reflectivepundit

Mumbai Killers Took Several Pages out of the Terrorist Playbook

By Brigitte L. Nacos
In spite of the large number of victims, the gunmen hijacking a fishing boat and their coming ashore aboard a dinghy, the singling out of American and British hostages, and the murdering of hostages in cold blood, nothing was terribly new about the Mumbai terrorism. While reporters and analysts were eager to find something “new” and “unique” about the horrific attacks, every single aspect of the latest terrorist nightmare in the midst of a huge metropolis was already part of the how-to-do textbook of modern terrorism. To be sure, terrorists prefer to surprise their targets with new modes of attack. But apart from 9/11, when terrorist hijackers flew airliners into the two World Trade Center towers and into the Pentagon, and the post-9/11 wave of hostage-holders' torturing and decapitating their western hostages in Pakistan, Iraq, and Saudi Arabia, terrorists have stuck to the pages in the playbook of this sort of political violence. If there was anything new about the Mumbai case, it was the utilization of so many proven tactics at the same time. In the following, I review some of the most obvious factors in the Mumbai attacks and compare them to past cases.

The Number of Victims: If reports are true that the terrorist team wanted to kill at least 5,000 persons, they aimed at a new record and would have trumped the number of victims of the 9/11 attacks by about 2,000. As it is, the number of dead and injured victims was not even a record for the Mumbai area because it was lower than the 209 killed and more than 700 injured in seven simultaneous bomb explosions on commuter trains in Mumbai on July 11, 2006. The point here is not to minimize what happened last week but rather to put it into historical perspective.

Maritime Terrorism: According to the Indian Navy, the terrorists hijacked a fishing boat, killed the captain (and perhaps his missing crew), and reached Mumbai aboard a rubber dinghy with knapsacks full of arms and ammunition. Although maritime terrorism comprises only a tiny fraction of all terrorist incidents, speedboats, dinghies, container ships, and cruise ships have been either utilized to launch attacks or as targets themselves in the past.

Negotiating with the Taliban? Forget It.

By Brigitte L. Nacos
Since Saudi Arabia brokered a meeting between Afghan officials and former Taliban leaders in Mecca several weeks ago, Afghan president Hamid Karzai has intensified his efforts to meet with Taliban leader Mullah Mohammad Omar for peace talks. Even though the U.S. government has placed a $25 million bounty on Omar’s head, Karzai guaranteed Omar’s safe passage to and from Kabul in case of actual negotiations. Never mind the position of the outgoing Bush administration on bi-lateral or multilateral talks with the Taliban. The incoming Obama administration should leave no doubt that the U.S. will not talk to Taliban representatives and is not in favor of Hamid Karzai doing so. Negotiations should be tried in almost all cases of international and domestic conflicts regardless whether nation states, non-state organizations, or both are involved. It would be a waste of time to negotiate with extremist Jihadi movements of the Taliban or Al Qaeda variety because they would not change their religopolitical agendas one iota but in the process win a degree of legitimacy.

The close ties between the Taliban and Al Qaeda and between Mullah Omar and Osama bin Laden are no coincidence. Both leaders and both movements are the most extreme manifestations of Salafism. Afghanistan under the oppressive rule of the Taliban movement reflected what the Salafi school of thought envisions as societal ideal. To be sure, most Salafis do not resort to or support violence. But jihadi movements and groups do.And their religopolitical fanatism does not leave room for negotiated compromise. That's precisely what Sayyid Qutb, the influential jihadi theorist, prescribed in his guidelines for a jihadi vanguard.

Paying More for Gasoline to Fuel Alternative Energy Exploration

By Brigitte L. Nacos
Today, for the first time in more than three years, the price for a barrel of crude oil fell below $50 on the New York Mercantile Exchange. In many regions of the country the gasoline price dropped below $2 a gallon in more than 20 states—about half of the cost some four months ago. With unemployment rising and no end of recessionary conditions in sight, many Americans breathe a bit easier when they fill up their cars. Yet, the news about falling oil and gasoline prices is more bitter than sweet because of the direct relationship between the cost of old energy sources and the development of new ones. When old energy is cheap—or let’s say relatively cheap--interest and investment in alternative sources tend to drop regardless of the long-term consequences for a nation mostly dependent on foreign oil.

President-elect Obama has promised to change America’s energy policy that up to now was most of all for the benefit of the oil industry and others in the old energy sector. Even if the future president can convince congressional majorities to sign on to his ideas and funding requests, he must also enlist the private sector and the public at large to support an all-out effort toward new energy sources and energy independence.

Government alone cannot do the job. The private sector is the engine for developing various kinds of alternative energy sources and, in the process, firms and jobs that cannot be outsourced to companies and workers abroad. Unless the price of oil and of all old energy remains at high enough levels to add profitability into the calculus of alternative energy, entrepreneurs will not get involved and car companies and other corporations will not change their ways drastically.

Hillary Clinton: Best Pick for Secretary of State

By Brigitte L. Nacos
I have no idea whether President-elect Barack Obama will offer Senator Hillary Clinton the important secretary of state position. But I am convinced that Hillary would be an excellent choice and indeed the best choice among those mentioned for the post. After Obama and Clinton met on Thursday in Chicago, Governor Bill Richardson of New Mexico, also in the run for the job, met with Obama on Friday. Perhaps John Kerry, another candidate, will be next to travel to Chicago. I agree with Gal Collins of the New York Times that Kerry’s personality is not well suited for the diplomat-in-chief position. Richardson would be a far better choice than Kerry because of his different persona and his diplomatic background (ambassador to the United Nations and negotiator who won the release of prisoners and hostage with North Korea, Iraq under Saddam Hussein, and Cuba).

However, there is no doubt in my mind that Senator Clinton is best qualified to be secretary of state from day one of the new administration in terms of the depth of her foreign policy knowledge, her extensive traveling abroad, and her positive image around the globe. President Obama’s victory on November 4th has been hailed in most parts of the world. With Hillary as secretary of state at his side, Mr. Obama’s campaign promise of CHANGE would gain more credibility abroad. Just imagine what a compelling message the image of an African-American U.S. president and a female U.S. secretary of state side by side at an international gathering would send to people here and abroad!

Moreover, by selecting Hillary, the incoming president would take an important step in the direction of those supporters of Senator Clinton who did not vote for him or did so reluctantly. This one important appointment would go a long way in reuniting Hillary’s most faithful fans with the Democratic Party under Obama’s leadership.

This Saturday morning, the Washington Post reports that Clinton, Richardson, and Kerry are top contenders for the attractive position. The fact that Senator Clinton has remained silent and not said that she is not interested seems to indicate that she wants the job. If the president-elect was not sure that she was his first choice before he invited her to Chicago, he should not have arranged a meeting that, as he must have known, would be reported. If he now decides in favor of Richardson or Kerry or someone else, it means snubbing Hillary in full public view. At this point, it would not be terribly credible, if Hillary were to declare that she is not and was not interested in becoming secretary of state.

New Medium and New Push to Narrow America's Ideal vs. Reality Gap?

By Brigitte L. Nacos
Throughout American history, when the inevitable gap between the declared ideals and the reality established by political institutions was deemed unacceptably wide, movements emerged that fueled creedal passions in favor of narrowing the disparity. In his book American Politics: The Promise of Disharmony, Samuel Huntington identified four what he called creedal passion periods that produced movements for change--the revolutionary era in the 18th century, the Jacksonian period in the early 19th century, the progressive period in the early 20th century, and the era of civil rights/anti-Vietnam protests in the1960s and 1970s. In all periods, one of the goals was, as Huntington put it, "the opening up of the processes of decision-making to public participation." 

It is particularly striking as Huntington recognized that each of the movements of those times was associated with the emergence of a new type of media. (1)The political pamphlet of the revolutionary period was central to the movement in favor of independence and a republican form of government; (2) the penny press—newspapers cheap enough for the masses—were instrumental in expanding democratic participation--albeit in the limits of the time; (3) the mass newspapers and news magazines with the advent of investigative reporting (muckraking according to Theodore Roosevelt) in the late 19th and early 20th period drove the progressive movement in its fight against corrupt political and business institutions and for participatory democracy; (4) the three national television networks shaped America's attitudes towards the struggle for African-Americans' civil rights and the Vietnam War and protests against.

I have wondered lately whether the new medium of our time, the Internet, would give birth to or facilitate a new popular quest for narrowing the once again widened gap between the promise of America and the performance of its institutions and the leading actors therein.

America Before And After Obama's Victory

Brigitte L. Nacos
Given the crises and problems troubling the nation and the world and, surely, awaiting the 44th president, one wonders why anyone in his or her right mind would have entered the race for the White House in the first place.

To be sure, Barack Obama’s victory marks a historic leap forward and moves the American dream from the realm of myth into that of reality. 45 years after Martin Luther King’s “I have a dream,” speech, the essence of his vision came true. While racism did not vanish over night, America has gone a long way to overcome racial and ethnic prejudices. For the majority of voters, Barack Obama was a candidate who also happened to be black—not a Black candidate.

The America of today is different from what it was yesterday. Today--and from now on-- every boy and every girl in this nation can believe in the American dream that requires adherence to fundamental values, most of all equality.   

Under the headline “Black Man Given Nation’s Worst Job” the satirical weekly newspaper The Onion published this morning the following job description of Barack Obama’s future position in the White House:

WASHINGTON—African-American man Barack Obama, 47, was given the least-desirable job in the entire country Tuesday when he was elected president of the United States of America. In his new high-stress, low-reward position, Obama will be charged with such tasks as completely overhauling the nation's broken-down economy, repairing the crumbling infrastructure, and generally having to please more than 300 million Americans and cater to their every whim on a daily basis. As part of his duties, the black man will have to spend four to eight years cleaning up the messes other people left behind. The job comes with such intense scrutiny and so certain a guarantee of failure that only one other person even bothered applying for it. Said scholar and activist Mark L. Denton, "It just goes to show you that, in this country, a black man still can't catch a break."

Satire aside, Obama may well have applied for and won the most difficult job in the nation and in the world. There is little time for victory laps. The president-elect must prepare for a running start to deal with the many problems and crises that the current administration will leave behind, among them the financial and economic crisis, a crumbling infrastructure, loss of jobs, energy dependency as well as the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, Iran’s nuclear program, the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, etc., etc.

Bradley Effect: R.I.P.

by David Epstein

OK, so I stayed up entering all the data by hand just to answer one question: what was the final word on the Bradley Effect I've had to discuss about a million times in the past few weeks.

The answer is: nada. I took the last polling projections from 538.com and compared them to the final results from the election, state by state. These numbers don't include Alaska or Hawaii, which aren't in yet, or DC, which is once again such an outlier that it throws everything off (95% of the vote??). Here's the graph, which pretty much tells the story:

The projections were more or less spot on. There's a slight upward tilt to the actual results, meaning that Obama did better than he polled in the states he won, and worse than he polled in the states he lost. On average, for all states, he underperfomed his polling by about 0.8%.

But we're not necessarily that interested in whether he won New York by 25 or 26 points, or whether he lost Wyoming by 33 or 34 points. In the states where the last polls had Obama within 10% of McCain, in either direction, Obama actually outperformed his polling by about 0.5%.

Of course, this doesn't mean that some people didn't lie to pollsters because of being embarrassed to admit they were voting against Obama. It means that, overall, the polls did a great job at estimating outcomes, and there's no evidence at all of a massive divergence between polled results and actual outcomes. Chalk one up for the guys in green eyeshades, and a bit strike against the theory of hidden racism in American elections.

A Normal Election

by David Epstein

A few thoughts on tonight's events.

In one sense, this was a completely normal election. If you take the 2004 election map and add 4% to the Kerry vote for each state (except for North Carolina, where you have to add 6%), then you get this year's map. So this was simply a good Democratic year, fueled by the economic meltdown, the war, and Bush's deep unpopularity.

But of course it is the fact that Obama, an African American, achieved this result that makes it so extraordinary. That he could win in every section of the country, including three states of the confederacy, is an achievement so stunning that we will not truly be able to comprehend it for some time to come. I never thought I would see this in my lifetime. Not only has the electoral map been redefined, but our psyches, our understanding of what our country is, and our sense of what we can be in the future will never be the same again.

Live Blogging on Election Day--Here

Election Day, 12 noon to 12 midnight, Columbia University's The Morning Side Post blog offers live blogging by professors and students in the United States and around the globe. You can follow the blogging on this site as well. David Epstein, Sharyn O'Halloran, and I are among the faculty bloggers.

McCain or Obama? Two New York Marathon Scenarios for Victory

By Brigitte L. Nacos
After watching the New York Marathon’s women’s and men’s races today, I couldn’t help but think of the presidential race. Paula Radcliffe of the United Kingdom was all the way in the lead and won decisively over Russia’s Ludmilla Pertrova. Compared to an election outcome, this would have been a landslide victory. It was a completely different story in the men’s race: Abderrahim Goumri of Morocco had a clear lead over the seemingly struggling Marilson Gomes dos Santos of Brazil in second place, but the Brazilian had a spectacular finish and passed the Moroccan with about a mile to go.
The news media’s overblown attention to opinion polls and the horse race aspect of election campaigns, especially when the presidency is at stake, has left the strong impression that Senator Obama’s quite comfortable lead in national polls during the last several weeks means victory on Election Day. This would be the equivalent of Radcliffe’s performance in today’s New York Marathon. But the Gomes de Santos versus Goumri scenario is equally as compelling and suggests that the trailing Senator McCain can still overtake the long-time leader and win. In other words, as Yogi Berra put it, “It ain’t over till it’s over.”   
Contrary to most pundits, both McCain and Obama are aware that it may be hazardous to predict the outcome of Tuesday’s elections on polls. To be sure, one would rather be in Obama’s positions since most nationwide voter surveys have him with a substantial lead and leads in major so-called battleground states. But since the electoral votes of states in the Electoral College determine who will be the next U.S. president—not the nationwide popular vote—the focus must be on key states in which polls have Obama in the leads but McCain—increasingly—in striking distance