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…read about the cyber version of strategic ambiguity.

When a country finds that it has been hacked, the hunt for the perpetrator begins. Investigators and diplomats go to other countries with offensive cyber capabilities and, with the scowl of an exasperated parent of many children, start asking who did it. A lot of literature on cyber attacks evaluates the consequences of a country saying “it was me” or “it wasn’t me,” but usually neither of those things happen. Instead, when the victimized country comes calling, potential suspects tend to waggle their national eyebrows and say “maaaaaaaybe is was me… but no… but maybe.” A new article [[link removed]] by Joseph Brown and Midnight Oil alumna Tanisha Fazal evaluates the strategy behind issuing “non-denial denials” about cyber attacks. The use of these ambiguous responses, Brown and Fazal find, is that they are a low-cost way of shaping perceptions of the non-denier’s capabilities. No one is going to escalate against a non-denier without substantial evidence of their guilt, but maintaining status as a suspect makes it seem like they could have pulled off the heist. In the opaque world of cyber operations, that perception can be a win in and of itself.l

do that study abroad program, kid!

If you’re going to start a rebellion against a state, it helps if you have another state backing you. They can supply money, weapons, diplomatic cover, sanctuary — all the things a budding insurgent needs. But how do you get another state to back your longshot rebellion? According to a new article [[link removed]] by Reyko Huang, Daniel Silverman, and Benjamin Acosta, it helps if you’ve spent some time outside your own country.

Their article examines how international experience shapes the opportunities available to prospective rebel leaders. Spending time abroad, they find, often leads to people being plugged into elite networks in other countries — networks that they can then call on for support when things kick off at home.

Using a database of rebel leader biographies, they find that international experience is much more highly correlated to gaining foreign state sponsorship than education, military experience, or even combat experience.

FORWARD TO A FRIEND [[link removed]] Nso group, reaping

The NSO Group, a private Israeli hacking firm known for its Pegasus spyware technology, has had a rough year. Until recently, the firm was riding high, selling Pegasus to authoritarian governments across the Middle East and North Africa with the express approval of the Israeli government. Today, it has been sanctioned by the US and, according to an MIT technology review article, just lost its shot at selling Pegasus to France.

According to the article, the French government was dotting the I’s and crossing the T’s on a contract with NSO to bring Pegasus — a program that allows governments to gain access to anything on a target’s smartphone — to Paris when a leak showed that the program was… already there. French President Emmanuel Macron’s phone number showed up on a leaked list of NSO group surveillance targets in July. Shortly thereafter, France canceled the contract.

The bigger problem NSO faces is US sanctions for its spyware of fortune business model. Wracked with debt and unable to sell its product, NSO has appealed the sanctions, but it will be difficult to explain away the role Pegasus has played in allowing authoritarian governments to target human rights activists, to say nothing of leading US allies.

FORWARD TO A FRIEND [[link removed]] DEEP DIVE whither wog: Part I

For the generation who came up in the era of The Surge — the US military’s doomed effort to turn around the Iraq War by adopting a new counterinsurgency strategy, deploying more troops, and taking branding advice from the X Games — one piece of defense-speak that sticks in the brain is the cursed phrase “whole-of-government.” We heard it hundreds of times, in press conferences, congressional testimony, and (for the nerdy among us) doctrine — counterinsurgents need to take a “whole-of-government” approach to counterinsurgency. For people still involved in insurgency studies and US policymaking around foreign security assistance, it’s still around, being used as a gold standard for other countries facing internal rebellions to live up to.

But… does it mean anything? If we set aside the alarming connotations of a literal interpretation of the phrase “whole-of-government approach to counterinsurgency” — mail carriers delivering cash bundles to Shia militias in Baghdad, park rangers marking trails for special operations forces to follow on night raids — what are we left with? How much of government is actually included in a “whole-of-government” effort, and how do different divisions of government coordinate? Those are the questions we’ll take on this week and next on Deep Dive, looking at research on how putatively whole-of-government programs actually function.

A new article [[link removed]] in the European Journal of International Security by political scientist Maya Dafinova examines how the implementation of whole-of-government (which she mercifully shortens to “WOG,” an innovation we will also adopt going forward) counterinsurgency varied between the Swedish and German experiences in the war in Afghanistan. As Dafinova points out, the essence of WOG is in increasing cooperation, coordination, and coherence within a range of government agencies that extend beyond just the military. Within the International Security Assistance Force in Afghanistan, many members pursued WOG approaches to their deployments, but results were all over the map. Dafinova looks at differences within governments as potential causes of the variation in how WOG worked out.

Both Germany and Sweden are parliamentary democracies with coalition governments — that is, the government is made up of multiple parties that negotiate how they are going to govern. Dafinova hypothesized that those coalition negotiations might condition how WOG efforts function even more than politics within the bureaucracies that would actually be doing the coordinating. In other words, it might matter less whether the defense ministry, the foreign ministry, and the development fund all got along and more whether the defense minister’s party, the foreign minister’s party, and the development fund director’s party got along.

In interviews with nearly 50 people on both civilian and military sides of the Swedish and German deployments in Afghanistan, Dafinova found that shifts in how WOG was prioritized and interpreted correlated very closely to shifts in the governing coalition of each country. In Sweden, when right wing parties gained more power, military and civilian officials felt more pressure to collaborate and pursue synergies in their work. When the left was ascendant, attention on WOG approaches waned and the debate turned to the value of having a military role in Afghanistan at all. That left the civilian and military bureaucracies to sort out cooperation among themselves – a recipe for little cooperation to take place. The Swedish International Development Corporation Agency even went so far as to limit its staff’s ability to interact with the military, worried that WOG approaches would just lead to their tactical cooptation by the defense ministry.

In Germany, the story was different but the importance of coalition politics was just as great. In contrast to Sweden, in Germany WOG approaches were a significant bargaining chip in coalition negotiations. In 2005, the left-leaning Green Party traded their vote on a missile defense integration program for moving €10 million from the defense budget to the Provincial Development Fund, a major vehicle for civilian-led intervention in Afghanistan. By 2010, a focus on WOG approaches was a crucial factor in allowing the German government – deeply ambivalent about its role in the US-led war on terror – that its involvement in Afghanistan was not fundamentally a matter of military intervention.

In all, Dafinova found, the presentation of the WOG concept as an apolitical commitment to uniting military and civilian instruments of national power bore little resemblance to the way WOG approaches were actually implemented. The pressure for military and civilian agencies to work together was highly conditioned on the state of national politics, and subject to the same horse trading and ideological demands as any other political issue. In the end, the government referred to in “whole-of-government” is less the bureaucracies at the operational level of the state and more the political coalitions atop it.

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Haley Clasen questioned [[link removed]] the strange myopia of President Biden’s idea of a “foreign policy for the middle class.” The president presents his foreign policy agenda as delivering results for everyday Americans, but by targeting the concerns of the middle class it leaves behind working class people who have suffered disproportionately from US failures on pandemic response, managing international corruption, and trade policy. A successful foreign policy, she argued, would not seek to preserve the status quo for the few who have weathered decades of stagnant wages and the biggest economic and public health shock in generations but instead focus on assisting the many who have been harmed by those disasters.

Halima Gikandi led off [[link removed]] The World’s Thanksgiving coverage with a report on a samosa company in Nairobi that has found success furnishing American expats with holiday apple pie in samosa form. The company, Wau Eats, reflects the ubiquity of samosas in east Africa. The fried snacks originate in central Asia, but they have a rich history in east Africa. Wau Eats has brought the samosa business into the 21st century in Nairobi by advertising on Twitter — a desperate move to survive the pandemic that has turned the company into a huge hit.

Elana Gordon reported [[link removed]] on the absurdity of travel bans issued by the US and Europe against African countries after the discovery of the omicron variant of COVID-19. South African scientists isolated the variant and did the responsible thing by reporting it to the World Health Organization. For their trouble, they, their compatriots, and residents of other southern African countries found themselves banned from traveling to the US and Europe, as though by discovering the variant and reporting it they had somehow created it. The variant has since been spotted in Europe, Canada, and elsewhere, and there is no evidence that it originated in southern Africa, yet the travel bans on southern Africans remain in place and have not been expanded to cover any other countries where the variant has been found.

FORWARD TO A FRIEND [[link removed]] WELL PLAYED

Stuff-Critical-State-cares-about correspondent Paul Musgraves is back with an absolute banger [[link removed]] about the time in 1989 when PepsiCo bought 17 rusting submarines and a bunch of other naval scrap from the Soviet Union in an attempt to turn Perestroika into Pepsistroika. It didn’t work, perhaps because PepsiCo didn’t put enough effort into communicating that the main competitor to Mountain Dew is a Nazi soda [[link removed]].

This [[link removed]] was on sale during Black Ops Friday — you just missed it.

Our “we say so without any irony” [[link removed]] T-shirt has people asking a lot of questions already answered by our shirt.

How did we never get a “Don Draper invents Friedrich Hayek” episode [[link removed]] of "Mad Men"?

As the name suggests, France’s force de frappe only ever deterred New England [[link removed]]. The Soviet Union was less impressed [[link removed]].

Alex Wellerstein on Soviet nuclear humor [[link removed]] — need we say more?

Army-Navy football — the US military’s true [[link removed]] prime base engineer emergency force.

Watching [[link removed]] the US defense acronym sausage get made is not a pretty sight.

“Cancel culture on hydrocarbons” is easily the most savorable phrase [[link removed]] of 2021.

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Critical State is written by Sam Ratner with Inkstick Media.

The World is a weekday public radio show and podcast on global issues, news and insights from PRX and GBH.

With an online magazine and podcast featuring a diversity of expert voices, Inkstick Media is “foreign policy for the rest of us.”

Critical State is made possible in part by the Carnegie Corporation of New York.

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