One of the primary ways the attacks of September 11, 2001 were supposed to have changed the United States was by revealing to us our vulnerability within our own borders to terrorist attacks. But of course, we had seen many terrorist attacks before then.  

We had seen them throughout American history -- shootings and hijackings and bombings. The destruction of Pan Am flight 103 in 1988 remains an open wound today. The 1995 Bojinka plot of Ramzi Yousef and his uncle, Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, to blow up 12 airliners en route to the United States and possibly kill as many as 4,000 people was a contributing factor leading to a major heightening of airport security by the Clinton Administration a year later.  The Oklahoma City bombing, also in 1995, is still regularly invoked as a sign of our vulnerability to domestic terrorists. Indeed, it was in 1995 that I first remember Richard Clarke, then a colleague in the Clinton Administration and a man who had been both prophetic and evangelical in his warnings of the al Qaeda threat, first describing to me what he sensed that threat to be.

Even just two years before 9/11 we went on high alert on the eve of the millennium, stopping a well-formed, multi-pronged terror threat aimed at our West Coast.

The 9/11 attacks were not even the first attack on the World Trade Center, that having taken place in 1993, also having involved Yousef, Mohammed and a half dozen or so others. In fact, several years before 9/11, I participated in a conference co-sponsored by the Naval War College that was entirely focused on terrorist threats on Wall Street. It took place on the top floor of the World Trade Center. Among those helping to support the event was Howard Lutnick, the chief executive of Cantor Fitzgerald. Many of his team from the company attended the event which considered a variety of potential ways terrorists might target the U.S. financial community including bombings using trucks or aircraft. And a few years later, some of those from Cantor Fitzgerald who attended the event would die when their offices in the World Trade Center were consumed in the attacks we have spent much of the past few weeks commemorating.

The morning of Sept. 11, I was to have met with an admiral whose office was adjacent to the wing of the building that was destroyed. But at six o'clock the night before my office received a call saying that he would have to reschedule the meeting. I was pretty put-off. For almost 15 hours.

As a consequence of the postponement of that meeting, I was in my office on the morning of Sept. 11. I was on the phone with a friend who lived in Lower Manhattan a little before 9 a.m. Suddenly, he became agitated and said, "Oh my God, oh my God." I asked what was wrong and he described for me what he had just seen, a plane flying into the north face of the North Tower of the World Trade Center. He suggested that I turn on the television in my office, which I did.

Soon after, I walked into the office next door which was occupied by my business partner at the time, former U.S. National Security Advisor Tony Lake. We were joined by another colleague, former Deputy CIA Director John Gannon. It was there that we saw the second plane hit the tower. At that moment, Tony said, "Al Qaeda" softly to himself. John nodded. It was, at that point, only a well-informed guess. But again, both men had been involved for most of the past decade in a growing effort to understand and contain the threat posed by al Qaeda and other similar groups.

Al Qaeda had officially "declared war" on the United States in 1996 and that the Clinton Administration, that had been tracking Bin Laden and his associates since almost its very first days had made him a principle target of its intelligence and counter-terror efforts years before 9/11. In 1998, for example, the Central Intelligence Agency had reported that al Qaeda was planning attacks on the United States and that personnel were being trained to hijack aircraft. In August of that year, our embassies in East Africa were attacked.

We went to lunch that day at an outdoor café near our offices, joined by another colleague, Susan Rice, today the U.S. Ambassador to the United Nations. I remember a meandering, vaguely surreal conversation touching upon what that day's events might mean and semi-deserted streets over which periodically could be heard jet fighters rushing overhead through the bright blue skies. There was a sense that threats which had been underestimated by many in Washington might now be taken more seriously, but even then there was also a sense that we would need to be careful to succumb to the temptation to over-reaction. As John Gannon would later often say, "the terrorists are not twelve feet tall," meaning that we should not succumb to the temptation to overstate the threat from them. And yet, of course, he was at the vanguard of those who also worked tirelessly to identify and contain the very real threats that existed.

As profound and horrifying a tragedy as it was therefore, 9/11 was not new but part of a pattern, not the beginning of a threat but in fact, one of the few instances in which the threat was realized by a small hate group with limited, sporadic capability to successfully follow-through on its grandiose, malevolent plans.

Nonetheless, due to the gravity of what happened a decade ago, we have had a tendency to set aside the historical context. It helped with the healing and indeed, it seemed respectful to those who were lost to frame the attacks as though they were something new, the act of a great enemy, a piece of a much grander struggle akin to past conflicts that took a high toll. I know when I think of those that were lost, personalizing it as we all do to the stories closest to us -- the kid who grew up across the street from me who was killed in Tower Two or my tennis partner whose sister in law was a flight attendant on the plane that crashed into the Pentagon -- there is some comfort from such an approach.

But comfort aside -- and it's no small thing, comfort, in the face of such grief -- the view is wrong. 9/11 was one of the few realized plots of a small band of outcast criminals. Such plots and such groups will always exist and we are within our rights and indeed, it is our responsibility to civilization, to eradicate such groups and take all reasonable steps to minimize such threats. But it does no one any good to overstate the risks and indeed, as we have seen, it has done us great damage to do so ... even as it has done service to the goals of al Qaeda and other radical extremists.

A decade later the attack has changed us because it touched us and altered irrevocably millions of lives here and across the Middle East. But if you look at the great issues before the United States in 2011, terror is no greater a threat nor any greater an issue today than it was throughout the 1990s. It is important, but our great challenges are the reinvention of our economy, the education of our children, the protection of our environment, the rise of new great powers and a rapidly changing global order, and the implications of participating in an interconnected, risk-filled, under-regulated, untransparent global economy.

9/11 was a heartbreaking event, an important chapter, but it was neither a beginning nor an end, not redefining nor an appropriate lodestar for future policies. As a consequence, tributes having been appropriately paid, memories having been rekindled, it is time to realize that the biggest threat posed that day comes from misunderstanding it and that the best way to contain the risks posed by the men who orchestrated it is to put them and their actions in the right historical context.

Where is Rick Perry when you need him? Just when I thought it was safe to embrace science, comes a news story in The Guardian entitled "Aliens may destroy humanity to protect other civilizations, say scientists." The subhead adds, "Rising greenhouse emissions could tip off aliens that we are a rapidly expanding threat."

Holy shit. I thought it was bad enough that the ice was melting off Antarctica so fast that golf resort developers are already drawing up blueprints and plans for holding the McMurdo Sound Open in 2020 or so.

Now, we now only have to fear rising sea-levels that will displace millions, submerge Wall Street (yet again), and wipe out most of Florida (ever cloud has its silver lining ... even if it is a cloud of ozone), but if the flood waters don't get us, E.T. will!

That's really too much.

Given the news, I hardly blame the president for spending a little time with his family on Martha's Vineyard. We need to be with our loved ones. And besides, Martha's Vineyard will be gone soon one way or another.

If only I had the absolutely disregard for science of a man like Rick Perry. After all, this is a presidential candidate who not only rejects the proven science that demonstrates the human contribution to global warming, he boasts that in Texas they teach both evolution and creationism. He is practically running on the same anti-science platform that was embraced by the Papacy around the time of Galileo. And if only I could bring myself to buy into his nonsense, then perhaps I wouldn't have to worry about both global warming and being obliterated by a little green man with a ray-gun.

According to the Guardian:

The authors warn that extraterrestrials may be wary of civilisations that expand very rapidly, as these may be prone to destroy other life as they grow, just as humans have pushed species to extinction on Earth. In the most extreme scenario, aliens might choose to destroy humanity to protect other civilisations.

"A preemptive strike would be particularly likely in the early phases of our expansion because a civilisation may become increasingly difficult to destroy as it continues to expand. Humanity may just now be entering the period in which its rapid civilisational expansion could be detected by an ETI because our expansion is changing the composition of the Earth's atmosphere, via greenhouse gas emissions," the report states.

A pre-emptive strike? Gak! But wait! There is a bit of good news in this. While the Rick Perrys of this world don't believe in actual science based on millennia of data and sophisticated analysis in hundreds of laboratories worldwide, they do have a proven track record of accepting as gospel, so to speak, impossible to prove stories about invisible creatures in outer space. So while the data about climate change may not persuade them to work to change our destructive behavior, perhaps speculative scenarios about how greenhouse gases may trigger an alien Armageddon might just get them to take the problem seriously. Even if those scenarios were actually dreamed up by scientists...

With new reports of flood-related calamity in Pakistan today, it is time to launch a different sort of international response to the problem in the Indus River Valley. Because as tragic as this disaster that has shattered the lives of perhaps as many as three New York Cities full of people has been, it is really only a prelude to even greater problems.

On one level, those problems are associated with the ever-present possibility of future floods, a threat that exists because of inadequate flood control infrastructure, flood warning mechanisms, and flood response resources within the country. On another level, as highlighted in Steve Solomon's insightful August 15 op-ed in the New York Times, perhaps an even greater problem in the years ahead -- due to both population growth and melting Himalayan glaciers that might even be a culprit in the current disaster -- will be linked to potential water scarcity, droughts, and resulting food shortages in the same region.

But there is a third looming problem, also addressed but not fully explored in Solomon's piece. That is the problem associated with the fact that the waters of the Indus are shared -- which is to say competed for -- by Pakistan and India. The less water for irrigation, drinking and energy production in the region, the more likely it is that there is conflict between these two nuclear states. Indeed, despite the ethnic and political tensions that have existed between these countries since Pakistan's founding, it could well be that water rather than religion or border disputes is the most likely trigger of future fighting, a prospect made deeply unsettling given the arsenal these two massive nations possess.

Read on

Everybody is concerned that Barack Obama is not emotional enough. MSNBC has seemingly devoted weeks of programming to try to get the president to be outraged about the oil spill in the Gulf. Liberal commentators are suggesting that the key for managing the crisis is that the president should show his feelings -- weep like Representative Melancon, rail like James Carville, mist up like a CNN reporter covering virtually any natural disaster.

But that's not what worries me. First of all, I don't think it will help a blessed thing to have Obama chew the scenery like Al Pacino in Scent of a Woman (or frankly, like Al Pacino in any movie -- personally, I think he thinks scenery chewing is a great way to add fiber to his diet). It's not who he is and American voters are smart enough to know that. What they want is not histrionics. They want action.

That said, I do have a worry. I think Obama is not unemotional. I think he is catatonic. I think he may be shell shocked. Let's look at the past week or two. Of course, we start with the Gulf. We have the Israeli flotilla fiasco. We have the thousandth U.S. soldier killed in Afghanistan. We have the Sestak mess and the Romanoff sequel. We have a Blagoevich trial starting in Illinois that is sure to feature several of the president's closest advisors prominently. We have essentially no job growth other than a bunch of folks the government has hired temporarily to work on the census. We have the stock market teetering. We have Europe wracked by new worries about bank derivative exposure and countries like Hungary. We have Iran's nuclear program buying week after week and little in the way of a global response. Now we have reports that Jim Webb's favorite country, Myanmar, is working on going nuclear. Who's helping them? The North Koreans who are on the verge of a shooting war with the South Koreans. The Japanese Prime Minister tries to do a solid for the U.S. and what happens to him? Booted out of office. Mexican political bigshots are disappearing off the streets. America is on the opposite side of the immigration issue from the President. It's hot out. The worst hurricane season in years is being predicted. Umpires can't even call baseball plays correctly. Larry King was flirting with Lady Gaga.

Emotional? We should be thankful the President of the United States is not curled up in a ball on the floor of the Oval Office weeping. That he can still get dressed in the morning, that he is still willing to show up for work, is a sign of great fortitude.

It's easy to carp. It's easy to give advice. It's not easy to sit where the buck stops. It's not an easy time to live at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue. And perhaps the hysteria engines in the U.S. media ought to think about that when they are barking nonsensical emotional advice at the White House in a set up that is very reminiscent of the tactics the U.S. used to get Manuel Noriega out of his hideaway in Panama. (For those of you who don't remember, that involved large, loud speakers...)

Frankly, what the president is doing, staying cool and trying to handle items one at a time is precisely what we need right now. My sense is that as bad as things are in the world, they are only going to get worse this summer. Markets will teeter. Wars will spark. The weather will not cooperate. It's going to be a long hot one... and that is precisely why we ought to be delighted we have a cool customer in the White House.

Although it's hard to believe, there have actually been developments this week that were more difficult to understand than the finale of Lost -- which is saying something since the show was roughly as incomprehensible as a boozy 3 a.m. chat with Lindsay Lohan.

We've had:

• People actually listening to the rantings of James Carville, a man who has turned Tourette's Syndrome into a form of political analysis. This week it was about how the government should take over shutting down the Gulf oil spill despite the fact that literally no one in the government has the expertise to do so.
• The U.S. still trying to undercut the benighted, ill-conceived and virtually certain not to work Brazilian-Turkish initiative with Iran in order to advance our own benighted, ill-conceived and virtually certain not to work sanctions program there.
• The release of a national security strategy that could have easily saved much paper by simply using a photo of George W. Bush with a big red circle around it and a line through his face. What made the strategy -- which was an almost perfect snapshot of mainstream foreign policy conventional wisdom -- incomprehensible was not its content so much as it was the clear disconnect between that content and what the administration was actually going to be capable of or inclined to do.
• The presentation of Exhibit A with respect to the aforementioned disconnect -- which was when Loveable Old Uncle Joe Biden then said we were on schedule to leave Iraq despite the fact that as the Post subhead put it: "U.S. expects to leave despite violence and political disarray." We seemed to have gone from the absurdity of "Mission Accomplished" to the pathos of "Mission Abandoned."
• Bland Lee Dewyze beating gifted Crystal Bowersox on American Idol. Even more baffling: that the show will still be the most viewed television program in America this week despite the fact that it contains less healthy nutritional content than one of KFC's Double Down sandwiches. (That's the one that uses two pieces of fried chicken instead of bread ... and come to think of it, the fact that America eats crap like that sandwich and watches crap like "American Idol" actually not only makes perfect sense...it explains why we ended up with Bush as president and why, maybe, Obama's national security strategy was even necessary. Not much there but at least it is a kind of policy detox. Better for our blood pressure, fewer toxic additives, and a recognition that for a while we're going to have to be on a fat free diet if we want to regain our strength.)

If all that's confusing to you, brace yourself -- the summer ahead may prove to be a real head spinner. And more on that note in tomorrow's offering. Stay tuned... 

My mother would not approve. The bane of my childhood...which was essentially the story of Alexander Portnoy playing softball with Beaver Cleaver and Richie Cunningham in the land of "The Ice Storm"...was her insistence on a thank you note for every occasion. Get an embarrassing set of pajamas from Grandma? Immediately drop everything and send a thank you note. Get $10 from Uncle Max that could have been used to purchase a perfectly wonderful Revell model P-51 Mustang but which your parents hijack and use to buy a new pair of shoes from Tom McCann? Too bad, there will be no staying up late to watch "My Mother the Car" if you don't write a thank you note. Orthodontist slit your gums while installing a torture contraption in your mouth? Probably ought to send a thank you note, just in case.

There was a valuable lesson in this (for which, ironically, I have yet to send my mother a thank you note.) Gratitude makes a difference. Without it, the beneficence dries up and the giver no longer feels so good about giving and your brother and sister end up getting the better presents. (Or the orthodontist develops a grudge against you which is a very bad thing.)

I think it's time to send my mother to Pakistan. And then to Afghanistan. And then to Baghdad. And then perhaps on to a few other choice spots from Honduras to North Korea. This hardly seems like a reward for an exemplary life, but she could teach these folks a lesson or two about gratitude. And then, when she is done with the tour ... and she develops her own perspectives on just how little our efforts at generating gratitude in these places are actually benefitting the United States ... perhaps she ought to come back here and provide a lesson or two for the administration and for some folks on the Hill, perhaps starting with Senator Kerry. Because not only is the United States suffering from something that appears to be much like a global gratitude deficit...it may well be that the problem is with our expectations and our mechanisms for manifesting our (not so selfless) generosity to the less fortunate (or strategically significant) worldwide.

A prime illustration of the problems we face comes in the form of today's New York Times story "In Refugee Aid, Pakistan's War Has a New Front" by Jane Perlex and Pir Zubair Shah. The article describes how the United States is losing the bidding war for the hearts and minds of Pakistanis and how Islamists are edging us out. The authors observe: 

Although the United States is the largest contributor to a United Nations relief effort, Pakistani authorities have refused to allow American officials or planes to deliver the aid in camps for displaced people. The Pakistanis do not want to be associated with their unpopular ally.

At the same time, the article goes on to describe how hard-line givers from the Muslim world are using their donations to effectively promote anti-U.S. and anti-Western views. Meanwhile it notes, even American NGOs are saying we shouldn't advertise the U.S. origins of aid shipments because it is likely to inflame hostility. Seems to me like a lose-lose proposition for us there. I mean, I understand the humanitarian rationale behind giving for the sake of giving but really, isn't the purpose of government aid to advance a government objective? Isn't it clear that's precisely what we are not successfully doing in Pakistan?

But the Pakistani government and the Pakistani people are not the only ones who don't seem to appreciate our aid (or who are happy to take it but would like to continue hating us just the same). In Afghanistan, the Karzai administration would not exist without the United States. Is it showing its gratitude by combating the corruption via which our aid is wasted? Is it showing it by making even the slightest effort to embrace the most fundamental universal values of respect for groups like women or journalists? Read the reports out of Kabul. They just don't seem to appreciate all we have done for them.

Neither, it seems does the al-Maliki government in Baghdad. Now, I can see plenty of reasons why the Iraqi people would be pissed off at America. The illegal invasion of their country, the deaths of hundreds of thousands of their people and the devastation of their economy come to mind. But I'm not talking about the Iraqi people here. I'm talking about a government that knows full well that even after the pullback of U.S. troops from the cities, it depends on the continuing presence of U.S. forces in the country to ensure national stability and its grip on power. Couldn't they have toned down the celebrations of "liberation" from the Americans just a trifle to reflect the fact that the United States is continuing to invest so much in their ability to hold on to power?

We spent much training the Honduran military that conducted that country's coup earlier this week. We have pumped serious aid money into North Korea to combat famine. We give the Egyptians, the Palestinians, and the Israelis plenty of cash and there seems to be a competition among them to see who can stall our objectives in the region most effectively or creatively.

Now, I realize we don't need to give aid money to people whose situations are stable. Aid tends to go to places where there are myriad challenges. But something is clearly not working here. The reflexive notion that we should write checks because it will generate goodwill seems not to be working. Clearly part of the problem here is with our expectations. And part of the problem here is with our history and perhaps we need to reconcile ourselves to unappreciated generosity for a while as a way of offsetting years of alienating people worldwide. But clearly another part of it is that we are a little ginger in our communications with our allies on these points...at the very least the governments who depend on us for survival ought to be nudged into a more constructive message with all due care to nuance the message to take into account local political realities.

Finally, the U.S. government aid apparatus remains one of its most dysfunctional. Early in the Obama transition there was talk of spinning out U.S. AID and related agencies into a Department of Development and Aid. I am generally anti-adding new departments to the government. But this was a pretty good idea. Economic peace-keeping and nation-building have been among our prime missions internationally over the past several decades whether we like it or not. But because we don't like it we have resisted building the kind of inter-disciplinary capacity to do it right...to recognize that provision of aid in post-conflict or conflict situations has completely different requirements (mostly political) than it does in development situations and that we need to more effectively blend pacification and economic missions. We need a civilian side Goldwater-Nichols to promote better collaboration and coordination among economic and political agencies in the fulfillment of this mission and better coordination with the military which still reluctantly does much of the heavy lifting in this area.

And beyond what we need, the world needs my mother. This is true on many levels. But in this instance it is because those who depend on our aid need to realize that regardless of who is president in Washington, all politics and history aside, the financial reality is that it is going to become harder and harder for the United States to continue providing aid as we have in the past and that average Americans (and even above-average Americans) are going to be soon looking even more energetically than in the past for excuses to shut the spigots. And that's saying something because aid has always been really unpopular in the United States, it's one of the reasons we give less as a percentage of GDP than most developed countries. Absent the thank you notes (which could be a nice card or possibly just making an effort to help the United States achieve our goals) the gratitude deficit could quickly translate into an aid deficit for those who are accustomed to receiving.

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Swine flu! World Health Organization at alert level 4! Markets rocked by sell-offs! Howie Mandel was right! Never shake hands! Bathe in Purell! See if you can borrow a face mask from Michael Jackson! Or hold your breath whenever you are near a ham sandwich! Armies of pigs in uniform marching on Washington! Orwell was right: the animals have turned on us, become more dangerous than us! Four legs bad, two legs good! Head for the hills!

Once again, the media is reacting to a potential threat with its usual calm, responsibly recognizing that sensational coverage of diseases can have far worse consequences than the diseases themselves. Or not.

Remember SARS? Fewer people died of SARS than choked to death in the United States on small objects that year. But estimates of global economic losses exceeded $40 billion. Back then, I wrote an article called "The Buzz Bites Back" for the Washington Post about this phenomenon dubbing it an "infodemic." And it was clear at the time that the progress of the information revolution was amplifying the impact of these information epidemics and accelerating their spread. Yet, still hysteria reigns again.

This is not to say that the WHO response has not been appropriate. It has. It is not to say that there isn't a vital public health role to be played by the media. It is critical that the media offer information about symptoms, precautions, and the spread of potential epidemics. But whereas health officials practice how to manage these crises, not only do the vast majority of media never think such matters through, newer "viral" media are all emotion all the time. 

One particularly fascinating element of the infodemic phenomenon is that the spread of rumors or news throughout society looks exactly like the spread of diseases; they are communicated in the same ways and patterns. (You'll note that in both the SARS case and the current instance, it was the infection of Americans that kicked mainstream media into gear and elevated the story into a code-one frenzy.)

The nature of the spread of such infodemics also, by the way, offers useful tools to epidemiologists trying to use modern media to identify potential medical risks and contain them. I know this was discussed in the Net Effects blog here at FP the other day and I would just like to offer one anecdotal insight that suggests to me that perhaps the skepticism about the value of using such tools expressed in the post has been overtaken by events. Back in the months before the SARS outbreak became public, I ran a company called Intellibridge which tracked "open source" intelligence for a variety of clients. In other words, we looked at what was available on the Net in many languages to see what it might offer government or business clients in the way of insights. 

One of our analysts spotted a small item in a newspaper in Guangdong province stating roughly that people should not panic due to rumors of an outbreak of a disease. When the Chinese government says do not panic, our analysts were trained to be skeptical and indeed, when we dug into the issue we found that word was spreading throughout southern China, largely by means of cell phone messaging, concerning this new outbreak of disease. In fact, we became so concerned that we called the Center for Disease Control...who proceeded to brush us off saying that they did not accept information of this source from the public. Ten weeks or so later the World Health Organization acknowledged the outbreak of the disease. 

The punch line: modern information technologies offer important tools for both containing and amplifying threats such as those posed by the global spread of epidemics. Considerable work remains to be done however, in understanding how to use these tools and to limit their abuse...and new media like Twitter and social networking sites do not make this task any easier. (Although figuring out how to manage this in the context of a free society is an especially important challenge for governments worldwide, arguably much more important than popular media-policy intersections like "public diplomacy.")      

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