Obsidian Wings

Zombie Hoover vs. The World

by Eric Martin

This David Leonhard piece (via Matt Y) on the global trend in austerity measures implemented despite the deep recession and severe unemployment crisis is quite appropos of recent conversations on this Site.  As such, here is an extended excerpt:

The world’s rich countries are now conducting a dangerous experiment. They are repeating an economic policy out of the 1930s — starting to cut spending and raise taxes before a recovery is assured — and hoping today’s situation is different enough to assure a different outcome.

In effect, policy makers are betting that the private sector can make up for the withdrawal of stimulus over the next couple of years. If they’re right, they will have made a head start on closing their enormous budget deficits. If they’re wrong, they may set off a vicious new cycle, in which public spending cuts weaken the world economy and beget new private spending cuts.

On Tuesday, pessimism seemed the better bet. Stocks fell around the world, over worries about economic growth.

Longer term, though, it’s still impossible to know which prediction will turn out to be right. You can find good evidence to support either one.

The private sector in many rich countries has continued to grow at a fairly good clip in recent months. In the United States, wages, total hours worked, industrial production and corporate profits have all risen significantly. And unlike in the 1930s, developing countries are now big enough that their growth can lift other countries’ economies.

On the other hand, the most recent economic numbers have offered some reason for worry, and the coming fiscal tightening in this country won’t be much smaller than the 1930s version. From 1936 to 1938, when the Roosevelt administration believed that the Great Depression was largely over, tax increases and spending declines combined to equal 5 percent of gross domestic product.

Back then, however, European governments were raising their spending in the run-up to World War II. This time, almost the entire world will be withdrawing its stimulus at once. From 2009 to 2011, the tightening in the United States will equal 4.6 percent of G.D.P., according to the International Monetary Fund. In Britain, even before taking into account the recently announced budget cuts, it was set to equal 2.5 percent. Worldwide, it will equal a little more than 2 percent of total output.

Today, no wealthy country is an obvious candidate to be the world’s growth engine, and the simultaneous moves have the potential to unnerve consumers, businesses and investors, says Adam Posen, an American expert on financial crises now working for the Bank of England. “The world may be making a mistake, and it may turn out to make things worse rather than better,” Mr. Posen said. [...]

The policy mistakes of the 1930s stemmed mostly from ignorance. John Maynard Keynes was still a practicing economist in those days, and his central insight about depressions — that governments need to spend when the private sector isn’t — was not widely understood. In the 1932 presidential campaign, Franklin D. Roosevelt vowed to outdo Herbert Hoover by balancing the budget. Much of Europe was also tightening at the time.

If anything, the initial stages of our own recent crisis were more severe than the Great Depression. Global trade, industrial production and stocks all dropped more in 2008-9 than in 1929-30, as a study by Barry Eichengreen and Kevin H. O’Rourke found.

In 2008, though, policy makers in most countries knew to act aggressively. The Federal Reserve and other central banks flooded the world with cheap money. The United States, China, Japan and, to a lesser extent, Europe, increased spending and cut taxes.

It worked. By early last year, within six months of the collapse of Lehman Brothers, economies were starting to recover.  [...]

As is often the case after a financial crisis, this recovery is turning out to be a choppy one. Companies kept increasing pay and hours last month, for example, but did little new hiring. On Tuesday, the Conference Board reported that consumer confidence fell sharply this month.

And just as households and businesses are becoming skittish, governments are getting ready to let stimulus programs expire, the equivalent of cutting spending and raising taxes. The Senate has so far refused to pass a bill that would extend unemployment insurance or send aid to ailing state governments. Goldman Sachs economists this week described the Senate’s inaction as “an increasingly important risk to growth.”

The parallels to 1937 are not reassuring. From 1933 to 1937, the United States economy expanded more than 40 percent, even surpassing its 1929 high. But the recovery was still not durable enough to survive Roosevelt’s spending cuts and new Social Security tax. In 1938, the economy shrank 3.4 percent, and unemployment spiked.

Given this history, why would policy makers want to put on another fiscal hair shirt today?

The reasons vary by country. Greece has no choice. It is out of money, and the markets will not lend to it at a reasonable rate. Several other countries are worried — not ludicrously — that financial markets may turn on them, too, if they delay deficit reduction. Spain falls into this category, and even Britain may.

Then there are the countries that still have the cash or borrowing ability to push for more growth, like the United States, Germany and China, which happen to be three of the world’s biggest economies. Yet they are also reluctant.

China, until recently at least, has been worried about its housing market overheating. Germany has long been afraid of stimulus, because of inflation’s role in the Nazis’ political rise. In responding to the recent financial crisis, Europe, led by Germany, was much more timid than the United States, which is one reason the European economy is in worse shape today.

The reasons for the new American austerity are subtler, but not shocking. Our economy remains in rough shape, by any measure. So it’s easy to confuse its condition (bad) with its direction (better) and to lose sight of how much worse it could be. The unyielding criticism from those who opposed stimulus from the get-go — laissez-faire economists, Congressional Republicans, German leaders — plays a role, too. They’re able to shout louder than the data.

Finally, the idea that the world’s rich countries need to cut spending and raise taxes has a lot of truth to it. The United States, Europe and Japan have all made promises they cannot afford. Eventually, something needs to change.

In an ideal world, countries would pair more short-term spending and tax cuts with long-term spending cuts and tax increases. But not a single big country has figured out, politically, how to do that.

I've got a couple of ideas to address long term spending cuts: pare down our insanely large military budget, disengage from wasteful and counterproductive foreign wars, create a smarter, less wasteful legal regimen for dealing with drug use and reassess our country's handling of exceedingly expensive end of life care, in which over-prescribed procedures generate results of dubious value, and can be as unwanted as they are likely to result in pain and discomfort without upside.

John Boehner Offers a Plan for Precipitous Withdrawal from Afghanistan

by Eric Martin

John Boenher, master strategist or stealth peacenik?  You decide.  Here, he predicts a strong showing and touts his Party's burgeoning prospects:

House Minority Leader John Boehner, the Ohio Republican with his eye on Speaker Nancy Pelosi's gavel, said the tide is turning the GOP's way.

"The American people have written off the Democrats," Boehner said Monday in an interview with Tribune-Review editors and reporters. "They're willing to look at us again."

Boehner stopped short of predicting Republicans would gain the 39 seats they need to retake control of Congress, but he said a backlash against President Obama's policies has energized Republican voters more than Democrats. Boehner said voters are angry at a government they believe is overreaching and indifferent.

OK, a bit cocky and boastful, but pretty much as expected for a political leader.  Besides, the GOP was bound to make at least some gains during the midterms regardless, and you can't fault him for crowing about it.  But then he goes and blows the wad:

Ensuring there's enough money to pay for the war will require reforming the country's entitlement system, Boehner said. He said he'd favor increasing the Social Security retirement age to 70 for people who have at least 20 years until retirement, tying cost-of-living increases to the consumer price index rather than wage inflation and limiting payments to those who need them.

Yeah, that ought to be a real popular message:

"People, you can either have 10 more years of this wonderful war in Afghanistan, or Social Security.  Since the GOP has its finger on the pulse of the American people, we're going to go ahead and begin dismantling Social Security.  Becasue that's what you want.  Amirite?"

Amid Concrete and Clay, and General Decay

by Eric Martin

Andrew Bacevich makes an extremely important point about some of the costs associated with perpetuating long term war(s), and how such a military posture erodes democratic institutions 

Long wars are antithetical to democracy. Protracted conflict introduces toxins that inexorably corrode the values of popular government. Not least among those values is a code of military conduct that honors the principle of civilian control while keeping the officer corps free from the taint of politics. Events of the past week -- notably the Rolling Stone profile that led to Gen. Stanley A. McChrystal's dismissal -- hint at the toll that nearly a decade of continuous conflict has exacted on the U.S. armed forces. The fate of any one general qualifies as small beer: Wearing four stars does not signify indispensability. But indications that the military's professional ethic is eroding, evident in the disrespect for senior civilians expressed by McChrystal and his inner circle, should set off alarms. [...]

After Vietnam, the United States abandoned its citizen army tradition, oblivious to the consequences. In its place, it opted for what the Founders once called a "standing army" -- a force consisting of long-serving career professionals.

For a time, the creation of this so-called all-volunteer force, only tenuously linked to American society, appeared to be a master stroke. Washington got superbly trained soldiers and Republicans and Democrats took turns putting them to work. The result, once the Cold War ended, was greater willingness to intervene abroad. As Americans followed news reports of U.S. troops going into action everywhere from the Persian Gulf to the Balkans, from the Caribbean to the Horn of Africa, they found little to complain about: The costs appeared negligible. Their role was simply to cheer.

This happy arrangement now shows signs of unraveling, a victim of what the Pentagon has all too appropriately been calling its Long War.

The Long War is not America's war. It belongs exclusively to "the troops," lashed to a treadmill that finds soldiers and Marines either serving in a combat zone or preparing to deploy.

To be an American soldier today is to serve a people who find nothing amiss in the prospect of armed conflict without end...

Throughout history, circumstances such as these have bred praetorianism, warriors becoming enamored with their moral superiority and impatient with the failings of those they are charged to defend. The smug disdain for high-ranking civilians casually expressed by McChrystal and his chief lieutenants -- along with the conviction that "Team America," as these officers style themselves, was bravely holding out against a sea of stupidity and corruption -- suggests that the officer corps of the United States is not immune to this affliction.

To imagine that replacing McChrystal with Gen. David H. Petraeus will fix the problem is wishful thinking. To put it mildly, Petraeus is no simple soldier. He is a highly skilled political operator, whose name appears on Republican wish lists as a potential presidential candidate in 2012. Far more significant, the views cultivated within Team America are shared elsewhere.

The day the McChrystal story broke, an active-duty soldier who has served multiple combat tours offered me his perspective on the unfolding spectacle. The dismissive attitude expressed by Team America, he wrote, "has really become a pandemic in the Army." Among his peers, a belief that "it is OK to condescend to civilian leaders" has become common, ranking officers permitting or even endorsing "a culture of contempt" for those not in uniform. Once the previously forbidden becomes acceptable, it soon becomes the norm.

"Pretty soon you have an entire organization believing that their leader is the 'Savior' and that everyone else is stupid and incompetent, or not committed to victory." In this soldier's view, things are likely to get worse before they get better. "Senior officers who condone this kind of behavior and allow this to continue and fester," he concluded, "create generation after generation of officers like themselves -- but they're generally so arrogant that they think everyone needs to be just like them anyway." [...]

During Vietnam, the United States military cracked from the bottom up. The damage took decades to repair. In the seemingly endless wars of the post-Sept. 11 era, a military that has demonstrated remarkable durability now shows signs of coming undone at the top. The officer corps is losing its bearings. [...]

The responsibility facing the American people is clear. They need to reclaim ownership of their army. They need to give their soldiers respite, by insisting that Washington abandon its de facto policy of perpetual war. Or, alternatively, the United States should become a nation truly "at" war, with all that implies in terms of civic obligation, fiscal policies and domestic priorities. Should the people choose neither course -- and thereby subject their troops to continuing abuse -- the damage to the army and to American democracy will be severe.

All that, and this particular Bacevich piece doesn't even touch on the interplay of perpetual war and the steady erosion of civil liberties, a deterioration that can prove difficult to halt, let alone reverse, even after the state of war has passed. 

On the contrary, the newer less protective civil liberties standards tend to creep into the domestic law enforcement arena, bringing a bit of the war front to the home front.

Heart of the Congo

by Eric Martin

I hadn't heard about Floribert Chebeya Bahizire until I read about his murder in the New York Times, but perhaps his death will serve to bring more scrutiny to the absolutely horrific conditions in the Congo, and further his courageous and tireless work to protect people from the abuses of rapacious domestic and foreign interests that have plagued that country's people for centuries. 

As an example of foreign involvement see, ie, the CIA's sordid hand (working with the Belgians) in the coup and eventual assassination of democratically elected, and extremely popular, leader Patrice Lumumba - who had the temerity to lead the fight to win independence from Belgium and then suggest that the country's vast mineral wealth be used to enrich the country and its inhabitants, and not foreign mining interests.   

Tragically, the Congo has seen little peace since that period (and certainly in the colonial period preceding it).  Floribert Chebeya Bahizire deserves to be honored for not accepting that status quo:

Floribert Chebeya Bahizire went about his work with an accountant’s meticulousness. He was trained to count numbers, and his life’s work became adding bodies: those jailed, those tortured, those killed by a repressive government.

Early on the morning of June 2, Mr. Chebeya, Congo’s best-known human rights activist, was found dead in his car in the Mont Ngafula area of this capital city, his hands tied behind his back. The Congo police inspector general had summoned him for questioning the afternoon before.

“I’m in front of the office,” Mr. Chebeya said in a text message to his wife at 5:20. “Keep track of me,” said his message sent two minutes later. That was the last she heard from him. She later received a message from his phone, but said she is certain it was not from her husband.

Now, more than three weeks later, the “Chebeya Affair,” as his killing has become known, continues to be told day after day on the front pages of Kinshasa’s newspapers. His death touched off an outcry that has not stopped, here or abroad. The United Nations secretary general said he was “deeply shocked” by Mr. Chebeya’s death, and the United States, European Union and French governments expressed concern and called for an independent inquiry.

The police inspector general, John Numbi, one of the most powerful men in the government of President Joseph Kabila, has been suspended. Officials have announced investigations, several officers have been arrested, and Interior Minister Adolphe Lumanu announced on national television that Mr. Kabila was “determined” to get to the bottom of Mr. Chebeya’s death. No cause of death has been released, and no charges have been filed, according to Human Rights Watch.

Suspicions about who ordered the death, and whether it was someone high in the government, persist. “He was quite a thorn in their side,” said Anneke Van Woudenberg, senior Africa researcher at Human Rights Watch.

“We’re in mourning,” said Claude Boilama, a civil servant, standing next to Mr. Tono. “He defended everybody. This was somebody of great courage.”

Nearly 1,000 mourners and diplomats attended a funeral service and burial for Mr. Chebeya on Saturday in Kinshasa. Dozens of riot police officers were on hand, but no violence was reported.

Human rights defenders, journalists and political opponents are routinely harassed or even killed in this strategic, mineral-rich country in the heart of Africa, but Mr. Chebeya was not an ordinary victim. He was the short, bespectacled, intense man who kept going, kept investigating, and kept speaking out, on the radio, in news conferences and at the head of demonstrations, year after year, in the face of constant threats and occasional beatings.

He pursued multiple investigations at the same time from his spartan, unmarked offices on a hillside here: the repression of political opposition, awful conditions in the prisons, the suspicious death of a young woman who had said she was Mr. Kabila’s sister.

To the outside world he was the vital on-scene witness, through the carefully documented bulletin of the organization he led, La Voix des Sans Voix, or Voice of the Voiceless, to what Human Rights Watch called “the systemic nature of political repression under President Kabila.”

That is courage.

Guest Post: Mass Unemployment Is Not a Conservative Social Value

by Jacob Davies

(Eric Martin: Frequent commenter, and occasional blogger in his own right, Jacob Davies, has agreed to pitch in on the front page in order to provide a fresh perspective, and needed relief for (and from) yours truly.  Below is Jacob's first of what we hope are many contributions)

I'm sure many of you have already read Krugman's column yesterday. Whether you agree with his prescription or not, this much seems certain:

Unemployment — especially long-term unemployment — remains at levels that would have been considered catastrophic not long ago, and shows no sign of coming down rapidly.

Austerity is in fashion among conservatives lately, and at first glance that may seem like a good philosophical match for conservative values. The emphasis on regressive tax cuts and reductions in redistributive measures & social safety nets are justified by a belief that the market economy is essentially meritocratic, that those who earn more deserve to keep what they earn, that reducing the amount they earn distorts the necessary incentives towards difficult and expensive education, hard work, and risky investment, and that redistributive measures reward those who are unproductive, lazy, or not endowed with great talent.

This is an appealing story. It has a grain of truth to it. There are lazy, dishonest, incompetent, and stupid people in the world, and the idea that they will get their comeuppance is pleasant. Some of them will.

Unfortunately, the idea is more wrong than right. Unemployment is corrosive towards the very values that conservatives hold high: family cohesion; hard work; honesty; marriage; child-raising; lawfulness. The punishments do not affect only, or even predominantly, the unworthy, and plenty of those unworthies who caused the crisis have escaped without significant harm. There is a great, but long, piece from the Atlantic from March that is worth reading in full, but there are a few choice quotes that make this clear:

Joblessness corrodes marriages, and makes divorce much more likely down the road... The gender imbalance of the job losses in this recession...when combined with the depth and duration of the jobs crisis - poses "a profound challenge to marriage," especially in lower-income communities.

The stigma against out-of-wedlock children has by now largely dissolved in working-class communities ... among adults with no college degree, changes in income have no bearing at all on rates of childbirth.

Communities with large numbers of unmarried, jobless men take on an unsavory character over time. These white working-class communities - once strong, vibrant, proud communities, often organized around big industries - they’re just in terrible straits. The social fabric of these places is just shredding. When young men can’t transition into formal-sector jobs, they sell drugs and drink and do drugs.

Once we start getting detailed data on the conditions of inner-city life since the crash, we’re going to see some horror stories - and in many cases a relapse into the depths of decades past. "The point I want to emphasize," Wilson said, “is that we should brace ourselves."

Mass unemployment is a crisis for traditional values; in light of which, one might ask why those who profess admiration for those values are fighting so hard against attempts to address it.

A Moth Who Just Wants to Share Your Light

by Eric Martin

Andrew Sullivan is highly quotable in response to David Brooks' gripes about the Rolling Stone story that played a part in the sacking of General McChrystal:

David Brooks writes the following sentence today:

The most interesting part of my job is that I get to observe powerful people at close quarters.

Like David, I am privileged in many ways to be able to meet and talk to a lot of powerful figures. David and I have been at many functions of this sort together, but I have to say I disagree. These interactions are the least interesting part of my job, and often the most misleading. Every now and then, you discover a nugget that adds something. But in general, you get the schtick and spin, larded with a few anecdotes to make you feel flattered to be included in the salons of power. And what still amazes me is how deferent most of even the A-list journos are (with a few glorious exceptions). In fact, the definition of an A-list journalist in Washington is the person who is chummiest and closest to the people they cover. They have risen to the top in part because they know what questions the powerful really don't want to answer - and decide not to ask them.

This is the most extreme when it comes to senior members of the military, where cults of personality by consummate operators, like the crashing bore, David Petraeus, create media narratives where reality is far less salient than spin. And so a great deal of the coverage is really about how plugged in the journalist is, and a lot of it is directed at his peers, whose approval he craves far more than he does his readers' or viewers'. The notion that we hacks should be instinctually hostile to the powerful, blunt in our questions, unsparing in our challenges, rude in our inquiries, and uninterested in getting to know anyone in power - that we should be much more skeptical precisely because we are so close - this seems almost archaic in late-imperial DC. In my view, that's why the public has come to despise the press in a populist age. Because the public rightly sees us as part of the establishment problem, not a means to its accountability. (One reason the United States so easily became a nation of torture, for example, is because Washington journalists, again with certain glorious exceptions, could not bring themselves to think of their friends and sources as war criminals.)

Now, of course, in the real world, some messiness is essential. Beat reporters cannot afford to freeze off all access with constant embarrassing truth-telling. But their aim should always be truth-telling as much as possible - not quick-hit Politico-style scooplets masking a deeper deference. My view is that these days too often it isn't, especially if it requires a reporter bucking the conventional wisdom - the Iraq surge worked! Petraeus is God! McChrystal is a genius! 

As Jeffrey Goldberg might boast, most of our leading journalists have been "toilet trained" in the norms of establishment journalism, and the extreme of deference journalists are expected to show to their subjects.  Amazingly, Goldberg thinks this is a good thing.

Cause at Night, the Sun in Retreat Made the Skyline Look Like Crooked Teeth

by Eric Martin

William Dalrymple has written a rather insightful article on our current predicament in Afghanistan, leavened with a historical recounting of Britain's own 19th century experience with conflict in that part of the world.

This is a pretty fair summation of the score:

The reality of our present Afghan entanglement is that we took sides in a complex civil war, which has been running since the 1970s, siding with the north against the south, town against country, secularism against Islam, and the Tajiks against the Pashtuns. We have installed a government, and trained up an army, both of which in many ways have discriminated against the Pashtun majority, and whose top-down, highly centralised constitution allows for remarkably little federalism or regional representation. However much western liberals may dislike the Taliban - and they have very good reason for doing so - the truth remains that they are in many ways the authentic voice of rural Pashtun conservatism, whose views and wishes are ignored by the government in Kabul and who are still largely excluded from power. It is hardly surprising that the Pashtuns are determined to resist the regime and that the insurgency is widely supported, especially in the Pashtun heartlands of the south and east.

This anecdote is quite telling:

The following morning in Jalalabad, we went to a jirga, or assembly of tribal elders, to which the greybeards of Gandamak had come under a flag of truce to discuss what had happened the day before. The story was typical of many I heard about the current government, and revealed how a mixture of corruption, incompetence and insensitivity has helped give an opening for the return of the once-hated Taliban.

As Predator drones took off and landed incessantly at the nearby airfield, the elders related how the previous year government troops had turned up to destroy the opium harvest. The troops promised the villagers full compensation, and were allowed to burn the crops; but the money never turned up. Before the planting season, the villagers again went to Jalalabad and asked the government if they could be provided with assistance to grow other crops. Promises were made; again nothing was delivered. They planted poppy, informing the local authorities that if they again tried to burn the crop, the village would have no option but to resist. When the troops turned up, about the same time as we were arriving at nearby Jegdalek, the villagers were waiting for them, and had called in the local Taliban to assist. In the fighting that followed, nine policemen were killed, six vehicles destroyed and ten police hostages taken.

After the jirga was over, one of the tribal elders came over and we chatted for a while over a glass of green tea. "Last month," he said, "some American officers called us to a hotel in Jalalabad for a meeting. One of them asked me, 'Why do you hate us?' I replied, 'Because you blow down our doors, enter our houses, pull our women by the hair and kick our children. We cannot accept this. We will fight back, and we will break your teeth, and when your teeth are broken you will leave, just as the British left before you. It is just a matter of time.'"

What did he say to that? “He turned to his friend and said, 'If the old men are like this, what will the younger ones be like?' In truth, all the Americans here know that their game is over. It is just their politicians who deny this." [...]

Now as then, the problem is not hatred of the west, so much as a dislike of foreign troops swaggering around and making themselves odious to the very people they are meant to be helping. On the return journey, as we crawled back up the passes towards Kabul, we got stuck behind a US military convoy of eight Humvees and two armoured personnel carriers in full camouflage, all travelling at less than 20 miles per hour. Despite the slow speed, the troops refused to let any Afghan drivers overtake them, for fear of suicide bombers, and they fired warning shots at any who attempted to do so. By the time we reached the top of the pass two hours later, there were 300 cars and trucks backed up behind the convoy, each one full of Afghans furious at being ordered around in their own country by a group of foreigners. Every day, small incidents of arrogance and insensitivity such as this make the anger grow.

There has always been an absolute refusal by the Afghans to be ruled by foreigners, or to accept any government perceived as being imposed on the country from abroad. Now as then, the puppet ruler installed by the west has proved inadequate to the job. Too weak, unpopular and corrupt to provide security or development, he has been forced to turn on his puppeteers in order to retain even a vestige of legitimacy in the eyes of his people. Recently, Karzai has accused the US, the UK and the UN of orchestrating a fraud in last year's elections, described Nato forces as "an army of occupation", and even threatened to join the Taliban if Washington kept putting pressure on him. [emphasis added]

Dalrymple's advice going forward isn't all that bad either:

The only answer is to negotiate a political solution while we still have enough power to do so, which in some form or other involves talking to the Taliban. This is a course that Karzai, to his credit, is keen to pursue; he made it clear that his peace jirga at the start of this month was open to any Taliban leader willing to lay down arms, and that jobs and monetary incentives would be available to former Taliban who changed their allegiance and joined the government. It is still unclear whether the new Tory government supports this course; Barack Oba­ma certainly opposes it. In this, he is supported by the notably undiplomatic US envoy to the region, Richard Holbrooke, described by one senior British diplomat as "a bull who brings his own china shop wherever he goes".

There is something else we can still do before we pull out: leave some basic infrastructure behind, a goal we notably failed to achieve in the past nine years. Yet William Hague and Liam Fox oppose this policy - as Fox notoriously said in his 21 May interview with the Times, which infuriated his Afghan hosts: "We are not in Afghanistan for the sake of the education policy in a broken 13th-century country." The Tories could do much worse than consult their own newly elected backbencher Rory Stewart. He knows much more about Afghanistan than either Fox or Hague. As Stewart wrote shortly before he entered politics, targeted aid projects that employ Afghans can do a great deal of good, "and we should focus on meeting the Afghan government's request for more investment in agriculture, irrigation, energy and roads".

And then get out of Afghanistan and off to see a dentist.

(via James Fallows)

A Heart of Stone, a Smoking Gun, I Can Give You Life, I Can Take it Away

by Eric Martin

Obama administration counterterrorism official John Brennan provides some interesting answers to questions from Eli Lake regarding the parameters of the Obama administration's declared authority to assassinate U.S. citizens abroad:

If a person is a U.S. citizen, and he is on the battlefield in Afghanistan or Iraq trying to attack our troops, he will face the full brunt of the U.S. military response," Mr. Brennan said. "If an American person or citizen is in a Yemen or in a Pakistan or in Somalia or another place, and they are trying to carry out attacks against U.S. interests, they also will face the full brunt of a U.S. response. And it can take many forms."

Adam Serwer is rightly concerned at the exceedingly loose standard enunciated by Brennan:

...Brennan seems to have revealed a lower threshold for targeting American citizens with lethal action. It's one thing to argue that since person X is a member of an organization at war with the United States, they can be targeted as a matter of self-defense, as State Department Legal Adviser Harold Koh did. It's quite another to say that an American citizen threatening a "U.S. interest" anywhere in the world is also subject to targeted assassination. That's a much broader category, and a much broader field of conflict.

Indeed, while Al-Shabaab [in Somalia] has yet to launch an attack against the U.S., you could conceivably target Americans who joined them for assassination under Brennan's standard based on the fact that they threaten "U.S. interests" in Somalia [by targeting the U.S.-backed regime in Somalia], where the U.S. military is not at war. Not just in Somalia, either. In "any other place."  So Brennan didn't just confirm that the administration targets U.S. citizens for killing. He appears to have revealed that the administration does so under a much broader rubric than previously known. 

I'm sort of hard-pressed to understand how this isn't simply an unrestricted license for the administration to kill whomever they want anywhere in the world, even an American citizen, subject only to an internal deliberations process among their lawyers.

It is important to consider that executive branch-initiated infringements on civil liberties tend to snowball over time, with each subsequent administration (regardless of Party) building upon (or, at the very least, consolidating) its predecessor's expansions of executive power.  One need look back no further than the Obama administration's disturbing pattern of embracing and utilizing Bush-era abuses such as torture and indefinite detention without trial, even if rhetorically casting such policies in a negative light.

Considering those tendencies, and the magnitude of the stakes involved in granting near carte blanch in the realm of assassination, establishing a standard based on the vague criteria of attacking "U.S. interests" should be resisted forcefully, to say the least. 

That slope comes pre-greased.

McChrystal out, Petraeus In

Thus reads the LA Times Headline.  The underlying Rolling Stone Interview is here

I don't have any firm idea on whether this development will improve or detract from our overall military and political goals in Afghanistan (I leave that analysis to my able co-bloggers), but it is very important from a political perspective.  Civilian control of the military is vitally important for the United States.  Our military is a ridiculously powerful tool, and maintaining civilian control of its strategic aims and methods is key.

McChrystal's problem should not be seen as disagreeing with the President in terms of his analysis of strategic chances of certain policies.  Honest assessment in that respect is not only tolerable, but is in fact vital.  His problem was in fostering an atmosphere of disrespect for the duty of the civilian branches to make the final decisions on strategic military goals.  

The problems that he addresses in the Rolling Stone article even seem to have a ring of truth about them.  I wouldn't be surprised at all if Holbrooke, for example, really does act like a loose cannon--disrupting long term strategies.  But open contempt for the civilian decision-makers can't be tolerated.  The military is a close knit organization, which rightly protects its own.  But it has too much power to allow an ethos of disrespect for its civilian commanders to fester without becoming dangerous.  And like any close knit organization, it can develop its own particular echo chambers which are well served by outside influence.  He not only held such attitudes about the civilian officials, he fostered them in his subordinates and published them for the entire world to see.  

I have no doubt that McChrystal is an honorable man who wants the best for this country.  But even honorable men can allow dangers to grow under their watch, especially if they get sucked up into the political infighting which seems to surround the entire Afghanistan effort.  Even honorable men can have blind spots about the wisdom of allowing military culture to grow further in the direction of disdain for civilian checks on its actions.

He had to go.  

--by Sebastian

Why Is There Never an Option "C"?

by Eric Martin

Shadi Hamid offers a partial defense of General McChrystal, prasing, in particular, McChrystal's emphasis on population-centric counterinsurgency doctrine, and the restrained rules of engagement that go along therewith:

...If we're going to fight a war, we should probably fight it under someone who's sensitive to the loss of innocent life. Not just because it's the right thing to do, but because it also has the added benefit of making sense. It's difficult (for me at least) to envision "winning" a war in which we start killing a lot more Afghans. That would be a recruiting paradise for the Taliban, would further undermine whatever legitimacy the American presence still has among Afghans, and make it more difficult to peel off Taliban to our side. And as McChrystal has said, you kill one civilian, you create 10 new enemies. 

But Hamid assumes far too much.  First of all, why is it a given that "we're going to fight a war"?  Once you box us in to that paradigm, sure, COIN is attractive in certain ways, but there should be a third option between fighting a COIN war and a non-COIN war, and that option should be: not fighting any war.  Full stop. 

Contrary to the operational presumption underlying Hamid's piece, it is not self-evident that we need to be fighting a war in Afghanistan at this point.  There are few, if any compelling reasons that would justify the astronomical costs involved - especially since COIN proponents argue that a 10-15 year timeline is required (that would be 10-15 tacked on to the 8+ years already invested).

Hamid continues:

Now, it's fair to make the argument that, despite what McChrystal says, we're killing a lot of civilians anyway.

Well, yeah, that kind of gives away a good chunk of the show, doesn't it?  COIN looks a lot better on paper and in theory than in practice.  Especially when the virtues of restraint are extolled by McChrystal - whose record with JSOC in Iraq was far from a model of sensitivity to civilian casualties.  See, also, ongoing night raids in Afghanistan, civilian detention and torture at black sites, as well as Bagram, and wide use of air strikes (that McChrystal bemoans but does not reduce sufficiently).  On the other hand, McChrystal says the right things, so it's a wash.  Or something.

More from Shadi:

But what troubles me is when critics of the war, particularly progressives, come very close to suggesting McChrystal should let the military loose and ride up the body count. As Andrew Exum writes, "In a weird way, Hastings is making the argument to readers of Rolling Stone (Rolling Stone!) that counterinsurgency sucks because it doesn't allow our soldiers to kill enough people." Counterinsurgency might suck, but it doesn't suck because of that.

Shadi never does mention any of those progressive critics, and what exactly it would mean to "come very close" to arguing that we should "ride the body count" but if they exist, I would still insist that option C is more attractive.

As for why counterinsurgency might suck, I would make the point that even COIN's most avid proponents insist that it is a time intensive, resource taxing enterprise that takes decades to even bring about a chance at success.  Which is why McChrystal's claim to be able to get'r'done in Afghanistan in 18 months was, on its face, entirely unrealistic.

Even after spending decades in the fight, COIN theorists agree that the fate of the mission will ultimately rely entirely on several factors outside of our control: the strength and legitimacy of the applicable government and its ability to garner the respect and support of a majority of the population in question, the existence or lack thereof of proto-institutions capable of being built up to levels that could solidify gains made in winning the allegiance of the population, no support/safe haven provided to insurgent groups from neighboring powers, hostility in the indigenous population to protracted foreign occupation, etc.

Given those realities, Afghanistan is, in fact, one of the worst places in the world to even attempt COIN, with several of those intractable obstacles present - factors that are fundamental to the putative "winning" COIN formula.

But since Hamid is right that a more unrestrained war effort would not only fail to succeed in its own right, but would also result in greater civilian slaughter, again, I'll take option C.