January 27, 2008
OP-ED COLUMNIST
The Age of Ambition

By NICHOLAS D. KRISTOF
DAVOS, Switzerland

With the American presidential campaign in full swing, the obvious way to change the world might seem to be through politics.

But growing numbers of young people are leaping into the fray and doing the job themselves. These are the social entrepreneurs, the 21st-century answer to the student protesters of the 1960s, and they are some of the most interesting people here at the World Economic Forum (not only because they’re half the age of everyone else).

Andrew Klaber, a 26-year-old playing hooky from Harvard Business School to come here (don’t tell his professors!), is an example of the social entrepreneur. He spent the summer after his sophomore year in college in Thailand and was aghast to see teenage girls being forced into prostitution after their parents had died of AIDS.

So he started Orphans Against AIDS (www.orphansagainstaids.org), which pays school-related expenses for hundreds of children who have been orphaned or otherwise affected by AIDS in poor countries. He and his friends volunteer their time and pay administrative costs out of their own pockets so that every penny goes to the children.

Mr. Klaber was able to expand the nonprofit organization in Africa through introductions made by Jennifer Staple, who was a year ahead of him when they were in college. When she was a sophomore, Ms. Staple founded an organization in her dorm room to collect old reading glasses in the United States and ship them to poor countries. That group, Unite for Sight, has ballooned, and last year it provided eye care to 200,000 people (www.uniteforsight.org).

In the ’60s, perhaps the most remarkable Americans were the civil rights workers and antiwar protesters who started movements that transformed the country. In the 1980s, the most fascinating people were entrepreneurs like Steve Jobs and Bill Gates, who started companies and ended up revolutionizing the way we use technology.

Today the most remarkable young people are the social entrepreneurs, those who see a problem in society and roll up their sleeves to address it in new ways. Bill Drayton, the chief executive of an organization called Ashoka that supports social entrepreneurs, likes to say that such people neither hand out fish nor teach people to fish; their aim is to revolutionize the fishing industry. If that sounds insanely ambitious, it is. John Elkington and Pamela Hartigan title their new book on social entrepreneurs “The Power of Unreasonable People.”

Universities are now offering classes in social entrepreneurship, and there are a growing number of role models. Wendy Kopp turned her thesis at Princeton into Teach for America and has had far more impact on schools than the average secretary of education.

One of the social entrepreneurs here is Soraya Salti, a 37-year-old Jordanian woman who is trying to transform the Arab world by teaching entrepreneurship in schools. Her organization, Injaz, is now training 100,000 Arab students each year to find a market niche, construct a business plan and then launch and nurture a business.

The program (www.injaz.org.jo) has spread to 12 Arab countries and is aiming to teach one million students a year. Ms. Salti argues that entrepreneurs can stimulate the economy, give young people a purpose and revitalize the Arab world. Girls in particular have flourished in the program, which has had excellent reviews and is getting support from the U.S. Agency for International Development. My hunch is that Ms. Salti will contribute more to stability and peace in the Middle East than any number of tanks in Iraq, U.N. resolutions or summit meetings.

“If you can capture the youth and change the way they think, then you can change the future,” she said.

Another young person on a mission is Ariel Zylbersztejn, a 27-year-old Mexican who founded and runs a company called Cinepop, which projects movies onto inflatable screens and shows them free in public parks. Mr. Zylbersztejn realized that 90 percent of Mexicans can’t afford to go to movies, so he started his own business model: He sells sponsorships to companies to advertise to the thousands of viewers who come to watch the free entertainment.

Mr. Zylbersztejn works with microcredit agencies and social welfare groups to engage the families that come to his movies and help them start businesses or try other strategies to overcome poverty. Cinepop is only three years old, but already 250,000 people a year watch movies on his screens — and his goal is to take the model to Brazil, India, China and other countries.

So as we follow the presidential campaign, let’s not forget that the winner isn’t the only one who will shape the world. Only one person can become president of the United States, but there’s no limit to the number of social entrepreneurs who can make this planet a better place.

You are invited to comment on this column at Mr. Kristof’s blog, www.nytimes.com/ontheground.

February 8, 2008
Gates Says Anger Over Iraq Hurts Afghan Effort

By THOM SHANKER
MUNICH — Defense Secretary Robert M. Gates said Friday that many Europeans are confused about NATO’s security mission in Afghanistan, and that they do not support the alliance effort because they opposed the American-led invasion of Iraq.

“I worry that for many Europeans the missions in Iraq and Afghanistan are confused,” Mr. Gates said as he flew here to deliver an address at an international security conference.

“I think that they combine the two,” Mr. Gates added. “Many of them, I think, have a problem with our involvement in Iraq, and project that to Afghanistan, and do not understand the very different — for them — the very different kind of threat.”

The comments were the first time Mr. Gates had explicitly linked European antipathy to American policy in Iraq with why large segments of the public here do not support the NATO security and reconstruction operation in Afghanistan.

Even more, Mr. Gates’ assessment was an unusually candid acknowledgment from a senior member of President Bush’s cabinet that the war in Iraq has exacted a direct, and significant, political cost, even among Washington’s closest allies.

Over recent weeks, Mr. Gates has made a public and private effort to persuade NATO governments to offer up more combat troops as well as military and police trainers for the Afghan mission. At the conclusion of a two-day meeting of NATO defense ministers in Lithuania Friday morning, Mr. Gates expressed confidence that “a number of the allies are considering what more they might be able to do.”

Mr. Gates said that his recent public comments, as well as his keynote speech here on Sunday, are to “focus on why Al Qaeda in Afghanistan and failure in Afghanistan would be a security problem for Europe.”

He said that Al Qaeda leaders hiding in and near Afghanistan, and terrorist foot soldiers linked to the organization, already were responsible for violent attacks in Europe.

In a public diplomacy strategy somewhat unusual for an American defense secretary, Mr. Gates said he will attempt to speak directly to the people of Europe, and not their governments, “in an effort to try and explain why their security is tied to the success in Afghanistan and how success in Afghanistan impacts the future of the alliance.”

Mr. Gates acknowledged there is a risk in making a personal appeal to Europeans for support in stabilizing and rebuilding Afghanistan if their own governments have not been able to make the case with complete success already.

There is no need to rethink the NATO strategy in Afghanistan nor to reshape the mission, Mr. Gates said. But while he is pressing immediately for increased commitments from NATO nations and other allies for combat troops, trainers and transport aircraft, he also stressed that rebuilding Afghanistan “is a long-term project.”

“Afghanistan is going to need significant international help and support for a long time,” he said. The goal should be to move toward civil reconstruction as insurgents are defeated, he said. Yet 2007 was a violent year for the mission, and a series of recent studies by respected policy institutes have said the international mission in Afghanistan is at risk of failure.

February 8, 2008
New Weight in Army Manual on Stabilization

By MICHAEL R. GORDON
WASHINGTON — The Army has drafted a new operations manual that elevates the mission of stabilizing war-torn nations, making it equal in importance to defeating adversaries on the battlefield.

Military officials described the new document, the first new edition of the Army’s comprehensive doctrine since 2001, as a major development that draws on the hard-learned lessons of Iraq and Afghanistan, where initial military successes gave way to long, grueling struggles to establish control.

It is also an illustration of how far the Pentagon has moved beyond the Bush administration’s initial reluctance to use the military to support “nation-building” efforts when it came into office.

But some influential officers are already arguing that the Army still needs to put actions behind its new words, and they have raised searching questions about whether the Army’s military structure, personnel policies and weapons programs are consistent with its doctrine.

The manual describes the United States as facing an era of “persistent conflict” in which the American military will often operate among civilians in countries where local institutions are fragile and efforts to win over a wary population are vital.

Lt. Gen. William B. Caldwell IV, the commander of the Army’s Combined Arms Center at Fort Leavenworth in Kansas, began briefing lawmakers on the document on Thursday. In an interview, he called it a “blueprint to operate over the next 10 to 15 years.”

“Army doctrine now equally weights tasks dealing with the population — stability or civil support — with those related to offensive and defensive operations,” the manual states. “Winning battles and engagements is important but alone is not sufficient. Shaping the civil situation is just as important to success.”

In both Iraq and Afghanistan, the military is enmeshed in rebuilding local institutions, helping to restore essential services and safeguarding a vulnerable population. The new manual is an attempt to put these endeavors — along with counterinsurgency warfare — at the core of military training, planning and operations. That would require some important changes. “There is going to be some resistance,” General Caldwell said. “There will be people who will hear and understand what we are saying, but it is going to take some time to inculcate that into our culture.”

Even as they welcomed it, other Army officers said there were inconsistencies between the newly minted doctrine on how to wage war and current practice. Army brigades in Iraq have too few combat engineers to support civil programs, they said. Also, they added, the Army does not promote officers who advise the Iraqi and Afghan security forces as readily as battalion staff officers and needs to improve their training.

Some Army officers have also questioned whether the development of the Army’s Future Combat System, a multibillion-dollar program in which air and unmanned ground sensors will be networked with armored vehicles so that soldiers can attack targets from a safe distance, is consistent with this new vision of war.

The new manual is expected to be formally unveiled this month. The New York Times was provided with a recent draft.

When the United States invaded Iraq, Donald H. Rumsfeld, then the defense secretary, and many ranking military leaders spoke highly of the value of speed and high-technology military systems, arguing that they could enable a relatively small number of troops to rapidly defeat the United States’ adversaries. The mission of stabilizing Iraq after the fall of Saddam Hussein was generally treated as a secondary concern, one that assumed that Iraq’s security forces would both cooperate and be effective.

The American military’s difficulty in securing Iraq has led to much soul-searching within the armed forces on how to prepare for future conflicts. Col. H. R. McMaster of the Army, who commanded the successful effort in 2005 to secure the northern Iraqi town of Tal Afar, asserts in a new article that an exaggerated faith in military technology and a corresponding undervaluation of political and military measures to secure the peace undermined American efforts in Iraq.

“Self-delusion about the character of future conflict weakened U.S. efforts in Afghanistan and Iraq,” he wrote in Survival, a journal published by the International Institute for Strategic Studies.

Colonel McMaster added in the article that the Army “is finding it difficult to cut completely loose from years of wrongheaded thinking,” noting that assumptions that high-technology systems will provide the American military with “dominant knowledge” of the battlefield has formed much of the justification for the Army program to build the Future Combat System.

At the Pentagon, Defense Secretary Robert M. Gates has cautioned the Army not to assume that the counterinsurgency campaigns in Iraq and Afghanistan are anomalies. Mr. Gates said in October that “unconventional wars” were “the ones most likely to be fought in the years ahead.” A 2005 Pentagon directive also advised the military to treat “stability operations” as a core mission.

The Army’s new manual tries to address such concerns. It paints a picture of future wars in which the Army needs to be prepared to deal with changing coalitions and complex cultural factors.

“The operational environment will remain a dirty, frightening, physically and emotionally draining one in which death and destruction result from environmental conditions creating humanitarian crisis as well as conflict itself,” the manual states. It will be an arena, the manual notes, in which success depends not only on force in defeating an enemy but also “how quickly a state of stability can be established and maintained.”

General Caldwell said the manual would influence Army education and training by stressing the sort of skills that are needed to bring stability to conflict-ridden states with weak governments.

“There will be people who naturally will say, ‘If I can do high-end offense and defense, I can do any lesser kind of operations,’ ” he said. “What we have found through seven years is that is not the case.”

Some steps to improve the Army’s abilities in these areas are already under way, he asserted. By way of example, changes are being made in the way combat engineers are assigned, to give commanders more flexibility.

Some of the Army’s up-and-coming officers, however, say much more needs to be done, including attracting more officers to disciplines that the manual says are so necessary, like advising foreign security forces and assisting with civil affairs.

“The parts of the Army closest to the battlefield have adapted, including tactics and doctrine,” said Lt. Col. Paul Yingling, who wrote a widely circulated article criticizing how the generals fought the Iraq war. “However, the institutional Army, to include our organizational designs and our personnel system, is essentially the same as before 9/11.”

He added: “The most important tasks we are doing in Iraq and Afghanistan are building host-nation institutions, including security forces and governance. We need to attract the very best officers into these specialties to be successful at these tasks.”

By Mark Sauer
All photos by Michael Carpenter

In his luncheon address on the struggle against narcotics, Admiral James Stavridis said Afghanistan is where narco-terrorism is fulminating.
America's overlooked "war," one that has taken an estimated 120,000 U.S. lives since the attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, was thrown into dramatic relief by the key Navy admiral charged with fighting it.
In a rousing call to arms, Admiral James Stavridis, Commander, U.S. Southern Command, challenged the thousands of military and defense-industry leaders at West 2008 to come up with innovative technologies and intelligence-sharing systems to combat the scourge of narcotics killing people across the Americas.
Stavridis, commander of the U.S. Southern Command based in Miami, said the nation's security is on the line in the long-standing struggle against illicit drugs, as much as it is in the broad war on terror.
The admiral's powerful luncheon address in the middle of the three-day convention, which is sponsored by AFCEA and the U.S. Naval Institute, centered on drug-related threats in Central and South America. He said "drugs are the fuel of misery" in the part of the world for which he is responsible.
"The struggle against narcotics is an increasingly important facet of national security in the United States today," Stavridis said. "The good news is we are not launching Tomahawk missiles in this part of the world, we are not down there with aircraft carriers and F-22s and Hornets.
"We are launching ideas in this part of the world. We are engaged in the marketplace of ideas and in order to compete, we are going to have to help our partners."
He added that drug cultivators and distributors are beginning to merge with the "stream of Islamic radical terrorism bubbling up around the world. They are tracking toward narco-terrorism, and the junction is in Afghanistan."

Former Deputy Secretary of Homeland Security Admiral James Loy, USCG (Ret.), moderator of the panel on the drug war, said America cannot ignore the drug curse.
In a panel discussion titled, "Forgotten War: How Goes the War on Drugs?" retired Coast Guard Admiral James Loy said an American public that is concentrated on headlines out of places like Iraq and Afghanistan, while ignoring the relentless drug curse, places itself in peril.
"Complacency, when aided by distractions by the war on terror, can be deadly," Loy said.
Stavridis's sobering address intersected with an overview of the Navy's role in helping to protect and develop maritime commerce throughout the world, offered by Rear Admiral Mike Tillotson, commander of the Navy Expeditionary Combat Command.
Noting that 80 percent of the world's commerce flows through its seas, Tillotson said that in addition to "forward presence and deterrence," the mission of an expeditionary force is to "strengthen partner nations and services so they can defend themselves, and keep issues local so they don't spread to our shores.
"We do this by building trust and confidence among nations."

Commander, Navy Expeditionary Combat Command RADM Michael Tillotson, who addressed West conferees at breakfast, said U.S. expeditionary forces help strengthen parnter nations. Whether talking about a shooting war, such as the conflicts in Iraq or Afghanistan, or a metaphoric war like the war on drugs, the two admirals said success could result only from cooperation among nations.
"We want our partner nations to ultimately provide their own security and to make sure they are not in any way supporting the spread of terror or drugs," Tillotson said.
Understanding the demographics, unique elements, needs, and history of countries involved is critical to the mission, the admirals said. Stavridis said Latin America is often mistakenly perceived as a monolith by those in the United States. "But it's hard to imagine a more diverse region," he said.
"Could there be two more different countries than Brazil, a nation of 200 million, an enormous, emerging mega-power where the language is Portuguese," he noted, "and Belize, a country of African" and European descent, which was a British colony and has English as an official language?
Chile, he said, is a First World country of 15 million, Spanish speaking with a business model based on Ireland and South Korea; while Haiti is the poorest country in the region, with 80 percent of people living on less than $2 a day, where Creole is spoken.
"This is not our backyard," he said. Yet we are linked through trade, demographics, politics – every nation in the region is a democracy except Cuba, Stavridis noted – and, of course, the commerce in narcotics.
The role of the military and its partners in the defense industry, he said, is to find ways to disrupt the air and sea-lane transit of drugs by smugglers from various countries, as well as bulking up interception efforts at our borders.
Latin America, Stavridis noted, is "a land of rivers," and drug runners use them constantly. Citing the valuable partnership already in place with Admiral Tillotson's Navy Expeditionary Combat Command, Stavridis urged defense-industry leaders to generate ideas on how to fight this most unconventional of wars.
"This is the ultimate team sport," he said. "We need everybody – the Drug Enforcement Administration, the Department of Defense, the State Department, intelligence agencies; and we need you."
Stavridis said detection equipment that may have been developed for Cold War purposes might be adapted, as could the type of fast "brown water Navy" boats made manufactured during the Vietnam War. He spoke of flooding border areas with wireless sensors, enlisting radar systems and developing specific intelligence software as some ways industry can be enlisted in the fight.
Another important need, Stavridis said, is to establish a Fourth Fleet. "We do not have a numbered fleet focused on this part of the world that we're talking about, and I am a big proponent of getting one," he said. "The need is there, starting with drugs, and on to disaster relief and all kinds of training and exercises.
"It's time we think seriously about that."
Freelance writer Mark Sauer spent more than 30 years as a journalist, working on daily newspapers in Lansing, MI, Houston, and San Diego. He focused on news and human-interest features, including many involving the military and military families in Texas and California. Both his mother and father served in the U.S. Army during World War II.

Pace Stresses Iraqi Attitude Shift

Former chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff General Peter Pace, USMC (Ret.), explained the reduction in violence in the Anbar Province as a result of a shift in attitude by local leaders. In his keynote address earlier in the day, retired U.S. Marine Corps General Peter Pace focused on the paramount issue facing the U.S. military: the War in Iraq.
Pace, former chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, said that while the surge of U.S. troops had achieved undeniable success since its launch a year ago, it was more important to understand changes brought about by certain Iraqis.
It wasn't the 4,000 Marines sent in to Anbar Province in Western Iraq that quelled the extraordinary violence there, Pace said. "What changed Anbar was the local sheiks who decided the Coalition's vision for the future of Iraq was so much better than Al Qaeda's.
"They have made the difference. They have determined that tomorrow will be better than today, they have decided to love their children more than they hate each other," Pace said. "I feel optimistic about Iraq not because of U.S. military might, but because of what is happening in the minds of local leaders there."
Winning over hearts and minds starts with basic communication and understanding, said Lieutenant Commander Joel Lang. He has deployed to the North Arabian Gulf five times in the past 10 years, most recently as commander of the USS Typhoon, a coastal-patrol vessel.
"Language is the key, but it's also very important to understand the environment," said Lang, whose latest mission involved everything from protecting oil rigs to performing sea rescues and intercepting potentially hostile craft.
"You have to understand the importance of the two fishing collectives that operate in Iran and Iraq, what the flags mean, who works for whom, who's paying off whom," he said. "It's understanding how not to piss a guy off even before you open your mouth."
Captain Robert Kapcio, commander of the hospital ship USNS Comfort on a recent 12-country humanitarian mission, said sometimes the vital needs or interests of those you're trying to help are completely misunderstood until a translator explains.

MCPOCG Charles Bowen One day in Guatemala, Kapcio said, nurses came back "wide eyed" from a trip to meet with pregnant women in a village. "They said they'd spent the afternoon explaining the birds and the bees to these women! The women had no idea how they'd gotten pregnant; apparently, they thought it was through immaculate conception. We're really talking basic health care here."
In Nicaragua, he said, the crew learned that veterinarians were more important to subsistence farmers than medical doctors.
"We were out with a vet working on a man's horse and asked that he bring his family to the clinic," Kapcio said. "He said he didn't have time for that. Then he explained: If his child dies, he can have another child. But if his horse dies, he can never afford another one and if the horse dies the whole family will die."
Such perspective, Kapcio concluded, comes only through understanding of language, culture and customs.
Charles W. Bowen, master chief petty officer of the Coast Guard, spoke at the evening's awards dinner about "the importance of people." Speaking of the men and women in all the services, he said, "they all have one thing in common: on a daily basis they get the job done."
Freelance writer Mark Sauer spent more than 30 years as a journalist, working on daily newspapers in Lansing, MI, Houston, and San Diego. He focused on news and human-interest features, including many involving the military and military families in Texas and California. Both his mother and father served in the U.S. Army during World War II.