When the Next War Comes

By David Horovitz

There is no Arab interest in another round of conflict, says Matan Vilna’i. But still, the deputy defense minister is preparing the Israeli home front for the worst.

‘No, no, no, no, no,” said Matan Vilna’i – to make sure I’d got the point. Then he added, “Absolutely not,” in case I was still missing it.

I’d asked him whether Israel was on the brink of another war – what with the renewed Kassam fire from Gaza, a spate of briefings at which senior officers have warned of the expanded Hizbullah and Syrian missile capacity, and the recent highly unusual IDF decision to reveal the specifics of Hizbullah’s military deployment in the “human shield” villages of southern Lebanon.

“Go back over the years,” urged the deputy defense minister.

“Every spring for generations, there are war threats.

They’re meaningless. They’re right about once every few decades.”

The fact is, he continued, “There is no Arab interest in a war. No Israel interest. After a war, we’d all be back exactly where we were before.”

We were speaking on Sunday, a day before the missile barrage at Eilat and Aqaba, and two days before battalion commander Dov Harari was killed and company commander Ezra Lakia badly injured in the worst incident at the northern border since the Second Lebanon War four years ago.

Those flare-ups underlined the perpetually incendiary tensions on Israel’s frontiers. They also underlined the imperative – despite Vilna’i’s “no, no, no, no, no” assurances – to constantly prepare for the worst.

And that is precisely what the former deputy chief of the General Staff is currently doing: assiduously preparing this country for war – just in case.

Preparing Israel for the new kind of war we get dragged into these days. Wars where the home front is the front line, where civilians are prime targets, and where, Vilna’i added in our interview, we can currently expect precious little international sympathy.

From his office high in the Kirya military complex overlooking the jam-packed streets and homes of Tel Aviv, Vilna’i is overseeing the protection of that vulnerable home front – the construction of a “support network” that is supposed to spring into action if sovereign enemies like Syria and Iran, or their Hizbullah and Hamas proxies, start emptying their immensely expanded missile arsenals into civilian Israel.

To some extent, according to Vilna’i, we are all already at war, and by “we” he means the free world, and by “war” he means the battles against terrorist aggressors fighting from within civilian areas.

The practical aspects of Israel’s capabilities and challenges in this new war environment dominated our lengthy interview, but the conversation also, inevitably, ranged across diplomatic and domestic political issues.

Vilna’i, the bullet-headed ex-military man with the subterranean baritone, is a Labor hawk, an ex-general who came within a whisker of making chief-of-staff and who names Yitzhak Rabin as his mentor.

He’s the kind of Labor pol whom Likud doves cite as being closer to their line of thinking than the strongly pro-settlement- growth likes of Danny Danon and Tzipi Hotovely. And he, in turn – to what would be the dismay of the traditional Likud Right – cites Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu as being likely to make “the right decision” on terms for peacemaking with the Palestinians.

“THERE’S BEEN a drastic change in the nature of war worldwide, and we’re at the focus,” said Vilna’i, as he elaborated on the new environment in which military conflicts now play out.

“We’re currently in World War III. It broke out on 9/11.

It’s a war without conventional fronts; a war without armies facing off against each other.

And the focus of this war is the civilian population. When we are acting in Gaza, for instance, we are responsible for the Israeli population, keeping it safe, obviously. We’re also responsible for the Palestinian population, because they are being used as human shields.

The enemy fires from within them. We respond with maximal caution and get hit with the Goldstone Report.”

He neither sighed nor even paused at the injustice of it all.

“That’s the new nature of war.”

In Israel’s particular context, he said, one critical strategic component that hasn’t changed is the centrality of Israeli deterrence. This is a theme that many of Israel’s defense chiefs reiterate in such conversations – the conviction that, even though Israel did not achieve a decisive victory against Hizbullah in 2006, and chose not to try to achieve one against Hamas in 2008/9, both those conflicts bolstered Israel’s capacity to scare the enemy into holding its fire.

As Vilna’i put it, they emphasized to those Iranian-backed proxies to our north and south that it would be wise for them to think twice before engaging Israel again: “In simple language, we’re the neighborhood bully,” said Vilna’i. “So you don’t want to start with us.

Start with us, and you get whacked.”

Again, in common with many Israeli military chiefs, he recalled Hizbullah leader Sheikh Hassan Nasrallah’s ostensibly rueful public reflection that, as paraphrased by Vilna’i, “If I’d have known what I was going to get [in the Second Lebanon War], I wouldn’t have started.”

In Vilna’i’s assessment, Nasrallah, and by extension Iran, were still licking their wounds at the time of Operation Cast Lead, which is why they chose to keep Hizbullah out of that conflict.

“In 2008, in Gaza, [Hamas’s Ismail] Haniyeh had anticipated that Israeli Arabs would start disturbances, and that Hizbullah would fire rockets at Haifa,” he said. “It didn’t happen.

Israel’s [Arab] citizens understand the rules. And Hizbullah, I imagine, said to itself, ‘We don’t want to get whacked again. Let Haniyeh do this on his own.’” Which begs the question, amidst the latest spate of attacks across our borders, and especially the confrontation near Misgav Am in the North, of whether that deterrent capacity has now dangerously eroded.

Our military correspondent Yaakov Katz noted in Wednesday’s paper that the latest fatal flare-up didn’t come out of the blue. Soldiers from the Lebanese Armed Forces – most of whom are Shi’ite, and many of whom openly cooperate with Hizbullah – have repeatedly trained their weapons on IDF troops at the border in the past year or so. “The IDF has also noticed a radical shift within the LAF top command, which has increased its anti- Israel rhetoric,” Katz added.

“When this is the spirit of the top command, it is not surprising that... the company commander who is positioned opposite Misgav Am ordered his troops to open fire at the IDF on Tuesday.”

Since 2006, Hizbullah has massively strengthened its missile capacity, freely importing weaponry from Syria, and deploying in the heart of the 160 Shi’ite villages in southern Lebanon. In a radical departure from security norms, the IDF last month released precise details of Hizbullah’s deployment in one typical village, Khiam – specifying the locations of command structures, weapons caches, missile launchers and even the improvised explosive devices intended to thwart any IDF ground attack.

The goal was plainly both to prepare the international community, so that the world would better understand how Hizbullah’s ruthless and cynical use of the villagers as human shields would determine the nature of future rounds of conflict, and to make plain to Hizbullah that Israel knew exactly what it was up to – that the intelligence flaws that undermined the 2006 war effort had been corrected. Israeli military sources, indeed, are adamant that while Hizbullah likes to claim that it knows far more about how the IDF functions than the IDF knows about its operations, the reverse is true. The publication of the Khiam specifics proved the point, they say.

For his part, Vilna’i made no grandiose boasts, but he did point to boosted Israeli capabilities in what he said were four crucial components in the new war era, as they apply in the case of Hizbullah.

“First, they know we can hit their missile launch points.

In the Second Lebanon War, within minutes, the IAF, with excellent intelligence, neutralized Hizbullah’s longrange capability.”

If Hizbullah has markedly expanded its arsenal since then, Vilna’i indicated, Israel has markedly expanded its capacity to confront it. “We have wonderful people,” he said. “Working day and night.”

Second, he went on, “we have the capacity to work inside enemy territory, to prevent them firing. Capturing territory. That’s the component that most resembles previous conventional war.”

That’s the component, it might be added, that did not function effectively four years ago, when the political stewards – of a conflict they preferred not even to acknowledge was a “war” – hesitated and changed their minds repeatedly about the deployment of ground forces, and when flaws were exposed in the IDF’s preparation, training, logistics, equipment and more.

The conviction in the defense establishment today is that such failures have been rigorously examined and rectified. Security chiefs also now routinely stress that Israel has made plain it will hold the sovereign state of Lebanon responsible for any cross-border violence and strike back, at Lebanese sovereign targets, accordingly – as even Tuesday’s confrontation indicated.

“We won’t go in that deeply, pursuing each missile,” is how Vilna’i put it. “We’ll strike hard so they’ll realize it’s not worth it.”

Third, said Vilna’i, is that Israel has made major strides in missile interception in recent years. “It’s not a 100 percent capability,” he cautioned, “but it’s important, especially for long-range missiles. We’re the only state that can do this. The Arrow is deployed.”

And finally, he came to the issue of civil defense, his particular focus as deputy minister.

“For a long time, we neglected this because it wasn’t so important. With Lebanon, with missiles hitting even deeper than Haifa, we recognized the new importance.

We needed to find an answer. Ehud Olmert, to his credit, gave responsibility for this to the Defense Ministry rather than the Ministry of Public Security. That was the right decision. From a military point of view, the whole country is the front.”

He waved toward the window and the bustling city.

“Tel Aviv is the home front.”

SINCE DECEMBER 2007, said Vilna’i, the ministry has been legislating, implementing and practicing to protect the citizenry.

“Yesterday I was in Beersheba for a drill: a chemical missile landing in the center of town. I was the general in charge of the Southern Command for five years,” he recalled. “I was in Beersheba during the first Gulf War. We had nothing at the time. We had good people and good will but that was all. Now, there’s an organized command structure. The mayor [Ruvik Danilovich] has answers to all the emergency needs. He has an IDF team supporting him, a police team, a municipal team.”

If war broke out, while the IDF would be doing its utmost to swiftly counter Hizbullah’s goal of firing hundreds upon hundreds of missiles into Israeli residential areas, the home front would be equipped “to ensure routine within the emergency situation.”

“We’re going city by city,” Vilna’i said of the preparatory work. “When a missile hits, we’ll have a network to deal with the damage – to cope with the injured, to make sure there’s water and food.”

He stressed that there was precious little of Israel that would be off-limits to enemy missiles – including Jerusalem. Military sources have indicated recently that Hizbullah has plenty of missiles sufficiently accurate to distinguish between east Jerusalem and the west. Vilna’i was more circumspect, but chilling.

“In a matter of time,” he said carefully, “they’ll be able to distinguish between west and east [of the capital]; next, they’ll be able to identify specific targets [around the country]. They’ll be able to hit strategic targets.

They’ll throw 500 missiles at us – most will hit open areas; others will cause damage. And the impact of a missile,” he said, in his no-nonsense, unemotional tones, “is akin to a bus blowing up, plus the surrounding damage.”

World War II-style bomb shelters were a thing of the past, he noted. The need now was for protected rooms and protected public areas in which people might have to spend a fair amount of time.

“Bomb shelters? That’s a concept from London 70 years ago. Stay down there for a while. That’s the way it was for me in Jerusalem in the War of Independence. In a bomb shelter, there was room to stand for maybe half an hour until the danger had passed. Nowadays, as the Second Lebanon War showed, people may have to spend a month in these rooms.”

About a third of Israeli residents have a protected room, he said, and legislation was in the works to ensure protection for all, “without spending billions and turning the whole country into a construction site.”

As an example, he noted that “there are lots of underground areas in this country. Vast. Here, next to the Habima theater, they’ve just built a five-floor underground parking garage. Well, every floor has an adjacent shelter that can hold 1,000 people. Each city is checking what it needs and the government will work with them.”

FROM THE practicalities of Vilna’i’s job, our conversation turned to the wider context – the diminishing international empathy for Israel in its relentless battle for survival, the superficial misperception of Israel as a Middle East Goliath, and the ostensible international conviction that Israel could do much more to ease its plight by showing greater determination to partner the Palestinians toward statehood.

“So long as we are seen as an ‘occupying people,’ we’re in trouble,” said Vilna’i, who took pains to define Labor as “not a left-wing party,” but rather as “a centrist, Zionist party.

“The world is cynical and not balanced. The UN Human Rights Council has never dealt with Darfur, where there are massacres. It only targets Israel,” he said.

Was he suggesting that if Israel was not present in the West Bank, it wouldn’t have been hit with Goldstone’s critique of Cast Lead? “No, we would have got it anyway,” Vilna’i said. “But the fact that we are seen as an occupying power works against us. Goldstone would have been seen differently.”

So what does he suggest? “I’m not prepared to compromise in any way on Israel’s security needs. We have to take care of ourselves. No one else can,” he began. “The terror threat has also changed.

It used to be cross-border and more recently the whole country is vulnerable to terror too. So terror has become a strategic weapon. And its perpetrators don’t want a peace deal. And we have to face up to it.

“But we also have to look to our place in the free world, alongside Europe, North America, Australia... The occupation plays against us in this. That doesn’t mean we should flee and run. It does mean we have to find the right balances – which is what we’re trying to do with the Palestinians.”

Vilna’i, who is 66, was drafted into the IDF a year before the Six Day War – rising to deputy chief of the General Staff via the paratroopers and the Sayeret Matkal commandoes.

With the passion of one who fought in them, he recalls that after the 1967 and 1973 wars, “the world was amazed by us. We were the extraordinary David.”

He could also have mentioned the 1976 Entebbe rescue, in which he participated, and which underlined Israel’s gutsy, innovative, daring underdog credentials.

“Now we are seen as a Goliath,” he added bitterly. “They forget that we’re still little David – demographically, territorially.”

He said he always reminds visiting politicians from abroad that “you’re sitting somewhere that has thousands of missiles aimed at it, aimed at civilians. There’s nowhere else like this on the planet. Not in Washington, Paris, London or Berlin. In Jerusalem, yes. In Tel Aviv, yes.

People ignore this. They say they’re sick of it [the conflict].

We used to be the heroes of the world. Not any more.”

In this respect, “Tom Phillips is right,” said Vilna’i, referring to the interview I published in this space last week with the departing British ambassador, whose content I had discussed with Vilna’i before we began our conversation.

Except, I noted, Tom Phillips seems to believe that Israel can do a whole lot more to fix things on its own.

Vilna’i appeared to take the point, responding: “Every decision-maker in this country is conscious of his responsibility for the fate of this country. We pulled out of Gaza.

We said we’d be done with it. What developed? The No.

1 terror state in the world. Less than an hour from here.

It doesn’t all depend on us.”

In fact, Vilna’i went on, “every area we’ve left so far, we’ve been hit with missiles from there. And if we relinquish Kalkilya, there’ll be rockets at Tel Aviv. If we relinquish Tulkarm, there’ll be rockets on Netanya. Actually,” he added on reflection, “we have relinquished Tulkarm [to the day-to-day running of the Palestinian Authority], but we’re still militarily overseeing things there.”

His voice, usually so low as to set my tape recorder vibrating, now rose a couple of tones in frustration.

“There are two sides to this game,” he said. “And to my disappointment, the Palestinian side has not handled things right. In Gaza they could have shown the world – to change Gaza into the Hong Kong of the Middle East.

Why didn’t they? Is that my fault?” Still, Vilna’i is forgiving. “Salam Fayyad understands all this,” he said of the PA prime minister. “He’s trying to do [things right] in the West Bank. But the fear is that some extremist terrorist group will take control, as happened in Gaza.”

Were Israel prepared to pull back further in the West Bank, would the PA prove more effective in maintaining control than it did in Gaza? “If this is done in a measured way,” he said carefully, “the answer can be yes, with the stress on the measured process. In the West Bank, they are fighting for their lives [against the Islamists], not ours,” he said.

The PA forces, he elaborated, were “doing well,” by which he meant firmly enforcing law and order. Invoking his mentor, he indicated that PA troops were curbing extremism without exaggerated concern for legal and human rights niceties: “As Rabin said at Oslo: ‘Not Bagatz [the High Court of Justice] and not B’Tselem,’ 17 years late.”

In Gaza, he noted, Hamas didn’t conquer the entire Strip when grabbing power in 2007. “It took over a few key power centers. It literally slaughtered – slit the throats of – the Fatah leaders. It threw some of them off the roofs of eight-story buildings and took over Gaza. The world doesn’t want to remember that. But that’s the fact. So I’m very pessimistic about Gaza. It’ll be a long process.

“The Gaza population already realizes that terrorist control is no good for them,” he asserted. “Abu Mazen [Mahmoud Abbas] sees himself as part of the solution.

The way back is via an agreement of one kind or another.

But it’s complicated. Really complicated. Any agreement [with the Palestinians] needs components relating to Jordan on one side and Egypt on the other. In Gaza there’s a limit to how many people can live there. There’ll be a population explosion in the end. The only solution is via the Egyptian border. Territorial swaps are part of it.

The first brick, which we are now trying to build, is a Palestinian state.”

ON THE vexed issue of peacemaking, Vilna’i is evidently somewhat, but not entirely, persuaded of Abbas’s and Fayyad’s intentions and capabilities. He’s also somewhat, but not entirely, persuaded of our prime minister’s readiness to go halfway to meet any genuine willingness for progress.

“With the Palestinian leadership now, there has been a change,” he said firmly. “It’s not [Yasser] Arafat – who’d say one thing in Tel Aviv and something else in Ramallah.

Ultimately, he was a terrorist in his essence. These are different people.”

Vilna’i goes so far as to assert that “Abu Mazen always spoke about peace. He opposed Arafat on this and that wasn’t easy. With all the difficulties, there is an opportunity here. Tom Phillips is right about that.”

Vilna’i recognizes that Abbas and Fayyad have yet to show a strategic willingness to persuade their own people of the need for compromise. But he also asserts that not all of Israel’s leaders are blameless in this regard. Abbas and Fayyad “understand the need” to tell their people it’s time for peace, he said. “But the question – and the very same question applies to our leaders – is what they’re prepared to tell their people.”

Switching quickly to the Israeli side of the equation, he added: “Rabin, for instance, dared to spell out [the imperative for a two-state solution]. In private conversations, all the leaders of the right understand it. All of them have done, for generations. It began with Menachem Begin.

“But there’s a constant problem on the right,” he elaborated, the Labor politician in him fully surfacing now.

“At big public rallies, they say one thing, and in power, they say something else. That cliché about ‘What you see from there, you don’t see from here,’ and so on. Menachem Begin, as prime minister of Israel, in his greatness, decided to leave Sinai. He had Labor as his security net.

Menachem Begin took a decision as prime minister, not as head of the Likud. [Binyamin] Netanyahu is standing in Begin’s shoes.”

And how does Vilna’i anticipate Netanyahu filling those shoes, come the moment of truth? “Everyone except for a tiny minority on the far right recognizes that the only solution is two states for two people,” he reiterated. “All the discussion today is about the complexities of getting to the two-state solution.

Netanyahu will have to make a decision in the next few months. He’s vacillating and I understand that. He’ll have to decide on whether to extend the building freeze.

He’ll have to decide if he’s Menachem Begin or not.”

Again, which will it be? “If you’re asking me, he doesn’t know himself. He’s smart and he understands what’s at stake, believe me.”

In terms of territorial compromise, Israel wanted to believe, 20 years ago, that it could reach an accord while relinquishing less than 90% of the territory in the West Bank. As the years passed, the assessment became progressively bleaker. What does Vilna’i envisage as the final price? “We’ll have to relinquish a great deal more than people think,” he said. “But that was always the case. There was never an American decision to recognize the settlements.

There were intermittent understandings, but never clear recognition, and the Americans are our best ally.”

Returning to his earlier theme, Vilna’i repeated: “The extended occupation is beginning to work against us, and this international delegitimization can only be offset by a peace agreement. I don’t want to be, as Tom Phillips put it to you, ‘Fortress Israel.’ I want to be integrated with the rest of the world.”

And he signed off with an assessment that, if accurate, will dismay plenty of Israelis and please many others: “The prime minister will have to make a decision and in my opinion, he’ll make the right decision. I say that on the basis of my knowledge of him and of the discussions that are being held. The grand strategy is clear. The question will be how it is achieved in terms of internal politics.

And, by the way, I personally don’t think anybody will be in a hurry to leave this coalition – not Shas and not Israel Beiteinu.”

Source : http://www.jpost.com/LandedPages/PrintArticle.aspx?id=183825 

Outsourcing to India Draws Western Lawyers

By HEATHER TIMMONS

NOIDA, India — As an assistant attorney general for New York State, Christopher Wheeler used to spend most of his time arguing in courtrooms in New York City.

Today, he works in a sprawling, unfinished planned suburb of New Delhi, where office buildings are sprouting from empty lots and dirt roads are fringed with fresh juice stalls and construction rubble. At Pangea3, a legal outsourcing firm, Mr. Wheeler manages a team of 110 Indian lawyers who do the grunt work traditionally assigned to young lawyers in the United States — at a fraction of the cost.

India’s legal outsourcing industry has grown in recent years from an experimental endeavor to a small but mainstream part of the global business of law. Cash-conscious Wall Street banks, mining giants, insurance firms and industrial conglomerates are hiring lawyers in India for document review, due diligence, contract management and more.

Now, to win new clients and take on more sophisticated work, legal outsourcing firms in India are actively recruiting experienced lawyers from the West. And American and British lawyers — who might once have turned up their noses at the idea of moving to India, or harbored an outright hostility to outsourcing legal work in principle — are re-evaluating the sector.

The number of legal outsourcing companies in India has mushroomed to more than 140 at the end of 2009, from 40 in 2005, according to Valuenotes, a consulting firm in Pune, India. Revenue at India’s legal outsourcing firms is expected to grow to $440 million this year, up 38 percent from 2008, and should surpass $1 billion by 2014, Valuenotes estimates.

“This is not a blip, this is a big historical movement,” said David B. Wilkins, director of Harvard Law School’s program on the legal profession. “There is an increasing pressure by clients to reduce costs and increase efficiency,” he added, and with companies already familiar with outsourcing tasks like information technology work to India, legal services is a natural next step.

So far, the number of Western lawyers moving to outsourcing companies could be called more of a trickle than a flood. But that may change, as more business flows out of traditional law firms and into India. Compensation for top managers at legal outsourcing firms is competitive with salaries at midsize law firms outside of major metropolitan areas of the United States, executives in the industry say. Living costs are much lower in India, and often, there is the added allure of stock in the outsourcing company.

Right now, Pangea3 is “getting more résumés from United States lawyers than we know what to do with,” said Greg McPolin, managing director of the company’s litigation services group, who divides his time between India and New York.

Outsourcing remains a highly contentious issue in the West, particularly as law firms have been trimming their staffs and curtailing hiring plans. But Western lawyers who have joined outsourcing firms are unapologetic about the shift to India.

Leah Cooper left her job as managing lawyer for the giant mining company Rio Tinto in February to become director of legal outsourcing for CPA Global, a contract legal services company with offices in Europe, the United States and India. Before hiring Ms. Cooper, CPA Global added lawyers from Bank of America and Alliance & Leicester, a British bank. The company has more than 1,500 lawyers now, and Ms. Cooper said she planned to hire hundreds in India in the next 12 months.

At Rio Tinto, Ms. Cooper said, she became a champion of the idea of moving work like document review to a legal outsourcing company “because it works really well.”

“It really is the future of legal services,” said Ms. Cooper, an American based in London who travels regularly to India and has spoken widely in promoting outsourcing. Still, she acknowledges hostility toward the practice. “When I was doing public speaking, people used to joke that I had better check under my car” for something planted by a junior associate angered by her views, she said.

Many legal outsourcing firms have offices around the world to interact with clients, but keep the majority of their employees in India; some also have a stable of lawyers in the Philippines. Thanks to India’s low wages and costs and a big pool of young, English-speaking lawyers, outsourcing firms charge from one-tenth to one-third what a Western law firm bills an hour.

Employees at legal outsourcing companies in India are not allowed by Indian law to give legal advice to clients in the West, no matter their qualifications. Instead, legal outsourcing companies perform a lot of the functions that a junior lawyer might do in a American law firm.

Even global law firms like Clifford Chance, which is based in London, are embracing the concept.

“I think the toothpaste is out of the tube,” said Mark Ford, director of the firm’s Knowledge Center, an office south of New Delhi with 30 Indian law school graduates who serve Clifford Chance’s global offices. Mr. Ford lived in India for six months to set up the center, and now manages it from London.

“We as an industry have shown that a lot of basic legal support work can successfully be done offshore very cost-effectively with no quality problems,” Mr. Ford said. “Why on earth would clients accept things going back?”

Many corporations agree that outsourcing legal work, in some form or another, is here to stay.

“We will continue to go to big firms for the lawyers they have who are experts in subject matter, world-class thought leaders and the best litigators and regulatory lawyers around the world — and we will pay a lot of money for those lawyers,” said Janine Dascenzo, associate general counsel at General Electric.

What G.E. does not need, though, is the “army of associates around them,” Ms. Dascenzo said. “You don’t need a $500-an-hour associate to do things like document review and basic due diligence,” she said.

Western lawyers making the leap to legal outsourcing companies come for a variety of reasons, but nearly universally, they say they stay for the opportunities to build a business and manage people.

“In many respects it is more rewarding than jobs I had in the United States,” said Mr. Wheeler, who moved to India when his Indian-born wife took a job here in 2006.

“If you’re talking about 15 employees in a windowless basement office, I’m not interested in making that my life’s calling,” he recalled thinking when he started talking to Pangea3. “But building a 500-person office, now that is a real challenge.”

Shelly Dalrymple left her job as a partner at a firm in Tulsa, Okla., in 2007 and is now based in India as the senior vice president of global litigation services at UnitedLex, a legal outsourcing company with offices in the United States, Britain, Israel and India.

When she first joined the industry, she said, growth was being driven by corporations that were pushing law firms to outsource to save money. Now, Western law firms themselves are starting to embrace the industry, she said. “We are seeing law firms who are putting a lot of thought into their future coming to us with interesting and creative ideas,” she said.

Partners in the West are asking legal outsourcing companies in India to create dedicated teams of lawyers for their firms, for example. Those teams could expand and contract depending on how much business the Western firm has. “That means a law firm with 500 members in Chicago can compete with a 2,000-member firm in New York,” Ms. Dalrymple said.

Moving to a legal outsourcing firm, especially in India, is not for everyone. About 5 percent of Western transplants cannot handle it and move back home, managers estimate.

Some find it hard to adapt to India. Other times, the job itself does not suit them — after spending years working nearly independently as a litigator, for example, it can be hard to transition to managing and inspiring a team of young foreign lawyers.

Even lawyers who stay are sometimes wistful about their previous careers. “Of course I miss litigation,” Mr. Wheeler said. But, he added, “watching people learn some of the same skills I did is gratifying.” 

Source : http://www.nytimes.com/2010/08/05/business/global/05legal.html?ref=general&src=me&pagewanted=print

Pentagon demands return of leaked documents

The Pentagon has demanded WikiLeaks remove more than 70,000 classified documents published online as well return thousands more unpublished files about the Afghanistan war leaked last month.

Military commanders have urged WikiLeaks to return the unpublished documents which contain sensitive details of Afghans who have assisted coalition forces.

The Pentagon request comes amid increasing concern that the documents may be used by the Taliban to identify potential targets. However, a spokesman said he did not have a "high degree of confidence" that the information would be returned.

WikiLeaks has also posted a massive file of password-protected documents called "insurance" on its website which cannot currently be read online. It is thought that this file may contain thousands of new documents which will be released should anyone connected to the site be arrested anywhere in the world.

Geoff Morrell, a spokesman for the Pentagon said: "The longer they [the documents] hang out there, the more opportunity there is for those who wish us harm – to do us harm to use those documents to their advantage. So we're trying to, as best we can, to mitigate the damage caused by this and compel them to take those documents off the internet and return them to the rightful owner, the United States government."

However, he added: "They've [WikiLeaks] shown no indication thus far that they appreciate the gravity, the seriousness of the situation they have caused, the lives they have endangered, the operations they have potentially undermined, the innocent people who have potentially been put in harm's way as a result."

The Pentagon disclosed that it has a team of 80 people trawling through the documents attempting to assess the damage that they could cause.

The FBI and Pentagon suspect that Private Bradley Manning, a 22-year old intelligence analyst, is responsible for the leaks. Pte Manning is already in custody in Virginia on suspicion of leaking other information to WikiLeaks.

Source : http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worldnews/northamerica/usa/7930912/Pentagon-demands-return-of-leaked-documents.html

                                           

You Are What You Click

Sven Birkerts

“Beginning in the late 1970s the world began to change—and fast.” So say John Palfrey and Urs Gasser in the introduction to their Born Digital:

Understanding the First Generation of Digital Natives. Intentionally or not, the assertion echoes Virginia Woolf’s oft-cited observation about the arrival of the modern era: “On or about December 1910 human character changed.” Both statements provoke argument, expressing as they do not just a sense of a world in transformation (the world is always in transformation), but that of a radical break. Woolf’s intuitions of Modernism have been parsed by generations of grad students, of course, but Palfrey and Gasser are staking out still unfamiliar territory. They are identifying a condition of technological critical mass that, paceEcclesiastes, is something new under the sun, the effects of which are profoundly shaping what they call the generation of “Digital Natives”—those born after 1980.

Palfrey and Gasser begin their study with a slightly hyperbolic but nonetheless apt description of how these not yet thirty-something Natives inhabit the world. It is almost enough to list their devices and tools: iPods, smart phones, Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, and a host of applications—“apps”—still too new to have made it into the dictionary. Of course, many of the Natives’ parents are users as well—“Digital Immigrants” in Palfrey and Gasser’s terminology—but for them these are learned behaviors, elected adaptations. For Natives, the various interfaces and the interactions they enable are simply the given:

Unlike most Digital Immigrants, Digital Natives live much of their lives online, without distinguishing between the online and the offline. Instead of thinking of their digital identity and their real-space identity as separate things, they just have an identity (with representations in two, or three, or more different spaces). . . . Digital Natives don’t just experience friendship differently from their parents; they also relate to information differently.

At first Palfrey and Gasser appear to be taxonomizing a new species in the making. But then, even before concluding the introduction, they pull back into a flatly civic tone and propound a pragmatic perspective. “We are at a crossroads”, they write. “There are two possible paths before us—one in which we destroy what is great about the Internet and about how young people use it, and one in which we make smart choices and head toward a bright future in a digital age.” So much, then, for the idea of deep transformation and exploring its social, political and moral implications. As the chapter titles unfold (“Identities”, “Dossiers”, “Privacy”, “Safety”) the promise of the book’s opening declaration all but fades into a treatise on the outward logistics of accommodation. We get bland assertions like, “For the time being, education is the best way to help Digital Natives manage the information-quality problem.” Born Digital ends up feeling like a missed opportunity, or an apocalypse indefinitely postponed.

A very different sort of retracted doomsaying characterizes Jaron Lanier’s You Are Not a Gadget: A Manifesto, which is in every way a more searching and provocative book. Perhaps this is because Lanier is what we might call a “Digital Insider.” Composer, thinker, an original guru of virtual reality and reputed coiner of that term, Lanier begins his book in a “state of emergency” tone, with short bullet-like statements declaring that the much-touted digital revolution has turned against its founding ethos and now threatens to entrap rather than liberate individuals. It is, Lanier tells us, subjecting creativity and the free flow of information to the sclerosis of “lock-in” and the need for systemic uniformity. Indeed, the very idea of the individual is at stake. Of Silicon Valley, his home turf, he writes:

The first tenet of this new culture is that all of reality, including humans, is one big information system. . . . There’s nothing special about the place of humans in this scheme. Computers will soon get so big and fast and the net so rich with information that people will be obsolete, either left behind like characters in Rapture novels or subsumed into some cyber-superhuman something.

Though Lanier himself does not look fondly on such developments, he knows well the mentality from which they originate. He puts his finger on the crux of the issue, nothing less than the core crisis of the human: How will individuality survive technologies that impose uniformity? His title, You Are Not a Gadget, suggests a strenuous rebuttal to the key danger he identifies. But alas, Lanier, a bit like Palfrey and Gasser, doesn’t deliver the promised manifesto. His chapters, in themselves fascinating essays on consumerism, the need to safeguard artistic products, the growth of networking sites and more, refuse the implications of his opening claims. He turns away from the big-picture scope that launches the book, leaving key questions unaddressed and his assertion of crisis ultimately unsupported.

Lanier’s retreat is harder to abide than that of Palfrey and Gasser, for unlike the latter, he grasps the convergence of causes at work and makes clear what is at stake. He identifies the pachyderm in the room, the prospect that the digital revolution is not just the latest human adventure or the next transformation the species must adapt to, but a force created by humans that is in big ways rewriting the whole human script. Yet he cannot seem to bring himself to do more than offer it a bag of peanuts.

This is not to suggest that humans have not changed (evolved, to cite the more technical term) since their origins, the new forms making their way towardHomo sapiens defined by whatever artificial designations are in fashion. Modern but Pre-Digital Man was different in untold ways from his counterpart in the Athenian agora. Millennia of history had altered his psychological structure, mentality and even his neural reflexes. What Lanier raises but then ducks is the inevitable question: If change and adaptation have been a constant all along, whence this sudden urgency about a changing “us”? Why not see the digital revolution as just the latest wave of technology, no less a boon than steam power or electricity and hardly an occasion for a top-to-bottom reconsideration of all things human?

If Lanier sidesteps the question, we may at least thank him for raising it. Change may be constant, but the gradations are hugely variable, with degree at some point shading into kind. Consider that the transformations of the human to date have all been dictated by social shifts, inventions and responses to various natural givens: modifications of circumstance, in short. We have adapted over these long millennia to the organization of agriculture, the standardization of time, the growth of cities, the harnessing of electricity, the arrival of the automobile and airplane and mass-scale birth control, to name just a few developments. But the cyber-revolution is bringing about a different magnitude of change, one that marks a massive discontinuity. Indeed, the aforementioned Pre-Digital Man has more in common with his counterpart in the agora than he will with a Digital Native of the year 2050. By this I refer not to cultural or social references but to core phenomenological understandings. I mean perceptions of the most fundamental terms of reality: the natural givens, the pre-virtual presence of fellow humans, the premises of social relationships. We have seen more pressure applied to species transformation in the past century than in the previous several thousand years.

What is driving the change is obviously complex, and determining its scale is difficult. Crucial is the fact that up until the time of the shift, the critical post-1980 saturation that Palfrey and Gasser cite as creating the Digital Native, we mostly lived our lives with reference to an “out there”, a tactile, sensory, natural world and the habitations that we fashioned within it. Now, however, we increasingly live in formative relation to a world of signals and symbols. These are signals and symbols we have created ourselves, but they are so vivid and complete as to have the consistency of a world. The old planet still exists, of course, though increasingly we heed its reality through the lens of natural catastrophes, news of which reaches our screens through the airwaves—all of which brings me to Nicholas Carr’s The Shallows: What the Internet Is Doing to Our Brains.

The Shallows is a serious expansion of Carr’s widely cited Atlantic essay, “Is Google Making Us Stupid?” Carr began the essay by questioning his own growing difficulty with sustaining focus on longer texts. Easily distracted, impatient, he found himself unable to concentrate as he had before, and he suspected that the reason was his ever-growing daily reliance on screen reading and his use of the Internet. He was led to ask the obvious question, which is his book’s subtitle slightly modified: What is the Internet doing to our brains?

The Shallows offers the alarming answer: a great deal. Our consuming involvement with digital media is significantly altering our mental processes. And insofar as we are our mental processes (are we not?), this involvement is changing who we are. Our circuit-based ways of living are refashioning us into that yet elusive creature, the Digital Native (though that label confers a deceptively atavistic solidity on a vaporous and provisional-seeming entity).

The first half of The Shallows goes directly to neurophysiology, arguing in essence that our brains are highly plastic organs that morph their essential structure in response to what they are asked to do. And they do this morphing quite rapidly. Carr cites, for example, research done on the brains of London cabbies, pointing to a direct correlation between their daily work and an enlarged hippocampus, that being the part of the brain that “plays a key role in storing and manipulating spatial representations of a person’s surroundings.” The hypertrophy was matched by proportionately smaller anterior hippocampus, “apparently a result of the need to accommodate the enlargement of the posterior area.” And: “Further tests indicated that the shrinking . . . might have reduced the cabbies’ aptitude for certain other memorization tasks.”

Another experiment no less suggestive in its findings tested brain modifications in two sets of people who were asked to learn to play a simple, single-handed melody on the piano. One group practiced the piece on a keyboard while members of the other sat in front of the keyboard and imagined playing the song. The researcher, Alvaro Pascual-Leone, “found that the people who had only imagined playing the notes exhibited precisely the same changes in their brains as those who had actually pressed the keys.” Carr theorizes his way through a finely textured analysis to the conclusion that we “become, neurologically, what we think.” Our inner exertions have the power literally to change us. It is not just that we are what we think; we are how, with what tools, we think.

If the brain changes in specific ways based the operations it performs (Carr’s difficulty focusing on long texts, for example), then it follows that our growing engagement with the fluid, quasi-neural network that is the Internet is capable of radically modifying our cognitive make-up. If there is any truth to this, and it’s hard to think there isn’t, then we can throw all those blithe “it’s just a tool” rationalizations right out the window.

Carr’s evocatively titled chapter, “The Juggler’s Brain”, gets right to the heart of the issue:

One thing is very clear. If, knowing what we know today about the brain’s plasticity, you were to set out to invent a medium that would rewire our mental circuits as quickly and thoroughly as possible, you would probably end up designing something that looks and works a lot like the Internet.

By outlining a kind of inventory of Internet functions, Carr reveals how those functions directly influence our cognitive processes. “Our use of the Internet involves many paradoxes, but the one that promises to have the greatest long-term influence over how we think is this one: the Net seizes our attention only to scatter it.”

What are the implications here? “Just as neurons that fire together wire together”, writes Carr, “neurons that don’t fire together don’t wire together.” This is more than a catchy mantra. It’s scientific shorthand for the fact that our daily Internet immersion is bending us steadily away from our base mental orientations and aptitudes. One way to reflect on the meaning of the change is to ask what is being lost. Carr puts it this way:

The mental functions that are losing the ‘survival of the busiest’ brain cell battle are those that support calm, linear thought—the ones we use in traversing a lengthy narrative or an involved argument, the ones we draw on when we reflect on our experiences or contemplate an outward or inward phenomenon. . . . [W]e seem to be taking on the characteristics of a popular new intellectual technology.

Carr is making a gigantic—and enormously disturbing—claim, and we need to muster some calm, linear thought to contemplate it. As an editor, teacher and long-term follower of the so-called public conversation, I see the eponymous “shallows” everywhere: in a political discourse that has become jittery and insubstantial, in a public life where values and seriousness seem to have melted into thin air. Or am I just screening through my bias?

I have brooded about the rise of the Internet and the waning of the print culture for decades. I think it through this way and that—analytically, nostalgically, apocalyptically and defensively—and the question I always return to is simple as can be: What is the import of our collective love affair with keypads and screens? How is it affecting the great intangibles—our thinking, our sense of initiative, our subjective self-grounding, our formulations of private and social meaning?

I don’t think the Internet (never mind the myriad other technologies of linkage) would distress me if I had faith that it could deliver, as its loudest boosters say it does, the values and virtues encoded in the system of print. If I thought that the digital realm could foster and sustain the kind of calm, linear, reflective thinking Carr describes, I would quiet my inner Cassandra. But it is undoubtedly, as Carr suggests, a system with enormous shaping power. And if he is right about the plasticity and wiring-and-firing of our neurophysical human endowments, then we must seriously consider the possibility that we are, as users, taking on with eyes wide shut the attributes of the medium. If this is so, then it must raise questions not unlike those Paul Gauguin used as the title for his monumental triptych: “Where do we come from? What are we? Where are we going?”

Acomprehensive response to the possibilities Carr raises would require many pages (or much scrolling). One angle will have to stand for the many others that could be pursued.

Shortly after Carr’s 2008 essay appeared, influential pundit and digital-booster Clay Shirky responded in a post on the Encyclopedia Brittanica blog that is well worth our attention. Shirky begins by identifying common ground: “I think Carr’s premises are correct: the mechanisms of media affect the nature of thought.” But whereas Carr sees cause for concern, Shirky takes the transformation as an inevitable challenge that we should look forward to meeting. The Internet is “an explosion of abundance”, here to stay, and any harking back to pre-Internet consciousness is a pointless exercise in nostalgia. No, he contends, “the main event is trying to shape the greatest expansion of expressive capability the world has ever known.”

This sounds at first blush like an exalting summons that one would be hard-pressed to decline. But lingering on it even a little reveals its bedeviling circularity: If the mind is being significantly shaped by the medium, what kind of shaping will that mind impose upon the cataract of information? What terms, structures, principles and ideals? If the medium shapes the mind instead of the mind the medium, what happens to concepts of autonomy and freedom? Shirky’s optimism appears grounded in a short-circuiting of human volition itself.

Shirky also makes various unsettling claims in the main body of his short text that epitomize a way of thinking rapidly gaining ground. Carr’s essay, he writes, is “focused on a very particular kind of reading, literary reading, as a metonym for a whole way of life.” He adduces Carr’s use of literary references and in particular his singling out Tolstoy’s War and Peace, which Shirky claims represents “the height of literary ambition and of readerly devotion.” Now that he has found his target, he warms to the attack. Disparaging Tolstoy’s novel for being “too long, and not so interesting”, Shirky then adopts the “hey, let’s face it” tone of the late-night stand-up comic. No one, he asserts, reads the supposedly great works anymore; television killed that activity decades ago, even though so-called “litterateurs” were for a long time allowed to retain their cultural status. But now, with the Internet-driven resurgence of reading, Shirky claims, we find no resurgent interest in these “cultural icons”, which for him is proof of “the enormity of the historical shift away from literary culture.” He twists the knife again: “The threat isn’t that people will stop reading War and Peace. That day is long since past. The threat is that people will stop genuflecting to the idea of reading War and Peace.”

Shirky is edging up on his big point now, which is that a certain kind of personality—the “complex, dense and ‘cathedral-like’ structure of the highly educated and articulate personality” (he borrows the words of playwright Richard Foreman)—is all but extinct. That style of thinking no longer sorts with the Internet’s processes and functions. “On the network we have”, he continues,

the bazaar often works better than the cathedral. . . . Getting networked society right will mean producing work whose themes best resonate on the net, just as getting the printing press right meant perfecting printed forms.

Shirky is ushering to the side not only the literary personality but, with it, a way of thinking that is a good deal more than a foppish adoration of supposed great works. Cashiering the readers of Tolstoyan megaliths, he is also, by taking the part for the whole, dismissing the ideals and legacies of the Enlightenment. Instead, he is calling us to mold our thinking to the ways of the Internet, which has suddenly been enthroned as the new procedural norm of things. Every bit as chilling as Shirky’s argument is the blitheness with which he accepts—no, rejoices in—the withering away of a whole culture, centuries in the making.

If this were just Shirky’s view, it would not much matter. But it isn’t, so it does. His words reflect an attitude and set of assumptions that are multiplying as rapidly as they are thoughtlessly. It’s as if Shirky has appointed himself spokesman for the party of the new. His assessments jibe closely with Lanier’s characterizations of the worldview of his fellow digiterati—the impatience at and anger toward what they see as the old order and the readiness to give everything over to the Internet paradigm.

Let’s take seriously for a moment the idea that an utterly unprecedented shift is underway, one that recasts not just our behaviors but also our core assumptions. Following an electronic as opposed to mechanical paradigm, this transformation is dramatically more accelerated and more deeply formative of our way of apprehending the world than any previous technological transformation. The whole business is happening right in front of our eyes, in the space of a generation, and in so total and simultaneous a way that there is no place to stand outside of it in order to calmly assess what is happening. As Shirky writes, “the main event is trying to shape the greatest expansion of expressive capability the world has ever known.” I agree, but I cannot command his poise, for I have too many uncomfortable questions. What will be our shaping tools, what skills do we hope to command, and, given that all shaping is done with some end in mind, what do we imagine we are bringing into being? What are the consequences if it turns out that we just don’t know?

Source : http://www.the-american-interest.com/article.cfm?piece=869