David Castonguay

In Praise of Warlords

2010-02-27T09:06:00.001-05:00

The following article appeared in FPIF. Follow the link above for the original version.

The United States helped develop and gradually train the Afghan National Forces (ANF) to defeat the resurgent Taliban. The Obama administration is stepping up this effort. The United States plans to makes the ANF the basis of a strategy that will allow the gradual turnover of tasks in July 2011. However, the United States is banking too much on the ANF. A better approach would be to empower the tribes, their elders, and the local militias to reject insurgency and play a greater role in the politics of their country.

The United States has made some efforts in the past to use local militias but only in a limited fashion. Instead, since 2001 the United States has continuously increased its role in fighting Afghanistan’s counterinsurgency, while the indigenous fighting capabilities effectively withered or passed over to the Taliban. The 30,000 troop escalation reinforces that mentality and is likely to be counterproductive in the long run. The strategy relies on a false belief that the surge in Iraq worked because of more foreign troops. Rather, it worked because the conflict between Shias and Sunnis exhausted both factions.

Instead, the solution lies within the Afghanis themselves and in particular the tribal system of the Pashtuns. The U.S. military must change its approach and emphasize tapping into these existing regional power structures. U.S. military officials must identify the leaders that are ready to work with the central government, reject insurgency, and do the fighting themselves instead of having foreign troops do it for them. Failure to do so will only put the ANF in the same situation that U.S. troops experienced over the last eight years — except that the Afghani army will be worse equipped and the overall governance structure will remain incoherent.

Last week, the ANF successfully defended Kabul against a brazen yet small-scale Taliban attack. But this was an anomaly. It took place in the capital away from the tribal regions. The ANF is not likely to become effective on a national level in 18 months.

First, despite last week’s successes, the ANF’s fighting capabilities have achieved a very poor record. The police and the Afghan army — the two major components of the ANF — have constantly given ground to anti-Afghan groups, which include the Taliban, other insurgent groups, and freelancing “commanders.” It has lacked the staying power, the discipline, and the courage that their opponents have. Additionally, central government agents such as the soldiers and officers of the ANF have a reputation for stealing from the population and being corrupt. The population of the rural regions often perceives the Taliban as stronger in providing security and fairer in dispensing justice.

Worse, the ANF is likely to face even greater problems. If we go by the experience of the creation of the Iraqi National Army, the ANF is likely to go through rampant desertions, defections, the possible use of the uniform to deliberately attack rival groups, and a general lack of will to fight. These problems will only become apparent when the United States presence starts to withdraw.

Furthermore, the head of the ANF training program, Maj. Gen. Richard P. Formica, has said that the ANF will not reach maximum capacity before 2013 — and that is probably an optimistic assessment. Building a modern central army is a long and expensive process.

Problems on the Ground

Afghanistan faces deep levels of corruption and fragmentation of governance which doesn’t bode well for the ANF either. “Commanders” exact fees for providing security to convoys and moving goods through their territory. These commanders aren’t part of the central government. They are essentially self-serving private groups that govern their stretch of road or parcel of territory. Some are Taliban, some are associated with them, and yet others have unclear allegiances.

The orthodox view is that the surge will knock the wind out of the insurgents and create some breathing space for the ANF and its civilian counterparts. But even a more aggressive timetable for training the ANF — which the Pentagon has asked for — is unlikely to help. In short, the United States is banking too much on the ANF.

Instead, the United States — as it still has the power to determine what direction the country takes — should go the path of least resistance and emphasize a bottom-up approach. The United States should recognize that corruption and fragmentation of power in the regions is, to a certain extent, endemic to Afghanistan. The United States should embrace this situation, rather than fight it. To do so, the United States needs to identify and empower the groups that are friendly to the central government and make every effort to reconcile those that aren’t. General McChrystal, the U.S. commander of the Afghan theater, has rightly said that “you can’t kill your way to victory.”

A Different Approach

Engaging local groups made up of tribes and warlords (or commanders) means according greater autonomy to them. Over time, they would consolidate and incorporate within the greater security apparatus of the country.

These grassroots efforts need greater emphasis — through intelligence on tribal politics, Afghan government reconciliation initiatives, and U.S. military engagement and empowerment of tribes and local leaders — because Afghanistan is a decentralized country. The most important and irreducible political unit is the tribe, at least in the Pashtun lands. Implementing a central government with western apparatus of control is akin to social engineering, bypassing the native political workings of the environment.

A centralized country has certain advantages. But going too fast with centralization (and dictating to someone else how fast they should go) risks implementing structures that are too weak to survive.

Currently, government agents lack legitimacy in the eyes of the locals, therefore giving rise to repeated accusations of corruption and injustices that erodes their capacity to operate and empowers the anti-Afghan forces. This lack of legitimacy and the weakness of the central government have created anarchy that has increasingly defined the country since 2002.

In a country where the internal politics look more like relations between states — rather than the normal relations inside a country in which the state has the monopoly on violence — self-determination is all the more important. It's also conducive to a long-term cooling down of the violence through a process of balancing power and negotiating relationships at the national level.

The Virtues of Decentralization

Yet there are many observers who see tribal politics, warlords and militias as a serious threat to the central government. Seth Jones clearly states “the U.S. assistance to warlords weakened the central government” in the aftermath of 2001. He and others believe that this kind of business is the principal reason why governance in the country has been so poor and the insurgency so strong. This viewpoint has been predominant amongst western deciders and intellectuals.

In fact, it’s the other way around: The poor governance and the resulting insurgency have stemmed from attempts to rule the country from the center in the image of modern states. The U.S. assistance to warlords was always as a last resort, done in an ad hoc fashion, and there was never any follow up to get the warlords in line with the central government. Instead, there is evidence that grassroots efforts, when properly supported, have a greater chance of success.

Ann Marlowe reported from Afghanistan last year that 250 soldiers of the 82nd Airborne were able to secure the highly contested province of Khost during their tour. The troops were able to win the support of Khost’s 13 tribes but when their tour was over the Taliban were able to regain control of much of the province, despite an increased American footprint. She also mentions the demise of a warlord in Herat that nevertheless resulted in a net security loss in the province.

Marlowe concludes:

If troops don't understand Afghan culture and fail to work within the tribal system, they will only fuel the insurgency. When we get the tribes on our side, that will change. When a tribe says no, it means no. IEDs will be reported and no insurgent fighters will be allowed to operate in or across their area.

This is a lot more than what the ANF can offer. Unlike the ANF, tribes and their leaders have the authority and legitimacy to stop their members from joining the insurgents.

Warlords in Afghanistan have a bad reputation because of their poor human rights records and their tendency to fight one another ever since the 1990s. But “warlord” doesn’t necessarily mean the big warlords of old. Rather, the label applies to any local commander who can muster a militia and garner local legitimate support. The commanders who can be friendly to the central government hold the keys to stability and rejection of the insurgency because they are legitimate elements of the social fabric.

This has been demonstrated time and again in Iraq where tribal culture is also important. The Sunni insurgency in Anbar and elsewhere, while couched in a greater national struggle, started to improve when the U.S. Army and Marines engaged rather than estranged the village elders and tribal leaders.

In Afghanistan, in the northern province of Kunduz, mounting pressure from the Taliban was successfully reversed by Bakhtiar Ludin, a former mujahedeen, and his militia after gaining the support of the central government in 2009. Mr. Ludin was helped by U.S. Special Forces, the CIA, and their Afghan counterparts. They revived the old Mujahedeen in their area — one of them was running a fish restaurant. They responded to the Kunduz governor who said if nothing was done, he’d have to side with the Taliban.

In another example, the 1st Battalion, 5th Marines in Helmand province turned a bad situation around this summer by adopting a population-centric rather than an insurgent-centric approach. Gen. Michael T. Flynn explains:

Many local elders quietly resented the Taliban for threatening their traditional power structure. The Taliban was empowering young fighters and mullahs to replace local elders as the primary authorities on local economic and social matters.

Based on its integrated intelligence, 1st Battalion, 5th Marines took steps to subvert the Taliban power structure and to strengthen the elders’ traditional one.

This speaks volumes for the presence of an indigenous tribal political structure that must take a central role in the greater counterinsurgency strategy and the rebuilding of the country.

The Tajik Example

Finally, there is the experience of Tajikistan recently documented in Foreign Affairs. With a minimal budget, international efforts were able to stabilize the country in the 1990s by allowing local warlords to retain more autonomy. Instead of less effective governance, warlords were able to generate more of it because they had genuine control over their area. On the national level, an essential balance of power was struck, borders were controlled and the country eventually moved on:

Rather than forcing free and fair elections, throwing out warlords, and flooding the country with foreign peacekeepers, the intervening parties opted for a more limited and realistic set of goals. They brokered deals across political factions, tolerated warlords where necessary, and kept the number of outside peacekeeping troops to a minimum. The result has been the emergence of a relatively stable balance of power inside the country, the dissuasion of former combatants from renewed hostilities, and the opportunity for state building to develop organically. The Tajik case suggests that in trying to rebuild a failed state, less may be more.

But giving a greater role to the tribes and the militias isn't a new idea. Just over a year ago, an American-backed plan experimented with the arming of a militia in Wardak province. The Obama plan itself talks about the need for U.S. troops to work with local political units and their militias. Yet it's a matter of what elements are emphasized and whether the U.S. military can change its culture.

Even the intelligence community has severe shortcomings in the knowledge department necessary to fight a successful counterinsurgency. In a scathing report, Flynn said the intelligence community was “ignorant of local economics and landowners, hazy about who the powerbrokers are and how they might be influenced...and disengaged from people in the best position to find answers.”

Adding more troops is possibly counterproductive in the long run, because it only postpones the inevitable playing out of the situation after the Americans are gone. In the end, the solution to Afghanistan will have to come from Afghans. The sooner tribes are engaged and the the sooner American and ISAF deciders stop seeing Afghanistan through their own political institutions, the less painful it will be. If this doesn’t happen, then the fledgling ANF is likely to crumble rapidly after the foreign forces are gone. And that will only extend the U.S. mission beyond what the American public, the Afghan population, and even the U.S. military itself can tolerate.

What Needs to Happen After the Marjah Offensive

2010-02-12T10:58:00.001-05:00

In Afghanistan, the Marjah offensive is about to begin. NATO and Afghan troops will invade the Taliban controlled town of 80,000 people and more than likely dislodge them. Thereafter, a new security force and government will be created. It is difficult to judge how much of a fight the Taliban will put up. Some have reportedly left the area aware of the publicity surrounding the operation. Yet other insurgents have built defensive positions and mined roads and pathways ready to defend.

Historically, it has been easy for NATO troops to defeat the Taliban in any given area. The problem has been to keep the land once they hand it over to the Afghan police and army. In the spirit of the new Obama strategy, this time must be different. Marjah can serve as a new model that can set the tone for things to come. For that, Afghan forces must take the lead in the offensive and they must receive praises from their government in the aftermath of their victory in a sort of publicity stunt similar to what we had in the repelled Taliban attack on Kabul a few weeks ago.

The real issue however is what the coalition and the central government do to administer and secure the area after the offensive is over. We can expect whatever is put in place in Marjah to survive just by the sheer weight of attention and resources likely to be poured in, but the decisions taken now may only reveal their impact one or two years down the road. Decisions about the structure of the new government and the composition of the security forces will be crucial for the longevity of the arrangements in this Pashtun tribal locale. It will be important to stress local elements and engage any potential pro-government commander and its militia to take an active part in the security arrangements. Just as important will be to give a strong and effective role to the elders in governing their own traditional land. This is to avoid the past mistakes of putting in place weak, corrupt and disconnected central government agents. At the risk of irritating the Karzai government, funds and resources ear tagged for the area will have to be distributed directly to local elements. Failure to do so will mean the temporary stability will disappear in a year or two.

The Afghan interior minister recently convened the Marjah elders in an effort to coordinate the transition after the military offensive. The tribes will be allowed to form two councils which will advise the government of the region on policy and local political appointments. Going further than this, the U.S. and central government powers must be able to seat the real power within those councils. They cannot be mere advisers or the governance problems of the past will repeat themselves. Tribes represent the basic political structure for the area; anything superimposed on top of that must be able to gain consent from the elders of the tribes. If the central administrators fail to win local support and if they act in a corrupt way in the eyes of the local population, elders may switch their support to or otherwise facilitate the return of the Taliban. This is what happened in the past and it can happen again.

The real problem is with legitimacy. It is not, as some claim, a matter of reconstruction. If the reconstruction efforts take place in a climate of political discord, it will appear to be the act of outsiders and will not gain any traction no matter how many hundreds of thousands is spent on schools, roads and irrigation. It is time we make room in the Afghan constitutional framework to devolve powers to areas such as these to accountable local powers. In these rest the tradition of governance and justice that will help extricate the regions from Taliban control and influence.

The second aspect of the issue is with the security forces that will keep the peace and prevent the Taliban from coming back. "Give me your sons and we will make a national police force with them" said Afghan interior minister Hanif Atmar. Recruiting locally is no doubt the right thing to do. The presence of central government forces in the area is also necessary. However, beyond those measures, efforts must be made to seek out local commanders in the area that may be willing to defend the area in conjunction with official government forces. Disbanding local militias has been a mistake in the past.

Perhaps the local militias are currently aligned with the Taliban. Once they are defeated, those local elements and their commanders must be allowed to remain full and must be empowered to play a role in this fairly remote area of Afghanistan. Allegiances can change and no where have they done so more than in Afghanistan in its 30 years of war. The pro-government forces must avoid branding individuals and their groups as necessarily Taliban when they are a potential help to the stability of a locale. Most of these people only want peace and don't really care whether the powers above are from the central government or the Taliban. Sometimes, they resent both and this is why they must be allowed to play a greater role in their own backyard. This is follows a basic principle of accountability and respect.

Recognizing instead of disbanding local militias presents the problems of fragmentation and coordination of security efforts, but failure to do so has a greater potential of breading dissent and helping the opposition in the longer run. Politics is never easy.

Disambiguating Corruption in Afghanistan

2010-02-06T14:33:00.001-05:00

Some observers on Afghanistan claim that ending corruption is key to a successful resolution of the Afghan conflict. However, ambiguity over what what constitutes corruption and which type of corruption is bad for Afghanistan can create empty statements and hazy recommendations. There are two types of corruption - political and economic - which we can further subdivide into local or central phenomena.

Afghanistan is a primitive economy with little legal framework and few institutions to regulate the way business is done. A contract to move goods for instance can be sealed over a cup of tea and a hand shake. This leaves a lot of room for corrupt practices such as pocketing money for personal gain, patronage, bribery and other impairments to "economic competitiveness". However, because of the weakness of governance, enforcing laws pertaining to economic transactions is difficult - neither is it necessary. A society can effectively function without complex legal contracts and procedures. Patronage, for instance, was a mainstay of the politics and economy of the Roman Republic and Empire throughout its history.

The U.S. government, in its attempts to help Afghanistan, is wasting its time trying to change local economic corruption. Yet there is still one aspect to be wary of here and that is how much international monetary assistance actually find its way into the hands of the enemy. By controlling territory, the Taliban and other insurgent groups have ironically the capacity to indirectly receive funding provided by the U.S. government (for instance, the U.S. will subcontract a trucking company, which then has to pay local insurgents duties to pass through territory they control). Given the economic situation of Afghanistan, some of this is unavoidable until the enemy is destroyed or reconciled.

The second category of corruption in Afghanistan is also economic but takes place at the top. Here, the problem is more important because the scale is bigger. It's also something the U.S. and the Afghan government can do something about.

Due to the same weaknesses we find at the local level, Afghanistan's resources can similarly be funneled to a handful of well connected cronies. Because the rich spend less of their incomes, and because it is easier at this level to take the money or profits out of the country, economic corruption at this level is worst.

Since this type of corruption affects international aid, the U.S. has the power to act on this and it should. In principle, international contributions are made to accomplish something. If that something is not fulfilled, then we have a failure of foreign policy. Big ticket items such as building roads, trucking contracts and construction projects should be handed out with greater accountability. Instead of supplying those services and goods through our own means (such as PACs), the U.S. government should continue to enable local elements. But they should break it down in smaller pieces (think micro-financing) and bypass the central government when it makes sense going straight to local endeavors. They can also use a tiny portion of the contribution money to hire a small army of American civil servants to monitor projects and see that things are being done.

To curb the problem of top economic corruption, the Afghan government could also heed the recommendations of Ashraf Ghani, an Afghan politician, and create an independent auditory body to monitor the financial transactions of government officials and members of their entourage.

The third category is local political corruption. This concerns the administration of the regions, tax collection, law enforcement and security. It is often what we call "governance" and it is of utmost importance. The amount of political corruption and the weakness of governance in the regions are the main reason why the insurgency has gained strength. Since I have discussed it before, I will not do so here. Suffice it to say that the root causes for local political corruption were a lack of legitimacy in local institutions administered by the central government and interference in tribal self-determination. The solution should be a move towards a de facto federative state granting more autonomy to the Pashtun tribal areas.

Lastly, let’s discuss political corruption in the central government. The latest example of that comes from the formation of the Karzai cabinet which was rejected initially by parliament at the end of December 2009. The progressive parliament wants an end to political appointees nominated for reasons other than technical merit, or open democratic appeal. There is no denying it: Karzai nominates cabinet members based on their ability to bring blocs of votes during the campaign as well as their capacity to deliver more broadly political support for the government. Afghanistan is not a democracy like we have come to expect in the West. Its internal situation is more akin to the international landscape of states vying for power in an anarchic environment.

While empowering progressive parliamentarians and reducing political corruption is a good objective, it should not be of immediate concern. In fact, the type of power broking and dealings that continues to take place is a necessary process that still needs to go a distance with the discontent Pashtun segments of Afghan society.

By and large, fixing corruption will not resolve the conflict in Afghanistan should therefore not be central to the solution. It is an impossible or incoherent task given the nature of the Afghan system. Moreover, corruption is primarily a problem within the Afghanistan that "works" - the one governed by the northern coalition of victors in 2001 and headed by Hamid Karzai. The Afghanistan that doesn't work is in "Pashtunistan". While recognizing that political corruption at the local level is the primary cause of the insurgency, fixing the corruption in the system is not the right angle. Instead, the U.S. should focus on supporting the right local actors therefore bypassing the problem of corruption or passing it on to the local actors instead of weak central government agents.

Resolving the economic corruption at the top would also have a positive impact on regional economics which would in turn keep young men away from insurgency, but it will not resolve the fundamental problems which are political and military in nature. The solution rests in negotiations and reconciliations with what Karzai called his "discontent brothers", and incorporation and representation for them within Afghan society and government. Alternatively - but also conjointly - the means are to destroy the enemy that seeks no compromise.

Quetta Shura

2010-01-27T12:33:00.001-05:00

Balochistan is another example of the unintended consequences an external military force can have on the legitimacy of a region’s political institutions. A well intended effort can quickly spread instability and alienate potential allies. Instead of quickly fixing a problem, it can take longer if the goal does not carefully match the means.

Balochistan is a large province in the south-west bordering both Iran and Afghanistan. Quetta is the southern tip of “Pashtunistan” and the presumed refuge of Mullah Omar the leader of the Afghani Taliban. He is part of the Quetta Shura, a collegiate group from which radiates Taliban and jihadist command and control and influence. The Shura is one of 3 main Taliban political center in Pakistan.Osama bin Laden could also be holed up in Quetta or the Pashtun part in the north of the province.

Historically Balochistan - much like the Tribal Areas to the north-east - has benefited from a large degree of autonomy due to its tribal background. The Balochs are a people who came from Iran 900 years ago. Balochistan was also the battle ground of a proxy war between the British and the Russians in the 19th century in the “Great Game” for resources and access to the sea in the Hindu Kush. The location of Afghanistan and Pakistan can again become the center of more international attention as China and India are looking west.

In any case, the autonomy and the future of Balochistan is currently in danger. The Baloch Assembly increasingly sees its power compromised by the greater penetration of the central government in its affairs. Some internal opinion believes there is potential for a civil war. The arm of the central government are the Frontier Corps (FC) in Balochistan, a central paramilitary organization responsible for maintaining security in the border areas for Balochistan but also for the Tribal Areas.

These incursions have come to a point where an analyst of Balochistan talks of a “parallel government” ran by the cent pak gov through the FC.

The pressure in Balochistan is likely to mount as the United States seek ways to engage the Quetta Shura. Despite being the location of Mullah Omar, the United has been unable to target Balochistan militarily like it has done in other sanctuary areas directly or through the Pakistanis.

The central government has led successful military offensives in both the Swat Valley and South Waziristan in 2009. In those areas, the Pakistanis saw vital threats to their own power and is the reason why they acted at great costs of their own. Historically, these offensives only took place after a treaty between the Tribal Areas and the central government collapsed amidst the turmoil left by the demise of President Pervez Musharaff.

The Pakistanis have recently said they would suspend any renewed offensives for a year. So that leaves North Waziristan and Balochistan untouched. Yet, North Waziristan is under heavy aerial drone campaign. Balochistan is different and no direct action by any side appears possible.

So what parties have to look for is the FC. But a better alternative would be the Baloch provincial institutions of government.

Many Balochistan people see the FC as a self serving entity, more concerned about increasing their power at the expense of the indigenous (democratic) institutions. They are seen as enriching themselves by controlling the lucrative smuggling activities while neglecting their duty. Officially, it’s protecting the Baloch people, denying access to the border to the “bad” people and seeking out anti government - and anti-afghan forces - within the province.

Since they do not serve their primary purpose the U.S. command is denied an important sanctum in Pashtunistan. And yet the FC continues to receive substantial portions of the U.S. aid sent to the Pakistani military.

The behavior of the FC is somewhat similar to the roles independent commanders - large and small warlords - play on the other side of the border in the lawless, anarchic parts of the country. While the afghan equivalents come from a weak central government, the Baloch case exhibits a predatory and corrosive effect on already existing institutions. The tip in the balance comes from resources – arms, money, and external support – that is being given to the FC but not to the Balochistan natural authorities.

The other forces in the region also destabilizing Baluchistan is, of course, the Taliban and other similarly minded groups. This is where things get so complicated because support for the Taliban comes from different sources. The FC is sometimes unconcerned with the Taliban and can also be quietly supportive. Similarly, within the province of Balochistan, there are those who reject the Taliban and wish to conserve and augment democratic and western liberal values, and those who have a soft spot in their heart for Muslim militancy and traditional values.

But even the democratic faction in Balochistan - who should favor efforts to defeat the most subservient religious extremists in their midst – disapproves the presence of the FC. This is because of the FC’s conflict of interest, their corrosive effect on Balochistan’s political institutions, and, also an invasion of privacy and human rights.

In America, there are debates over how much government should encroach upon civil liberties in the name of greater security. Similarly, the people of Balochistan demand at what cost can the FC go after religious extremists and impose draconian measures such as sealing the borders, clamping down on protests, intrusively investigating the public and carrying kinetic actions in the midst of the population.

The growing instability of Balochistan can be another lesson for American endeavors in Afghanistan: governance must be served through the bottom up instead of top down. Whatever your intentions, external forces wielding military might entering a region will necessarily corrode indigenous political institutions - making the external force illegitimate. The external forces will also inevitably slowly shift its purpose becoming less inclined to battle fringe extremist insurgents and more inclined to self-serving privateering or otherwise get involved in running the area.

Throughout history, for any given political system where there is a center dominating the periphery, the relative power of the center vis-à-vis the periphery will fluctuate over time for various reasons. Sometimes, the “barons” are stronger and sometimes the “king” is. Clearly, given the socio-economic nature of the tribal areas of Afghanistan and Pakistan, and the relatively weak means or intent the Pakistani center or the Americans in Afghanistan have to bring about change, the tip of power must lie with the barons. An invading power bent on establishing full central control must be ready to do things neither the Pakistani nor the Americans are ready to do. Historically, such measures have included things like purging the local intelligentsia, establishing colonies or otherwise being ready to stay for the long run.

As a consequence, the money and support that went to the FC should have gone to the government of Balochistan. If it had been the case that Balochistan authorities were supporting actively enemies of the Pakistani government or US government, efforts should have been made to support indigenous factions to dethrone the authorities. Instead, bypassing local institutions is only likely to alienate the whole population of Balochistan -including your natural allies - and creates multiple levels of instability within the political community and the structure of power instead of simply targeting the authorities.

US Command Ready to Engage the Taliban

2010-01-25T11:47:00.001-05:00

Hamid Karzai has for years said that reconciliation with the insurgent groups would be necessary for the future of his country. The United States who was instrumental in ousting the Taliban in 2001 refused any rapprochement with those it viewed as threatening its national security. The Karzai government never had strong enough incentives to follow up on its idea because the US was interposed between them and their enemies.

But now, Gen McChrystal, who has said in the past that the US cannot “kill its way to victory” in Afghanistan went further by floating the idea that some Taliban may be allowed to join a future Afghani government. This would follow a period of diplomatic negotiations between the parties. Gen McChrystal’s boss defense secretary Robert Gates has also recently stated the Taliban was part of Afghanistan’s “political fabric”.

These are steps in the right direction. The political situation in Afghanistan will not be resolved by national elections, but by first giving official recognition to regional blocs of interests. This blocks can then be allowed to enter into negotiations to share power and determine the right levels of autonomy in a federative state. Without a doubt, that must include the people siding with the Taliban and similar groups.

This is a sound strategy because to defeat an insurgency, you must take away their reasons to fight which is. Immediately, for a large segment of discontent Pashtuns, this is a lack of representation in the politics of their country and a right to self-determination in their ancestral lands.

One such group, Hekmatyar’s Hezb-e-Islami, which operates independently from the Taliban but has far reaching control and influence in three provinces in the east – has publicly stated that they would be amenable to negotiations. This is a sign that negotiations are possible and a case where the leader is ripe for reconciliation.

On the other hand Haqqani, the leader of the most important Taliban network aimed against Afghanistan but operating out of North Waziristan, Pakistan, recently said of the recent attack on Kabul that it was his group’s response to Karzai’s overture for negotiations.

Yet, even when leadership is not ready to lay down the arms and parley we must assume that there are pragmatic forces within these groups that would abandon and renounce the hard line adopted by their leaders if given the right incentives.

This is a valid assumption because the Taliban are people too, and like you and me, can respond to more material concerns and have the capacity to move away from impossible ideologies. The extremism in their organization comes from the top. David Rhodes gave us a glimpse of that in his report on his seven month captivity. He said that whenever the leaders weren’t around his captors attitude would relax, but when the leaders came back the discussions turned ideological and attitudes turned more stringent.

This is because any group needs an ideology upon which members can agree and coalesce. And it is often incumbent upon the leaders to remind its members their purpose and in this case why they are fighting. The maintenance of the group depends on the leader’s ability to continue to attract new members - in this case radicalized youth coming from all over the Muslim world to do jihad, or homegrown Pashtuns whose land were invaded.

The leaders often come to be much more extremist than any of their members, sometimes developing megalomania or at least a sense of grandeur and historical purpose that sets them apart. You do get a feeling in the Bin Ladden or Haqqani videos that they believe they are holy men fighting a holy war. This isn’t new, and many individuals throughout history either involved in desperate causes or wielding immense power have showed similar traits such as emperors or religious martyrs.

But take away their base - or their base’s reason to fight - and recruits will stop coming. From a Muslim jihadist’s point of view, this is the harm done to its flock by outsiders, the invasion of their land, and the destruction of their way of life. But from a Pashtun point of view, this is simply a denial of political representation and autonomy in their homeland.

Therefore, keeping the door for negotiations is an important new aspect of the US strategy that would at least address the Pashtuns’ more immediate needs.

Gen McChrystal justified his new intent by saying that “as a soldier, my personal feeling is that there’s been enough fighting”. After years of conflict this has a certain amount of truth. But in fact, the door should have been kept opened since 2002 after the Taliban was soundly defeated. Instead, the Bush Manichean view of the world seems to have dictated the purpose and actions of US actors in foreign land framed in the extremist “War on Terror”. Intransigent action calls for an answer in kind and Bushism found its match.

Opening the door to insurgents for negotiations is important because the following tactical military truth is also a sound strategic principle: a cornered enemy will fight to the end. If you completely and cordon off all escape routes, your target will have no choice but to fight to the death. The escape route for the Taliban and the Pashtun as a whole is a greater role in their government and a greater right to autonomous self determination amongst their tribes on their turf.

The lead role in this endeavor will have to be the Afghan central government, the northern factions that support and constitute it, and other already won over Pashtun groups. While this is taking place, a bold and accelerated turn over of military tasks will have to take place to put – literally – Afghan skin in the game. These tasks will be best served by local groups tied to tribes, militias and regional commanders within the Pashtun areas who are more likely to effectively deal with the insurgents amongst them than the Afghan Army can. This will also allow the natural political channels and basic political units of the country – the tribes in the Pashtun lands – to express themselves. These local groups will ultimately, through coalitions and political consolidation, be the ones who will broker power with the central government and the other national regional blocks – the other Pashtun groups, the Tajiks, the Uzbeks, etc.

Baathist Witch Hunt Dangerous for the Future of Iraq

2010-01-20T09:36:00.003-05:00

Much of the future of Iraq hinges on the upcoming legislative elections to be held in early March. The elections were originally scheduled for January but have been postponed because the Sunni, Shia and Kurdish power brokers could not agree on who could run for election. More than 511 candidates have been disqualified from running in a Shia dominated government (which is coincidentally reminiscent of the frequent massive disqualifications of presidential candidates in the other Shia country next door).

The reasons given or otherwise are that the banned candidates were too high up in Saddam’s former Baathist regime, or that they had links with insurgents in the past years when ethnic violence was at its highest.

This amounts to a witch hunt. A political witch hunt is when a group of people is systematically targeted by a majority through a combination of discrimination, imprisonment/interrogation, barring from positions of power, or defamation of character and public humiliation, for illegitimate reasons based on identity or ideology.

I believe that the security and ability to survive for a regime depends on its ability to generate an image of justice and legitimacy in the minds of the its relevant constituents.

Justice and Legitimacy are cognitive categories and while they are influenced by material conditions – the distribution of wealth, the efficiency of courts, the application of repressive and security instruments, the lawful transfers of power - they are abstract entities. The calculus of material factors determining whether or not such and such an arrangement is legitimate or just can sometimes leave a gap with the effective sentiments of justice and legitimacy within a population.

Indeed the nature of a state of justice or injustice and of legitimacy or illegitimacy within someone’s mind is often best studied by the poetic traditions studying the drama of personal relations rather than the scientific traditions looking at empirical material and economic statistics. The government of Iraq may have all intents of splitting the spoils of oil fairly between the different factions, but the perception of injustice in the interaction between the political actors could matter more in the end.

It all depends on "what’s the story" – what narrative or spin the constituents are putting on the material events. Ultimately, those perceptions can make the difference whether or not a group of people decides to take up arms against its government.

In this case, the widespread barring of former Baathists, who are of course all Sunnis, by the Shia dominated government on specious grounds will be perceived as an injustice against their group and will delegitimize the government after the elections. It will further create injustices by the resulting material lack of representation for Sunni interests within the government over the next electoral cycle.

Of course justice and legitimacy can be different looking at the same events depending on your constituency – and indeed, when two constituencies are opponents, they are always different. The Shias’ narrative is that former Baathists element were at the core of the horrendous sectarian violence that tore apart their country a few years ago. Baathists were the people who repressed them under Saddam too, and, by psychologically transposing their past suffering to the Sunni community as a whole, for centuries indeed.

The Shias are also suspicious of the Baathists credentials as great democrats. But this is all a mistake on the Shias' part and the burden of changing attitudes lies on their side.

Saddam is no more and the current political community of the Sunnis - which has for leaders former Baathists by the force of things, is different from the regime of yore. A political community is not a regime (understood here as the structure of government), no more than a regime is the authorities of the regime. Those are three different elements defining the nature of political systems and we cannot confound them. There is no reason why the former Baathists will not play by the new regime’s rules.

A lot is hanging in the balance. The cessation of out of control sectarian violence a couple of years ago was only permitted by a parallel robust political effort to integrate the country at the national level. The unraveling of the national political process could rekindle the devastating fires of the religious schism. Sunni participation in the political process is critical.

The burden of changing attitudes and to compromise is also on the Shias because they are the strongest faction. They are less likely to get up from the metaphorical negotiating table than their Sunni counterparts for whom this could very well be make or break.

Link: Political Turmoil Follows Barring of Hundreds from Iraq Ballot - NY Times

Photo Credit: AP through NY Times.

Another Video of Afghan Jihadists

2010-01-14T17:06:00.002-05:00

This is another video made by a courageous female western journalist named Claire Billet. She was embedded with a Taliban faction for 3 days.
While these events took place in 2007, the information contained in the video is still relevant to understand the depth of control the Taliban has over territory in Afghanistan. It is also a unique look at who the insurgents are and their tactics.

She amazingly filmed an attack on an afghan police outpost from their perspective. She also carried interviews, shared meals and traveled around with them in their zone of control.

The other peculiar thing about this report is that the leader of the band in the video, Abu Tayyeb, was also the man responsible for kidnapping New York Times journalist David Rohde for 7 months in 2008-2009. (You can read David’s full story here in case you missed it.)

There are two videos from Claire Billet - one in French, the other in English. Both have different content and are equally worth watching.

English news report, French news report (English translation of the French report).

Here’s what I could tell about the insurgents from watching these videos.

1) They have poor military training. The footage of the firing range shows they have amateurish command of their firearms. They are probably very poor marksmen.

2) The attack on the police outpost wasn’t rehearsed. They were still passing orders at only 100 meters or so from the target. They didn’t approach the outpost in any kind of formation either.

3) Yet, the orders, once given, emanated from sound tactics presumably passed down by the old timers from the 1980’s to the new generation. They positioned two firing groups then drew enemy fire with a bait. Once they knew where to shoot at they responded with all their punch . They had a reserve group in case one group was intercepted and they knew not to linger too long. The attack was successful and caused 3 deaths according to a government report in the days after.

4) The band itself is composed of a leader, Abu Tayyeb, supported by a few experienced fighters probably in their 50’s who act as a source of knowledge. Then there are the younger recruits. One of them came from Iraq and spoke no Pashto. He was in Afghanistan to fighting jihad and more specifically was waiting for a suicide mission.

5) The band controls the area they operate in through and through. They – or the greater group around them, administer justice, supervise education, are free to travel openly, and, we know this from other sources, collect duties from goods passing through their area. (This is a similar situation to the tribal areas in Pakistan. In fact, Abu Tayyeb travelled between both areas in the narration of David Rohde. This is what the Taliban mini-state consist of.)

6) They are extremely courageous. They are not afraid to die because they are very religious. They are always courteous to the young journalist and appear to abide by a code of honor in everything they do. They love each other and are clearly bound by a strong feeling of brotherhood.

7) The threat of American airpower was of little concern to them. But then again, this was 2007 when most American material and personnel was occupied in Iraq. The threat is probably much greater today, if only for the fact that the use of drone attacks is currently being stepped up tremendously. If you knew where they were, it would be easy to hit them.

A Short History of American Strategic Mistakes in Afghanistan

2010-01-11T11:11:00.032-05:00

President Bush announced that major combat operations were complete with the overthrow of the Taliban regime in November 2001. It is astonishing to look back and realize that US forces only amounted to 1,300 boots on the ground at that time. The war was won by the United Islamic Front (UIF) - or Northern Alliance as it is known in the West, who had been fighting the Taliban (or, at times, each other) in a complex decade-long civil war. The Americans provided decisive air power, intelligence and Special Forces but their footprint was small.

How did we get to a point where we need 130,000+ ISAF troops (plus an additional 100,000 defense contractors in the country) to fight a counter insurgency against an enemy whose control of the country has admittedly been growing again but is obviously nowhere near what it was in 2001?

Tora Bora

First, we need to look at Tora Bora and the escape of Bin Laden to Pakistan. The failure to capture him was attributed to an over reliance on afghan troops. From that point on, the Pentagon decided they needed to take things in charge themselves and play a front role in hostilities when their national interests was concerned.

Listen to what General Franks, then Commander of the US Central Command, had to say about the Tora Bora episode.

"Our relationship with the Afghans in the south and east was entirely different at that point in the war [before Tora Bora]," he said, "it's no secret that we had a much more mature relationship with the Northern Alliance fighters." Franks added, "still thinks that the process he followed of helping the anti-Taliban forces around Tora Bora, to make sure it was crystal clear to them that we were not there to conquer their country . . . was absolutely the right thing to do." (Washington Post)

This is from an April 2002 article.

And then this, from the same article

"We [messed] up by not getting into Tora Bora sooner and letting the Afghans do all the work," said a senior official with direct responsibilities in counterterrorism. "Clearly a decision point came when we started bombing Tora Bora and we decided just to bomb, because that's when he escaped. . . . We didn't put U.S. forces on the ground, despite all the brave talk, and that is what we have had to change since then."

The truth is that both approaches are not mutually exclusive and can coexist within the conflict in Afghanistan. Tora Bora should have been branded a "unilateral opportunity" and the US command should have spared no effort in targeting their direct enemy Osama Bin Laden. At the same time, the "swamp draining" activity where you deny a favorable environment to your enemy must be done in support of indigenous forces. Instead, the US armed forces eventually took upon itself almost all security tasks and consequently all nation building since the latter is conditional to the former.

Dismantling of the Northern Alliance

Secondly, at the same time in 2002, and since then during the creation of the interim and then the permanent central government, the UIF was disarmed and dismantled. The natural fighting abilities of the victors of 2001 were effectively phased out (which was not unlike the banning of the Iraqi army in 2003 with its own disastrous consequences).

Why was the UIF dismantled and disarmed?

First, the UIF was a coalition of armed factions separated along ethnic and religious lines that coalesced in 1996 after Kabul fell to the Taliban. To a large degree, they only united to face a greater enemy and it was feared that, after the Taliban was defeated, the UIF would disintegrate into its constituent parts and fighting would erupt in between them as it did in the past.

The second factor in importance was the efforts to create a strong central government that could lawfully wield the country's armed forces. The fear was that Uzbek, Tajiks or Shia Hazara warlords would serve their own interest in a lawless fashion and diminish the unity of the country.

Finally, in the decade long civil war, few if any of those warlords had shining human rights records which made supporting them unpalatable to the Americans and to the UN who sponsored the Afghan government.

Conclusion and Results

These two factors - the US taking on all aspects of security and nation building, and the dismantling of the UIF contributed to the inability and unwillingness of the Afghanis to provide for their own security, organically build their country, and engage the resurgent Taliban as early as 2004. The American boots on the ground rose steadily since the invasion and yet failed to prevent the anti-afghan forces from out pacing them because of weak central governance.

The Americans have the power to capture villages from the Taliban and other anti-afghan forces, but, as soon as they leave, the anti-afghan forces move back in. It has been constantly reported since 2002 that the troop level was insufficient to take on all the tasks of carrying a successful counter insurgency. Although that is the wrong goal, this is what they set themselves up for.

Moreover, american soldiers, their generals and civilian officials, and even the CIA lack the proper knowledge of the workings of Afghan society and the tribal system. Troops may acquire knowledge of one village or area and successfully work with the local leaders but then hand it over after their tour is done only to see their work undone.

Finally, American forces are seen as occupiers and not a single human being on the planet likes to see strangers irreverently stumping on their backyard and making the law.

As I will argue in my next piece, facing the prospect of a yet to be fought out counter-insurgency, the US must transfer rapidly security tasks to the Afghanis and reverse the situation of the last eight years. The Obama plan gets that, but still makes a mistake of emphasizing the ANF (Afghan National Forces which includes police and Army) instead of using the intrinsic tribal political systems of the country. The UIF will have to be revived to some extent and local militias established within the tribal system will have to be incorporated in the greater security apparatus of the country while acknowledging that these efforts must primarily be done within the Pashtun lands who have suffered the greatest from poor governance and poor security.

Note: Some will say that the conflict has changed between then and now: the Americans are very good at ousting governments like they did with the Taliban in 2001 or in Iraq in 2003 and can do it relatively cheaply, but fighting a counter-insurgency is different and demands more boots on the ground. But there are evidence that local militias and local warlords are better at it and offers a better approach, as we shall see in a later article. Moreover, fighting the war of someone else is not in the national security of the US.

Photo Credit: Life.com

Afghanistan: The Difference with Iraq

2010-01-08T11:28:00.036-05:00

We are hearing that there are still disagreements about the implementation and interpretation of the Obama plan for Afghanistan. The differences seem to pit the Pentagon against the civilian executive. The American generals wish for a more expensive, fuller counter insurgency strategy while the civilians insist on a narrower engagement. The Obama administration is eager to find a way out and is ready to tolerate a certain level of violence within Afghanistan as long as true counter-terrorist action is carried out effectively. The Pentagon, on the other hand, is reluctant to give up a strategy that seems to have worked so well for them in Iraq.

There lies the problem. I believe that the ongoing resolution of the conflict in Iraq has much less to do with American military involvement through a Surge of troops and a re-writing - however praise-worthy it was, of the Counter-Insurgency manual by General Petraeus, than it had to do with changing conditions in the indigenous conflict between the Sunnis and the Shias.

In Iraq, an active civil war was going on. The Sunnis had lost their traditional position of dominance in the country and were fighting for their future against a vindicative and revived Shia majority. Partly because of Saddam's past policies of integrating the country by settling Sunnis in traditional Shia or Kurdish territory, there was now a central area in Iraq that became the hotbed of inter-sectarian violence centered in and around the capital Baghdad. On top of the century old sectarian rivalry, Iraq had rich oil reserves that acted as a strong centralizing force.

The turning point came late in 2006 - before the Surge was even announced, when the Sunnis collectively figured they could not win. They were in desperate need for an ally and that ally came in the form of the US occupier. At the same time, the US forces changed their approach and instead of fighting them like they did in 2004 and 2005 in Fallujah or Ramadi, engaged the Sunni population at the village and tribal level creating more human contacts and offering local leaders money and development support in exchange for their help in turning the irreconcilables within their midst. Not only that, but the Americans also offered political protection against their Shia adversaries vis-à-vis the creation and composition of the national government. The US successfully came in between both parties and the political process of forming a government and the reconstitution of the country could move forward. The Surge itself provided the additional security needed to cement the tacit truce, particularly in Bagdad which was the focal point of the sectarian violence, but it could not and was not the primary factor in the consumption of the inter-sectarian conflict.

The Shias were also exhausted on their side and so the parallel political process at the national level could move forward. The opportunity was seized, the security gains cemented but only because an equilibrium had been reached in the intestine conflict. In many ways, the "violent dialogue" of the inter-sectarian conflict was a necessary step.

Since then, the violence has dropped both in between Shias and Sunnis and against American forces although there continues to be few but spectacular attacks every other month perpetrated by the Sunni irreconcilables. December was the first month in the war without a single American casualty, and the inter-ethnic violence continues to go down on a year by year basis in a conflict that has made over 100,000 Iraqi casualties by most estimates - only a fraction of which came from direct American action. The next step for Iraq is the parliamentary election now slated for March. How successful they are will dictate whether the country continues down the path of peace or if tensions reappear between the factions.

The situation in Afghanistan is largely different and this is why the American cannot hope to successfully fight a counter-insurgency without going beyond their national tolerance, surtaxing their treasury and perpetuating a legacy that is weakening their international standing. They should not do it on the principle of balancing responsibilities and national interests. And they cannot expect the same success from a new Surge because they fail to see the fundamental differences between the two conflicts, and overestimate their role in the improvement of the situation in Iraq.

In Afghanistan the war is not between two indigenous factions, but between the anti-afghan forces and the US government. The Taliban and other groups loosely associated with them are fighting the Americans first hoping that one day they will get at the central government and its northern allies. The civil war between the old afghan adversaries is frozen and the "violent dialogue" will not resume until the Americans rescind their front role. The Karzai government is not only shielded by the presence of the US government (see "Afghanis fighting for Afghanistan") but also by its geography. In Iraq, both warring factions were intermingled in the infamous sunni triangle. Not so in Afghanistan where the Pashtuns are located primarily in the South and East and have sanctuaries across the border in Pakistan effectively forming a Taliban mini state. There is no violence in Kabul like there was in Baghdad. There is neither a centrifugal pull exerted in Afghanistan by the equivalent of Iraqi oil. The conflict is currently more religious, more about freedom and less pragmatic. The Sunni tribal leaders and power brokers were interested in keeping a stake in their country and eventually joined the central government. The anti-afghan forces are true mujahedeens and currently see no reason to engage the central government. Neither are the Karzai governement and its northern allies ready to extend a hand to their foes since they have little incentive to do so.

Of course, there are different paths for conflicts to resolve themselves and certainly not all should look like Iraq. But basing a strategy on "what worked in Iraq" and applying it to fundamentally different conditions on the ground makes for a very dubious outcome. At the core is a discrepancy between national interests - that of the Americans and that of the Afghan government, and their security responsibilities. There needs to be an intellectual separation made between the afghan conflict which is the affair of the afghan factions to resolve, and the counter-terrorism and support role - not front role, in the afghan conflict which is the affair of the Americans.

My next piece will be about the prospects of the Afghan National Forces and the historical mistake of the Americans to play a front role in the Afghan conflict after Tora Bora and the disarmament of the Northern Alliance.

Photo credit: CFR.org

A Rare Look at the Political Intents of an Afghan Mujahideen Leader

2010-01-05T15:42:00.007-05:00

The landscape of armed Afghan political groups is large; it is more than Taliban vs the Karzai government or its American protector. In fact, the Karzai government has to govern by maintaining a balance between different factions that are formed largely along ethnic and religious lines. At one point in time, some of the parties of Karzai's coalition have fought one another and this is largely the reason they have been disarmed since 2001 fearing defections and usurpations, and why they continue to be largely compensated by political appointments and corruption money coming from the massive international contributions to the country, and why they are more or less free to carry their most dubious local economic activities.

The opposition to the Karzai government is also formed by different groups of which the Taliban is only the strongest. Some of these groups have very limited interactions amongst one another. Many are only local while others have more national appeal and claim thousands of fighters such as the group Hezb-e Islam led by Gulbuddin Hekmatyar.

The "anti-afghan" groups are united in their Islamic freedom fighting cause, but can have different views about how they want to run the country. Hekmatyar actually favors democracy within an Islamic framework. "The important issue for us is to end occupation, re-establishing the country's sovereignty, transferring the political power to an interim non-reconcile government and establishing an Islamic government in a free Afghanistan via a free election to correspond with the will of the people", he said in a rare interview with a western journalist just before the elections in 2009. He however rejects the current government saying "Kabul's government consists of looters, corrupt men and criminals". He nevertheless says that he is open to negotiations if they are "sincere" and have something to offer.

The American top military brass - including Gen. Petraeus, have said that a key to the new strategy will be to operate a separation amongst all of the anti-afghan forces between those that are reconcilable, and the hardliners which aren't and must ultimately be destroyed or kept in check. Is Hezb-e Islam reconcilable?

You can judge for yourself in the full interview with Hekmatyar in which he reveals the nature of his ties with other Mujahideens in Afghanistan and Pakistan, his grievances with the occupiers and the central government, and his intents for the future.

Alternatively, at the top is a report by the courageous journalist who carried the interview in which you can see the soldiers of Hezb-e Islam in the field.

David Brooks On Our Unreasonable Expectations of Governments

2010-01-02T18:18:00.003-05:00

David Brooks always has a knack for grasping the social conscience on an issue, and telling us how wrong we are collectively to think the way we do on it. This time, he hits the spot again by criticizing the way public opinion responded to the Christmas Eve bombing attempt by holding its government responsible for failing to prevent it. But, Mr. Brooks, there's two things I'd like to correct.

First, I disagree that we had a more mature attitude towards government 50 years ago, that "there was a realistic sense that human institutions are necessarily flawed" and that sometimes, the proverbial crap will hit the fan despite our leader's best efforts.

In fact, our unreasonable attitude holding our rulers responsible for things they really aren't in control of is as old as civilization. The Ancient Egyptians held their Pharaohs responsible for the bad crops they got despite the futile but expensive efforts of the Pharaoh and his priests to carry out religious rituals aimed at influencing the gods of good weather. We didn't have a temporary moment of reason 50 years ago either if the situation in the UK was an example. After winning the war for the Britons, Churchill was voted out of office because of a bad economy and a lack of social welfare measures. He couldn't help it; his country was broke.

Second, Brooks is right that a greater centralization is at the source of a wider range of expectations upon the government. But, excuse me for nitpicking, but the process of centralization didn't really start 50 years ago, but 220 years ago with the French Revolution. The social unrest of the 19th century, the industrialization process, and the keynesianist-welfare state of the 20th century further enhanced the historic demands on government to increase their scope of control as well as the redevance they have to citizens.

Re: The Cash Committe: How Wall Street Wins On The Hill

2010-01-02T16:46:00.010-05:00

The HuffPost has an article showing how deep an impact campaign financing has on legislation. While the effect is well known if not always fully acknowledged, the report describes the workings of the House Banking Committee and analyses the behavior of people who compose its membership recently.

Whether you are a conservative or a progressive on economic matters, and whether you agree or disagree with a piece of financial reform or another, two conclusions can be made on the workings of the legislative process from the article.

First, the banks and other financial interests have an advantage in influencing policy at the committee level, not because their ideas are fundamentally better, but because they have more money to contribute to the election and re-election of legislators and can have a strong influence on their career and personal wealth. Second, it corrupts the democratic process because people who got elected running a progressive campaign fail to accurately represent the mandate they got once they are placed on those committees aggressively targeted by lobbyists.

There is, however, some major saving points for the legislative process as a whole. First and foremost, if the more vulnerable committee members are ready to step on their party line for personal advancement, their leaders are ultimately more accountable to their constituents and have the power to rein in members who went astray - and given the ire of the population over big banks and the financial meltdown last year, they have every incentive to do just that since many of their seats will be up for re-election next year. Second, anything that comes out of a committee then has to go through the House and then the Senate where people who were shut out of the process have the power to defeat an outrageously left or right bill.

Nevertheless, the corrosive effect of campaign financing and personal advancement alluded to in my previous post (see Senate Reform and the Source of the Problem) is real and is brilliantly documented in this article.

Here are my notes.

- Many legislators will seek to join a "money committee" instead of another because "joining [one] makes fundraising, especially from donors with financial interests litigated by the panel, significantly easier". Members of money committees are particularly vulnerable to lobbyist pressure. "It creates a culture where people don't have to show up... You just show up to vote... " says freshman Rep. Jackie Speier (D-Calif.)

("Money committees" include the banking committee chaired by Barney Frank as well the tax-policy-writing Ways and Means Committee and the Energy and Commerce Committee.)

- The Steering and Policy Committee assigns seats on the money committees in particular to "frontline members" who need financial bolstering in states that are likely to be hotly contested during the next election. "As a result, leadership made a choice to prioritize fundraising over the passage of strong legislation."

- Legislators and staffers lack experience and knowledge of what they are suppose to legislate on. Those members "don't understand what it is they're tackling -- though they might be able to repeat talking points from lobbyists." ""What they know is people," says a former staffer."

- There is cohesion between the career of a lobbyist, that of a legislator and that of their staff, which further raises questions of conflict of interests (despite a bar of one year for a staffer to join a lobby group). "According to a HuffPost analysis of the 243 people who've worked on the committee -- including clerical and technology staff -- since 2000, almost half of the 126 people who have left registered as lobbyists, mostly for the financial services industry." "Cashing out is using your position to get a significantly greater salary in the private sector," says Ventrone, who now works for the National Association of Realtors.

- This creates a lack of representation for the interests of the general public, and can corrupt progressive politicians. "But then again, banks and other financial interests can afford an army of aggressive and well-connected middlemen, while consumers groups are left with one or two sentries to cover two chambers. It can mean the difference between winning and losing."

- In politics, nothing is ever simple and the strategy of some democrats of voting with the banks could backfire. "But is it all that pragmatic? Waffling centrists can have a hard time holding on to their seats -- especially when a populist wave comes washing over, wiping out pandering politicians. And by pushing for Washington to go soft on Wall Street, the frontline Democrats -- and the leadership that put them there -- have helped create the very storm that could carry them away."

Riots in Iran: Have things changed in 10 years?

2009-12-31T17:46:00.022-05:00

The riots were the worst in Iran since the revolution of 1979. Thousands of students took to the streets, pelting stones at security forces and setting fire to pictures of the country's Supreme Leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei.

The disturbances left a trail of burned-out vehicles and smashed shop fronts. (BBC News)

The above could be a description of events taking place recently during the Ashura or during one of many protests doting the Iranian calendar since the rigged-elections of June 12. But the above recounts what took place 10 years ago, in July 1999.

Back then, reformist President Mohammad Khatami had been voted in office two years previously in a land slide election. Yet he was a member of the political community and sided quickly with the hardliners within the regime when the violence broke out. This explains in large measure why the manifestations only lasted 6 days. Khatami, who favored gradual, peaceful reform to the violent uprising, was never able to make much headway with his program despite being re-elected in 2001. The Supreme Leader and the twelve-member Guardian Council, two bodies with greater power within the Iranian political system than the President, believed that Khatami could become the Gorbatchev of the regime fearing that his reforms would gather an unstoppable momentum which would lead to a counter-revolution, and so they clamped down. (Mr. Khatami is now one of several figures in the current opposition movement.)

During Khatami's second term and after him, there was the American-Iraq war and the ongoing nuclear crisis. Both were foreign threats and acted as unifiers upon Iranian society putting to the fore its most hawkish and conservative forces.

But today, after accusations of vote-rigging during the Presidential re-election of President Ahmadinejad, we have entered the second round of political dissent within the country and the consequences have the potential to go much deeper. In fact, in some ways, we already have if we are to believe the words of Major General Mohammad Ali Jafari, head of the increasingly powerful Revolutionary Guard or IRGC. He spoke this summer after his command effectively wrested control over the internal situation:

“We are convinced that the IRGC must play a deciding role in the preservation and continuation of the revolution.”(...)“These events put us in a new stage of the revolution and political struggles, and all of us must fully comprehend its dimensions,” (Press.tv, an Iranian Government media)

Indeed, while the 1999 protests were short lived, we have now witnessed 7 consecutive months of unrest. This unrest has manifested itself not only in visible street protests, but through civil disobedience such as anti-government chants during football matches, a "currency campaign" whereby thousands of rial notes have been marked with anti-government graffiti, and, none the least, it is being expressed through the internet which the authorities have failed to control effectively.

The message in 1999 wasn't clear; students reacted spontaneously to a series of events. They wanted more openness within civil society and less control from the government in their lives, they just weren't sure how much and how to do it. They had no leader but by and large, they wanted reform which, as we saw, the government failed to deliver.

Today, the message still isn't very clear yet. It has evolved from contesting the election results to toppling the regime. It is certainly not established - like some westerners wish to believe, that the population as a whole would vote to establish a liberal democracy if they were subjected to a referendum. After all, their rallying cry during the protests is often "Allahu Akhbar" (God is great). What is significant however is that in the footage of the demonstrations are represented a wide spectrum of the population, in particular women, some older men, and working class men, the latter traditionally the base of the Ahmadinejad government. It isn't just students.

While none can speak for all, the leaders of the opposition are more present than they were in 1999. Ten years ago, the clerics pulled together and the protesters were left to hang dry. Today, there is a mixture of pragmatists, reformists, and moderate conservatives openly voicing their concerns on the handling of the situation by the authorities in support of the popular protests. Some leaders such as Mousavi have also joined the crowds on occasion.

Overall, the opposition counts two presidential candidates, two former presidents, and a group of clerics. Some of these figures are currently testing how much they can get away with and haven't yet been arrested only because the hardliners within the regime do not want to make martyrs out of them. Instead, the Iranian Police have been targeting members of their entourage. The regime seems to be making strenuous efforts to balance its reaction and avoid giving the opposition greater cause for action. At the same time, the Mousavi's, Kerroubi's, Rafsanjani's, and Kathani's probably do not wish to cast their lot with a populist movement that may or may not succeed and with whom they may or may not fully agree.

“The longer this goes on, the more difficult will it be for the likes of Moussavi and Karroubi to sustain their current position,” said Ray Takeyh, an Iran expert at the Council on Foreign Relations who has worked for the State Department. “They have to at some point opt for regime survival or become the leaders of an opposition movement calling for more than reform.”(NY Times)

It is as of yet unclear what direction they will take. All of the opposition figures were and are still part of the political elite of the country having served, or continuing to serve in some cases, at the highest level of government (Rafsanjani is the chairman of the Assembly of Experts who has the constitutional power of removing the Supreme Leader). In any case, there is now a great factional divide tearing up through every level of Iranian society.

UPDATE: Mousavi has since stated he was ready to become a martyr for the cause.

On the other side of the divide is what Robin Wright has called the "New Right" in a recent report to the House Oversight and Government Reform Subcommittee on National Security and Foreign Affairs.

The New Right centers around a second generation of revolutionaries who call themselves “principlists.” Many came of age during the revolution’s first traumatic decade. They provided the backbone of the Revolutionary Guards and Basij(or “mobilization resistance force”) that secured the revolution during the chaotic early years. They were hardened during the 1980-88 Iraq war, the bloodiest modern Middle East conflict. In the 1990s, they went to university and entered the work force. After Ahmadinejad’s election in 2005, many gained positions of political or economic power. (Iran's Green Movement)

It is important to stress that the clerics are now deeply divided about the course to take which was not the case in 1999. Kerroubi, Rafsanjani and Khatani are all clerics. Qom, the traditional center of intellectual thought for Shia Islam in Iran, is split over the issue and have called into question the neutrality of the Guardian Council as early as July. Although we can only speculate, it is easy to imagine dissension amongst the Guardian Council and hesitation about what to do following the events in June which would have opened the door for more affirmative action by the Revolutionary Guard.

The New Right has effectively wrested control of the regime and the security instruments needed to hold on to power. In stark contrast to the revolution’s first generation, most are laymen, not clerics. They have effectively pushed many of the original revolutionaries, including big-name clerics, to the sidelines—at least for now. (Iran's Green Movement)

The beneficiary and the instrument of this political change within the Iranian regime is without question the Revolutionary Guard. Over the years, they have increased their presence throughout society. It's alumni occupy cabinet positions, they are are members of parliament, and head large corporations. Ahmadinejad is a former member himself and has further increased the institution's economic role which now translates into a "multibillion-dollar business empire" (NY Times). The Revolutionary Guards is a corps of around 120,000 people, is seen by many as the vehicle of upward social mobility, and is believed to be in control of developing the Iranian nuclear program.

A recent RAND Corporation study on the Revolutionary Guard had this to say about the vision and the purpose that its members have for themselves:

Within the factional debates that characterize Iran’s political landscape, the IRGC leadership appears to believe that its legitimacy is dependent on reviving and burnishing its role in the foundational myths of the Islamic Republic of Iran—the suppression of internal enemies during the revolution’s early days, a role in the “sacred defense” during the Iran-Iraq War, and the postwar economic reconstruction. (RAND)

The comments by Jafari, the head of the Revolutionary Guard noted above express as much.

However, the extent to which it can flaunt the other political institutions is uncertain as the constitution of Iran is ultimately circumscribed by a system of checks and balances. One thing is certain: if a full fledged counter-revolution is to go the distance (i.e. reversing the Islamic revolution), the cycle of violence is only going to become much worse and the Revolutionary Guard and their Basij vigilantes will be called to play a growing role. The Revolutionary Guard is “the only institution in Iran capable of both enforcing and breaching any red lines.”(comments reported in RAND)

And there is ample room for things to get much uglier. Despite eight deaths during the violence, it is worth noting that most police forces and the Basij militia refrained from using lethal force during the Ashura protests, sometimes at their own personal demise. The police and the Basij were mostly armed with batons and tear gas, and youtube videos have shown them often being overwhelmed, cornered and beaten themselves (see "Uskowi on Iran" for an image and video analysis of the Ashura clashes).

Wednesday, amidst pro-government rallies numbering in the hundreds of thousands, there were signs that the regime is ready to escalate its response. In what seems to have been a conscious effort by the regime to send a stronger message, the leader of the legislative, the speaker of Parliament Ali Larijani, said that the protesters violated civil rights, and called for the “arrest of offenders of the religion and the harshest punishment for antirevolutionary figures.” (NY Times) Others said that the protesters were now considered "enemy of God".

On a note of optimism, one possible scenario for a quieter revolution comes from the fact that even within the ranks of the Revolutionary Guard, the factional divide between realists and ideologues is present. It is reported that in 1997, around 77% voted for Khatami. But this was a different time and about a popular vote. The opacity of the "New Right" is such that it is difficult to tell if there are any cracks within their resolve.

Senate Reform and the Source of the Problem

2009-12-28T13:02:00.014-05:00

The increasing polarization of the American political system and the efficiency - or lack thereof, of passing policy is a subject of interest to me.

Ezra Klein has been following that trail and collected his thoughts on the topic this Sunday. Click here.

The main ills of the system are the following:

the absence of bipartisanship, the use of the filibuster to obstruct progress rather than protect debate, the ability of any given senator to hold the bill hostage to his or her demands

In Brooks and Shields last Friday, one of them stated that the number of times a filibustering attempt was made this year exceeded that of the whole decade of the 1960’s.

As a result, bills are focusing on the “low hanging” fruits instead of tackling problems more comprehensively and fixing politically difficult yet important problems. The benefit of the population and the general interest of the state are left to suffer.

This here is the best line of the article:

The government can function if the minority party has either the incentive to make the majority fail or the power to make the majority fail. It cannot function if it has both.

What this translates into is an inability to legislate effectively because the minority party increasingly wants to see the majority fail and has the power to make it fail. As a consequence, filibustering and other delaying tactics means more time is spent doing less things. If the tendency is maintained, the American legislative process is facing paralysis.

It puts the American political system at a disadvantage when faced with other, nimbler political systems, such as better functioning democracies, or, for that matter, authoritative China. (See here my post contrasting the US and the Chinese political systems in their capacity to take on the challenge of developing and implementing new Energy solutions)

This is not to say that America should repaint itself with an autocratic brush; rather it should seek the following, which is how the system was meant to work:

a world in which the majority can pass its agenda is a better one, a place where the majority party is held accountable for its ideas and not for the gridlock and inaction furnished by the Senate's rules.

But short of phasing out filibustering, or implementing a regressive majority threshold - two measures being suggested here and there, I am skeptical that America can get away without making other reforms in other facets of the American political system. This is because the ills of the democratic political system in America lies not in the Senate procedures: rather, the amount of filibustering and partisanship are symptoms of an increase in the power of public opinion, and, at the same time, of the system of electoral financing.

There used to be a time when Congress – and for that matter, their western equivalents, were truly representative: legislators were elected and then went to their Houses, Congresses and Assemblies where, by and large, they were free to confer with their peers and make legislation. Today, because of the explosion of media coverage, politicians are never completely done with campaigning. While there was certainly bickering in the past, compromises and cooperative actions were possible. Today, those are seen as giving in and as political defeats.

Secondly, it used to be that being a public servant was a duty of the higher class of society: doctors, lawyers, and the educated elite that were already rich. There was an ethic of service and an Enlightenment-inspired duty towards reason that is now greatly lost. Today, politicians are there to cater to the interests of their campaign financiers and constituents, and very little temperate reasoning is left after they have gone through their campaign rhetoric aimed at manipulating the population into voting them into office. The legislative houses are no longer refuges of reason, but stages from which the elected members project their spin. Furthermore, political success is now a way to pursue personal monetary gains, which was certainly not the case in the past but creates conflicts of interest (a public servant is there to serve the public).

I am not advocating a return to past institutions: such change would be anachronistic. But establishing the differences between past and present, and seeing why the rules were working then and not so much now can be enlightening. Another important factor only alluded to here is the homogenization process in successive stages of the two main political parties since the Civil War.

Political reforms are perhaps the hardest things to do for any regime. Reforming part of the american legislative process will certainly be hard in the current context where any bill one party puts forward will undoubtedly be seen through the very same partisan lens it is trying to mitigate. But as the Ezra Klein piece mentions, the first problem a drunk must fix is not one of the biggest he faces – his debt, the loss of his family, etc, but the seemingly lesser one that is the fact that he drinks every night. Likewise, before America can tackle the problems of tomorrow, it needs to fix its very ability to tackle problems efficiently, which is the growing troubles with the legislative process.

Why Climate Change Needs its Own International Institution

2009-12-27T12:45:00.008-05:00

The science of climate change can be controversial: it is hazy at best, corrupt at worst. Short of seeing too much into “climate gate” however and putting the blame on scientists for their zeal and conflict of interests, the biggest problem with the science is that its subject matter is incredibly complex. What will happen and how will it affect us and the planet remotely into the future are very difficult questions to answer.

What is certain however, is that we can’t afford to not do anything about it.

Consequently, there are two useful metaphor in dealing with climate change I have come across.

The first is that we must see the need to do something about it as an insurance we buy today against the possibility of disastrous scenarios in the future. You put a small down payment today against the small but would-be catastrophic risk that something will happen. This addresses the need of the international community to be willing to sacrifice a small portion of global GDP (perhaps 1%) to safeguard against serious trouble 100 years down the road. The purpose here is to slow down or possibly reverse that adverse impact we are having on our environment.

Complementary to the first, the second metaphor is that we must find contingency plans, and develop accompanying technologies and systems to go with it, that we can spring into action if needed much like you would equip a house or a building with fire protection measures such as ladders and sprinklers in case a fire happens. Those fire protection measures may never be used - but they are there in case an unforeseeable but catastrophic event occurs.

I will discuss measures spawning from the first metaphor above as it pertains best to my belief that some form of international institutionalization will be necessary to successfully tackle the problem of climate change. I will leave the second metaphor perhaps for another time.

It is worth noting that from the start we have pursued the first metaphor with first Rio de Janeiro, then Kyoto, and now Copenhagen. All three were failures: Rio was inconclusive, Kyoto saw last minute measures that eventually were never upheld, and Copenhagen was salvaged but with targets so small and far into the future such that no one would be compromised again.

There are two sources of problems that haven’t been met yet that explain those shortcomings: a lack of representation of the relevant interests and, secondly, a lack of institutionalization to streamline an effective international-wide policy.

First the problem with who’s interest it is that are being represented or not represented.

A very smart man said that we are having problems coping with climate change because it epitomizes the kind of problems humans are bad at: we are pretty good at solving problems that will have an immediate impact, but bad at the ones that require us to sacrifice now to gain a greater reward or avoiding a greater cost in the future. But a look at the success of insurance companies and the dissemination of their products through all walks of life, for all kinds of situation small and large shows us otherwise. Likewise, engineers often try to foolproof their systems with measures that directly factor into the cost of their designs; and military planners account for a wide array of strategic scenarios that requires expanding costs now just in case they happen in the future. We are thus pretty good at valuing risk and putting a price tag on it.

The problem lies with who’s interest the shot-callers on climate change policy serve: the state. Despite what the heralds of globalization were saying 10 years ago, the state is and will remain the main actor and decider on the international stage for the foreseeable future. The state is personified as having interests on the world stage and its leaders pursue those interests as they engage in competition with other states. Consequently, no state wishes to adopt measures that will undermine their economic interest if they cannot ensure that other states will do the same without cheating. That is very difficult to do.

Take the model of domestic politics. Here, the state’s interest - often called national interest, sometimes clashes with the individual’s interest. The liberal left and the conservative right can best be seen as who’s interest they advocate most: the individual for the liberals and the state for the conservative. Both sometimes are in conflict with one another as anyone who even remotely follows the politics of his country can attest.

But of course, not all problems are zero sum games. In fact, what is good for the state is in most cases good for the individual, and vice versa. Likewise, what is good for the international community is often good for the states that compose it. Indeed, if the worst climate change scenario proves true, there might be no states to talk of in a post apocalyptic world.

The problem thus becomes one of common good. Common goods, throughout history, have always been served by governments, or by rich nobles performing the function. In any case, public goods always go beyond the individual’s interest. Thus, the lack of representation of the states’ collective is tied to the lack of institution that will carry out the public good function on climate change.

What we are lacking, decidedly, is real power vested in a body representing the international community’s interest, i.e. the states’ collective interest, to tackle problems of climate change in order to balance the power of the states and enforce upon them their resolutions.

This undoubtedly raises questions of sovereignty which, in our current effective state model, can be thorny, but which are not insurmountable. There are precedents: The WTO and the European Union, while both messy and uneven experiences, are successful, enduring institutions in their own right.

On the other hand, the recent Copenhagen summit was chaotic, unprofessional, and inflamed by fanatic protesters. While much of the legwork should have been done before the conference, the leaders arrived at the end left to hang dry by the negotiators. The leaders essentially signed a face-saving agreement that amounted to nothing. The president of the conference and the organization put too much on the table coming from too many people, and there was too little head-to-head time between the main actors to accomplish anything meaningful.

What we need to start with is to create an international body, probably modeled on the WTO, with permanent staffers both at the international level and within each countries to carry out negotiations, tackle issues one at a time in a deliberative manner, do one-on-ones between specific states, or blocs of states, and slowly develop a permanent institution that will have its own processes and functions with an arbitration arm that can issue legally binding obligations between countries.

While the problem is pressing, you can’t accomplish that in two weeks - no matter how many costumes and props you bring to the party.

Is China is Becoming the Leader in Green Energy?

2009-12-25T13:49:00.015-05:00

This week, The New Yorker published the best piece I've read so far on China's political-economic seamanship as it moves forward in the new field of green technologies. The piece is a great help in contrasting the US system and the Chinese one as they come to grip with new Energy solutions.

I see the principal themes of the development of new Energy technologies in both countries as follows: the difference between the role of government in China and that in the US; the lead that China is currently getting not only in manufacturing the new green technologies but in augmenting those technologies; and the question of whether China is capable of discovering the next big landmark technological revolution, and thus breaking the current predominant "Apple model" (own the brand, the design, and the intellectual property, and then get China to drive down the costs).

Here's my short version of the article with commentary.

First, it must be established that China is seeking to attain the leadership role in green energy:

As President Hu Jintao, a political heir of Deng Xiaoping, put it in October of this year, China must “seize preemptive opportunities in the new round of the global energy revolution.”

The US will irreparably fall behind if they do not act :

David Sandalow, the U.S. Assistant Secretary of Energy for Policy and International Affairs, has been to China five times in five months. He told me, “China’s investment in clean energy is extraordinary.” For America, he added, the implication is clear: “Unless the U.S. makes investments, we are not competitive in the clean-tech sector in the years and decades to come.”

China's recent experience developing wind powered solutions is discussed: China actually covered ground through protectionism but, at the same time, (temporarily) felt the ills of a command economy:

China has made up so much ground on clean tech in part through protectionism—until recently, wind farms were required to use turbines with locally manufactured parts. The requirement went into effect in 2003; by the time it was lifted, six years later, Chinese turbines dominated the local market. In fact, the policy worked too well: China’s wind farms have grown so fast that, according to estimates, between twenty and thirty per cent aren’t actually generating electricity. A surplus of factories was only part of the problem: local bureaucrats, it turned out, were being rewarded not for how much electricity they generated but for how much equipment they installed—a blunder that is often cited by skeptics of China’s efforts.

They have a point; many factories are churning out cheap, unreliable turbines, because the government lacks sufficient technical standards.

While the US government is only starting to think about revamping its aging national electricity grid - and being marred by parochial concerns about power line trajectories, etc, the author reports that China is making bigger strides, and more easily:

China is already buying and installing the world’s most efficient transmission lines—“an area where China has actually moved ahead of the U.S.,” according to Deborah Seligsohn, a senior fellow at the World Resources Institute.

Yet, it is worth noting that, just as much in China as in the US, the bigger share of energy generation will continue to come from coal for the foreseeable future:

The prospect of a future powered by the sun and the wind is so appealing that it obscures a less charming fact: coal is going nowhere soon. Even the most optimistic forecasts agree that China and the United States, for the foreseeable future, will remain ravenous consumers. (China burns more coal than America, Europe, and Japan combined.)

Here, China is actually taking the technological lead to make coal cleaner:

“Fifteen or twenty years ago, anyone you asked would have said that Western technologies in coal gasification were superior to anything in China,” Lin said. “Now, I think, that claim is not true.”

Above all else, widespread price control in China has helped its researchers find efficient, cleaner coal solutions by raising the price of coal which forced firms to reduce their costs of production which fosters innovation. In the US, on the other hand, raising prices through taxation is a difficult thing to do due to the powerful interest groups constantly lobbying a congress that is highly polarized and concerned with financing their next campaign.

The article also recounts how China is transforming its cities by adopting green technologies. Measures range from subsidizing low-energy bulbs, to creating programs to swap out old furnaces for new cleaner alternatives such as solar water heaters. In the US, on the other hand, those measures are often seen as infringing upon the right of the american citizen to choose what he consumes.

-----------------

The first lesson to be had is that a new dose of political-economy targeted at reshaping and revamping how the US invests and fosters in Energy R&D and manufacturing will be necessary.

He said that its purpose is simple: to spur innovation of ideas so risky and expensive that no private company will attempt them alone. The government is not trying to ordain which technologies will prevail; the notion of attempting to pick “winners and losers” is as unpopular among Chinese technologists as it is in Silicon Valley. Rather, Yao sees his role as trying to insure that promising ideas have a chance to contend at all. “If the government does nothing, the technology is doomed to fail,” he said.

The other reason why government intervention is necessary is because companies natureally serve their own interest before the national interest. There is a good example of that again in the article when Kevin Czinger, an american business man with an interest in developing the first mass produced electric car, finally elected to find chinese partners because he figured american car makers were going to move slowly so as not to undercut their own products.

Perhaps addressing the free-market purists, here's what one chinese engineer describes the competitiveness of the system of the Chinese system for developing new technologies:

“[Competition] is very intense—like a Presidential election,” he joked, and he sketched out the system: “Normally, each project will have five to eight contenders—some less, some more—but there is a broad field of innovators. A lot of companies are doing the same thing, so everyone wants to have a breakthrough.” He went on, “It’s not possible to have a flawless system, but it makes relatively few mistakes. It combines the will of the state with mass innovation.

China is investing in R&D - particularly in Energy, in a huge way.

R. & D. expenditures have grown faster in China than in any other big country—climbing about twenty per cent each year for two decades, to seventy billion dollars last year.

Comparatively, the US has slashed early investments in Energy under the Reagan administration and again in the second Bush term. The latter came after against a growing awareness in the American scientific community that there is a pressing need for investment in new energy technologies. The reasons for the cuts were the usual republican concerns about big government and the belief that the market is the best mechanism for directing economic growth and innovation.

But the fact is, government investment in green energy makes sense both from a liberal point of view and a conservative point of view: it will generate GDP and jobs; it will make the US competitive in the next big technology internationally which will directly translate into national power; and, oh - by the way, it will help to save the planet from climate change. Thus, investing in Energy R&D is the biggest and best job package Obama can make. And, unlike the stimulus, it will outlast his administration.

But there is a second lesson we can draw from this article: in a world where the state will continue to be at the forefront of political change, one advantage China will have over its American competitor is the age old nimbleness of an authoritarian political regime - both in diplomacy and in economic policy.

Congress, please take note.

But the chinese system is not without its fault, and America has a tradition of overestimating its rivals. The Chinese R&D financing programs have experienced their share of scandals:

... it confirmed what many Chinese scientists said among themselves: the Chinese science system was riddled with plagiarism, falsified data, and conflicts of interest.

There is also a tendency by the Chinese bureaucrats to take less risk and fund the projects that will keep the failures low. On the other hand, the tradition of venture capitalism in the west assumes the rate of failure will be high.

... the system that allowed China to master the production of wind turbines and batteries does not necessarily equip China to invent the energy technology that nobody has yet imagined. “Add as many mail coaches as you please, you will never get a railroad,” the economist Joseph Schumpeter once wrote. Scale is not a substitute for radical invention, and the Chinese bureaucracy chronically discourages risk.

Here is perhaps the million dollar question:

As an editorial last year in Nature put it, “An even deeper question is whether a truly vibrant scientific culture is possible without a more widespread societal commitment to free expression."

While the US government is slowly waking up to the need to invest in Energy technology, the differences in attitudes between Congress and the office of the President are telling. While Congress - and in particular democrats, view the issue through the prism of protecting domestic jobs, and preventing China from taking the lead rather than embracing the problem itself, Obama seems to get it:

... in April, Obama vowed to return America’s investment in research and development to a level not seen since the space race. “The nation that leads the world in twenty-first-century clean energy will be the nation that leads in the twenty-first-century global economy,” he said. “I believe America can and must be that nation.”

And this:

The stimulus package passed in February put more than thirty-eight billion dollars into the Department of Energy for renewable-energy projects—including four hundred million for ARPA-E, the agency that Bush opposed.

The conclusion the author draws about the near future seems to be appropriate, and is worth using to wrap this up:

The larger fact, however, is that no single nation is likely to dominate the clean-energy economy. Goldwind, Coda, and the Thermal Power Research Institute are hybrids of Western design and Chinese production, and no nation has yet mastered both the invention and the low-cost manufacturing of clean technology. It appears increasingly clear that winners in the new-energy economy will exploit the strengths of each side. President Obama seems inclined toward this view. When he visited Beijing in November, he and Hu Jintao cut several deals to share energy technology and know-how which will accelerate progress in both countries. This was hardly a matter of handing technology to China; under one of the deals, for instance, the Missouri-based company Peabody Energy purchased a stake in GreenGen, so that it can obtain data from, and lend expertise to, a cutting-edge Chinese power plant.

Afghanis fighting for Afghanistan

2009-12-24T15:11:00.005-05:00

[Afghan] Police fought a three-hour gunbattle in the center of an Afghan provincial capital Monday, finally killing two Taliban militants who stormed a multistory market with dozens of civilians inside, an official said. (AP)

The above AP article recounts an isolated clash between Afghani police forces and Taliban fighters in the small regional capital of Paktia. The incident was anecdotal and small in scale: there were no more than 2 to 5 insurgents, the police did what police do, it took place in a remote area of Afghanistan, and it isn't going to affect the greater strategic situation of the country. However, I believe it could potentially be significant if it is a sign of things to come.

What's the big deal?

The big deal is that since 2001, the American forces have taken over the security for the Afghan people in its entirety. As a result, the central government is shielded from its own regional foes by foreign troops fighting their war for them. The big deal is that the firefight took place in Paktia province, one of the many areas in the South and the East controlled by the Taliban where no Afghani national troops - nor any provincial militia, have dared opposing them for the past 8 years.

This may be an isolated incident - and other similar clashes certainly have occurred in the past years here and there, but the frequency of precisely this type of incident will be the largest measure of success for the new American strategy in the area, and the biggest factor in the stability of the country and the sustainablity of the central government for years to come.

In the next year and a half, Afghanis fighting for Afghanistan is more important than the reduction of corruption, the quantity of american military operations, or the success of the agricultural and infrastructure development program, while all important in their own right. Only the stability of Pakistan - and their continued military pressure on insurgent groups on their side of the border, rivals in importance.

The reason is simple: the Americans are interposed between two warring factions while the fighting ability of the central Afghani fighting capabilities were allowed to wither over the years. Remember the Northern Alliance? It ceased to exist because it's lost its purpose. For this, a lack of American forethought is to blame.

Still, while the new American strategy in Afghanistan now favors more embedding american forces with Afghani troops to fight a scaled up insurgency, the emphasis must be more on finding local allies rather than building a national army from the ground up. It takes time to raise an army and assure proper hierarchy and control; it takes much less to deal with local leaders, hand them a wad of cash, put a rifle in their hands, and make them comprehend they will either have to fight for it or loose it. A local solution is even more important because the country is so fragmented ethnically and geographically, so isolated and poor in some of the Taliban regions, and lacking a concentrated national resource like Iraq did which increase the tendency for decentralization.

The problem in other words, is incentives: neither the central Afghani, nor provincial leaders will have incentives in as long as the american forces are taking the bullets day in and day out for them. As a result, a proper dialogue - violent tho it may be to start with, between the warring factions of Afghanistan cannot resume and cannot resolve itself efficiently (short of a complete destruction of one of the factions, but that is impractical and unfeasible).

My fear is that if the local approach to the problem lacks proper emphasis, and if embedded military actions become the exception rather than the norm by the force of things, the American generals in July 2011 will have very few sectors to recommend for troop draw down. It is thus better to start sooner and move aggressively if you truly want to become the "cavalry over the hill" rather than continue to be the protector of a defenseless ally.

The isolated incident between the handful of police and insurgent forces in the tiny border province of Paktia must be a sign of things to come if we are to witness a successful and more durable counter insurgency in the next year and a half.

Shultz on Too Big to Fail

2009-12-23T16:19:00.004-05:00

In a PBS Newshour interview, George Schultz opposed the 700 billion bail outs for financial firms last year. As Labor and then Treasure secretary, he successively successfully opposed bailing out, or giving in to labor demands and pressures facing companies that were deemed too big to fail.

The basic principle he puts up against that is that when you have skin in the game, you take care of the money you manage. In the past year, this has certainly become a cliché.

But he also said that if a company is too big to fail, then it shouldn't be allowed to get that big. Here are the two mechanisms he would used to go about doing that.

Christmas lights

While he recognizes that some companies will have interests in becoming big, parts of their company should be individualized such that if one parts fail, not all of it fails. If the financial products department of AIG would have been allowed to fail without bringing down the healthier insurance department, that would have been better.

He used the analogy of Christmas lights. Before, when one bulb went out, the whole chain would go out and it took a long time to figure out which light bulb was bad the longer the chain got. Manufacturers solved the problem by creating a parallel mechanism in which one bulb can now go out without bringing the whole chain down. The same should be done for large companies that are too big too fail.

The bigger you are, the bigger your social responsibility

He also said some additional regulations are needed for very large companies that have large economic and social impacts. Mainly, a big financial companies should have larger capital requirements than smaller ones since the risk of failure affects so many more people.

This would inevitably mitigate some of the economic advantages gained from M/A's, but who would want to build a skyscraper without proper fire protection?

The failures of the legislative process

2009-12-23T11:11:00.003-05:00

In the wake of growing entrenchment of partisanship in american politics, and, as we speak, in the denouement of the health reform bill, concerns about the efficiency and the soundness of the american legislative process are rising.

Here's a quick piece striking a conversation on the topic, in particular about changing the majority threshold and how to avoid the repeat of Liebermann-esque or Nelson-esque holdouts.

http://www.marginalrevolution.com/marginalrevolution/2009/12/how-to-limit-filibusters.html

Actually, it would be interesting to get some numbers on how easily or not policy was passed 100 years ago or 50 years compared to today, and then, in particular, how easily congress has amended and can amend its own ways going forward.

Iran's nuclear aspirations, Turkey's take on it, and what 2010 has in store

2009-12-22T15:59:00.005-05:00

Iran abandoned an agreement negotiated in October seeing them send nuclear material for enrichment in Russia and in France just as fast as it adopted it. While negotiations along the same lines may be revived, the recent pickup in internal unrest has put those on hold.

Israel had put a deadline of December '09 for negotiations with Iran while they have given assurances behind closed doors that they are not yet committed to a military strike. The renewed and intensification of negotiations - with a tilt towards stronger sanctions is likely to resume soon with pressure coming from the US as they have announced at the end of December. In doing so, it will be important to understand the positions of possible detractors in the process such as China and Russia. Turkey is another one of those and considering their interests in the affair will have to take precedence over unilateral action vis-à-vis Iran.

Here's a focus on Turkey as it sees its neighbor, Iran.

Turkey, like China, have large commercial interests in Iran and are not ready to jeopardize that. On top of that, Turkey shares a long border with Tehran which happens to be kurdish territory. Turkey launched a series of raids inside Iraq a few years ago to attack kurdish villages and they consider the PKK a terrorist organization. Erdogan mentioned that Turkey has a treaty with Iran regulating their relationship going back to 1636! They will thus support a strong Iranian government no matter who's in power. Erdogan has called Ahmenidejad (sp?) his "friend" in the past; he clearly doesn't want to estrange his neighbour.

Turkey also feels like it's been treated unfairly over the past 50 years in its petition to integrate the EU. Today, it seems to have grown out of that phase. It is enjoying economic prosperity despite of it and is now looking around the world for partners and allies in a more even fashion. Luckily for Turkey, the world is now becoming more multi polar and they can more easily choose who to dance with. Look for it to regain a more influential role in the Middle East in the years and decades to come. Thus, above all, Turkey wants to remain independent. They are likely to continue to refuse moving closer to the US or other NATO countries on Iran nuclear issue or other similar agendas just like they did in 2003 when they were asked to play a greater role in the Iraq invasion. They are not about to align the faith of their country with what they see as american or israeli interests as they witness the turmoil it has created in a country that has gone down that route, Pakistan.

So while China and Russia have shown some leniency to the US on the Iran issue if we go by the latest Security Council resolution, Turkey might be a tougher sell. Turkey wants more diplomatic efforts to be done which they believe haven't been exhausted yet.

What is the relevance of Turkey? It is a secular country by constitution, it is the only working democracy in the muslim world, it is very prosperous especially by middle eastern standards, it is a NATO country and aspires to become an EU member. This is a natural ally for the US in the region, one that isn't tainted by oil resources, or hasn't been forced through conflict to become an ally. While the main issue for the US must be ultimately to prevent Iran from acquiring nuclear weapons, attitudes of countries such as Turkey must be considered. This is something that the Obama administration does infinitely better than the last one. They must continue to do so, and cherish and nurture deep and wide diplomatic ties with as many countries as they can.

So what's going to happen with the nuclear issue in Iran in the first few months of 2010?

El Baradei, the now retiring IAEA head, has said for his departing words that we were "at the end of the road" with Iran. But short of an Israeli or American aerial strike in 2010, I think the new direction will be tougher sanctions - if that. Some sanctions that are being discussed could be crippling from the Iranian economy and many people will want to try that first. This is what the international community will settle for unless conditions change drasticially. While Israel is the only country facing a survival issue in this whole affair, they would be foolish to act militarily on their own. This is especially true considering the enduring political turmoil within Iran as I write this which is one of the major condition that could change very rapidly in the months to come. A revolution within Iran could render the nuclear issue moot, so why spend more political capital now if the indications are Iran is still a good way away from a bomb?

The last thing I'd like to add is about Iran's intentions for nuclear energy.

When you are faced with an enemy, the natural, instinctual thing to do is to assume that that enemy is in the business of deploying all of its energy solely to do you harm, particularly in the most evil, vicious way. The problem is that those assumptions are not only always different from the truth, but they enhance themselves in a vicious circle because your enemy will entertain the same rationale (Indeed, the tragic all-out-war, downward maelstrom of militaristic schedules and attack contingencies that was WW1 was in fact a direct consequence of this rationale considering the rather limited, regional original event that started it). The fact is the "death to america" rhetoric that we often hear coming from Iranian Friday preachers or officials is mostly targeted at domestic audiences, and is fringe in nature. At best - or at worst? they are the Glenn Becks of Iran. Neither the iranian military nor the clerical council (whichever you believe to be the real authority within Iran at the moment) would have on top of its to-do list on day one of acquiring a functional bomb to drop it on Israel.

Iran and other similar countries who want, or wanted the bomb in the past, do so for two reasons. First, the bomb is seen as a symbol of power and prestige. It would transform its relationships with neighbors, add more weight to their negotiating capabilities internationally, and enhance the national sentiment at home. Second, and this one is less obvious, Iran and many other countries, still feel the weight of the post colonial historical legacy. They have the need - no the urge, to break away from it. They feel that the anti-nuclear pressure exerted against them is patronising. Ask any people on the street of those countries why they want the bomb and chances are they will tell you: "You have it, why not us?"

The Mission

2009-12-22T12:05:00.006-05:00

The purpose of this blog is to comment and analyze international news and events.

The guiding principle informing this commentary is a take on Socrates' Paradox which says that nobody does evil willingly applied to international affairs. My belief is also that a certain moral neutrality is necessary for a better understanding of events as they unfold and inscribe themselves against the background of historical change material and moral.

There are many voices to be heard on politics coming from the media and governments, but few have the luxury of not being partisan or not being otherwise polarized by the unconscious cultural narratives constituting their historical position. My goal is to add my voice to those few. It is not a matter of being "a-ideological" - that is impossible; rather, it is a matter of depth and an attempt to make the unconscious conscious.

While I will never refrain from advocacy, the disinterested pursuit of knowledge, and, principally, the desire to understand the "other side" of the story for a better global understanding will remain at the core of my reflection. I will often adopt the american point of view, but this is only because I live there.