keep using guns to destroy lives and communities.  A few years ago, I was fortunate enough to be asked to join the Board of Directors of PAX, our country’s leading non-profit dedicated to reducing youth gun violence.  I thought I was making a difference.  And then I wake up on a day like today, and I read the news from Islamabad, and the news from Tucson, and I realize just how much more difference there is to be made, and how much work we all have before us.

The headline on yesterday’s Wall Street Journal read “Iran Arms Syria with Radar [sic]“.  My orthographic quibbles about the proper spelling of RADAR notwithstanding, the article quotes officials who say the new RADAR could pose a security threat to Israel.  No doubt it could.  The point of the article is that this level of military and technology “cooperation” constitutes a serious security threat.  No doubt it does.

Wall Street Journal, from Getty Images

One fact missing from the story was that the Syrians had already spent huge amounts on their air defenses—billions, by some estimates¹.  And as the former US top cybersecurity official, Richard Clarke, points out in his new book, Cyber War: The Next Threat to National Security and What to Do About It, those investments had failed spectacularly.  Clarke those reiterated last night at the Aspen Institute Security Forum that the challenge of cybersecurity lies in the manner in which it levels the playing field in such unexpected ways.  In the case of the briefly infamous 2008 Israeli air raid on the North Korean-designed (and operated?) Syrian nuclear facility, the Syrian RADAR systems appear to have been shut down before a single Israeli shot was fired:  someone (the Israelis, we presume) hacked the Syrian RADAR networks caused them either not to detect the F-15s and F-16s overhead, or not to display them.  (Neither of those aircraft is stealthy;  there is no question the RADARs could have detected them.)  Perhaps the first public acknowledgment of cyberwar in a modern military action followed, as first publicly reported by David A. Fulghum, Robert Wall and Amy Butler (“Israel Shows Electronic Prowess,” in Aviation Week).

So one wonders about this WSJ story:  why are the Syrians buying new RADAR equipment instead of new firewalls and routers?  Well, perhaps they are….

1. Clarke, Richard A. and Robert K. Knake, Cyber War, Harper Collins, 2010

The conference is abuzz with the words of Admiral Michael Mullen, Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, who spoke yesterday and twice raised the topic of terrorist synergies: the joining of forces between previously unrelated and even mutually distrusting terrorist organizations. Having spent the week fighting the fire that was Gen McChrystal’s dismissal and just himself back from a trip to Afghanistan, Pakistan and Israel, it is clear that Adm. Mullen was a man on a mission to identify and address this new phenomenon of terrorist cooperation.

The term and concept are relatively new: there has previously been talk of criminal-terrorist synergies, but in general those reflected local alliances made, if not as a matter of expedience, certainly not with a view towards a global strategy. The trend has existed for a while: as the Hon. Fran Townsend (former Assistant to the President for Homeland Security and Counterterrorism) pointed out today, the trend began early in the Bush Administration: Indonesia’s Jamaat Islamia overtly supporting Al Quaeda; Sudan’s GSPC aligning similarly, etc. But US officials, at least, have taken some comfort in the rifts within Islam and the assumption that, for example, primarly Sunni organizations like Al Quaeda would not join forces with Shiite regimes such as Iran.

Take comfort no longer. There is a palpable sense among officials here that we are now fighting a globally decentralized, cooperating terrorist network which is willing to forego internal idealistic disagreements in favor of the ultimate goal: damaging the West and, specifically, the United States. We have graduated from a multitude of fights against separate entities to a unified fight against global terrorism.

Asif Hassan/Agence France-Presse – Getty Images

Insidious forces of extremism continue to erode core Pakistani political and governmental functions.  Indeed, this particular suicide attack focused on Karachi, which lies at the southwestern-most end of Pakistan and, along with the rest of Sindh Province, has enjoyed relative peace and tranquility since the high profile attacks against Western targets it saw in 2002.  These attacks thus portend a serious escalation of the destabilization–and all of this despite (or perhaps because of–keep reading!) a continued US commitment to the region in the form of a time-limited commitment to Afghanistan.  Indeed, today’s Associated Press notes the recent increase in Haqqani network attacks on Pakistani intelligence and security operatives in North Waziristan is further straining US-Pakistani relations.  (The Haqqani network is an Al-Quaeda linked Afghani Taliban faction operating on both sides of the Afghan/Pakistan border.  Its increased activity may or may not be a result of an increased US activity in Afghanistan, but its recent impact on Pakistani ISI is nonetheless serious and potentially the source of some Pakistani concern over US activity.)

As well-known Washington Post correspondent David Ignatius pointed during a fascinating session at the recent Leading Thinkers Washington Forum on US-Pakistan relations, Pakistan both welcomes increased US commitment to Afghan stability (and thus to avoiding Afghanistan’s return to the status of a failed state), but also has cause for concern because of the possibility that more US troop pressure in southeastern Afghanistan will result in more insurgent activity both in the Swat valley (to the northeast) and in Pakistan’s Waziri provinces (to the northwest)–via a kind of chaotic osmosis destined to bring only increased threats to Pakistani stability.

One way or another, the conclusion is clear and worrisome:  Pakistan is heating up, and the US’s “Afghan Surge” has not quelled the hostility or the unrest.  If anything, the unintended short-term consequence of the US efforts in Afghanistan may be increased internal tension and terrorist activity in Pakistan.  Let’s hope we can complete the task in Afghanistan sufficiently quickly to avoid permanent destabilization of its neighbor to the south.

One needn’t spend much time browsing in The Bazaar before you realize: the proverbial cat is out of the bag. He is not the first to report that the knowledge of how to construct a nuclear weapon is no longer particularly hard to come by. (You may not quite be able to download the plans off the Internet, but the basic “gun” model used in the Little Boy (Hiroshima) bomb is fairly easy to construct from the right amount of Uranium 235.) Thus for a long time, the world has relied for its nonproliferative intentions on the difficulty of obtaining sufficient quantities of weapons-grade U235 (loosely defined as uranium whose 235 isotope is present at >90% by mass). Building centrifuges requires far more engineering and machining expertise than does building the actual bomb, and Western nonproliferation efforts (and the IAEA‘s efforts) have thus focused on nipping the process in the materials production bud.

Blame it on the leaky Russians (Langewiesche convinces us that they had little, if anything to do with nuclear proliferation) or the incredibly trusting Dutch, who initially hired A. Q. Kahn and later let him waltz out of the country with the plans for what are still considered state-of-the-art uranium centrifuges (state-of-the-non-classified-art, I should say), or the Pakistan government, which first propped up Kahn and which later bowed to US pressure to arrest him—and then promptly locked him away under house arrest so that no Western intelligence services could ask any further awkward questions relating to the involvement of the Pakistani government itself—but no matter how you slice it, not only has nuclear knowledge proliferated, but therefore so has nuclear technology. The North Koreans, the Iranians and the Libyans now also have the know-how (if not the machines, in the case of newly-reformed Libya) to produce significant quantities of weapons-grade uranium, and of course so do the Pakistanis, the Indians, the Israelis (not officially , the Germans, the French, the British, the Chinese, the Russians and the US. That’s roughly half the world’s population (50.6%, to be precise) whose governments are known have access to nuclear weapons technology. A majority.

Thus I conclude that the nonproliferation agenda is bankrupt. So far as we know, we have kept these weapons out of the hands of non-state actors. But such was not the aim of the Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty! In order to create effective controls which might curb the transfer of nuclear technologies to non-state actors, we’ll have to start by identifying what didn’t work in the NPT—for starters, the overt inequity between the nations permitted to maintain such weapons (namely the permanent members of the UN Security Council) and those not permitted to do so. The NPT created second-class citizens of half the world. Any surprise the world didn’t abide by the treaty? It’s Versaille all over again: a Phyrric victory of an asymmetric treaty over geopolitical reality.

So much for sleeping tonight.

Earlier this month, I participated in a seminar led by Clark Kent Ervin, the former Inspector General of the Department of Homeland Security, author of the frightening and eye-opening Open Target: Where America Is Vulnerable to Attack. The seminar focused on the current nature of the terrorist threat against our country. We were an eclectic bunch: a US Army Major military intelligence specialist in counterterrorism, two State Department employees, a venture capitalist or two, and a few of us who otherwise have some association our nation’s security infrastructure.

Despite our various backgrounds, a palpable sense developed in the room that something remains deeply wrong with America’s counterterrorist strategy. My friend and colleague, Major General (Retired) Steve Siegfried, who was the Inspector General of the US Army as well as the first Director of Homeland Security for South Carolina, puts it this way: of all of the steps terrorists take before and during a terrorist attack, most of them take place before the attack: they plan, they reconnoiter, they fund, they rehearse, they stage, and only then do they execute. So that means that most, if not all, of terrorist prevention can (and probably should) take place before execution. But look closely at the structure of DHS: not a single intelligence agency exists within DHS. How can the Department prevent terrorism by staunching it in its early stages, if it doesn’t have a mandate or an internal structure to generate the intelligence necessary on which to react? Think about it differently: you can either prevent or you can react. If you can’t gather intelligence, how can you prevent? DHS is fundamentally structured to be eternally reactive!

We are not the only ones who think there’s a problem. Foreign Policy and The Center for American Progress published a fascinating–and frightening–study, called “The Terrorism Index.” They asked 100 of the country’s top foreign policy experts some basic questions. The results are shocking:

• 81% of these experts believe the world is more dangerous for America and its interests than it was immediately after 9/11.
• 43% of the American public think we are safer, while only 19% of experts agree.

• 75% believe the US is losing the war on terror. (That’s 93% of liberals, 81% of moderates, and 50% of conservatives.)
• 46% of the American public think we’re winning.

• 62% believed that US policy towards North Korea is having a negative impact on US national security, despite the fact that 73% of respondents believed that North Korea ought to be Priority Number 1.

For an excellent overview, watch this video:

So at least this blogger thinks the situation is worse than we think. And as a “business guy,” I know very well that you can’t fix what you can’t measure. So the first step is to get a measurement of the problem–start realistically measuring the threat level (no more yellow/orange/red business, please!)–and then executing to fix the greatest threat. That would be North Korea’s nuclear ambitions.

My then-wife and I moved from New York City to California some five months before the attacks of 2001. I had been back in New York on business the day before and had, in fact, been in the Towers that Monday. Aimee walked her dog between the towers every morning between 8:30 and 8:50. But for the luck of the draw, one or both of us would have perished.

On that morning, we frantically tried to contact friends and family, and over the next two days we realized just how many friends and family we had lost. After a day, with nobody knowing when the planes would fly, we decided to drive back home.

Too much has been written about the profound effect of 9/11 on our generation for me to attempt to equal their eloquence. Suffice it to say that my life will never be the same, and I consider myself lucky that I have a life which I can say has changed. Our dear friends were not so lucky.