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restraint on its behavior, and it was taken into account by New Delhi. "I think it

sobered a lot of people," said Jerry Rao, who, as noted earlier, heads the Indian

high-tech trade association. "We engaged very seriously, and we tried to make the

point that this was very bad for Indian business. It was very bad for the Indian

economy . . . [Many people] didn't realize till then how suddenly we had become

integrated into the rest of the world. We are now partners in a twenty-four by seven

by three-sixty-five supply chain."

Vivek Kulkami, then information technology secretary for Bangalore's regional

government, told me back in 2002, "We don't get involved in politics, but we did bring

to the government's attention the problems the Indian IT industry might face if there

were a war." And this was an altogether new factor for New Delhi to take into

consideration. "Ten years ago, [a lobby of IT ministers from different Indian states]

never existed," said Kulkarni. Now it is one of the most important business lobbies

in India and a coalition that no Indian government can ignore.

"With all due respect, the McDonald's [shutting] down doesn't hurt anything," said

Vivek Paul, "but if Wipro had to shut down we would af-

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feet the day-to-day operations of many, many companies." No one would answer the

phones in call centers. Many e-commerce sites that are supported from Bangalore would

shut down. Many major companies that rely on India to maintain their key computer

applications or handle their human resources departments or billings would seize up.

And these companies did not want to find alternatives, said Paul. Switching is very

difficult, because taking over mission-critical day-to-day backroom operations of

a global company takes a great deal of training and experience. It's not like opening

a fast-food restaurant. That was why, said Paul, Wipro's clients were telling him,

"'I have made an investment in you. I need you to be very responsible with the trust

I have reposed in you.' And I think that created an enormous amount of back pressure

on us that said we have to act in a responsible fashion ... All of a sudden it became

even clearer that there's more to gain by economic gains than by geopolitical gains.

[We had more to gain from building] a vibrant, richer middle class able to create

an export industry than we possibly could by having an ego-satisfying war with

Pakistan." The Indian government also looked around and realized that the vast

majority of India's billion people were saying, "I want a better future, not more

territory." Over and over again, when I asked young Indians working at call centers

how they felt about Kashmir or a war with Pakistan, they waved me off with the same

answer: "We have better things to do." And they do. America needs to keep this in

mind as it weighs its overall approach to outsourcing. I would never advocate shipping

some American's job overseas just so it will keep Indians and Pakistanis at peace

with each other. But I would say that to the extent that this process happens, driven

by its own internal economic logic, it will have a net positive geopolitical effect.

It will absolutely make the world safer for American kids.

Each of the Indian business leaders I interviewed noted that in the event of some

outrageous act of terrorism or aggression from Pakistan, India would do whatever it

takes to defend itself, and they would be the first to support that-the Dell Theory

be damned. Sometimes war is unavoidable. It is imposed on you by the reckless behavior

of others, and you have to just pay the price. But the more India and, one hopes,

soon Pakistan get enmeshed in global service supply chains, the greater disin

centive they have to fight anything but a border skirmish or a war of words.

The example of the 2002 India-Pakistan nuclear crisis at least gives us some hope.

That cease-fire was brought to us not by General Powell but by General Electric.

We bring good things to life.

Infosys Versus al-Qaeda

Unfortunately, even GE can do only so much. Because, alas, a new source for

geopolitical instability has emerged only in recent years, for which even the updated

Dell Theory can provide no restraint. It is the emergence of mutant global supply

chains -that is, nonstate actors, be they criminals or terrorists, who learn to use

all the elements of the flat world to advance a highly destabilizing, even nihilistic

agenda. I first started thinking about this when Nandan Nilekani, the Infosys CEO,

was giving me that tour I referred to in Chapter 1 of his company's global

videoconferencing center at its Bangalore headquarters. As Nandan explained to me

how Infosys could getits global supply chain together atonce for a virtual conference

in that room, a thought popped into my head: Who else uses open-sourcing and

supply-chaining so imaginatively? The answer, of course, is al-Qaeda.

Al-Qaeda has learned to use many of the same instruments for global collaboration

that Infosys uses, but instead of producing products and profits with them, it has

produced mayhem and murder. This is a particularly difficult problem. In fact, it

may be the most vexing geopolitical problem for flat-world countries that want to

focus on the future. The flat world-unfortunately-is a friend of both Infosys and

al-Qaeda. The Dell Theory will not work at all against these informal Islamo-Leninist

terror networks, because they are not a state with a population that will hold its

leaders accountable or with a domestic business lobby that might restrain them. These

mutant global supply chains are formed for the purpose of destruction, not profit.

They don't need investors, only recruits,

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donors, and victims. Yet these mobile, self-financing mutant supply chains use all

the tools of collaboration offered by the flat world-open-sourcing to raise money,

to recruit followers, and to stimulate and disseminate ideas; outsourcing to train

recruits; and supply-chaining to distribute the tools and the suicide bombers to

undertake operations. The U.S. Central Command has a name for this whole underground

network: the Virtual Caliphate. And its leaders and innovators understand the flat

world almost as well as Wal-Mart, Dell, and Infosys do.

In the previous chapter, I tried to explain that you cannot understand the rise of

al-Qaeda emotionally and politically without reference to the flattening of the world.

What I am arguing here is that you cannot understand the rise of al-Qaeda technically

without reference to the flattening of the world, either. Globalization in general

has been al-Qaeda's friend in that it has helped to solidify a revival of Muslim

identity and solidarity, with Muslims in one country much better able to see and

sympathize with the struggles of their brethren in another country-thanks to the

Internet and satellite television. At the same time, as pointed out in the previous

chapter, this flattening process has intensified the feelings of humiliation in some

quarters of the Muslim world over the fact that civilizations to which the Muslim

world once felt superior-Hindus, Jews, Christians, Chinese -are now all doing better

than many Muslim countries, and everyone can see it. The flattening of the world has

also led to more urbanization and large-scale immigration to the West of many of these

young, unemployed, frustrated Arab-Muslim males, while simultaneously making it much

easier for informal open-source networks of these young men to form, operate, and

interconnect. This certainly has been a boon for underground extremist Muslim

political groups. There has been a proliferation of these informal mutual supply

chains throughout the Arab-Muslim world today-small networks of people who move money

through hawalas (hand-to-hand financing networks), who recruit through alternative

education systems like the madrassas, and who communicate through the Internet and

other tools of the global information revolution. Think about it: A century ago,

anarchists were limited in their ability to communicate and collaborate with one

another, to find sympathizers, and to band together for an

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operation. Today, with the Internet, that is not a problem. Today even the Unabomber

could find friends to join a consortium where his "strengths" could be magnified and

reinforced by others who had just as warped a worldview as he did.

What we have witnessed in Iraq is an even more perverse mutation of this mutant supply

chain-the suicide supply chain. Since the start of the U.S. invasion in March 2002,

more than two hundred suicide bombers have been recruited from within Iraq and from

across the Muslim world, brought to the Iraqi front by some underground railroad,

connected with the bomb makers there, and then dispatched against U.S. and Iraqi

targets according to whatever suits the daily tactical needs of the insurgent Islamist

forces in Iraq. I can understand, but not accept, the notion that more than

thirty-seven years of Israeli occupation of the West Bank might have driven some

Palestinians into a suicidal rage. But the American occupation of Iraq was only a

few months old before it started to get hit by this suicide supply chain. How do you

recruit so many young men "off the shelf" who are ready to commit suicide in the cause

of jihad, many of them apparently not even Iraqis? And they don't even identify

themselves by name or want to get credit-at least in this world. The fact is that

Western intelligence agencies have no clue how this underground suicide supply chain,

which seems to have an infinite pool of recruits to draw on, works, and yet it has

basically stymied the U.S. armed forces in Iraq. From what we do know, though, this

Virtual Caliphate works just like the supply chains I described earlier. Just as you

take an item off the shelf in a discount store in Birmingham and another one is

immediately made in Beijing, so the retailers of suicide deploy a human bomber in

Baghdad and another one is immediately recruited and indoctrinated in Beirut. To the

extent that this tactic spreads, it will require a major rethinking of U.S. military

doctrine.

The flat world has also been such a huge boon for al-Qaeda and its ilk because of

the way it enables the small to act big, and the way it enables small acts-the killing

of just a few people-to have big effects. The horrific video of the beheading of Wall

Street Journal reporter Danny Pearl by Islamist militants in Pakistan was transmitted

by the Internet all over the world. There is not a journalist anywhere who saw or

even just read

about that who was not terrified. But those same beheading videos are also used as

tools of recruitment. The flat world makes it much easier for terrorists to transmit

their terror. With the Internet they don't even have to go through Western or Arab

news organizations but can broadcast right into your computer. It takes much less

dynamite to transmit so much more anxiety. Just as the U.S. Army had embedded

journalists, so the suicide supply chain has embedded terrorists, in their own way,

to tell us their side of the story. How many times have I gotten up in the morning,

fired up the Internet, and been confronted by the video image of some masked gunman

threatening to behead an American-all brought to me courtesy of AOL's home page? The

Internet is an enormously useful tool for the dissemination of propaganda, conspiracy

theories, and plain old untruths, because it combines a huge reach with a patina of

technology that makes anything onthe Internet somehow more believable. How many times

have you heard someone say, "But I read it on the Internet," as if that should end

the argument? In fact, the Internet can make things worse. It often leads to more

people being exposed to crazy conspiracy theories.

"The new system of diffusion-the Internet-is more likely to transmit irrationality

than rationality," said political theorist Yaron Ezrahi, who specializes in the

interaction between media and politics. "Because irrationality is more emotionally

loaded, it requires less knowledge, it explains more to more people, it goes down

easier." That is why conspiracy theories are so rife in the Arab-Muslim world

today-and unfortunately are becoming so in many quarters of the Western world, for

that matter. Conspiracy theories are like a drug that goes right into your bloodstream,

enabling you to see "the Light." And the Internet is the needle. Young people used

to have to take LSD to escape. Now they just go online. Now you don't shoot up, you

download. You download the precise point of view that speaks to all your own biases.

And the flat world makes it all so much easier.

Gabriel Weimann, a professor of communication at Haifa University, Israel, did an

incisive study of terrorists' use of the Internet and of what I call the flat world,

which was published in March 2004by the United States Institute of Peace and excerpted

on YaleGlobal Online on April 26, 2004. He made the following points:

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While the danger that cyber-terrorism poses to the Internet is frequently debated,

surprisingly little is known about the threat posed by terrorists' use of the Internet.

A recent six-year-long study shows that terrorist organizations and their supporters

have been using all of the tools that the Internet offers to recruit supporters, raise

funds, and launch a worldwide campaign of fear. It is also clear that to combat

terrorism effectively, mere suppression of their Internet tools is not enough. Our

scan of the Internet in 2003-04 revealed the existence of hundreds of websites serving

terrorists in different, albeit sometimes overlapping, ways. . . There are countless

examples of how [terrorists] use this uncensored medium to spread disinformation,

to deliver threats intended to instill fear and helplessness, and to disseminate