Gutenberg 2.0 | Harvard Magazine May-Jun 2010

Photograph by Jim Harrison

Nearly half of Harvard’s collection is housed at the Harvard Depository, a marvel of efficient off-campus storage. Library assistant Carl Wood reshelves books in the 30-foot-high, 200-foot-long stacks.

“Throw it in the charles,” one scientist recently suggested as a fitting end for Widener Library’s collection. The remark was outrageous—especially at an institution whose very name honors a gift of books—but it was pointed. Increasingly, in the scientific disciplines, information ranging from online journals to databases must be recent to be relevant, so Widener’s collection of books, its miles of stacks, can appear museum-like. Likewise, Google’s massive project to digitize all the books in the world will, by some accounts, cause research libraries to fade to irrelevance as mere warehouses for printed material. The skills that librarians have traditionally possessed seem devalued by the power of online search, and less sexy than a Google query launched from a mobile platform. “People want information ‘anytime, anyplace, anywhere,’” says Helen Shenton, the former head of collection care for the British Library who is now deputy director of the Harvard University Library. Users are changing—but so, too, are libraries. The future is clearly digital.

Photograph by Jim Harrison

Isaac Kohane, director of the Countway Medical Library, sees librarians returning to a central role in medicine as curators of databases and as teachers of complex bioinformatics search techniques.

Yet if the format of the future is digital, the content remains data. And at its simplest, scholarship in any discipline is about gaining access to information and knowledge, says Peter Bol, Carswell professor of East Asian languages and civilizations. In fields such as botany or comparative zoology, researchers need historical examples of plant and animal life, so they build collections and cooperate with others who also have collections. “We can call that a museum of comparative zoology,” he says, “but it is a form of data collection.” If you study Chinese history, as Bol does, you need access to primary sources and to the record of scholarship on human history over time. You need books. But in physics or chemistry, where the research horizon is constantly advancing, much of the knowledge created in the past has very little relevance to current understanding. In that case, he says, “you want to be riding the crest of the tidal wave of information that is coming in right now. We all want access to information, and in some cases that will involve building collections; in others, it will mean renting access to information resources that will keep us current. In some cases, these services may be provided by a library, in others by a museum or even a website.”

Meanwhile, “Who has the most scientific knowledge of large-scale organization, collection, and access to information? Librarians,” says Bol. A librarian can take a book, put it somewhere, and then guarantee to find it again. “If you’ve got 16 million items,” he points out, “that’s a very big guarantee. We ought to be leveraging that expertise to deal with this new digital environment. That’s a vision of librarians as specialists in organizing and accessing and preserving information in multiple media forms, rather than as curators of collections of books, maps, or posters.”

Librarians as Information Brokers

Bol is particularly interested in the media form known as Google Book Search (GBS). The search-engine giant is systematically scanning books from libraries throughout the world in order to assemble an enormous, Internet-accessible digital library: at 12 million books, its collection is already three-quarters the size of Harvard’s. Soon it will be the largest library the world has ever known. Harvard has provided nearly a million public domain (pre-1923) books for the project; by participating, the University helped with the creation of a new tool (GBS) for locating books that is useful to people both at Harvard and around the world. And participation made the full text content of these books searchable and available to everyone in the United States for free.

GBS appeals to Bol and other scholars because it gives them quick and easy access to books that Harvard does not own (litigation over the non-public-domain works in GBS notwithstanding). For Bol, such a tool might be especially useful: Harvard acquires only 15,000 books from China each year, but he estimates that it ought to be collecting closer to 50,000. So GBS could be a boon to scholarship.

But GBS also raises all kinds of questions. If everything eventually is available at your fingertips, what will be the role of libraries and librarians?

“Internet search engines like Google Books fundamentally challenge our understanding of where we add value to this process,” says Dan Hazen, associate librarian of collection development for Harvard College. Librarians have worked hard to assemble materials of all kinds so that it is “not a random bunch of stuff, but can actually support and sustain some kind of meaningful inquiry,” he explains. “The result was a collection that was a consciously created, carefully crafted, deliberately maintained, constrained body of material.”

Internet search explodes the notion of a curated collection in which the quality of the sources has been assured. “What we’re seeing now with Google Scholar and these mass digitization projects, and the Internet generally,” says Hazen, “is, ‘Everything’s out there.’ And everything has equal weight. If I do a search on Google, I can get a scholarly journal. I can get somebody’s blog posting….The notion of collection that’s implicit in ‘the universe is at my fingertips’ is diametrically opposed, really, to the notion of collection as ‘consciously curated and controlled artifact.’” Even the act of reading for research is changed, he points out. Scholars poring through actual newspapers “could see how [an item] was presented on the page, and the prominence it had, and the flow of content throughout a series of articles that might have to do with the same thing—and then differentiate those from the books or other kinds of materials that talked about the same phenomenon. When you get into the Internet world, you tend to get a gazillion facts, mentions, snippets, and references that don’t organize themselves in that same framework of prominence, and typology, and how stuff came to be, and why it was created, and what the intrinsic logic of that category of materials is. How and whether that kind of structuring logic can apply to this wonderful chaos of information is something that we’re all trying to grapple with.”

How does searching digitally in a book relate to the act of reading? “There may be a single fact that’s important,” Hazen explains. “Is the book’s overall argument something that’s equally important as the single fact or is it just irrelevant? When people worry about reading books online, part of the worry is that the nuances of a well-developed argument that goes on linearly for 300 pages [are missing]. That’s not the way you interact with a text online.” How the flood of information from digitized books will be integrated into libraries, which have a separate and different, though not necessarily contradictory, logic remains to be seen. “For librarians, and the library, trying to straddle these two visions of what we’re about is something that we’re still trying to figure out.”

Photograph by Jim Harrison

The printed book took hundreds of years to replace handwritten manuscripts, which persisted as an economical way to produce small numbers of copies into the nineteenth century, nearly 400 years after Gutenberg invented movable type. Robert Darnton, director of the University Library, shown with Diderot’s Encyclopédie, predicts great longevity for the book.

Moreover, the prospect that, increasingly, libraries will be stewards of vast quantities of data, a great deal from books, and some unique, raises very serious concerns about the long-term preservation of digital materials. “What worries us all,” says Nancy M. Cline, Larsen librarian of Harvard College, “is that we really haven’t tested the longevity for a lot of these digital resources.” This is a universal problem and the subject of much international attention and research. “If you walk into the book stacks,” she points out, “you can simply smell in some areas the deterioration of the paper and leather. But with something that hums away on a server, we don’t have the same potential to observe” (see “Digital Preservation: An Unsolved Problem,” page 82).

Despite these caveats, Bol’s vision of future librarians as digital-information brokers rather than stewards of physical collections is already taking shape in the scientific disciplines, where the concerns raised by Hazen are less important. In fields faced with information overload—such as biology, coping with a barrage of genomic data, and astronomy, in which an all-sky survey telescope can generate a terabyte of data in a single night—the torrents of raw information are impossible to absorb and understand without computational aids.

Medicine has had to cope with this problem ever since nineteenth-century general practitioners found they could no longer keep up with the sheer quantity of published medical literature. Specialization eventually allowed doctors to focus only on the journals in their particular area of expertise. Throughout such transitions, libraries played an important role. Doctors, upon completing their rounds, would comb the stacks for records of similar cases that might help with diagnosis and treatment. Today, the amount of new information being generated in the biological sciences is prescribing another momentous shift that may provide a glimpse of the future in other disciplines. For a doctor, learning about a genetic test and then interrogating a database to understand the results could save a life. For libraries and librarians, the new premium on skills they have long cultivated as curators, preservers, and retrievers of collective knowledge puts them squarely on top of an information geyser in the sciences that could reshape medicine.

Mining the Bibliome

Isaac Kohane, director of the Countway Library at Harvard Medical School (HMS), recently asked a pointed question on his blog: Who is the better doctor—the one who can remember more diagnostic tests or the one “who is the quickest and most savvy at online searching for the relevant tests?” He predicts that “we are going to be uncomfortable with some of the answers to these questions for many years to come” because success based not on bedside manner, but on competence interacting with a database, implies a potential devaluing of skills that society has honored. And who is pondering these issues most acutely? A blogging librarian and pediatric endocrinologist with a Ph.D. in computer science.

One hundred years ago, says Kohane, a report on medical education in the United States concluded that doctors were inadequately prepared to care for patients. Half the medical schools in the country closed. “I think we are at a similar inflection point,” he says. “If you look at bioinformatics and genetics, you see vivid examples—which can be generalized to other parts of medicine—where the system has inadequately educated and empowered its workers in the use of search, electronic resources, and automated knowledge management.” Genetic testing, he adds, offers a “prismatic example”: studies in the Netherlands and the United States have shown that “physicians are ordering genetic tests because patients are asking them to, [even though] they don’t know how to interpret the tests and are uncomfortable doing so.”

Kohane sees similar problems when making the rounds with medical students, fellows, and residents: “When we run into a problematic complex patient with a clearly genetic problem from birth, and I ask what the problem might be and what tests are to be ordered, their reflex is either to search their memories for what they learned in medical school or to look at a textbook that might be relevant. They don’t have what I would characterize as the ‘Google reflex,’ which is to go to the right databases to look things up.” The students doubtless use Google elsewhere in their lives, but in medicine, he explains, “the whole idea of just-in-time learning and using these websites is not reflexive. That is highly troublesome because the time when you could keep up even with a subspecialty like pediatric neurosurgery by reading a couple of journals is long, long gone.”

The journals themselves have grown in number and quantity of articles, but “the amount of data being produced and analyzed in large, curated databases,” Kohane says, “exceeds by several orders of magnitude what appears in printed publications.” The fact that students and doctors don’t think to use this digital material is an international problem. “Even at Harvard,” where “we spend millions of dollars” annually for access to the databases, “many of the medical staff, graduate students, and residents don’t know how to use…,” he pauses. “Well, it’s worse than that. They don’t know that they exist.”

But in this lamentable situation Kohane sees an opportunity for medical libraries, whose role, he believes, had faded for a while. “It is becoming so clear that medicine and medical research are an information-processing enterprise, that there’s an opportunity for a library that would embrace that as a mission…to be again a center of the medical enterprise.”

Kohane has sought to do just that by creating an information institute—an HMS-wide center for biomedical informatics—embedded within Countway Library. The institute offers voluntary mini-courses, invariably oversubscribed, explaining what the relevant databases are, how to plumb them, and how to analyze the data they produce. A parallel effort under his supervision seeks to “mine the bibliome”—the totality of the electronically published medical literature—by allowing researchers to track down relationships between genes and diseases in the published literature that would not be apparent when searching one reference at a time. Librarians in the institute also comb databases for contradictions, and find references to sites in the genome that can’t possibly exist because the coordinates are wrong. In making sure that information is good, the library is “returning to its original mission of curation,” says Kohane, “but in a genomic era and around bioinformatics.” This defines a new role for librarians as database experts and teachers, while the library becomes a place for learning about sophisticated search for specialized information.

Such skills-based teaching, learning, and data curation depend on finding individuals who are trained in medicine and also have the public-minded qualities of a librarian—rare indeed, as Kohane readily acknowledges. And even though the cost of such bioinformatics education is small relative to the millions of dollars spent on subscription fees for electronic periodicals (the price of which doubled between 2000 and 2010, says Kohane; see “Open Access,” May-June 2008, page 61 for more on the crisis in scholarly communication), the resources to provide more educational support for complex types of database search training are insufficient across the University. “That’s because we are trying to bolt on a solution to a problem that probably should be addressed foursquare within the core educational process,” he says.

There is growing awareness of the need to have an “information-processing approach to medicine baked into the core education of doctoral and medical students.” Otherwise, Kohane says, “we’re condemning them to perpetual partial ignorance.” Already, a few lectures on the topic are being introduced into the medical-school curriculum, making HMS a pioneer in this area. Discussions about bringing more of the biological/biomedical informatics agenda to the undergraduate campus are also under way.

Even in the relatively tradition-bound profession of law, digitization cuts so deeply that when Ess librarian and professor of law John G. Palfrey VII restructured the Law School library last year, he says he thought about the mission less as “How do we build the greatest collection of books in law?” and more as “How do we make information as useful as possible to our community now and over a long period of time?”

This focus on information services within a community guided both personnel decisions and collections strategies. “We scrapped the entire organizational structure,” reports Palfrey (whose digital genes can be traced back to his former position as executive director of the law school’s Berkman Center for Internet and Society). Last June 30, all the librarians handed in resignations for the jobs they had held and received new assignments. There is now a librarian who works with faculty members, teaching empirical research methods, and another who helps students and faculty conduct empirical research. The collection development group includes “a lab for hacking a library”: a member of that team is working on an idea called “Stack View” that would allow the re-creation of serendipitous browsing in a digital format. Technology “allows you to reorganize information and present it in a totally different way,” Palfrey points out.

The law library’s new collection-development policy is organized along a continuum of materials for which the library takes increasing responsibility. These range from resources in the public domain that aren’t collected, but to which the library provides access; to materials accessed under license; and all the way up to unique holdings of an historic or special nature that the library archives, preserves, and may one day digitize in order to provide online access. The fact that the library no longer buys everything published in the law has been made explicit. “It is no longer possible financially, nor is it desirable—not all of it is useful,” Palfrey says bluntly. Only a third of newly purchased books are initially bound. “We’ll put a barcode on it, put it on the shelf, and see if people use it,” he explains. “If they do, and the book starts to wear, then we’ll send it to the bindery.”

Even though these changes may seem like cutbacks (they were in fact planned and in process before the University’s financial crisis became apparent), he believes skilled librarians are in no danger of becoming obsolete: “The role of the librarian is much greater in this digital era than it has ever been before.” Good lawyers need to be good at information processing, and Palfrey found in research for his book Born Digital that students today are not very good at using complex legal databases. “They try to use the same natural-language search techniques” they learned from using Google, he says, rather than thinking about research as “a series of structured queries. It’s not that we don’t need libraries or librarians,” he continues, “it’s that what we need them for is slightly different. We need them to be guides in this increasingly complex world of information and we need them to convey skills that most kids actually aren’t getting at early ages in their education. I think librarians need to get in front of this mob and call it a parade, to actually help shape it.”

Mary Lee Kennedy, executive director of knowledge and library services at Harvard Business School, whose very title suggests a new kind of approach, agrees with Palfrey. “The digital world of content is going to be overwhelming for librarians for a long time, just because there is so much,” she acknowledges. Therefore, librarians need to teach students not only how to search, but “how to think critically about what they have found…what they are missing… and how to judge their sources.”

Her staff offers a complete suite of information services to students and faculty members, spread across four teams. One provides content or access to it in all its manifestations; another manages and curates information relevant to the school’s activities; the third creates Web products that support teaching, research, and publication; and the fourth group is dedicated to student and faculty research and course support. Kennedy sees libraries as belonging to a partnership of shared services that support professors and students. “Faculty don’t come just to libraries [for knowledge services],” she points out. “They consult with experts in academic computing, and they participate in teaching teams to improve pedagogy. We’re all part of the same partnership and we have to figure out how to work better together.”

Photograph by Jim Harrison

“A man will turn over half a library to make one book,” said Samuel Johnson. Nancy Cline, Larsen librarian of Harvard College, displays a manuscript letter from the Hyde Collection of Dr. Samuel Johnson; all its Johnson letters are available online as part of the University Library’s open-collections program.

“Just in Time” Libraries

All this is not to suggest that the traditional role of libraries as collections where objects are stored, preserved, and retrieved on request is going away. But it is certainly changing. Two facilities—one digital, the other analog—suggest a bifurcated future. The two could not be more different, though their mandates are identical.

In Cambridge, the Digital Repository Service (DRS) is a rapidly growing, 109-terabyte online library of 14 million files representing books, daguerreotypes, maps, music, images, and manuscripts, among other things, all owned by Harvard. In a facility that also serves other parts of the University, a two-person command center monitors more than a hundred servers. Green lights indicate all is well; red flashes when environmental conditions such as temperature or humidity exceed designated parameters. In a nearby room, warm and alive with the whirr of hundreds of cooling fans, their cumulative sound resembling the roar of a giant waterfall, a handful of servers hold the library’s entire digital collection. Other servers are dedicated to “discovery,” the technical term for the searchable online catalog, or “delivery,” the act of providing a file to an end user.

There are at least three copies of the entire repository—one in, and two outside of, Cambridge. One of them, secured by thumbprint access, is constantly being read by machines at the disk level to ensure the integrity of the data, a process that takes a full month to complete. “Several times a year,” says Tracey Robinson, who heads the library’s office for information systems, “we detect data that have become corrupted. We engage in a constant process of refreshing and making sure that everything is readable.” Any damaged material is quickly replaced with another copy from the backup.

The analog counterpart to the DRS is the Harvard Depository (HD), located in the countryside about 45 minutes from Boston. A low, modular building with loading dock bays, it resembles a warehouse more than anything else. In many ways, that is precisely what it is. Just two librarians oversee 7.5 million books held in an energy-efficient, climate-controlled environment—more than twice as many as are held at Widener, which is three times as large. “The libraries based in the city are among the most expensive in terms of linear capacity,” says Nancy Cline. “The Depository as a concept is absolutely essential for us.” A number of other libraries in the Boston area, including MIT, use the HD. The facility absorbs half a million new books each year, circulates 220,000, and boasts a 100 percent retrieval rate. (In 24 years, just two books could not be found for delivery; in a typical library, one study showed, patrons find what they are looking for only 50 percent of the time.)

The secret to the HD’s extraordinary density and retrieval rate is simple: here, a book is not a book. Titles, subjects, authors—none of this so-called “metadata,” the information people typically use to find things, matters. “We know how many books we get in,” says assistant director of the University Library for the Harvard Depository Tom Schneiter, who directs the facility, “but we don’t know what they are. To us, they are just barcodes. It makes our work much more efficient.” A staff of dedicated workers, who rotate through different tasks in order to break up the routine, can check in as many as 800 barcodes an hour. All the items are sorted and shelved according to size in bins that are themselves barcoded. This allows the height of the shelves to be perfectly calibrated to the height of the books; no wasted airspace. Place a request for one of the books in the HD and it will be delivered the next business day to the campus library of your choosing.

Originally, the HD was intended to store only low-circulation items. But because the libraries of the Cambridge campus are “full to bursting,” says Pforzheimer University Professor Robert Darnton, the director of the Harvard University library, “doing triage” on thousands of little-used books from the shelves each year to make room for new ones proved impractical. Now, most new books are simply sent to the HD. Although some professors lament the death of shelf-browsing, others are grateful when a book they love is sent off, because they know that when next they want it, not only will it be found, it will be well-preserved: time essentially stands still for the books at the HD, where an environment set at 50 degrees and 35 percent relative humidity is expected to maintain a book in the condition in which it arrived for 244 years.

The price of such longevity and retrievability is about 30 cents per stored volume per year, which compares favorably to the cost of digital storage; expense estimates from the HathiTrust (a national group of research libraries that have created a joint repository for digital collections) for storing a digital book scanned by Google range from 15 cents for black and white to 40 cents for color annually. Actually delivering a physical book from the HD, on the other hand, costs $2.15—much more than the delivery of a digital book to a computer screen.

But making comparisons between digital and analog libraries on issues of cost or use or preservation is not straightforward. If students want to read a book cover to cover, the printed copy may be deemed superior with respect to “bed, bath and beach,” John Palfrey points out. If they just want to read a few pages for class, or mine the book for scattered references to a single subject, the digital version’s searchability could be more appealing; alternatively, students can request scans of the pages or chapter they want to read as part of a program called “scan and deliver” (in use at the HD and other Harvard libraries) and receive a link to images of the pages via e-mail within four days.

One can imagine a not too radically different future in which patronless libraries such as the DRS and the HD would hold almost everything, supplying materials on request to their on-campus counterparts. Print on demand technology (POD) would allow libraries to change their collection strategies: they could buy and print a physical copy of a book only if a user requested it. When the user was done with the book, it would be shelved. It’s a vision of “doing libraries ‘just in time’ rather than ‘just in case,’” says Palfrey. (At the Harvard Book Store on Massachusetts Avenue, a POD machine dubbed Paige M. Gutenborg is already in use. Find something you like in Google’s database of public-domain books—perhaps one provided by Harvard—and for $8 you can own a copy, printed and bound before your wondering eyes in minutes. Clear Plexiglas allows patrons to watch the process—hot glue, guillotine-like trimming blades, and all—until the book is ejected, like a gumball, from a chute at the bottom.)

Indeed, the HD might one day play a role as the fulcrum for “radical collaboration” with the five other law libraries in the Boston area, says Palfrey. “We’re asking, ‘Could we imagine deciding, as a group of six, that we’re actually going to buy something and put it in the Harvard Depository,’” a central location from which the physical book could be delivered to any institution? “It would cost us a sixth as much.” Other Harvard libraries could explore the same strategy.

That doesn’t mean Harvard’s campus libraries would become less important. Because they are embedded in the residential academic community, they remain integral to University life. Students (and faculty members) are big users of the physical spaces in libraries, though they are using them differently than in the past.

“Libraries are not conservative places anymore,” says Cline. “From the user perspective, it is an interesting time. Some people still want the quiet, elegant reading room. Others would be frustrated if they had to be quiet in every part of the buildings, in part because their work requires that they talk, that they work in collaborative teams, that they share some of their research strategies. We’re rethinking the physical spaces to accommodate more of the type of learning that is expected now, the types of assignments that faculty are making, that have two or three students huddled around a computer working together, talking.”

Libraries are also being used as social spaces, adds Helen Shenton, where people can “get a cup of coffee, connect to WiFi, and meet their friends” outside their living space. In terms of research, students are asking each other for information more now than in the past, when they might have asked a librarian. “The flip side,” Shenton continues, “is that some places are embedding their library and information specialists within disciplines and within faculties. So I think the whole model is like one of those snow globes. You pick it up and shake it around and all the pieces will settle in a different way, which is incredibly exciting.”

A Future for Books

“A big misconception is that digital information and analog information are incompatible,” says Darnton, himself an historian of the book. “On the contrary, the whole history of books and communication shows that one medium does not displace another.” Manuscript publishing survived Gutenberg, continuing into the nineteenth century. “It was often cheaper to publish a book of under a hundred copies by hiring scribes,” he says, than it was to set the type and hire people to run the press. Likewise, horsepower increased in the age of railroads. “There were more horses hauling passengers in the second half of the nineteenth century than there were in the first half. And there is good evidence that now, if a book appears electronically on your computer screen, and it’s available for free, it will stimulate sales of the printed version.”

Jeffrey Hamburger—a scholar of an even earlier medium, the medieval manuscript—who was recently named chair of a library advisory group, says that “the notion that we are going to abandon the codex as we have known it—the traditional book—and go digital overnight is very misguided. It is going to be a much longer transition than anyone suspects, just as the transition in the past between the oral tradition of literature in antiquity and silent reading as we’ve known it for almost two millennia was a long transition, taking the better part of a millennium itself.”

Hamburger, the Francke professor of German art and culture, has worked extensively here and in Germany on projects involving the application of new media to the study of medieval manuscripts, but he says there are “still many, many things that new media cannot do as effectively as a good old-fashioned book”: for example, combining text and an associated image on opposing pages. “It’s instructive how many of the words we use to describe computer interfaces—tabs, bookmarks, scrolling—are derived from our experience with the book, and that’s not just because of experience or familiarity,” he adds. “It’s because they have a certain practicality, and all of those, it so happens, are inventions of the Middle Ages.” Computers, in reverting to scrolling, have “gone back to a much older technology, which had its merits but was deficient in its own ways, which is why it was replaced.”

In advocating for the continued importance of books, and raising his concern that this could become the “lost decade” for acquisitions to Harvard’s library collections, Hamburger emphasizes that he is not framing the University’s current crisis in terms of books versus new media. “We need both, and we’ll continue to need both. I think we have to take as a premise that the library is a vast, far-flung, varied institution, as varied and diverse as the intellectual community of the University itself, working for a range of constituents almost impossible to conceive of, and it’s not just a service organization. I would even go so far as to call it the nervous system of our corporate body.”

It would be a terrible mistake, Hamburger continues, “if different factions within the faculty, be it scientists and humanists, be it Western- or non-Western-focused scholars, started squabbling over resources. As a university, we have by definition a catholic, all-embracing mission, and the question is how to coordinate resources, not compete for them. The greatness of this university in the past and in the future rests on the greatness of our library. Without the library—old, new, digital, printed—this institution wouldn’t be what it is.”

Jonathan Shaw ’89 is managing editor of this magazine.

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Unfreezing Kosovo

Image via Wikipedia

Reconsidering Boundaries in the Balkans

Nikolas K. Gvosdev
NIKOLAS K. GVOSDEV is Professor of National Security Studies at the U.S. Naval War College. The views expressed here are entirely his own.

When Kosovo unilaterally declared its independence in February 2008, proponents of the move assumed that Serbia’s acquiescence to Kosovo’s final status was not absolutely necessary. The United States and many countries in Europe hoped Kosovo would gain quick recognition. These supportive governments thought that Kosovo would then have access to capital and investment, and that the northern, ethnically Serbian parts of the province would want to take part in the post-independence economic boom. Sadly, things have not gone according to plan.

Although the United States and many European countries did recognize the new state, some EU members -- such as Spain -- did not, due to fears of setting a harmful precedent that could weaken the doctrine of territorial integrity. Most other world powers have also declined to recognize an independent Kosovo, including Brazil, China, and India. Although some U.S. policymakers predicted that the Islamic world would embrace a new Muslim state -- and express gratitude to the United States for bringing about its birth -- almost no members of the Organization of the Islamic Conference have extended recognition. Even states that enjoy the patronage of the United States, such as Georgia and Iraq, have declined to support Washington by recognizing Kosovo (both countries face separatist problems of their own).

Being considered nonexistent has led Kosovo to struggle economically -- a situation made even worse by the lack of a formal agreement with Serbia on property claims. As U.S. Assistant Secretary of State Philip Gordon said recently, Kosovo is hampered by “high unemployment, low investment rates, and a relatively small economic base.” The government in Pristina requires Western aid to meet its expenses. Meanwhile, Kosovo remains a regional hub for narcotics, weapons, and human trafficking, with corruption a major deterrent to foreign investment.

Image via Wikipedia

Initially, many hoped that growing prosperity in Kosovo would entice those living in the Serb-majority region north of the Ibar River, as well as the residents of the ethnically Serb enclaves in the south, to reconcile themselves to the reality of Kosovan independence. But the weak economy has left this promise unfulfilled. Serbian participation in the electoral process has been minimal. Even many ethnic Albanians seem to be questioning the merits of independence: whereas 93 percent of Kosovo’s Albanians believed that independence had been a good thing two years ago, that number is 75 percent today.

Making matters more perilous is that, contrary to the assumptions of many proponents of independence, Belgrade has not reconciled itself to this fait accompli. Rather, it is challenging the legality of the unilateral declaration of indepedence, arguing that the rules-based international system was compromised when Kosovo’s status changed without agreement by both parties.

Serbia has asked the International Court of Justice to rule that Kosovo's declaration of independence was illegal according to international law. If the ICJ rules along these lines, then Kosovo would enter a permanent state of limbo (the court's decision is expected later this year). In such a scenario, Kosovo would not be able to join international bodies such as the UN, and its relationship with the EU would remain unsettled. Some countries may withdraw their recognition, as well.

But the ICJ process also creates a pretext for renewed negotiations that might break the existing deadlock. In pushing for talks, the United States and Europe must contend with two realities. First, the government in Pristina is not going to withdraw its declaration of independence, nor are states that have already recognized Kosovo -- beginning with the United States -- prepared to rescind their recognitions. Second, no government in Belgrade will recognize the current boundaries of Kosovo as legitimate. And in the aftermath of the 2004 riots, in which mobs attacked Serbian communities and churches, no Serbian administration can trust that ethnic Serbs and Serbian heritage sites will be safe in an independent Kosovo. To convince Belgrade otherwise would require outside security guarantees, but NATO is not prepared to make an open-ended commitment to deploying forces in Kosovo.

Whatever the outcome, Belgrade would benefit from resolving Kosovo’s status. Serbia’s relations with all of its neighbors -- and its position as the linchpin state of the western Balkans -- are complicated by the lingering Kosovo question. Its domestic politics are also negatively affected, as nationalists are able to attack pro-reform and pro-Western parties by championing the “fate of Kosovo.” Moreover, the U.S. strategy of compartmentalization -- whereby Kosovo is treated as an issue separate from the rest of the U.S.-Serbian relationship -- is not viable. The Obama administration cannot deepen cooperation with Serbia in order to stabilize the western Balkans yet “agree to disagree” on Kosovo.

To move forward, Washington must delink the question of independence from the question of frontiers. In other words, the debate over whether there should be an independent, Albanian-majority state of Kosovo must be handled separately from territorial issues. There are precedents for this approach: after World War I, the international community recognized that there would be an independent Armenia and Poland before the boundaries were definitely created; today, the Israel-Palestinian peace process works from a starting point of a two-state solution, although no final territorial settlement has been made. And yet, ever since the failed Rambouillet peace talks in 1999, diplomats have made the mistake of insisting that an independent Kosovo cover the entirety of the province as defined by the communist strongman Josip Broz Tito.

Belgrade and Pristina may come to an eventual agreement if the question of boundaries is split from the theoretical question of independence. Such talks should proceed without preconditions. This means that Serbia should not be required to change its constitution to cede legal and territorial claims to Kosovo (just as Ireland held on to its constitutional claims to the north of the island until 1998 without precluding talks with the United Kingdom). Nor should the government in Pristina be forced to abandon its earlier declarations.

Territorial adjustment, however, should certainly be on the table. The broad outline of a settlement is already clear: the Serb-majority regions north of the Ibar should remain part of Serbia, with some sort of arrangement made for important Serbian heritage sites and enclaves in the south.

One possible model for the latter is the agreement reached between Italy and the Vatican in 1929. For decades, the Catholic Church had not recognized the takeover of Rome by Italy in 1870; the Italian state was similarly uninclined to cede its claim over its capital city. The Lateran Treaty resolved this issue by establishing Vatican City as a neutral but independent state. Additionally, the Vatican received extraterritorial rights over sacred sites in and around Rome and in other parts of Italy. Of course, the Kosovo case is not identical, but the Lateran model could provide guidelines for a sustainable settlement.

An agreement between Belgrade and Pristina would resolve Kosovo’s state of limbo in the international community. It would simultaneously settle the critical issue that has slowed Serbia’s integration with Europe: Belgrade's ability to show that it controls all the territory under its jurisdiction, a requirement if it is to ensure enforcement of the acquis communautaire, the EU's body of common law. An agreement would also lift the current barriers to Kosovo's membership in the UN, signaling a final resolution to the issue.

Critics of such a plan would suggest that the very idea of redrawing boundaries is dangerous because it could call into question other disputed borders in the Balkans. But the reality on the ground is that Pristina has never controlled the territories north of the Ibar. And as shown by the continued need for NATO troops to protect Serb enclaves and monasteries in the south, Pristina does not really control those areas either. Would NATO member states launch a military campaign to conquer Mitrovica and the north in order to forcibly bring them under Pristina’s governance?

Some critics might also argue that adjusting Kosovo's boundaries would compromise its status as a viable state. Yet Kosovo is far less viable in its current condition. Moreover, if outstanding property disputes and border issues are resolved, international investors would feel more secure investing in Kosovo. Economic development, in turn, would have a positive effect on security and long-term stability.

And adjusting territorial boundaries would not necessarly spark new instability, because any agreement would respect the principles of the 1975 Helsinki accords by being voluntary and negotiated, not a forcible change imposed by one party on another.
Recent statements by senior officials in Belgrade suggest that Serbia wants to resolve the lingering sources of instability in the western Balkans. It has repeatedly said that it is flexibile on the question of Kosovo. Meanwhile, Pristina cannot consolidate its position and begin true governance under the status quo. Restarting serious negotiations between the two sides -- with both parties prepared to offer concessions -- could finally move Kosovo toward a durable, lasting peace.

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Kemalism Is Dead, Long Live Kemalism

Image via Wikipedia

How the AKP Became Ataturk’s Last Defender

Dariush Zahedi and Gokhan Bacik

DARIUSH ZAHEDI is a Research Fellow at the Institute of International Studies at the University of California, Berkeley, and currently teaches at Zirve University, in Turkey. GOKHAN BACIK is Associate Professor of International Relations at Zirve University and a contributor to Zaman and Today’s Zaman.

In both Turkey and the West, Kemalism -- the principle that Turkey should be secular and Western -- has been pronounced dead. The country is drifting away from both, the argument goes, and Islamists, led by the governing Justice and Development Party (AKP), are socially and politically aligning the country with the authoritarian regimes of the Middle East.

Turkey’s domestic and foreign politics are indeed transforming. In the ongoing Ergenekon trial, state prosecutors, encouraged by AKP officials, are indicting a group of alleged Kemalist academics, journalists, officers, and politicians (accusing them of plotting to overthrow the government) in order to purge them from public institutions. Meanwhile, a growing AKP-aligned religious bourgeoisie is starting to dominate various sectors, including energy, finance, manufacturing, and the media. Trade unions and professional associations, such as the Istanbul Chamber of Commerce, are also increasingly under the sway of the AKP. And in terms of foreign policy, Turkey is pursuing ties with Iran and Syria while putting some distance between itself and its old allies in the region, such as Israel.

But in reality, most of the AKP’s policies are not incompatible with Kemalism. Indeed, the irony of Turkey today is that the AKP -- a religiously rooted, conservative political party -- has become the closest thing the country has to a defender of Mustafa Kemal Ataturk, the founder of Turkey’s original Kemalist vision.s

For the last several decades, military Kemalism has been the organizing principle of Turkish politics, with a small group of military officials (along with a few bureaucratic and judicial representatives) responsible for guarding European values in Turkish society. But the military’s dominance has always been a distortion of Ataturk’s idea of Kemalism. Beginning in the 1920s, a few years before the declaration of the Republic of Turkey, the leaders of the Kemalist movement were adamant that the new state should embrace European social, economic, and political practices. Recognizing that Turkish society was still a long way from achieving secular modernity, they urged a period of tutelage during which the government would lay the socioeconomic and cultural foundations needed for transformation, such as modern infrastructure, better provision of social services, Western legal codes, a cadre of economic technocrats, and a reorganized educational system.

The military was never meant to lead this process. Ataturk, who had been a general in the Ottoman army and a field marshal in the Turkish army, set aside his military fatigues upon assuming the role of head of state in 1923. He removed other military officers from political posts, promoted civilian control of the armed forces, and cautioned the military against intervening in political affairs. He gave responsibility for developing the public’s understanding of liberal, Western values to politicians, civil servants, schoolteachers, journalists, and public intellectuals. Finally, he encouraged the country to adopt modern, liberal economics, though the worldwide depression of the 1930s forced him to resort to state control of the economy.

Elite guardianship over the country’s political and economic systems was to be temporary, lasting only until the bulk of the people had embraced modern norms and institutions. Thereafter, the guardians would relinquish their control over the economy, institute multiparty elections, and extend greater rights to the citizenry.

In 1938, Ataturk died and Ismet Inonu, who had served as prime minister until Ataturk removed him shortly before his death, became president. It was during Inonu’s 12-year, increasingly autocratic rule that civilian Kemalism warped into military Kemalism. Inonu relied on the military (which had supported his bid for the presidency) to implement his policies. Even after he was voted out of office in 1950, the military remained the most powerful actor in the Kemalist establishment. The Cold War only perpetuated this distortion: in exchange for Turkey’s alignment with the Western bloc, the United States gave its support to an increasingly strong military, which, in 1960, carried out the first of three Cold War–era military coups and brought Inonu back to power.

At the end of the Cold War, with communism no longer a threat, Turkish military rulers shifted their sights to creeping Islamization. Beginning in the 1990s, they sought to use the army’s status as the protector of secular Kemalism to justify its continued dominance in Turkish politics. In 1997, they forced the elected government to resign, purportedly because it was pursuing an Islamic agenda. Working with allies in the judiciary and bureaucracy, they banned Islamic political parties, jailed their leaders, and expelled suspected members from government posts. The media, which was supportive of military Kemalism, hailed their actions.

But the military’s claim that it is the protector of Kemalist values is increasingly falling on deaf ears. Many of the AKP’s policies represent an actual fulfillment of Ataturk’s notion of Kemalism. Western values are no longer abstract; they are codified in the Copenhagen criteria for EU accession. The AKP has tried to institutionalize civil liberties, improve minority rights by ending martial law in Kurdish regions, promote civilian control of the military, and further develop the free market.

The emerging industrial, commercial, and financial bourgeoisie, most of which is linked to the AKP, in effect accomplishes Ataturk’s grand historical vision. This rising middle class no longer wants (or needs) to be treated like an adolescent in need of supervision. It willingly embraces democracy, participation in civil society, and the market. It yearns to be a part of the modern world and -- if allowed -- would want to become a member of the European Union.

Rather than being apprehensive about the AKP and its political, economic, and foreign policies, the West should welcome it. A democratic, market-oriented, prosperous, and stable Turkey, at ease with its Islamic identity and at peace with its neighbors, will prove to be a more natural ally than a military Kemalist state. It will also be better positioned to promote Western interests. A Turkey that is respected and trusted by its neighbors can serve as a broker between, for example, Iran and the West, Israel and Palestine, and Israel and Syria.

This is not to suggest that the AKP is completely benign. Indeed, Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan’s frequent attempts at silencing dissent in the media are worrisome and should be countered.

In time, however, the rise of a middle class will be the most effective guarantee that Turkey will continue its route to secular, Western democracy. Although much of the emerging pious bourgeoisie is closely linked with -- even dependent on -- the AKP, this class will shun extremist policies that endanger its economic interests, even as it continues to embrace moderate Islam. Eventually, the AKP and parties like it may play a role akin to that of the Christian democratic parties of Western Europe.

Finally, those who worry that the AKP’s already lengthy tenure appears set to continue, thereby affording it the opportunity to erode Turkey’s secular foundations further, should recognize that the opposition’s prospects would improve if it embraced some of the more liberal tenets of the AKP’s political platform, such as market reform, civilian control of the military, and the extension of greater cultural rights to the Kurdish minority. But rather than dividing the AKP’s base among its intellectual, religious, entrepreneurial, and Kurdish components by championing progressive causes, the opposition parties have so far opted for reflexive opposition dismissal to its religious platform and bemoaned the end of Kemalism.

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Legitimation Crisis in Afghanistan

NEIL SHAPIRO

In the media celebration of our "victory" over the Taliban in the Helmand Valley, little attention has been given to the nature of insurgency: the proper tactic of guerrillas is to fade away before overwhelming power, leaving behind only enough fighters to force the invaders to harm civilians and damage property. This is exactly what happened in the recent fighting in Marja. Faced with odds of perhaps 20 to 1, helicopters, tanks and bombers, the guerrillas wisely dispersed. Victory may not be quite the right description.

That battle will probably be repeated in Kandahar, which, unlike the agricultural area known as Marja, is a large and densely populated city. Other operations are planned, so the Marja "victory" has set a pattern that accentuates military action. This is not conducive to an exit strategy--it will not lead out of Afghanistan but deeper into the country. Indeed, there is already evidence that this is happening. As the Washington Post reported shortly after the Marja battle ended, not far away "the Marines are constructing a vast base on the outskirts of town that will have two airstrips, an advanced combat hospital, a post office, a large convenience store and rows of housing trailers stretching as far as the eye can see."

Since the Helmand Valley is the focal point of the military strategy, it is important to understand its role in Afghan affairs. The Helmand irrigation project, begun in the Eisenhower administration as a distant echo of the TVA, was supposed to become a prosperous island of democracy and progress. As a member of the Policy Planning Council in the Kennedy administration, I visited it in 1962. What I found was deeply disturbing: no studies had been made of the land to be developed, which proved to have a sheet of impermeable rock just below the surface that caused the soil to turn saline when irrigated; the land was not sufficiently leveled, so irrigation was inefficient; nothing was done to teach the nomad settlers how to farm; plots were too small to foster the social engineering aim of creating a middle class; and since there were no credit facilities to buy seed, settlers were paying 100 percent interest to moneylenders. In short, after the buildup of great expectations, disappointment was palpable.

Was it a portent? It seems likely. At the least, it's striking that precisely where we carried out our first civic action program is where the Taliban became most powerful.

So what should that experience have taught us? That we should learn about the Afghans, their country and their objectives before determining our policy toward them. There is much to be learned, but I will here highlight what I believe are the three crucial issues that will make or break our relationship.

The first issue critical to evaluating US policy is the way the Afghans govern themselves. About four in five Afghans live in the country's 20,000-plus villages. During a 2,000-mile trip around the country by jeep, horseback and plane half a century ago, as well as in later trips, it became clear to me that Afghanistan is really thousands of villages, and each of them, although culturally related to its neighbors, is more or less politically independent and economically autarkic.

This lack of national cohesion thwarted the Russians during their occupation: they won many military victories, and through their civic action programs they actually won over many of the villages, but they could never find or create an organization with which to make peace. Baldly put, no one could surrender the rest. Thus, over the decade of their involvement, the Russians won almost every battle and occupied at one time or another virtually every inch of the country, but they lost about 15,000 soldiers--and the war. When they gave up and left, the Afghans resumed their traditional way of life.

That way of life is embedded in a social code (known in the Pashtun areas as Pashtunwali) that shapes the particular form of Islam they have practiced for centuries and, indeed, that existed long before the coming of Islam. While there are, of course, notable differences in the Pashtun, Hazara, Uzbek and Tajik areas, shared tradition determines how all Afghans govern themselves and react to foreigners.

Among the shared cultural and political forms are town councils (known in the Pashtun areas as jirgas and in the Hazara area as ulus or shuras). The members are not elected but are accorded their status by consensus. These town councils are not, in our sense of the word, institutions; rather, they are "occasions." They come together when pressing issues cannot be resolved by the local headman or respected religious figure. Town councils are the Afghan version of participatory democracy, and when they act they are seen to embody the "way" of their communities.

Pashtunwali demands protection (melmastia) of visitors. Not to protect a guest is so grievous a sin and so blatant a sign of humiliation that a man would rather die than fail. This, of course, has prevented the Afghans from surrendering Osama bin Laden. Inability to reconcile our demands with their customs has been at the heart of our struggle for the past eight years.

As put forth in both the Bush and Obama administrations, our objective is to prevent Al Qaeda from using Afghanistan as a base for attacks on us. We sharpened this objective to the capturing or killing of bin Laden. That is popular with US voters, but even if we could force the Afghans to surrender him, it would alienate the dominant Pashtun community. Thus it would probably increase the danger to us. But it is unnecessary, since a resolution of this dilemma in our favor has been available for years. While Pashtunwali does not permit a protected guest to be surrendered, it allows the host, with honor, to prevent the guest from engaging in actions that endanger the host. In the past, the Taliban virtually imprisoned bin Laden, and they have repeatedly offered--provided we agree to leave their country--to meet our demand that Al Qaeda not be allowed to use Afghanistan as a base. Although setting a withdrawal date would enable us to meet our objective, we have turned down their offers.

The second crucial issue in evaluating our policy is the way the people react to our civic action programs.

Afghanistan is a barren, landlocked country with few resources, and its people have suffered through virtually continuous war for thirty years. Many are wounded or sick, with some even on the brink of starvation. The statistics are appalling: more than one in three subsists on the equivalent of less than 45 cents a day, almost one in two lives below the poverty line and more than one in two preschool children is stunted because of malnutrition. They are the lucky ones; one in five dies before the age of 5. Obviously, the Afghans need help, so we think they should welcome our efforts to aid them. But independent observers have found that they do not. Based on some 400 interviews, a team of Tufts University researchers found that "Afghan perceptions of aid and aid actors are overwhelmingly negative." We must ask why this is.

The reason, I think, is that the Taliban understand from our pronouncements that civic action is a form of warfare. The Russians taught them about civic action long ago, and Gen. David Petraeus specifically proclaimed in his Iraq days, "Money is my most important ammunition in this war." Thus many ordinary citizens see our programs as Petraeus described them--as a method of control or conquest--and so support or at least tolerate the Taliban when they destroy our projects or prevent our aid distribution.

To get perspective on this, it is useful to look at Vietnam. There too we found that the people resented our efforts and often sided with our enemies, the local equivalent of the Taliban: the Vietminh, or, as we called them, the Vietcong. The Vietminh killed officials, teachers and doctors, and destroyed even beneficial works. Foreigners thought their violence was bound to make the people hate them. It didn't. Like the Kabul government, the South Vietnamese regime was so corrupt and predatory that few supported it even to get aid. When we "inherited" the war in Vietnam, we thought we should sideline the corrupt regime, so we used our own officials to deliver aid directly to the villagers. It got through, but our delivering it further weakened the South Vietnamese government's rapport with its people.

Is this relevant to Afghanistan? Reflect on the term used by Gen. Stanley McChrystal when his troops moved into Helmand: he said he was bringing the inhabitants a "government in a box, ready to roll in." That government is a mix of Americans and American-selected Afghans, neither sent by the nominal national government in Kabul nor sanctioned by local authorities.

How will the Afghans react to McChrystal's government? President Karzai was at least initially opposed, seeing the move as undercutting the authority of his government. We don't yet know what the inhabitants thought. But we do know that when we tried similar counterinsurgency tactics in Vietnam, as the editor of the massive collection of our official reports, the Pentagon Papers, commented, "all failed dismally."

If we aim to create and leave behind a reasonably secure society in Afghanistan, we must abandon this failed policy and set a firm and reasonably prompt date for withdrawal. Only thus can we dissociate humanitarian aid from counterinsurgency warfare. This is because once a timetable is clearly announced, a fundamental transformation will begin in the political psychology of our relationship. The Afghans will have no reason (or progressively less reason, as withdrawal begins to be carried out) to regard our aid as a counterinsurgency tactic. At that point, beneficial projects will become acceptable to the local jirgas, whose members naturally focus on their own and their neighbors' prosperity and health. They will then eagerly seek and protect what they now allow the Taliban to destroy.

If under this different circumstance the Taliban try to destroy what the town councils have come to see as beneficial, the councils will cease to provide the active or passive support, sanctuary and information that make the Taliban effective. Without that cooperation, as Mao Zedong long ago told us, they will be like fish with no water in which to swim. Thus, setting a firm and clear date for withdrawal is essential.

This leaves us with the third issue, the central government. We chose it and we pay for it. But as our ambassador, Gen. Karl Eikenberry, has pointed out in leaked reports, it is so dishonest it cannot be a strategic partner. It is hopelessly corrupt, and its election last year was fraudulent; General Petraeus even told President Obama that it is a "crime syndicate." It is important to understand why it lacks legitimacy in the eyes of its people.

For us, the answer seemed simple: a government must legitimize itself the way we legitimize ours, with a reasonably fair election. But our way is not the Afghan way. Their way is through a process of achieving consensus that ultimately must be approved by the supreme council of state, the loya jirga. The apex of a pyramid of village, tribal and provincial assemblies, the loya jirga, according to the Constitution, is "the highest manifestation of the will of the people of Afghanistan."

Like the Russians, we have opposed moves to allow Afghanistan to bring about a national consensus. In 2002 nearly two-thirds of the delegates to a loya jirga signed a petition to make the exiled king, Zahir Shah, president of an interim government to give time for Afghans to work out their future. But we had already decided that Hamid Karzai was "our man in Kabul." So, as research professor Thomas Johnson and former foreign service officer in Afghanistan Chris Mason wrote last year, "massive US interference behind the scenes in the form of bribes, secret deals, and arm twisting got the US-backed candidate for the job, Hamid Karzai, installed instead.... This was the Afghan equivalent of the 1964 Diem Coup in Vietnam: afterward, there was no possibility of creating a stable secular government." An interim Afghan government certified by the loya jirga would have allowed the traditional way to achieve consensus; but, as Selig Harrison reported, our ambassador at the time, Zalmay Khalilzad, "had a bitter 40-minute showdown with the king, who then withdrew his candidacy." We have suffered with the results ever since.

Could we reverse this downward trend? If we remove our opposition to a loya jirga, will the Kabul government respond? Probably not so long as America is willing to pay its officials and protect them. But if we set a clear timetable for withdrawal, members of the government will have a strong self-interest in espousing what they will see as the national cause, and they will call for a loya jirga. Indeed, President Karzai already has.

Would such a move turn Afghanistan over to the Taliban? Realistically, we must anticipate that many, perhaps even a majority, of the delegates, particularly in the Pashtun area, will be at least passive supporters of the Taliban. I do not see any way this can be avoided. Our attempts to win over the "moderates" while fighting the "hardliners" is an echo of what we tried in Vietnam. It did not work there and did not work for the Russians in Afghanistan. It shows no sign of working for us now. As a 2009 Carnegie Endowment study of our occupation and the Taliban reaction to it laid out, even after their bloody defeat in 2001, "there have been no splinter groups since its emergence, except locally with no strategic consequences."

Nor, as I have shown in my history of two centuries of insurgencies, Violent Politics, are we likely to defeat the insurgents. Natives eventually wear down foreigners. The Obama administration apparently accepts this prediction. As the Washington Post reported this past fall, it admits that "the Taliban cannot be eliminated as a political or military movement, regardless of how many combat forces are sent into battle."

A loya jirga held soon is the best hope to create a reasonably balanced national government. This is partly because in the run-up to the national loya jirga, local groups will struggle to enhance or protect local interests. Their action will constitute a brake on the Taliban, who will be impelled to compromise. Today the Taliban enjoy the aura of national defenders against us; once we are no longer a target, that aura will fade.

If we are smart enough to allow the Afghans to solve their problems in their own way rather than try to force them to adopt ours, we can begin a sustainable move toward peace and security. Withdrawal is the essential first step. Further fighting will only multiply the cost to us and lead to failure.

About William R. Polk

William R. Polk (williampolk.com) is the senior director of the W.P. Carey Foundation. He is the author, most recently, of Understanding Iran, and is working on a new book on Afghanistan, Pakistan and Kashmir, tentatively titled The Cockpit of Asia

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Entertainment Trumps Politics on Chinese Web Sites - NYTimes.com

Image via CrunchBase

By DAVID BARBOZA

SHANGHAI — The daily Web habits of a typical 18-year-old college student named Li Yufei show why American Internet companies, one after another, have had trouble penetrating what is now the world’s most wired nation.

He writes a blog, downloads Korean television shows, manages two Web sites devoted to music and plays an online game called Rongguang Hospital, at Baidu.com.

“I started doing a lot of this when I was about 11 years old,” says Mr. Li, a freshman at the Shanghai Maritime University. “Now, I spend most of my leisure time on the Internet,” he says. “There’s nowhere else to go.”

Google’s decision last month to remove some of its operations from China has overshadowed a startling dynamic at work in this country, a place where young people complain that there is not a lot to do: the Internet, already a potent social force here, has become the country’s prime entertainment service.

Image via CrunchBase

Frustrated with media censorship, bland programming on state-run television and limits on the number of foreign films allowed to be shown in China each year, young people are logging onto the Web and downloading alternatives. Homegrown Web sites like Baidu, Tencent and Sina.com have captured millions of Chinese youths obsessed with online games, pirated movies and music, the raising of virtual vegetables, microblogging and instant messaging.

Even though Facebook, Twitter and YouTube are blocked by censors here, Chinese social networking sites like QQ Zone, Tianya.cn and Kaixin001.com are flourishing in surprisingly inventive ways.

A study conducted by the Boston Consulting Group found that people in China (which now has nearly 400 million Internet users) are far more connected than Americans, and that globally only the Japanese spend more time on the Web.

Analysts say Google struggled to gain market share in China partly because the company had failed to build a big enough online community around its search engine, unlike its chief rival here, Baidu.com.

The surprising power of online communities in China has Communist Party leaders worried about the ability of online social networks to spread viral messages that could ignite social movements, and pose a challenge to the party and its leaders. They saw what happened to Han Feng, a midlevel party official in southern China, when his private diary was recently posted online.

In the diary, Mr. Han catalogued not just the hefty bribes he was taking, but detailed his sexual escapades with co-workers and mistresses. The ensuing online uproar led to his sacking and a criminal investigation.

“For the government, the scary part of the Internet is the unpredictable power of its organization,” said Yang Guobin, an associate professor at Barnard College and author of “The Power of the Internet in China” (Columbia University Press, 2009).

“Although people are there socializing, it can provide a platform for lots of other activities, and even turn political,” he said.

But young people in China say they are excited about the Web not because it offers a means to rebellion, but because it gives them a wide variety of social and entertainment options.

One of the more remarkable developments in the Internet in recent years has been the informal network of young people who volunteer to produce Chinese subtitles for popular American television series like “Prison Break” and “Gossip Girl.”

The Chinese subtitles are often translated within hours of the program’s showing in the United States, and then attached to the video and made freely available on Chinese file-sharing sites.

Chinese Internet companies have gleaned a lesson from this: entertainment trumps politics on the Web in China.

“The Web is really a reflection of real life,” says Gary Wang, founder and chief executive of Tudou, one of China’s biggest video-sharing sites. “What people do in real life is they go to karaoke rooms, they go to bars, they get together with friends and they shop. And that’s what they do online.”

Baidu is one of the companies that recognized the link. Founded in 1999, Baidu — which got an early investment from Google — quickly established itself as China’s largest search engine.

By the time Google sold its stake in Baidu and set up its own Chinese-language search engine in 2006, Baidu was already expanding its site in the hopes of building a community that would stick around longer on the site.

One of the company’s most popular offerings is the Baidu Post Bar, an online bulletin board of hot topics that now accounts for nearly 15 percent of the site’s traffic. (Among the most popular topics in recent weeks was a television anchorwoman’s ties to a corrupt official).

There is also Baidu Knows, Baidu Space (for blogs) and Baidu Baike, a Chinese version of Wikipedia.

Now, the company is working on an online video site that would work much like Hulu.com, the site in the United States where several broadcast TV networks present their shows.

Every Chinese Internet company seems to be building its own online conglomerate to offer online games, shopping, blogs and bulletin boards. Few companies want to specialize.

Just like American TV networks, state-run networks in China are worried that entertainment is migrating to the Web and that young people are souring on television. So they are trying to jazz up their offerings with reality shows or programs modeled on “American Idol.”

Sometimes, though, network news divisions get even by investigating the follies of their Web competitors.

In 2008, for instance, China Central Television — the biggest state-run network — ran an exposé on how Baidu accepted money to bolster the search results of unlicensed medical companies.

Baidu reviewed its policies, but also cleverly managed its way through the scandal by paying more than $5 million to be a sponsor of the state network and by courting the Chinese press.

Several Chinese journalists say that soon after Baidu suffered bad publicity, the company offered to fly a group of journalists to Hong Kong for a leisurely weekend at a luxury hotel.

A spokeswoman for Baidu declined to comment on the Hong Kong press outing, but media coverage of Baidu improved.

Google’s late start in China made it difficult to keep pace with Chinese competitors, who were constantly rolling out new things to appeal to young Web users.

Analysts say Microsoft’s new search engine, Bing, also has little chance of succeeding. Although Microsoft has spent years building a presence in China and working with the Chinese government, the company’s online offerings have fared poorly.

“I don’t think Bing will come even close to Baidu,” said Lu Bowang, president of China IntelliConsulting in Beijing. A Microsoft spokesman declined to comment on Bing’s China strategy.

Mr. Li, the Shanghai Maritime University student, says he surfs the Web to find or build his own community. A shy person with no siblings, he now has 300 online buddies, and says he turns to the Web to find what he cannot find anywhere else, particularly on state-run TV, which banned some Korean shows years ago.

“The State Administration shut down a lot of the popular Japanese and Korean series a long time ago,” he says. “So I have to go online to find things like this.”

Chen Xiaoduan contributed research.

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White House Quietly Courts Muslims in U.S. - NYTimes.com

Image by Getty Images via Daylife

By ANDREA ELLIOTT

When President Obama took the stage in Cairo last June, promising a new relationship with the Islamic world, Muslims in America wondered only half-jokingly whether the overture included them. After all, Mr. Obama had kept his distance during the campaign, never visiting an American mosque and describing the false claim that he was Muslim as a “smear” on his Web site.

Nearly a year later, Mr. Obama has yet to set foot in an American mosque. And he still has not met with Muslim and Arab-American leaders. But less publicly, his administration has reached out to this politically isolated constituency in a sustained and widening effort that has left even skeptics surprised.

Muslim and Arab-American advocates have participated in policy discussions and received briefings from top White House aides and other officials on health care legislation, foreign policy, the economy, immigration and national security. They have met privately with a senior White House adviser, Valerie Jarrett, Homeland Security Secretary Janet Napolitano and Attorney General Eric H. Holder Jr. to discuss civil liberties concerns and counterterrorism strategy.

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The impact of this continuing dialogue is difficult to measure, but White House officials cited several recent government actions that were influenced, in part, by the discussions. The meeting with Ms. Napolitano was among many factors that contributed to the government’s decision this month to end a policy subjecting passengers from 14 countries, most of them Muslim, to additional scrutiny at airports, the officials said.

That emergency directive, enacted after a failed Dec. 25 bombing plot, has been replaced with a new set of intelligence-based protocols that law enforcement officials consider more effective.

Also this month, Tariq Ramadan, a prominent Muslim academic, visited the United States for the first time in six years after Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton reversed a decision by the Bush administration, which had barred Mr. Ramadan from entering the country, initially citing the U.S.A. Patriot Act. Mrs. Clinton also cleared the way for another well-known Muslim professor, Adam Habib, who had been denied entry under similar circumstances.

Arab-American and Muslim leaders said they had yet to see substantive changes on a variety of issues, including what they describe as excessive airport screening, policies that have chilled Muslim charitable giving and invasive F.B.I. surveillance guidelines. But they are encouraged by the extent of their consultation by the White House and governmental agencies.

“For the first time in eight years, we have the opportunity to meet, engage, discuss, disagree, but have an impact on policy,” said James Zogby, president of the Arab American Institute in Washington. “We’re being made to feel a part of that process and that there is somebody listening.”

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In the post-9/11 era, Muslims and Arab-Americans have posed something of a conundrum for the government: they are seen as a political liability but also, increasingly, as an important partner in countering the threat of homegrown terrorism. Under President George W. Bush, leaders of these groups met with government representatives from time to time, but said they had limited interaction with senior officials. While Mr. Obama has yet to hold the kind of high-profile meeting that Muslims and Arab-Americans seek, there is a consensus among his policymakers that engagement is no longer optional.

The administration’s approach has been understated. Many meetings have been private; others were publicized only after the fact. A visit to New York University in February by John O. Brennan, Mr. Obama’s chief counterterrorism adviser, drew little news coverage, but caused a stir among Muslims around the country. Speaking to Muslim students, activists and others, Mr. Brennan acknowledged many of their grievances, including “surveillance that has been excessive,” “overinclusive no-fly lists” and “an unhelpful atmosphere around many Muslim charities.”

“These are challenges we face together as Americans,” said Mr. Brennan, who momentarily showed off his Arabic to hearty applause. He and other officials have made a point of disassociating Islam from terrorism in public comments, using the phrase “violent extremism” in place of words like “jihad” and “Islamic terrorism.”

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While the administration’s solicitation of Muslims and Arab-Americans has drawn little fanfare, it has not escaped criticism. A small but vocal group of research analysts, bloggers and others complain that the government is reaching out to Muslim leaders and organizations with an Islamist agenda or ties to extremist groups abroad.

They point out that Ms. Jarrett gave the keynote address at the annual convention for the Islamic Society of North America. The group was listed as an unindicted co-conspirator in a federal case against the Holy Land Foundation for Relief and Development, a Texas-based charity whose leaders were convicted in 2008 of funneling money to Hamas. The society denies any links to terrorism.

“I think dialogue is good, but it has to be with genuine moderates,” said Steven Emerson, a terrorism analyst who advises government officials. “These are the wrong groups to legitimize.” Mr. Emerson and others have also objected to the political appointments of several American Muslims, including Rashad Hussain.

In February, the president chose Mr. Hussain, a 31-year-old White House lawyer, to become the United States’ special envoy to the Organization of the Islamic Conference. The position, a kind of ambassador at large to Muslim countries, was created by Mr. Bush. In a video address, Mr. Obama highlighted Mr. Hussain’s status as a “close and trusted member of my White House staff” and “a hafiz,” a person who has memorized the Koran.

Within days of the announcement, news reports surfaced about comments Mr. Hussain had made on a panel in 2004, while he was a student at Yale Law School, in which he referred to several domestic terrorism prosecutions as “politically motivated.” Among the cases he criticized was that of Sami Al-Arian, a former computer-science professor in Florida who pleaded guilty to aiding members of a Palestinian terrorist group.

At first, the White House said Mr. Hussain did not recall making the comments, which had been removed from the Web version of a 2004 article published by a small Washington magazine. When Politico obtained a recording of the panel, Mr. Hussain acknowledged criticizing the prosecutions but said he believed the magazine quoted him inaccurately, prompting him to ask its editor to remove the comments. On Feb. 22, The Washington Examiner ran an editorial with the headline “Obama Selects a Voice of Radical Islam.”

Muslim leaders watched carefully as the story migrated to Fox News. They had grown accustomed to close scrutiny, many said in interviews, but were nonetheless surprised. In 2008, Mr. Hussain had co-authored a paper for the Brookings Institution arguing that the government should use the peaceful teachings of Islam to fight terrorism.

“Rashad Hussain is about as squeaky clean as you get,” said Representative Keith Ellison, a Minnesota Democrat who is Muslim. Mr. Ellison and others wondered whether the administration would buckle under the pressure and were relieved when the White House press secretary, Robert Gibbs, defended Mr. Hussain.

“The fact that the president and the administration have appointed Muslims to positions and have stood by them when they’ve been attacked is the best we can hope for,” said Ingrid Mattson, president of the Islamic Society of North America.

It was notably different during Mr. Obama’s run for office. In June 2008, volunteers of his campaign barred two Muslim women in headscarves from appearing behind Mr. Obama at a rally in Detroit, eliciting widespread criticism. The campaign promptly recruited Mazen Asbahi, a 36-year-old corporate lawyer and popular Muslim activist from Chicago, to become its liaison to Muslims and Arab-Americans.

Bloggers began researching Mr. Asbahi’s background. For a brief time in 2000, he had sat on the board of an Islamic investment fund, along with Sheikh Jamal Said, a Chicago imam who was later named as an unindicted co-conspirator in the Holy Land case. Mr. Asbahi said in an interview that he had left the board after three weeks because he wanted no association with the imam.

Shortly after his appointment to the Obama campaign, Mr. Asbahi said, a Wall Street Journal reporter began asking questions about his connection to the imam. Campaign officials became concerned that news coverage would give critics ammunition to link the imam to Mr. Obama, Mr. Asbahi recalled. On their recommendation, Mr. Asbahi agreed to resign from the campaign, he said.

He is still unsettled by the power of his detractors. “To be in the midst of this campaign of change and hope and to have it stripped away over nothing,” he said. “It hurts.”

From the moment Mr. Obama took office, he seemed eager to change the tenor of America’s relationship with Muslims worldwide. He gave his first interview to Al Arabiya, the Arabic-language television station based in Dubai. Muslims cautiously welcomed his ban on torture and his pledge to close Guantánamo within a year.

In his Cairo address, he laid out his vision for “a new beginning” with Muslims: while America would continue to fight terrorism, he said, terrorism would no longer define America’s approach to Muslims.

Back at home, Muslim and Arab-American leaders remained skeptical. But they took note when, a few weeks later, Mohamed Magid, a prominent imam from Sterling, Va., and Rami Nashashibi, a Muslim activist from Chicago, joined the president at a White-House meeting about fatherhood. Also that month, Dr. Faisal Qazi, a board member of American Muslim Health Professionals, began meeting with administration officials to discuss health care reform.

The invitations were aimed at expanding the government’s relationship with Muslims and Arab-Americans to areas beyond security, said Mr. Hussain, the White House’s special envoy. Mr. Hussain began advising the president on issues related to Islam after joining the White House counsel’s office in January 2009. He helped draft Mr. Obama’s Cairo speech and accompanied him on the trip. “The president realizes that you cannot engage one-fourth of the world’s population based on the erroneous beliefs of a fringe few,” Mr. Hussain said.

Other government offices followed the lead of the White House. In October, Commerce Secretary Gary Locke met with Arab-Americans and Muslims in Dearborn, Mich., to discuss challenges facing small-business owners. Also last fall, Farah Pandith was sworn in as the State Department’s first special representative to Muslim communities. While Ms. Pandith works mostly with Muslims abroad, she said she had also consulted with American Muslims because Mrs. Clinton believes “they can add value overseas.”

Despite this, American actions abroad — including civilian deaths from drone strikes in Pakistan and the failure to close Guantánamo — have drawn the anger of Muslims and Arab-Americans.

Even though their involvement with the administration has broadened, they remain most concerned about security-related policies. In January, when the Department of Homeland Security hosted a two-day meeting with Muslim, Arab-American, South Asian and Sikh leaders, the group expressed concern about the emergency directive subjecting passengers from a group of Muslim countries to additional screening.

Farhana Khera, executive director of Muslim Advocates, pointed out that the policy would never have caught the attempted shoe bomber Richard Reid, who is British. “It almost sends the signal that the government is going to treat nationals of powerless countries differently from countries that are powerful,” Ms. Khera recalled saying as community leaders around the table nodded their heads.

Ms. Napolitano, who sat with the group for more than an hour, committed to meeting with them more frequently. Ms. Khera said she left feeling somewhat hopeful.

“I think our message is finally starting to get through,” she said.

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