The Age of the Unthinkable (27 page)

As Kaminsky thought about it, he realized that the best solution would be one that spread quickly and quietly. And here the
systems nature of the Internet, the way in which every node is connected to every other node — the very thing that made the
DNS hole so terrifying — was his greatest ally. If he didn’t plug most of the big holes in DNS at once, then the networked
nature of the problem meant hackers might slip through the unprotected parts of the system before he finished the job. But
if he could get the Net’s most important players to switch right away — and to trust he wasn’t leading them down a blind alley
— then the pace of repair might be fast enough to beat the hackers.

To begin with, Kaminsky and some of the key Web architects organized a secret emergency meeting. Because most of these white-hat
hackers and engineers had worked together for years — a reminder of the importance Holling attached to the persistence of
relationships in chaotic settings — all of them agreed to come (several from overseas) even under such strange conditions.
The gathering was held in an anonymous conference room at Microsoft in Redmond, near where Kaminsky lived. Each member of
the core group then began contacting selected friends who worked at the largest phone companies, network providers, and server
software firms. They agreed early on not to speak directly about the problem via e-mail unless it was heavily encrypted and
to avoid cell phones, whose signals might be intercepted.

The solution they came up with was known as a “spontaneous patch,” and the plan was brilliant — as long as it could be kept
quiet. Working together in secret, a group of programmers intimately familiar with the DNS rules would rewrite a chunk of
code that would fill the DNS hole on most of the machines on the Internet. Their program had to be sneaky enough to work without
revealing the location of the flaw to hackers, who would immediately start attacking machines that hadn’t been vaccinated
yet. Kaminsky knew the secret would get out sooner or later — in fact, he even decided that he’d divulge it himself at some
point to make sure computer-systems managers understood what had almost happened — but it was vital that this take place
after
the spine of the Internet had been repaired.

After weeks of work by a group of engineers secreted away from their colleagues, the patch was ready. And on the morning of
July 8, 2008, representatives for the largest information technology companies — firms like Microsoft, Oracle, EarthLink,
and Google — slipped the patch into their computers. This was a huge leap of faith for systems administrators, but here Kaminsky
relied on the fact that he had worked in tech departments at Fortune 500 companies for a decade. He assembled an all-star
collection of programmers who hammered systems operators with an urgent message: “If we don’t all hang together, we hang apart.”
Pentagon programmers, home-brewed web admins, heads of IT at some of the largest companies on earth — they all made the leap,
and without any top-down order. By the first evening,
50 percent
of the Net’s servers were repaired. Two weeks later it was 85 percent, and no hacker had found the hole — and this was done
without urgent government intervention or big new laws. Kaminsky’s lone PR concession was an explanatory online video featuring
his niece. “I wanted people not to panic,” he said. “And I figured, how can you possibly panic when a nine-year-old-girl is
saying don’t panic?” Given the Web-ending stakes, that patch launch day was, he said, as terrifying as it was gratifying.
In a matter of weeks he had gone from diagnosing a potentially lethal flaw to finding a way to fix it. In short, a bunch of
guys in a room, working indirectly, secretly, and urgently, had managed to do what no large corporation or government would
have been able to do: they had saved the Internet from itself.

As we’ve seen, so many of the problems we face today are networked, meaning that simply acting will change the parameters
of what we’re confronting. As soon as we announce plans to restructure Iraq, the game on the ground changes. Pounding Hizb’allah,
as we’ve seen, only makes them more resilient. Seeing the world as a system is something our enemies do well: if you look
at the clever way Iran has wired the Middle East with alliances, loyal terror groups, and financial links, you won’t be surprised
to learn that President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad holds a Ph.D. in traffic engineering. If and when Israel attacks Iran, it can
expect a cascade of indirect hits from all these sources, not just Iran itself.

When the very nature of acting changes the landscape or alters the flow of ideas or money or weapons, we have to find different
and systemic ways of making change. This runs contrary to a lot of our habits. Recall how much our diplomacy leans on direct,
public negotiations. That
directness
is an essential part of how we see and think, as we saw in Clausewitz. But a Kaminsky–Sun Zi way of acting not only works
in our world of complex systems but, in some cases, offers a profound sort of security that will let us, finally, begin to
feel we’ve got a grip on some rather insoluble-looking problems.

To see how this approach might work, let’s return for a moment to that Hall of Fame insoluble problem: the “Middle East peace
agreement.” It has been meant, for sixty years now, to be the proof of diplomatic brilliance in action, as if, simply by working
hard enough, the scales of Arab and Israeli interests could be conclusively balanced. (Former Middle East peace negotiators
joke that it’s the only job with lifetime employment.) But what if we were to imagine peace not as something to be architected
and dropped onto an unstable sandpile base but as something to be shaped by indirect effects, as Sun Zi might encourage? What
if we put Kaminsky in charge?

The 2007 attempt at Middle East peace, the 1990s Oslo accords, and a dozen other now-forgotten efforts — all looked more or
less like something the U.S. government would have dreamed up if they had been asked to tackle the DNS flaw. They started
with an explicit announcement of the goal: to resolve the Israel-Palestine dispute once and for all, a so-called final settlement.
Officials imagined a very particular narrative (like those American history teachers of Nisbett’s) and then tried to persuade
a group of unlikely, angry, and clever participants to stick to the script. Predictably, it was like waking up one morning
and telling your entire family that they’d be heading in for unnecessary root canals during the day. Everyone would begin
to adjust their lives and schedules to avoid the appointment. Long-forgotten baseball games or school reports would suddenly
come to mind. So, too, with these “master plan” Middle East peace strategies. The announcement of each step simply created
pressure that promised to undo the whole. Plans to give money to the Palestinians, for instance, only seeded new interest
groups that fought over how best to take the proceeds (and the power attached to them). Trying to table a formal agreement
drove each side — intensely aware of domestic politics — into more deeply entrenched positions. And the essential hope of
such an agreement —
finality —
terrified many of the participants. If this was really
it,
really the last best deal, then they had best struggle as hard as they could for what they wanted.

What would Kaminsky do? What kind of effects and indirect tactics might we use? To begin, imagine a Middle East peace process
with no big-name negotiators who felt it important to be visible and active, to announce the anticipated five-act performance
of peacemaking. (Recall the feature Sun Zi prized most in his generals: anonymity.) Theatrical Camp David persuasion sessions
would be retired. Few explicit cash infusions. No dreamed-of signing ceremonies. Instead, an effects approach would begin
its patient work in the cognitive domain. It would take stability as its ultimate goal and treat the two sides as part of
a dynamic system demanding constant vigilance, since a slip into chaos was possible at any moment. Destabilizing, finger-pointing
debates by those in the White House or the European Union about how Palestinians and Israelis govern themselves would be muted
at all costs, since even the slightest pressure could start a cascade of recriminations and violence. (As happened in Gaza,
where angry Palestinians elected a Hamas-led government in 2006 despite — or because of — explicit American encouragement
to do the opposite. “I don’t know anyone who wasn’t caught off guard,” said Secretary of State Rice, who should have known
better.) This approach to Middle East peace would trust that a sensible and durable arrangement would emerge from stability,
for without stability no such agreement could be durable. Effects diplomacy would map the environment with hundreds of small
policy efforts: creating dozens of new NGOs, empowering teachers, improving policing. The aim might be to change as little
as possible in some areas and instead to encourage education, small business, and moderate religious figures — classic slow
variables. Such a policy might even encourage small upheavals as a way to avoid bigger ones down the road, like those controlled
burns that make forests resilient. The process could be managed by a small, secret group in a special peace “war room,” not
by a big name angling for a Nobel Prize. Patience, not persuasion, would be the virtue. The deadline would not be the end
of a president’s term or the run-up to an election — in fact, there would be no deadline at all. One day Palestinians and
Israelis might awaken to a different landscape without quite realizing how it had emerged.

In sum, this would be systems-style leverage: avoid direct conflict, use the forces already at play, manipulate so quietly
as to be unnoticed, know that no effort truly ends. Treat Middle East peace not as something to be hammered together but —
to use Hayek’s idea for economies — as a garden to be tended. In the annals of Chinese philosophy, there is a famous gardening
story that captures exactly the problems we make for ourselves with our direct and impatient instincts: “There was a man from
Song who tugged at the ends of his rice plants because he was worried they were not growing fast enough. Having done so he
went home, not realizing what he had done. ‘I am worn out today,’ he told his family. ‘I have been helping the rice grow.’
His son rushed out to look, and there the plants were, shriveled up.” Middle East peace will most likely come well after we’ve
stopped tugging.

Of course, direct conflict has to remain a part of our lives. There are plenty of situations in which a hard, violent option
is the best one. This is why it’s best to think of effects not as a replacement for action, but as an extension. You can imagine
such approaches being tried in areas as different as financial regulation and negotiations with Iran, approaches that would
take their strength from being clever, constantly engaged, and as flexible as the world itself. This could be done not only
in places where we have real and enduring conflicts, but also in places where we’re not quite sure where we stand yet. It’s
hard to know, for instance, if China will ultimately be a friend or foe to the United States. But at the moment, most U.S.Chinese
discussions are shaped by the American desire for direct, noisy, public collision at the
schwer-punkt
of disagreement: human rights, currency reform, environment. But what about being more like Sun Zi? Why not try an indirect
approach, engaging China on many fronts at once, trying to shape the international environment as a way to shape China? What
about working with China in dozens of areas more assiduously, instead of concentrating 90 percent of our effort on issues
we disagree on. Why not look at U.S.Chinese relations as a mesh to be shaped and managed instead of a series of diplomatic
battles that look like nothing so much as trench warfare? As hard as it is to understand (recall Bohr on quantum mechanics),
directly confronting China on these points has the same likelihood of success as most other direct confrontations in the sandpile
world. There’s plenty in Chinese policy that is urgently in need of change; in many cases China’s leaders are the first to
admit it. But foreign pressure often makes it harder, not easier, to trigger these shifts, since they can’t be seen to be
made as a result of demands from the West. It may well be that the best way to ensure development of human rights in China
is to work quietly and around the margins.

We should not delude ourselves about what we now face. Having spent a couple of decades running around with the idea that
we can directly convince the world to agree with us, we now confront a real shortage of leverage. This is a profound gap in
our grand strategic immune system. We now need to construct everything from new treaties to new relationships as sources of
indirect leverage. In areas such as nuclear proliferation or finance we have virtually no useful tools. And we need to learn
an instinct for indirectness, one that, for instance, would have had us respond to 9/11 not only with direct attacks but also
with even larger, more intense indirect efforts such as schools, hospitals, and other social initiatives. There will be many
moments in the future where we will be surprised, confused, and terrified. Our usual reaction — to hit back or cower — needs
to be augmented with an instinct for generosity and decency. This is a lot to ask. But direct attacks alone, as we’ve seen,
fail over and over. Our deep-security immune system needs to work as efficiently indirectly as directly. The lesson of Kaminsky
and Sun Zi should be starkly clear now. There’s a reason that effects thinking has dominated Chinese strategy for centuries
and our own immune systems for far longer than that: it works.

The South African town of Tugela Ferry sits about 130 miles north of the city of Durban on the Indian Ocean coast. It feels
dropped, almost accidentally, along the clay-red two-lane road that leads through the town and onto the vast Drakensberg plain.
This is Zulu country, and you can see how the jolting physical beauty, the contrast of ochre cliffs and green hills, must
have struck the British soldiers who fought here during the 1800s and waxed poetic about a land so deeply moving. Tugela Ferry
itself, however, now wears the unmissable rags of severe poverty. The long-distance buses run into Durban park in the center
of town, improbably close to the mazes of indigo-clad women selling handmade clothes and food. You catch, at moments with
them, glimpses of a rough joy that belies a difficult life, but mostly what you catch here is the rough life. Tugela Ferry
is the urban center for 250,000 people, but it’s the barest sort of center: a few stores, a modest hospital. Like the rest
of this part of South Africa, the area around Tugela Ferry has one of the highest rates of HIV infection in the world. More
than 40 percent of the population here has AIDS; in some nearby villages, where that rate can be even higher, you can feel
you are driving through a quiet, sad, impending graveyard of stick-thin men and women.