U.S. intelligence seeks foreign input in future study
U.S. intelligence seeks foreign input in future study
Tabassum Zakaria
Reuters
Langley, Virginia
The secretive U.S. intelligence community is reaching out to
foreign experts around the world to help identify economic and
security trends up to the year 2020, a senior U.S. intelligence
official said.
Robert Hutchings, chairman of the National Intelligence
Council, said he believed three of the biggest countries --
China, India and Indonesia -- were open to significant and
unpredictable change during the period covered by the year-long
study.
The previous report, released in 2000, looked at trends to
2015 and had depended mainly on U.S. input. "As good as it was,
(it) was pretty much America-centric. It was the American view of
future trends. 2020 will really be a global view of future
trends," he said.
Hutchings said the centerpiece of the new study would be a
series of regional conferences in Europe, Asia, Latin America,
South Africa, and, he hoped, the Middle East.
"We will invite a diverse group of regional experts to
consider their own regions' future out to the year 2020," he said
in a Reuters interview this week at his office at CIA
headquarters. The National Intelligence Council acts as the U.S.
intelligence community's think tank.
Hutchings said he hoped the report would reflect the enormity
of changes under way. "I would hope it would somehow convey the
magnitude of the flux of the world we're dealing with," he said.
China, India, and Indonesia are countries to watch for
possible significant and unpredictable change, Hutchings said.
"It's really hard to imagine China looking much the same in
2020," he said, noting that its economy was growing so fast that
it was radically transforming the country.
"So the question is how elastic that (China's) political
system is and how creative. A continuing economic growth of the
proportions we've seen in the last decade is incompatible with
one-party rule over the course of say the years to 2020,"
Hutchings said.
The Middle East will be different in 2020, and the hope was
that a prosperous, independent Iraq would emerge and affect the
broader region, but there could also be "less hopeful scenarios,"
Hutchings said without giving details.
The National Intelligence Council has increasingly been
reaching outside the spy world to network with experts from
business, academia, and science partly due to government cutbacks
that reduced U.S. expertise in areas like Africa and Latin
America, Hutchings said.
"And frankly in a lot of the parts of the world where the
questions (are that) we are addressing, the value of our secrets
is no longer as great as it used to be," he said.
"The future of China is not to be uncovered by secrets or some
secret cache of information in China to answer the question,"
Hutchings said. "It's a mystery that we're going to unravel by
talking about it with lots of people who think long and hard
about China."
The 2015 report was released in December 2000 just before
President George W. Bush was inaugurated and nine months before
the Sept. 11 attacks. The new report will be released after next
year's presidential election and before the inauguration.
The 2015 report predicted increasingly sophisticated terrorist
tactics "designed to achieve mass casualties" and a growing
threat of missile attack.
"I think we still are dealing with the changing shape of
international terrorism," Hutchings said. Al-Qaeda is "more a
cause than an organization. It's going to be an ongoing challenge
to deal with this threat."
But he said the fight against terrorism would be in better
shape by 2020. "I can foresee a time in which the threat that
seizes us now has been much attenuated."