Two Words on National Security

I recently came across two interesting bits of national security information on the internet. The first was this interesting website on strategic communication. “Now what,” you rightly ask, “is that?” Well, one of the many useful things the website provides is definitions. In the case of this particular term, it refers to:

“The synchronized coordination of statecraft, public affairs, public diplomacy, military information operations, and other activities... to advance US foreign policy objectives.”

In other words, strategic communication involves making sure that your messages to foreign governments and populations are clear and consistent. All too often, American administrations from either party will forget about key components of strategic communication, or the whole thing. Messages from different governmental entities are frequently contradictory. Often they focus on traditional state-to-state diplomacy, to the neglect of public diplomacy. And they usually ignore the propaganda value of our deeds.

The Strategic Communication website is still a work in progress, and looks raggedy in sections, but there are a lot of good resources already, and I expect more to come.

The second thing I came across was this book, How to Break a Terrorist: The US Interrogators Who Used Brains, Not Brutality, to Take Down the Deadliest Man in Iraq by Matthew Alexander. I have not read it yet, but I am intrigued by the title and the reviews I have seen. Cruel and inhuman practices have caused many people to turn up their noses at the term "interrogation" - and rightfully so. But Alexander reminds us that torture is not the only means of obtaining information from captives. Indeed, smarter techniques not only avoid brutalizing the subject, but are also more likely to produce quality information. That is a lesson often lost in the polemics about interrogation.


This post first appeared on Statecraft & Security on Sunday 27 September 2009.

My Kind of Guy

I have recently acquired a new hero in my pantheon: Rory Stewart. He was born in Hong Kong in 1973; his father was a diplomat, his mother an academic. He mostly grew up in Malaysia, where he and his father would encounter tigers on their camping trips. Stewart attended Eton, served as an officer in the Black Watch, and then studied history, politics, philosophy and economics at Oxford, where he also tutored Princes William and Harry. He joined the Foreign Office and was posted to Indonesia for two years and then to Montenegro. However, a short while later he decided to take an 18 month sabbatical and walk across Asia. (Well, Turkey to Bangladesh. Close enough.) This provided the material for his first book, The Places in Between. He then returned to the Foreign Office and, at the age of 30, became acting governor of an Iraqi province, providing the material for his second book, The Prince of the Marshes: And Other Occupational Hazards of a Year in Iraq. Back in Afghanistan, he founded The Turquoise Mountain Foundation, a non-profit organization which seeks to foster traditional Afghan craft as a means of economic and social regeneration. He has been teaching at the Kennedy School of Government at Harvard since 2008 and is the Director of the School's Carr Center for Human Rights Policy. He is 38 years old.

I first came across this interview with the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation, but I couldn't figure out how to embed it. The one below is perhaps even better: