Intelligence_ From Secrets to Policy - Mark M. Lowenthal [203]
The environment issue is also somewhat amorphous. The basic goal—preserving a healthier global ecology—stumbles when it comes down to practicalities. As has been the case with international efforts to deal with AIDS, the nations at the center of the issue have different interests and preferences. The international community may believe that it has a vested interest in the preservation of some local ecological habitat, such as a rain forest. However, the nation whose land it is may be more interested in its own economic development than in the stewardship of a world ecological resource.
The basic intelligence tasks are identifying major threats to the environment, identifying states whose policies may be harmful to the environment, and tracking major changes in the environment. Again, a gap separates intelligence from what policy makers are supposed to do with it. Substantial intelligence community involvement in environmental policy dates back only to the late stages of the cold war.
Much of the intelligence about the health and environment issues can be carried out by means of open sources. Commercial infrared satellites can track environmental changes. The spread of disease also can be tracked overtly. Intelligence on these issues has tended to suffer from the inattention of policy makers and from the fact that overt means of collecting intelligence have been less fully developed than the clandestine means.
Access to water is an important issue in its own right and in relationship to global warming. The issue is driven, in part, by the growth in global population, which puts increasing demands on all water sources, both surface and aquifers. Building dams, both to control flooding and to create reservoirs, has both political and environmental consequences. For example, China’s population and its continued economic growth is outpacing available water resources and water, unlike oil or minerals, cannot be shipped in sufficient quantities to make any appreciable difference. The growing need for water, worldwide, has serious policy implications and is an area where more intelligence analysis may be required over the next few years.
As was noted earlier, in 2007, the House Intelligence Committee requested that an NIE be prepared on global warming. Initially, DNI McConnell demurred, although he eventually agreed to have such an NIE written, even as he noted that this effort would not be at the expense of such issues as terrorism. Inevitably, the DNI could not simply refuse to have such an NIE prepared. There are two broad issues to be considered analytically. The first is the degree to which global warming is occurring, at what rate, and what steps might reverse any adverse trends. This does not require many intelligence sources and can probably be written to a very large extent with expertise from beyond the intelligence community. The second issue is the consequences of prolonged and continued global warming in terms of U.S. national security interests, taking into account shifts in weather, their effect on agriculture, rising ocean levels, the potential for regionally determined diseases to spread to newly warming areas, and so on. Questions of this sort will likely be much more speculative and are also likely to become fodder in the political debate over global warming. This is likely to be another NIE where the DNI cannot keep unclassified KJs (which many are likely to be unclassified in any case) from being published.
PEACEKEEPING OPERATIONS
Since the end of the cold war, international peacekeeping operations have expanded dramatically. Regional outbursts of violence, most of them within the borders of one country (or former country), have required the imposition of