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Max Boot posts on the flawed “Yemen” model for dealing with terrorists.
Back in September, when President Obama was announcing his strategy for coping with ISIS in Iraq and Syria, he eschewed sending U.S. combat troops. Instead, he said, “This counter-terrorism campaign will be waged through a steady, relentless effort to take out ISIL wherever they exist using our air power and our support for partner forces on the ground. This strategy of taking out terrorists who threaten us, while supporting partners on the front lines, is one that we have successfully pursued in Yemen and Somalia for years.”
This caused many commentators, including me, to do a double take. As I wrote at the time, “The president’s analogy to Somalia and Yemen is not an encouraging one. Obama may be one of the few people around who thinks that the U.S. has achieved so much success in those countries that it is a model worth emulating.”
Now the Charlie Hebdo massacre in Paris brings further evidence of how flawed the Yemen model actually is. Considerable evidence has emerged of links between al-Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula and the gunmen who murdered 12 people at the Charlie Hebdo offices. Said Kouachi, one of the two brothers involved, was said to have visited Yemen in 2011 for training, and before launching the assault either he or his brother told bystanders, “Tell the media we are Al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula.” …
Jonathan Tobin wants to know why the president can’t call the Paris market attack anti-Semitism.
… The president did well to express solidarity with France as our oldest ally as well as condemnation of the actions of the terrorists that he characterized as standing for “hatred and suffering.” But the sensible reluctance on the part of Western leaders from casting this conflict as one between all Muslims and the rest of the world is no excuse for his determination to ignore the fact that these crimes are rooted in a form of political Islam that is supported by tens if not hundreds of millions of people around the globe. Pretending that these armed killers are not connected to a worldwide movement, even as information about their connections to such groups continues to trickle out, does nothing to avoid antagonizing those who already hate Western values and culture. It also serves to help unilaterally disarm both Muslims and non-Muslims who understand that we must directly confront the corrupt and evil source of this violence within the spectrum of Islamic belief.
Just as wrongheaded was the president’s conspicuous omission of a mention of anti-Semitism. …
Readers will remember we have included many items about the Air France flight that vanished over the South Atlantic five years ago. Now it appears the Air Asia flight that fell out of the sky might also have been the victim of pilot error. A Daily Beast article wonders if modern jets are too automated.
Too many computers and not enough ‘hands-on’ flying mean most pilots would have fallen victim to the weather that brought down AirAsia 8501.
As searchers close in on what appears to be the main wreckage of AirAsia Flight 8501 the retrieval of the airplane’s flight data and cockpit voice recorders should soon follow. The wreckage lies no more than around 100 feet down in the JavaSea. Although there are strong currents and poor visibility, compounded by the high seas generated by stormy weather, divers should be able to locate the rear end of the fuselage where the flight data recorder, the black box, is located.
The black box and the cockpit voice recorder will together be able to give a highly detailed second-by-second account of what now seems of primary interest to investigators: how the two pilots responded to a sudden and violent cell of weather within a thunderhead cloud that engulfed them, probably reaching more than 20,000 feet above their cruise height of 34,000 feet.
Investigators will focus on whether the sudden emergency was so extreme that no degree of pilot skill would have helped. Or did the pilots, once more, lack not only the experience of meeting such a challenge, but also whether they, and thousands of other pilots around the world, were ever trained to handle this specific combination of challenges?
I say “once more” because since the loss of Air France Flight 447 on June 1, 2009, a serious deficiency has been exposed in how pilots are trained—and how their acuity is regularly tested—to handle modern jets with state-of-the-art cockpit automation.
Some background is useful here. …
… By the first decade of this century the most frequent cause of serious accidents had been narrowed down to—and still is—“loss of control.” This might seem a very loose term, but it has emerged in a very specific environment during the course of airline operations all over the world.
Two paths converge: human skills and automation. Cockpits have become “de-manned.” Computers are flying a modern commercial airliner for most of the time, and flying it well, with a finesse that human reflexes cannot match. …
… Captain Chesley Sullenberger, who in 2009 made the now legendary emergency landing on the Hudson river in an Airbus A320—identical to that in AirAsia Flight 8501—has said, commenting on the AirAsia event, that very few pilots flying either modern narrow body or wide-body jets today have ever experienced a stall in those jets. (They do get stall training in elementary initial flying lessons, but it is nothing like what they’re more likely to experience in today’s modern jets.)
This is almost certainly true of Captain Irianto, the 53-year-old pilot of the AirAsia A320, and his copilot, 46-year-old Remi Emmanuel Piesel. The fact is that five years after the Air France Flight 447 catastrophe, only now are computerized flight simulators used in training pilots being rewritten to replicate loss of control scenarios. This is why it is virtually meaningless to cite the fact that Captain Irianto had 20,000 hours of experience as a pilot and that 6,100 of those hours were on A320s. Unless he had faced in a simulator what he probably faced in that thunderhead over the JavaSea, he would not have been ready for it. Even then, as the Airbus tests showed, old habits die hard. …
Scientific American published a good piece on how to raise smart kids. A more correct title might be how to raise accomplished kids.
… A brilliant student, Jonathan sailed through grade school. He completed his assignments easily and routinely earned As. Jonathan puzzled over why some of his classmates struggled, and his parents told him he had a special gift. In the seventh grade, however, Jonathan suddenly lost interest in school, refusing to do homework or study for tests. As a consequence, his grades plummeted. His parents tried to boost their son’s confidence by assuring him that he was very smart. But their attempts failed to motivate Jonathan (who is a composite drawn from several children). Schoolwork, their son maintained, was boring and pointless.
Our society worships talent, and many people assume that possessing superior intelligence or ability—along with confidence in that ability—is a recipe for success. In fact, however, more than 35 years of scientific investigation suggests that an overemphasis on intellect or talent leaves people vulnerable to failure, fearful of challenges and unwilling to remedy their shortcomings.
The result plays out in children like Jonathan, who coast through the early grades under the dangerous notion that no-effort academic achievement defines them as smart or gifted. Such children hold an implicit belief that intelligence is innate and fixed, making striving to learn seem far less important than being (or looking) smart. This belief also makes them see challenges, mistakes and even the need to exert effort as threats to their ego rather than as opportunities to improve. And it causes them to lose confidence and motivation when the work is no longer easy for them.
Praising children’s innate abilities, as Jonathan’s parents did, reinforces this mind-set, which can also prevent young athletes or people in the workforce and even marriages from living up to their potential. On the other hand, our studies show that teaching people to have a “growth mind-set,” which encourages a focus on “process” (consisting of personal effort and effective strategies) rather than on intelligence or talent, helps make them into high achievers in school and in life. …