Al-Jazz and Julian Assange

Interesting interview with Julian Assange on al-Jazeera. It provides some answers, and of course raises more questions, regarding things I myself was asking here about Wikileaks in the previous weeks, in posts here and here. For example, here is Assange's position on why the United States is among those most targeted by Wikileaks, and not, say, North Korea.

Omissions! Cover-up! Things we don't know!

I am tired of all the talk about how the Wikileaks dump is a global public good. It is good for my research as a foreign policy analyst, it is good for some people to vent their anger at governments they didn't like in the first place, and it is also good for the Guardian's, the NYT's, and others' sites which are getting significantly more hits these days. But this is not a global public good, it just does not fit the definition. So I decided to reveal here something that... ought to be considered.

This shall also be the question of the day today. So... if tomorrow Wikileaks would suddenly decide to dump at us 250,000 diplomatic cables in Chinese, Japanese, Hindi, Urdu, Persian, Arabic or Russian... who would translate all that stuff to English? Any smart plans for that contingency, friends? Suggestions beyond "Google translate" are welcome.

In any case, it is interesting to note that for once, English language being the lingua franca may be a disadvantage to those concerned.

Breaking news... no, shattering is the right word... Shattering news: the Pakistani media teaches a lesson that should have been known before. No matter how enthusiastically it is reported on, similar stuff can even be faked. Omigod, the emperor may be faked.

The age of sustainable defeat

The title may seem confusing, and the reason is that it is actually confusing. What it would entail is not really clear. But we do live in an age like that, where many sense something like this.

Not so long ago there used to be talk of humanitarian intervention that ambitious people wanted to turn into talk of the responsibility to protect: turning the right to intervene straight into a duty to intervene, possibly. Already prior to 9-11, but especially in its wake, a postmodern imperialist discourse developed that suggested the duty to intervene would go beyond altruism as it could also stem from national security imperatives. The West had its mission, for example to transform Russia and China into responsible stakeholders of globalisation, and to bring about good global governance, universally. The point was made that if such good global governance does not result from the use (or also the supposedly spontaneous, free-market-based availability) of carrots, and especially if there is active and subversive resistance against it, or collapse that puts areas beyond any decent degree of governance at all, the West would need to go in, and (Paul Collier and others proposed) use modern armies for the global public good. In line with this, the idea of "development in a box" emerged. If only the West, an incorruptible force for good, controlled the key independent variables in the area in the box, the dependent variable of good governance could eventually be guaranteed.

This ideologically motivated expectation did not really prove correct. Resources were missing for the grand strategic project. Cooperation and coordination within the West was insufficient. The ideology underlying the whole venture was also wrong in many of its most basic assumptions. And, from case to case, motives were not necessarily in line with the ideology.

The Iraqi undertaking turned into counterinsurgency, and while the end results may seem clearly better than what may have been expected in, say, 2006, this counterinsurgency was rearguard action to snatch the semblance of victory from the jaws of defeat. In Afghanistan, with Western leaders taking turns saying it is less than a perfect government one is looking for there, while looking at the possibilities of "reconciliation" and "negotiations" (and most importantly the responsible exit), the rearguard action nature of the ongoing efforts is even more visible. Lack of resources obviously plays a role in this. Iraq exhausted some, whereas others did not have much to spend on operations in Afghanistan to start with. And then came the economic crisis. Too bad.

Meanwhile, the significance of the lack of realistically needed resources does not stop people from claiming that cultural differences are what in the end prevent success in Afghanistan. Cultural relativism is very much a la mode when it comes to Afghanistan, as it has always been in fact. People subscribing to these views see it as natural that you won't get too good a solution there.

Parallel to this, others are looking to transform the agenda and present other issues such as climate change as the key challenge: the precarious future of humanity's current, resource-intensive way of existence (or, slightly rewording this, the uncertain future of the humanity-intensive phase of the history of planet Earth). So, once again, the point is hammered home that you just cannot continue to pay so much attention to Afghanistan, faced with bigger problems. Throughout, you may sense the underlying declinism and fears of the end of Western hegemony (and last-minute efforts to sustainably salvage some of it) informing much of this thought.

With this, the spirit of the age, in mind, it was really interesting to read this article in Newsweek about how we might be running out of antibiotics. And how we may need to get used to a world where we can take their availability a lot less for granted. You get the point. The bacteria are takin' over -- taking back lost terrain. Of course this process is actually playing out in physical reality, whereas the security agenda, underlying perceptions and stereotypes, and the related dilemmas of resource-allocation in determining what is feasible are more a function of social reality as such: of processes playing out in the hearts and minds.

Wikileaks and freedom of information, wiki-wiki

I am watching the latest wikifreaks saga unfold from the sidelines. I don't really have the time these days to delve into all that's come out myself. I need the information wiki-wiki (which is apparently a Hawaiian term for quick). I only care to read what journalists selectively mention in their reports on what were revelations to them. But I do have some fundamental observations that can perhaps inform the debate over Wikileaks.

1. I am a member of the attentive public, but my behaviour disproves the theory (in as much as there is anything like that) behind Wikileaks. I am consuming filtered reports about what fell in Julian Assange's lap. I am fed a censored version of everything. Intentionally or unintentionally, the people doing the filtering keep things secret from me.

2. Wikileaks seems to have the idea that a government, when it keeps secrets, is merely this ugly, intrusive presence in our lives: an unwanted stranger in our midst that uses asymmetrical information as a resource for its autonomous operations, to its own good. This is wrong. There are other reasons to keep secrets, too. Julian Assange just can't add up one and one to arrive at two. States keep secrets because others keep secrets, too. Social actors of all kinds. Individuals, legal persons, loose networks and hierarchichal organisations, and... and other states. And yes, you, reading this, you also keep secrets. Your friends do as well.

3. States providing security through keeping secrets against other states keeping secrets is a deeply troubling tautology if you are a well-to-do intellectual with no concern for others' safety and security. Willing to get lost in sophisticated arguments in obscure locations purely for the spiritual inspiration this causes. I am not saying the above tautology should not be concerning at all. That would be ridiculously naive. State actors (individuals, organisations, networks on behalf of states) sometimes do really nasty things really only serving their own good, and that is bad. That Julian Assange believes it is the United States' federal government that is most a source of worry when it comes to that, seems to be clear from his behaviour. Whether he is right in thinking this (if he is really thinking this), is up to you to judge. But in making the decision to see the world through Assange's eyes, you cannot in a moral sense continue to cooperate with a government that is supposedly the source of your moral worries. (In practice, of course I am aware that individuals usually tolerate a lot of cognitive dissonance, especially when they are not really sure about what they think, feel, and say. That is, most of the time.)

4. If, on the other hand, you do not want to work against state(s) Julian Assange does not happen to like, the smallest contribution you can make to these apparently, then, benign powers' smooth operation is accepting the idea that some things are going to be kept secret. Far less than what would be the norm in non-democratic countries for example. But still there are going to be secrets. You don't have to join the army and take on hostile strangers in distant lands, and you don't need to personally help capture criminals. You don't need to go on diplomatic assignment for years to a country you would have never visited otherwise, either. You just have to accept that the government keeps some secrets since you don't think (as we have agreed) that the government keeps secrets only against you and against all that you hold dear.

5. The revelation that someone thinks that Medvedev, to Vladimir Putin, is what Robin is to Batman is probably not kept secret, as long as it is a secret, against you. It is kept secret for the sake of decency.

6. When a government does not really operate autonomously but is aided by a willing informer, such as Afghan informers who give information about insurgents in Afghanistan, the identity of the informer is kept secret from you not really against you, right? It is a matter of honour as well as instrumental rationality.

7. If decency or practical rationality does not matter to you (forgive me for addressing an imaginary reader here), why don't you punch the person sitting next to you in the face right now? Alternatively, why don't you hug the person next to you, if that is what you would rather do? Let me suggest two options. Maybe because you are an anarchist, and you would hate it if I would be telling you what to do. Alternatively, maybe it is because you have just fooled yourself into thinking something about yourself that is not really true, and you are not really an anarchist. Perhaps you are just a mortal being trying to make sense of a world full of contradictions. Up to you to judge what is more probable.

8. If decency or practical rationality does matter to you but you think Wikileaks only harms people as collateral damage, what is the basis of your moral condemnation of air strikes killing civilians? What is Wikileaks' basis for morally condemning air strikes killing civilians? How do they want to help create a better world, the possibility of which they claim to believe in if they don't bother to take much precaution before off-loading on target?

9. In the end, the irony is that to the average man or woman on the street who is too busy dealing with everyday problems to go through the Wikileaks files, or even the newspaper and television reports for that matter, the presence of Wikileaks may be somewhat reassuring. We are safe from the government, they can no longer keep secrets, is what they might think. Thus Wikileaks may as well be a legitimising force in favour of governments, even with all the practical complications and problematic implications, from time to time, of the unwanted leaks.