Greg Sanders

Can more resources solve Afghanistan's problems?

After attending an off the record briefing, not with an administration official, I heard a way of thinking on Afghanistan that I believe illuminates the new American approach to Afghanistan. To be clear, I have the benefit of others ideas here, but am speaking for myself, credit errors to me and insight to others.

Between the increases earlier this year and the planned 30,000 troop escalation, the Obama administration has dramatically increased the resources going to Afghanistan while making comparatively small adjustments in policy. The approach to rural Afghanistan seems to be shifting from anti-drug efforts to rebuilding the agricultural sector. At the same time, there's talk of working around President Karzai rather than continuing the past policy of flowing all funds through him. Finally while counterinsurgency thinking was not mentioned by name during the speech is being endorsed through population-centric efforts and increasing restraint when it comes to possible civilian casualties.

These changes sound more incremental than revolutionary and no harsh trade-offs were made explicitly. This doesn't mean that more is not going on behind the scenes, but it does seem consistent with the critique of recent Afghan policy that the main problem is that the war was dramatically under resourced. This is certainly accurate, relative to Iraq, when it comes to contract spending and a range of other metrics. On the other hand, critics will note that we are spending more per year than Afghanistan's total GDP, which bespeaks both Afghanistan's remoteness and the expense of military measures in treasure, let alone blood.

So what happens if this view is wrong? If a lack of resources wasn't the main problem or equally likely more resources could well have stabilized the country in the early calm period but are no longer enough. That's where the withdrawal date could come in. There are many caveats to it and strictly speaking we're just supposed to begin the transition to Afghan authority. Even so, I suspect the date will be compelling for our allies and if the situation does not improve may have substantial political support domestically from the President's own party. In essence setting the date puts Afghanistan in the category of a limited war. If the occupation proves unworkable we can dramatically reduce our role even if that means failing to meet key objectives. Looked at another way, there is a level of resources we aren't willing to deploy to "win," the draft is not on the table and the main nation the President is interested in nation building is our own.

It's important to remember that we will see a lag in any results from implementing this new resource level. Sending more people to the country and getting them in action takes time. That said, we can now begin to judge the results of the first troop hike and test the hypothesis that implementation and not strategy is the main problem we face that can be directly controlled from the U.S. end (unlike local corruption).

Next America Repost: Defense-Industry Haikus

In a silly experiment, with help from Matt Zlatnik, I present the following seven haikus inspired by defense-related newsletters. There’s a bit of a contest involved with these with a prize of a Lockheed Martin toiletries kit, see the Next America page for details.

Private security
Cost six billion through ‘09
More in subcontracts

Big 3Q spend bump
The supplement arrived late
Not conspiracy

Cost-plus contracting
Now buys many more services
McCain not pleased

Six hundred million 
Meant for small businesses 
Went to the big boys

Europe does research 
But Americans sell stuff
Thank you big budget!

Big helicopter 
Spend lots on fancy add-ons
Save the President!

Large trade surpluses
Show the U.S. still produces
When it comes to arms

Again, go here for the source newsletters.

This entry also available at CSIS’s Next America Blog.

Help Afghan governance, keep the Afghan police from burning detainees with hot oil

Just read a Foreign Affairs article [by Mark Moyar] on legitimacy in Afghanistan. The broad takeaway was that performance, not elections brings legitimacy. That's probably true to an extent. The strong point of elections is more removing inept leaders than in selecting skilled ones.

That said, this bit gave me pause:

Placing American combat advisers and troops alongside the Afghans will help address the governance problem as well. In provinces where U.S. troops go everywhere with the Afghan National Police, the American presence deters the police from setting up the roadside checkpoints they have customarily used to shake down passers-by. The Americans do not allow the Afghan policemen to beat civilians over the head with rocks or burn detainees with hot oil, which they have been known to do elsewhere.

It's one thing to act to leverage the power of the police and help them accomplish their missions. It's quite another to have our job be to keep them from going completely out of control.

153 billion dollars

That's the amount, in 2008 dollars, we've spent on contracts performed in Iraq, Afghanistan, and their theaters since 2001.  Check the map for the breakdown.  It shouldn't surprise anyone that Iraq has the majority of the spending, Iraq has had many more troops and most of the spending goes to supporting them.  It's important to keep in mind that while private security contractors tend to make the most news, they're direct contracts only account for $6 billion of the $153 billion.  That said, if you want to account for sub-contracting than you can probably double or triple that figure.

Check back over the next week if you're curious who is spending that money and want details on what they're buying.  For those that are impatient, the results are available in this overview newsletter.

Part of my job is to follow and study financial and industrial aspects of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan.  On this veterans day I do want to thank those that have served and also to do my part to help people understand this part of the wars.  So, if you've got any I'll do my best to help bridge the civil-military gaps in knowledge.

Afghanistan's Future: Colombia? Vietnam? Pakistan? Lebanon? Afghanistan's past?

As the administration works to formulate a new strategy for Afghanistan, popular and elite support appears to be dropping off and a string of attacks makes the stakes all too clear.

Dichotomies such as counter-insurgency versus counterterrorism, double down or fold, are useful ways to try to force prioritization rather than allow inertia to set strategy.  However, they preclude options that would vary the approach based on the region.  Another, still overly simple, way to look at Afghanistan is by comparing possible end states.

Colombia: The U.S. has had mixed success is strengthening the government of Colombia and cracking down on cocaine cultivation.  However, mirroring Colombia's achievements would still be a boon to Afghanistan while still being a more realistic end-state than the mountainous and decentralized democracy of Switzerland.  Getting to Colombia in the mid-term would likely require a counterinsurgency approach and a substantial increase in resources and improvements in governance.

Vietnam: Joshua Kurlantzick raises Vietnam as a positive model of an end state. Namely after the withdrawal and the fall of South Vietnam, while the country is still authoritarian, the U.S. enjoys a close relationship with that country and the long-feared domino effect never occurred.   Whether a successor of the current government or the Taliban is in charge, the question of terrorist havens must be addressed.  However, that issues is by no means limited to Afghanistan.

Pakistan: Through the use of Predator drones support by good intel, the U.S. has been quite successful at targeting Al Qaeda leadership without a large scale military presence on the ground.   Austin Long discusses how such an approach could be applied in Afghanistan (via Michael Cohen).  On the one hand, civilian casualties from drone strike do raise tensions, on the other, many of the civilian deaths from airstrikes were a result of missiles and bombs being used to provide support to U.S. combat troops.  The experience in Pakistan shows that these target strikes alone will not defeat the Taliban, but may achieve the narrower objective of crippling Al Qaeda.  Implementing this strategy in the short-term should be manageable, but the sustainability, either in Afghanistan or Pakistan, is an open question.

Lebanon: According to Scott Wilson, one train of thought emerging in the Administration is that we attempt to weaken but not destroy the Taliban.  The analogy would be Hezbollah, which controls a portion of Lebanon and participates in its government as a minority party.  There is a risk that allowing this would destabilize Pakistan, but on the other hand the relationship between Pakistan and the Taliban has often been far friendlier than the relationship between Hezbollah and Israel.  Such an approach could be population-centric in government strongholds while reserving the counter-terrorism for any Al Qaeda activity in the remainder of the country.

Afghanistan's Past: A way to pursue counter-insurgency with less troops would be to exclusively defend the cities.  As Matt Yglesias notes, this approach in some way mirrors the Soviet approach in the latter stages of their occupation, though of course would not seek to emulate many soviet methods.  The Soviet approach may be a subset of the Lebanon approach, the difference would be that a cities approach would pick key population centers nation-wide while a more Lebanon-like approach may abandon some larger population centers in Taliban sympathizing territory while protecting smaller but more sympathetic locales.

Successful pursuit of a strategy in a hostile environment typically requires providing a sufficient level of resources and sacrificing desirable objects that are not necessary for success.  More ambitious approaches require far more resources which will further tax the U.S. economy.  Less ambitious approaches, up to and including withdrawal, will not accomplish everything we would like to see happen in Afghanistan, but may prove the most efficient way to advance U.S. interests and values.  As the Status of Forces agreement in Iraq showed, these choices will be further limited by what the local politicians and population will support, but for such a negotiation to be practical we need to first determine what we are shooting for.

While determining the cost in casualties of any of these strategies is quite difficult, the cost in dollars is easier to estimate.  So, reader, do you think this is a good starting list?  Are there any other end-states to be considered?

This post is also available at ameasureofsecurity.org and Next America.

There are nearly 200,000 contractors in Iraq and Afghanistan but most aren't toting guns

There are presently more U.S. contractors than troops in Iraq and Afghanistan. James Glanz of the NY Times reported on this parity back in September citing data from March 2009 in a Congressional Research Service report by Moshe Schwartz.

I've seen the latest data and in June of 2009 the trend still held: there were 194,000 contractors in Iraq and Afghanistan and only 190,000 troops. This high ration had first occurred during the U.S. mission in Bosnia where concerns about the size and duration of the U.S. peacekeeping mission made sending large numbers of troops politically costly. Waging two wars at the same time further strained the personnel side of the U.S. military and contractors handling support functions proved easier than a massive increase in recruiting, let alone restoring the draft.

The key word in that last sentence is support. While armed private security contractors spawn many news stories but as of June 2009 only represent 11% of the contractors in Iraq and 7% of the contractors in Afghanistan. Thus the typical face of contracting in Iraq may well be an employee at a base Cinnabon and not a Blackwater security guard.

This post is also available at ameasureofsecurity.org.

Nationalism: state-building’s double edged sword

With Afghanistan in the news because of the elections and the latest policy debates back home, I’ve been pondering why nation-building is so hard even though failed states are the exception and not the rule.

Part of the problem is often arbitrary colonial borders, but I think there’s a deeper issue.  Generally speaking, we are trying to build modern nations.  Absent ethnic or sectarian cleansing, this requires a state that can cross racial and religious lines.  When not going for a pluralistic empire, nationalism is the way to cross such lines.

However, at the same time, nationalism is a very effective anti-occupation force.  Identifying with one countries naturally sets one in opposition to other countries to some extent and to any occupiers to a much greater extent.  This force, in combination with guerrilla warfare, historically is most known for helping to bring about the end of colonialism, but it does act as a natural enemy to even more humanitarian occupations.

On the whole, I think this will make occupations extremely difficult in all but a few cases.  There are other forms of military intervention, for example peace keeping missions, that seem to be more capable of avoiding this problem.  I think I may need to do some reading up on nationalism, if I’m right about its dual-edged nature, there may be patterns in its appearance in opposition to actions by superpowers even when direct occupation or colonialism isn’t an issue.

Recovering from a cold

Hence missed post yesterday and a short one today.

One thought I’ve had about nation building.  In many ways it is similar to a classic system engineering or other optimization problem.  Improvement in aggregate is possible, but it tends to require a good number of tough choices about on what issues to antagonize existing power brokers. 

I think this gets to why we have such a hard time of it.  As outsiders, it’s far from clear to us which compromises will undermine our long term goals and which are necessary to make any progress.  Post-conflict reconstruction research does address this problem by suggesting the use of local inclusive councils to make allocations decisions.  It gets trickier at the national level, particularly since local political leaders have ever incentive to free ride off occupiers.

Perhaps part of the solution at the national level are treaties like the Status of Forces Agreement in Iraq.  Such negotiations force both the occupier and the local government to figure out what they care about most and how much they’re willing to sacrifice.  Such agreements also can provide an exit, according to the SoFA we’re out of Iraq by the end of 2011, earlier if the referendum on the agreement actually happens and it fails to pass.

Doctrine and the Zombie Wars

Pallab Ghosh of the BBC reports that researchers in Canada have done a mathematical model of a widespread zombie outbreak and evaluated possible counter-strategies.  Dan Drezner has done excellent work in postulating what various systemic international relations theories would predict about the outcome of such an undead crisis [Update: link fixed].  Inspired by his analysis, below is my attempt at providing an in character explanation of how advocates of different U.S. military doctrines would suggest we face the zombie peril.  This analysis is in good part a response to the work of premier writer on this topic, Max Brooks, with particularly attention paid to the excellent fictional social history World War Z. 

Conventional warfare: Some elements of conventional warfare have been widely derided even before facing a threat that can neither shocked nor awed.  Similarly, against zombies decapitation strikes are no longer in any sense a game-changing euphemism but are instead a constant operation requirement.  However, while weapons and munitions must be modified, the solution to a zombie outbreak falls is still a matter of properly applying force on a massive scale.  Proper use of the Weinberger-Powell doctrine would ensure that the zombie menace is met with overwhelming force rather than the sort of half measures that could get U.S. soldiers killed or worse zombified, 

It is the job of the military to secure borders and when going abroad clear territory of zombies and then implementing an exit strategy rather than getting sucked into a quagmire of nation building.  As a side note, while the A-10 and AC-130s may be the most useful platform against the zombie, it is vital that we restore funding to the F-22 to deter hostile nations from exploiting the outbreak and U.S. distraction to expand their territory.

Counter-Insurgency: Critics of COIN doctrine argue that zombies lack hearts and minds, they only possess brains that must be splattered.  However, this facile argument overlooks the fact that counter-insurgency has always understood that zombies; the ultimate irreconcilables, cannot be won over.  What conventional warfare advocates fail to understand is that zombies, much like violent extremism, cannot simply be cleared via overwhelming force. 

Vectors for reemergence will always be prevalent, the undead are nothing if not patient, and long-term defeat of ghouls requires the cooperation of local populations abroad or heaven-forbid at home.  If a local has seen the military apply indiscriminate force they will be unwilling to report if their neighbors, let alone friends or family, have shown signs of infection.  We may have to occupy failed states that have become persistent sources of zombies, but we will largely act in a supportive role by training and equipping local anti-zombie forces.   Ultimately, resources must be put towards putting skull-crushing boots on the ground although there is a also a role for national guard troops and civilian agencies rebuilding communities ravaged by the zombie plague.

Net-Centric Warfare: World War Z was pointedly skeptical about the use of technology deeming the Landwarrior system as good for little more than watching the death of comrades from their point of view.  The book’s faith in simple rifles, lines of soldiers, and even melee weapons overly romanticizes earlier periods of warfare.  Cutting edge technology is expensive, but in the event of a mass-casualty zombie outbreak, the lives of survivors are all the more precious. 

Ingenuity and invention can substitute for manpower by using sensors to detect precursors of outbreaks in populated areas or to keep an unblinking eye on wilderness, abandoned settlements, and even the oceans.  Anti-zombie squads can use unmanned ground vehicles to scout out urban areas and perhaps even to target ghouls remotely.  Unlike humans, robots cannot be added to the ranks of the enemy.  This technology can also save lives, infrared scopes can be used to differentiate between the heat signatures of living creatures and the undead.  Best of all, the against zombies net-centric systems of systems do not have to worry about enemy eavesdropping, cyber-terrorism, or anti-satellite strikes. 

Intervention-Skeptic: The flaw of all the above perspectives is that they view the military as the solution to a zombie outbreak.  The ultimate solution to a zombie outbreak is a cure or at a bare minimum a vaccine.  As we work to develop such a solution, our first priority must be securing the United States, although many suspect that the actual risk to developed nations is overstated in the first place.

Yes, some violence may be necessary, but there is a reason most military anti-zombie sorties result in disaster.  Taking the fight to the zombie ultimately only depletes our resources while adding to their ranks.  Even the less violent counter insurgency approach is delusional.  Do we honestly expect citizens of other countries to accept a U.S. soldier killing their mother, even if said ghoulish mother was craving brains a few moments earlier?  We are not capable of effectively developing other nations under peacetime conditions, how can we expect to do so during a zombie outbreak?

 

I wouldn’t spoil the actual doctrine used in WWZ, but it makes more sense than the above while and still is quite horrifying.  If you enjoyed this, or if you thought you might have enjoyed this were I a better writer, I’d strongly recommend the book.

Ending the no harboring approach to fighting terrorism

One of the less controversial foreign policy shifts after 9/11 was the decision that we could no longer tolerate countries harboring terrorists in the manner that the Taliban had granted protection to Al Qaeda.  However, nigh eight years later, it appears that pursuing this idea via a substantial on the ground military presence is nigh unworkable. 

We may yet pull of Afghanistan and our difficulties there are in no small part the result of neglect in the early years.  Even so, doing an Afghan occupation or any occupation in general is quite taxing and not the basis of a sustainable policy.

Short of full invasions, drone strikes appear to be a more effective military tool than the cruise missile strikes of the Clinton years.  However, they do need to be balanced against the risks of delegitimizing allied governments.  With governments unwilling to work with us, I think the drones lose much of their utility as non-failed states probably have ways to shoot them down if they’re lingering.  A more sustainable tool may be cooperation a la plan Columbia, but that’s likely too reliant on leaders’ personalities and also encourages a dangerous codependence between patron and client.

Ultimately, I believe that military techniques have their role, but the military is not the right tool to take the lead in counterterrorist action.  Ultimately it matters that we haven’t been hit since 2001 and that Western European democracies have suffered attacks but hits lack the regularity of the Northern Ireland or Basque conflicts.  Over the long term, reforming or more likely distancing ourselves from Middle East autocracies and working on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict is the way to counter this threat.  Until then we have a wide range of options to apply to different countries as the situation demands it, but we have to understand that there’s no simple military solution that doesn’t risk exacerbating conflicts over the mid-term.

So where does this leave us on Afghanistan and Pakistan?  I’m not sure, but I think our choices need to be drawn primarily from a strategic assessment of local conditions and not the post-9/11 response of nominally making the entire world consistently unsafe for terrorism.

Dublin 1916 Revolution Walking Tour and Kilmainham Gaol 2009-07-14

Conditions were not right in Ireland in 1916 for throwing off British rule.  A good number of potential soldiers had been mobilized, but many went of to fight in World War I.  Similarly key organizers and a vital weapon shipment were both captured by the Brits.  This prompted the nominal leader of the would-be revolution to call off “maneuvers” for that day in a newspaper that also made mention of the recent setbacks.  This was probably the right call, generally speaking human nature errs against changing plans even when condition on the ground change so it’s hard to cut your losses.

Ultimately though the attempted at revolution happened anyways.  A disparate group of Irish leaders came together and captured the Dublin Post office and were able to hold it against an initial onslaught of cavalry.    Ultimately the British just sent a warship up the river Liffey and shelled the rebels from a distance.  The leaders were captured and taken to Kilmainham Gaol which has quite an imposing edifice and is commonly used in films, including the original Italian job.  As a practical tourist note, don’t try to take the Luas light rail line to the gaol unless you’re of a mood for a walk.  It looks close on some of the tourist maps, but that is a result of inconsistent scale.  Better to take the bus.

In any event, support for independence wasn’t that strong at the time of the revolution attempt, that changed when the leaders were executed.  Adding insult to leg injury radical labor leader James Connolly could not stand up and so was executed via firing squad while tied to a chair.  The executions were largely limited to key leaders as a result of public outcry, but by then the seeds of successful revolution were already sown.  However, one thing our guide mentioned was that, with the exception of good exhibits at Kilmainham Gaol and a few other places, the Irish civil war that followed the treaty with Great Britain doesn’t tend to be as widely discussed.  Score more people were executed in that conflict than were after the 1916 revolution, although in fairness the casualties were nothing like that of the potato famine which could be fairly blamed on the occupying power at the time.

I think I’ll read up on the civil war when I get the chance, I have a feeling it will be instructive regarding some modern conflicts.

Belfast Black Taxi - Political Tour July 10, 2009

To my surprise, we were actually in Belfast shortly before the Orangemen march.  That’s the time when a group of Unionists (Protestants who want to stay in the UK) do their traditional march celebrating the a victory of William of Orange in Ireland.  As a side note, Orange was his color because he was from Holland, he was the Norman that conquered the UK.  This march goes through a Catholic neighborhood and thus tends to direct clashes.  The controversy over the march, and the larger marching season, is a symptom of sectarian conflict and not a root cause, but it does make for good news stories. 

The tour, done in the back of a black taxi that Belfast is known for, got into the deeper issues.  Here’s wikipedia’s full summary of the Troubles.  A short version is that Catholics were a minority in Northern Ireland and often discriminated against.  The British army was actually sent in to protect them around 1970 but ended up throwing oil on the fire at Bloody Sunday in (London)Derry when protesters were shot.  Civilians were killed by partisans and security forces had happened prior to that point, but that was when the bombing campaign got going.  In Belfast the center of the conflict was in two polarized neighborhoods in the West part of the city that were immediately adjacent to one another.  The tour went through both of them, pictures on the Loyalist side first.

The square at the start is a march staging area.  It’s surrounded by murals, some historical, some focusing on paramilitary (including terrorist) leaders, and a few that are harder to characterize. 

Next stop was the “Peace wall” between the two communities.  There were multiple gates with no checkpoints, though they would be closed in the evening.  Similarly getting around the wall wouldn’t be hard at all.  Instead, it serves to force anyone seeking to cause trouble to go through a few chokepoints, throw things over the wall at the caged backyards on the far side, or travel outside of their strongholds before or after an attack.  While the Good Friday peace accord has been in place for around a decade now, our driver, Tom, didn’t think the wall would be going away anytime soon.  I think he’s probably right.  Walls do a good job of providing protection but they also calcify lines of division.  You can’t attack as easily but nor can you intermingle.

The ones that came later on the Catholic side were more recognizable as appeals for legitimacy or agitation regarding other conflicts.  The most interesting one for me was the mural of Bobby Sands, who was an IRA leader that the leadership managed to get himself elected as an MP while he was in prison.  He subsequently died on hunger strike as part of an attempt to get IRA prisoners treated as political prisoners/P.O.W.s.  Apparently he’s still a contested symbol between those in the IRA that compromised and breakaway hardliners, but I think the mural we saw was firmly in the mainline camp.  On the Catholic side there we’d also seen a remembrance garden listing the IRA and civilian dead from the Troubles.  Though there were certainly dead on the Unionist side, we didn’t see any of such shrines, so I’m not sure how they’d be different.

On the whole, the Black Taxi tour was well worth doing at 25 pounds for two people.  As an added bonus we got dropped off over at Queen’s university setting up our dinner and walk for the evening.

Assassination of Dr. Tiller and Counter-insurgency

Dr. George Tiller was one of a handful of doctors that were essentially abortion providers of last resort for those late in a pregnancy.  Thus, as Matt Yglesias notes, they make a fairly effective target for political violence.  Here’s my attempt to look at how we should respond if I were considering a more generic counter-insurgency operation.

1) Differentiate between groups with similar agendas and investigate those that cross the line into threats or violence.  I tend to think the thresholds for investigation were too low in practice post-9/11 as they had often been throughout U.S. history, so I strongly doubt any increased powers are needed.  However, coordination of these efforts at a federal level is probably a good idea.  In any event, deciding that political violence is appropriate and acting on that decision is hardly unprecedented but it makes one a legitimate target for state violence within the usual legal confines.  Live by the sword, die by the sword.

2) Co-opt groups willing to eschew violence.  This does necessitate talking to them but does not require giving them what they want.  I think we might do better if we actually debated abortion rights rather than ‘judicial activism’ as the former is what people care about.  At the same time, I think it is key to have those whose rights are most impacted to be directly involved in negotiation.  That’s why I’m trying to eschew making compromise proposals, it isn’t my rights on the line.

3) A civil protection strategy is necessary.  Ann Friedman over at The American Prospect gives a good breakdown of the history of violence and intimidation as well as Congressional efforts to stop it.  That link is via Ezra Klein who I think makes a mistake in this passage: “That campaign [to deny access] stretched over decades of protests, lawsuits, violence, and, finally, murder.”  Successfully implementing a co-option strategy requires clearly differentiating between acts that are legitimately within the political sphere and those outside of it.  This doesn’t mean the strictly political are appropriate, fair, or the like, just that they use legal tools and can be countered by other legal political tools such as the National Network of Abortion funds.

4) Keep things in perspective.  I haven’t been able to find the chart by Googling, but the Washington Post had a great chart that did show that incidences of clinic violence were going down on the whole.  However, as noted above, the 1% of abortions that happen in the third trimester and have a notable bottleneck when it comes to providers.  This vulnerability means that even a comparatively small violent campaign can be effective.  The U.S. can mitigate but not eliminate the threat of violence and as a result so long as the bottleneck is so small there will always be a worry.  Decreasing the intimidation short of violence levels will help, but I think a game changer might be needed.  I have some thoughts on that issue, but I think that gets back into areas where I have no extra knowledge.

Play the long game in Pakistan, stop the drone attacks

I do not believe that the Pakistani government is in imminent danger of falling to the Taliban.  While their forces recently came within 60 miles of the capital, Islamabad, taking a capital is a conventional military effort that is highly vulnerable to a conventional military response.  As Yglesias notes, it’s bizarre that the U.S. is more worried about the Taliban than the Pakistanis are.  From what I’ve been reading from all sources, the Taliban are not particularly popular and thus are also not a threat for an Iranian style revolution.

Nonetheless, the situation there is obviously deeply troubled.  How do we deal with it?  I think we have to play the long game.  Pakistan’s military is far too influential and the Inter-Service Intelligence (ISI) had a hand in the formation of the Taliban as part of regional power politics.  I definitely think shoring up the civilian government is the best hope, but there’s been far too many trade offs between the Bhutto and the Sharif family and power is too concentrated in the elites.

So how can we interfere to make things better?  I don’t know.  Aside from pressure to work out political conflicts I don’t think we’ve really got the skill or knowledge to pull it off well.  Thus, I think the best we can do is to work to avoid doing things that make the situation worse.  I tend to support the aid conditionality bills in Congress. 

Beyond aid, one of the biggest destabilizers is our persistent use of unmanned aerial vehicle strikes.  These were chosen as a less controversial means to strike at the Taliban than using U.S. special forces.   I think the choice to avoid special forces is wise, but that we shouldn’t be making these strikes if we can’t avoid double digit casualty counts.  If we get a clear shot at Osama, fine, but that sort of example is a special case and not the basis of a campaign.  Long story short, I agree with the NY Times op-ed call for a moratorium.  Spencer Ackerman summarizes:

I'll be doing the Ricks book salon imminently, but before I do, take a look at this New York Timesop-ed call for a moratorium on the Pakistan drone strikes by COINdinista luminaries Andrew Exum and Dave Kilcullen. (This, if I'm not mistaken, is the furthest Kilcullen has gone: in his recentAccidental Guerrilla talk at CNAS and April congressional testimony, he called for reducing American reliance on the drones or to think long and hard before their uses, not an outright halt. I could be overlooking something, of course.)

The basic argument is familiar to all students of counterinsurgency: the strikes give the veneer of efficacy while sowing the seeds for long term instability; and a real strategy prioritizes the provision of security and services to the population rather than focusing on the elimination of an enemy who you're probably not so good at distinguishing anyway.

We aren’t going to win the long game by fairly regularly taking actions opposed by the Pakistani people. 

Photograph of a MQ-1B taken by Senior Airman Larry E, Reid Jr. from a U.S. government site.

Funny Numbers

Speaking for myself here.

William Wheeler goes to far in a Politico piece where he points out that the Department of Defense official numbers don't get to the entire budget (Hat tip, Ackerman).  That's true.

Here's his accounting:

• $534B - Topline
• $6B - Mandatory expenses for DoD
• $130B - War Supplemental

Those are all uncontroversial.  If someone doesn't at least reference the supplemental then they don't know the defense budget.  I haven't tracked the mandatory expenses in OMB before, I'll check that out.  [Here's what I find arguable:]

• $22B - DoE money for nuclear matters, selective service, and national defense stockpile.  Odd grouping there and I don't know the numbers off the top of my head, but it seems plausible.
• $106B - Department of Veterans Affairs.  Fair enough.  If we get universal health care than I might favor breaking up this number some, but until then the whole thing seems reasonable.
• $28B - Treasury Account to pay for military retirements.  Wasn't particularly aware of this.  Seems like a reasonable classification.

Here's the accounting I'm more dubious of:

• $43B - Homeland Security.
• $57B - Department of Defense's share of interest on the national debt.

We don't account for anything else by including its share of the debt.  Why should we do that with Defense spending?  Homeland security is arguable.  I could see counting the Coast Guard[, although it is more policing,] but I can't really see counting the Federal Emergency Management Agency.

Here's where I've got a major problem:

What about the military and economic aid to Iraq and Afghanistan, gifts and loans to Israel and others, U.N. peacekeeping costs, and all the rest from the State Department? Add $49 billion.What about the military and economic aid to Iraq and Afghanistan, gifts and loans to Israel and others, U.N. peacekeeping costs, and all the rest from the State Department? Add $49 billion.

The foreign military aid come to about $15B and some of that aid is already on the military books.  Economic aid to Iraq and Afghanistan via the State Department are civilian programs.  That I could see argument on, but what's crazy is he lumps in the entire State Department budget.  So all Foreign Policy is Defense Policy now?  Bull.  Look, the numbers above are already huge?  Why fudge them to sneak in an extra 5% or so?  The problem with this sort of tactic is that it throws his other numbers into doubt despite the fact that the base uncontroversial $670B number is already insanely high and is basis enough to argue for substantial cutbacks.  The only explaination I can see was that he really wanted to be able to justify rounding up to one trillion dollars.

That said, I agree with him on the F-22 and he makes a fair point critiquing the F-35.  It really isn't ready for a dramatic expansion.

What are the risks of counterinsurgency?

Some of the pushback against Gates' Defense proposal is that he's shifting too far from conventional warfare to counter-insurgency.  This is sometimes described as fighting the last war despite the fact that the wars are still ongoing and the programs being cut were made for the Cold War and thus even further out of date.  Regardless of what we need for counter-insurgency, we're overly invested in conventional warfare capability.  There is a risk in trying to make a force that can do both, better to split capabilities and allow specialization.

However, Michael Cohen does get to some of the real problems with counter-insurgency:

It is simply incorrect to say that only the Army can perform post-conflict reconstruction and I'm utterly unconvinced that its proper for the US military to be expanding its skill set to include aid and development functions. Isn't this why we have a civilian agency dedicated to aid and development?

Now as some of my friends at the Pentagon often remind me AID and State, as currently formulated, are not as well positioned as they should be to play these roles. But the solution is not to outsource this stuff to the military, it's to build up capacity at civilian agencies so they are better able to play their assigned roles! One of the reasons the military has taken on responsibilities that used to be restricted to civilian agencies is that they were given the responsibility at the outset of the Iraq War - and under the Bush Administration the capacity of our civilian agencies was allowed to diminish.

In the end, this is perhaps the greatest problem I have with counter-insurgency doctrine, and the most intractable divide between myself and COIN-danistas: embedding COIN in military doctrine is not a benign exercise. It risks shifting power dramatically and perhaps irreversibly toward the military and away from civilian agencies - and it provides a rationale for ever-expanding military budgets. Considering that the greatest security challenges facing the US in the future will come from non-state actors and transnational threats - and thus best confronted by the non-military elements of our national security toolbox -- the result could be a US national security and foreign policy apparatus that is ill-prepared and badly positioned to confront them.

So, ultimately, is the Gates budget spending too much on counter-insurgency?  The Sec. Def. estimated that 50% of the budget is conventional, 40% dual use, and 10% straight counter-insurgency.  That means between $50B and $70B that's completely counter-insurgency focused.  Given that we do have two wars going, that doesn't seem crazy.  However, it's also comparable to what we're spending overall on civilian foreign policy agencies.  That could give a rough rule of thumb, military counter-insurgency spending should not exceed civilian spending.

How do we get to wear a large scale civilian shift is possible?  I don't know.  However, until we find that political approach, I'm going to try to be careful not favor any interventions that, even if legitimate, the U.S. lacks the capability to successfully implement.

End of the “War on Terror” brand

The administration has been moving away from the phrase of “war on terror,” first with a lower level memo and now via a statement by Secretary of State Clinton.  Ackerman notes that this reflects thinking that focuses on al-Qaeda, “Not Hezbollah, not Hamas, not the Sadrist current and so forth; but al-Qaeda.”

So, that deals with the “terror” part of the phrase.  The question is are they moving away from the “war.”  As Yglesias raises, the question is whether we want to maintain a safe harbor denial policy.  The logic of this approach follows fairly logically from 9/11, deny groups like al-Qaeda any safe places to organize such as Afghanistan or northwest Pakistan.  Here’s Yglesias:

You need to be wary of a strategic concept which implies that the security of American citizens requires the United States to achieve effective physical control over 100 percent of the world’s land area. We should be especially wary of it given that effective physical control of U.S. territory didn’t actually stop the 9/11 attackers from traveling throughout the country, learning to fly, hijacking airplanes, etc. Absent al-Qaeda acquisition of a nuclear weapon (and they’re not going to find one in Kandahar), the main way al-Qaeda can threaten the United States is by baiting us into implementing costly and unworkable policy responses and some of the “safe haven” rhetoric seems to be pointing us in that direction.

This overstates things a bit, in most cases we’re talking diplomatic arrangements with states and not direct control of their territory.  However, given the number of failed states and uncontrolled regions out there, even this standard is difficult to meet.  One intermediary step is predator drone strikes, which seem to be systematically more effective than cruise missiles for this sort of thing.  Having them lingering probably means some level of acquiesce by the state in question.  Obviously such strikes will not be particularly popular.  Alternately there’s intelligence cooperation, but that can mean empowering groups like the Pakistan’s ISI which is thought to have connections with the Taliban.

Figuring out how to handle Afghanistan is one question, but the larger issue is what balance of military, intelligence, and judicial tools works best.  This is a hard problem, and both military and intelligence tools can often make it harder by recruiting more adversaries.  I think addressing the grievances is the ultimate answer, but that does still leave us with the problem of those already radicalized.

[Beginning] of the End in Iraq

I wasn't at all sure this would happen when I was reading the paper this morning, but Obama's speech was better than I hoped.

The key acknowledgement wasn't the 18th month draw down.  With 50k troops as a resisidual force, that's more than the U.S. will have in Afghanistan, even after 17k more arrive as ordered.  However, he also acknowledged the reality of our agreement with the Iraqis, everybody out by the end of 2011.  As Ackerman notes, originally Obama was talking about keeping that force there indefinitely  (That's why I supported Edwards specifically for the Iowa primary.  Let's just say I'm very glad we dodged that bullet.)

Marc Lynch describes the good parts of the speech in detail.  One point he picks up on that particularly gladened me, we are committing to help resettle Iraqi refugees including those that can't go home because they helped us.  This is the necessary moral adjunct to respecting Iraqi self-determination, we still owe a debt to those individual Iraqis that threw in their lot with us.  Also, admirably, Obama did take the time to directly address the people of Iraq.

Ackerman has the full text as well as some additional useful insight.

There was, of course, still some hedging in the speech.  That's to be expected.  Even so, why am I so assured?  I think Fred Kaplan sums it up best:

For some time now, the United States has had less and less say over the nature and direction of post-Saddam Iraq. We declared it to be a sovereign nation, at which point its leaders started acting as if it were true...

If all hell breaks loose, is it possible to revise the SOFA to let U.S. troops remain? Strictly speaking, no. Article 30 states that either party can notify the other that it's terminating the agreement—but it also notes that the termination wouldn't take effect until one year after the notice (by which time the full withdrawal might be mandatory). The Iraqi parliament could theoretically draft a new SOFA, but the one in place now took many months to compose, and if the country is falling apart—the premise of this scenario—it's unlikely that the factions would agree on a revision or on wanting U.S. troops to stay in any case.

Blog roll addition: Marc Lynch

There's a great discussion up on the Foreign Policy blog of Tom Ricks' new book: the Gamble.  Everyone seems agreed that it's a good book and I tend to find Ricks reporting quite useful.  That said, I quite disagree with his conclusions.  Happily, Marc Lynch is way ahead of me and challenges Ricks directly on two vital points.

First is the near-complete absence of the Status of Forces Agreement, which Iraqis call the Withdrawal Agreement. The SOFA sets an end-date for the withdrawal of U.S. troops, at December 31, 2011... Ricks may feel that the United States will ignore these requirements, or that the Iraqis don't really mean it, or that they are a bad idea. But he makes no argument one way or the other, instead acting as if it simply doesn't exist. To the extent that this reflects the mindset among his key informants, that's a problem...

Second is the near-complete absence of Iraqis. In 325 pages of text, I could find only ten pages which quoted an Iraqi of any description, and only two unmediated by an American military official.

Here's Ricks's response where he forthrightly addresses the points:

1. On the Status of Forces Agreement, I just don't think it is that meaningful.

As I watched it come together in Baghdad, it appeared to me to simply be a way of taking the American military presence off the table as a divisive issue in Iraqi politics. That is, it was much more about 2009 than about 2011. So I make less of it than others do. I might be wrong...

2. On the absence of Iraqi voices, Lynch's criticism again is correct.

I was aware of this lack, painfully so, but decided against trying to paper it over with some desultory interviews. I don't speak Arabic and I am not an expert on Iraq, so I think I would have done of mediocre job of trying to figure out the Iraqi side of the story. What I know a lot about is the U.S. military. I even speak some of its dialects... The absence of Iraqis in my book is especially significant because Iraqi solutions will be the key to the end of this story. That is, Iraqis will make the decisions that determine how this all ends.

I take this to mean that Ricks thinks the SOFA was a successful con-job by American and perhaps also by Iraqi politicians.  Perhaps it is, but Ricks never explains how he thinks we can pull this stunt in perpetuity. 

There's an old adage on strategy cited here by Gen. Franks: "In any war plan the enemy gets a vote."  Modifying it slightly, in any occupation, the populace gets a vote.  If that vote doesn't come in the form of democracy it can still come in the form of support for insurgency or counter-insurgency.  I don't see how it is possible to form any conclusion about what we should do in Iraq without taking into account the views of the Iraqi people.  I mean this in a realist sense, not a liberal sense.  We may be able to stay in Iraq in perpetuity but if we do so without popular support the Iraqi people can extract a heavy price. 

To be clear, I am not saying that I'm a regional expert or an expert on the conflict.  Ricks certainly knows it orders of magnitude better than I.  He is an excellent writer and as his responses show above a self-aware and an honest one.  I think his reaching a conclusion about staying without grappling with Iraqi popular opinion is probably attributable to status quo bias.  In someways leaving Iraqi can be literally unthinkable in much the same way that I'm sure leaving Vietnam was unthinkable.  Giving up control can be a very difficult step to take until one is pushed.

Since I am not a regional expert, let me recommend someone who is: check out Marc Lynch on the foreign policy blog.

Iron Man vs. the Imperialists

I’ll be attending a talk tonight at 6:30 by Spencer Ackerman on just that subject:

Not doing anything Thursday at 6:30? In Washington? Rather improbably, I'll be giving a PowerPoint-enabled talk at the Transformer art gallery on P Street, expanding on my "Iron Man vs. The Imperialists" essay from last year. Consider it an opportunity to heckle me to my face.

I might try to evangelize him on Amanda Waller. 

The coming withdrawal from Iraq

Spencer Ackerman notes an AP article and finds independent confirmation the information:

The United States plans to withdraw most of its troops from Iraq by August 2010, 19 months after President Barack Obama's inauguration, according to administration officials. The withdrawal plan would fulfill one of Obama's central campaign pledges, albeit a little more slowly than he promised. He said he would withdraw troops within 16 months, roughly one brigade a month from the time of his inauguration. ...

The 19-month strategy is a compromise between commanders and advisers who are worried that security gains could backslide in Iraq and those who think the bulk of U.S. combat work is long since done.

This would leave 30 to 50 thousand troops in Iraq, although the Status of Forces Agreement (SOFA) mandates that most of them get out by the end of 2011.  There's room for negotiation there, but Obama has said he'll abide by the agreement and I think domestic Iraqi politics place a severe upper limited on long term U.S. presence. 

Ackerman isn't particularly worried about the three month delay and thinks it's fairly good politics by making a fixed withdrawal look like a compromise.  That's probably true from at least a domestic U.S. perspective.  From the Iraqi perspective, we probably want to front load that a bit.  I've read the suggestion that making a large withdrawal gesture prior to the referendum on the SOFA would ease the passage of the agreement which would mean we wouldn't need to withdrawal even more rapidly. 

Beyond the lack of details on scheduling, there's one major error in the AP piece.  Specifically the implication that some Obama advisors "think the bulk of U.S. combat work is long since done."  That's the sort of naive formulation that Tom Ricks tends to push back against, and rightfully so.  There's still a lot of fighting left.  But I part company with Ricks and this Joshua Keating post on Ricks' blog.  The argument for withdrawal isn't that the fighting is done, but that the U.S. role in the fighting is largely done.  Why?  Because as the SOFA debate show the Iraqis are ready for us to start leaving.

Photograph by Jamesdale10 used under a creative commons license.

A closing thought on the whole Ayers thing

Back during the campaign, Republicans often attacked Obama over his relatively minor associations with former Weatherman William Ayers.  Ayers had the sense to stay quiet during the campaign.  He did put out an op-ed in December where he explained himself but didn't really grapple with the decision to use violence.  Howard Machtinger, another former Weatherman, has a post that I found far more useful and reflective (Via Matt Yglesias). 

In the initial history, Machtinger argues that the organization did not commit terrorism, but that one cell of it had the intent to do so by blowing up a non-commissioned officers dance at Fort Dix.  Instead, they blew themselves up killing three of their members in a townhouse.  The organization classified that as a "military error" and targeted property and not people in subsequent attacks.  After most members turned themselves in for amnesty in1978-9 a splinter group helped commit an armed robbery that killed two police officers.  That roughly gels with what I've read and seen elsewhere.

His analysis of what drove the Weather Underground seems plausible to me:

There were also those who argued for the legitimacy of armed resistance—defending its use in national liberation struggles, for instance—without trying to implement it as an appropriate strategy for that historical moment in the United States...

What lay behind the WU trajectory, however, was not merely frustration with the shortcomings of the “aboveground” movement, or long-term strategic thinking. It was an attempt to prove revolutionary mettle in the imagined spirit of the Vietnamese resistance or the Black Panthers...

Other longtime activists argued that our actions would isolate the movement, obscure its message, and sabotage priorities: We dismissed all of these criticisms as examples of white privilege, if not cowardice. Counter-arguments served mainly to convince us of our own revolutionary righteousness. Not even Chicago Black Panther leader Fred Hampton’s labeling us “Custeristic”—for the 1969 Days of Rage demonstration, which he accurately saw as self-destructive—slowed us down.

Machtinger laments that they rejected the "organizing tradition" of leftist politics used by "the Civil Rights, Black Freedom, Women’s Liberation and antiwar movements."  

This organizing tradition, which the WU abandoned, has a developmental, long-haul perspective and an emphasis on building relationships that endure. It respects collective leadership and holds that the best movement leaders should have ongoing, accountable relations with their bases—the grassroots...

The WU favored more dramatic action that ended up disconnecting the purported leadership from any mass base, leaving it unaccountable (except self-glorifyingly to a nebulous “people of the world”) in its self-defined trajectory. The WU rationalized its practice by attacking any possible base as too privileged, too corrupted by consumerism and imperialism.

Similar temptations toward what has been variously called “infantile” leftism, “phallic” politics, or “petit-bourgeois” adventurism have not disappeared – they reappear in new guises, but parade with the same heedlessness and self-importance. The “fierce urgency of now” is always with us, but the struggle to maintain one’s humanity in building a movement for social justice in an oppressive world has a more profound urgency.

I'm no revolutionary, but I think this particular case study does have lessons for foreign policy interventions.  The world is far more anarachic than even 1960s America and those situations where intervention takes place typically have rather limited avenues for non-violent opposition.  Nonetheless, there is a definite risk of disconnecting with the base of people you intend to help as well as the domestic base whose resources and even blood are being used towards this purpose.  This of course isn't a new insight, but I think the pathologies that develop in examples we can systematically reject can be helpful in identifying mistakes when the use of violence seems more appealing. 

The situation in Afghanistan is bad, but not as bad as I thought

I attended an event today with David Langer head of polling of ABC.  Langer was very impressive, the poll hit all corners of Afghanistan and its methodology seems sound to me.   David Lettis over at Next America summarizes the presentation and throws up links to the podcast and video.  If you want to know more about what the Afghan’s think, skim the full presentation.

Ackerman had read other coverage and brakes down the details on Afghan support for the occupation:

What’s surprising about the poll is that the Afghans don’t appear to take the jump from “everything sucks and I don’t trust the United States to keep me safe” to “the United States is an illegitimate occupying force that I will not support.” Nearly 60 percent say the Taliban is the biggest threat to Afghanistan, but only eight percent say U.S. forces are. Support for attacks on U.S. troops are transactional, dependent on where there haven’t been airstrikes that kill civilians: it’s 44 percent in areas where the United States has recently launched airstrikes, and 18 percent where it hasn’t.

In general there is not support for more NATO troop presence.  However, those areas with substantial numbers of international forces tend to be most positive.  The airstrikes tend to happen where we’re weak.  Dr. Cordesman argued that it’s important to differentiate between air strikes done with substantial advance planning, those done with bad intel, and close air support of coalition troops in tough fights.  I was a bit surprised that he seemed to be arguing  that the planned in advance bombings did not anger the populace in the way that the tactically necessary close air support did.  Most all of the really controversial civilian casualties I’ve heard about were from bombings, admittedly he did allow for bad intel bombings but I don’t recall hearing about massacres resulting from close air support.

There’s local support for negotiation, but with preconditions that the Taliban should stop fighting.  One key divergence from Iraq, by and large people seem to have no confidence in local militias.  Only 18% of people think they can provide security and 17% think they’ve got strong local support.  The numbers for the Taliban are about half that with Coalition forces being around 40% and legitimate government institutions all being 60%+.  I tend to favor a more provincial approach, so I’m going to have to look at the data there closely to see what the Afghans are saying about that.  Langer did mention that the ratings of provincial governments tend to vary on the basis of development factors while the national government was judged on both security and development.

So what’s the better than expected news?

• There’s no real variance across ethnic groups and 77%Afghans first and their own ethnicity second. Afghanistan may not have a traditional of strong national governments, but that doesn’t mean they have ethnic separatists.
• While we’ve been dropping about 8-10% points in terms of support each year, we do still have the majority.  So long as that’s true I favor sticking it out.
• While the security situation has gotten worse and have dragged down living conditions, local conditions have improved in terms of basic necessities and infrastructure.  The economy is still doing terribly but is actually a trifle better than in 2007.  This suggests to me that we’ve gotten better with development aid and that if we can improve the security situation we may be in a position to consolidate improvements.

From this report, I’d say we’re losing in Afghanistan but that we have not lost.  The situation is going to be hard to handle, I’m not sure that we can.  I haven’t heard anything strategically that greatly reassures me that we’re improving on any front other than the amount of resources.  That said, resources do matter.  Langer repeatedly emphasized that those areas where we had a strong presence, we were popular which Cordesman reasonably argued showed the benefits of Clear, Holding, and Building rather than just clearing.

The attempt to end military tribunals hits a roadblock

In defiance of President Obama’s executive order, Abd el Rahim al Nashiri is still being tried under a military tribunal.  Key quote from Carol Rosenberg’s article:

In his ruling, the judge, Army Col. James Pohl, said a delay in Nashiri's arraignment would deny the public's interest in a speedy trial. He also said nothing that took place at the arraignment would prevent the Obama administration from deciding to deal with Nashiri in a forum other than the military commission now set to hear his case.

I suspect the judge’s decision is wrong on the law.  That said, I’m sure the President can find a way to legally contest this decision so I’m not especially bothered by the judge’s action.  More obnoxious are comments by the former commander of the Cole.  Matt Yglesias retorts retired Cmdr. Kurt Lippold’s idea that we should ignore human rights and legal advocacy groups:

I am one who believes that international relations should be largely understood through the lens of interests. But there’s still such a thing as right and wrong. And we should, in fact, make adequate respect for the law and for human rights an important priority when making our policy decisions. Over the long run, Americans will much prefer to live in a world governed by law and human rights than one of chaos and brutality. And other countries will be better-disposed to our national power and leading global role insofar as they see us upholding humane values and basic decency.

It’s also worth noting that the USS Cole was a military ship, and thus a legitimate target.  It was a suicide bombing, via boat, but the problem with such bombings isn’t the suicide.  The problem with most suicide bombings is that they hit civilian targets.  Yes, Kamikaze tactics are disturbing.  But to throw out a cultural example I don’t recall too many people complaining about the end of Independence Day for that reason.

That said killing 17 sailors is still an act of war and can be fairly treated as such.  Replying with military means is certainly legit.  Alternately, since it was done by a non-state actor, you could treat it as a criminal act.  Either way it’s just bizarre that the one guy still facing military tribunals designed (badly) for terrorists isn’t even accused of targeting civilians.

Martin Luther King Day, 2009

Tomorrow, we’ll celebrate moving the Dream a bit closer to reality.  Today though, I’m looking to Gaza.  There’s finally a cease fire.  Hamas still stands, as expected.  Their capacity to launch rockets in the short term is doubtless diminished and some of their leaders are dead.  The butcher’s bill:

Overall, 1,314 Palestinians were killed during the war, including 412 children and 110 women, the United Nations reported Monday, attributing the information to the Ministry of Health in Gaza.

Thirteen Israelis died after the war began Dec. 27, including three civilians struck by Hamas rocket fire.

Not sure how many dead Israeli soldiers but it sounds like better leadership, plus better known territory and an opponent that lacked Hezbollah’s armament kept the count a good deal lower than the recent Lebanon war.

So what strategic ends were achieved?  Hamas is hurt but is attracting much more popular support than it did prior to the war.  Collective punishment, that is to say causing civilian suffering so they pressure militants, is again being tried to keep the piece.  In solid terms, the main impact is that the current government of Israel, as of the last articles I read about a week ago, has regain much of the popularity it lost through the foolhardy Lebanon war.  So maybe Netanyahu, the leader of Israeli’s hardline party, may not win in the coming elections or he may win by a smaller margin.

None of the goals that were predictably achievable or actually achieved justify more than a thousand dead,  As for me, I want no more to do with Israel’s current leadership than with any Democrats still standing by the Iraq war.  If the only way to win an election is to kill 400+ enemy children, then it’s time to lose the election.  King’s opposition to the war in Vietnam, one waged by his political allies in the Democratic party, is sometimes downplayed but is key to his legacy.  To call for non-violence only when it comes to the actions of the stateless, to the action of others, shows no particular moral insight.

Hundreds dead and for what?

With Israel’s attack now in its third day, I thought I had to address it.  Ezra Klein does an excellent job of summarizing the narratives about who started it. Hamas did end the temporary ceasefire and launched ineffective rocket attacks.  At the same time, due to Israeli blockade, the situation in the Gaza strip were worse in June than at any time since the 1967 occupation and have subsequently degraded (hat tip Yglesias).  Blockades are also acts of war under international law.

Hamas isn’t nearly as well armed as Hezbollah, but I’m going to predict that a ground occupation will prove to be an expensive and ultimately low return strategy.  At best it will involve losing solders, meeting a few superficial objectives, and then withdrawing to the status quo.  At worst it will involve a reoccupation of Gaza and in turn a dramatic aggravation of Israel’s demographics problem.  There are about 1.5 million Palestinians in Gaza versus the 2.4 million in the West Bank.  The total population of Israel is 7.1 million but only about 5.4 million of that population are ethnically Jewish. 

So, if you’re worried about maintaining a Jewish state without Gaza you’ve got 5.4 million Jews and about 4.1 million of everyone else.  With Gaza you’ve still got 5.4 million Jews, but almost 5.5 million of everyone else.  Now Palestinians don’t get a vote in Israel’s elections and neither ‘Jews’ nor ‘everyone else’ are a unified block.  But as is practically always the case, the economically developed Israeli population is growing slower than that of the destitute Palestinians.  Without Gaza Israel has a trend problem, with Gaza the problem is has already arrived.

More after the cut.

Should we assassinate Robert Mugabe?

Richard Cohen argued we should a couple weeks ago, perhaps by use of a Predator drone.  He’s a bit more oblique, hoping to merely inspire his flight by circling his house, but the basic idea is the same.  I may have been fairly sympathetic to this position back in college where I was actively interested in the connections between technology and interventions.

A comment from Stephanie Zacharek’s review of Valkyrie shows my worries now.  Valkyrie is a film about a plot to assassinate Hitler (I have no compunctions on that front):

The operatives knew that it wouldn't be enough just to assassinate Hitler, or Hitler and SS leader Heinrich Himmler. They would need to take control of the government as well, and their chief tool for doing so would be Operation Valkyrie, a contingency plan that, as the movie explains it, had been conceived by the German military as a way to contain civil unrest in the event of Hitler's death, or if his power were somehow compromised.

It’s been a while, so I’m having some trouble with finding the primary sources, but back in March Mugabe lost an election, he made some relatively conciliatory statements but met with his senior advisors and shortly there after took a harder line.  As I understand it, those senior advisors control the military are Mugabe’s power base along with the gangs of armed youth that are the his Zanu-PF party’s militia.

Mugabe’s death has a good chance of leading to a civil war, many of his people are in it for self-interest and violence is their way of life.  This isn’t to say that they couldn’t be cowed or defeated by an organized opposition with support from neighbors, but that if not handled properly, removing them from the scene will be even bloodier than their current abuses.  The legacy of easy former Soviet State revolutions can prove a mirage for outsiders.  In those cases fragile regime collapsed once it became clear through public displays that the state could not or would not effectively crack down.  Showing that an outside power can kill the President does not reveal the same information about the state of the country.  Remember, there is no charismatic leader in Burma, but the regime persists nonetheless.

That said, revolutionary leaders are a special case, one happily departing this mortal coil.  Thus, while I don’t think that Mugabe’s could hold power for long, his successors could certainly make their departure bloody.  Is that blood worth it?  Not our choice to make, I leave that to the people of Zimbabwe.  At present the opposition has committed to non-violence and I respect that.

Photo of police brutality during a 2007 protest from Sokwanele – Zimbabwe used under a Creative Commons license

The Trouble With Matt Yglesias on Kosovo

I tend to agree with Yglesias often enough that I worry whether I’m actually adding an value.  Heck, I’ve got a copy of his book Heads in the Sand and gave it a rather positive review.  That said, the one area I tend to disagree with him his humanitarian intervention, specifically on Kosovo.  Quoting myself from the review:

[T]he book elides some potential faults within the liberal internationalist camp. The disagreements go back to Kosovo which in other venues Yglesias has treated it as legitimate but considers it a bad model for the future. Kevin Drum, operating from within the liberal internationalist tradition, demurs and offers support for Kosovo that I personally find compelling.

When I asked him about Kosovo in a session on his book at the New America Foundation, he basically said that there’s no real point arguing about a special case when we’ve got bigger issues to focus on.  Fair enough, but in a post on The Trouble With Genocide Prevention Yglesias never mentions Kosovo but sets up a dichotomy that calls it unilateral:

But then whenever anyone suggests that the U.S. commit itself to following international law and not using non-defensive military force absent a UN Security Council authorization, people show up insisting that we need to maintain the right to unilateral non-defensive war in order to stop genocide. Then whenever humanitarian emergencies break out, we do nothing to stop them.

Not surprisingly Jon Chait over at TNR vehemently disagrees with Yglesias arguing the Kosovo case and that no U.S. government has ever committed itself to giving the UN a veto.  I think the later point is weak, the US has historically reserved the right to do a lot of stupid thing.  Happily, there is a middle ground commonly discussed in international relations circles: requiring the support of the UN or a regional organization.  Rather than treating Kosovo as a special case, this is a rather straightforward standard that gets both Kosovo and Iraq right.  No major regional org supported the war in Iraq, NATO didn’t even come close.

More after the cut.

The difference between national interest and national security

So, does the U.S. still care if Osama bin Laden is alive or dead?  Robert Baer argues no in Time and Hanna Ludqvist over at Democracy arsenal disagrees with him and argues yes.

The most interesting part of Baer's piece comes at the end, however, when he asks:

But what if bin Laden really is dead, buried under a hundred tons of rock at Tora Bora or so weakened that he might as well be dead? Indefinitely crashing around Afghanistan and Pakistan's wild, mountainous tribal region on a ghost hunt cannot serve our interests. The longer we leave troops in Afghanistan the worse the civil war there will become. One day Obama will need to give up the hunt — declare bin Laden either dead or irrelevant. He has more important enemies to deal with, from Iran to Russia.

Baer seems to be saying here that terrorism, specifically from al Qaeda and the Af-Pak region, is no longer the greatest threat to the United States. Wow, that's bold. Also wrong, according to CIA director Hayden, who also said last week that "If there is a major strike on [the United States], it will bear the fingerprints of al Qaeda" and that al Qaeda "remains a determined, adaptive enemy unlike any our nation has ever faced... The war is far from over." While the United States has not been attacked since 9/11, Europe has and numerous al Qaeda plots have been uncovered. Those al Qaeda actions came from safe havens in Afghanistan and Pakistan.

Part of this is a discussion of the importance of Bin Laden.  I don’t buy that he’s irrelevant, though he may well be dead and we should continue to raise that issue regularly.  Either he’ll release another video at some point or we can work on making him much more irrelevant by encouraging speculation as to his survival.

That said, regardless of the best tactics in handling that particular villain, it is rather odd to think of a group like Al Qaeda, ruthless though they may be, as the greatest threat to the U.S.  In determining a threat, you’ve got to balance odds of a problem with magnitude.  Russia’s nuclear arsenal means it’s still the greatest magnitude threat, but even with Putin’s nostalgic turn full fledged conflict is fairly unlikely.  Same with China.  The magnitude of a potential Al Qaeda attack is definitely much smaller, but unlike any nation at the moment they’re actually likely to throw all they can at us.

That said, even after 9/11 it seems fairly odd to think that a bunch of guys primarily living in the mountains of Afghanistan are really the main thing the U.S. needs to be worried about.  Between fixing the economy and defeating Al Qaeda, I think it’s safe to say that the economy is the higher priority.  The trouble is that national security often acts as a trump card in debates.  We don’t have an industrial policy, because that would be an affront to capitalism, except when it comes to defense. 

Often people try to challenge this view by describing environmentalism or economic prosperity as a security issue.  However, that still leads to a warped definition of our national interests.  We’re a superpower that spends as much on our military as the rest of the world does and the number block is the EU, not China or Russia.  A monomaniacal focus on security is more likely to cause problems like Iraq than to make our lives even marginally safer.  I think liberals and progressives ultimately have to be willing to talk about America’s national interests and that security issues will generally make the top 10 but not necessarily the top three.

A Revolution in Criminal Affairs

There’s a great quote in the new CDI book, America’s Defense Meltdown, from the second chapter by Col. Chet Richards.

Much of what is hypthesized as “Fourth Generation Warfare”  -- state versus nonstate groups or “transnational insurgencies" – fall into [the law enforcement] category and so does not represent a new form of warfare so much as an evolution of crime.  Our opponents in these conflicts are not organized military forces or even insurgent units fighting to overthrow a government, but have more the form of transnational criminal cartels, albeit sometimes with an ideological or religious veneer. [Emphasis mine]

On that topic, Douglas Burgess argues in a NY Times Op-ed (Hat tip, my friend David) that piracy is terrorism.  I think the ‘enemies of the human race’ talk is a bit much, pirates often have the courtesy of at least ransoming rather than slaughtering their victims, but being able to prosecute them under universal jurisdiction makes a lot of practical sense.

For another relevant discussion, opium production in Afghanistan is one of the key revenue sources for the Taliban.  Happily cultivation is down 19% according to the latest UN report.  Patrick Barry over at Democracy Arsenal takes it upon himself to read beyond the executive summary and finds a key reason in addition to suppression efforts and weather:

Second, and most importantly, the dynamics of farm prices. As (Afghan) supply has once again exceeded (world) demand, prices for opium (both fresh and old) are down 20% in nominal terms (and much more at constant prices).

I’d heard at least a year ago that production was exceeding world demand but that prices weren’t falling yet.  That seemed rather odd to me, I’m guessing that prices are stickier in illegal markets.

However, I think that the Taliban doesn’t fall under the straight criminal framework.  They do want to govern Afghanistan and it guides their actions.  Noah Shachtman over at the Wired danger room notes that the Taliban is dropping some of the crazy puritanical stuff and is focusing on anti-occupation efforts.  Al Qaeda in Iraq hasn’t does this, and that’s part of what caused the Sunni Awakening and why everyone hates them.  This is via Ackerman who notes that the Taliban is probably trying to avoid their mistakes and that this will make it harder to split them a la the Awakening.

And the breakup is official

The Status of Forces Agreement passed Iraq’s presidency council (which basically gives the Shia, the Sunnis, and the Kurds each a theoretical veto).  For more on the SOFA, here’s my earlier post.

Iraq: The democracy kicked in!

Electoral democracy has taken its lumps in post-conflict situations.  The lead-up to elections is statistically correlated with a rise in violence while the post-election period doesn’t lead to a substantial drop-off.  Participatory direct democracy is a popular tool at the low levels, but the two don’t have to be linked.  Protection of minority rights can even be at odds with majoritarian democracy.  For a round up of some of these critiques you can see Fareed Zakaria’s The Rise of Illiberal Democracy.  And obviously not even those wacky neo-cons thinks it actually works in the way shown below.

Family Guy~Democracy comes to Iraq | Funny Jokes at JibJab

Nonetheless, the strength of democracy is not picking good leaders but in kicking out bad ones. Similarly while democracy can lead to problems with minority rights, it’s also rather good at bringing in excluded factions.  In the Iraqi case, this process was slower because of electoral boycotts (have those ever worked?) but now the Sunni Awakening groups and Sadr’s people, if not Sadr himself, are likely to participate in the upcoming provincial elections.

Those thinking we may be staying in Iraq for another ten years, and that think this is a good thing, tend to say that Prime Minister Maliki is just responding to domestic political pressure.  His chief Shiite rival, Sadr, seems to have lost some support as a result of the tougher line. They may be right in the source, but as the SOFA negotiations shows, they are very wrong in the implications.  The U.S. occupation is massively unpopular, the surge and associated efforts strengthened Maliki’s hand, but that just makes him less dependent on the U.S. and thus better able to negotiate a tough deals.  The Sunni’s also managed to win a concession and adopt my favorite suggestion [update: notably proposed by the PCR team over at CSIS] on handling Iraq, a referendum on the agreement and thus the occupation.  If we can’t win that referendum in July we’ll need to be out in 18 months and not 3 years.

Of course, at the same time, democracy has been working in America.  Kicking out our old leadership led to the Iraqis trusting that withdrawal might actually get implemented and progress on the SOFA.  As Matt Yglesias notes, Obama did not ‘get lucky’ that the Iraqis supported his withdrawal plan.  Instead, he was aware of the unpopularity of the occupation and incorporated that into his plan.  Good policy can make for politics.

Also, some commenters seem to think this is a win for the admin.  Chill people.  We need to be out of Iraqi cities by the end of 2009, that substantially limits what we can actually do on the ground, and there’s a deadline for total withdrawal, absent circumstances short of negotiating a new agreement, by 2011.  Our contractors no longer have legal protections. In short, we are staying on an uncomfortable SOFA, it does not fold out to make a bed, unlike Japan, Germany, or Korea, this is not a long term arrangement.

Assault on Mumbai

The news from India is frankly frightening.  This sounds like a well coordinated attack involving a fair number of armed militants hitting many targets at once.  By the time you’re reading this, there’s fresher news, but it sounds like at least 100 dead.  Based on early reports, the main targets are the US and the UK.  The exact motivations are still obscure, there’s a range of militant groups in India, not all Islamist by any means, and the one that claimed responsibility is a relatively unknown one.

The US and UK might mean this is partially about Iraq, if it were about Afghanistan France or Germany might also be targeted.  Alternately we might just be seen as the leadership of an opposition coalition.  Yet another possibility is that the the UK was included because of its historical relationship with India.  I don’t know.  That said, this is in no way just about us, they hit relatively hardened targets including taking out the anti-terror chief.

As India figures out what to do next we should look after the safety of our people but first and foremost support that great, pluralistic, and democratic nation. The “Global War on Terror” is worse than a useless catch phrase, it encourage conflating potential adversaries and encourages a focus on primarily military measures.  Figuring out what happened here will be hard work and the next steps depend on discovering whether this was perhaps an Al Qaeda operation or something more local.  Isaac Chotiner gives a quick summary of the worsening spiral of violence between extremist Islamic and Hindu groups, a conflict that will no doubt be aggravated by this attack, which was perhaps part of the point.

Aside from any larger geopolitical implications and repercussions, then, it is worth giving some thought to what now awaits Bombay. An Indian friend of mine currently works at the Taj Mahal Hotel in the Colaba area of the city. It is one of the amazing landmarks that was attacked tonight. I have not gotten word from my friend, who was fortunate to get this good job that enables him to provide for his wife and children. And, although he does not advertise it, he happens to be a Muslim--a Muslim who has faced the same hardships faced by many Muslims in Bombay. Even if he's presently safe and uninjured, he and many residents of this remarkable city face long and possibly harrowing days ahead.

While we learn more, once the immediate crisis is dealt with, our first foreign priority should be to make it as easy as possible for India to shore up the foundations of its pluralistic society.  Part of that is helping to find and punish those responsible, but dealing with the larger problems doesn’t end and given the inherent difficulties may not even start there.

Well, okay, if you say so.

Via Ackerman, according to the the Associated Press, Afghan President Hamid Karzai has told the Security Council that “the international community should set a timeline to end the war in Afghanistan.”

Here’s Ackerman’s analysis:

Is it too much of a stretch to wonder if Karzai is floating the timetable idea as a bankshot way of promoting his negotiations with the Taliban? In other words, is he trying to box people -- namely, Americans -- in to thinking that the only thing less desirable than negotiating with the insurgency is to set a date for leaving Afghanistan, so they better support the first option?

And another thing, in the context of those negotiations: If it's true that the Taliban feels stronger than the government right now, would it feel such an incentive to negotiate if it believed Karzai was going to kick the U.S. out no matter what?

I really don’t know how to read this.  If it is a bankshot it’s a hell of a maneuver.  I don’t think Obama would be opposed to such negotiations in the first place, so I’m not sure why they’re turning the screws on us.  First and foremost I’m guessing it’s just the more straightforward example Ackerman raises, response to domestic pressure.

I guess it’s time to put a more thought in how we can exit in a manner that best serves the Afghan people and kneecaps Al Qaeda.  Just exiting will put a damper on recruitment, but Osama was in Afghanistan well before we were.

So what can we do about Somalia?

After being reminded of a horror story about the stoning of a young rape victim in Somalia, I wanted to add to my previous post to note what we can do.  First off, the Islamic Courts Union wasn’t this bad, but now it’s fragmented and not about to come back together again.  We can work with the moderates, are generally unwilling to work with the militants, and as the story above shows some of the factions are resorting to acts so evil that in a novel they would be attributed to bad writing.

So the current ‘legitimate’ government is unpopular, the alternative is broken and in some cases completely nuts, what can we do?  Going back to Bronwyn Bruton at the Africa policy blog:

The urgent humanitarian intervention in Somalia. On the contrary, in the absence of a comprehensive strategy to stabilize and rebuild Somalia, the United States should perhaps look to humanitarian relief above all other projects. The sincere prioritization of humanitarian support may eventually mitigate the rampant anti-Americanism that has taken root in Somalia. This is a truly modest goal; but it is probably the only victory within our grasp. The U.S. should actively urge the U.N. and IGAD to refrain from political negotiation, and to focus all efforts on recapturing a posture of neutrality. A position of neutrality is an essential pre-condition for any viable interaction with Somalia, and the international community should focus on positioning itself to re-engage when the security situation eventually stabilizes.

In the longer term, and as a short-term measure to promote peace and economic development at the community level, the United States should examine several nontraditional strategies, including the previously explored “bottom-up” and/or “building block” approaches that were applied with some success in Somalia during the 1990s.

This seems sound to me.  When we don’t have good options, sometimes lowest common denominator aid is all we can do.    If we’d done a better job of taking the interests and desires of the people of Somalia in account in the first place we might have been able to do much better, instead we made the situation worse and there’s no easy do-overs.

Enlightened Self-Interest isn’t enough

I recently watched a bloggingheads TV between Robin Wright and Ross Douthat and for once I pointedly disagree with something Robin Wright said (Douthat didn’t take a stand on this either way).  Specifically around the 49 minute mark he argued for a liberal-realist fusion that there’s an argument on realist grounds and humanitarian grounds for intervening in Somalia and probably intervening as much as you can practically handle around the world.  That American self-interest can lead you to do a lot to fight disease and prevent failed states.

I think that view is a fairly traditional one in Democratic circles, but that it gets one critical thing wrong.  Namely enlightened self-interest isn’t so good at incorporating the opinions of the people you’re intervening on behalf of.  Establishing a democratic government can do a lot to help.  However, even a democratic government may not reflect popular sentiment until that government is strong enough to stand on its own and until those locals that oppose the intervention are brought into the process.  The situation can be far worse when we’re backing a transition government that we judge to be the lesser of two evils.

For an example of this sort of failure, I would point to… Somalia.  Bronwyn Bruton has a post at CSIS’s Africa Forum on the present debacle there.  Details after the cut:

Economics of Conflict

I assume my readers are sufficiently cynical to realize that conflicts are often driven by economic factors. However, that still leaves the question of how those factors work.

Here’s some interesting new data from Dani Rodrik

One of my graduate students, Oeindrila Dube, has written a fascinating paper (jointly with Juan Vargas) on the determinants of Colombia’s civil war, and how world prices for its major exports (coffee and oil) affect the intensity of the conflict.

The central question is this: do higher world prices enhance or reduce the conflict? You could make arguments in both directions. Lower prices increase reduce incomes, and may make it less difficult for individuals to be recruited into guerilla or militia forces. On the other hand, lower prices make the underlying resource base less valuable and reduce the spoils over which the two sides can fight.

He links to a Slate article that provides a layman’s summary. The short version is that higher prices on labor intensive resources, like farm goods, reduce civil conflict because the wealth is spread around. For capital intensive products, like oil, the trend goes the opposite way in what’s called the resource curse.

De-escalation

Thank goodness.

TBILISI, Georgia, Aug. 12 -- Russian President Dmitry Medvedev said Tuesday he was halting military operations in Georgia because they had accomplished their end, although explosions continued to rattle the now largely abandoned town of Gori...

"The security of our peacekeepers and civilians has been restored," Medvedev said, referring to Russian arguments that the incursion was needed to repel a Georgian offensive in South Ossetia. Russian officials have claimed that a Georgian push into the province last week claimed 2,000 lives, including those of more than a dozen Russian peacekeepers stationed there.

Obviously Putin still runs the show, but I don’t see President Medvedev making this kind of announcement if it wasn’t going to happen. This isn’t over by any means, the fighting is still ongoing, but it looks as if the Russians aren’t going to go for total conquest or deposing the Georgian government.

(Brought to my attention by Dylan Matthews over at Ezra Klein’s blog)

Escalation

The situation in Georgia is getting worse as Russia bombs well past the disputed region and may be seeking to overthrow the elected (albeit somewhat problematic) Georgian President. President Bush is appropriately strengthening his rhetoric, Georgia is calling for a cease fire at this point, Russia has achieved any objectives it could proportionately seek regarding the break-away province of South Ossetia.

U.S. interests and values do not demand action on behalf of South Ossetia against the Russians. It’s an ugly situation to be sure, but also a complex one. However, the situation is rather different for Georgia proper. We need to figure out what tools at our disposal we’d be potentially willing to use, more bluffing won’t do, and at the same time determine what we’re willing to trade. Calling for international peacekeepers on the South Ossetian border is all well and good, but I don’t see it happening unless we’ve got more international support or are willing to put a lot on the line. That said, it’s a fine opening position. Realistically, we should probably be willing to trade influence over the breakaway province for protection for Georgia proper.

This situation has arisen in large part because the U.S. has written checks that we can’t cash. Matt Yglesias ably summarizes a good Fred Kaplan piece on why Georgian President Shakashvili foolish sent the troops into South Ossetia. In short he thought, thanks to all sorts of support and signals from the U.S., that we’d be willing to bail him out. Here’s the wrap from Yglesias:

This highlights, I think, some of the limits of the kind of bluff-and-bluster approach to foreign policy that seems popular among conservatives these days. Or, rather, it highlights the fact that popular as bluster-based policymaking is on the American right it can have some extremely high costs and that, tragically, a large proportion of those costs can wind up being borne by the people who were nominally supposed to be the beneficiaries.

Other classic cases include the Shi’a uprising after the first Gulf War and Hungary’s uprising back in 1956 against the Soviet Union. For an instance under a Democratic President, you could probably include Saddam’s attacks into Kurdish areas under Clinton. That said, Shakashvili greatly overreached even what we had said, Georgia did not get fast tracked into Nato and we’re tied down in two wars. Even with what support he was given, the attack into South Ossetia was highly ill advised. However, it shouldn’t cost him his Presidency until elections or constitutional removal procedures come into play.

Georgia, Georgia, the whole day through

I think Gregory Djerejian has had the best post I’ve read on the matter. Key points:

First, let us disabuse ourselves from the notion that Mr. Saakashvili (head of the government in Georgia) is some glorious democrat (the election he barely won in January included irregularities, and there continues to be endemic corruption
in Tblisi). Second, let us recall that many south Ossetians and
Abkhazians are not particularly keen to live under Tbilisi’s yoke,
indeed some prefer Russian influence to predominate there for the time being. Third, if there is any truth to Russian allegations that there are some 1,500 fatalities in the South Ossetian capital of Tskhinvali--and they were caused by a major initial over-reach by the Georgian military (we will need to wait for more details to emerge)--expect many more brutish bombardments like the Russians apparently have conducted in the Georgian town of Gori, alas. Fourth, some context: ever since the overly hasty recognition of Kosovo went live, Putin has been very keen to intimate what’s good for the goose is good for the gander, having personally threatened Saakashvili that Russia would formally recognize as independent states Ossetia and Abkhazia.

His final point is that Saakashvili really screwed up here by launching an offensive to resecure Ossetia. I do think it’s important that we keep Russia from taking over neighbors, but there’s a difference between Georgia proper and breakaway republics that have function autonomy. First priority here should be de-escalation and stopping the killing.

The War Powers act that doesn't do anything

So there’s a new proposal on how to revamp the War Powers act, which gives Congress a mechanism to force withdrawals under certain condition but that is a mechanism that Congress has never used. In any event a proposal to fix it seems fairly worthless as enforcing the act would require overcoming a veto. If you can overcome a veto you already can basically do what you want, why do you need a war powers act?

Timothy Noah also picked up on this and provides some explanation as to why this whole area is so messed up: Congress doesn’t want that responsibility. He cites a historical example.

What amazed and shocked me, and moved me to write up the debate for the New Republic, was the unembarrassed manner in which members of Congress declared as their paramount interest the absence of any legislative fingerprints on whatever might result from allowing (or not allowing) the Navy convoys to enter an area of violent conflict. In fact, it was pretty much taken as a given that the War Powers Resolution would not be invoked, not because the president was not complying with it (no president ever has) but because doing so would require Congress to either approve or revoke Reagan’s decision.

If he’s right, we’ve got a structural flaw in the Constitution. We need a Congress willing to actually exercise or deny the ability to declare war. Absent that, we need an alternate check to ensure accountability for one of the executive branches most dangerous powers. The only alternative I’m coming up with is a no confidence vote as an alternate means to impeachment of removing a president.

Horror in Zimbabwe

The latest new, from the LA Times via Yglesias, show the situation further degrading. I’ve got a Washington Post article to read for some more background on Mugabe’s base of support.

It seems the ZANU-PF have set up a series of camps around Zimbabwe that "provide a base from which to burn houses, displace people and beat, maim or kill opposition activists" on which, in addition, large numbers of women are being held captive as slaves and frequently raped.

The hopeful side of the LA Times’s very bleak account is the suggestion that the government may actually be running out of the necessary cash to keep all its goon squads in operation. Still, even if something happens to force Mugabe from power, one has to think that a lot of these folks in his militias aren’t necessarily going to give up their own appetite for robbery, rape, mayhem, etc. no matter what happens at the top.

I think there’s going to need to be an African Union force to help return Zimbabwe to normalcy after Mugabe is gone. The International Criminal Court should probably launch investigations, particularly ones that target key military and militia leaders, the type politicians may be more willing to throw to the wolves. Indicting Mugabe makes sense as well, but probably any deal to get him out of power will mean he gets sanctuary somewhere.

Anyways, the situation is developing, and unfortunately it seems to be developing much faster than the African Union’s response.

Quote of the Day

John McCain on the greatest threat to the economy:

"Well, I would think that the absolute gravest threat is the struggle that we’re in against radical Islamic extremism, which can affect, if they prevail, our very existence. Another successful attack on the United States of America could have devastating consequences."

Ezra Klein on John McCain:

This is more like Marvel’s "What If?" series. What is the Supervolcano explodes? What if we have an "I Am Legend" style pandemic? Or a "28 Days Later" zombie virus? What if "radical Islamic extremism" prevails and terrorists establish a global caliphate?..

Bin Laden lives on a rock in a cave near some mountains... That makes it impossible that he’ll prevail and threaten our existence, so he’s not an acceptable answer under the first premise.

Quite so. Terrorism is not an existential threat to the U.S. This does not mean it cannot hurt us or that it isn’t important, but it simply is not on the same scale as the USSR.

The future of the Air Force

Not that long ago, Secretary of Defense Gates fired the military and civilian heads of the Air Force. This decision has been pretty popular on the blogs I read and among the people I talk to. Kevin Drum has a quick rundown of the reasons they were asked to resign.

Publicly, Defense Secretary Robert Gates says that his recent firings of the Air Force’s top civilian and military leaders was due to a couple of incidents of mishandling of nuclear components. But Noah Shachtman says Gates’s feud with the Air Force has roots that go back to his decision to prevent them from taking over almost all of the military’s big unmanned aircraft:

Things only got more tense when Gates said that the future of conflict is in small, "asymmetric" wars - wars in which the Air Force takes a back seat to ground forces. Then Gates noted that the Air Force’s most treasured piece of gear, the F-22 stealth fighter, basically has no role in the war on terror. And when a top Air Force general said the service was planning on buying twice as many of the jets - despite orders from Gates and the rest of the civilian leadership - he was rebuked for "borderline insubordination."

The next Air Force general, for the first time in 25 years, is not going to be a fighter pilot. Ben Friedman praises this idea hoping it will reduce the "threat inflation" of China and end the push for more F-22s. Yglesias also thinks this is a good idea, but notes that it doesn’t get to the core problem: we don’t need a separate Air Force.

My thoughts after the cut.

Event Write Up: Nationbuilding after Iraq

Amb. James Dobbins who is presently working for Rand gave a pretty good presentation at CSIS on the state of nation building (the Project on Middle East Democracy also has notes). I went to this one because Rand has done some good work on the topic, and is the source of the estimate that we’d need 400k U.S. troops to really pull off Iraq right.

Iraq was 7th time the U.S. tried nation building in little more than a decade with the prior cases being Kuwait, Somalia, Haiti, Bonsia, Kosovo, Afghanistan. Six of those seven where Muslim nations. Thus our screw ups were not a matter of inexperience but not taking it seriously as core mission. More specifically, we fail to transfer skills from administration to administration and he offered multiple proposals on how to fix that.

Nation building became much bigger after the Cold war where the goal was typically suppressing conflict rather than resolving it. The goal was to prevent high level clashes. Subsequently many more that go longer and thus add up.

Entity	Cold War frequency	Post-Cold War frequency	On-going	Now Peaceful	Now Democratic
U.S.	1 every 10 years	1 every 2 years	5 (in 2004)	4 / 8	4 / 8
U.N.	1 every 4 years	1 every six months	20	6 / 8	7 / 8

So U.N. scored higher than U.S., why? Part of it is case selection and the difficulty of the cases the U.S. chose. At the same time, the UN takes the mission more seriously, has doctrine, a cadre of experts, and while smaller than the U.S. still 100k deployed soldiers. It can work, look at stats, cold war fueled dozens of proxy wars, killed millions of people every year, number of conflicts now down by 50% 1993 to 2003; casualties dropped even more. It’s still lower now, although current conflicts have slowed the decline.

I’ll discuss some of the policy implications in a future post.

How wrong was I about the Iraq war?

How wrong was I a little over five years ago?  Embarrassingly so, considering I had a frigging BA in Political Science. I’ve grabbed these from an old personal site, so I’m not linking it. In essence I backed the Tony Blair approach on Iraq. So based on what I said back then, if I’d been in the Congress I’d probably have unwisely voted for that accursed resolution.

The question here is can Bush be trusted? I’m willing to believe him on his intentions to rebuild Iraq but I don’t believe he’s willing to take substantial political risk to guarantee that it will succeed. Fortunately I believe there are still enough leaders left in America that it will not be allowed to fail...

Ultimately, I’m gonna sleep [fine] without Saddam Hussein or even a soft-autocrat in charge of Iraq. Let alone knowing that said leader won’t have access to weapons of mass destruction. It’ll also help that most U.S. troops are out of Saudi Arabia and thus all that much farther from Mecca. But most important, a rebuilt democratic Iraq will be a proving grounds for idealism in American policy. I have enough faith in current non-Bush leadership, liberal democracy, and America to think we’ll pass the test. Although if I’m wrong,or if Bush actually is just straight out evil, the price will be terrible. Here’s hoping I’m right...

Finally, I believe we’ll suceed [sic] in rebuilding Iraq if we have the will to do it. Although, as much as I knock the admin, at least they are being aggressively rhetorically pro-democratic. I just hope the misteps [sic] in regard to preparing for the next stage were mistakes and not indications of lack of concern...

In short my judgment on the biggest foreign policy decision of the past decade was terrible. I supported sending between hundreds of thousands and millions of Iraqis and 4,000 American troops to their death based on faith and not the analysis, available at the time, of the order of magnitude of the true cost. 

So in short, I fell for the classical Green Lantern line of thought. With sufficient will we’d be fine. I’d seen a lot of humanitarian interventions that went from okay to not so impressive. These interventions were typically mediocre at best, although the incompetence of the start of the Iraq occupation was still remarkable.

However, I will not avail myself of the incompetence defense. The Iraq war was a horrific mistake, one that could have been and indeed was foreseen by many people including some friends. After having realized this mistake, I have left the ranks of liberal hawks as have many others.

I’m sorry.  My form of penance is listening more to those that were right and trying to fix the problems the invasion caused.  My read for the past few years is that the best first step is withdrawal from Iraq.  What lessons have I learned?  I think Timothy Noah is right, it's probably a better use of your time to focus on why some people got it right than what people who got it wrong think now.

And behind it all there's a price to be paid

From the Washington Post (Emphasis mine)

Iraqi forces were backed by U.S. and British reconnaissance planes as they launched their Basra offensive, an operation aimed at breaking the power of politically backed gunmen in the city.

The fiercest fighting took place in Basra neighborhoods where Iraqi forces targeted members of Sadr’s Mahdi Army, further risking the collapse of a cease-fire that Sadr declared last summer. His fighters’ stand-down has been widely credited with helping curb violence throughout the country during the U.S. troop buildup known as the surge.

From what I can glean from the Post, the real change in status quo came from the Iraqi security forces. Two days ago Sadr’s followers launched a civil strike planning mass protests and shuttering their stores.

But in recent weeks, Iraqi security forces have clashed with Mahdi Army militiamen and conducted large raids and arrests of Sadr followers in southern Iraqi towns such as Kut and Diwaniyah. Sadrist leaders in Baghdad said that they were still obeying the cease-fire and that the demonstrations would be peaceful.

The protests came a day after at least 60 Iraqis were killed in a wave of car bombings, suicide attacks and gun violence, and the U.S. military death toll reached 4,000.

Some of the uptick in violence may be attributable to elements of Sadr’s forces that aren’t following the ceasefire, but that’s not a major change from the hardly peaceful status quo. [Update: Spencer Ackerman thinks the first blow may have come from Sadr’s people who could have just been waiting out the surge.] At this point, the cease fire may be completely falling apart. So why the change? Sadr’s Shiite rivals are the biggest faction in the government. I’m guessing we went after Sadr in exchange for the Shiites withdrawing their veto of the election law. That happened four days ago and was personally negotiated by Vice President Cheney. We badly needed that election law because the Sunni Awakening Forces are increasingly restless over lack of pay and the fact that they need those election to displace other Sunni groups that got in the provincial government because they didn’t boycott the elections.

To be clear this is just a guess. But this is the sort of unpleasant faction balancing that we’re going to be doing again and again if we stay in Iraq. We’ll soon know whether we frakked this one up and the Sadr ceasefire completely breaks down. But rather than making tough call after tough call, the better choice is to get the hell out of Iraq.

[Update: Ilan Goldberg argues that the Sadr ceasefire may have been key to driving down civilian casualties. A co-worker of mine provided an alternate theory that we could be hitting Iran’s assets intentionally either as signal or to reduce their options for counterstrikes.]

Our real moral obligation to the Iraqis...

Should be focused on those who want our help. The Post headline says it all: Stalwart Service for U.S. in Iraqi is Not Enough to Gain Green Card. Saman Kareem Ahmad was widely lauded by the U.S. military but has been turned down by the U.S. government. The reason:

Ahmad had once been part of the Kurdish Democratic Party, which U.S. immigration officials deemed an "undesignated terrorist organization" for having sought to overthrow former Iraqi leader Saddam Hussein.

After doing a bit of searching I only found one reference to the KDP and terrorism. Apparently they were associated with an explosion at a NGO that killed two. They are not designated as a terrorist group by most governments and aren’t even on the U.S. Foreign Terrorist Organizations list, at least according to this site. That said, at least one Assyrian site does have a beef against them but doesn’t seem to back it up with independent news accounts.

Anyways, this sort of thing is why many counter-terrorism efforts worry me. Militant non-state groups are routinely conflated with those that purposefully attack civilians. Why? Because it’s in the interest of governments in general to demonize any competitors. So when there’s no real push in the administration for helping Iraqi refugees, innocent allies get hurt.

Not exactly the enduring challenge of our time

Fortunately, the overall threat from terrorism is still fairly small and in no way comparable to Nazi Germany or the Soviet Union. James Fallows notes a good David Ignatius and points to an old cover story covering the same material in the Atlantic. The article is on a new book called Leaderless Jihad by Marc Sageman which is based on data about 500 Islamic terrorist.

The first wave of al-Qaeda leaders, who joined Osama bin Laden in the 1980s, is down to a few dozen people on the run in the tribal areas of northwest Pakistan. The second wave of terrorists, who trained in al-Qaeda’s camps in Afghanistan during the 1990s, has also been devastated, with about 100 hiding out on the Pakistani frontier. These people are genuinely dangerous, says Sageman, and they must be captured or killed. But they do not pose an existential threat to America, much less a "clash of civilizations."

It’s the third wave of terrorism that is growing, but what is it? By Sageman’s account, it’s a leaderless hodgepodge of thousands of what he calls "terrorist wannabes." Unlike the first two waves, whose members were well educated and intensely religious, the new jihadists are a weird species of the Internet culture. Outraged by video images of Americans killing Muslims in Iraq, they gather in password-protected chat rooms and dare each other to take action. Like young people across time and religious boundaries, they are bored and looking for thrills.

"It’s more about hero worship than about religion," Sageman said in a presentation of his research last week at the New America Foundation, a liberal think tank here. Many of this third wave don’t speak Arabic or read the Koran. Very few (13 percent of Sageman’s sample) have attended radical madrassas. Nearly all join the movement because they know or are related to someone who’s already in it. Those detained on terrorism charges are getting younger: In Sageman’s 2003 sample, the average age was 26; among those arrested after 2006, it was down to about 20. They are disaffected, homicidal kids -- closer to urban gang members than to motivated Muslim fanatics.

Sageman’s solution to the third wave is fairly straightforward. First, as we’re already doing, disrupt these groups when they gather to train. Second, stop glamorizing them and playing up the War on Terrorism. Third, get out of Iraq to cut off sources of radicalization.

That said, this doesn’t mean we’re immune. As Fallows article notes:

Yes, there could be another attack tomorrow, and most authorities assume that some attempts to blow up trains, bridges, buildings, or airplanes in America will eventually succeed. No modern nation is immune to politically inspired violence, and even the best-executed antiterrorism strategy will not be airtight.

Bloody hell

Benazir Bhutto, a top opposition leader in Pakistan, was killed by suicide bombing.

Ackerman adds, "The most likely culprit is the Pakistani Taliban and
al-Qaeda. But it’s not exactly an event met with tears by the Pakistani military, which thoroughly controls the government and the economy."

That said, President Musharraf will almost certainly use this as an opportunity to consolidate power.  He may well make a play to attempt to transition into a fully autocratic state with U.S. patronage, like say Egypt or Saudi Arabia.  With nukes and a real but minority Islamist terrorist opposition there’s a good chance the U.S. will let him.  If we do, there [will] certainly be more bloodshed to come.