Greg Sanders

Mistakes in Afghanistan, the U.S.’s and my own

I did not predict Afghanistan’s rapid fall to the Taliban. I had hopes that money without troops might give a fighting chance but sadly pessimistic takes were borne out. I knew many of the factors that drove it, but underestimated their magnitude. The challenges of corruption, dysfunction, and a lack of legitimacy raised in the Afghanistan papers were ones that were well known in the field. That said, stealing the salaries for non-existent “ghost soldiers” is a large problem but systematically failing to equip or provision actual forces is a precursor to collapse.

This failure is not the same as the Afghan National Army being unwilling to fight; as the Costs of War project reports, they’ve suffered 66,000 lost. However, it is a stark demonstration of no confidence in the fallen Afghan government and its ability to operate without U.S. military support. Kori Schake writes an apologia for this failure after $83 billion invested in training, and she concludes “We shouldn’t be surprised that many think the situation is hopeless after our abandonment and are surrendering. We should be amazed and respectful that any have volunteered to fight.” Even though I disagree with her on conditionality, I’d concur that we should not be cavalier regarding others’ willingness to face grave danger collectively for the chance at a better life. But the legitimate complaints of the Afghan Army underline our failure - after 20 years and 2 trillion spent - to have built a state with a political chance of sustaining itself or a military trained and structured to operate independently. My colleagues Anthony Cordesman and Grace Hwang put it plainly:

There are substantial official sources that show that Afghanistan was not winning against the Taliban before the [Trump] peace agreements, even with massive U.S. combat air and intelligence support as well as with the extensive support from allied forces and cadres of U.S. special forces, elite units, train and assist forces, and intelligence operators.

President Biden is correct the status quo was not sustainable. There had been a lull in U.S. casualties due to the Trump deal with the Taliban that promised withdrawal. While the Taliban held back as part of the deal, casualties had been rising in the years beforehand (though far below surge levels). Civilian casualties have been above 10,000 per year, with over 3,000 killed, for the last six years. A reliance on air strikes can result in a grim trade off between those two figures. Colleagues have suggested that approaches liked armed overwatch may have been able to enforce a stalemate while minimizing risks to U.S. troops, but I fear the humanitarian costs of such such an approach based on its antecedents in Somalia, Syria, Libya, and Yemen.

I do not think the war was doomed from the start, although there are many reasons it was inherently challenging. More important is that many of the worst and most lasting mistakes were made early on. Steve Saideman briefly outlines some of the bigger ones:

Who is responsible?  Everyone.  The US made big mistakes at the outset---relying on warlords, having too small of a footprint, sponsoring a constitution that was a very bad fit, distracted by Iraq--and other mistakes along the way--cycling generals and strategies, for example.  Obama made mistakes, Trump didn't help.  Biden's team has handled this endgame poorly. The allies could have done better (see our book for some reasons why they didn't).  Pakistan did so much to undermine the effort, and Iran and eventually Russia did some damage. The Afghans were served poorly by their own politicians. 

I focus most on the constitution because it is foundational to the challenges of building a state that can develop an independent legitimacy. While I disagree with some parts of his take, Shadi Hamid does a good job of elaborating on why the Afghan constitution, a centralized presidential system, was such a terrible fit: it alienated local and regional actors, it failed to support the rise of political parties or any checks on the President, and it raised the stakes on competition in a society riven with divides. In this early period the U.S. did have popular support within Afghanistan and far more diplomatic opportunities, but the political situation degraded over time especially as attention was distracted by the war in Iraq. No constitution will guarantee that power brokers like Abdullah Abdullah would not question the validity of the elections or force brokered deals such as the one with Ashraf Ghani after the 2014 election. However, there would have been a chance to channel more politics into coalition building and also allow for greater political variation between provinces if the governors were not all centrally appointed. The flaws in the constitution are a core reason I reject blaming America for an absence of strategic patience. When the fundamentals are flawed and many indicators are trending in the wrong direction, the limitations of perseverance are shown. We may be able to maintain a stalemate at a higher cost, but as Saiderman notes in his piece, it’s easier to break than to build.

I think a related mistake is that our often incoherent strategy, the oft lamented fighting twenty one year wars rather than one twenty year war, was frequently shaped by different U.S. factions compromising over means, enabled by in more recent years keeping costs in blood and troop counts low. I think our internal divisions contribute to our failure to apply incentives that both Mara Karlin and Rachel Tecott argue are key to successfully building a partner force. The limitations of security assistance is a longstanding topic of concern . I think we often fail to apply what my then-colleague Melissa Dalton called smart conditions. This is partially because conditions are hard for reasons Kori Schake outlined in her above piece, but also because I think our partners’ assessments of donor vulnerability are often based on the faction in the United States that considers recipient the most important. Condition based withdrawal might send the right message to adversaries but can also undermine our local partners’ incentives to address fundamental problems. Moreover, as Christine Fair notes in her harsh critiques suggesting betrayal by the U.S. and Pakistan, the actions of U.S. partners are often highly incompatible.

There are some larger issues I’m still grappling with, such as Jacqueline Hazelton’s argument that counter-insurgency involves truly ugly choices that are bad enough that the U.S. should largely stay out of them. I think we can do better on conditions, but this argument does at least help explain my surprise at the relative ruthless and criminal but ultimately more winning Syrian government counterinsurgency approach, which is in no way a model to emulate. However, I find myself more convinced by those that argue that we should have tried harder on corruption, from what Sarah Chayes argues in Foreign Affairs there was much we chose not try. I know at least one contractor facility we visited seemed disproportionately ornate for its minimal level of activity.

I also wonder about our approach to women in Afghanistan in general. In a Smart Women Smart Power podcasts, Lyla Kohinstany argues that we undercut efforts to give Afghan women a chance to participate in building security. On the peacebuilding side, evidence shows that women’s participation results in agreements that are more likely to hold. So I am skeptical about Shadi Hamid’s point on culture. I think backlash is a real phenomenon but simply trying to avoid it ties our own hands. Instead, I think the challenge is weighing backlash against both the breadth and depth of support in among Afghan women themselves. That said, in the present circumstances as shockingly courageous women protest against the Taliban and are suppressed, offering asylum must be a priority.

As for my own mistakes, three stand out:

• First, I failed to face the extent to which the U.S. had lost popular support. By 2009 the favorability in polling towards the U.S. had switched to slightly negative. I was able for some years to find related questions in the Asia Foundation polls but in the ones I’ve looked at in the past month they did not ask directly about some of the core questions of views of Coalition forces that I’d like to know. I don’t think the evidence supports the claim that “the vast majority of Afghans have always viewed the Taliban as the lesser of two evils.” However, I feel I underestimate how much support continued.
• A core finding from my 2011 trip to Afghanistan was that many of the Afghan vendors were happy, even eager to work with the United States or coalition forces. There stories were often inspiring, though of course that was a self-selected group. Those interviews supported the idea that using local vendors helped build the economy and built up the country in other ways, such as the entrepreneur that funneled her profits into a school. However, one of the hopes of the host nation first program was the eventual transition to a more independent state, and here the news was far less optimistic. They largely did not trust the Afghan government and, in at least one case, cited direct experience with corruption. I did not then and do not now know how to overcome that problem, but if I had paid more attention to it, I would have been more prepared for the difficulties of sustaining the Afghan government via financing.
• Building partner militaries is a naturally appealing middle ground in theory, but even as Obama embraced it there were many warning about its limitations.  Robert Farley’s summary piece concludes that we have had some success with special forces, but that in general the U.S. is good at building relationships but bad at building independent forces. I believe the U.S. can do more with conditions, especially because I think our strategic interests, especially in the Middle East, are often overstated and thus our donor vulnerability less of a problem than  conventional wisdom allows. However, when faced with repeated failure, analysts should be humble about their hopes for better results from better implementation not backed by structural changes. Tobias Switzer reaches a similar conclusion on humility for building air forces in particular, though as he notes our provision of ill suited equipment was a clear unforced error.

i think the biggest consequence of my own mistake was that my own attention stayed on vague hopes of a middle path rather than being one small voice trying to build up the Plan B. The number of Afghans withdrawn in August was a remarkable achievement and, as Gordon Adams notes, the U.S. was ill positioned, in part due to the timing of the Trump withdrawal agreement and an utter lack of prioritization of Afghan allies in planning or transition, to accomplish an evacuation sufficient to the need. The possibility of a longer delay was undercut by mistrust within the United States, but also would have meant both making a then uncertain Afghan collapse seem more likely and accepting even greater risks of U.S. casualties than occurred in August. It may have been worth doing anyway. Moreover, while I fear Charli Carpenter’s U.N. peacekeeping force was a longshot, I think it may have been one of our best shots for an Afghanistan not dominated by either the Taliban or years or decades more of civil conflict, especially if considered as part of an Obama administration endgame when the U.S. had more leverage.

My one hope is that for now, American popular support for Afghan refugees is holding. Future departures will depend on diplomacy than military force, but for those of us in the foreign policy community that feel we have both failed and that honor and humanitarian drives hold further obligations, there is work yet to do.

Images: A few selections from my trip. I would like to center the people of Afghanistan more but I fear showing those we interviewed or their hardworking employees would only bring them danger.

Closing bases in Afghanistan

With the closure of Bagram Air Force base, the U.S. departure from Afghanistan is picking up speed. My read had been that this is a top focus for the Biden administration, in particular driving the selection of Sec. Austin as someone that would get it done. Likewise I suspect it is largely taking precedence over attempts to use the FY22 defense budget proposal to shift policy and may have contributed to its lateness (along with the highly dysfunctional transition).

Even with that read,S I fell prey to status quo bias and so was surprised that Bagram air base has now been closed, as Dan Lamothe reports:

The transfer of Bagram air base to Afghan forces was completed with no ceremony or fanfare, a quiet end at a base that was for years the nerve center of the U.S. counterterrorism campaign across Afghanistan. U.S. Special Operations troops based there hunted al-Qaeda, the Islamic State, the Taliban and other militant groups in raids across Afghanistan’s rugged mountains to the east. Fighter jets, drones and cargo planes took off from Bagram’s twin runways day and night. Each of the previous three U.S. presidents visited the airfield during trips to meet the troops.

The base also was the site of detention facilities at which both U.S. troops and CIA interrogators tortured prisoners, according to U.S. government reports and investigations by human rights groups. The United States closed its detention center at Bagram in 2014, U.S. officials said.

Stripes also shared a quite surreal story about the Pokemon Go artifacts left behind as part of the closure.

I have been to Afghanistan once, and my part of the team went to not to Bagram but Kandahar Airfield in southern Afghanistan, which closed in May. It had already been shrinking a few year later, with the remarkable boardwalk already winding down by 2013. Home of a TGI Fridays, a floor hockey rink, and local goods shops, it was a a remarkably non-martial outpost but one of many places where memories of earlier stages of the war could lead one astray in thinking of the post-surge mission.

Predictions of coming disaster are often used to argue for indefinite interventions and I think the negative assessments have been more likely to be rebroadcast. Sadly, most of the reporting seems negative as well. Denial appears to have hampered any move to a more achievable strategy by the Afghan government. Similarly, militias taking up arms against the Taliban does reduce the risk of a takeover but could lead to a greater factionalism and ethnic conflict. President Biden is willing to offer sustained financial support, and some remote operational options, but for better or worse the core burden is Afghanistan’s to bear.

I had long hoped there may be some third way. To accept less ambitious goals, move away from the idea of a centralized presidential state in a highly divided country and even to consider autonomous regions in a Taliban peace deal.  Charli Carpenter and David Cortright argued that U.N. Peacekeeping could be one such option, though I think peacekeepers from Muslim nations would be necessarily but far from sufficient to gain Taliban consent. I generally favor diplomatic and development surges but I do believe that for them to succeed the Afghan government will need to hold its own military. I think Michael Cohen goes to far in saying disaster for the Afghan people is inevitable and the U.S. will have little influence, but I think he is correct to say that we should not sugarcoat  the downside risks for the Afghan people. For that reason, I am particularly grateful that both war supporters and opponents have come together to emphasize the criticality of visas for those Afghans that worked closely with the United States.

I strongly suspect that dating back to at least the Obama administration there has not been a deal on the table that would have been acceptable to both the Afghan government and the Taliban. I’ve long pondered Dominic Tierney’s book the Right Way to Lose a War. He proposes a “surge-talk-leave” that draws on a variety of past conflicts including the polarized war of 1812 and multiple examples where coalition disagreements complicated matters. However, even as he acknowledges coalition challenges, I think his and other approaches to Afghanistan often treat it as a two actor game and do not do enough to consider the agency of the national forces. So long as it had public support in Afghanistan, I would potentially be comfortable with keeping a residual force at the present cost of treasure and blood if it seemed to be bringing peace closer. However, my theory long was that a willingness to leave may be what it takes to have a chance of convincing the Afghan government to consider the range of options that may be necessary to achieve a political settlement, and at best that could only even be a chance. I think politics and negotiation would be critical and an ideally tailored institutional design from on high would not be sufficient, let alone seen as legitimate. However, the failure of an actually occurring withdrawal to shift dynamics makes me wonder if such hardball ever had a chance.

If you told me just over a decade ago, as I stared out at the hills of Kabul, that this is how U.S. presence ends I would have been saddened but not, I think, surprised. Even now I can easily imagine worse options. I remain skeptical of a prior Biden idea of somehow staying but narrowing even more to the counterterrorism mission, so perhaps this is for the best. My visit was a minor one, nothing compared to those who live their of course or those that served in defense or military capacities. Even so, I keep thinking back to the co-educational school we visited, funded by the profits of an Afghan contractor working for the U.S. government, and wondering where the students, their teacher, and the founder are today. This is an analytical error of sorts. The founder was charismatic and her extremely compelling story is missing the counterbalance of other missions at abroad and at home that lost out to the U.S. war in Afghanistan. Similarly, there are the stories of the roughly 857 U.S. service members that have died in that decade, more from the coalition partners and far greater losses among Afghan troops and civilians and who surely had all manner of opinions on the war in life. For now, I can just give it some measure of my attention and strive to be clear eyed in observing what happens next and learning for the future.

[Update: Revised penultimate paragraph for clarity.]

Three pieces for the 70th Anniversary of the Hiroshima Bombing

As always, speaking for myself and not my employer.

I'll start with an in-depth discussion of competing nuclear strategies for the United States.

Project Atom: A Competitive Strategies Approach to Defining U.S. Nuclear Strategy and Posture for 2025-2050

Clark Murdoch and his team are valued colleagues (though Sam has gone on to greener pastures). While I disagree with Clark on a good number of issues, I think his approach of using workshops and competing teams gets to the core of what think tanks do best, acting as a home for informed arguments. My expertise does not lie in this area, but my inclinations align with Barry Blechman and Russell Rumbaugh of the Stimson Center. The left can accurately complain that they're generally excluded from such debates in the national security sphere, but frankly I'm often relieved to find an argument at all rather than the low-end Kabuki that the Farley article describes. I'll always be grateful to Clark for stirring the pot from the audience at one of our events some years ago, providing some relief from a panel that was unexpectedly aligned rather than debating.

Do Iranian Nukes Matter?

Robert Farley of the Patterson school makes the controversial case that most of the hawkish and regional players don't care about Iran's nuclear program as much as they claim. I'm not sure I agree with the hard case of this argument, but the soft version seems quite robust to me. Those forces opposing the nuclear deal have revealed that, absent revolutionary changes to the Iranian government, they care more about maintaining an adversarial relationship than they do about minimizing the likelihood of an Iranian breakout. This is a multilateral deal, backed by Europe, Russia, and China. The alternatives opponents suggest would cause the multilateral coalition to fall apart and even military strikes would only delay Iran some small number of years. I think Farley goes too far to say various factions do not care about nuclear weapons; they just are lower on the priority list than advertised.

Magical Thinking and the Real Power of Hiroshima

I was moved by this piece by Jeffrey Lewis of the Center for Nonproliferation Studies on his visit to Hiroshima.

Over time, we’ve come to see nuclear weapons as Hersey saw them, as the ultimate expression of material and spiritual evil of total war. The bomb has come to represent the ability of our civilization to destroy itself and our nagging fear that our political and social institutions are inadequate to save us from the abyss.

This norm, really this fear, helps explain why nuclear weapons have not been used again in anger in the intervening 70 years. One might point to deterrence, but nor have we used the bomb against states with no nuclear weapons. Even Eisenhower hesitated in response to suggestions nuclear weapons night help relieve French forces trapped by the Viet Minh at Dien Bien Phu.

I think the President and those directly involved deserve tremendous credit for the Iran deal. Even though the then-Senator Obama's intention to pursue such a deal was the deciding factor for me back during the 2008 primary, at best I'd figured it was a 50-50 thing. But I'll end with Lewis's closing words:

A visit to Hiroshima would be a chance for the president to get it right and to reflect on his legacy. Maybe he would be satisfied that he has done enough — he has done more than many — but Hiroshima is powerful place. Amid the meetings and motorcades, I think the reality of the place may sneak under the cordons and around the bodyguards. It might slip past that famously cool façade and tickle him under the collar. I think the place would ruffle him a bit, more than he likes to admit. And I think like anyone else who visits, he’ll wish he had done more.

The case for selective engagement in the Middle East

Speaking for myself and not my employer.

Over the past years, starting with the war in Iraq and amplified by the failures of the Arab Uprising, I'm increasingly uncomfortable with the underlying strategic logic of U.S. engagement in the Middle East. By this, I don't just mean the perennial debate about achieving stability versus democracy. I do think that can be a false choice, but the falseness of the choice doesn't mean we can always get both together. Instead, in many cases, U.S. intervention is unlikely to achieve either, thus I'm taking the opportunity to lay out my case after a recent piece in the new newsletter Evening CSIS “Strategic Partnership in the Middle East: Respecting Our Gulf Allies, Realism About Ourselves.” It's by respected senior scholar Dr. Tony Cordesman, and just as I'd hoped he lays out a strong case for a policy I disagree with. This is not something I've discussed with him, as he's one of our most senior and respected scholars, and if the opportunity ever arose I'd need to be conversant in a lot more underlying research. However, I am comfortable making this argument on my own personal blog.

Dr. Cordesman and I are in agreement that the war of choice in Iraq was a disaster and that we should acknowledge the real differences between countries the U.S. partners with in the region. However, we disagree on his characterization as several more recent policies as mistakes. This leaves me more supportive of policies of the Obama administration, but this isn't a matter of partisanship. In the 2008 primary race between Senators Clinton and Obama, I chose to support Obama because of his policies on Iraq and Iran.  Of course, I may still have been wrong then, but if so partisanship is not the reason why.

Rather than debate the specifics of choices in Syria and regarding the Arab Uprising, I'm going to focus on the differences in underlying strategic logic that results in my standing behind several policies that Dr. Cordesman characterizes as mistakes. That logic is U.S. strategic dependence on the Middle East.

As for the U.S. side of strategic dependence, the U.S. could not tolerate a military vacuum in a region whose oil exports were critical to world trade, the manufactured imports that support the U.S. economy, and limit the growth of energy prices. While U.S. petroleum imports dropped to some 8% of total U.S. imports in 2013 and are projected to drop further through 2030, the U.S. Department of Energy reference cases still projects that the U.S. will import some 32% of its total liquid fuels by 2040.

More significantly, indirect U.S. energy imports will continue to rise.  The CIA World Factbook indicates that total U.S. imports rose to some $2.3 trillion dollars in 2013, or some 14 % of a total U.S. GDP of $16.7 trillion. Some 86% of those imports came in the form of manufactured goods, and roughly 60% of those imports came countries dependent on petroleum imports and at least 30% from Asian nations critical dependent on Gulf oil and gas. No one can deny the advantages the U.S. has gained from increases in U.S. and Canadian oil and gas production, but energy independence is at best a myth that can only affect direct petroleum imports, and will not affect growing U.S. dependence on indirect energy imports in the form of manufactured goods.

The U.S. should be concerned about dominance of the Milddle East, not a "military vacuum"

If the Middle East was dominated by a single power, e.g. Russia, China, Iran, or even a unified Gulf Cooperation Council, then that power could substantially raise U.S. energy costs through sanctions. However, with the end of the Soviet Union and ongoing intra-regional rivalries, no great power is in the position to dominate the Middle East. By comparison, a "military vacuum" may result in price volatility, which does pose real problems to the global economy, but it does not pose a risk similar to the 1970s Oil Embargo. Avoiding a "military vacuum" is a remarkably ambitious objective because it requires the U.S. to act as a hegemon rather than prevent the rise of an opposing hegemon. The Carter doctrine recognizes this:

"Let our position be absolutely clear: An attempt by any outside force to gain control of the Persian Gulf region will be regarded as an assault on the vital interests of the United States of America, and such an assault will be repelled by any means necessary, including military force." (emphasis mine)

Given the range of difficulties Dr. Cordesman illuminates elsewhere in his piece, I argue that chasing Middle East hegemony is a mistake and a distraction from Asia. This is not to say that successive U.S. administrations and Congresses do not place great value on particular partnerships in the region, notably with Israel, but advancing bilateral interests is also a lower bar than upholding hegemony throughout the region.

Imported manufactured goods are fungible

Dr. Cordesman is certainly correct that several major U.S. trading partners are dependent on Middle Eastern oil supplies, notably including China. However, manufactured goods have a wide range of inputs, in terms of the quantity and quality of labor, capital input, energy sources, etc. If Chinese goods get more expensive because of rising energy costs, there will be disruptions, but we can also buy goods from different countries that made different investments decades ago. There are also any number of substitutes available. People can pay for more maintenance services if cars get more expensive or substitute other goods. No doubt there are specific goods for which this is a larger problem, but our level of imports from oil-intensive economies in aggregate does not prove evidence of strategic dependency.

China has a common interest in avoiding Middle East volatility

Russia is admittedly an energy exporter that could benefit from volatility, but as Dr. Cordesman piece notes, the major East Asian powers would not. Specifically, China is a major energy importer and thus would likely be rather displeased by Iran mining the straights of Hormuz even if that also disadvantaged countries that are traditionally more aligned with the United States. The People's Republic of China is building its power projection capabilities, but they are not on par with the United States nor will they be in the next few decades. A rising China is a potential peer competitor to the United States because they are focused in on their region rather than engaging in Cold War-style competition across the globe. China is active in Africa and Latin America, buying resources and making connections, and if the United States does step back they will likely spend treasure, and perhaps blood, to enhance their influence there. However, China is a rising great power: they will be expanding their influence somewhere, and the range of complicating factors and schisms in the Middle East limit the marginal benefits of playing a larger role there.

Negative externalities from climate change reinforce the importance of moving away from oil

If we have a choice between spending a dollar decreasing the volatility of Middle Eastern oil prices or reducing dependency on oil, we gain a double benefit from the latter.

My conclusion: Selective engagement

I would argue that in judging U.S. policies in the Middle East, we should always consider the option not to act and should consider the husbanding of U.S. blood and treasure to be a mark of strategic success in its own right. Dr. Cordesman may well be right that more respectful partnerships with a range of authoritarian in the Middle East is the best way for the U.S. to actively prevent military vacuums in the region. However, I would argue that instead we'd be better off limiting interventions to those cases in which there is good reason to believe that we can achieve real improvements in human security in the region, be it through democracy or stability. This isn't to say that we should only act when it is a sure thing; a nuclear deal with Iran has long been a fifty-fifty shot at best. But in my opinion, either bargaining hard to stay in Iraq under P.M. Nouri al-Maliki or pouring weapons early into Syria were unlikely to achieve much good even if they would have pleased frequent partners in the region.

Discussing examples are debates for a different time that require support specific to the situation. I am laying out my strategic disagreement here because I disagree with a postulate held by many in the U.S. foreign policy establishment. To often, such postulates go unstated, and I greatly appreciate that Dr. Cordesman lays out his case and evidence in detail.

I am still unconvinced by the argument for direct U.S. intervention in Syria

As ever, speaking for myself and not my employer.

The New York Times editorial board and Kevin Drum do a good job of laying out the case that the President should seek Congress's approval before going to war in Syria.

In the end, aren't the president's personal convictions all that prevent any military operation from escalating?

It's a fair point, and I'm glad he brought it up. The answer, I think, lies in congressional approval for military action, and this is one of the reasons I think it's so important. If Obama is truly serious about not sending combat troops into ISIS-held areas in Iraq, then let's get a congressional resolution that puts that in writing. Let's get an authorization for war that spells out a geographical area; puts a limit on US troop deployments; and specifically defines what those troops can do.

Would this be airtight? Of course not... But nothing is airtight—nor should it be. It's always possible that events on the ground really will justify stronger action someday. However, what it does do is simple: It forces the president to explicitly request an escalation and it forces Congress to explicitly authorize his request. At the very least, that prevents a slow, stealthy escalation that flies under the radar of public opinion.

Presidents don't like having their actions constrained. No one does. But in most walks of life that deal with power and the use of force, we understand that constraint is important. Surely, then, there's nowhere it's more important than in matters of war and peace. And that's one of the reasons that congressional authorization for war is so essential.

ISIS did heinously execute two Americans that were already in Syria, and they should be punished for that. However, as Zack Beauchamp pointed out, the President implicitly noted that they are not a significant threat to the United States and there is no immediate crisis preventing getting congressional authorization. Syria continues to be an extremely challenging foreign policy problem and as Marc Lynch summarizes, the political science research on the civil wars does not support the idea that we could have just fixed it by intervening to a greater extent:

Would the United States providing more arms to the FSA have accomplished these goals? The academic literature is not encouraging. In general, external support for rebels almost always make wars longer, bloodier and harder to resolve (for more on this, see the proceedings of this Project on Middle East Political Science symposium in the free PDF download). Worse, as the University of Maryland’s David Cunningham has shown, Syria had most of the characteristics of the type of civil war in which external support for rebels is least effective. The University of Colorado’s Aysegul Aydin and Binghamton University’s Patrick Regan have suggested that external support for a rebel group could help when all the external powers backing a rebel group are on the same page and effectively cooperate in directing resources to a common end. Unfortunately, Syria was never that type of civil war.

So put me in the skeptic camp on the benefits of striking Syria. I was less skeptical with the war in Libya, but I take the same position now as I did then: if the President thinks this is a good idea, then take it to Congress. It's in the Constitution for a good reason and there aren't any circumstances that prevent it. Were I in Congress, I'd be inclined to vote no absent notable constraints. However, I'm in the minority there apparently, so what's the harm in asking?

69th Anniversary of the bombing of Hiroshima tonight at 7:10 p.m. Eastern time today (August 5th)

Kate’s Mother passed on a reminder to me.

I thought I would pass on the link to http://www.worldpeace.org/ in case it was of interest to anyone that’s been reading along.

[Update: Fair warning, audio quality on the stream is not the best, there’s a buzzing, hopefully that’ll get fixed.]

[Update 2: We’re guessing it’s actually cicadas in the background which does make sense for summer time in a park.]

International Relations Debate Notes: Reputation for Resolve

Routine reminder: I speak for myself and not my employer.

What’s a reputation for resolve? The summary below will lay out the technical definition, but the short version is that those calling for more coercive action (be it military or economic) backing up U.S. threats and red lines regularly cite reputational benefits that will go beyond the immediate incident. Alternately, those believing in the importance of reputation for resolve may simply argue for making more limited use of threats and red lines, as is outlined below. This ties into a variety of related concepts; reputation in general, deterrence, and credibility all tie together to the concept, but the biggest controversy lies in the resolve component.

The Foreign Entanglements show on Blogging Heads TV recently had a debate on the matter that I summarize below because I think that you often can learn more of the strengths and weaknesses of each side when they actually talk to one another. To more succinctly summarize the discussions, I’ve grouped arguments thematically rather than by when they occurred in the video. For a literature review going in, check out the blogging heads link or this Drezner piece from a few years back.

Mercer’s Deterrence Theory:

Deterrence is based on credibility/reputation which has three parts:

• Power: What a state’s capacity is. What forces or tools does it have available and how costly is it to use them? In general the United States is the highest capacity state in the world, but it varies from case to case. When it comes to Iran or Russia, Europe has more economic tools available.
• Interest: How much does the country care about this issue? The United States does not have a high interest in Libya or Syria, but fought a war in the former case and not the latter. By comparison, free travel of oil through the Straits of Hormuz is considered a high interest of the United States.
• Resolve: Whether a country’s leadership seems likely to use its power to assert the interest in question. In poker terms, does the county’s leadership have a tendency to bluff?

Critiques to a reputation for resolve

Going back five years or so, the resolve portion of that triad has faced substantially more skepticism from academic political scientists. Farley was defending the strong critique, not just that a reputation for resolve is not applicable as the situation varies, but that it is not even well enough understood to be a useful concept. Farley argues that the reason for this is that we cannot predict how actions that send messages will be received. There's too many moving parts. Specifically, had the U.S. bombed Syria without overthrowing Assad, this might have been viewed as a result that failed to demonstrate resolve.

Debating the examples

Farley countered that we we have not seen a reputation for resolve in practice. Our red lines against Iran include, for example, mining the Straits of Hormuz. These have not been pressed and what we have done in Syria has made no difference. The reason for this is that we obviously have greater interests at stake in Iran. On the other hand, red lines often do not work when our interests are weak; for example, our red line in Syria did not work even though we had just deposed Qaddafi in Libya.

Gartenstein-Ross argues resolve when your interests are highly involved is different than when they are peripheral. He outlined the reputation for resolve as relevant in two categories 1) where U.S. interests are low but a clear threat is made, 2) where U.S. interests are directly involved but the situation is messy. He argued that Syria was reacting not to Libya but instead the lack of U.S. response to Iran's support of insurgents that killed Americans in Iraq and Assad's allowing foreign fighters to transit through Syria to Iraq.

Farley argues that we have no real visibility into the Assad regime; one could tell a competing narrative that the U.S. would be interested in payback when an opportunity arose due to the weakness of his regime. This leaves reputation for resolve as a variable without predictive content. Gartenstein-Ross agreed that the Assad regime would consider both stories. This is a case of acting with incomplete information.

Farley points to Cold War history, saying that if academics and historians can't establish a how a reputation for resolve works with the extensive archives from the Cold War, then policymakers should be extremely careful about making any decisions on the basis of a reputation for resolve.

How to implement academic humility

Gartenstein-Ross laid out that he believes that reputation for resolve is a case where the academics are experiencing a bias towards variables they can measure. In one example, for a time the statistic-oriented baseball fans undervalued fielding because there wasn't a good way to report on it, unlike hitting. Leaving out an important variable could then lead to an undervaluing of certain players and worse performance for the team despite a more scientific-seeming approach. Gartenstein-Ross specifically believed that academics were prone to make this mistake and believed they made the same error when discounting the specific religious content of belief systems in militant organizations.

Farley replies that practitioners are not acting in a theory-free zone; they are operating with theories that come out of Cold War deterrence theory and Thomas Schelling. They continue to operate with this Cold War understanding because that's where they gained much of their experience. Those with the strongest and most visceral feel of reputation and resolve were old Russia hands. Academics should be humble, but that humility encourages tearing down previous academic theories that are now obsolete. It is possible that we will find a way to show the impact of reputation for resolve in the future, but in the absence of such evidence we should not expend blood and treasure to maintain a reputation for resolve.

Gartenstein-Ross says that the two views are not necessarily irreconcilable. He is not arguing for expenditure of blood and treasure to maintain a reputation for resolve. Instead, when things are not in our interest, we should be very hesitant to make any sort of threat if we are not willing to fulfill it. By this means reputation can be obtained, and we should use this mechanism.

The utility of bluffing and a reputation for resolve

Farley queries whether this means Gartenstein-Ross wishes to take the bluff away from the United State's strategic toolkit. He further charges that many of those who say we should have acted in Syria are doing so on the basis that we could better bluff our way through Crimea. Farley raises the example of the Chinese air identification zone. In that instance, the U.S. flew B-52s, planes that you cannot possibly overlook, through the zone and China did nothing. Similarly, he says that Putin has effectively deployed bluffing on multiple occasions.

Gartenstein-Ross stands by his view and argues that the Chinese bluff was counterproductive. During the unipolar moment in the 1990s we had a high ability to bluff.  However, our relative decline over the past thirteen years have weakened our ability. He finds the U.S. bluff on Syria to be outmoded thinking much as Farley argues that the reputation for resolve is outmoded. Bluffs are now more likely to be called, both because of the reduced capability and because of the vicious circle of he reputation for resolve because bluffs that are called.

Gartenstein-Ross then returns to the Iran example in pointing to the utility of a reputation for resolve. The U.S. has a variety of red lines with respect to Iran. Some are clear, like the Straits of Hormuz. However, there are subtler moves regarding the nuclear program where a reputation for resolve can matter. Reputation for resolve is not as important for the bluff, or the big policy areas and matters of war and peace, but for subtler decisions it plays a bigger role.  He says that while he's more skeptical than Farley of political science's ability to truly measure something like the reputation for resolve and thinks Farley overstates a legitimate critique, he believes that it's something that should be better understood.

My own thoughts

Gartenstein-Ross argues the more limited case for reputation for resolve and I think to really judge that debate we’d have to get into the literature on bluffing. That said, it is important to remember that in the specific case of Syria, tons of chemical weapons were removed from the country and their existing facilities were demilitarized. There are allegations of continued use of chlorine gas and continued atrocities by the Syrian government are indisputable, but the significant quantity of weapons and facilities destroyed is a boon in its own right.

What’s more telling is that the Gartenstein-Ross’s limited case for a reputation for resolve points to greater restraint when U.S. interests are low. He repeatedly argued that President Obama’s mistake was setting the red line, not in failing to enforce it. While he noted that our reputation for resolve was diminished by failing to engaged in unspecified retaliation against Iran and Syria for aiding insurgents in Iraq, he did not lay out any positive mechanisms by which to increase our reputation for resolve. If spending blood and treasure are off the table and limited strikes will make little difference, than wherefore complaints from other commentators about the President’s policy in Ukraine? U.S. sanctions have slowly been ratcheted up. European allies have been slower to act, but due to greater connections with Russia their actions have had greater effect.

What about complaints from allies?

This debate did not touch on one source of complaints of ill-resolve: those from U.S. allies. Gripes have been made in public and in private. Vehement critiques of resolve like Daniel Larison do not dispute the existence of such complaints but instead argue that they play to Washington’s pride and insecurity. I don’t doubt that some of that goes on, but I think some of the behavior may have a less harsh interpretation, namely allies bargain about who should bear the burden of common interests. Matt Yglesias gives an example of how this works in European debate over sanction policy:

The biggest gas importer is Germany, which would rather see someone else's ox gored. Angela Merkel has been talking up the idea of a ban on the export of military equipment to Russia. Conveniently, Germany doesn't have a big outstanding weapon sale to Russia. But France is scheduled to sell advanced Mistral naval vessels to Russia. Much of the international community wants France to cancel that deal, hurting the Russian military and the French economy while leaving others unscathed. Meanwhile, from the French viewpoint a better countermove might be for the UK to seize Russian funds and property squirreled away in London.

It’s not that France, Germany, and the UK doubt one another’s resolve, they’d just genuinely prefer that someone else pay the bill and no doubt can come up with compelling normative reasons why this is so. Rather than applying the deterrence-elated concept of reputation and credibility writ large to allies, I would argue that we should apply a range of appropriate tools, such as collective action problems to negotiation theory to security dilemmas. This is not to say that complaints from allies are merely bluffs and puffery – the current alignment of the Middle East in particular is genuinely unstable - but that their use of the word credibility should not dictate our choice of intellectual framework.

Hiroshima Peace Museum: Main Building 2014-05-28

Content warning: The main museum gets most directly into the consequences of the bombing of Hiroshima, beyond even what is shown in the East building.

Walking through corridors showing the damage done to Hiroshima to property and to people, I certainly felt a moral imperative that these weapons never be used again. However, how is it that nuclear weapons have only been used twice in battle? I believe deterrence and mutually assured destruction is part of the story, but a key related concept is what Thomas Schelling calls the nuclear taboo. At first the escalation to nuclear weapons was seen as more of a continuation of existing policy than a radical break during WWII, and President Eisenhower made nuclear first use a policy in the event of a conventional Soviet invasion of Europe. However, by 1964 President Johnson declared “Make no mistake, there is no such thing as a conventional nuclear weapon. For 19 peril-filled years no nation has loosed the atom against another. To do so now is a political decision of the highest order.” This reflected earlier decisions not to deploy them in Korea and subsequent avoidance by the U.S. in Vietnam, by Israel against Egypt in 1973, and by the Soviets in Afghanistan. Nina Tattenwald discusses the origin of the taboo (summary by Patrick Lam) and the main building passionately and decisively makes the case that this taboo must be maintained whether you believe in full abolition or that they’ve contributed to the decline in great power war.

The displays (excerpted online) covered the multitude of ways that nuclear weapons can visit destruction upon cities: the rays of heat, the blast itself, the conflagration of flammable materials, and of course the radiation. The picture on the left shows a portion of the facade of a bank where someone was sitting at 8:15 that morning, likely waiting for it to open. Given the location, the person died on the spot, the stone around them was blasted white while the steps underneath them left the remnant of their “shadow” in the middle of the picture.

The mangled remains of the city, stone, wood, and steel filled many of the displays showing the widespread extent of the damage from a single nuclear bomb with a small yield by today’s standards. The museum did its best to mark where each piece came from within the blast zone. The details filled out the almost incomprehensible damage shown in the photographs and the detailed model on the right. One piece I don’t have the heart to include in the display was the shredded remnants of the school uniforms of children who died in the bombing or the days thereafter (let alone the photographs of the burned bodies directly afflicted). Some had been evacuated to the country but others were conscripted to create firebreaks and in anticipation of conventional bombing.

Death and devastation can come in many forms. As I’ve earlier mentioned, more people died from a single raid in the firebombing of Tokyo; however, that raid involved 334 B-29s with 279 dropping bombs. By comparison, the Enola Gay flew with only two other planes, suggesting a terrible potential to scale that was achieved by both sides in the Cold War. This is also where the radiation comes in, as experienced by many of the hibakusha, the survivors of the atomic bombs. Sadako Sasaki, who helped inspire the Children’s War Memorial, had been two at the time of the bombing but died years later of leukemia despite having been quite healthy in the interim. The picture on the right are some of the cranes she folded; you may have read or heard of her story when you were a child.

The remainder of the museum focused on the stories of survivors, the rescue and recovery efforts, and even pictures drawn by those who were there. This was complemented by prayers and wishes for peace from around the world and a view out to the rest of the park. Based on the wikipedia page, one million people visit the museum a year. I hope, in addition to whatever else we do to make this a better world, we all work to keep this taboo from fading.

Hiroshima Peace Museum: East Building (Pt. 2) 2014-05-28

The first floor of the museum continued to show a variety of consequences of the bombing, but I’d like to focus on the letters that make up the wall undergirding the model of the A-Bomb Dome. They are written on behalf of the people of Hiroshima to protest every nuclear weapons test. The letters continue until present day and are primarily not driven by states like North Korea, but instead are by ongoing sub-critical tests by Russia, China, and the United States. Such test produce no yield of fissile material and are allowed under the Comprehensive Nuclear Test Ban Treaty. However, while such tests are safer than other forms of testing, the city government objects to their intent as it seeks nuclear disarmament. I’d be interesting in discussing those issues in further depth at some point, although it was not my international relations focus and at my think tank (who I continue not to write on behalf of) the topic is handled by a different program. However, suffice to say, the topic is not a flight of fancy. The arsenals of the U.S. and the former Soviet Union have shrunk dramatically and there are any number of steps that disarmament advocates call for, such as de-alert weapons or ruling out first use, short of total abolition.

The second level dealt with Hiroshima under Allied occupation, specifically British Commonwealth forces in this city’s case. This is a topic I am somewhat familiar with, although it has been several years since I read Embracing Defeat. The exhibit focused on the ramifications of the bombing, from the Red Cross hospital where survivors were treated on the left, to the U.S. government studies of the effects of radiation poisoning that at times prioritized secrecy of treatment of the afflicted. Particularly hard-hitting for us, due to my Mom’s prior work at the United States Information Agency (not extant at the time), was the discussion of censorship on reporting of the extent of the damage to Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Restrictions imposed after the outbreak of the Korean War also prevented public gatherings including the 1950 peace festival, although the mayor did travel abroad to speak on the topic in France. The occupations of Japan and Germany are widely viewed as the best examples of the potential of rebuilding an enemy after a war. I still agree with that assessment, although I think there are many factors that resulted it in not being an applicable model elsewhere and it’s important to remember that even after the war ended there remained policies that put security concerns above ethical ones.

Finally, the top floor focused on the current state of nuclear weapons in the world, with the globe on the right showing declared stockpiles. I found this part to be informative and well-argued. I also particularly appreciated the sheer number of languages offered in the digital displays. That said, there’s a few other books I’ll be ordering and a few debates I wish to watch before I write in greater detail on these topics. The next portion was the museum shop, from which we acquired a good number of bilingual children’s books on the Sadako and the Thousand Paper Cranes and other materials before proceeding to the second building. That one was rawer now that the the context has been established, and included more artifacts. It reminded both Moti and myself of nothing so much as the Holocaust Museum, both in content and caliber. I am yet unsure if I can do it justice in this format. I may continue on with the trip in the next post and save any further discussion for writing that is not travelogue.

To end on a slightly more hopeful note, I do want to emphasize the extent to which the de-escalation and then end of the Cold War has dramatically reduced the global stock of nuclear weapons. This should not encourage complacency; North Korea has gone nuclear and even now the world powers are in talks to reach a deal with Iran to prevent further proliferation in the Middle East. But if anyone tells you that the world is scarier now than it was at the height of the Cold War, they are trying to sell you something or just don’t know what they’re talking about. The progress we’ve made on preventing the annihilation of the human race is vital, and some credit must go to those who have made it their lives’ work to convince leaders and peoples of the world that these weapons must be constrained.

Hiroshima Peace Museum: East Building (Pt. 1) 2014-05-28

Some years ago, in my home town of Washington, D.C., the Air and Space Museum had an exhibit about the Enola Gay, the plane that dropped the atomic bomb on Hiroshima. I believe I went through it, but I may just be conflating pictures of the plane with past trips to the museum in my ever fallible memory. Regardless, that exhibit unsuccessfully sought to avoid controversy by focusing on the technical aspects and avoiding politics and context. Worse yet are museums that actively distort the past for propagandistic purposes. By comparison, the Peace Museum takes an extremely challenging topic and addresses it in a forthright and informative matter.

The initial section gives the history of Hiroshima leading into the Second World War. Hiroshima was a garrison city a staging area for troops in various wars, one of the centers for emigrants from annexed Korea, and an industrial town with a significant reliance on mobilized students and forced labor. The panel on the right discusses the invasion of China: “Early in the War with China, the Japanese Army occupied many Chinese cities. In December 1937, it took the capital city, then called Nanking. The occupation of this important city cheered the Japanese people, who considered the war in China a holy crusade. Hiroshima’s residents celebrated with a lantern parade. In Nanking, however, Chinese people were being massacred by the Japanese army.” It goes on to briefly discuss varied estimates of the death toll. Wartime atrocities are not the subject of the museum - for that there is the Kyoto Museum for World Peace - but it squarely addresses the context of the bombing before making the hard case against it.

After reviewing the history, the museum proceeds to the actual attack. There are any number of artifacts, although the greater detail is held for the second building and a future post. On your left is a pocket watch donated by Akito Kawagoe, stopped at the exact moment of the bombing. The discussion of the decisions of the U.S. government does not rely on hyperbole. Instead it presents key memos and minutes from the debates, showing various competing views. As is somewhat widely known, the old capital Kyoto was also considered as a possible target. However, its selection was vehemently opposed by Japan experts within the U.S. government as a sacrilege which would destroy any hope of future peace with Japan. The museum did not specifically argue that there was a clear course that would have achieved peace without the use of the bomb, but did highlight that possible concessions, such as allowing the continuation of the imperial system as the occupying forces did anyways, were not deeply explored before the attack.

 

The destruction of the bombing was shown in multiple forms, including the two models above. One related point mentioned by the museum, but not an area of primary focus, was that the firebombing of Tokyo and not the bombing of Hiroshima or Nagasaki is widely cited as the source of the largest casualty count from a single air raid. The horrifying specter of nuclear war is not just the enormity of the individual bombings, but that the threat can scale up in a way that more air force-intensive operations could not. This relative continuity in death toll is perhaps one of the reasons why the specific morality of the atomic bomb was not as hotly debated. In many ways it was a continuation of existing policy by other means. However, the questions raised there require research beyond the scope of this post.

Our last morning at Peace Memorial Park 2014-05-28

The entire group wanted to spend time at the museum, but Kate, my mother, and I decided to get up earlier and attend the daily carillon ringing at Peace Memorial Park one last time. The chimes toll electronically, with a slight background buzz, but I’m still moved every time I hear it.

When approaching the carillon, we passed by a large number of students, respectfully gathered at the Children’s Peace Memorial. They presumably were there with similar intent when it came to timing. Moti was not with us, so I could not tell you what exactly was said, but the sentiment was unmistakable.

We then walked to the west side of the island, which we had not yet explored. It was perhaps the portion in which the weight of history was felt most heavily as it included the Atomic Bomb Memorial Mound which sat over a vault holding the unclaimed remains of many of the victims of the bombing.

Further south is a monument specifically to the Korean victims of the attack. It estimated their number at twenty thousand, about ten percent of the dead. [The total casualty count estimated by the memorial is higher than most other sources, but the estimate of the number of Korean dead is in line with what I’ve seen elsewhere]. Japan occupied Korea well before the U.S. had entered the second World War and the garrison city of Hiroshima had a population that were soldiers, mobilized students, and ordinary civilians. Later in the trip, at the Osaka Human Rights museum, I got to see video of other Koreans, then residing in Japan, celebrating the end of the war and as one might expect very glad to see the end of the occupation of their nation. The placement of this memorial on the main island is actually a relatively recent change, one that happened only within the past few decades. I’m very glad that it did.

Update: Fixed the date in the title and add a note on the casualties.

Arriving at Hiroshima 2014-05-26

While I loved the entire trip, Hiroshima is what I cite as my favorite part. This was partially true because I had been to Kyoto, Osaka, and Tokyo in the past, so while still spectacular they were not as packed with discovery. Also, while Japan is a treasure trove of trains, Hiroshima is flush with trams, both of the single car streetcar and the two car long trolley variety. The short length is made up by volume, a mixture of classic cars like the one on the right to smooth curves of modern models. After completing our misty ride on the Sakura line from Osaka to Hiroshima, we rode one of those classic cars into the city center and then walked down to our hotel, the Tokoyu Bizfort.

My mother called it in for the night, and the rest of us walked down a covered promenade towards the river and the Peace Park. I’d seen such plazas on my past trip; they’re a natural outgrowth of large pedestrian-friendly cities that have an extended rainy season. We stopped for a chocolate snack at the Stick Sweets Factory before walking the rest of the way to the Peace Memorial Park.

The Park was once a busy downtown commercial and residential hub. In 1945 Hiroshima was a garrison city, but still an urban space in its own right. The nominal target of the atomic bomb was the Aioi bridge at one end of the island. The building Hiroshima is perhaps most known for, the A-Bomb dome, was the Hiroshima Prefectural Commercial Exhibition Hall, the closest building to survive the blast. We walked through the park as the sun went down.

The Wind Rises

The wind is rising! . . . We must try to live!
- The Graveyard by the Sea by Paul Valéry

The Wind Rises is the story of an aeronautical engineer, of dreams of flight, of the gifts and price of love, and about the choices we make as the world around us falls apart. It is the last masterpiece of Hayao Miyazaki, the famed Japanese anime director, but the setting is the all too real-world Japan during the interbellum period. The film is subtle and understated: I believe it will reward repeat viewings, but dream sequences and time skips may also leave first-time viewers a bit confused. This fictionalized tale of Jiro Horikoshi, designer of the famed Japanese Zero fighter, does demand patience and an interest in the mechanics of flight, but should be quite accessible to American audiences and those who do not typically watch animation. I recommend it as a true work of art, one that wrestles with challenging questions and largely overcomes its flaws. To go any further requires a deeper discussion of the plot.

Discussing those flaws requires grappling with the thorniest question of the premise: how does it handle the war? In abstract terms, this film is a tragedy. The more you know of history, the more signs and portents are at hand. By the midway point, this is made quite explicit by a Cassandra who intrudes with mentions of just what was happening in the world in the early 1930s. I think that character is key to the film, although a venerable friend found him off-putting.

Moving on to spoiler-filled reviews, Inkoo Kang in L.A. Weekly and Devin Faraci do speak to the tension in the piece but I think Film Critic Hulk [and the shouting-free SBT] effectively retorts most charges. I sympathize with critics’ desire for a film focused on challenging revisionists (and indeed, Miyakazi has done so in writing). I in fact have one such Japanese film on my shelf, the Human Condition, which I intend to watch before writing up my final thoughts on The Wind Rises. However, The Wind Rises is a subtle knife and not a manifesto, and both have a role in changing minds. While I view it as a great film, I do think the critics hit their mark when they complain of the absence of the foreign victims of Imperial Japan from the piece. Manchuria is referenced and this is a home front piece, unlike Das Boot which effectively depicted a historical a take no prisoners policy. However, I do think that the frontlines that Horikoshi was so distant from could have been depicted in his dreams even as he assiduously ignored them in his waking life.

Flaws acknowledged, this is an important film. We do not live in uniquely dangerous times, but nonetheless the wind rises.

Image credit: Promotional stills taken from pieces by paulselluloid and Barbara Chai.

[Update: Added a positive review that doesn’t use all caps.]

This blog opposes a military strike on Syria

My grounds are fairly straightforward. We don’t have the backing of a major Arab ally, let alone a major regional organization or the U.N. Security Council. The first is certainly not sufficient but that we lack it is terrifying. In Libya our initial action did have the backing of the Security Council and we got support from the Arab League to go further. That support weakened as time went on, to be fair, and similarly I will note that the verdict is still out on Libya’s outcome.

I’ll also note that while horrific video is out there, let’s get the report from the U.N. inspectors. They’re there; they won’t be attributing responsibility, but it isn’t for the U.S. to judge whether their arrival was sufficiently timely.

Ultimately, while I think there are good political science and economic cases against, I actually found Noah Millman’s breakdown decisive:

Since the creation of the United Nations, the only legitimate justification for the unilateral use of force is self-defense. Nobody alleges that a strike against Syria is an act in self-defense.

Nobody is even seriously defending it under “responsibility-to-protect” which was the justification for the Libyan intervention (and the Kosovo war before that). RTP extends the concept of self-defense to the defense of others. It’s a highly suspect doctrine with obvious potential for abuse – potential that was very arguably realized in the Libyan case. But even this expansive mandate for intervention doesn’t apply to Syria, where we are not proposing to protect the rebels but to punish the Syrian government for its reported use of chemical weapons against civilians.

If we launch an attack on Syria, it will not be under any legal warrant whatsoever. But the entire public justification for an attack is the to punish Syria for a crime of war – that is to say, the justification is the need to uphold international law. In other words, an attack would be an open declaration that the United States arrogates to itself the right to determine what the law is, who has violated it, what punishment they deserve, and to take whatever action is necessary to see it carried out. If that’s liberal internationalism, then I’m a kumquat.

I favor building a legal case against Assad. I don’t believe that will hasten the end of the war, but nor will this bombing.

As ever, I speak for myself and not my employer.

I'm schedule[d] to be on 1500AM Federal News Radio this afternoon to talk about Defense Contracting sometime after 3

Along with DIIG Assistant Director Guy Ben-Ari, the plan is we'll be speaking with Francis Rose about trends in defense contracting. It may be around 3 p.m. but no promises.

If you'd like to listen online, it should be live steaming from the Federal News Radio site.

[Update: The archive is available from Federal News Radio]

This blog favors voting for Obama and moving to a primarily criminal-justice/intelligence approach to anti-terrorism efforts

On my Google Reader feed, I’ve recently noted my agreement with voting for the Obama administration even if you have a variety of legitimate critiques against them on foreign policy militancy or war on drugs grounds.

Four quick reasons: the President has respected our status of forces agreement with Iraq and withdrawn from that nation, the President opposes waterboarding and Gov. Romney does not, the President is far less likely to launch and ill-advised strike against Iran, and on domestic policy grounds while Obamacare, which Gov. Romney has promised to gut, needs to go much further it is still the greatest advancement of the U.S. social safety net since the sixties. On top of this, I’d add that I am unaware of any civil rights issue on which the Republican candidate is better than the President.

Nonetheless, this should not to be taken as a statement of support for our drone bombing campaigns in Pakistan and Yemen. Similarly, I’d favor working out a status of forces agreement that could pass muster in the Afghan parliament, and if that means accelerating our withdrawal or reducing the amount we operate outside of bases before that withdrawal, so be it. Obviously, there are many on the left that are more vehement on these issues and I respect that. I’d encourage the American citizens among them them to vote for the President, eyes wide open, but I respect if they wish to criticize U.S. policies and withhold/retarget money/labor from campaigns as a means of applying pressure. The lesser of two evils argument just applies to voting, trying to use it to squash reasonable foreign policy criticisms is illiberal.

Towards that end, here’s a Kevin Drum post on some of the civilian deaths that inspire that criticism. He calls attention to one particular poor practice that is escalating the number of these casualties.

It appears that drone activity has declined in 2012, although that may be an artifact of the time it takes to gather data. Aside from the raw numbers, though, Glenn draws particular attention to this passage from the report:

The US practice of striking one area multiple times, and evidence that it has killed rescuers, makes both community members and humanitarian workers afraid or unwilling to assist injured victims. Some community members shy away from gathering in groups, including important tribal dispute-resolution bodies, out of fear that they may attract the attention of drone operators. Some parents choose to keep their children home, and children injured or traumatized by strikes have dropped out of school. Waziris told our researchers that the strikes have undermined cultural and religious practices related to burial, and made family members afraid to attend funerals.

…There's no question that fighting a counterinsurgency is hard. And it's fundamentally different from fighting a conventional war because it's difficult to separate militants from civilians — something that insurgents explicitly count on. But even if you accept drone strikes as a legitimate part of counterinsurgency, and even if you accept that civilian casualties are an inevitable part of that, "double tap" strikes are simply heinous. They're also far more likely to turn the indigenous population against you, which makes them counterproductive as well as immoral. After all, it's not as if top al-Qaeda leaders are the ones likely to be conducting rescue operations. At best, you might get a few foot soldiers but nothing more.

Again, the whole post is well worth reading and brings more data to bear (go to Greenwalt or the recent drone report for even more). So I support dropping the ‘double tap’ strike immediately and moving away from a war model. Obviously, the criminal justice model failed to prevent 9/11, but the best response there is to improve the model rather than adopt a military one. The initial military approach cost more American lives, let alone hundreds of thousands of Iraqis, than were lost to Al Qaeda. The drone war approach does have far fewer deaths associated with it than the occupation approach, but Osama Bin Laden is dead, al Qaeda is not the force it once was, and it’s time to end our wars. As Drum notes this is hardly a popular position, but it is not going to get more popular unless we talk about it.

Usual caveat, speaking for myself, and not my employer.

Event: SIPRI military expenditure data 1988-2011

The briefing: The Stockholm International Peace Research Institute (SIPRI) is well known for their military expenditure data which emphasizes consistent global coverage. Sam Perlo-Freeman went over the data. World spending is $1.7 trillion and for the first time since 1998 did not increase in real terms. That comes to $249 per person or 2.5% of world GDP. This leveling off was driven by the United States, although otherwise patterns from 2010 to 2011 I hard to discern. Russia and some developing world countries have been moving up on rankings and European countries have been down, although the U.S. is still dominant at 41% of global military spending. One regional point: Asia and Oceania has overtaken western and central Europe in the past few years.

SIPRUI puts the U.S. at $711 billion in outlays, which includes State department military age. That puts it at 4.7% of U.S. GDP, one of the higher rates in the world. They anticipate overall spending to fall given the end of the wars, assuming no new ones start, and if sequestration starts in January 2013 it will mean much steeper declines. By comparison, the total for Europe was fairly constant, but only thanks to increases from Russia and Azerbaijan (89%!). In central Europe the cuts started in 2009, spending in western Europe  ha been declining more recently although France, Germany, and the U.K. have been making smaller cuts so far. As you might expect, Greece, Spain, and Italy have all had fairly dramatic cuts.

What’s an anti-interventionist liberal’s alternative to Paul?

Over at L'Hôte, Freddie argues that the argument over Rep. Ron Paul’s weaknesses has been used as a distraction from the larger critique of American interventions. Robert Farley pushes back some on the specific Indonesian example Freddie raises. While I’m generally anti-occupation I’m not an anti-interventionist, but I think it’s important to keep them part of the discussion.

I’d first like to note a point of disagreement with the post.

Left wing politicians like Bernie Sanders and Dennis Kucinich have embraced discussion of foreign policy and civil liberties, and for their trouble they have been dismissed as unserious by the self-same progressives who now dismiss Ron Paul's ideas…

I do think Rep. Kucinich does tend to be dismissed, but I don't think discussing Sen. Sanders (no relation) is taboo. Ezra Klein interviewed him in August of 2011. Admittedly Klein interviews many politicians, but in May of 2011 he posted video of Sen. Sanders smacking down Sen. Rand Paul. In June of 2011 Klein argued that the moderation of Sen. Sanders proposals, compared to Republican extremism, shows that the national debate is imbalanced. The Senator from Vermont appears to appreciate Klein's work and cited him from the floor of the Senate in June(Source: Fishbowl D.C.). Now that’s just Ezra Klein and is in a domestic context, so perhaps the specific objection is that Sen. Sanders foreign policy views aren’t really discussed.

That objection aside, the question Freddie raises at the end is well worth addressing:

I want those who profess belief in liberalism and egalitarianism to recognize that they are failing those principles every time they ignore our conduct overseas, or ridicule those who criticize it. What I will settle for is an answer to the question: what would they have us do? If you can't find it in you to accept our premises, at least consider what you would do if you did. For those of us who oppose our country's destructive behavior, there is no place to turn that does not result in ridicule…

I think the solution is primary challenges for members of Congress. Matt Yglesias and Freddie have disagreed about this point before but I think the key argument for congressional challenges is that they have a proven track record. The various conservative groups that now make up the Tea Party make regular use of primary challenges and have been rewarded with increasing ideological consistency in Republican Party.

This isn’t to say they haven’t overreached and cost the Republican party seats, it’s a tactic with clear limits. However, I think the experience on the Republican side, see the 1992 election, also indicates that Congressional challenges are far less likely to backfire than Presidential ones. Working on getting state government elected officials is generally a good idea but obviously isn’t that helpful for shifting foreign policy.

I think clear and enforceable red lines are another fairly effective technique. This means picking certain issues where disagreeing with your group means denial of funding or even actively supporting a replacement candidate. Part of the reason there’s such strong pushback against Rep. Paul is that he impressively manages to violate the redlines of almost every member of the liberal coalition. In the 2008 election, I’d say the anti-interventionist made fairly effective use of support for the Iraq war as a redline issue which is part of what got President Obama the nomination. I think that electoral effort deserves part of the credit for the fact that we’re did comply with our treaties and withdrawal the U.S. military (if not contractors) from Iraq.

This is actually an area where a fair amount of popular support is potentially available as both the war in Iraq and in Afghanistan lost popular support well before they lost elite support. Dan Drezner has argued that realism rather than liberal internationalism has more support among the American populace. To be sure, realism is not primarily concerned with preventing U.S. complicity in overseas violence but it is fairly consistently anti-interventionist in a way that does check liberal and neocon hawkery. I’d advise finding one or two policy statements that have support from a strong majority or vehement plurality in a fair number of states or Congressional districts. The anti-war movement probably doesn’t have the clout to raise their own challengers, but such criteria, if publicly applied, could help leverage existing resources by targeting them all at one race.

I think it would also be fair to withhold funding from any candidates, including President Obama, that violate your redlines. While I do have some strong objections to some of President Obama’s actions on civil liberties and foreign policy, I’m still willing to donate to him. However, I think redirecting donations of time or money away from a sitting Presidential candidate, even in a tough race, is a perfectly valid tactic for anti-interventionists. We all have to pick priorities.

Celebrating the end of the Iraq War

Mixed feelings are the common response to the news that the United States has completed the terms of our treaty and withdrawn from Iraq. That is appropriate; there is substantial uncertainty about Iraq's future and there is a level of ongoing violence that belies the term peace.

However, I would argue that celebration is also appropriate. I'm glad that we were able to end ahead of schedule giving the recently deployed a chance to celebrate the holidays at their home. The withdrawal completes a process of de-escalation that first saw troops pulled out of Iraqi cities and then out of the country entirely. As one might expect, this process involved steady declines in the level of violence directly precipitated by the U.S. occupation. While there are still Americans in Iraq who will maintain our relationship with that country and at times be in harm's way, the withdrawal is no illusion; the change has been significant and I suspect any attempts to reverse it would be politically disastrous.

There are those that argue that while this may prove temporarily good news for us, it will come at Iraq's or ultimately our expense. I would counter with my second reason to celebrate: we chose to respect the will of the Iraqi people as expressed through their nascent, troubled, and yet still somewhat democratic institutions. To the right, you can see the parliamentary vote on the Status of Forces Agreement that set our deadline for departure, an agreement that had been negotiated under President Bush. The abstentions are certainly troubling, but I have seen no evidence that they, let alone the Sadrist-dominated no voters, favored a less restrictive agreement. After we returned sovereignty to the Iraqi government they are without question the competent authority under just war theory to determine whether America's involvement should continue. They decided it should not, at least not under conditions acceptable to the U.S. government. Arguments about whether we could achieve a better result by staying longer should only come into play after answering the question about whether we have the authority to stay.

Thus while there are many to mourn, an overabundance of regrets, and a widespread sentiment that the war was a mistake, I would argue that we should celebrate its end. The return home of our troops, the reduction of violence that we're participating in, and the triumph of treaty law in dictating the timeline are all outcomes worth celebrating.

As ever, I speak for myself and not my employer.

Back from Afghanistan

I got back yesterday. It's been quite a research trip, but not the sort I can write up as the interviews were for work and were not for attribution. I think I understand some of the fundamentals of Afghanistan a bit better now but had no dramatic revelations. 7 or 8 days in country does not make one a regionalist or an expert in the war.

I'll save any further thoughts until tomorrow, after President's announcement tonight on withdrawal.

Anyone who goes by "the great" is an egomaniac 2011-04-18

Ramses the II, or Ramses the Great, was a successful conqueror who guaranteed his place in history by the incredible measures he took to ensure that he could not be forgotten. This is shown all over Egypt, but for the moment it makes a good way to introduce his work in Luxor temple. He built and expanded temples, but he also made sure that he laid claim to older sites and statues by having his name, in hieroglyphic cartouche format, over that of prior rulers. Rejecting the sentiment of "turnabout is fair play" he then commanded that his cartouche be chiseled incredibly deeply into the stone, to ensure that such a rewrite could not happen to him.

Statues of Ramses II guard the entrance to Luxor temple, and he never seems happy to have just one statue of himself when he could build two or four. That said, the pharaoh may defend himself by noting that statues do fall down and their faces all too often are eroded, which is all the more reason to make backups. At least the statues didn't always have the same pose, he would sometimes change his headdress or even his height between statues. This also happened when depicting the gods, and I suppose this reflected different aspects of himself or just was meant to keep things visually interesting.  However, we don't really see any Ramses at leisure, Ramses making a silly face, or the like.

Perhaps the least charming aspect of Egyptian temples is their tendency to depict chains of captured or beheaded foes, the pharaohs beating down enemies with their maces, or a sitting depiction of the pharaohs stepping on various rivals. As a testament to the range of peoples on Egypt's borders, these enemies tend to come in at least two ethnicities shown to the left and right. In this particular display each enemy had a cartouche with the name of the captured city, like a conquest tracking info-graphic out of the game Civilization. If I ever find an image of a bunch of these little guys pulling down the overarching figure of the king, I will snap it up in a second.

Metaphor duel: Zombies versus Robots/Cyborgs

In a clash of professors Charli Carpenter has been making a humorous but genuine critique of Dan Drezner's International Politics and Zombies. She gave a video presentation at the International Studies Association that's well worth watching if you have any interest at all in international relations and or the pop culture topics. If your interest runs deeper, check out their bloggingheads.

Sen. Lugar is right, Libya merits of a declaration of war

His statement, written up by David Jackson in USA Today (passed on by someone I follow in Google Reader) bears quoting in full.

Senator Dick Lugar, the ranking Republican on the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, reiterated his call today for "full congressional debate on the objectives and costs" of President Obama's military actions in Libya, "and a declaration of war" to proceed.

"There needs to be a plan about what happens after Gadhafi," Lugar said. "Who will be in charge then, and who pays for this all. President Obama, so far, has only expressed vague hopes.

"Congress has been squabbling for months over a budget to run the federal government for a fiscal year that is almost half over," Lugar said. "We argue over where to cut $100 million here and there from programs many people like. So here comes an open-ended military action with no-end game envisioned.

"With the Arab League already having second thoughts, and Turkey nixing NATO taking over, today there are even more questions. We also have to debate how all this effects the Saudis, Bahrain and Yemen.

"The facts are that our budget is stretched too far and our troops are stretched too far," Lugar said. "The American people require a full understanding and accounting, through a full and open debate in Congress."

I am not as skeptical of Libya as are many in the progressive community. I don't think I would have chosen this level of intervention with the information I have available given the inability of the rebels to hold off Col. Gadhafi's onslaught on their own. That said, I do think the Security Council provides sufficient authorization from an international law perspective. However, there is also the matter of our constitution and while I do think that this situation has arisen because Congress has abdicated its responsibility as Yglesias argues, that doesn't remove the need to publicly go to Congress. I'm unimpressed with the administrations private consultation of Congress, I believe it happened but its still not sufficient. The war powers act should be enforced. The President must either get Congressional authorization or withdraw our support within 60 days or much sooner. I'm not saying Congress should vote no, but they should vote.

A no fly zone for Libya?

I think legitimacy is a key issue here. China and Russia have both gone along with an arms embargo and financial sanctions as well as referral to the international criminal court, but have expressed strong skepticism about going further. That said the Chinese position doesn't seem to be vehement:

Li Baodong, China’s ambassador to the United Nations, emphasized the need for diplomacy to resolve the crisis, and respect for Libya’s territorial integrity, Bloomberg reported.

“We believe that this political crisis should be resolved through peaceful means such as dialogue,” Li told reporters at the U.N. in New York, according to Bloomberg. “We respect the sovereignty, independence and territorial integrity of Libya.”

Li said China would “heed and respect the opinions and positions of Arab countries and African countries.”

That same article by the Ann Simmons also notes that that the Arab League is discussing the possibility of a no fly zone in combination with the African Union. That seems like the most likely way to establish legitimacy. On the whole, multilateral diplomacy seems to be bringing an increasing number of assets to bear. This isn't to downplay the fact that people are being killed but the past ten year experience shows fairly definitively that simply removing a dictator doesn't necessarily get you to a peaceful country. Ultimately, I think the Libyan opposition forces, together with their defected diplomats, should work on making the positive case for their movement and showing that they'll be capable of healing their country. Their military work has been impressive but there's hard political work ahead. While waiting is frustrating, I think there is an opportunity here for the opposition to truly become a transition government.

Mubarak may be stepping down.

Too soon to say on the details, but it does sound as if this would still be a transition within the ruling party. Vice President Omar "Egypt is not ready for Democracy" Suleiman is a likely successor. Whoever comes next, there will definitely be some policy shifts and concessions. Whether there's genuine reform will be trickier to guess but the sustained commitment shown by protestors does make me think that there's now an activist core that can be a source of continuing pressure.

If you want to watch what comes next live, Al Jazeera English is probably a good choice.

Beyond the point of no return in Egypt

From what I'm reading from a range of sources, mostly Twitter, it sounds as if the security situation has deteriorated in Egypt with many blaming the former security services for the looting. U.S. citizens are being offered evacuation. From David Kirkpatrick and Alan Cowell's reporting for the NY Times, it sounds like a crackdown order is coming:

But the soldiers refused protesters’ pleas to open fire on the security police. And the police battered the protesters with tear gas, shotguns and rubber bullets. Everywhere in Cairo, soldiers and protesters hugged or snapped pictures together on top of military tanks. With the soldiers’ consent, protesters scrawled graffiti denouncing Mr. Mubarak on many of the tanks. “This is the revolution of all the people,” read a common slogan. “No, no, Mubarak” was another.

By Saturday night, informal brigades of mostly young men armed with bats, kitchen knives and other makeshift weapons had taken control, setting up checkpoints around the city.

Some speculated that the sudden withdrawal of the police from the cities — even some museums and embassies in Cairo were left unguarded — was intended to create chaos that could justify a crackdown.

If enough of the Army cooperates, Mubarak could still get control of the situation. However, it would be a discredited regime that emerged from the rubble. We're now seeing an Egyptian population that is willing to stand up and choose its own destiny. I think John Quiggin is right in that we are seeing the end to the Arab exception [which treats Arabic nations as unready for democracy], although the oil rich emirates can probably buy their people off for some time to come. Yglesias highlights the key point (emphasis Yglesias):

The point applies most obviously in relation to oil. The idea that the US can legitimately use its military power to ensure continued access to oil resources rests, in large measure, on the (not entirely unfounded) assumption that those controlling the resources are a bunch of sheikhs and military adventurers who happened to be in the right place, with guns, at the right time. Without the Arab exception, the idea of oil as a special case, not subject to the ordinary assumption that resources are the property of the people in whose country they are found, will also be hard to sustain.

It is time to say that we will not support a regime that engages in a brutal crackdown and that free and fair elections are the only soft landing available. More important, it's time to call in the chips we have with the military to increase the odds that a crackdown order is not obeyed. The removal of the police forces made this a double or nothing situation; martial law without security services will likely prove reminiscent of the Tiananmen square massacre where police forces were similarly inadequate or unavailable.

[Minor grammar edits and a clarification on the term "Arab exception."]

What Caprica[‘s pilot got] right and wrong about suicide terrorism

I just started catching up on the second half of the first season of Ron Moore’s Caprica (I just got through episode 10). I won’t get into spoilery details but the sci-fi series is based on the richest world of a multi-planet civilization. The technology is not far advanced from ours and the social climate is typified by decadence escapist virtual reality networks. A key plot driver is a religious terrorist group, called the STO, which in a twist on our reality are monotheists in a polytheistic world. Andrew Sullivan had recently reminded of Robert Pape’s research on suicide terrorism and I thought it might be interesting to see how Caprica matches up. As a quick side note, I classify the STO as clear villains and as a general rule disapprove of any violent tactics target civilians, understanding motives shouldn’t be confused with condoning them.

What Caprica gets right:

• A strategy of weak actors: True enough, the STO are outcasts.
• Targetting democracies: Based on what was shown in Battlestar Gallactica, Caprica is the seat of government for the democratic civilization and thus this definitely holds.
• Suicide attackers “are most often educated, socially integrated, and highly capable people who would expect to have a good future.” This also seems to fit with the small number of bombers shown in the series as well as with their larger network.
• Terrorists are typically recruited through their social network: This isn’t directly from the Pape summaries but I’ve heard it elsewhere and it holds true of the STO network recruiting in Caprica.

What it gets wrong:

• Terrorism is primarily a nationalistic and not a religious phenomenon with the objective “to compel democracies to withdraw military forces from the terrorists’ national homeland.” The STO’s grievances appear primarily to be religious. They hate Capricans, often their own people, for their decadence.
• Notably, as Kate reminds me, Battlestar Galactica actually got this right as Spencer Ackerman covers in a spoilery Slate article from 2006. In that instance, some of the humans used suicide terrorism against Cylon occupiers (the Cylons were even a democracy of a sort, just an evil one).

So why does this matter? In many ways, Caprica works as a dark mirror of our world. Anti-heros abound and we know the civilization only a few decades away from apocalypse. I suspect that in addition to entertaining its meant to provoke hard thoughts about where we’re going as a people. The trouble is that it gets the casual mechanisms wrong, suicide terrorism is not about alienated youths in and of themselves.

To be clear, this research, summarized here in an op-ed and in slightly greater detail on wikipedia just applies to suicide terrorism and not other assassinations and bombings. The dataset they use to reach these conclusion is freely available online. I could find the STO quite plausible as a terror organization, but unless and until the STO gets a notable piece of future-tech working I don’t think they’d have a ready supply of suicide bombers available. I don’t think it’s a decisive problem, suicide terrorism hasn’t been a huge part of the series and if it hadn’t come up in a recent episode I wouldn’t have thought of this at all. Also, in fairness to Caprica, perhaps it is an aberration in the series universe as well, but if it is I don’t recall hearing any evidence to that effect.

Update: After sleeping on it, I wanted to emphasize the last point a bit more. After the two-part pilot, we don’t see that much action from the STO either way. So, conceivably, the big event that got the whole series rolling could have been a fluke. Pape’s research might not apply to the second half of this season based on spoilery exogenous technological advancements.

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.