Hum's the word

Human stories from a world in conflict. No Images? [Click here]( March 15, 2019 Editor’s note: We are trying some new features this week in our Global Security newsletter and would like to know what you think. Please [take our survey](. Introducing Critical State (Beta), a partnership between The World and Inkstick Media. If you read just one thing ... Last week, President Donald Trump [rescinded]( part of an Obama-era executive order requiring the intelligence community to create a yearly, public report of deaths resulting from US counterterrorism drone strikes. The Pentagon will continue reporting on drone strikes it undertakes as part of “military operations,” but those do not include strikes directed by the CIA in places like Yemen and Somalia. The lack of reporting is concerning to the policy analysis community because tracking civilian casualties is a necessary part of understanding the consequences of American counterterrorism efforts. But also because it means the public will lose even more understanding of whether and why drone strikes have increased dramatically in [some areas]( under the Trump administration. ## ... if you read more than one thing Today in appearances of impropriety The Pentagon is now [in business]( with Palmer Luckey, one of Silicon Valley’s most prolific supporters of various right-wing causes. His start-up, Anduril Industries, won a contract to work on Project Maven, DoD’s attempt to bring artificial intelligence to the battlefield. - Anduril is creating virtual reality technology to allow soldiers to visualize terrain and targets in three dimensions. The technology, Luckey claims, is already in use at various bases and on the US-Mexico border. - Luckey, who made his money by developing the Oculus Rift virtual reality system and then selling the company to Facebook for $2 billion, got his entry into politics in part through [Holocaust-denier]( and far-right activist [Charles Johnson]( — Johnson [arranged]( for Luckey to meet then-Interior Secretary Ryan Zinke to pitch an idea for a border wall between the US and Mexico. It is unclear if that idea is the same one now in use by the Pentagon. When The Daily Beast asked Johnson for more information, he instead suggested the reporter should attempt the anatomically impossible. China backs Pakistan in UNSC The ongoing confrontation between India and Pakistan does not take place in a vacuum, a fact underlined this week when India once again [attempted]( to have Jaish-e-Mohammad founder Masood Azhar designated as a “global terrorist” by the United Nations Security Council. JeM claimed responsibility for the February attack on Indian military forces in Kashmir that set off the current crisis, but that wasn’t enough to keep China from vetoing the designation. - This is actually the fourth time China has voted to keep Azhar off the list, a favor it does for Pakistan, one of its closest allies. A designation would mean that Pakistan would have to freeze Azhar's assets and keep him in the country, which would be embarrassing given the purportedly close relations between JeM and Pakistani security services. - The vote is significant as a marker of how far the often-tense India-China relationship hasn’t come, despite efforts on both sides to shore up ties. That China would continue covering for JeM at Pakistan’s behest after such a brazen attack shows that the Modi government has more work to do to complete its “[reset](” with China. ## Deep Dive This week’s Deep Dive returns to the work of MIT political scientist Vipin Narang, this time in concert with his University of Chicago colleague Paul Staniland, on the roots of Indian foreign policy. In an [article]( in the fall 2018 issue of Security Studies, Narang and Staniland use cases from India to develop a theory of why politicians in democracies sometimes make major efforts to move a foreign policy issue forward and how they are constrained in doing so by their constituents. Narang and Staniland rate foreign policy issues on two scales: salience and clarity. Salience is a measure of “how much the average voter cares” about a particular issue. Clarity is a measure of how easily a politician can be blamed for messing up an issue — or take credit for a success. In American politics, for example, nuclear security would be a low salience, high clarity issue. Voters don’t spend a lot of time thinking about it, but if nuclear weapons [accidentally dropped]( on rural North Carolina hog farms in 1961 had exploded, it’s hard to imagine that the president would have avoided blame. Different mixtures of salience and clarity generate different “accountability environments.” Narang and Staniland call the low salience, high clarity accountability environment “bounded flexibility” because it gives politicians incentive and opportunity to take positive action, but produces little effort from anyone else. Narang and Staniland, however, are less interested in protecting American pork than they are in understanding how India makes its foreign policy decisions. One particularly high salience case right now is the issue of how India responds to cross-border terrorism from Pakistan. They code cross-border terrorism as having high salience and high clarity — polling shows that Indians consider Pakistan to be a major threat, and, as a military threat, any missteps will be laid at the feet of the prime minister and their government. That puts the issue in the “high responsiveness” quadrant on Narang and Staniland’s framework. That means they predict that Indian leaders should put a lot of effort into both managing policies toward Pakistan and understanding public opinion about what those policies should be. History largely validates this prediction. In previous confrontations between India and Pakistan, Narang and Staniland report, Indian prime ministers exerted very close control over military responses, including current Prime Minister Narendra Modi. When Pakistani militants killed 17 Indian soldiers in a grenade attack in 2016, Modi and his National Security Adviser Ajit Doval “personally devised and ordered what ended up being known as the ‘surgical strike’ retaliation, which involved Indian special forces … destroying several militant compounds.” The “accountability environment” framework helps us understand how India is currently responding to its crisis with Kashmir, and how democracies broadly engage with questions of foreign policy. In a time when the salience of terrorism crossing the border from Pakistan could hardly be higher, the response becomes a political endeavor, perhaps even more than a military one. Show me the receipts Blame game over aid leaves Syrian refugees stranded in desert 'death' camp Shawn Carrié and Asmaa Al Omar [contacted]( refugees at the Rukban Camp in Syria, just east of the Jordanian border. The camp, home to over 40,000 people displaced by the Syrian civil war, is in dire condition due to a diplomatic deadlock. The United Nations has aid for the camp both in Damascus and just two miles across the border in Jordan, but neither the Syrian nor Jordanian governments will allow aid shipments through. The American military base at al-Tanf, just 15 miles from the camp, has also refused to transport the aid, leaving Rukban residents effectively trapped in the desert. [Learn more >]( [A woman scrubs her rug in the desert refugee settlement of Rukban.] How women wage war Jessica Trisko Darden [makes the case]( that the roles women take on in ISIS implicate them far more deeply in the group’s violence than claims of being “just a housewife” would suggest. Drawing on research for her [new book]( on women in insurgencies, written with Alexis Henshaw and Ora Szekely, Darden points out that women in rebel groups often move seamlessly between combat and non-combat roles. That fluidity has allowed some women to duck post-conflict justice for war crimes, and Darden suggests governments should be wary of allowing women veterans of ISIS to do the same. [Learn more >]( Where's the 'swagger' at the US State Department? Matthew Bell [took the commentariat’s temperature]( about President Donald Trump’s diplomatic record. Tufts University professor Dan Drezner told Bell that the administration’s foreign engagement has been “an unmitigated disaster,” pointing out that the White House submitted a budget request this week that would slash State Department funding by over a quarter. Reliable contrarian and Atlantic Council deputy director Matthew Kroenig told Bell that the president’s foreign policy team is doing “better than they’re getting credit for,” largely due to improved relations with Israel and the Gulf states. [Learn more >]( Well played Reporters like to complain that they don’t write their own headlines. This week offered some evidence that they probably should, both because they can be [pretty amazing at it](, and because the professional headline writers can end up with some [real clunkers](. ## Critical State subscribers read Erin Connolly’s [excellent essay]( on how the Pentagon is trying to avoid unsettling associations with Hollywood horrors in its artificial intelligence research. The Air Force Research Laboratory, uh, [didn’t](. ## [This one]( might require a little explanation. In 1988, political scientist Robert Putnam wrote probably the most-cited article in international relations, which was a neat trick given that Putnam isn’t an international relations specialist. The article is called “[Diplomacy and Domestic Politics: The Logic of Two-Level Games](,” and it offers a framework for thinking about the complex dynamics between domestic politics and international systems. It’s hard to lose the game at both levels, but as Professor Saunders points out in her tweet, the UK is [pulling it off](. ## Indeed, the biggest international news of the week is probably the ongoing train crash that is Brexit, but we’ve saved coverage of it for Well Played because the best Brexit analysis we’ve seen can be found on [this Twitter thread](. Enjoy. Thanks for reading. [Please let us know what you think]( of this new approach to the Global Security newsletter. Public Radio International (PRI) is a global nonprofit media company focused on the intersection of journalism and engagement to effect positive change in people’s lives. We create a more informed, empathetic and connected world by sharing powerful stories, encouraging exploration, connecting people and cultures, and creating opportunities to help people take informed action on stories that inspire them. 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