Bernd Debusmann

The world is becoming ever more dangerous. Threats to the United States are multiple and complex. Just think of terrorists, rogue states, dangers arising from Middle East revolutions, cyber attacks, Iran’s nuclear ambitions, the rising power of China. The list goes on.

It makes for a world “more unpredictable, more volatile and more dangerous,” as Secretary of Defense Leon Panetta has put it. According to polls, most of America’s foreign policy elite thinks the world is as dangerous, or more dangerous than it was during the Cold War.

This belief, write the foreign policy analysts Micah Zenko and Michael Cohen, shapes debates on U.S. foreign policy and frames the public’s understanding of international affairs.

“There is just one problem,” they write in the latest issue of Foreign Affairs, “it is simply wrong. The world that the United States inhabits today is a remarkably safe and secure place. It is a world with fewer violent conflicts than at virtually any other point in history.”

They add: “The United States faces no plausible existential threats, no great power rival, and no near-term competition for the role of global hegemon. The U.S. military is the world’s most powerful.” And though there are a variety of international challenges, they pose little risk to the overwhelming majority of American citizens, say the two scholars.

Take terrorism: Of the 13,816 people killed by terrorist attacks in 2010, only 15 (or 0.1 percent were U.S. citizens, according to the two scholars. Between 2006 and 2010, terrorist attacks world-wide declined by almost 20 percent and the number of deaths by 35 percent.

Zenko and Cohen argue that there is a disparity between foreign threats and domestic threat-mongering that America’s political and policy elites are unwilling to recognize and even more unwilling to integrate into national security decision-making.

Why? Hyping threats serves the interests of both political parties, and more so in an election year. Republicans turn up the volume of warnings to better attack Democrats’ alleged weakness in dealing with threats. Democrats exaggerate threats as a protection against Republican attacks.

The chronic exaggeration of threats, argue Zenko and Cohen, also serves as a justification for huge budgets for the military and America’s intelligence agencies.

Result: the militarization of foreign policy, a skewed allocation of funds and not enough emphasis on non-military national security tools.

Challenging what has become conventional wisdom, the two write that “American foreign policy needs fewer people who can jump out of airplanes and more who can convene round-table discussions and lead negotiations.”

Yet, the budgets of the two principal agencies of “soft,” rather than military power, the U.S. Agency for International Development and the U.S. Department of State, pale in comparison with the Pentagon. Its enormous budget “not only wastes previous resources; it also warps national security thinking and policy-making.”

THE ONE-PERCENT DOCTRINE

Will the two scholars’ thought-provoking arguments prompt policy-makers to rethink? Probably not, but the fact that their piece appears in the house organ of America’s foreign policy establishment will spark debate – and no doubt criticism from defenders of the so-called 1.0-percent doctrine, the notion that no effort must be spared to counter a threat even if there is only a 1.0-percent chance that it will materialise.

Counter-intuitive though it may seem, given a daily diet of news on bloodshed from places around the world, Zenko and Cohen are not alone in insisting that the world has become a safer place.

Last year, Steven Pinker, a psychology professor at Harvard, published an influential book, “The Better Angels of our Nature,” that traces the decline of violence over the centuries.

“Believe it or not – and I know that most people do not – violence has declined over long stretches of time,” Pinker writes. “And today we may be living in the most peaceable era in our species’ existence.” That decline is an unmistakable development, visible on scales from millennia to years, he says.

Pinker admits that his assertion may strike some as “between hallucinatory and obscene”, given that the new century began with more than 3,000 people killed in the attacks on New York and Washington and that wars inIraq, Afghanistan, and Darfur killed thousands more.

But relatively speaking, the beginning of the 21st century and all of the 20th (despite two world wars and the holocaust) featured less bloodletting than earlier eras. In the 17th century, for example, the Thirty Years’ War reduced the population of Germany by a third.

Do such numeral comparisons change perceptions? Not according to Pinker. “Our cognitive faculties predispose us to believe that we live in violent times,” he writes in the preface to his book, “especially when they are stoked by media that follow the watchword ‘if it bleeds, it leads.’”

Sometime in the next three decades, the U.S. military will be able to field robots that can make life-and-death decisions, operating without human supervision thanks to software and superfast computers.

But the technology to get to that point is running far ahead of considerations of the ethics of robotic warfare.

Or, as Peter Singer, a Brookings Institution scholar who has written widely on military robots has put it — technology grows at an exponential pace, human institutions at a linear, if not glacial, pace. That echoes an observation by the late science fiction writer Isaac Asimov that “science gathers knowledge faster than society gathers wisdom.”

The subject merits debate after the January 26 announcement that the Pentagon is planning to trim America’s armed forces by 100,000 while boosting the global fleet of armed drones, America’s most effective tool for the targeted killing of anti-American militants. So far, the drones are remotely operated, by pilots on bases in the United States.

But for a glimpse of how U.S. military thinkers see the future of the drone program, an 82-page report by the Air Force is recommended reading. Entitled “Unmanned Aircraft Systems Flight Plan 2009-2047“, it says that “advances in AI (Artificial Intelligence) will enable systems to make combat decisions and act within legal and policy constraints without necessarily requiring human input.”

Rather than just supporting humans in what the military calls the OODA loop (for observe, orient, decide, and act), drones will be able to “fully participate” in each step of the process. Humans will no longer be “in the loop” but “on the loop” — able to veto decisions taken by the flying robot — if time permits in the split-second environment of combat.

While they make more headlines than other systems, drones are just part of an American inventory that has grown explosively over the past decade and includes ground-based robots whose tasks range from defusing improvised explosives devices and shooting down incoming artillery shells to evacuating wounded soldiers. From virtually zero, the drone fleet grew to more than 7,500 and ground based robots to an estimated 15,000.

“Authorizing a machine to make lethal combat decisions is contingent upon political and military leaders resolving legal and ethical questions,” the paper states. “Ethical decisions and policy decisions must take place in the near term in order to guide the development of future capabilities, rather than allowing the development to take its own path.”

In other words, let’s sort out ethics and policies before letting the robotics genie fully out of the bottle. It’s a point made with increasing alarm by a number of civilian scientists, robotics experts and ethicists who fear, among other things, that sending more robots and fewer humans into wars will make starting them easier.

REMOVING BARRIERS TO WAR

“We possess a technology that removes the last political barriers to war,” Singer, author of Wired for War, wrote in an essay in the New York Times this month. “The strongest appeal of unmanned systems is that we don’t have to send someone’s son or daughter into harms way. But when politicians can avoid the political consequences of the condolence letter — and the impact that military casualties have on voters and on the news media — they no longer treat the previously weighty matters of war and peace the same way.”

This is a view shared by the International Committee for Robot Arms Control (ICRAC), a group formed in 2009 to press for an international debate on the regulation and control of armed military robots. ICRAC believes that the robotics revolution of warfare deserves the kind of debate that led to treaties on the use of poison gas or the ban on landmines.

None of the questions that prompted the formation of the group have been answered. For example: who would be accountable if an autonomous robot killed civilians? The manufacturer? The field commander in whose area the robot operates? The programmers who wrote the software? The procurement officer? The president?

The Geneva-based International Committee of the Red Cross has begun looking into the implications of robots in war but those favoring more regulations should not expect support from the administration of Barack Obama, who has presided over a dramatic increase in the number of drone strikes on targets in Pakistan since he took office in 2009.

That campaign, run by the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) rather than the military, killed dozens of al Qaeda fighters and other militants using the rugged mountains on the Pakistani side of the border with Afghanistan as a safe haven. The strikes also killed civilians and stoked anti-American hatred in a country of 180 million that is of strategic importance to the United States. There has been similar blow-back in Yemen and Somalia.

This is one of the reasons why some prominent experts on military robots favor slowing the pace of development. In December, philosopher Patrick Lin of the California Polytechnic State University ended a briefing to CIA officials with a line robotic warfare enthusiasts might do well to remember:

“Integrating ethics may be more cautious and less agile than a ‘do first, think later’ (or worse ‘do first, apologize later’) approach but it helps us win the moral high ground – perhaps the most strategic of battlefields.”

PHOTO: U.S. Air Force First Lieutenant Zachary Goff (L), and Chris Allen, a student from Ohio State University, operate the control console to run a test flight of a drone at the Micro Air Vehicles lab at Wright Patterson Air Force Base in Dayton, Ohio, July 11, 2011. REUTERS/Skip Peterson

Bernd Debusmann is a Reuters columnist. The opinions expressed are his own.

As the clock ticks towards the end of America’s military presence in Iraq, there are increasingly dire warnings of a humanitarian disaster unless steps are taken to protect more than 3,000 Iranian dissidents living in a camp in Iraq. How closely is Washington listening?

Gloomy forecasts for the fate of the exiles at Camp Ashraf, north of Baghdad near the border with Iran, have come from Amnesty International, a long string of prominent former U.S. government officials, retired generals, and members of the European Parliament. One of them, Struan Stevenson, predicts “a Srebrenica-style massacre,” a reference to the 1995 killing of more than 8,000 Bosnian Muslims during the Bosnian War.

Stevenson, who is head of the European Parliament’s delegation on Iraq, issued his warning this week in an op-ed in the conservative Washington Times newspaper. Also this week, Amnesty International said there was a “serious risk of severe human rights violations” if the Iraqi government went ahead with plans to force the closure of the camp by the end of December.

On a more subdued note, the administration of President Barack Obama, long silent on the exiles, is also expressing concern. U.S. officials, according to a State Department spokesman, are impressing on the Iraqi government the importance of treating the residents of Camp Ashraf humanely.

How seriously the Iraqis are taking American exhortations is open to doubt. U.S. influence in Iraq is waning rapidly while that of Iran is rising.

Iran’s supreme leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, has repeatedly urged Iraq to expel the exiles. They belong to the Mujahedin-e-Khalq — or the People’s Mujahideen Organization of Iran (PMOI) — once a powerful armed group that staged raids into Iran between 1986 and 2001, when it renounced violence. The PMOI handed over its weapons to U.S. invasion forces after the fall of Saddam Hussein in 2003.

After being vetted for possible involvement in terrorist activities, the PMOI members at Ashraf were granted “Protected Person” status under the Fourth Geneva convention and the U.S. military assumed control of the camp. That was a bizarre twist even by the standards of the Middle East because the PMOI remained on the U.S. government’s list of terrorist organizations.

American protection of the camp ended in January 2009, when the U.S. transferred control to the Iraqi government. According to testimony to a Congressional hearing, that transfer followed an explicit and written assurance by the Iraqi government that it would respect the protected status of Ashraf residents.

Just seven months later, Iraqi security forces stormed into the camp, whose inhabitants include around 1,000 women. In the ensuing clashes, at least nine residents were killed and scores injured. On April 8, 2011, Iraqi security forces moved into the camp again, using what Amnesty International termed “grossly excessive force and live fire.” Thirty-six residents were killed and more than 300 wounded.

So much for respecting assurances to the Americans.

LACK OF RESPECT

That lack of respect, prominent U.S. supporters of the PMOI say, has its roots in a 1997 decision by the Clinton administration to put the PMOI on the State Department’s list of foreign terrorist organizations. In the words of Louis Freeh, who was director of the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) at the time, the move was part of “a fruitless political ploy to encourage a dialogue with Tehran” without evidence that the group posed a threat to the United States.

In an op-ed article in the New York Times, he added: “Tragically, the State Department’s unjustified terrorist label makes the Mujahedin’s enemies in Tehran and Baghdad feel as if they have license to kill and trample on the written guarantees of protection given to the Ashraf residents by the United States.”

There is an obvious irony in the fact that practically the only thing the American and Iranian governments have in common is their designation of the PMOI as a terrorist organization. But that has done nothing to accelerate a State Department review of the label ordered by a federal court in Washington on July 16, 2010.

(The European Union took the group off its list in 2009. Britain did so in 2008, on a court ruling that called the designation “perverse.”)

Fifteen months later, Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, in an interview with a Voice of America program in Farsi, noted that the EU had taken the PMOI off its terrorist list “after a very thorough assessment” that came to the conclusion there was no evidence of terrorist activity. “We’re still assessing the evidence here in the United States.”

Judging from the snail’s pace of that assessment, there is no sense of urgency about the matter. That’s something the Obama administration might come to regret.