Yes it's true, yet strangely you don't see that headline splashed across CNN.  The reason is that this wasn't a conventional attack on Iran, it was a cyber attack.  As David Sanger reported in the New York Times,

The Iranian government agency that runs the country’s nuclear facilities, including those the West suspects are part of a weapons program, has reported that its engineers are trying to protect their facilities from a sophisticated computer worm that has infected industrial plants across Iran.

In short, a computer worm has infiltrated the systems that run Iran's nuclear facilities, causing an unspecified amount of damage.  As the story reports, experts (and I am certainly not one) believe the level of sophistication of the attack could only be achieved by a state.  Without further information about the extent of the damage or nature of the worm, which given the nature of attack is unlikely to be made public, it's impossible to say for sure who released the worm or why, but early speculation points at two prime suspects - Israel and the United States.

Attacking the technological base of the Iranian nuclear program is not a solution to the problem, but it will most likely slow the program.  While that may seem minor, if you believe Jeffrey Goldberg's recent article in The Atlantic then perhaps a bit of time may be tremendously important.

Even more important, however, will be the repercussions from this attack.  If Iran believes that the U.S. or Israel was behind the attack, it may seek to retaliate, in cyberspace or with a conventional attack.  Furthermore, if other nations, particularly China and Russia, come to believe that America was behind this attack, it could mark the start of a new era of cyberwar.  Until now countries have tested defenses and capabilities, much like boxers circling the ring and throwing exploratory jabs.  Launching a prominent attack on Iran's nuclear systems could come to be viewed as the first real punch thrown in this match, and could signal to other powers that the fight is on. 

Once that barrier is crossed, and cyberwar crosses from potential to actual, there is no going back.
       

By: Beka Feathers

Last Saturday, Afghans across the country went to the polls to choose the men and women who will represent them for the next five years in the Wolesi Jirga, the lower house of the Afghan National Assembly (unless they were in the 20 percent of the country where the security situation kept polling places from opening, and the further undisclosed portion where people were simply too frightened to show up). Preliminary results will be announced later today, and a few days from now, domestic and international election monitors will offer their opinions on whether the vote was "free and fair." Nobody seems to want to ask whether the election was a success.

What does success mean? As with nearly everything else in Afghanistan, it depends on where you stand. For the individual candidates, of course, it means a seat in the new parliament. For Hamid Karzai, it means a body of people without the will or organization to provide any serious opposition to his policies. For ISAF and the international community, it largely means the ability to claim that despite fraud and violence, the Afghan people are still committed to democracy. And for the Afghan people themselves?

Every post-election report suggests that success isn't even on the radar screens of most Afghans. Their confidence in the ability of any national institution to provide responsible governance or to sustain the rule of law has fallen so low that for many, it just wasn’t worth the risk of showing up. Even an optimistic estimate says that turnout was down 43 percent from the 2005 parliamentary elections. Polling places were sparsely attended even in relatively secure areas (unless you count the people who locked themselves inside the stations so that they could vote over and over again).

It isn't just the security situation behind this electoral malaise. It's true that over a thousand polling stations never opened, and that the Taliban made good on threats to attack voting centers and election monitors. It's also true that many warlord candidates were running their own intimidation campaigns to prevent their opponents' supporters from getting to the polls.[1] But the most serious enemy Afghan democracy faced last Saturday was doubt.

The Afghan people doubt that elections bring change. They doubt that those elected are interested in anything other than lining their own pockets. They doubt that any of their supposed allies in the international community still believe democracy can flourish in Afghanistan, no matter what their upbeat press conferences say. That's the real reason they aren't going to the polls.

On some of these points, there's not a lot that well-intentioned international observers can do from Washington, London, Kabul or anywhere else. The parliament might not improve conditions for the average Afghan, newly-elected members might do nothing but line their pockets, violence and instability will almost certainly continue to be a feature of daily life. The only aspect of this process over which internationals have complete control is whether or not we telegraph to the Afghan people and the world that we think the new parliament is a failure before it even gets off the ground. On this point, the most important lesson we can learn is to start talking out of only one side of our mouths.

It's hard to find a uniformly positive perspective anywhere these days about the central government in Kabul, and the Afghan people know that. They aren't looking for the international community to paint a false and rosy picture of a functioning democratic bureaucracy when they know that they've got a collection of corrupt and indifferent strongmen. They don't have time to waste on American domestic PR struggles. If they look to the outside at all, it's for solutions, and support for solutions, to these problems.

International advocates for Afghan democracy can do a lot to hold their own contractors and governments accountable for corruption. They can support the fledgling efforts of the parliament to assert itself against Karzai's increasingly broad claims of authority. They can treat individual members of parliament as men and women with a responsibility to uphold the will of their constituents, rather than as placeholders to be trotted out on official occasions. And most importantly, international actors can start matching words to actions - either the election was a success for big-picture democracy, or it means we should wash our hands of the whole project. ISAF forces, American taxpayers, and certainly the Afghan people can't afford to have it both ways for any longer.

The current political conversation in Afghanistan is about the ideals that underpin the system, not about the policies of individual factions. The value of democracy is itself an issue up for debate, and that campaign did not end on September 18. If reform-minded Afghans and their international partners want average Afghans to trade in their doubt, they need to do what losing parties do in a mature democracy. Instead of bemoaning the injustice of their loss, they need to start planning for the next one.

[1] For more information on pre-election tactics by candidates, see this excellent summary by the Afghan Research and Evaluation Unit “Afghan Election, 2010: Alternative Narratives.” http://www.areu.org.af/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=28&Itemid=33

Well summer has finally ended, and I have no choice but to accept the unfortunate reality that school is beginning yet again.  On the plus side, now that I've returned to academia and a somewhat-normal routine, I'm set to resume blogging regularly (or at least less-irregularly).  To kick things off, here is a response to Dan Drezner's post about how millennials understand foreign policy.  Jeremy wrote a terrific response last week, and so I'm going to expand upon some of his themes and explore a few new ones.

I see two major points in this discussion:

1) We are not isolationist, instead we are globalized to an unprecedented degree.
2) We are cynical of how the world works, but that is not always a bad thing.

The most important point, contra-Drezner, is that our generation is not going to be "anti-interventionist to the point of isolationism."  Instead, as Jeremy noted, this generation is truly the first "globalized generation."  In terms of foreign policy, this means that we understand the inherent interconnectedness of today's world.  Every individual across the globe could potentially impact our lives here, as the 9/11 hijackers proved, and as we increasingly rely on the internet for all aspects of our daily lives our vulnerability too grows.  This is the bitter fruit of economic globalization and the revolutions in communications, travel, and technology that have changed the fundamentals of our existence.

Furthermore, we millennials understand that there is no going back.  We cannot retreat to "Fortress America" and choose isolation; for seclusion is no longer an option.  There are two reasons for this - structural and personal.  Structurally, I find it hard to believe that the world will stop "shrinking" anytime soon.  Communications technologies are constantly growing more powerful, and as the global economy continues to integrate it pulls the world inextricably together.  We no longer manufacture everything in America that we need to survive, and the oceans of the world no longer serve as protective barriers against foreign intrusion.  America is part of this global system, and millennials understand that taking our ball and going home simply no longer applies.

On the personal level, globalization, however you choose to define it, has taken root amongst our peers.  Many millennials have traveled, studied, lived, and worked overseas, and not solely in Old Europe.  We are fortunate to have these opportunities, made possible by the decrease in time, barriers, and, most importantly, cost of international adventure.  The factors that enabled us to travel more than any previous generation are not going away, nor are the connections we made to people, places, and cultures.  In other words, we millennials have a greater understanding of the globe than our predecessors, and a vested interest in places that is impossible to otherwise replicate.

The second major point concerns our relationship with governments, our own and foreign, and the international system.  We are, to put it mildly, cynical.  The distortions and lies of the Bush Administration regarding Iraq headline the list of grievances, but struggling through the Great Recession while watching Congress dither is only slightly less influential.  Thanks to the miracle of the internet we have witnessed the prevarications of other governments and the ways in which they manipulate their own people.

This cynicism is not necessarily a bad thing.  Our eyes are open to the ways of the world, and we are prepared to analyze the events of the future, not simply accept what we are given.  And this doesn't mean that idealistic optimism is dead - we millennials have our fair share of dreamers, planners, and changers.  But we do recognize the difficulties of achieving real, substantive, enduring changes, and come prepared.

Drezner's post is laced with pessimism for the future, and Jeremy is fueled by anger and frustration from our experiences.  I don't share these views, but, like Jeremy, I am cautiously optimistic about the chances for our future.  The interconnected world presents evolving threats, and it will require intellectual rigor, pragmatic flexibility, and a clear vision to meet these new challenges.  I have faith that we millennials are prepared for what comes next.

A few days ago the U.S. and Saudi governments announced a record breaking $60 Billion dollars in future arms sales. This comes as a great relief to the Obama administration who was faced with the prospect of massive layoffs in the defense sector as the Defense Department begins to roll back its budget. While these cuts will come slowly over the next few years,the more important issue for the defense industry is the lack of big ticket defense procurements in the pipeline. Defense budgeting usually looks five to ten years into the future and from what I have seen of these budgets there is simply not enough money coming their way to maintain the American defense sector at its current size. This is however nothing new. The American defense industry has essentially existed as a welfare system since the end of the Cold War. If you were to ask Ash Carter, Under Secretary of Defense for Acquisition, Technology & Logistics, he would tell you (privately of course) that the DoD is personally paying the operating costs of several U.S. weapons factories that are not producing so much as a single bullet. In fact only one weapons plant has actually shuttered its doors since 1991.

So why is Saudi Arabia suddenly buying $60 Billion in weapons just when the U.S defense industry is showing signs of struggling? A sale perhaps? The answer is in fact two fold and has as much to do with the Kingdom's unique relationship with the United States as its does with its own internal politics.

Officially, Saudi Arabia spends around 13% of its annual GDP on defense, despite having not fought a real war since the 1930's. (Yes there was some bombing of rebels in Yemen last year but I would hardly call that a war.) Furthermore, as was demonstrated during the 1991 Gulf War, Saudi Arabia sits firmly under the protection of the U.S military's security bubble and has no real need for a high tech military and yet they are one of the top buyers of American made F-15's and Sidewinder missiles as well as the second largest purchaser of Bradley fighting vehicles in the world. While the relationship between the U.S. and Saudi Arabia is long and complicated it essentially goes like this. The U.S. built up Saudi Arabia's oil industry in the 1930's and remains its biggest customer. In exchange for Saudi Arabia keeping the supply of oil steady the U.S. government agrees to provide the Kingdom's rulers, the Al-Saud family, with complete protection from both internal and external threats. The one caveat on this relationship has always been that whenever the U.S. defense industry is suffering and a key election is approaching the Al-Saud's pitch in to buy just enough weapons to ensure that workers in key electoral areas like Washington and California are not laid off. The Clinton administration did the same thing in 1993 when Saudi Arabia agreed to buy 72 F-15's for $9 billion dollars just in time for the mid term elections.

The second reason for Saudi Arabia's willingness to buy $60 Billion in weapons it doesn't need has to do with corruption within the House of Saud. While it is certainly true that the Al-Saud family is by far the richest clan on the face of the earth, over the past decade money has gotten a little tight. Decades of largess has allowed the Al-Saud family to expand to over 20,000 members with the typical male having anywhere between 10 and 40 children each. This means that allowances have dropped down to the range of $10,000 to $15,000 a month for the average prince. While this is certainly huge by normal standards it is not enough maintain a leer jet and the general lifestyle that many Saudi royals feel is their birthright. As a result, many in the Al-Saud family have had to resort to more nefarious ways of making money. Typically this activity comes in the form of "commissions" that they receive from foreign companies in exchange for the Saudi government granting them business contracts.

How large are these commissions and how large will the commission be for this most recent deal? Lets take the Kingdom's 1993 purchase of 61 commercial aircraft from Boeing for $7 billion as a case study. Boeing was in fierce competition with France's Airbus to win this contract. In an effort to win, Boeing was advised to secure the services of Khalid bin Mahfouz, a man known as the Saudi banker to the King. His consulting contract stated that he would be entitled to a whopping 5% of the price at delivery of all the aircraft. Court documents would later show that his commission was actually more in the range of 10-12%.

Behind the scene the fix was already in well before Boeing secured the services of Mr. Mahfouz. In February of 1993, Secretary of State Warren Christopher had been sent by President Clinton to pressure King Fahd (now deceased) to make the deal exclusively with Boeing. So why hire Mr. Mahfouz at all? While the Al-Saud family technically owns all the oil under Saudi Arabia, members of the family cannot simply withdraw funds from the Arabian Oil Company's accounts. ARAMCO is supervised and audited by huge international corporations and such thievery would not go unnoticed. Instead members of the Saudi royal family must either overpay or overbuy from foreign companies in order for those companies to return a percentage of that money (usually around 10-12%) back to the Saudi royals personal accounts. So while Mr. Mahfouz pocketed a cool $700 million from his consulting job with Boeing a significant portion of that money would have had to be dispersed amongst the Saudi royals starting most likely with Crown Prince Sultan, brother to the King and head of the the Saudi Defense Ministry.

So how much money should we expect the Saudi Royal Family to pocket off this new $60 billion dollar arms purchase? If we conservatively estimate that there is about 10% graft on every deal then the Al-Saud should walk away with around $6 Billion. Will some of this money end up being given to organizations that support terrorism? History says yes, but since the Kingdom has staunchly refused to cooperate in the Treasury Department's terrorist financing investigations we will likely never know for sure. If you are interested in a more in depth explanation of how things work inside the kingdom I would highly suggest reading Sleeping with the Devil by Robert Baer from which most of the facts in this article were taken.

It has recently been brought to my attention that as someone in their mid-twenties I am a member of what has been referred to as the millennial generation. We are a group of people who were raised in years of economic prosperity and tech bubbles, only to have our world views rocked by the tragic events of 9/11. We spent our college years being lied to about why the nation needed to go to war in Iraq, and we sat in shock as over 4,000 men and women our own age lost their lives in two wars. Finally, once we reached maturity and entered the workforce, we experienced first-hand the result of a previous generation overcome with greed, a generation that had had complete and undying faith in the infallible nature of the capitalist marketplace.

Some pundits have suggested that the millennial generation is set to become one of the most isolationist and financially cautious generations that America has ever produced. However, upon hearing this I suddenly remember that the people making such claims are in fact members of the very generation whose sheer ineptitude resulted in the very conditions that were supposed to have gotten me so depressed and jaded in the first place. To those who have already preemptively given up on us millennials I say to you why don't you forget about retiring and instead start earning again to pay China back for all that money you all so wisely borrowed from them. In the meantime we up-and-comers will attempt to shift through the ashes of our once economically strong and internationally respected country.

I contend that the events on 9/11 have had the exact opposite effects of isolationism. We millennials may just have easily been called the first globalized generation as we saw first hand the effect that 19 Arab hijackers, disgruntled with foreign policies we had never heard of, could have on all of our lives. Since that day the number of students studying Arabic and Middle Eastern culture has sky rocketed across American campuses. I recently met the daughter of a New York City firefighter from Queens who had just returned from studying in Cairo. When I asked her why she chose to study Arabic she told me that after her father saw the towers fall in person he was determined to have his kids understand how such a thing could have happened.

Yes, our generation is going to be much more skeptical of politicians as a result of having been flat out lied to and manipulated by the Bush administration over the Iraq War. But is skepticism when it comes to ones elected officials ever really a bad thing? One thing I will say though is that the only way to truly keep one's government in check is to have a population willing to educate themselves on the issues. I appeal to all of my fellow twenty somethings to abandon all of the pied pipers parading their uneducated opinions across cable tv and recognize what our parents have not, that not everything calling itself news is really news. Would you watch FOX if it was renamed APE (American Propaganda/Entertainment)? I didnt think so. We must all recognize the fact that there is a difference between being informed and being educated. Watching the "news" endlessly all day might give you insight into what is happening in the world, but these shows will rarely tell you WHY they are happening. Those answers can simply only come from reading and independent investigation.

Our generation has the hard task of having to understand a very complicated world in its entirety. The policymakers of tomorrow will need to have the foresight to understand what unrest in places like Kazakhstan is going to do to the global energy markets and in turn how this will effect Saudi Arabia's relationship with its Arab neighbors. Previous generations of leaders felt secure that all they needed to leave college knowing about was the Soviet Union and the policy of deterrence. Maybe some of them even learned Russian in an attempt to be the best. Fast forward to today where members of the millennial generation are fighting to win a war in Afghanistan, a country where five languages are spoken and two (Dari and Pashtu) are vital to successfully completing the mission.

A final thought on whether the millennial generation is more or less likely to engage in military operations abroad in the wake of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. The next generation of military leadership that have just begun to take the reigns are the men and women who have spent the last nine years making their bones effectively making strategies like Counterinsurgency work. They see the importance of getting involved in countries like Yemen before they become safe havens for terrorists. Will be be doing nation building along the lines of Afghanistan and Iraq? Certainly not, but that does not mean that we will not seek to have a presence. If anything, it was the previous generation of cold warriors in the military who were so scarred by their experience in Vietnam that kept us from getting involved in places likes Afghanistan before they became a problem.

The road ahead will not be an easy one for the millennial generation, but I am secure in the fact that the series of blunders that we have been witness to over the past decade will serve to make us, the next generation of leaders, more cognoscente of the world in which we live. While we may not be as optimistic about the future as the baby boomers who came before us, I truly believe that it is the realism of the millennial generation that will one day return America to the pinnacle of international esteem.

I have been meaning to write a post recently concerning muttering that I have been hearing from individuals with experience in Iraq about the very real possibility that Iraq may be in store for another civil war. Yesterday's coordinated attacks by insurgents are a chilling sign that it is far too soon to be breathing sighs of relief over the state of Iraq. The bombings that occurred on Tuesday took place over the course of two hours in 13 different cities including Fallujah, Ramadi, Tikrit, Kirkuk, Basra, Karbala, Mosul and Kut. If these names sound familiar, they should as they have been the sites of some of the most heavy insurgent activity over the last seven years. These attacks represent three main points; 1. that the insurgency is still alive, 2. they still maintain an organizational capability that allows them to coordinate attacks all across Iraq, and 3. the insurgents are still in possession of a great deal of explosives.

While the Iraqi government and U.S. forces both estimate the Iraqi insurgency to number only in the hundreds, these malign actors are not the main focus of concern for people who have been observing Iraq closely these past few years. Politics and ethnic divides are far more likely to split Iraq than the actions of a few well armed fanatics.

The most likely fault line for civil war in Iraq is the oil rich city of Kirkuk. The majority shiite population of Iraq strongly favors having all the countries oil revenues come under the control of the central government, which is of course mostly controlled by Shiites. The Kurds residing in Northern Iraq have for years now claimed Kirkuk as the capital of their state within a state and they are vehemently opposed to the Iraqi government infringing upon their chief revenue stream. The Kurds have for years now been silently (or not so silently if you live there) ethnically cleansing Kirkuk of Sunni and Shiite Arabs alike. The Kurdish paramilitary force, the Peshmerga, while distinctly smaller than the Iraqi military would still be capable of making a stand against the Iraqi state should there be a show down over the sovereignty of Kirkuk and its mineral wealth. Should such a conflict lead to the Kurds declaring an independent state this would only serve to make matters worse as such a declaration would surely force Turkey to get involved militarily seeing as how they have been dealing with their own Kurdish uprising for decades.

Another likely source of trouble in Iraq's near future is the rumored return of the radical cleric Moqtada al-Sadr who for the past several years has been in self imposed exile in Iran where he has been studying to become an Ayatollah (I am told he is still very far away from deserving such a title). A recent article in Foreign Policy Magazine entitled the King of Iraq highlights the immense amount of power Sadr is still capable of wielding in Iraq. However, the article is poorly titled as Sadr is much more a king maker than he is a king. Iraqs deposed and yet still sitting Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki owed his election to Sadr's support. He also likely owes his latest electoral defeat to the fact that Sadr turned on him after the Iraqi government started allowing the U.S. military to attack Sadr's Mahdi army.

We must now ask ourselves what happens if Sadr returns to Iraq intent on seeing his candidates placed in the positions of greatest power within the Iraqi government. Iraq's Sunni population is not likely going to take such a grab for power lying down. Memories of Mahdi Army death squads killing Sunni's in hospitals as a result of Sadr controlling the Ministry of the Interior are still fresh in the minds of most Sunnis. But if Sadr does not get his way it is a very real possibility that we will see a resurgence of the Mahdi army, which it is important to point out, was never disbanded or disarmed despite the fleeing of its leader to Iran.

Other theories for what may lay ahead in Iraq's future include: the resurgence of another strong man dictatorial government, increasing power plays by Iran, or god forbid another ethnic conflict between Sunnis and Shiites like the civil war we already saw play out from 2006-2007. I am not trying to spread the message of doom and gloom, as I will be the first to admit that the Iraqi security forces have come along way in the past 3-4 years. All I am saying is that we here in the America should hold off on printing another Mission Accomplished banner anytime soon.

We here at D&D are still enjoying our August recess, but fear not, we shall return soon.  In the meantime, the NYT featured a story today from Dexter Filkins about how the ISI used the CIA and American resources to arrest Mullah Baradar for their own, self-serving ends.

“We picked up Baradar and the others because they were trying to make a deal without us,” said a Pakistani security official, who, like numerous people interviewed about the operation, spoke anonymously because of the delicacy of relations between Pakistan, Afghanistan and the United States. “We protect the Taliban. They are dependent on us. We are not going to allow them to make a deal with Karzai and the Indians.”

Well that's discouraging.  And who could have ever imagined that was the case?