Naturally, it’s about Secretary Hillary Clinton. For once, there was a GOOD article, calling out some of the sexism with which she has had to deal, while highlighting the incredible work she has been doing on behalf of the State4 Department, and our country. David Rothkopf had this article, “It’s 3:00 a.m. Do you Know Where Hillary Clinton Is?” I admit, when I first saw the title, I thought he was being snarky, and it was going to be yet another hatchet job on this amazing woman, this bright star. Imagine my delight when I read it, and discovered, far from snark, this was a serious article, about a serious role, and a serious person. All I can say is, it’s about damn time:

When it comes to Hillary Rodham Clinton, we’re missing the forest for the pantsuits.

Clinton is not the first celebrity to become the nation’s top diplomat — that honor goes to her most distant predecessor, Thomas Jefferson, who by the time he took office was one of the most famous and gossiped-about men in America — but she may be the biggest. And during her first seven months in office, the former first lady, erstwhile presidential candidate and eternal lightning rod has drawn more attention for her moods, looks, outtakes and (of course) relationship with her husband than for, well, her work revamping the nation’s foreign policy.

Even venerable publications — such as one to which I regularly contribute, Foreign Policy — have woven into their all-Hillary-all-the-time coverage odd discussions of Clinton’s handbag and scarf choices. Daily Beast editor Tina Brown, while depicting herself as a Clinton supporter, has been scathing and small-minded in discussing such things as Clinton’s weight and hair, while her “defense” of Hillary in her essay “Obama’s Other Wife” was as sexist as the title suggests.

Indeed, sexism has followed Clinton from the campaign trail to Foggy Bottom, as seen most recently in the posturing outrage surrounding the exchange in Congo when Clinton reacted with understandable frustration to the now-infamous question regarding her husband’s views. Major media outlets have joined the gossipfest, whether the New York Times, which covered Clinton’s first big policy speech by discussing whether she was in or out with the White House, or The Washington Post, where a couple of reporters mused about whether a brew called Mad Bitch would be the beer of choice for the secretary of state.

May I just pause here to say, THANK YOU for calling these “news” sources out for these sexist depictions/attacks on Clinton. Thank you.

As to the work of Secretary Clinton, the article continues:

Amid all the distractions, what is Clinton actually doing? Only overseeing what may be the most profound changes in U.S. foreign policy in two decades — a transformation that may render the presidencies of Bill Clinton and George W. Bush mere side notes in a long transition to a meaningful post-Cold War worldview.

The secretary has quietly begun rethinking the very nature of diplomacy and translating that vision into a revitalized State Department, one that approaches U.S. allies and rivals in ways that challenge long-held traditions. And despite the pessimists who invoked the “team of rivals” cliche to predict that President Obama and Clinton would not get along, Hillary has defined a role for herself in the Obamaverse: often bad cop to his good cop, spine stiffener when it comes to tough adversaries and nurturer of new strategies. Recognizing that the 3 a.m. phone calls are going to the White House, she is instead tackling the tough questions that, since the end of the Cold War, have kept America’s leaders awake all night.

In these early days of the new administration, it has been easy to focus on what Clinton has not achieved or on ways in which her power has been supposedly constrained. Indeed, some of her efforts have been frustrated by difficult personnel approvals or disputes with the White House about who should get what jobs. But this is the way of all administrations. More unusual has been the avidity with which the new president has seized the reins of foreign policy — more assertively than either George W. Bush or Bill Clinton before him. Obama’s centrality amplifies the importance of his closest White House staffers, while his penchant for appointing special envoys such as Richard Holbrooke (on Afghanistan and Pakistan) and George Mitchell (on the Middle East) has been interpreted by some as limiting Clinton’s role.

Given the challenges involved, it was perhaps natural that the White House would have a bigger day-to-day hand in some of the nation’s most urgent foreign policy issues. But with Obama, national security adviser Jim Jones, Vice President Joe Biden and Secretary of Defense Robert Gates absorbed by Iraq, Afghanistan and other inherited problems of the recent past, Clinton’s State Department can take on a bigger role in tackling the problems of the future — in particular, how America will lead the world in the century ahead. This approach is both necessary and canny: It recognizes that U.S. policy must change to fulfill Obama’s vision and that many high-profile issues such as those of the Middle East have often swamped the careers and aspirations of secretaries of state past.

Which nations will be our key partners? What do you do when many vital partners — China, for example, and Russia — are rivals as well? How must America’s alliances change as NATO is stretched to the limit? How do we engage with rogue states and old enemies in ways that do not strengthen them and preserve our prerogative to challenge threats? How do we move beyond the diplomacy of men in striped pants speaking only for governments and embrace potent nonstate players and once-disenfranchised peoples?

In searching for answers, Clinton is leaving behind old doctrines and labels. She outlined her new thinking in a recent speech at the Council on Foreign Relations in New York, where she revealed stark differences between the new administration’s worldview and those of its predecessors: The recurring themes include “partnership” and “engagement” and “common interests.” Clearly, Madeleine Albright’s “indispensable nation” has recognized the indispensability of collaborating with others.

Who those “others” are is the area in which change has been greatest and most rapid. “We will put,” Clinton said, “special emphasis on encouraging major and emerging global powers — China, India, Russia and Brazil, as well as Turkey, Indonesia and South Africa — to be full partners in tackling the global agenda.” This is the death knell for the G-8 as the head table of the global community; the administration has an effort underway to determine whether the successor to the G-8 will be the G-20, or perhaps some other grouping. Though the move away from the G-8 began in the waning days of the Bush era, that administration viewed the world through a different lens, a perception that evolved from a traditional great-power view to a pre-Galilean notion that everything revolved around the world’s sole superpower.

Obama and Clinton have both made engaging with emerging powers a priority. Obama visited Russia earlier this year and will host Indian Prime Minister Manmohan Singh in his first state dinner in November. Clinton has made trips to China and India, and she would have been with Obama in Russia had she not injured her elbow. Both have visited Africa and the Middle East, reaching out to women and the Islamic world.

To anyone who has been following Clinton throughout her career, the manner in which she has been pursuing her position should come as no surprise. You may recall a book she wrote some time ago, It Takes A Village, in which these kinds of concepts have been discussed. She works in a collegial manner, holding the bigger picture firmly in hand as she goes about her work. It isn’t about her. It is about the world, the country, and the citizens here and abroad. It is about pulling women and children up out of poverty, having people be educated, allowing people to live their lives, and not just fight to survive. That’s her deal, and it has been for a long, long time. And it is that commitment that leads to this:

On many critical agenda items — from a rollback of nuclear weapons to the climate or trade talks — such emerging powers will be essential to achieving U.S. goals. As a result, we’ve seen a new American willingness to play down old differences, whether with Russia on a missile shield or, as Clinton showed on her China trip, with Beijing on human rights.

At the center of Clinton’s brain trust is Anne-Marie Slaughter, the former dean of Princeton’s Woodrow Wilson School of Public and International Affairs. Now head of policy planning at the State Department, Slaughter elaborated on the ideas in Clinton’s speech. “We envision getting not just a new group of states around a table, but also building networks, coalitions and partnerships of states and nonstate actors to tackle specific problems,” she told me.

“To do that,” Slaughter continued, “our diplomats are going to need to have skills that are closer to community organizing than traditional reporting and analysis. New connecting technologies will be vital tools in this kind of diplomacy.”

A new team has been brought in to make these changes real. Clinton recruited Alec Ross, one of the leaders of Obama’s technology policy team, to the seventh floor of the State Department as her senior adviser for innovation. His mission is to harness new information tools to advance U.S. interests — a task made easier as the Internet and mobile networks have played starring roles in recent incidents, from Iran to the Uighur uprising in western China to Moldova. Whether through a telecommunications program in Congo to protect women from violence or text messaging to raise money for Pakistani refugees in the Swat Valley, technology has been deployed to reach new audiences.

Of course, you need more than new ideas to revitalize the State Department; you need resources, too. The secretary has brought in former Bill Clinton-era budget chief Jack Lew to help her claw back money for statecraft that many in Foggy Bottom feel has been sucked off toward the Pentagon. She has also created special positions to back new priorities, such as Melanne Verveer as ambassador at large for women’s issues, Elizabeth Bagley to handle public-private outreach worldwide and Todd Stern as the chief negotiator on climate.

Even just a few months in, it’s clear that these appointments are far from window dressing. Lew, Slaughter and the acting head of the U.S. Agency for International Development are leading an effort to rethink foreign aid with the new Quadrennial Diplomacy and Development Review, an initiative modeled on the Pentagon’s strategic assessments and designed to review State’s priorities. Stern has conducted high-level discussions on climate change around the world, notably with China. Clinton made women’s issues a centerpiece of her recent 11-day trip to Africa, where she stressed that “the social, political and economic marginalization of women across Africa has left a void in this continent that undermines progress and prosperity.”

Unlike other politicians, I don’t think Clinton appoints people to be “window dressing,” but to get the job done. That is further evidenced with the following appointment:

Clinton has also signaled the importance of private-sector experience by naming former Goldman Sachs International vice chairman Robert Hormats, a respected veteran of four administrations, to handle economic issues at the State Department, as well as Judith McHale, former chief executive of Discovery Communications, to run public diplomacy. In the same vein, she has opened up Cuba to American telecommunications companies and reached out to India’s private sector on energy cooperation — showing that this administration will seek to advance national interests by tapping the self-interests of the business community. As with any new administration, there have been inevitable problems. The old campaign teams — Clinton’s and Obama’s — still eye each other warily, but this feeling is gradually fading. And by most accounts, the administration’s national security team has come together successfully, with Clinton developing strong relationships with national security adviser Jones and Defense Secretary Gates. Her policy deputy, Jim Steinberg, has renewed an old collaboration with deputy national security adviser Tom Donilon; the two of them, working with Obama campaign foreign policy advisers Denis McDonough and Mark Lippert, have formed what one State Department seventh-floor dweller called “a powerful quartet at the heart of real interagency policymaking.” Henry Kissinger may have overstated matters when he said this is the best White House-State relationship in recent memory, but it’s not bad, while the State-Pentagon relationship is in its best shape in decades.

Huh. Well, I’ll be. Who could have seen THAT coming? Oh, I know - the 18 million people who voted for her!

But Clinton is not looking back to what was. Rather, she is looking ahead to see how best she can fulfill her work, As such, again, she looks at the big picture, and how best to accomplish what needs doing, including:

At the heart of things, though, is the relationship between Clinton and Obama. For all the administration’s talk of international partnerships, that may be the most critical partnership of all.

So far, according to multiple high-level officials at State and the White House, the two seem aligned in their views. In addition, they are gradually defining complementary roles. Obama has assumed the role of principal spokesperson on foreign policy, as international audiences welcome his new and improved American brand. Clinton thus far has echoed his points but has also delivered tougher ones. Whether on a missile shield against Iran or North Korean saber-rattling, the continued imprisonment of Aung San Suu Kyi in Burma or rape and corruption in Congo, the secretary of state has spoken bluntly on the world stage — even if it triggered snide comments from North Korea.

It is still early, and a president’s foreign policy legacy is often defined less by big principles than by how one reacts to the unexpected, whether missiles in Cuba or terrorism in New York. Promising ideas fail because of limited attention or reluctant bureaucracies, and some rhetoric eventually rings hollow, as the self-congratulatory “smart power” already does to me.

Nevertheless, there is evidence that, seven months into the job, Obama’s unlikely secretary of state is supporting and augmenting his agenda effectively. Not as Obama’s “other wife,” not as Bill Clinton’s wife, not even as a celebrity or as a former presidential candidate — but in a new role of her own making. (drothkopf@carnegieendowment.org

David Rothkopf is a visiting scholar at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace and the author of “Superclass: The Global Power Elite and the World They Are Making” and “Running the World: The Inside Story of the NSC and the Architects of American Power.” He will be online to chat with readers Monday at 11 a.m. Submit your questions and comments before or during the discussion.)

Indeed - she is embracing a “role of her own making.” It is hard not to consider what could have been had she been President instead of Secretary of State. Don’t get me wrong - as I have said a number of times, I am glad that Clinton is in such a crucial role for our country. Clearly, we need her. But the same intelligence; the ability, and vision, to hold the big picture in her grasp while determining the best course to achieve those goals, while finding the people who can affect those goals; the nation-building, yes, the community-building; are all the ingredients necessary for a good presidency. And I am pretty sure that a President Hillary Clinton would not have made any “wee-wee” remarks about the press corp, either. It’s a matter of decorum, the ability to hold things, events, people, in tension. It’s a matter of vision, and the ability to effect change in a real, meaningful way. That’s our Hillary. Thank heavens she is finally starting to get the recognition she so richly deserves.

f you don’t have time to watch the video, click on it anyway, and the transcript is available underneath it.

I have company from out of state, so this will be brief. Suffice it to say, for someone Obama claimed to be a Foreign Policy lightweight, she sure makes him out to be a liar, doesn’t she?

Admit it - her cracking up laughing made you smile, didn’t it? Sure did me…And then the way she engaged with External Affairs Minister Krishna afterward, so warm and engaging. He seemed to be pretty happy, too.

Interesting about the whole nuclear power issue, isn’t it? About us building nuclear power plants in India? I’d love to hear your thoughts on that, especially if you read THIS article in Newsweek, or THIS one from US News. So, what do you think?

Gotta go run pick up my favorite cousin, who is also one of my favorite people (you know, blood family who is also chosen family), at the airport. But you know I’ll check in later…

The two pincers putting the squeeze on Pakistan are 1) its mainstream majority population, and 2) its extremist, fundamentalist minority that is now getting armed to the teeth and swept up by the Taliban. In between is the Pakistani Army, which has no experience in counterinsurgency operations and is using conventional warfare to fight the well-armed Taliban, blowing up entire towns and dwellings, which has caused a massive refugee crisis — the largest of its kind since Rwanda — and for which Pakistan made NO advance preparations.

Here are some illuminating videos I’ve found that I’d like to share with you because they taught me so much. Included in the first two are Hillary Clinton’s statements.

From WorldFocus.org, an excellent backgrounder on the Swat Valley crisis, with these explanations to set up the video:

United Nations figures show that over 1.45 million people have been displaced by ongoing violence in Pakistan since May 2.

The immense strain of this humanitarian crisis is challenging the Pakistani government as it tries to avoid internal dissent against the consequences of its anti-Taliban military campaign.

The U.S. has pledged more than $100 million dollars in emergency assistance for Pakistan.

Ahmad Kamal, Pakistan’s former ambassador to the United Nations, joins Martin Savidge to discuss the situation in the refugee camps and how the military campaign is going.

From Hillary Clinton’s statement, posted at the State Department’s Web site:

Humanitarian Aid to Pakistan

[...]

Americans can use technology to help, as well. Using your cell phones, Americans can text the word “swat” — to the number 20222 and make a $5 contribution that will help the U.N. High Commissioner for Refugees provide tents, clothing, food, and medicine to hundreds of thousands of affected people. And before I came over here, we did that in the State Department. So we are making some of the first donations to this fund.

President Obama and I hope that individuals who have fled the conflict will be able to return home quickly, safely, and on a voluntary basis. Some have already gone back to their communities. And as they do, the United States stands ready to help Pakistan’s government support displaced persons as they rebuild their lives.

But as long as this crisis persists, our assistance will continue. We face a common threat, a common challenge, and now a common task. And we know that the work ahead is difficult, but we have seen an enormous amount of support and determination out of the Pakistani government, military, and people in the last weeks to tackle the extremist challenge. And we’re confident that with respect to the humanitarian challenge the people of Pakistan and their government, as well as the international community, can come together and forge not only the assistance that is needed, but stronger bonds for the years ahead. …

These two CNN videos are CRITICAL to view. The first gives you great background information on what’s going on in Pakistan, and the second discusses the disturbing developments in Pakistan’s nuclear weapons arsenal:

Crisis in Pakistan 2:25
CNN’s Ivan Watson reports on the first pictures from the battles between Pakistan’s army and the Taliban.

Is Pakistan adding nukes? 1:57
CNN’s Chris Lawrence looks at satellite photos that indicate Pakistan is building a nuclear reactor.

UPDATE: “Pakistan Is Rapidly Adding Nuclear Arms, U.S. Says“

[...]

During a hearing of the Senate Armed Services Committee on Thursday, Senator Jim Webb, a Virginia Democrat, veered from the budget proposal under debate to ask Admiral Mullen about public reports “that Pakistan is, at the moment, increasing its nuclear program — that it may be actually adding on to weapons systems and warheads. Do you have any evidence of that?”

It was then that Admiral Mullen responded with his one-word confirmation. Mr. Webb said Pakistan’s decision was a matter of “enormous concern,” and he added, “Do we have any type of control factors that would be built in, in terms of where future American money would be going, as it addresses what I just asked about?”

Similar concerns about seeking guarantees that American military assistance to Pakistan would be focused on battling insurgents also were expressed by Senator Carl Levin of Michigan, the committee chairman.
“Unless Pakistan’s leaders commit, in deeds and words, their country’s armed forces and security personnel to eliminating the threat from militant extremists, and unless they make it clear that they are doing so, for the sake of their own future, then no amount of assistance will be effective,” Mr. Levin said.

[...]

::::::

From John Batchelor’s blog. Every Sunday, hear Larry Johnson on John Batchelor’s nationally syndicated radio show, aired on KFI-AM.

O P E N   T H R E A D   T O O

John Batchelor’s show begins at 10 p.m. ET. Then, at 10:30 p.m. ET, DON’T MISS LARRY JOHNSON TONIGHT on the Batchelor show, via KFI 640 AM.

Check out the full slate of guests and topics tonight. John Batchelor’s KFI show begins at 7:00 p.m., so tune in early. Here are the topics and fellow guests during Larry’s appearance:

If this is your first time listening, you’ll want to visit the site early in case you need to download an easily installed program to hear the show.

GO HERE to view the full line-up of guests and topics tonight on KFI, from beginning to the program’s conclusion.

Yesterday, I wrote of Afghanistan, Iraq, and the US. Today, it is India:

What courage, what strength, these women demonstrated. May their success be far and wide.

Speaking of courage and strength, here is a broader retrospective of Women Leaders in our history who helped get us where we are:

Here is one of my favorite athletes in one of my favorite sports (soccer), a woman who made history, Julie Foudy, in celebration of Women’s History Month:

Oh, and yes, Hillary should have been in the video of Women Leaders. So this one is for her, and for all of us:

[Writer's note: Part I is my commentary on the movie, Slumdog Millionaire and Part II is about the inspiring story of the real slums in Dharavi, Mumbai.]

PART I — A Commentary

I find the word Slumdog highly objectionable. Whom are we calling Slumdogs? Who are we to call them that? How do they feel being called that? [Referring to someone as a dog is also offensive in Indian culture.]

Yet the movie Slumdog Millionaire has the slick title and the awards to go with it.

This genre of movies makes Indian audience (and perhaps others) uncomfortable raising many different emotions: in some helplessness, embarrassment, denial, and acceptance of ills of poverty; in others anger, humiliation, and even irritation at the privacy invading curiosity of Westerners peeking into their debased existence as if it is some two-headed monster that they have to watch, pity, and recoil at the same time.

I have to admit that I don’t understand the fascination of Western filmmakers (especially British dudes) to insert themselves into this mix. May be they think they are doing social service.

At the end of the day, a pragmatic reaction to all the hoopla is to conclude that it is only a movie and that certain things, good or bad, are done with artistic license. The good news is that the music and the artists got their well deserved recognition. Bollywood music with its elaborate choreography in the recent days is a visual as well as aural feast when it is done well (if you are doubly curious about this point, you can check these videos from other movies: here and here).

Here is the song from Slumdog Millionaire that won an Oscar for the music director, A. R. Rahman:

A Western director went and filmed the movie authentically in the Mumbai slums; the rest of the world was treated to the real and unadulterated truth about the ugliness of poverty and the hell on earth reality. Like I said before maybe some of them think they are doing social service. Some of the little children in the movie were also authentic; they came from those very slums. They didn’t even have to act; they just had to be themselves. They were paraded in all finery on the red carpet at the Oscars. What will happen to them tomorrow? Do they go back to the same slums they came from? How generous of the director to set up education funds for those kids after making millions of dollars exploiting their life story and circumstances. Is that fair or enough? These children are not like extras in other movies. The incongruity between the station in life of the filmmakers with these children (and their families) is too vast. Some of the children themselves do not have the full opportunity to exploit their current windfall like their western counterparts. I worry what will happen to them next. There is a reason why some things are not to be trifled with. I have a message to that director — If you can’t find a complete solution to their quality of life (and their parents will have a say in it now that they are also involved), you have no right to fool around with their heads.

After watching this video, I fervently hope these kids do well in life and the adults in their life now do right by them. Oh, that little Rubina is so cute (and looks so vulnerable — Indian papers say that her biological mother has surfaced from nowhere in the last couple of days and vying for her against her step-mother). Can I adopt her?

A Bonus Video on the inspiration for the book on which the movie is based:

The movie Slumdog Millionaire was made from the original book entitled Q and A written by Vikas Swarup, an Indian diplomat/writer. It is noted that the Hole in the Wall project was an inspiration to writing the story Q and A and I can see how. This is a project from 1999 (still running) which envisioned putting a computer in slums and rural areas to study how the children would use that resource. The unique vision for this project came from the project founder and education specialist Dr. Sugata Mitra. The world would be a better place with more people like Dr. Mitra than people like Danny Boyle.

CNN News video on both the movie and the Hole in the Wall project:

More on Hole in the Wall project from a 2002 PBS Frontline/World story:

Several years ago, a computer scientist, Dr. Sugata Mitra, had an idea. What would happen if he could provide poor children with free, unlimited access to computers and the Internet? Mitra launched what came to be known as the hole in the wall experiment.

The first Hole in the Wall computer kiosk went online on January 26, 1999, in the slum of Kalkaji in New Delhi. Today, there are 52 such kiosks connecting kids to the Internet around the country. By the end of 2003, Dr. Mitra and his team at the Centre for Research in Cognitive Systems hope to have 108 Hole in the Wall computer kiosk clusters operating in 22 different sites across India. Funding for the Hole in the Wall experiment comes in part from the Indian government, the World Bank and the International Finance Corporation.

A Bonus Read: Is the Slumdog version the real India?

[snip]Writers and filmmakers came from far away to capture the real India — poor people and scabby dogs sharing space in hot dustbowls. Now, thanks to Aravind Adiga, Danny Boyle, Simon Beaufoy and David Miliband, it’s being argued that the real India is back in focus. Is it?

The truth is the real India never really went away — in real life or fiction. In the ’50s and ’60s, the best, most popular Bollywood stories were told by Raj Kapoor, who often played the underdog. He was a Chaplinesque tramp living on a footpath and trying to make both ends meet in the big, bad city. The trend continued into the ’70s and ’80s when angry young men — born in gutters and raised on the sidewalks — fought pitched battles with the men who ran the system. [snip]

With such a rich collection of stories about the real India already with us, why do we credit the new kids on the block with its creation?

Narendra Jadhav, vice-chancellor of Pune University and author of the Dalit family story Outcaste: A Memoir, says, “I don’t think Adiga and Boyle have shown the real India. There is a silent revolution happening in India, with millions of people who have lived on the margins for centuries, now experiencing positive changes in their life. Adiga’s The White Tiger and Slumdog Millionaire show the bad side of this change. That’s also a reality but it’s not the real India.” Jadhav’s multilayered saga traces the awakening of Dalits over three generations. No story about the real India could be more real than this.

The [Jadav's] book, translated into 17 languages, has been a bestseller in many European countries. It has sold 200,000 copies just in South Korea. “It’s a story of triumph but it’s not a rags-to-riches story. It’s a story of courage and hard work. My father never went to school but I went to the US to do my PhD,” says Jadhav, formerly chief economist of the RBI. “It’s a book with universal appeal.”

Dr. Jadhav’s inspiring life journey of overcoming obstacles as a Dalit (lower caste) in a democratic society riddled with contradictions of its caste system is not sexy enough to win an Oscar but reveals the most important social progress happening in India now.

PART II — Dharavi Story

Those of you who saw the movie may have recognized the resourcefulness of the young man to pull himself out of the wretched circumstances that bound him to a different destiny. There are many such real life examples of resourcefulness and hard work in the slums of Mumbai, one in particular called Dharavi. I see nobility in these people who have helped themselves. It is a fairytale that won’t win an Oscar but puts food on the table for a family, a shanty roof over one’s head, and meager sanitation for some, and for the lucky few, even a way out of their slums. But many self righteous ignoramuses with their cliched notions of slums and poverty demand that we all have to accept the slum dwellers’ wretched existence for what it really is, no sugarcoating slum dwellers’ suffering. What these privileged few don’t understand or are unaware of are the modest successes brought about by those same slum dwellers in their quest for a better life. Dharavi is one such hopeful story.

Now from the movie version of a Mumbai slum to a real life story of the slum Dharavi in Mumbai.

The Foreign Policy site did a photo essay recently about the slum dwellers of Mumbai (there is also a more detailed article in The Guardian). Some facts about Dharavi from the photo essay:

Up their alley: About half of Mumbai’s 16 million residents live in informal settlements known as slums, the largest of which is Dharavi. Between 600,000 and 1 million people call Dharavi home, but for many, it is also their place of business, the site of approximately 15,000 cottage-industry factories powered by an unflagging entrepreneurial spirit. “You in the West so easily see the slum as a negative concept. … But Dharavi has also been mirroring India’s economic revival,” one Dharavi advocate told The Guardian.

Trash to treasure: Dharavi may look like a junkyard, but there’s no such thing as junk here. The community is a superhub of recycling, employing more than 250,000 people who make their living reincarnating others’ refuse. Eighty percent of Mumbai’s plastic gets reborn in the slum. As seen here on Feb. 3, workers meticulously sort everything from bottles and lids to ballpoint pens and broken toys. The plastic is ground into tiny flakes that are reprocessed into new products.

Carrying on: Dharavi is famous for its potters’ colony, called Kumbharwada. [snip] Other products manufactured in Dharavi’s cottage industries include soap and leather. One leather worker was so successful that he exported 25,000 belts to Wal-Mart in the United States; he has since moved up and out of Dharavi. Although low by Western standards, wages are much more than can be earned in rural India, a fact that attracts migrants. All told, annual economic output in Dharavi is anywhere from $650 million to $1 billion.

Can-do spirit: Another product that is recycled is metal cans that once contained cooking oil. Workers, similar to those shown here in Dharavi on Feb. 3, hammer dents out of the cans, bathe them in water, and polish them for a second life. One can-recycling entrepreneur told The Guardian at his “corporate headquarters”: “We process over 400 of these [cans] a day. … We clean them up and sell them back to the oil companies and direct to local consumers.” Other recycled products include cardboard and paint chips, which are pounded into a powder that can be reconstituted into paint.

As the reporter from The Guardian said [getting beyond the squalor and the depravity of the surroundings] “If you have the patience to look closer, you will find here one of the most inspiring economic models in Asia. Dharavi may be one of the world’s largest slums, but it is by far its most prosperous - a thriving business centre propelled by thousands of micro-entrepreneurs who have created an invaluable industry - turning around the discarded waste of Mumbai’s 19 million citizens. A new estimate by economists of the output of the slum is as impressive as it seems improbable: £700m a year.”

How did Dharavi come to be? from the Time:

As Bombay[Mumbai] grew and industrialized, Dharavi became a “human dumping ground” for dispossessed workers and penniless migrants arriving to seek their fortune in India’s commercial capital, says longtime resident Ram Bhaukorde, 69. “Anyone too poor for Bombay proper could find a home and a living here,” says Bhaukorde. Today, Dharavi has a population of between 600,000 and a million—the figures are rough because the area was officially an illegal settlement until 2004 and the authorities have yet to quantify it—and it’s the largest contiguous slum in the world.

Yet in recent years prosperity has been trickling down to Dharavi’s residents, many of whom are no longer rib-counting poor. Today, there’s 24-hour electricity and running water—albeit for just an hour a day. In a research study published in 2002, C.K. Prahalad and Allen Hammond reported that 85% of households own a TV, 75% a pressure cooker and a mixer, 56% a gas stove, and 21% a telephone. Locals estimate that 70% of Dharavi’s buildings are now used for commercial purposes, such as banks and restaurants. Dharavi is home to some of the city’s best leatherworkers, as well as textile and furniture factories, potteries and bakeries. Moreover, as Bombay has expanded, what was once malarial swamp on the edge of the city now occupies prime real estate right at its center. Sayyed says a standard two-room, 21-square-meter apartment now sells for more than $11,000, up from $7,000 two years ago and $1,500 a decade ago.

“We did this,” declares Bhaukorde, gesturing at Dharavi’s bustling main drag. “No government, no rich people, no charity. Just poor people, working hard.”

From the LA Times:

Many residents bristle when they hear such terms [as when a developer called it a black hole]. They dislike the word “slum,” which they feel conjures up an image of misery and torpor.

Squalor and wretchedness definitely exist. Rats scuttle along the gutters. Women wring out the day’s wash in open drains while their children play cricket between heaps of rotting garbage. In some parts of Dharavi, several families share a single tap, and even more families share a single toilet — or simply do their business in open areas. Stray dogs add to the stench.

But there are no idle hands here. Dharavi is a hive of activity, a marvel of entrepreneurial spirit and hard work that, in its own way, is as much a reflection of the new India and its go-go economy as the glass offices of the business park across the way.

[snip]

Khan, the cardboard-box recycler, languished as a farmer in Uttar Pradesh, India’s most populous state, before landing here eight years ago looking for something better. He is constantly hustling, a go-getter attitude that enabled him to buy his own workshop in 2006. The property has nearly doubled in value since, he said. Khan, 40, oversees seven employees, all recruits from his home village. As his own boss, he is able to go home for lunch with his wife and five children every day. In a good month on the farm, Khan earned 6,000 rupees (about $140). Here, monthly revenue can be 50 times that. “Why would I go back?” he asked rhetorically as he relaxed for a few minutes on a stack of collapsed boxes.

In Mumbai real estate is scarce, even a middle class family could at best afford a one bed room apartment. That being the reality, Dharavi sits on a huge swath of prime real estate. Developers, government officials salivate at the thought of demolishing the slum and building high rise office buildings and apartments. In one plan, Dharavi residents are even offered to be housed elsewhere in 225 sq ft apartments. But as the LA Times article notes:

But many who live here take fierce pride in a community that they and their families built, for some over several generations, with little help from the state. They refuse to be uprooted without a fight.

“This is like my country now,” said Ramakant Rai, a grizzled electrician who has lived in Dharavi for 35 years, most of them in a shack built right up against a massive water pipe laid down during the British Raj. “I say to the government, let us stay here and we’ll build our own houses.”

[snip]

In 3 1/2 decades of living in Dharavi, he[Rai] has heard politicians and officials talk big before about reclaiming and rehabilitating this place. Those politicians and officials are gone now. Dharavi — with all its failings and problems, its chaos and unruliness — remains.

Dharavi is perhaps not even the bottom of the barrel. Life in general in a country like India holds many challenges. Rural life and farming depend on the Monsoon. Migrant workers from rural areas rush to the big cities in search of jobs. Poverty extends through multitudes of layers to varying degrees and as quality of life is improved for one layer, another surfaces in its place. There are good and bad politicians. Corruption is a way of life for some when they are in a hurry to elevate their current economic status. Government can only do so much when you have a billion people to feed and provide shelter. Let us not forget that India is a democracy unlike China which can institute a one child policy and quickly reduce its population growth. Who can complain about human greed or corruption from what we have seen here in this country recently? I can easily see these politicians here being equally corrupt if I transplant them there. We just have a more sophisticated veneer here.

As hapless observers we can lament all we want from our cozy, comfortable surroundings about how bad, ugly, wretched it is for those slum dwellers. We can demand others to do the same, insisting that there is no nobility in poverty. All that is a given and does not interest me at an intellectual level. I am looking for solutions. I am looking for a ray of hope, a silver lining somewhere. I see that in Dharavi residents. At no point, can we assume that they lack pride and self-respect, and work ethic and ingenuity. Acknowledging and lauding their efforts to get out of their meager existence with or without the help of others is the least we can do. There are no slumdogs here. There are only human beings trying to survive and even lead honorable lives. We have to uphold their dignity in the way we talk about them, in the way we acknowledge their existence.

Looking to the future, my wish is for the government and the developers to honor what Dharavi residents have built over the years by providing support for their “entrepreneurial” spirit. May be the Oscar winning director Danny Boyle could help them out with some of his millions.

Setting aside sarcasm about Danny Boyle and the rest, Dharavi represents a challenge as well as promise and potential for urban development. The challenge is that these are illegal settlements, squatters who don’t own the land they live on. The promise is that they have built a successful and economically viable community albeit without infrastructure on the same land. So the question now is how this community should be transformed into a legitimate township. Developers, local and central government, and advocates for Dharavi are struggling over these issues. The proposals from developers to give Dharavi residents free apartments in high-rise buildings have not been received well. Prakash Apte, an Urban development expert says this about Dharavi redevelopment plans and efforts [see here for article]:

Case studies all over the world have documented the inappropriateness of high-rise resettlement projects in poor areas. The social and economic networks which the poor rely on for subsistence can hardly be sustained in high-rise structures. These high rise projects are not appropriate for home-based economic activities, which play a major role in Dharavi.

The least that can be done in this redevelopment plan is to refurbish the work places of the existing industries within the residential areas and remodel this project by providing low-rise high-density row housing for existing families engaged in home based occupations. This way, each house will have a ground floor and an additional story , as well as a terrace and a courtyard which can be used for these home-based business activities.

Unfortunately, the formulation of Dharavi Redevelopment Plan as a profit-maximizing real-estate tool leaves no room for exploring such sustainable and economically viable low-rise, high-density approaches. It exposes the DRP as a weak cover-up for a land grab of the worst kind.

Disagreements about how to end injustice, and specific injustices, are as old as injustice itself. Whether one is considering the injustices of colonialism, racist domination, oppression of women…in each and every one of these areas, those who can agree in broad general principle have often found themselves disagreeing over specifics, including some major ones. To make common cause does not magically bring about harmony.

When Gandhi fought to escape the injustices of British rule, he was opposed by people who resisted his ideas about throwing over caste distinctions. When Mandela picked up arms to fight apartheid, many withdrew their support from his movement. When King sought to expand his conception of civil rights to include equal access to economic opportunities, former and potential allies turned against him.

None of these examples of fights for justice achieved perfect justice, no more than the Civil War achieved a perfect Union. But I do believe that the U.S. Civil War achieved a more perfect union. Likewise, I believe the India of today is a far more equitable place than the India of one hundred years ago, that the South Africa of today, like the U.S. of today, has achieved within the past fifty years enormous strides toward racial justice.

My own dream is that within my lifetime, I see the progress toward the good of justice for women that Gandhi, Mandela, and King got to see the toward the goods of justice they pursued in their lifetimes. They managed to see results in their pursuits even though each had to learn when to resist pressures from people who genuinely shared their vision and when to resist the lure of becoming subservient to those who offered only short term funding and enrichment rather than truly shared commitment.

Now, even as I write this, millions of men and women are freshly galvanized to make it a reality that all the world comes to see women’s rights as human rights, to see woman as just as much the paradigm representative of humanity as man, and therefore to see a woman’s rights as indistinguishable from any human’s rights. With all that energy comes passion and motivation. But with it comes too friction and infighting. With it too comes the willingness by some to give up the chance to speak truth to power, in order perhaps, to gain power, but nevertheless at the sacrifice of a chance to speak without fear of offending.

I believe that at the end of every day, and at the start of every morning, a person needs to be able to reflect upon herself or himself, and address these questions to herself or himself: if I am fighting for justice, am I making choices that do not compromise my integrity? What can I tolerate in allies even if I cannot join wholeheartedly in every step they take? Can I broaden my toleration without selling out my convictions?

Especially in the fight against the subjugation of women, men and women must ask themselves these questions, because one of the hardest obstacles to achieving progress toward the good of justice for women is the tendency toward infighting on the one hand and selling out on the other. Fighters for the empowerment of women tend to care about all sorts of injustice and obviously have some very basic differences, including differences in sex, race, and class. These differences can lead to fissures and cracks that can render the fight for justice for women, for justice for people, very tough going. But the common interest in justice for all must be used to resist the fissures and to repair them, when possible. What cannot be repaired is selling out. Certainly, one person’s “sell-out” may be another person’s “reasonable compromise”. Personally, I believe in the necessity to question one’s own choices in such matters very closely, because it is very tempting to see oneself as the reasonable compromiser, the unifier, the one who moves beyond “unnecessary” partisanship rather than to recognize in oneself the more natural tendency in human nature toward selling out.

For my own part, I prefer to err on the side of sticking to my convictions rather than losing them in a process of mollification and conciliation. If enough other people join me in those convictions, then they and I will not have to mollify and appease: we will ultimately have coming to us those who would now have us coming to them. We will be numerous enough and bonded together strongly enough in the fight for women’s rights - the fight for human rights - to the point where will we have the upper hand, both ethically and tactically.

For my own part, I would rather take ten million baby steps toward the good without losing my footing in conscience than take a great leap and risk losing my moral compass. I will march with as wide a cohort as I can - even when we disagree on some things - in the name of reaching my goals. But I will not join ranks with those who are able to take heady leaps that gain them a seat at the local powerbroker’s table or a grant of some of that powerbroker’s money at the price of their integrity.

If ten million or twenty million or fifty-one million people choose to baby step along with me and I with them, we will, together, make the same rate of progress as those who choose to go it more or less alone. In the fight to beat misogyny and sexism, in the fight to achieve proper representation and empowerment for women, I expect great changes. I demand great changes. I will work toward great changes. But I know the greatest shifts toward justice take years to accomplish. To stick it out, every step forward must be appreciated and celebrated (e.g. Senator Clinton’s name placed in nomination even at the admitted charade of a free and open Democratic Party convention) and every step backward must be condemned and resisted (e.g. the retention of a speechwriter for the President of the United States of America who participates in boorish, distasteful and sexist party shenanigans.) Time is on the side of those who fight for justice, so long as those who fight for justice do so with patience and tenacity, and resist the parallel temptations toward selling out or excessive infighting.

NOW on to the BUMPING UP of Larry Johnson’s EXCEPTIONAL essay that sensible people everywhere should read. We realize that the KoolAid dipsomaniacs are unable to see, let alone comprehend, but we’ll persist.

By LARRY JOHNSON, originally published on November 11, 2008:

If you enjoyed the George W. Bush era, you are gonna love the Barack Obama regime, because Obama is relying on some of the same folks who helped create the mayhem and failures in the CIA. That’s right, boys and girls. Take a look at today’s Wall Street Journal:

President-elect Barack Obama is unlikely to radically overhaul controversial Bush administration intelligence policies, advisers say, an approach that is almost certain to create tension within the Democratic Party. . . .

The intelligence-transition team is led by former National Counterterrorism Center chief John Brennan and former CIA intelligence-analysis director Jami Miscik, say officials close to the matter. Mr. Brennan is viewed as a potential candidate for a top intelligence post. Ms. Miscik left amid a slew of departures from the CIA under then-Director Porter Goss.

Advisers caution that few decisions will be made until the team gets a better picture of how the Bush administration actually goes about gathering intelligence, including covert programs, and there could be a greater shift after a full review.

The Obama team plans to review secret and public executive orders and recent Justice Department guidelines that eased restrictions on domestic intelligence collection. “They’ll be looking at existing executive orders, then making sure from Jan. 20 on there’s going to be appropriate executive-branch oversight of intelligence functions,” Mr. Brennan said in an interview shortly before Election Day.

Putting John Brennan in charge of this effort is mind numbing. Brennan was one of the George Tenet toadies who defended the former CIA Director when I, along with a group of other retired CIA officers, demanded that Tenet donate part of the proceeds of his book to the families of U.S. soldiers who died in Iraq and to return his medal of freedom.

Brennan was part of the group of the insiders who saw no problem with George Tenet helping cook the intelligence and mislead the American people about the threat in Iraq. Here’s what Tim Shorrock wrote about that dust up:

Tenet’s ties with contractors were underscored last week in a dispute between two groups of former CIA officials over Tenet’s legacy. On April 28, six former intelligence officers wrote to Tenet, saying he shared culpability with President Bush and Vice President Cheney for “the debacle in Iraq,” and suggesting he donate half the royalties from his book to Iraq war veterans and their families. All of the signatories had severed their ties to U.S. intelligence, although three of them, Phil Giraldi, Larry Johnson and Vince Cannistraro, work as consultants for news organizations, corporations and government agencies outside of intelligence.

A few days later, six recently retired officers responded. They called the first letter a “bitter, inaccurate and misleading attack” on Tenet and pointed out that it was drafted by officers who “had not served in the Agency for years.” Tenet, his supporters said, “literally led the nation’s counterterrorism fight.” And three of its six signatories were directly involved in that fight — as contractors. They included John Brennan of the Analysis Corp.; Cofer Black, Tenet’s former counterterrorism director and vice chairman of Blackwater, the private military contractor; and Robert Richer, the former deputy director of the CIA’s clandestine services. Richer recently left Blackwater to become the CEO of Total Intelligence, a new company formed with Black and other ex-CIA officials to provide intelligence services to corporations and government agencies.

In the immediate aftermath of 9-11 Brennan was in charge of the Terrorist Threat Integration Center (which was replaced subsequently by the National Counter Terrorism Center) and failed to give the U.S. State Department the correct statistics on the number of terrorist attacks in 2003. He forgot to count an entire month’s data. I discovered the error and alerted folks at State Department.

Professors Alan Krueger and David Laitin independently discovered the discrepancies and published an op-ed in the Washington Post. Here’s a link for a comprehensive article discussing that intelligence failure.

So you think I am being too hard on Brennan? Sure, anyone can make a mistake. However, he was back in the news in 2005. I learned in March of that year that the State Department was not going publish the CIA stats on terrorism because the number of attacks had dramatically increased and the Bush Administration thought that made it look like they were losing the war on terror. John Brennan was part of that effort to keep the truth from the American public. Here’s the piece I wrote to help draw attention to this issue back in 2005:

The numbers are in and the news is not good for U.S. efforts to contain and reduce the threat of international terrorism. 2004 marked the highest number of significant incidents of terrorism since the intelligence community started keeping statistics in 1968. (An incident is counted as significant if an attack results in the death, injury or kidnapping of one or more persons or property damage in excess of $10,000). Attacks jumped from 175 in 2003 to 651 in 2004. This surpasses the previous high of 273 significant attacks in 1985.

The bad news kept on coming. One thousand nine hundred and seven (1907) people died in international terrorist attacks last year. This marks the second highest death toll since 1968; falling short of the infamous record of 2001.

Unfortunately, former 9-11 Commission Staff Director, Phil Zelikow, and chief of the National Counter Terrorism Center, John Brennan, tried with some success to confuse the press and suggest that the numbers do not matter. In a deft display of obfuscation and spin Messrs. Zelikow and Brennan made several points. It started with Zelikow’s claim that:

The compilation of data about terrorist attacks is not a required part of the report, but traditionally had been provided by the State Department, going back to the years in which the State Department was basically the public voice of the U.S. Government on international terrorism, generally. . . . But what’s important for our purposes is what the law said the NCTC should do. It said the NCTC was the primary organization for analysis and integration of — and I’m quoting from the law now — “All intelligence possessed or acquired by the United States Government pertaining to terrorism or counterterrorism.” The law further stated that the NCTC would be the United States Government’s “shared knowledge bank on known and suspected terrorists and international terror groups, as well as their goals, strategies, capabilities, and networks of contact and support.” (Phil Zelikow)

State Department’s role as the lead for coordinating international terrorism was established by a National Security Decision Directive signed by President Reagan in early 1986. This was in response to an interagency fight that broke out during an effort to apprehend the terrorists responsible for the hijacking of the Achille Lauro cruise ship. While flying over Italy in late 1985 in pursuit of Abu Abbas, a State Department official and a CIA officer argued heatedly over who was in charge of the mission. Recognizing the need for a clear chain of command the Department of State was put in charge of coordinating the efforts of CIA, DOD, and FBI efforts to track and deal with terrorism. The first man put in charge of this effort was L. Paul (Jerry) Bremer.

Mr. Zelikow is misleading the media by asserting that the State Department “traditionally compiled the data”. That is simply not true. The State Department never was in charge of collecting or compiling the statistics. It simply coordinated the process of assembling the data in order to provide the Congress and the American people with a comprehensive view of international terrorist activity. Since 1986 the Counter Terrorism Center at the CIA had the task of compiling the data and writing the narrative analysis. Don’t take my word for it, just ask the former Chiefs of the Counter Terrorism Center starting with Dewey Claridge and ending with Cofer Black.

By splitting the statistics on terrorism from the country reports, Zelikow is creating the kind of stovepiping of information which the 9-11 Commission claimed helped undermine US efforts to detect and defeat Al Qaeda’s effort to launch their suicide attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon. There is nothing in the new law requiring this move.

John Brennan, the head of the National Counter Terrorism Center, made the unbelievable admission that when the CIA shifted responsibility for counting terrorist incidents to the Terrorist Threat Integration Center (TTIC) in the fall of 2003 only three part time people were assigned to the task. Brennan said:

To ensure a more comprehensive accounting of terrorist incidents, we in the NCTC significantly increased the level of effort from three part-time individuals to 10 full-time analysts, and we took a number of other steps to improve quality control and database management. This increased level of effort allowed a much deeper review of far more information and, along with Iraq, are the primary reasons for the significant growth in a number of terrorist incidents being reported.

The American people are asked to believe that nobody at TTIC understood in the aftermath of 2001 that we needed to keep a comprehensive count of terrorist events. Implicit in this criticism is a smear on the good work done previously at the Counter Terrorism Center. CTC did not consider counting terrorism events an afterthought. They used a sound methodology of monitoring news media reports, FBIS reports, and cables from US Embassies and Defense Attaches to identify possible acts of international terrorism. An act of violence did not necessarily mean that terrorism was involved. Instead expert analysts from CTC and State Department’s Bureau of Intelligence and Research (INR) would meet periodically to review and decide what incidents represented acts of international terrorism.

This process broke down when the responsibility for doing this was shifted from CTC and put under Mr. Brennan’s stewardship at the Terrorist Threat Integration Center in late 2003. Mr. Brennan in fact shares much of the responsibility for the debacle with the statistics that were misreported in the report issued in April 2004. He did not ensure that his part time employees could count.

With the beefed up work force at NCTC we now know that 10 analysts were involved in counting 651 significant international terrorist attacks in 2004. Geez, I guess that means it took each analyst one year to keep track of 65 attacks.

Brennan asks the media and the American people to believe that the rise in attacks is simply the result of better counting by more people. Not true. An independent data source from RAND-MIPT shows a similar dramatic rise in attacks and deaths. This is not an artifice of methodology. Something bad is going on out there.

Two countries account for a major portion of the increased terrorist activity—the Kashmir region of India and Iraq. With respect to Kashmir, it is important to note that since 1998 this area has consistently appeared in the appendix in Patterns of Global Terrorism that described significant incidents. I have used this data in briefing for foreign governments during that period to point out that not only was India being repeatedly attacked by Islamic jihadists (who were funded and trained by Pakistan), but that the people of Kashmir repeatedly suffered one of the highest death tolls of any country in the world from terrorist attacks. The sad fact is that media, and to a lesser extent the U.S. Government, tended to ignore these attacks.

It is worth recalling that the cruise missiles fired by President Clinton in August of 1998 in retaliation for the Al Qaeda bombing of the US Embassies in Kenya and Tanzania struck a camp in Afghanistan and killed members of one of the groups that carried out attacks in the Kashmir as well as two Pakistani intelligence officers. In the war against Islamic extremists Kashmir matters.

Brennan’s response on Iraq is more puzzling:

QUESTION: Do you regard the Iraq numbers that you just gave us — for which, thank you — as comparable? And the reason I ask is that I’ve got to figure that if there’s one piece of real estate that the U.S. intelligence community has devoted enormous resources to in the last two years, it’s got to be — two-and-a-half years — it’s Iraq. Therefore, do you think those figures are comparable, ‘03 to ‘02?
MR. BRENNAN: In terms of what the term you’re using — “comparable” — to sort of denote here, I’m not certain. The rigor that we applied worldwide for the 2004 data also applied to Iraq. So it was Iraq, Kashmir, and others. So that number, I think, is the result of exhaustive search and research on that. Also, as I pointed out, the number of civilians that have come not just from the United States, but also from other countries — the number of individuals who, in fact, are in different places in Iraq that have been involved in some of the attacks that have taken place there, I think that is the reason why, in fact, we’re seeing an increase in that number.

Although Brennan is not certain about the comparability of the numbers we do not have to rely on him. Data maintained by the Defense Intelligence Agency, which is reported on at least a weekly basis to the Secretary of Defense, shows clear unambiguous data that the level of terrorist activity in Iraq mushroomed in 2004. In fact, the highest level of attacks ever recorded in Iraq occurred in December 2004.

Iraq is relevant to the threat of international terrorism principally because it is serving as a drawing card for jihadists throughout the Islamic world. I have had recent discussions with senior government officials representing three countries in the Persian Gulf. To a man they were alarmed by the images coming out of Iraq showing US soldiers abusing muslim women and the shooting of unarmed insurgents. The perception of the United States as an invader is inciting terrorism in the region, not quelling it. Several commented on the perceived parallel of the U.S. presence in Iraq as comparable to what the Soviets did in Afghanistan during the 1980s. They worry that we are sowing the seeds of future jihadist terrorism.

The real news from the press conference of Messrs. Zelikow and Brennan is that they have not finished counting the incidents from last year and that the numbers are likely to go up when revised statistics are issued in June. Moreover, both conceded that events in Russia and Philippines, where several hundred were killed, were excluded from the data.

I welcome Mr. Brennan’s commitment to look at the methodology and recommend corrections. The failure to count attacks inside Russia by Chechen separatists, for example, needs to be re-examined. While ten years ago there was no evidence that the Chechen were receiving outside assistance, that is not the case today. In fact Chechen fighters in the battle of Anaconda in Afghanistan in March 2002 killed American soldiers. The Chechen movement has clear economic and military ties to international jihadists. In future reports it would be entirely appropriate to classify as international attacks something carried out by any group with established ties to groups outside of their country.

There is no single statistic that can tell us what is happening in the war on terrorism. Reporting multiple attacks does not necessarily mean that casualties will follow. As Brennan and Zelikow correctly note most of the casualties were caused by a relatively small number of attacks. But, those attacks were carried out by Islamic extremists that have clear ties with Al Qaeda.

In light of this it is breathtaking that someone with Zelikow’s intellect can argue that numbers don’t matter. The following exchange occurred during the Wednesday afternoon press conference:

QUESTION: Um, 651 attacks in 2004, compared to 175 attacks in your report in 2003. That’s a sharp increase in terrorist attacks. What does that tell us about the war on terrorism — the global war on terrorism and the cooperation? . . . .
MR. ZELIKOW: I mean, the short answer is it doesn’t tell us anything about the war on terror. The statistics are simply not valid for any inference about the progress, either good or bad, of American policy. I think that’s the honest answer. If you just look at what the statistics are and what kind of inferences can legitimately be drawn from them, I can’t come up with a defensible inference.

Here’s the bottom line. Numbers do matter. If more people are being killed in Iraq and India then we need to ensure that US policy for combating terrorism is focused on those areas. To pretend that the threat of terrorism is as great in Brazil as in Iraq is delusional. And to pretend that objective facts say nothing about the reality of terrorism perhaps shows us why the US effort to deal with Islamic extremists is going in the wrong direction.

Friends in the intelligence community tell me that Zelikow, when confronted with the higher numbers, tried to have those numbers suppressed. Once word of this leaked out Zelikow shifted gears to damage control and constructed the artificial and misleading explanation that NCTC is now doing something new that was never done before. Oh yeah, and it is mandated by law.

Sadly this simply shows how uninformed Zelikow is about the history of counter terrorism policies and procedures during the last 25 years, notwithstanding his post as staff director of the 9-11 Commission. Maybe this explains why the Commission had such difficulty identifying who failed in their duty to prevent those terrible attacks in September 2001. Phil Zelikow by his own admission has trouble making sense of numbers.

So you thought Barack Obama would bring change to the abuses at CIA? Think again. He’s relying on folks who helped debase and embarrass the CIA. That’s not change I want to believe in.