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Bin Laden’s Protectors in Pakistan

After a predictable wave of jingoistic euphoria, the death of Osama bin Laden has raised some troubling questions about Pakistan and discredited a lot of the previous conventional wisdom about his whereabouts. To summarize what we know:

  • Bin Laden was not constantly on the move, but had stayed in his final location for several years.
  • He was not in tribal areas near the Afghan border, but deep within Pakistan, not far from the capital.
  • He was in fact still operationally involved with al-Qaeda. He was by no means so preoccupied with evading detection that he could not continue to act as leader.

Regarding the U.S. operation against Bin Laden, it should be clear this was a “kill” mission from the beginning, as the original plan was to destroy the compound with a missile attack. It is hardly credible that trained SEALs would take a head shot to incapacitate an unarmed man if “capture” was a primary objective, rather than a contingency. The U.S. probably wants to minimize blowback by downplaying the cold-blooded nature of the assassination. Most noteworthy is how Obama’s bold disregard for Pakistani sovereignty (as promised in 2007) is praised even by liberals, as his predecessor Bush succeeded in raising American tolerance of overt imperial posturing. The world is our playground, so it seems.

What of the Pakistanis? It is clear by now that, contrary to Sec. Clinton’s initial attempt to emphasize the cooperation of Pakistan, this had been an exclusively American operation for almost a year. The Pakistanis had no knowledge of CIA surveillance in Abbottabad, and they were given no advance notice of the SEAL operation. In fact, the only reason they found out at all was because one of the helicopters crashed. Even then, the SEALs were on the way back to Afghanistan by the time planes were able to scramble. No magical radar-evading or radar-jamming technology was needed, as the helicopters were shaped to leave almost no radar image if they fly low enough, and they could not be sighted visually at night.

Bin Laden certainly had a support network in Pakistan, and it is credible that this included current or former members of the Pakistani military and intelligence service, which are known to contain radical Islamic sympathizers. Still, the high command is of more moderate, secular leanings, which means there was certainly a major intelligence failure on some level if the leadership was unaware of Bin Laden’s presence. The sometimes clumsy surveillance methods of Pakistani intelligence are well attested. Still, the required level of incompetence is not so great as one might think, considering that fortified compounds are commonplace in that part of Pakistan, and that the Americans entertained doubts about the compound for nine months before deciding there was enough evidence to act. The only reason they even found the compound was because they knew the identity and location of Bin Laden’s courier, who took great precaution not to leave an electronic trail to the hideout. Any official Pakistani support received must have been at a low level, judging from the negligible number of armed guards.

As for the civilian government, there is little reason to doubt that Zardari had no knowledge of any coverup, but he is a relatively weak leader in a country dominated by its military establishment. More than three years after the assassination of his wife lifted him to the leadership of his party on a surge of sympathy, the current president has sought to distance himself from his corrupt past, which earned him the nickname of “Mr. Ten Percent,” only to find a more dangerous situation in Pakistan, where top-level terrorists can operate with near impunity, under the noses of the military and security establishment. He is in the difficult situation of simultaneously claiming ignorance and competence.

The U.S., for its part, may be losing its propaganda touch, judging from its weak attempts to spin the released Bin Laden videos. “He dyed his beard and watched himself on television? How vain!” (Either that or he was trying to remove time indicators from his videos and learn what information the press had on him.) “He wore a blanket because he was cold? How frail!” If this is really the best they can do, then there is not much left of the American propaganda machine that Goebbels so admired. Still, even in their prime, Americans have had little of that Roman virtue of recognizing valor in an adversary (apart from the Civil War, where the enemies were Americans). If all our enemies must be cowardly and weak, it is remarkable that we expect to be praised for our victories.

Reflections on Egypt

As a rule, the masses will not revolt against even the worst government unless they are starving, and Egypt is no exception. Having endured the unpopular Mubarak regime for 30 years, Egyptians did not suddenly discover the internet or develop a stronger taste for democracy. What has happened in recent months is that food prices have escalated without an increase in government food subsidies, bringing an already impoverished society to its breaking point.

A nice graphical depiction of Egypt’s food and energy crisis can be found at The Oil Drum, showing how Egypt’s increased oil consumption is leading it to become an oil importing nation for the first time. Without the windfall of oil export revenues, the government can no longer subsidize its failed domestic economy to alleviate the cost of food and other necessities. Egyptians literally have nothing to lose by resisting a government that has denied them the means of subsistence.

Egypt’s problems are an extreme form of similar problems held throughout the Middle East, as global oil exports are down, and many Arab governments find themselves too cash-strapped to keep their populations fed by subsidies. Only in such extremes do we find genuinely spontaneous mass movements from the bottom up, which are not orchestrated by any political or military cadre. The success of the Egyptian revolution in a mere 18 days has removed the biggest obstacle to mass revolt, namely the fear that there is no chance of success.

Ironically, most of the Arab dictatorships came to power by leading populist movements that toppled Western-backed monarchs in the 1950s and 60s. Several of these regimes, facing the same economic problems as their predecessors, eventually became dependent on the US or the USSR for military aid in order to secure their rule. The nations with greater oil wealth could afford to deliver economic improvement to the lower classes, which was generally implemented through socialistic or statist programs. The inefficiencies of socialism led to attempts at privatization reforms, such as those enacted by Mubarak, but the implementation of these reforms reeked of cronyism and corruption, offering little tangible benefit to the lower classes.

The mass revolutions in Egypt and elsewhere have no discernible political program other than to get rid of the existing failed regime. It is by no means guaranteed that the long-term result of these revolutions will be parliamentary democracy. After all, that had been the intent of the 1952 revolution that resulted in Nasser taking charge of Egypt. The present Egyptian military has disavowed any intent to rule, but even civilian leadership in the Middle East often proves reluctant to relinquish power, once obtained. Whatever the form of the new government, it will face the same structural economic and social problems that brought down the previous regime, and free elections will not bring any miraculous solutions. Both the market economy and the social welfare state can bring their fair share of ills, as the wealthy nations of the West have recently learned or re-learned.

Much has been said of the role that so-called “social media” played in the Egyptian revolution. Such tools were undoubtedly helpful in coordinating mass revolts without the help of structured leadership, but they would have come to nought if there was not a broad determination among the people to persevere in their protests. The Egyptian government was astoundingly successful, from a technical perspective, in shutting down the Internet for five days, yet the protests persisted with even greater fervor and finally the government relented. Shortly after the revolution, Syria actually liberalized internet access, realizing that its suppression would only give the people one more occasion for discontent, as if you had cut off power or water or any other utility. The Internet does not create revolutions, but gives voice to discontent that is no less real if the nation is unplugged.

Parsing Is Not Understanding

The substantial advances in natural language processing made by IBM’s “Watson” supercomputer, while genuinely impressive, have unfortunately given rise to exaggerated claims of the sort that is all too common in computer science. Our tendency to anthropomorphize our creations has led many to uncritically claim that Watson has “intelligence” or is able to understand “meaning” in words. Even less soberly, some are envisioning a day when such “artificial intelligences” will make humans obsolete. These silly claims are grounded in a philosophical sloppiness that fails to distinguish between concepts and their representations, between signal processing and subjective awareness, between parsing and understanding. I have already addressed some of these errors in the eighth chapter of Vitalism and Psychology.

While a little fanciful anthropomorphizing of a computer may seem harmless now, there is a grave danger that we will be led into disastrous social and ethical decisions when computers are able to mimic intelligent behavior more convincingly. As an extreme example, if we were to take seriously the claim that a computer has rendered humans obsolete, we would foolishly replace ourselves with a bunch of unaware machines sending signals to each other, yet having no interior psychological life. Alternatively, we might decide that machine “intelligences” should enjoy rights formerly reserved only to humans.

These absurdities can be avoided if we confront the reality that there is nothing fundamentally different about the behavior of supercomputers like Watson as compared with its simpler predecessors. All these machines do is process signals algorithmically. They have no intensional understanding of meaning. What we call a computer’s “understanding” or “intelligence” is really how it treats a certain signal object. This is strictly determined by its hard wiring and its program (though the latter may include random variables). It is completely unnecessary for the computer to know what it is doing. For example, Watson may distinguish which of the several definitions of the word “bat” is intended by context, but this distinction does not involve actually knowing or seeing a baseball bat or a flying mammal. It is a strictly functionalistic analysis of language, selecting one of several possible attributions based on a probabilistic analysis using syntactic context.

Years ago, I wrote a C program that solves quartic polynomial equations, which was simple enough to run on an IBM 386. This program did not give the computer the power to understand higher mathematics. I simply reduced an intelligible process to an algorithm that a machine could execute without understanding anything about anything. The computer did not know it was doing math any more than a chess program knows it is playing chess. The same is true with respect to Watson and language. It has not the slightest grasp of conceptual meaning. The impressive achievement in its programming is reducing the vast possibilities of natural language parsing to an executable algorithm that has a high degree of accuracy (though not perfect) in its results.

It is certainly not true that Watson understands language the same way humans do, much as Deep Blue did not play chess as humans do. Quite simply, humans do not have the computing ability to explore millions of possibilities in a few seconds, so that is certainly not how we identify the meanings of words in speech in real time. We are able to intuit or directly understand the meanings of words, so we do not have to do much deep analysis to figure out how to interpret ordinary conversation. The great power of rational understanding is that we can get directly at the answer without walking through countless possibilities. This is why I was much more impressed with Kasparov than with Deep Blue, for Kasparov was able to keep the match competitive even though he could not possibly go through millions of possibilities each turn. He had real wisdom and understanding, and could intuitively grasp the most likely successful move on each turn, with a high degree of accuracy.

Some, unwilling to accept a fundamental distinction between computers and authentic rational beings, have sought to demote the latter to the status of computers. They will say, in effect, that what we have said about how computers work is perfectly true, but human beings do not do anything more than this. All we do is process data, and relate inputs to outputs. This position can hardly be characterized as anything but profound willful ignorance. A moment’s careful introspection should suffice to demolish this characterization of human intelligence.

Unfortunately, philosophical naivete is endemic in computer science, which purports to reduce intensional meaning and understanding to its extensional representations. This is linguistically naive as well, for if a signal is an arbitrary sign for a concept, it follows that meaning is not be found in the signal itself. The computer never interprets anything; it only converts one set of signals into another set. It is up to us rational beings to interpret the output as an answer with meaning.

Highly accurate natural language processing is an important step toward establishing credible computerized mimicry of intelligent processes without subjective understanding. Although we can never create genuine intelligence using the current modalities of computer engineering, we might do well enough to create a superficially convincing substitute. In a world that increasingly treats human beings with a functionalistic input-output mentality, such developments could have profound social and ethical implications, which I treat in my new short story, “The Turing Graduate,” to be published soon.