Greg Sanders

How will we pay for the next Afghanistan policy?

President Obama’s speech on a new strategy for Afghanistan and what resources will be provided to support it is coming this week.  Congress, whose power over war comes through the power of the purse will have to decide whether to provide supplemental support to cover any increases beyond what’s already budgeted.  On the whole, Congress often involves itself with acquisition decisions but tends to be more reticent in dictating war spending.  However, there’s presently a rather new idea raised by Rep. Obey being debated when it comes to budgeting the war: raise funds to cover expenses.

Estimating the cost of an escalation would be difficult.  Cristi Parsons and Julian E. Barnes have an article in the L.A. Times that covers the range of opinions (via Matthew Yglesias and Spencer Ackerman).  Standard estimates run between $500 thousand and $1 million per troop, with the specifics obviously dependent on what the troops are doing what’s being included in the calculations.  A memo by the Pentagon Comptroller “said the yearly cost of a 40,000-troop increase would be $30 billion to $35 billion -- at least $750,000 a person. An increase of 20,000 would cost $20 billion to $25 billion annually, it said -- a per-soldier cost equal to or greater than the [million dollar per soldier] White House estimate.”

Key House Democrats, including three committee chairs and the chair of the party caucus are supporting a graduated surtax to pay for war in Afghanistan according to David Rogers of Politico (via Yglesias).  It isn’t yet clear how Speaker Pelosi feels about this approach and I haven’t read anything describing similarly united heavy hitters in the Senate.  Also, the tax wouldn’t kick in until 2011 and could be delayed another year if the President deemed the economy still in weak shape.  Nonetheless, the tax would be broad based and include the middle class, with the exception of those who served or lost an immediate relative in the war.

Will it pass?  I don’t know, Ackerman argues that Congress is interested in exercising more control  and Yglesias notes that if a large portion of Democrats obviously support the tax than Republicans will be in position to demand their own chance to influence war policy.  In either case, the consequences may prove important not just for Afghanistan but for future U.S. military engagements.

Updates: Persona 4 and exercise gaming

I’ve finally gotten a bit of free time and so have been playing more Persona 4.  I still really love that game, despite, or perhaps because, it manages to psych me out with some of the social choices and various quizzes.  Most of the answers could be easily googled, but I’m going with just the knowledge I have on hand and I’ve had an embarrassing wrong streak.  All the more so since I’m normally good at tests.  In some ways it gets the high school vibe down cold, it’s a lot more fun, but it still feels easy to screw up and embarrass yourself. 

I hope I didn’t deny myself a social connection by being a jerk to someone because I was confused about whose younger brother he was.  If I did, such is life, but it’s still embarrassing.  I’m actually a bit reminded of the first No One Lives Forever which rewarded you for taking the professional dialogue choice and not the one that just made you sound cool. 

I’ve been playing in combination with Wii Fit Plus.  While the free step mode doesn’t net that many calories, free running actually seems to have a similar burn rate as does EA Active Life.  We just picked up the add-on for Active Life, the creatively named More Exercises.  I’m not going to make the transition just yet, because the 30 day challenge isn’t offered in the sequel, instead it’s got a six week thing.  That’s fine, but after running into some initial trouble, my pride is on the line on getting through the challenge this time.  That said, I’m not that proud, I’m entirely willing to change the clock so that I don’t get burned get bumped to the next day for finishing at 12:05 AM.

Anyways, good weekend on the whole.  We’ve been working our way through Avatar Season 2 and have loved it.  The story gets steadily more into mini-arcs as time goes by while still retaining an episodic charm.  The only downside is that there’s only three seasons so we’re now more than half way through.

The Marshall plan as a U.S. counter-mercantile policy

Excerpt from an interesting piece by David Brin who argues that a key differentiator of Pax Americana has been encouraging actual trade rather than mercantilism:

Look, lest there be any misunderstanding, I am not downplaying the importance of Japanese, Korean, Malaysian, Chinese and Indian efforts to uplift themselves through the hard work of hundreds of millions who labored in sweatshops making toys and clothes for U.S. consumers.  Without any doubt, those workers... (like the generations who built America, before 1950,  in the sooty factories of Detroit and Pittsburgh)... and their innovative managers, were far more heroic and directly responsible for the last six decades of world development than American consumers, pushing overflowing carts through WalMart. 

Nevertheless, those consumers —plus the trade policies that made the WalMart Tsunami possible, plus a fantastically generous and nearly unrestricted flow of intellectual capital from west to east — all played crucial roles in this process that lifted billions of people out of grinding, hopeless poverty.  Moreover, it now seems long past time to realize how unique all of this was, in the sad litany of human civilization.

This roughly aligns with my view, although it only worked out this way in parts of the world. Resource rich countries tend not to be so lucky.

I wonder if the counter-mercantile approach was more possible because of advances in the understanding of economics or because of shifts in the rewards for the elites of powerful countries.  Remember that Adam Smith was a vehement critic of mercantilist policies.  I do think the original choices in the Marshall plan and other points mentioned by Brin played a critical role in putting us down this road, but it would have been unlikely to have been sustained if it weren’t fairly beneficial to a range of groups with a lot of political clout.

A good portion of Americans aren’t particularly happy with this deal.  Other developed countries, classically Germany, have done a better job of protecting and promoting their manufacturing base.  I also wonder whether pursuit of intellectual property protections as a top priority has undermined our ability to get concessions elsewhere.The path we chose probably wasn’t the only workable option.  I do hope that offering a solid safety net and ramping up Green job industries will help ease some of the issues around trade.  The world still has got at least a billion people to lift out of absolute poverty.

Happy Thanksgiving everyone

I’m rather grateful to have the chance to spend my time as a research and analyst, to get to write about, and to have many interesting friends, not to mention a geeky wife, to talk and play with.  Given recent years, I’m especially glad to be able to do all this in good health.

I’ve always had a rather privileged life, I’ll consider it to have been a good life if I can help spread the privileges I’ve enjoyed to a wider swath of humanity.

Taking Conor Friedersdorf's bet on the [deficit] neutrality of health care

Conor Friedersdorf has a post despairing over our country's fiscal situation as part of it, he raises the fiscal issue again.  

Does anyone who argues it’ll all be deficit neutral in the end, or that costs will go down, want to wager on that proposition? (Update on the prior paragraph: I’m told that any talk of costs going down is actually shorthand for slowing the rate of increase.)

I expect the Congress will keep putting off the Medicare cuts from before the bill, but that's the status quo.  In all other senses, yeah, I think it will be deficit neutral and I'd bet at dinner at a reasonably nice D.C. restaurant (assuming Conor hasn't escaped DC by then) on the credibility of the CBO estimates and the Democratic Congress's willingness to not repeal key sections of the bill.  It will be tricky to adjudicate the exact details here since healthcare reform is a multi-round process, but I'm flexible on the definition of terms.  [I'm even willing to make this a one-sided bet.  If I win I can make my self a nice curry to celebrate the improved fiscal situation and universal healthcare of America of the future.]

Why am I confident?  See my post analyzing the political viability of the CBO analysis.

Side note on the term broke: the vast majority of our debt is held in U.S. dollars and the bonds are inflation adjusted. That's a privilege not shared by countries that go into default, the risk is that we'll be cut off, not that we can't pay off what we owe now.  However, as Yglesias points out, bond rates are at nigh record lows, so it doesn't look like we'll be cut off anytime soon.  This doesn't mean we don't need to worry about long term fiscal sustainability, it does mean that we are not in a debt crisis.  The NY Times article is focused on the fact that interest rates will doubtless go up at some point, this is true, but that points to the important of deficit reduction in the mid-term.  Spending money now to deal with record unemployment makes sense, so long as we organize the programs in such a way that don't require us to take on more debt as the economy improves.  This is quite different than what happens with home owners in the crisis because they had adjustable rate mortgages.  That's very different, it means that not just is your new debt at a higher rate, it also changes your old debt.

[Addendum: Jamelle over at the League of Ordinary Gentlemen also takes on Conor's piece.

The reflexive, evidence-free dismissal of the CBO scores (High Broderism at its finest) at the beginning of Conor’s post is enough to convince me that he isn’t actually interested in hearing liberal ideas for bringing the United States back on a firm fiscal footing. That said, it’s worth reminding Conor that in the three decades since the Republican Party became the dominant political coalition in American politics, the deficit has been reduced exactly once, and that was during Bill Clinton’s presidency. All three Republican presidents of the “conservative era” – Ronald Reagan, George H.W. Bush, and George W. Bush – were responsible for significant increases in the deficit, and in the case of the latter, a tremendous increase in the overall national debt.

He's got a good graph to illustrate the point.]

[Update: Embarrassing title typo fixed]

A defense of the fiscal responsibility of the Senate Health bill

Tyler Cowen attacks those of us who support the bill claiming we retreat into the relative.  In short, he doesn’t believe the various automatic cuts will happen and is unsatisfied with our defenses of those cuts.

This fight gets more into political science than economics as such.  The economics of the bill as written are covered by the CBO, the question is whether the politics of the bill are sustainable.

Here’s why I think they are:

1. Assuming no changes to the filibuster as implemented in the 21st century, post-passage it will be possible to defend the fiscal responsibility of the bill with 41 votes rather than the 60 votes otherwise required (or 51 votes and luck of the draw if using reconciliation).
2. People with expensive health plans are elite, but they lack the organizational infrastructure and natural ties held by the doctors and elderly who have blocked automatic Medicare cuts.  Their negotiating clout is undercut by the fact that the group contains natural enemies: union workers and corporate execs.  Further, their numbers will be decreased by many companies choosing to simply avoid the health care excise by giving more taxable income.
3. Democrats, under the prior Democratic president, managed to balance the budget.  The good economic times of the 90s were certainly critical to that happening, but we managed it nonetheless largely due to the revenue raising that helped lose us the Congress.  Why would we do it again after losing the Congress the last time?  I don’t believe in politician fiscal hawks, but I do believe that your average Democratic Representative and Senator faces more elite pressure to do something about the deficit than expand health benefits.  Universal Healthcare does address a core middle class concern, but things like the level of subsidies and the benefits of the bronze plan are going to be lower priority for Democratic leadership than being described by the media as fiscally responsible.  If this wasn’t the case, then why did the Reid bill come it at $856B rather than maxing out the $900B the President suggested.  Liberal bloggers, such as myself, won’t get their in a better world cost reductions but we also won’t get our better world benefits for the poor.
4. This will make it easier to raise the eligibility age for Medicare once universal healthcare is in place.  We can do something sensible like index it to the expected lifespan.  Obviously this will be grandfathered in due to the political clout of the elderly, but those who aren’t that near receiving benefits are a larger group that won’t be as motivated.
5. Some of the bloggers Tyler is critiquing are willing to say that the new mammogram guidelines could well be a good idea and that critics should provide counter arguments based on science.  There may well be strong counterarguments, I’d be curious if the false positive downsides still outweighed the detection upsides if we’re talking African American and/or lower income women, but I need to see that data before I go along with the critique. Furthermore, when it comes to things like mammograms, many people are averse to getting tests in the first place, stopping government encouragement for those under 50 without special risk factors, even if coverage is maintained, should make a difference in usage.  I will concede that this up roar and HHS concessions does bad for us, but the strength of the response on breast cancer is the exception as advocates for breast cancer patients are highly organized and feminist groups are on edge after being backstabbed in the House.  There was not a political response of the same magnitude of recommendations on prostate cancer screens.  Interestingly enough, the American Cancer Society didn’t object to those, so I think their critique on changing mammogram standards should certainly get a fair hearing.  Also, I’ll note the fact that the timing of this release shows the scientific independence of the review process, the timing was awful.

40-40K more troops may be all that’s [potentially] available for Afghanistan

Spencer Ackerman has some detailed reporting on how many troops would be available for an Afghan surge given current policies.  Via the Armchair Generalist I’ve also got a clip of him discussing it on Rachel Maddow.

This makes sense.  After all, troops have been fairly slow to leave Iraq and extended deployments showed that we were already at capacity.  None of this is to say that we couldn’t leave Iraq faster or consider pulling back from some of our other global bases, I think either could be done responsibly.  Alternately we could decrease the dwell time troops get at home or call up more reserves, which I think would be a terrible idea.

Since I do try to run a datablog here, I’d like to highlight two terrific charts on Ackerman’s piece.  He’s got a breakdown of Army National Guard and Army combat brigade deployment data.  I think he really raises the bar with those tables, check them out.

[Update: Clarified headline to signify that I’m discussing what Obama could send, not how many troops he’s likely to send.]

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.

Preview of coming numbers

I'm fairly exhausted tonight, so I'm posting from the phone. Sadly I haven't figured out an efficient way to post links so this will just mention good posts but not link to them at this time. Maybe I need to master post by email, I think several apps have options to share things vkia email.

Regardless, I've seen three bits of security data I want to post about.
1 total cost of the wars to date, from CRS via Yglesias.
2 number of troops available to surge in Afghanistan. Apparently absent accelerated withdrawal from Iraq, 40k is the max, data from Ackerman.
3 Unintentional civilian deaths outnumbering intentional deaths. Multiple sources on that.

Quick comments on EA Sports Active Life

Doing a proper review seems a bit pointless since the new version is out.  Let’s just say that the general consensus: Wii Fit is good for exergaming, Activelife is good for exercising, seems about on the money.  Comparing calorie counts with Wii Fit plus, the 30 day challenge seems to burn about 50%-100% more calories, minute per minute, than a reasonably strenuous mix of wii fit activities.  Active Life Routines also help you get those 30 minutes done with less interruptions.

I actually do miss a lot of the cute features in Wii Fit: neat island backdrop, seeing friend’s Miis, and some of the games.  Active Life is a bit more tethered to reality in ways that I don’t think are necessary to be an effective exercise program but may be better suited to the target audience.

I’m currently working my way through the 30 day challenge.  It’s a great feature, it handles your routine picking for you and lets you pick a difficulty.  Hard is rather hard, I’ve kept with it for now but may need to drop to medium before the end.  One annoyance though, if you end after midnight, the whole thing counts as the next day.  Since you only get a new 30 day challenge the day after completing the previous one, this rather breaks up the schedule a bit.

One other slight note of annoyance: the directing on the videos is bad.  They do a good job showing the exercises, but it’s not necessary to smile constantly while doing so.  That creeps me out a little.  Also I’m terrible at inline skating but slowly figuring out the tricks.

One bit of tech synergy that might work well with exercise gaming: picture in a picture television.  Active life uses the picture in a picture concept, but I don’t see any reason it couldn’t be combine with watching another show entirely rather than watching an avatar duplicate the exercise.  Unlike wii fit, you don’t really have single exercise 30 minutes options, probably for the best, so dual-gaming is likely out, but I wouldn’t mind working through my DVD backlog.

Would staggered regional elections help with post conflict reconstruction?

Elections can lead to more violence for a range of reasons, but it can't help that monitors and security forces have to cover the whole country. This likely wouldn't work for general presidential elections but could work for the legislature. I don't think staggered terms are part of the problem with our Senate. I'm not sure if it would be better to have regional blocks or just a mix of elections throughout the country. Blocksb would be easier to administer but they may throw off the politics by varying the importance if regions.

Progress on Guantanamo bay

It took long enough, but it appears that the administration is finding ways to deal with the detainees at Guantanamo.  A few of the big names are being transferred to federal court to await trial and apparently there’s a nigh empty prison in Illinois that may end up taking even more (hat tip, James Lamond of Democracy Arsenal).  From the the story, the admin still isn’t committing to much and there’s a law to deal with.

I am not happy about the restrictions on transferring detainees Stateside.  It is nothing but rank cowardice and foolishness, they aren’t super powered mutants nor are they leaders of cartels that can effectively lead operations from prison.  The public relations debacle that is Guantanamo Bay drives enemy recruitment, the consequences for that are real and deadly, but the illusion of a homeland that can be completely isolated from the world seems to drive willingness to but deployed troops at risk to protect against non-existent dangers at home.

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.

Ta-Nehisi Coates gets me excited about Dragon Age

I've been a bit meh on Bioware's new game Dragon Age despite being a big fan of the company.  I think there's two main drivers:

1. I'm basically sick of conventional western fantasy as a setting.
2. The marketing has been pretty low key so it hasn't caught my attention aside from some Penny Arcade comics.

I'm really enjoying Avatar: The Last Airbender right now, so I won't go so far as to say I've entirely soured on fantasy, but at this point I tend to see it as a net negative as a setting.  There's just so much that's either been done to death or is problematic.  I prefer settings that deal with issues that we are presently wrestling with or that are unfamiliar.  This is why I want to figure out ways to do more modern settings in DnD.  DnD does fantasy well and has some settings that do work for me such as Eberron, Planescape, maybe Spelljammers, our current tabletop game campaign settings.

Anyhow, Coates has one of the best communities for discussing my cultural interests that I've ever seen.  I tend to get along well with people that are drawn to his writing and he also puts in the work to maintain it.  If you want a place to talk about some of these issues, I really recommend it. I don't actually usually hang out on gaming site boards (with the exception of Brainy Gamer), but if you want to talk about the cultural aspects rather than the mechanical aspects I can't recommend his comment threads highly enough.

Anyways, here's the bit that got me excited about Dragon-Age:

As a fan of Bioware, I've been waiting on Dragon's Age for a long-time now, and it really doesn't disappoint. It reminds me a lot of Oblivion, but better. I think Oblivion offers more options, in terms of customizing, but the game was just too big for me. It felt really lonely, and combat felt non-intuitive. The thing about Dragon's Age is you can actually see people doing cool shit--like ripostes etc.

My one beef with the game is the gore--it's way too much.. But the gore actually makes the game look less mature. It makes it feel like it was built for twelve year olds who want to feel like their doing something forbidden...

Back on story, It felt right to play the descendants of slaves (What can I say? Even when I'm role-playing, I'm hood.), so I picked an elf. I don't want to say too much about the game, but the sequence where you have to storm the castle and save your betrothed is really intense. I'll have more to say as I get further in. But for right now, color me impressed.

Preliminary Droid Review

I am generally pleased. There's many lauditory reviews so I'll focus on downsides: 1 Touchscreen buttons sometimes resist triggering and other times go off when brushed over. 2 While the multitasking works great, not all apps seem to qualify, which can be tricky if you lose data when switching away. 3 Battery life drains fast if you run an app in the background. No big surprises and most of these point probably apply to many touch phones. To close on a positive not, I love the power cord, it is a usb cord [and an adaptor that let's you plug a usb dongle into an outlet. It keeps the number of wires down and that plug adaptor might help me charge other apps. The only problem there is that it is quite short. Also, appropriately, this post got prematurely posted due to my brushing the post button, but I'm still happy enough with the phone that I've gone back and finished my praise of the power options.]

Practical review: pixelpipe app for android phones

I recently picked up a Motorola Droid, a smart phone that runs Google's android 2.0 os. Much of the functunality for this phone, like the eye phone, comes from downloading apps to log on to irc, check your rss feeds, or in this case post blog entries.

Pixelpipe can handle posts, status updates, and pictures for a myriad of services. So many, really, that they should allow keyboard searches to speed things up. On first use, the interface is a bit inelegant, but at the same time is powerful. In example, it only lets me create a pipe for one typepad blog at a time and creates and extra blog, named after my email, with each add. But it was free and it's easy to work around problems. If this post shows up and looks good, consider this a positive review.

20th Anniversary of the fall of the Berlin Wall

My memories of the fall of the wall, and the people walking and then driving to west Berlin and the like, are not that strong.  Oddly enough, I more clearly remember watching on television the coup against Gorbechev, perhaps because I was in [Wales] at the time.  However, I do remember caring about it and doing reports on it and making aluminum foil dioramas.  My pastor had actually gone to Berlin soon thereafter and gotten me a few pieces of the wall, for which I’m still grateful.  My mom actually had visited the divided city, her stories of riding the subway around and seeing the shuttered East Berlin stops and their exposed lightbulbs and single patrolling guard has always stuck with me.

I’ve had a chance to tour the reunited Berlin and loved the experience.  That said, some of the East Berlin construction has got to be the ugliest architecture I’ve ever seen, and that includes Communist construction in the PRC.

All in all, I find the steady consolidation of Europe to be one of the most inspiring stories in human history, made all the more remarkable by its peacefulness after such a destructive past.  While the EU has a stodgy technocratic reputation, its steady peaceful expansion has far outstripped the 20th century expansion of the U.S.  At the same time, I’m quite proud of the role the U.S. played in the reunification of Berlin and Germany as a whole.  We put our faith in the peaceful democratic nature of our two-time enemy and that belief has been redeemed.

Condolences to the families of those killed and injured at Fort Hood

Wired’s Danger Room does a good job of summarizing many of the details.  Beyond that, spending lots of time focusing on crazies seems to inspire other crazies to emulate their methods. 

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.