John avlon: jared Cohen, a u.s. State Department expert on the middle east, delivered a message. He says the region's youth are not much different from their Western counterparts. Technology has given us a golden opportunity to "connect" with these young people, he says. Avllon: if We want to win these young people over, We need to connect with them.
John avlon: jared Cohen, a u.s. State Department expert on the middle east, delivered a message. He says the region's youth are not much different from their Western counterparts. Technology has given us a golden opportunity to "connect" with these young people, he says. Avllon: if We want to win these young people over, We need to connect with them.
John avlon: jared Cohen, a u.s. State Department expert on the middle east, delivered a message. He says the region's youth are not much different from their Western counterparts. Technology has given us a golden opportunity to "connect" with these young people, he says. Avllon: if We want to win these young people over, We need to connect with them.
One evening last November, the
house lights at Fairfield Univer-
sity’s Quick Center auditorium
dimmed, and the full-house au-
dience stared up at a 2008 film
clip from The Colbert Report,
the political comedy show. Steven
Colbert’s guest was Jared Cohen,
a twenty-six-year-old expert on the
Islamic Middle East then working in
the U.S. Department of State. Between the
jokes, Cohen had a serious message to deliver: The back-
ward, hate-mongering Middle East on our TV screens
was but a sliver of the whole picture. The whole picture,
he suggested, was considerably more hopeful than the
news reports led us to believe.
Colbert seemed unconvinced. “I hear
a lot of chanting of ‘Death to America.’
That seems to be the number one hit
over there.”
“Oftentimes when you hear people
shouting ‘Death to America'in the Middle
East, they were paid fifty dollars a day to
do it,” Cohen explained,
“That's good money! I'd do it for much
less," Colbert said, but the ramifications
of his crack were sobering. Most of the
chanters were young, jobless, and frus
trated, and fifty dollars was good money
indeed. In truth, Cohen said, Middle
Eastern youth generally consider “Death
to America” to be an empty slogan and
‘America itself to be a source of endless
fascination.
When the clip ended, Cohen himself
walked onto the stage—tall and fair-
skinned, with an upright gait, dark wavy
hair, and somewhat slepy blue eyes.
Cohen, the son of Dee and Donald
Cohen of Weston, had come to expand
con the dual message he has been pushing
since Condoleezza Rice invited him to
join the State Department in 2006: Youth
in repressed societies lke Iran and Syria
are really not much different from their
Western counterparts; and the technology
rrr tier
revolution sweeping the globe has hand.
ced us a golden opportunity to “connect”
‘with these young people, and thereby win
them over,
“Took at the world through the lens
of connectivity,” Cohen said, causing
some older people in the audience to shift
their knees and frown. Perhaps they were
envisioning young Americans absorbed
in their gadgets, oblivious to live friends
or to the sun shining on the last autumn
leaves. But Cohen meant something else
entirely—the power of cell phones and
social media like Facebook and Twitter to
create social change, to shed light in dark
places. We never would have heard about
Neda Agha-Soltan, the beautiful young
Iranian shot dead amid post-election pro-
tests in 2009, if not for acell phone video
uploaded to the Internet. While the video
could not change the outcome ofthe ele
tion, it did embarrass Iran on the interna-
tional stage, exposing its brutal tactics for
all to see. (Iran shamed itself further by
claiming the video was faked.) “The entize
‘world was forced to make a comment on
it.” Cohen told his audience, then waited
beat. “That's a change in policy.”
History would soon endorse Cohen's
message. In December protests erupted‘young guns at State isthe fashioning of
‘a new dimension to foreign policy called
“rwenty-first-century statecraft.” This new
statecraft knows that borders once sealed
bya Berlin Wall or Big Brother have been
rendered porous by digital technology.
It knows that this generation is the first
in human history equipped to mobilize
causes on a massive, even global scale,
via digital networking. And it knows that
the same technology used to instantly
collect millions of relief dollars for Haiti
(@ Hillary Rodham Clinton initiative)
is also used to radicalize Muslim youth,
‘Ours isa world gone viral, and
the good and the evil are doing.
battle in digital space as well as
‘on physical topography.
Cohen did not leave govern-
ment because he lost interest
in technology and its emerg-
ing uses, but because (a) it
was time, and (b) he wanted a
different avenue of attack.
Google offered him that ave-
tue. In October the company
best known for its search
engine installed Cohen as
founding director ofa new enti
ty called Google Ideas. What is
it, exactly? The thing is still in
its formative stage, but Cohen
envisions a “think/do” tank
that generates innovative solu-
tions to stubborn world prob-
lems and then puts them into
action. Think of it as a sort of,
free-floating state department
with private sector efficacy.
When one considers Google's
reach (unprecedented) and am
tion (“Our goal is to change the world,”
says CEO Eric Schmidt), one begins to
‘grasp that Cohen now sits ata great nexus
‘of technology and power and influence—
and he's barely twenty-nine years old.
But we are getting ahead of the story.
LESSON LEARNED
Cohen is Iucky to be alive. Six years
ago, at the height of the war in Iraq,
no MoFRLYMEDIACOM
this Jew from Connecticut went bum-
bling through the Middle East—hanging
cout with Hezbollah in Beirut, partying
‘with Muslim youth in the back alleys of
Teheran, interviewing Palestinian ter-
roriss in the notorious refugee camps of
southern Lebanon. Atone of these camps,
Mia Mia, Cohen asked a gang of Hamas-
devoted young men what they would do if
1 Jewish person walked into their camp.
“We would cut his head off,” said a voice
from the rear, and the gang erupted in
laughter.
‘Then Cohen went to Iraq. Showing
Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton talking with Jared Cohen
fa rare regard for self-preservation, he
entered the country through Turkey
and planned to stick to Iraqi Kurdistan,
way up north, a fair distance from the
insurgency tearing apart the rest of the
country. After satisfying his curios:
ity among the Kurds, he hired a taxi to
‘whisk him back up to the Turkish border.
Drowsily he reclined inthe backseat of the
driver's rusted-out Camry with its cracked
‘windshield and bullet hole in the door.
‘The Camry rattled along the highway and
Cohen shut his eyes. When he awoke, the
car stood motionless at a busy roadside.
‘The view out his window collided nastily
with his expectations: Where were the
green hills of Kurdistan, where was the
‘Turkish border? Cohen leaned forward
‘to question the driver, but the man had
disappeared. Scrambling out of the car,
exhausted and disoriented, Cohen tried
to absorb the troubling scene around him:
a torched car flipped on its hood, rubble-
strewn buildings. “I was in Mosul,” he
wrote later, “the most danger-
‘ous city in one of the most dan-
‘gerous countries in the world.”
‘The August sun beat down;
the temperature had risen
toa suffocating 130 degrees.
Tt was even hotter inside the
Camry, but Cohen felt he
hhad no choice but to hunker
down in the seat, out of sight.
Curious passersby peered in
at iim anyway as he pondered
the absurdity of his predica-
ment: a lone American Jew in
Mosul—a largely Sunni city
where Saddam Hussein's sons
Uday and Qusay had sought
refuge (and where the U.S.
military had found and killed
them). At length the driver
returned, smiling and bearing
‘two jugs of black-market gaso-
line, For unknown reasons
he had driven not north to
‘Turkey, but west toward Syria,
a dangerous route cluttered
with Sunni insurgents and their
roadside bombs. “I winced every time
cour car approached garbage on the street,
while the driver blithely barreled along,
Cohen wrote. When he reached Syria,
USS. troops manning the border regarded
the American wearing baggy Kurdish
pants and a Banana Republic T-shiet with
disbelief. “What the hell are you doing
here?” they asked. “You are in awar zone.
‘This is an insurgency.”in Tunisia, and in January Egypt caught
the fever, which spread in turn to Bahrain,
Yemen, Algeria, Libya and beyond. Since
those who assembled in these countries
could not have done so in great numbers
without social media, their uprisings
are often called “Facebook” or “Twitter”
revolutions.
From his own time as an intrepid solo
traveler in the Middle East, in 2004 and
2005, Cohen saw the technological tidal
wave just beginning to swell. “In Iran,
67 percent of the country is under the
age of thirty,” he told me by phone from
his apartment in New York City. “My
belief was thatthe youth in Iran were ade
facto opposition, and they didn't realize
their significance as a demographic.” One
‘moment of enlightenment came as Cohen
‘wandered about a Teheran marketplace,
watching the young congregate like bieds
but seeming to purposefully avoid contact
with one another. It was an odd sight
“What are you guys doing?” Cohen
asked one young man.
“Oh, we're using Bluetooth,” he sai.
‘Where's your earpiece?”
‘What earpiece?”
Hereitbears explaining that Bluetooth's
inventors sought to fix a simple problem:
how to drive a car and use the phone at
the same time. In other words, Bluetooth
technology transmits data wirelessly over
short distances—such as between your
earpiece and the cell phone resting in
your cup holder. These kids had discov.
ered that Bluetooth could work not just
between a cell phone and its earpiece, but
also among all cell phones within a cer-
tain range. Cohen was still puzzled. They
‘were texting people standing right in the
same cluster? Why not just talk? Soon he
had his answer, and his revelation: These
young people were strangers to one anoth:
cr, and their messages floated indiscrimi:
nately to every cell phone user within
their litte bubble of space. The texts were
creating sort of invisible, interactive bul-
letin board: “Any good parties going down
tonight?" "Who can tell me of a bass play
cer for my rock band?
In the free world, only a creep would
send anonymous text messages to unsus-
Pecting latte-sippers sitting three tables
away at a Starbucks, But in authoritar
jan regimes like Iran, the psychology is
completely different. By putting a modest
technology to innovative use, the young
could get around monitoring, restrictions,
and blockades; they could indulge their
Cohen offered
accidental proof
of digital power by
becoming the
third most followed
goverment
employee on
‘Twitter, behind
Barack Obama and
John McCain.
antiauthoritarian impulses
“Aren't you worried about getting
caught?" Cohen asked,
The youngman shookhishead. "Nobody
over thirty knows what Bluetooth is.
“And so I got really interested in this
notion of what happens when you throw
technology into a repressive society,”
Cohen said. “You can't even begin to
imagine how it will be used.”
Last September Cohen left the govern:
‘ment. His legacy, along with that of other
a‘country, Can I get you any more tea?” And
they'd do these mind games with me.”
‘Unable to pursue his intended research,
Cohen wandered the country, look-
ing for friends his own age, intelligence
agents “escorting” him much of the time.
Eventually it dawned on him he had
‘come to study the wrong opposition. The
important opposition were not political
players, but the impressionable, reach:
able young—the great majority of whom
despises the ruling theocracy. Cohen real
ized this one day in the town of Esfahan,
after his weary escort retired to the hotel.
Unfettered, Cohen aimed his camera at
abit of police state propaganda: “Down
‘With the USA” stenciled in big black let-
ters across the facade of an apartment
building, A young man stepped forward,
‘urging him not to take the picture. “This
does not represent the Iranian people!” he
protested, “We love the USA. If you look
around and you talk to people, you will not
BY THE NUMBERS
WworLD:
50%
porcantage ofthe population that
eee
Contiratin of phene/interet
Servos (lon cel ones Sn
Zoiton access to web)
PAKISTAN:
100 million
number of cell phone users
(in 2000, it was
‘only 300,000)
AFGHANISTAN:
30%
percentage of growth i call
Fone ene since 2001
Data extracted rom
The Dptal Disruption
Connectivity andthe Buon
of ower iby ere Schmit and
SoralGohenForoen stars
November/ December 2010
2 MorruymeD.cou
see that we hate America, You will see the
opposite.”
Tn time subterranean Iran opened up
for Cohen. He saw illegal satellite dishes
(often smuggled through Kurdistan by
donkey) planted on rooftops everywhere,
enabling Iranians to tune in to the BBC,
CNN, and that decadent teen drama, The
(OC. He attended late-night parties (minus
his escort) where the young drank, played
cards, and danced to hip-hop music, and
girls shed their ijabs in favor of slinkier
Western attire. “For Iranians,” Cohen
wrote, “this was their democracy after
dark.” Even what wasn't secret was some-
times shocking. Cohen learned that in Iran
there are about 25,000 Jews, twenty-seven
synagogues and even a Jewish member of,
parliament. Strange for a country whose
president would like to see Israel pushed
into the sea.
"The Middle East carried all sorts of
expectation baffles. Wild beach parties
in Lebanon? Gay raves in Syria? Iranians
‘who wept for us on 9/11? These sorts of
things were not exceptional, Cohen found,
but rather part of an identity concealed
from authority figures: a youth identity.
ven young militants—Cohen calls them
“broken souls with dangerous toys"—have
such an identity, and one can summon it
by talking about universal subjects ike dat-
ing and musi. Remarkably, as Cohen bade
‘goodbye to the impoverished young men
‘of Mia Mia, the ones who had joked about
cutting off the heads of Jews, he exchanged
Jhugs and handshakes. Perhaps there was
hope yet. On the other hand: “You go to
southern Lebanon, and you ask people
why they like Hezbollah. It’s because
Hezbollah pays their water bill, their elec-
tricity bill, it pays for their school fees, it
buys them their cell phones.” No amount
of sensible, moderate rhetoric can break
that sort of allegiance.
OF U.S. INTEREST
Notlong ater survivinghis ravelsto Iran,
Lebanon, Syria and Irag, Cohen emerged
as an intellectual of particular intrigue
{In 2007 he published Children of ihad, an
“Aren'tyou worried
about getting
caught?”
Cohen asked.
Theyoung man
shook his head.
a over
thirty knows what
Bluetooth is.”
—Cohen’s conversation with
young Iranian man
eye-opening book about Middle Eastern
youth that overthrows many an American
preconception. Meanwhile, Condoleezza
Rice tapped him to work on her policy
planning staff, the State Department's
“idea shop.” Such staffers usually labor in
obscurity, but Cohen kept popping up in
the news (including a write-up inthe New
Yorker), largely because of his precocity:
at twenty-four, he had written two wel
regarded books, acquired mind-blowing
experience at great personal risk, and was
advising the secretary of state on the most
complex foreign policy issues of the day.
“He had insights into Iran that frankly we
didn’t have in the government,” Rice told
‘The New York Times. “He was so articulate
about it, I asked him to write up a memo
that could send to the President.”
‘After Obama's election Hillary Rodham
Clinton took the unusual step of keeping
Cohen on. Cohen (who once told me
he is liberal on most domestic issues)
doesn't see foreign policy as necessarily
Republican or Democratic; but in parti-
san Washington his Bush provenance was
suspect. “'d had such good relationships
in the [Bush] administration,” he said.
“And then one day I come to work and
‘everybody's gone. That's such a weird
feeling. It was rebooting to day one, and
OO EEEJared Cohen (far left) at a briefing with President Bush on counterterrorism and counterradicalizaton.
ROAD TO IRAN
I first met Jared Cohen in June 2004, not
long before he left for the Middle East.
He struck me as sort of drowsy and off
handedly brilliant. Though his interests
were many—he was a talented athlete
and artist—he appeared to be fast-track
ing to a distinguished career in foreign
policy. At age twenty-two, he was fresh
from Stanford, where he'd written an
award-winning examination of the 1994
Rwandan genocide called One Hundred
Days of Silence. (In preparation, he'd
bounced around Aftica on his own, where
he earned a reputation for recklessness
alongside his established academic bri
liance. In 2001 he snuck into war-crazed
Congo in the back ofa truck, under cover
of bananas.)
By the time I met him, at his parent's
house in Weston, his focus had shifted
from Africa to the Middle East. He was
When one considers Google's reach
(unprecedented) and ambition
(‘Our goal isto change the world,”
says CEO Eric Schmidt), one begins to
grasp that Cohen now sits at a great
nexus of technology
and
and influence—and he's barely
twenty-nine years old.
learning to speak Arabic and Farsi and
\was about to pursue his new passion as a
Rhodes scholar at Oxford. “Nobody's real:
ly looking at modern relations with ran
I see it asthe next hot spot in the Middle
East,” he said then, presciently, Cohen
hhad no intention of sitting cozily behind
Oxford's rain-spattered windows, perus
ing the latest scholarly literature about
Iran. Instead, he planned to go to Iran
himself, that December, to chat up both
the theocracy’s leaders and their restless
adversaries.
Of course, Iran would never let him do
that. The plan fell apart one night when
the Revolutionary Guard rousted him
ut of a sound sleep. “They brought me
toaroom. They did this really weird thing
where'dbesittingthere,and they‘dcome
in and start screaming at me: ‘Have you
ever seen the inside ofan Ir
ian prison?
You're in big trouble! You're never get-
ting out of here.’ They'd slam the door
shut. Then the same guy would come
back twenty-five minutes later with tea
and brochures and say, ‘We're so excited
you're here in Iran, we hope you like ourThad to prove myselfall ver again. There
were plenty of people who disliked me.”
‘Alec Ross, who worked on the Obama
campaign and is now senior advisor for
innovation to the Secretary of State,
proved a critical aly. “There were all
these haters trying to get this guy shot in
the head,” Ross told an interviewer lst
summer. “I read what he'd writen, and
Tm ike, ‘This guys actually brilliant; he’s
going to be my partner.’”
CCohen had another champion in Anne-
Marie Slaughter, the director of policy
planning and a former Princeton dean.
“T mean, her whole recent academic work
was about a networked world,” Cohen said,
“We saw the word in very similar ways”
‘As for Hillary Clinton? She's made ot
nectivity such a hallmark of her steward-
ship that Cohen call her the "godmother
of twenty-first-century statecraft.” (Last
January she delivered a major speech on
Internet freedom, the first of its kind.)
Yet when the New York Times Magazine
‘wrote about the new “digital diplomacy.”
in July 2010, it focused on Cohen and
Ross, and photographed them with their
mobile devices drawn like six shooters.
Cohen offered accidental proof of digital
power by becoming the third most fol
lowed government employee on Twitter,
behind Barack Obama and John McCain,
ONE FOR
THE MASSES
Cohen has not escaped criticism. In fact,
he's somewhat controversial. During the
Iranian street protests of June 2009, it hap-
‘pened that Twitter planned an hours-long
shutdown in order to upgrade its website
‘The State Department (meaning Cohen)
thought the timing unfortunate: Much
news of Iran reached the West through
‘Twitter, which can broadcast, as it were,
tomillions of people ata time and to virtu
allyany device withascreen. Twitter going
down at such a crucial moment, Cohen
said, “could remove a critical information
bridge.” What Cohen did next became the
talk of foreign policy circles. He e-mailed
his friend Jack Dorsey, founder and chair-
rman of Twitter, and provided “situational
awareness." By the end of the day, Twitter
decided to postpone its shutdown.
Cohen had proceeded on his own initia:
tive and stood to receive a drubbing i his
actions were judged to be roguish, “I've
always been a big believer, in a moment
of crisis, in doing something and asking
for forgiveness later,” Cohen told me.
[And when the Times broke the story (on
page one) tricky questions emerged. The
Obama administration's stated policy is
not to meddle in Iran's internal affairs,
Had Cohen meddled? Iran certainly
thought so. And had Cohen medaled as
well with a private company? “It’s an
interesting precedent,” Cohen remarked
“It raised all these questions that nobody
knew the answer to...My feeling is, it
doesn’t constitute meddling if you're not
physically meddling in ran. And it doesn't
constitute meddling witha private sector
‘company if you're not issuing an injunc-
tion, They could have said no.” And the
administration backed him up.
‘A.much broader debate, now acceerat
ing, pits digital optimists (Cohen is often
sald to be one) agains digital pessimist
‘The former claim that events like the
Iran protests highlight digital tools’ abil-
ity to give voice to masses of the voiceless,
and thereby influence events; the latter
(including the writer Maleolm Gladwell)
argue that digital activism is pretty weak
tea, and gives the possibly harmfal ill
sion of accomplishing good when nothing
much changes. Cohen insists the debate
is pointless because it's setled. “In the
Jas ten years, cell phone growth has risen
from 907 million to 5 billion. Internet
access has grown from 361 million to
2billion. Sots not that 'm an optimist;
it’s that I don’t see the point of debating
‘whether technology matters when those
are the kinds of trends you're working
with.”
Digital technology is not inherently
‘good or bad—no more than 2 knife is.
It depends on who's wielding it, and to
TED THE TAILOR
Serving Greench
vince 1948
Prsicion perfection
end gual
Rated Bes ofthe
(olden Const 2010
2 Church Street
Greenwich, CT 06830
Tal: 1-203-869-5699
Nantucket
i eEeE——Eeeee