NewPopulationBomb

In a word, probably yes.  Once ethnic cleansing has begun (it is occurring now in the coastal hills as Alawite regions, encouraged by the regime of Assad, are massacring Sunnis), it takes some years to overcome distrust and conflict.  But the examples of Bosnia and Rwanda show that even after horrible massacres, a country can function once again if good leadership can be found.

The real puzzle in Syria is who can take charge of the opposition and a post-Assad regime?  Right now, the civilian opposition government in exile is riven with factional rivalries.  The militia leadership in the country is increasingly dominated by jihadists, who have both financial support from Saudi Arabia and the gulf and the military experience won in Iraq to be effective.  The tilt in the entire Middle East is toward stronger Islamist regimes, as people come to identify Islam with nationalism in opposition to past imperial and western domination.

In the absence of a less extreme Islamist leadership, arming the Syrian rebels will simply hasten the conversion of Syria into a headquarters for Islamic jihad, posing an even greater threat to Israel, Lebanon, and eventually the US.

Is there anything that can be done?  Yes — possibly.  A regional solution in which the US, Russia, Turkey and Saudi Arabia agree to support the rebels AND call for an international peace-keeping force to prevent humanitarian disasters and oversee initial elections (as in East Timor, but with a larger and longer international presence), might work.  Such a strong international commitment not only to arm and support the rebels but supervise a post-conflict peace and regime-building might undercut the jihadist leadership.  It would certainly undercut the Assad regime’s attractiveness to those on the fence and thus prompt more defections that would hasten its demise.

Yet I worry that the international community will shirk from supporting such a vitally necessary but expensive peace keeping/state reconstruction operation.  If the talks in Geneva (which will include regional players plus Russia and the US) focus only on getting Assad to step down, they will likely fail, as the increasingly obvious consequence of Assad leaving will be chaos and sectarian massacres.

As with President Kagame in Rwanda, who has insisted on a national Rwanda identity, someone in Syria will have to impress upon his or her followers a Syrian national identity, which hitherto has been weak, despite the long historical existence of Damascus and Aleppo as centers of civilization.  Under the aegis of UN peacekeepers, this will be easier, but it needs to be done by any means.

So here is the requirement for a hopeful outcome in Syria:  (1) regional agreement to support the rebels; (2) commitment to support international peacekeepers following a regime change; (3) leadership among Syrians themselves that promotes a united Syria and post-sectarian national identity.

That’s a very tall order right now; but it doesn’t mean the world shouldn’t try.  Letting the current situation grind on means more deaths and risks spreading the conflagration to other countries throughout the region.

Again, my apologies to all faithful readers for the long absence — I was literally at sea!

Lots has happened — new stock market highs, new life in Japan, fresh optimism about the US and Africa.  Some of this is justified, but much I fear is not, unless new policies develop to make these gains sustainable.

There is also a strong turn toward Islamist regimes in Egypt, Libya, Turkey and now Syria (where today’s rebels, if they become tomorrow’s regime, are increasingly dominated by Al Qaeda-influenced Jihadists).

I will have a fresh blog later today on Syria; and then resume the normal 2-3 times per week schedule.

Thanks for coming back!

Sorry for the long absence — blogging will return May 20.  

Here is a quote from Turkey’s finance minister, regarding their plans to improve education in that country (from THE GLOBALIST).  He is discussing what he sees as the critical issue — bringing the quality of education in the poorest and most distant regions up to the level of that in the capital:

“Currently, the big divergence in the education which students receive in Istanbul and, say, Hakkari, which is the furthest southeastern spot in Turkey, is mainly due to differences in teacher training and quality.  Our government is trying to tackle this challenge on many fronts. We are in the process of equipping every single classroom in Turkey, even in the remotest villages, with fiber optic cable, a broadband Internet connection and providing touch screens and big whiteboards (Emph. added).

That is one way to reduce the current gap as quickly as possible, as least in terms of access to educational information. Another is that every student in Turkey from the fourth grade onwards will be given a tablet PC for free. (Emph. added)

The overall objective is that we use these technologies to level the playing field as quickly as possible by centrally developing content and making it accessible to every single student.”

Turkey now has 17.1 million students in pre-school, primary, and secondary school, just over a third as many as the US has (49 million), and a larger number than the population of many European countries.

If Turkey succeeds, it will leapfrog the quality of education given to young people in the US and in many European countries; if you think it is a powerhouse today, just wait.  Turkey could, twenty years from now, be the best educated country in Europe.

Of course, this is all just a plan, and as we know, there is often a great gap between a plan and its execution.  Still, the ambition is impressive — a tablet for every student (it sounds expensive, but actually could save a small fortune over purchase of traditional textbooks), every classroom wired; that is something we aim for in our colleges, and in our best high schools, but hardly from fourth grade.

In the US, the gap in the achievement level between children from wealthier and poorer families has greatly increased in the last few decades, and the difference in quality between suburban and private schools and major urban schools is a scandal and disgrace.  So are we marshaling ideas and spending funds to do something about that?  No — we are cutting back; even here in Fairfax county, one of the richest counties in America, the federal sequester and stagnation of property tax revenues means that school budgets face cuts.

Of course, the US is pioneering the Massive Open Online Course (MOOC) for college students.  And according to the NY Times, state colleges in California are having great success experimenting with blends of MOOCs and on-campus tutoring to improve student learning.  Some believe that in less than ten years, the traditional large lecture course will be obsolete; instead students will absorb material from a variety of MOOCs and on-line sources, and then spend class time engaged in critical problem-solving with on-line support.

Yet students will not benefit from these opportunities unless they are prepared, and that means quality primary and secondary education.  The U.S. could well find itself in the same place as it did with the transistor and video-tape: inventing the breakthrough technology (in this case MOOCs) only to see other societies pick it up, develop and apply it, and reap the major benefits to an even greater degree.

The US needs to focus less on debt, cut-backs and instead imagine a world of growth, opportunity, and change.  If we fail to do this, we will be outrun and educationally out-gunned; just look at Turkey.

As I am flying out of Madrid today, security is unusually tight — they are running a marathon in the city, and marathons are now high-risk events.

The news is usually consumed with details of the Boston bombers and the aftermath.  However, this weekend USA TODAY ran a heart-stirring story of an American veteran of the Iraqi war who is recovering from terrible burn injuries.

We can never underestimate the sacrifices our veterans have made.  Over 2 million men and women served overseas in Iraq and Afghanistan.  Over one thousand died; over three thousand came home with devastating burns or amputations; over 50,000 incurred other injuries, and up to 400,000 experienced post-traumatic stress injuries or mild head trauma.

The news flurry regarding the Boston bombers shows how short-sighted we are.  First, there is much more attention given to the handful of victims and to the perpetrators than to our vets, dozens of whom commit suicide every year because they cannot fit into a society that does not understand and appreciate what they have done.

Second, after all the sacrifices, injuries, and continued misunderstanding, the bombings in Boston demonstrate that a thousand US deaths and tens of thousands of injured have not made us safe from our supposed adversary in the “War on Terror” — the violent hatred of jihadists against innocent Americans, based on the very real damage that American foreign policy has done to Muslim communities around the world.

To be sure, America has defended Muslims too — in Kosovo, in Bosnia, and in northern Iraq (Kurdistan), the U.S. has helped Muslims find security and autonomy to run their own lives.  In Libya, US actions freed a nation and likely saved tends of thousands from being massacred by Gaddafi’s forces.   But on the whole, whether in Palestine, Syria, Chechnya, Afghanistan, or Iraq, when Muslims die or are driven from their homes and their land, the U.S. either does little or nothing to stop it, or actively supports the forces that are doing it.  And when death rains down suddenly and magically from the skies, courtesy of drones and predator missiles, the logo U.S.A. is found on the bomb fragments that remain.

What have we accomplished at the cost of so much injury and blood?   Did we punish al-Qaeda for killing 3,000 Americans on 9/11?  Yes, but that was done by a Seal team that caught up to bin Laden in Pakistan, and by special forces and drone attacks on al-Qaeda leadership — not by the massive ground invasions of Iraq and Afghanistan.

Have our efforts won the US greater support among Muslims of the world, earning their trust and help in putting an end to Islamic terrorism?  If only that were so; but most studies suggest the opposite has occurred.

And yet, one place in the Islamic world where the U.S. is applauded and thanked is in Libya.   There, the US intervened minimally and sensibly; protecting innocents and pushing back against Gaddafi’s forces just enough to stop them and let demoralization and the efforts of Libyan rebels end Gaddafi’s rule.

That is the lesson of war.  Not that it is always wrong, but that one has to be careful to make sure it is done right.  That the need is truly vital, and the actions proportionate and well-designed to reach a goal.

As much as I consider US military intervention in Iraq and Afghanistan a tragic and misguided waste, the Vietnam of our generation, I still believe the US should set up a no-fly zone along the Syria-Turkey border, and increase its lethal aid to Syrian rebels. (More about that in a forthcoming post).

But today, as I leave behind the Madrid marathon, I want to remember our veterans, and ask that they get our respect and thanks for their sacrifices.  Whatever the outcome, they did what they were called upon by our government to do; for that they deserve more thanks and support than they have received.

Confronted with the news that the Russians asked the US to look into possible violent activities by Tamerlan Tsarnaev, the elder Boston bomber, you might wonder why he was able to wreak havoc in Boston.

The answer is the same as for any person drifting toward psychopathic behavior or murder — the tell-tale clues are only visible in hindsight.  Probably hundreds of people fit the profile of Tsarnaev, none of whom go on to commit terrorist acts.  The problem is we have no way to tell which one will.

The world is, inherently and irredeemably, complex.   By this I do not mean complicated.  Sending rockets into space is complicated; analyzing the human genome is complicated.  But these remain systems that are analytically simple — you can pull them apart into many small elements, and the total of the system is the sum of those elements.  The problem with the social world is that it is complex in the sense that the big picture does NOT simply emerge from adding up the elements.  In decoding the human genome, there are basically four nucleotide bases that appear as the basic terms in DNA sequencing, and the hard part is to take the millions of bases in a DNA molecule and figure out their order.  We do this by splitting many strands of DNA from an organism into smaller pieces, identifying the sequence in those pieces, looking for overlaps, and then putting the whole thing together from the bits.  Fortunately, every strand of DNA from the same organism has the same sequence (that is, except for random mutations), so get enough strands and enough pieces and enough computing power and you can figure out the sequence of the entire molecule.

Now imagine how much harder this would be if each nucleotide was an individual thinking and acting bit, that could change its order at will, disguise itself or pretend to be another base to fool observers, and in which no two sets of interactions were exactly the same twice.   The whole system we use would be useless.

It would be nice if the analysis of terrorism, or the psychology of individuals, was amenable to accurate predictions, like that of rockets or DNA.  But the phenomena are just different, and always will be.

In fact, people find it immensely hard to deal with situations that involve more than a few variables, especially when those variables can interact with each other and act in non-linear ways (another way of saying you can’t simply add up the bits to get the whole).    This is why interventions to improve society so often fail.

I recently learned one reason our education programs in Afghanistan went so badly.  Citing a study showing that investing in primary education produced the greatest return, better than investing in secondary or tertiary education, USAID decided to put ALL of its educational investment into primary education — after all, that gives the best bang for the buck.  So they set a target of getting ALL Afghan children into primary school.

Yet that program has been in many ways a failure, because schooling is not the same as education.  That is, you can herd children into a newly built school, but if you have inexperienced, barely literate teachers who show up only half the time, very little learning goes on (a recent Center for Global Development study shows that this a common problem in developing countries).

Yet if you seek to expand primary education by millions of children, how can you expect to teach them unless you train hundreds of thousands of teachers?   The math is simple:  if you put 5 million children in school, and you aim for a 50 to 1 student to teacher ratio, you need at least 100,000 teachers, not counting administrators, substitutes, and other support staff.  But how do you get those people if you invest nothing in secondary and tertiary education?  Answer — you don’t.  And your goal of actually providing primary education falls to the practice of setting targets for bodies in classrooms, never mind about actual learning.

Why does such folly occur?  Because to deal with the problem requires thinking in terms of complex systems with many interrelated elements – how many secondary and tertiary teaching graduates do you need, and how fast can they be produced, and how can we adjust the expansion of primary schooling to the availability of qualified teachers?   That is a complex problem; among other things it may take years to determine how many people actually complete a teaching credential among those that sign up (in the US, the drop-out rate from colleges is over 40%, largely due to admitting students who are not prepared to do college work).  So how you can you tell how fast teachers can be produced?

It is much simpler to simply pick a target that CAN be approached in linear fashion – you build a school, get students to attend, and the total number of students schooled is just the sum of those bits.

All too often, companies and governments and individuals in all walks of life make decisions on the basis of habit (this worked before), rules of thumb, easily measured targets, simple analogies, and other approaches that lend themselves to few variables and linear thinking.

You might say that we should then put people in charge who can think in terms of many dimensions, non-linear relations, and complexity.  And you would be right — except for the fact than many such folks are academics who cannot manage people at all, and who master this approach because they only focus on a tiny slice of life and can’t generalize it to real-world problems.  What you need are managers who understand complexity, can harness the judgment of experts to guide their decisions, and then manage people to effectively carry out those decisions.  That combination does not arise very often.

So we should be very glad that for most of the things we do — growing food, building highways, generating electricity — the world responds pretty well to simplifications that involve breaking down complicated problems into lots of smaller simpler problems and that the solutions to the simpler problems can be added up to create the solution we need to the complicated one.

Sadly, that just does not work well for truly complex problems – like picking out in advance, from hundreds or thousands of jihad-influenced individuals, which ones will actually set up a bomb or where and when they will do so.

So don’t be too hard on our homeland security folks — they have done a pretty good job.  And learn to accept that the real, living, breathing world of people is darn hard to manage.  The main thing we can do is always be learning from, and resilient to, the things that we will inevitably miss.