Mumbai, One Year Ago

On this day, the anniversary of the terrorist attacks in Mumbai (Bombay), India, I watched the excellent HBO documentary Terror in Mumbai.  The film pieces together the complete chronology of the 60-hour attack and includes much footage of the terrorists in action as captured by CCTV cameras.  Even more amazingly, the documentary presents much of the dialogue of the terrorists as they were carrying out their murders.

How?  As it turns out, months before the attack, Indian intelligence had planted SIM cards in Pakistan with known terrorist group, Lashkar-e-Taiba, who would be revealed as the masterminds of the attack.  When the attacks began, security officials realized that three of the attackers were using tagged SIM cards, and authorities were able to monitor their conversations in real-time!

Throughout, the terrorists were in contact with their Lashkar handlers, and Terror in Mumbai reveals the chilling details of these conversations.  The terrorists--all young, naive kids--are heartlessly urged to kill as many people as possible, informed that their mission must end in their own deaths (or they won't go to heaven), and fed assurances that God will reward them for their actions.

For me, there was an additional personal reaction to watching the attacks replayed.  My parents, sister, and I were in Mumbai, where my dad's family lives, only a few months before the attacks.  We stayed in the famous Taj Mahal Hotel, perhaps the city's most iconic landmark.  Watching footage of the attackers shoot up the lobby, throw grenades in the tower, and kick down doors to shoot terrified guests is still as surreal now as it was when I was glued to CNN last year watching it all unfold.

Terror in Mumbai, brief though it is (only about an hour long), is a revealing look at many things: the ambitious jihadi aspirations of the Lashkar-e-Taiba, their manipulation of impressionable youth into an ideology of hate and violence, the incompetence of the Mumbai police when the attacks started, the heartbreaking human toll of the attacks (including many Muslim victims), and a damning indication of how groups initally set-up by Pakistani intelligence (ISI) to serve as proxies against India in Kashmir have spiraled out of their handlers' control.

Given how simple it was for this type of terrorist act to be carried out (no hijacking of airliners, just gun-wielding young kids in t-shirts and jeans) it's scary to think how easily such a scenario could be replicated--in India, the U.S., or anywhere in the world.  Fareed Zakaria, who narrated Terror in Mumbai, importantly points out that combating this enemy is about more than just foreign policy or military action.  We also have to fight the conditions of hopelessness that allow our enemies to attract followers to nihilist acts.

The presence of a non-fundamentalist education to teach young people, and a society that provides gainful employment (and thus a viable future instead of a sense of failure) are as instrumental as anything else in the war on terrorism.

Time to Step Our Game Up

Much of the coverage of President Obama's visit to China this week has reminded me that many in this country still view China through an outdated prism.  Americans see China as many things: a burgeoning economic titan, a source of cheap labor and manufacturing, a communist dictatorship with a bleak human rights record and a zeal for censorship.

But what is often ignored is how the Chinese people see China.  The majority see their country doing very well, with an economic transformation providing opportunities unthinkable a generation ago.  David Brooks noted this week that "eighty-six percent of Chinese believe their country is headed in the right direction"!  They see that China has a legitimate claim to deserving its traditional name as the "Middle Kingdom", or center of the world.

This is even though China's Communist Party has only provided incremental political liberalization for its people despite an embrace of modernization and globalization.  Far from being a problem, the country's economic success has only emboldened its rulers and entrenched them in their positions.

Anyone who's been hoping since the end of the Cold War that Western-style democracy would come to China should realize that China will continue to go its own way.  To me it's a silly question of semantics whether to drop the prefixes "potential" or "future" in front of "superpower" to describe China.  Just note that the one undisputed superpower, the United States, is a debtor to China.

Anecdotally too, I've walked around the Pudong area of Shanghai and thought to myself "this is what the future looks like".  That assessment, back in 2004, seemed primitive when I spent a week in Hong Kong last year, and was positively staggered at the cleanliness and efficiency of the city, their impressive new airport, the beautiful new bridges, and the sleek, intuitive MTR subway system that blows away the creaky NYC subway and even my beloved DC Metro.  (If there's one pressing need I wish was the top of our country's priority list, it's the infrastructure, stupid!)

Of course, the U.S.'s major economic strengths--the fostering of innovation, commitment to free markets, and the best higher education system in the world--continue to make it the key player on the world stage.  Nonetheless, data about income inequality or our country's struggling public schools, to name just a couple examples, should convince anyone of the need to step our game up.

How to do so is worthy of discussion in a future post.  For now, I'd recommend reading Michael Porter--famous to business school students and consultants everywhere for, among other things, developing the "Porter's Five Forces" framework--who has the best succinct analysis of what we need to do that I've come across: "Why America Needs an Economic Strategy".

Defending "Goldmine" Sachs?

Earlier this week, The Times of London published a much-read article on Goldman Sachs that featured an extensive interview with the company's CEO, Lloyd Blankfein.  Blankfein drew much attention for a quote in the article, said light-heartedly, in which he claimed to be "doing God's work".

Predictably, many people didn't see or care for the humor there--elsewhere in the article, an unnamed Goldman employee wryly notes, "We don't club baby seals.  We club babies."  Across the blogosphere and throughout the media, criticism of Goldman has continued to grow in recent months.

Because Goldman is indisputably the king of Wall Street, and because much attention has been placed on prominent ex-Goldman leaders in key government positions, the firm is a lightning rod for criticism during the current financial crisis.  Yet, bombastic quotes aside, the main impression I came away with after reading the article was a sense of reinforcement in my belief that Goldman is simply smarter and better at what they do than anyone else out there.

Truth is, even before the financial system's implosion, Goldman was more successful and more competent than its competitors.  Its acumen at realizing the severity of the sub-prime mortgage crisis early on is just one example--the article notes "When the credit crunch hit, [Goldman's] losses in the mortgage sector were only $1.7 billion, lower than any other big investment bank. UBS lost $58 billion."  It should also be pointed out that Goldman never underwrote anywhere near the amount of bad mortgage debt as did competitors like Citigroup and Merrill Lynch, and Goldman still hedged its risk in order to limit its losses and avoid catastrophe.

Charges against Goldman of illegal market manipulation or of having sinister influence over government policy are pure paranoia.  Yes, Goldman has benefited handsomely as a result of the banking industry bailout.  But, as Blankfein points out, Main Street needs Wall Street in order to generate economic growth.  Huge paychecks and bonuses?  Well, Goldman makes gigantic profits, and the bonuses make up only a small percentage of those.  Hey, Tiger Woods also makes a boatload of money.

Well, it's on that issue of compensation that I'm sympathetic to the critics, not just of Goldman, but of the entire banking industry.  On the one hand, I believe that that these companies should be allowed to determine their own compensation plans and reward success as they see fit.  On the other hand, the Wall Street banks make their huge profits (which enable their huge bonuses) by placing enormously risky bets--bets which they know are covered by the government if they bet poorly.  Since the government can't afford to lose Wall Street, Wall Street can play fast and loose.

I think the issue at the heart of the matter is how we view our economy.  We are comfortable with the idea of business offering tangible goods and straightforward services, relatively easy to quantify and categorize and explain.  We are far less comfortable with the idea of money made on paper, from the endless buying and selling and re-shuffling of assets and debt and commodities and securities.  To the casual observer, it's just money being created out of thin air.  Forget slamming the mighty Goldman Sachs for being the best player at this game, the real question at hand is whether it's sound to have an economy so dependent on this type of operation.

I don't know the answer to that, but unfortunately I think there won't be serious discussion on this topic, or it will be drowned out by typical class-warfare sentiments.

Video Games are Big Business

I'm not much of a video game player--I don't have an Xbox, Playstation, or Wii in my apartment, and my gaming is limited to a rare bit of Madden or the like at a friend's place. Yet in recent years, it's no secret that video games have gone from being the pastime of kids and nerds to being in the mainstream--titles like Madden, Grand Theft Auto, and Guitar Hero are all centerpieces of pop culture. Not only that, they're a big business.

My eyes popped at an AP headline today that said "'Call of Duty' game sells $310M in 24 hours". That is referring to a new game called Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 2, which apparently sold a staggering 4.7 million copies in North America and Britain on its first day on sale. The $310 million is revenue from only those regions, not even total worldwide sales, but it still makes this game the "biggest-selling launch in the history of entertainment".

Wow. That's a bona-fide blockbuster, and far more so than any Hollywood theatrical release. By comparison, the biggest movie opening of 2009 was Transformers 2, which made "only" $109 million its first weekend. It's the only movie released this year that has a total gross more than Modern Warfare 2's opening, so even though movies nowadays often rely on DVD sales for half their revenue, there's no question this game has put up some serious numbers. View this as a sign of a shift away from the traditionally dominant players in the entertainment industry.

Unsustainable Dysfunction

In today's New York Times, Singaporean academic Kishore Mahbubani writes with barely-concealed smugness over the "retreat of the West", which is "quite inept at managing its economies", while America in particular has suffered a "loss of moral authority".

Though I believe it would be as presumptuous to count the West out now as were those who believed in Western unipolarity after the Cold War, one line in particular in Mahbubani's article troubled me immensely: "respect for Western practices will diminish, unless Western performance in governance improves again." Immediately I thought of my growing concern over the dysfunctional nature of American government. For some time now, I have become increasingly doubtful of our government's ability to tackle some of the most challenging problems our country faces.

In the current climate of hyper-partisanship, both major political parties and most of their prominent leaders treat their role in governing as if it were a game. The media is mostly complicit to this, when it's not an active participant. Rare is the elected official with a proper and coherent sense of purpose with the ability and desire to promote the national interest first. On issue after issue, there is a void of leadership and/or realistic solutions. Instead of constructive dialogue, the vast majority of what is said in Congress is a waste of everyone's time.

The current political battle over health care is just one example. Regardless of political views, anyone can agree that promoting access to health care for a greater number of citizens is a good thing--the question, of course, is how to achieve that goal. This weekend, the House passed a bill after overcoming months of dithering sidetracked not by the proposal of viable alternatives but by distractions that included (seriously) claims that "death panels" were out to execute senior citizens.

Now, the bill comes to the Senate, where it is... dead. Inaction is what the Senate is good for these days, where neither rigid adherence to ideological doctrine or compromise and negotiation is enough to muster up the 60+ votes actually needed to pass a bill. As the Washington Post's Steven Pearlstein noted today, the perversity is that "it would take 60 votes to pass a bill that included the public option and 60 votes to pass one without it".

Health care is just one area where we as a country face challenges, but there are several others, and they are not limited to only one party's pet causes. Where is the political will to implement an energy plan that reduces our dependence on foreign oil and improves the environment? Who has the foresight to realize our national infrastructure and transportation system is aging, falling apart, and already inferior to several other countries? Where is the courage to meaningfully reform and improve the education system? Who has any realistic ideas as to how to deal with entitlement spending? Where is the concern over enormous budget deficits, enormous I.O.U.s to foreign lenders, and an increasingly competitive global economy?

Ultimately, of course, the blame for failure or the credit for averting disaster is not so much on the politicians as it is on the American public who elects them. At some point, the American public will have to decide it's time to Get Serious. For real. I don't know what it will take to bring about the change in attitude so that we can tune out the talk radio hosts and cable squawkeres and have sober, serious, meaningful action take place in Washington. I thought it would have been 9/11, but I was wrong. It could have been the "once in a generation" financial crisis, but that still produced an economic stimulus bill which was more like a discretionary spending wish list. So what will it take?

I don't think Mahbubani will be right about American decline. I certainly don't want him to be right. But I'm wondering how much longer we can continue to ignore and delay serious action on the greatest challenges this country is facing.

Do-Gooders for Afghanistan and Iraq?

Among the ranks of my fellow recent college graduates are many, including some of my good friends, who have chosen to dedicate a year, two, or more of their lives to social improvement programs such as the Peace Corps and Teach For America. These people are among the best and brightest of their generation, not to mention the most motivated and unselfish.

Meanwhile our country is involved in massive reconstruction efforts in Iraq and Afghanistan. As we have found out in both countries, the larger share of fighting a war has nothing to do with military combat at all. In Iraq and Afghanistan, a massive rebuilding effort is needed to tackle challenges related to infrastructure, education, public institutions, and human rights.

To me, it seems obvious that here is a situation that is fertile ground for civilian assistance (our military does a great job but they can't do it all!), particularly through the volunteer efforts of smart, motivated Americans, and especially young people. Yet while you hear plenty of stories about recent college grads volunteering in HIV clinics in Botswana or teaching English in Japan, I have not heard much about civilian volunteering in Afghanistan or Iraq.

Surely there must be a need on many different fronts, whether in schools, as office staff, working with youth, accounting, and so much more. Additionally, older, more professionally experienced volunteers like lawyers or civil service workers would surely be useful, no?

So if you're not in the military, how does someone my age who is willing help out? A Monster.com job search reveals only jobs working for private contractors, typically in security or involving machinery, or permanent positions with international organizations which require years of international experience.

Yes, the aforementioned Peace Corps is an option, though that is just one program, and a rigid 27-month one at that. I've done a lot of Googling to try and find non-governmental organizations (NGOs) with volunteer programs, and (especially for Afghanistan, my focus) found very little. In spite of the security issues and language requirements, I'm quite surprised at the dearth of large, reputable programs to place volunteers there, especially for shorter-range volunteer opportunities that would require anywhere from a few months to a couple years.

One of the few promising ones I have found out about which claims to be accepting international volunteers is a small outfit called Skateistan. This organization, focused on children in Kabul, promotes education, health, and cross-cultural interaction. They also have the unique idea of being centered around promoting a love of skateboarding--an idea so radical, it just might work extremely well! I'll be following their progress closely in the weeks to come.

If anyone reading this post does know of any interesting volunteer opportunities in Afghanistan or Iraq, please get in touch with me. I would be very interested to hear about it.