Sources & Methods #41: Improving Counterterrorism with Stephen Tankel

 
Stephen-Tankel.jpg
 

Stephen Tankel 101:

stephentankel.com

Twitter: @StephenTankel

Reaching out: tankel@american.edu if people have questions.

Professor at American University -  https://www.american.edu/sis/faculty/tankel.cfm

Senior Editor at War On The Rocks - War on the Rocks

Adjunct Senior Fellow at the Center for New American Security

First book: Storming the World Stage: The Story of Lashkar-e-Taiba
New Book: With Us and Against Us: How America's Partners Help and Hinder the War on Terror

Show Notes:

4:51 - What I was trying to do (with this book) is ask the question: If most of these partners are both helpful and hurtful, what can the United States reasonably expect from them? And then to offer propositions about what it can expect in terms of cooperation, with the understanding that managing expectations here and what to expect from partners here in knowing what to expect from partners is a critical component.

5:50 - The inspiration for the book came from the year I spent working in government as a senior advisor at the Department of Defense, working primarily in south and central asia, and being forced to wrestle from a policy perspective with the tradeoffs involved in dealing with these countries.

10:21 - I think it’s fair to say that the Bush Administration had often prioritized counter terrorism interests above other interest, and the Obama Administration tried to treat them as a separate entity rather than what really needs to happen in either of those administrations - which is integrating counter-terrorism within the broader US foreign policy approach.

11:03 - There’s another threat between short term security interests and long term interests in promoting good governance, rule of law, human rights, stability overall. We see this with a new report from a US Institute of Peace report on Fragile States.

It’s really hard to do, when you’re focused on shorter term objectives like access for forces for security cooperation, training and equipping local CT forces, or for drone strikes.

These tradeoffs are not unique to the United States.

13:12 - This book is primarily for US policy makers and people in those circles, and also intended to get me tenure (laughs).

17:21 - What I really try to do is get at things from the perspective of the partner with whom the United States is partnering. So I spend as much if not more time about the threat perceptions, the politics, the security compulsions of the partner in question than I do the United States.

It’s strategic empathy - I’m trying to get into the shoes of a partner.

18:09 - One of the main recommendations I have at the end is that the United States needs to devote at least as much time to understanding the perspectives and perceptions of its partners as it does its own internal machinations. Within the confines of the book, I’m trying to get at this from other countries’ perspectives.

23:33 - Another point on regionalism (to Matt’s question) - I think you’re talking primarily about regionalism from the perspective of having people with expertise on this regions. I think that is important. But I think there’s another type of regionalism - to create instruments of statecraft, policies, what we would call Congressional Authorities in the US, that are regional rather than nation specific, that encourage being able to work across a region or across part of a region from a policy perspective rather than always working bilaterally.

Bilateral is going to remain the primary mechanism through which any two countries. But at least from a US perspective, I have encouraged the idea of regional authorities for security assistance, cooperation, development, and things like that because I do believe it is helpful to take a regional view to these issues rather than working bilaterally.

26:22 - Quite frankly - standard metrics for me, that’s the brass ring. I would settle for metrics. I would settle for State Department having metrics, DoD having metrics, and NCTC having metrics, I would settle, from a USG perspective, every agency having metrics.

[On why we don’t have standard metrics everyone can look at and figure out where things are] I think it’s human nature, I think it’s bureaucracy, I think it’s those different theories. I would add more. First - it is my sense that practitioners often don’t have an appreciation for spending time and money on measurement because they want to just get out there and do it. And they see spending time and money on measurement as taking away from everything they could be throwing at the problem. I’ve been an evangelist for the idea that metrics will help you get more bang for your buck. I don’t want to spend my time and money measuring, I want to spend it doing. So you need to change the way you think. You need to think about measurement as intrinsic to whatever you’re trying to accomplish.

Two, I don’t think any bureaucratic culture plays to the strengths of monitoring and evaluation. Because monitoring and evaluation is meant to be objective. And objectively speaking, not every program is going to succeed. Simply because your program fails doesn’t mean it’s your fault. But nobody wants to be the person who was running the program that failed. So I do think there is a human nature issue but especially a bureaucratic culture issue that pushes back against monitoring and evaluation because nobody wants to be on the one who runs the program that doesn’t go well.

One of my dream projects that I want to find funding for is to explore ways in which it might be possible to import into a government culture the culture that in some ways, if not favors, at least s applauds failing early in Silicon Valley or business or something.

This idea that effective monitoring and evaluation - it shouldn’t be that you don’t want to fail, it should be that you want to fail early and figure it out so that you can reform. But that requires a big cultural change within government, within UN, within anything about how we think about these issues.

Monitoring and evaluation is is hard. It’s hard to gather data. There are disagreements about how to analyze that data.

Article at War on the Rocks: Doing More With Less: How to Optimize US Counter-terrorism

37:32 - One of the areas where we just don’t have a good sense of how well or poorly we’re doing is the question of resiliency. I’f you’d asked me 5-7 years ago, I would’ve said we’re doing poorly on that. Now, I just don’t know because we haven’t had a major attack. We’ve had some smaller attacks  in the US but we’ve kind of gone about our business. At the end of the day, it may be policy makers who are in some cases - I don’t want to say more seriously than they should, but are inflating it more than it needs to be more than the general public.

39:30 - If one looks at where we ultimately want to go with this - it’s that this becomes for most of these countries a law enforcement problem and not a military problem, and that it is a problem that not just their police are strong enough to deal with, but their judiciaries are strong enough and they have prosecutorial capacity and they have capable judiciaries that are able to prosecute people that are involved in terrorism or terrorism-related offenses. And they have prisons that are capable of holding these people where they will not be radicalized. Those are really big asks.

42:06 - [On training police and justice systems actors vs training military soldiers in foreign countries] The United States, for legal reasons, has a lot of trouble training police. Because it used to be that the secret police were used to terrorize the population, so we have laws on the books going against training police. Those laws need to change.

45:40 - Individually, policy makers are all really smart. Collectively, policy-making does not look that smart.

Even though individuals may not be risk averse, institutions typically are risk averse.  
57:30 - [On Useful Tools for Your Career] Learning Languages - I lived in Egypt for awhile, I studied in Syria, I spent a lot of time for my PhD on the ground in Algeria and Lebanon, using other language. I think it’s not only obviously useful in being able to conduct an interview or read a newspaper, two things I would probably struggle to do nearly as well today because I haven’t used it as much as I should have, but the simple - and it’s hardly simple - the exercise of trying to learn a language in and of itself is helpful in understanding other people, other cultures, what have you. I think there’s a lot of value in having the exercise of trying to learn, even if you’re never going to be that great of a linguist. I often encourage my students who have an interest in another part of the world to go live there. I think living in other places - its a bit trite - but it’s an eye-opening experience. I think it’s very easy to say, much harder to do.

1:00:13 - To say to people coming up - ultimately at the end of the day, there’s no substitute for this other than doing it for awhile, which is something people told me 10 years ago when I was starting out and I found frustrating, but now a decade out, I find useful.

And that was useful for government - I understood it a lot better after being inside it.
1:01:40 - Advice from Vali Nasr - He said, Stephen, if you learn a single thing about South Asia during your year in government, you can no longer call yourself an expert on South Asia. Your job is to be a participant observer. It is to work on whatever your bosses want you to work on. It is to participate in the bureaucracy. Go think big strategic thoughts whenever they want you to, but really learn how everything works so that when you come out you have an understanding of the challenges the average bureaucrat faces. That’s an approach I’ve tried to take with me with everything.

Sources and Methods #34: Lynne Kelly

Lynne Kelly 101:

Lynne's website

Knowledge and Power in Prehistoric Societies

The Memory Code

Lynne on Twitter

33 Memory Experiments

Show notes:

2:20 - Knowledge and Power in Prehistoric Societies was published by Cambridge University Press so it is the academic version of The Memory Code.

3:10 - I was looking at the way indigenous cultures, in particular Australian Aboriginal cultures, record information about animal behavior and I started to realize that they were storing information about a huge number of animals in memory.

8:07 - I listed ten different aspects of these memory systems that indigenous cultures used which would show up in the archaeology and in order to claim that a site such as Stonehenge is in fact a memory palace, I want at least eight, if not the whole ten, of these different aspects as indicators. There has to be public and restricted places. There must be performance spaces because all knowledge is performed in oral cultures because dance, song, and mythology are far more memorable. There must be sequenced sets of locations because that's the way all oral cultures are explored around the world. There are also handheld devices that I found: The African Lukasa, or memory board of the Luba people, the Australian Aboriginal, Churinga, which is an inscribed object that has abstract signs. I found these sort of devices everywhere so I started wanting them in the archeology, as well, and that whole pattern is what is required, not just odd little bits and pieces that I can jump to the conclusion 'Oh that must be memory!'

10:08 - In literate societies, we separate things into separate domains and we like our knowledge to remain separate, but indigenous cultures don't do that, they integrate everything and that's why I had to learn from Aboriginal cultures, and then from Native American, in particular the Pueblo people, but also looking at African and Pacific cultures and how all of these things work in an integrative way. So if you look at Australian Aboriginal songlines, Australian Aboriginal people still move out north and still move around the landscape, moving from sacred location to sacred location and at each of those locations, they would perform a ritual. Now, a ritual is a repeated event and so they would repeat a song or a dance or a story at each location. Some of the research shows that seventy percent of those songs were about practical stuff.

All cultures had the same idea of broad landscape sets of shrines and sacred places where they performed the information.

19:16 - I have yet to have anyone fault the theory. It's been received very well. There are some that are quiet about it, but the book as you will see in the front of The Memory Code is endorsed by big name archaeologists; Rosamund Cleal in England, William Lipe who's endorsed it, he was also one of my examiners, is a big name in America.

23:12 - Oral cultures do not stay static, so they will add new information/adapt all the information, depending on what's happening.

If you look at the artwork of Australia, we've got some of the oldest continuous art tradition and they are constantly touching it up, but also adding things. So right up north which is where the longest art tradition is being mapped, you get the moccasin, the fishing boats from Indonesia, getting added on top of the rock art a couple hundred years ago because they were being added into the story, into the oral tradition, into the knowledge system. So things have changed and updated, but the basic structure isn't.

25:38 - My 33 memory experiments - What I have tried to do is take each of those sorts of those devices and those sorts of information and start trying it myself.

29:47 - Indigenous stories, if you read the originals, do not have a straight linear narrative unless they are translated for Western cultures in which that's added into them.

34:23 - Here we've gone to a lot of group work and projects without this grounded information stored in. Plus, we have little kids singing and dancing and making up stories and then as they get older, they behave insensibly. That's what we're going to be working on the funding for primary and secondary here and we're setting up what's called the Orality Centre in Castlemaine, where we're going to start embedding songlines.

Sources and Methods #22: Jonathan Brown

 
 

Jonathan Brown 101:

Jonathan Brown on Wikipedia

Jonathan Brown's website / blog

Jonathan Brown on Facebook

Jonathan Brown's books (via Goodreads)

Misquoting Muhammad (via Amazon.com)

 

Show Notes:

3:40 - What I was trying to do was to write a book that would introduce a reader with no background - or take a reader with a good amount of background into more depth - into of the world of dealing with scripture in the Muslim tradition. How Muslims have understood they’re scriptural tradition and built on it to understand their religion in the face of centuries and centuries of change and particularly, recently more intensive change…. to get readers to see it as one of the world’s intellectual traditions that participates in the same dialogues and questions that other religious and philosophical traditions have dealt with.

5:13 - As a historian, I don’t think humans have much role in shaping history, I’m more of a materialist.

8:00 - (One of the big questions is) How do human beings know what God wants, without falling victim to their own whims and inclinations? So you have revelation, which is supposed to come in and free human being from their own biases and their own weaknesses and the weakness of their reason. But at the same time, revelation isn’t accessible except through reason and through interpretation, which is inevitably compromised by biases. So in a lot of ways, the Islamic tradition is about a lot of people and a lot of schools of thought trying to say - here’s the best way to minimize that bias.  

16:25 -  Most of these problems (spiritual authority in the Muslim world) are problems of modernity. It’s the problem of, how do people deal with an interpretive tradition, a scriptural tradition in a world where a lot of the tools of interpretation have been democratized or popularized, both through printing, through mass education, and then through electronic media and the internet. So prior to 1850, the people who spoke for Islam and told people what it meant was a class of scholars… it was fairly unified in how it saw the world and the message it preached. That starts being challenged in the late 19th century by the creation of – in the Muslim world – of European-style universities by the rulers of those Muslim states to try and match European development. And eventually you get the rise of the intellectual, who will be a practicing Muslim but will chip in with his two cents about religion from a different perspective, and that creates a new pluralism of authority. That’s the same world we’re in now.

19:52 - A lot of what I do in teaching and in my work is getting (them) not to look and act on the face of scripture too much but to always at least start looking for ways to be instructed about what’s behind the face of scripture.

20:41 - So I think Muslims should look at their own tradition and look at how they have indulged their own whims and their own biases over the centuries - and I did that in the book on the issue of women-led prayer - but I also think the same questions need to be asked with / to our interlocutors where questions assume certain cultural preferences.

33:25 - If there’s one thing I could have people understand: It would be to see Muslims as normal people and Islam itself as a religious tradition.

35:20 - If there’s a misunderstanding of religion or a version of Islam people don’t like, it must be corrected by Muslims, because they’re the only ones who will listen to each other.

Workflow:

37:26 - One thing I do, is I take very good notes. I usually take paper notes. So if I read a book, I usually make notes in the margins. When I finish the book, I go back and copy down all the notes in the margins of things I want to quote. So whatever it is I read, if I find it interesting, I’ll take notes on it and put it in my notebook. First thing is to take very good notes of everything. In this book, there were things I wrote down in college 20 years ago.

The second thing is - when I realize there’s a project I’m working on, or an idea for an article or a book, I’ll come up with a symbol. This book was an M with a circle around it. And I’ll go back and look through my notes. And 1) This will refresh things in my mind for teaching or other things and 2) it might be for my project. So when it gets time to actually get on to a project, I’ll go back through my notes and copy down all that information into a Word file with footnotes. So I’ll basically have a gigantic list of data, and I’ll start to organize that into chapters and themes, and that I’ll write into the outline document. So the writing comes from the data up to the final product.

In terms of processing information - obviously I read a lot, but talking to people is very important, and I find my teaching a very important tool to understanding what I read.

42:00 - When one tries to write a book that tries to get a lot of information across to an audience that is not a specialist, than you have to chose material that you can relate easily, and if it’s foreign to them, there has to be a really good reason why you’re going to tell them about it, and you have to be ready to give it the time it needs to explain that material. So you have to chose things that are relatable, but at the same time you don’t want to have everything relatable because then they think there’s nothing different about what I’m reading from my own life.

 

Brown’s picks:

Movies:

Lawrence of Arabia

The 13th Warrior

Books:

On The Muslim Question by Anne Norton

Music:

Reggae or anything by Dire Straits