Let me just say that for all the flaws of analysis and manners that one can find in Kaplan’s earlier, more travel-oriented books, I also rather like them. Hearing a somewhat cranky man recount his adventures in weird places can be pretty entertaining even if mistakes are made. The problems really arise in more recent years, roughly post-9/11, when Kaplan becomes more and more a policy writer. That’s when stuff really runs off the rails. But it’s worth noting that Kaplan is not only employed by The Atlantic, but also by CNAS one of the most influential defense policy organizations in town. Which is perhaps the best illustration of the point that there’s an endless market in policy circles—even in allegedly left-of-center policy circles—for nationalism and militarism, no matter how poorly done.
Pat Lang has a very good long post expressing an appropriately skeptical view of the history of counterinsurgency as a policy concept. I won’t rehash everything he says, but I’m very much in agreement that when your big precedent of success is the British in Malaya (“The British succeeded in suppressing this revolt but what did this successful effort gain them?”) then you don’t have much of a precedent.
He recommends the following course of action for Afghanistan instead of COIN:
What should we do?
– Hold the cities as bases to prevent a recognized Taliban government until some satisfactory (to us) deal is made among the Afghans.
- Participate in international economic development projects for Afghanistan.
- Conduct effective clandestine HUMINT out of the city bases against international jihadi elements.
- Turn the tribes against the jihadi elements.
- Continue to hunt and kill/capture dangerous jihadis.
How long might you have to follow this program? It might be a long time but that would be sustainable. A full-blown COIN campaign in Afghanistan is not politically sustainable.
The thing of it is that I think this is pretty much what the Obama administration’s strategy actually looks like. We’re not, after all, sending nearly the number of troops that FM 3-24 would suggest for countrywide counterinsurgency. Instead the idea is that this should be enough troops to secure key population centers. The idea is then that this (a) buys time to build up Afghan state capacity and (b) convinces anti-government forces that there’s no way a Taliban-led coalition is going to establish itself as the government of Afghanistan. That, in principle, should create adequate incentives for at least some of the current members of the Taliban-led coalition to want to strike deals with the Afghan government.
Yesterday, Ian Fry, the Tuvalu delegate to the United Nations Climate Change Conference in Copenhagen, Denmark, made an impassioned plea for legally binding agreements to be made by world leaders to save his nation and other low-lying island states. The tiny Pacific island nation of Tuvalu and other small island states have proposed a new treaty to protect these nations. Fry noted that is is “an irony of the modern world that the fate of the world is being determined by some senators in the US Congress”:
It appears that we are waiting for some senators in the U.S. Congress to conclude before we can consider this issue properly. It is an irony of the modern world that the fate of the world is being determined by some senators in the U.S. Congress.
Watch it:
The New York Times explains the “obstacles” that the Senate poses for Obama. The Tuvaluan delegate suggested that President Obama earn his “rightly or wrongly”-awarded Nobel Peace Prize by addressing climate change, “the greatest threat to humanity.” Tearfully, he concluded: “The fate of my country rests in your hands.” The U.S. representative, Jonathan Pershing, spoke a few minutes later, but “didn’t respond directly to Tuvalu’s plea.”
Brad Johnson has two posts up from Copenhagen in which leaders of small island nations Cape Verde and Tuvalu plead for the developed world in general and the United States Senate in particular to not willfully condemn their nations to extinction.
This is another piece of the puzzle that the climate denial conspiracy theorists never seem to deal with. Maybe Al Gore made up all this climate science in order to sell tickets to his documentary, but what on earth is the government of Tuvalu doing? Why would they be running around the planet pretending that the existence of their nation is threatened by greenhouse gas emissions? Aren’t these the people with very large incentives to correctly understand this issue? Don’t you think they want to believe that the skeptics are right and there isn’t really a problem here?
There’s is growing bipartisan support for a shrinking cap on carbon.
On Friday, Maria Cantwell (D-WA) and Susan Collins (R-ME) put forward a draft climate bill, the Carbon Limits and Energy for America’s Renewal (CLEAR) Act — full text and info here. The bill embraces a market-based system to set a price on CO2 using a shrinking cap on carbon with post-2020 targets that are similar to the ones in the House bill that passed and the Senate bills under consideration.
While the bill is a political nonstarter that is unlikely to garner broad support (see below), the good news is that it’s exceedingly difficult to imagine that the two Senators could support this bill and not ultimately support the final version of the bipartisan climate and clean energy bill that Graham, Kerry, and Lieberman are working on with the White House with the support of Senate majority leader Harry Reid.
A key swing Republican, Sen. Lisa Murkowski (R-AK), released this remarkably positive statement about the CLEAR Act:
While I imagine there are some small businesses who are finding it difficult to obtain credit, the thing about a recession is… there’s reduced demand for stuff. I don’t think easing credit is the solution to all of our problems.
I don’t know if he’ll find this comforting or what, but the last person I heard make that critique of a focus on credit easing works in the government on economic policy issues. So at a minimum this perspective is around the table.
At the request of ANC 6C01 commissioner Keith Silver the development team for the Arts at 5th and I project delivered a status update at this month’s full commission meeting. Ty Simpson of Spectrum Management, Bob Holland of Holland Development and Jad Donohoe of Donohoe Development each took the floor to share details with the community.
Ty Simpson explained that the development team has met with the office of the Deputy Mayor of Economic Development office over 120 times (2 times per week) since the RFP was awared in September 2008. To date the development team has spent over $600K in planning the project. The development agreement/ground lease is slated to go before the City Council in the March/April timeframe.
According to Bob Holland the current economic conditions have dried up financing possibilities from Wall Street for the project.
So while credit easing isn’t the solution to “all our problems” I think there’s evidence that additional credit easing would lead more projects to be undertaken. More projects would mean fewer unemployed people. Fewer unemployed people would mean more people with money to buy things in stores. More people with money to buy things in stores would mean more jobs selling goods at stores, more jobs shipping goods to stores, and more jobs making goods. Those jobs would mean lower unemployment and more money to spend. Etc., etc., etc. Which is just to say that under conditions of elevated unemployment, every little measure that gets fewer people doing nothing helps a lot.
Since President Obama delivered his Nobel Peace Prize acceptance speech last week, Bill Kristol has been arguing that it is somehow in-line with his neoconservative philosophy and that it vindicates President Bush’s “global war on terror” that he wholeheartedly supported.
Today on Fox News Sunday, Kristol continued with the theme, calling it “the most Bush-like speech of his presidency” and that it “articulated his own version of the pre-emptive doctrine.” Kristol later said that it actually lays the groundwork for a preemptive strike on Iran:
KRISTOL: There’s this one sentence, “There will be times when nations – acting individually or in concert – will find the use of force not only necessary but morally justified.”
That’s a pretty striking statement. I mean any American president should say that who’s looking at Iran developing nuclear weapons. I think he is, it’s not just that Israel might use preemptive force against Iran. This speech lays the predicate for a legitimate use of force to prevent Iran from getting nuclear weapons by the U.S.
Watch it:
The problem with Krisol’s logic is that Obama’s speech outright rejected the Bush approach:
I know that engagement with repressive regimes lacks the satisfying purity of indignation. But I also know that sanctions without outreach — and condemnation without discussion — can carry forward a crippling status quo. No repressive regime can move down a new path unless it has the choice of an open door.
“The satisfying purity of indignation,” as Matt Duss noted, is “a wonderfully succinct description of the simplistic and destructive ideology that drove George W. Bush’s foreign policy, and which Bill Kristol is still trying heartily to convince himself and others hasn’t been discredited.”
Noting that Kristol and his washed-up neocon gang are increasingly turning their sights on Iran, IPS News’s Jim Lobe reminds us that, just like with the Iraq war, consequences and reality have little bearing on this new push:
Kristol doesn’t ask what may be the impact on McChrystal’s efforts [in Afghanistan] of war with Iran. There’s every reason to believe, at least at this point, that the Pentagon is probably the national-security institution most adamantly opposed to an attack on Iran — be it by Israel or its own forces — precisely because it would greatly complicate Washington’s position throughout the region. But that’s not the point. Now that Obama is committed in Afghanistan, the neo-con priority moves to Iran, with urgency.
It appears that we are waiting for some senators in the U.S. Congress to conclude before we can consider this issue properly. It is an irony of the modern world that the fate of the world is being determined by some senators in the U.S. Congress.
Watch it:
The New York Times explains the “obstacles” that the Senate poses for Obama. The Tuvaluan delegate suggested that President Obama earn his “rightly or wrongly”-awarded Nobel Peace Prize by addressing climate change, “the greatest threat to humanity.” Tearfully, he concluded: “The fate of my country rests in your hands.” The U.S. representative, Jonathan Pershing, spoke a few minutes later, but “didn’t respond directly to Tuvalu’s plea.”
All of us from Lawrence Summers to John Taylor were expecting a very different financial crisis. We were expecting the ‘Balance of Financial Terror’ between Asia and America to collapse and produce chaos. We are not having that financial crisis. Instead we are having a very different financial crisis. Catastrophic failures of risk management throughout the entire banking sector caused a relatively minor collapse in housing prices to freeze up global finance to a degree that has not been seen since the Great Depression.
True enough. I wonder, sometimes, though how likely it is that if it starts to look like we’re seeing this crisis clear, then we suddenly do get that other financial crisis. After all, one thing that happens in a crisis, it seems, is that people flock to US treasuries bolstering the value of the dollar and making debt-finance look easy. Absent a crisis, that psychology can flip, leaving us with the other crisis.
AP reporters read emails, 1 million words, and queried “seven experts in research ethics, climate science and science policy.”
In the past three weeks since the e-mails were posted, longtime opponents of mainstream climate science have repeatedly quoted excerpts of about a dozen e-mails. Republican congressmen and former vice presidential candidate Sarah Palin have called for either independent investigations, a delay in U.S. Environmental Protection Agency regulation of greenhouse gases or outright boycotts of the Copenhagen international climate talks. They cited a “culture of corruption” that the e-mails appeared to show.
