Violence and political change

I finished all 483 pages of Francis Fukuyama's The Origins of Political Order today. What a great book! I highly recommend it if you're interested in human history and political, social, and economic development.

Given the scope of the book and the many millenia it spans, I don't feel up to the task of summarizing it right now. So I'll just share this quote on the role of violence in political change that I found interesting:

The ability of societies to innovate institutionally thus depends on whether they can neutralize existing political stakeholders holding vetoes over reform....

The stability of dysfunctional equilibria suggests one reason why violence has played such an important role in institutional innovation and reform. Violence is classically seen as the problem that politics seeks to solve, but sometimes violence is the only way to displace entrenched stakeholders who are blocking institutional change. The fear of violent death is a stronger emotion that the desire for material gain and is capable of motivating more far-reaching changes in behavior. We already noted ... that economic motives like the desire to put in place a large irrigation system were highly implausible causes of pristine state formation. Incessant tribal warfare or fear of conquest by better-organized groups is, by contrast, a very understandable reason why free and proud tribesmen might agree to live in a centralized state.

Fukuyama cites the disagreement over slavery in the U.S. as a conflict that "could not be solved under the Constitution and necessitated a war that claimed more than six hundred thousand American lives." And as a consequence, the power of the federal government expanded significantly.

He also makes the claim that accountability in political systems is not sufficient to support good governance, arguing that the emergence of modern liberal democracies requires "a relative balance of power between a cohesive state and an equally well-organized society that can defend its interests." While the rarity of that condition explains why the English parliamentary case is unique rather than typical, the increasingly free flow of ideas since the Industrial Revolution has allowed other nations to more readily borrow and adapt such institutions to their own needs. Still, the success of externally imposed nation building is limited by the degree to which a society can be mobilized on its own behalf...

Quotes for the day

"What happened Sunday sent a message: When we say we will never forget, we mean what we say."

"The fact of the matter is you will not see bin Laden walking on this Earth again."

-- President Obama

First 500 days

First Read takes notes of what's happened in Obama's first 500 days of office:

Day 500: With hyperpartisan stories like the Romanoff job offer (dredged back into the news), the kickoff of the Blagojevich trial, and, of course, the continued oil spill, it might go unnoticed by some that today is Barack Obama's 500th day in office (though, some might argue TOMORROW is 500; We’ll let Judge Mark Knoller decide, but we digress). There's always a lot of hype surrounding a president's first 100 days, but Obama has now been in office five times longer than that marker and what a stretch it's been. On a day -- in a presidency -- when small-picture brushfire stories (like Romanoff) are dominating, here's a step back at the big picture and all that's gone on. It could almost read like Billy Joel’s “We Didn’t Start the Fire”… Oil spill, Health care, Tea Parties, Financial reform, bailouts for cars and banks, the stimulus, Cash for Clunkers, Toyota, Haiti, L’Aquila, Iran's elections, David Cameron, Gordon Brown, Israel flotilla, North Korea sinks South Korean ship, Afghanistan troop increase, underwear bomber, Ft. Hood, Times Square, Predator drones, Nobel Peace Prize, State of the Union/Bobby Jindal, Ted Kennedy. Scott Brown, Michael Steele, Sarah Palin resigns, Bob McDonnell, Chris Christie, special elections, Sonia Sotomayor, Elena Kagan, incumbent fever (Bennett, Specter, et al), Charlie Crist's party switch, Evan Bayh, Sex Scandals: The Appalachian Trail, John Ensign, Eric Massa, Mark Souder, Jim Traficant out of jail, announces independent bid, The Salahis, Carrie Prejean, It’s John Edwards’ baby, Rangel loses his gavel, The Replacements: (Blago/Burris, Gillibrand/Caroline Kennedy, Beau Biden/Iraq/hospitalization, Al Franken sworn in as a senator MONTHS after Election Day, The Gores separate. And, by the way, for a little more context, remember this: JFK, at Day 500, had not yet faced the Cuban Missile Crisis and his attorney general, RFK, had yet to order the integration of Ole Miss. or the University of Alabama.

Our new mode of war

Michael Ventura at the Austin Chronicle has a keen sense of observation when it comes to America at war. In 2004 he wrote that "war is how civilizations make love," and his argument seemed sound to me. ("Lessons of Guernica")

In his December 4th column Ventura describes the changes in how we fight as a nation. No longer waging total war, we now seem to mire ourselves in endless conflicts:

In World War II the phrase often employed was "total war." Every walk of life participated in combat. Every citizen sacrificed for the effort. We paid for that war with higher taxes and war bonds. The objective was clear: "unconditional victory."

Now we have two mutually supporting strategies or models of war – and this has been true since at least the onset of the Vietnam conflict.

The primary, announced model is medical, as in surgery or therapy: We'll go in, heal the patient's ailment, fix what needs fixing, and leave. When we leave, everything is supposed to be better. Whatever the rhetoric, in reality victory is defined therapeutically – not winning, but solving a problem.

The underlying model, however, is very different: addiction. No matter what, and no matter the cost, we'll keep on doing what hasn't worked until it does. That is the very definition of addiction, with addiction's financial rule: If we don't have the money (and we don't), we'll beg, borrow, and become debt slaves until what can't be done is done.

They say everything goes faster now, and that's largely true of everything but war. With these co-enabling models of therapeutic and addictive war, war continues in a kind of slow motion. The objective is vague. It's often hard to tell who the enemy really is. The front line is everywhere and nowhere. We suffer far fewer casualties (partly because medical attention is better and more immediate), but war goes on and on and on.

Global Guerrillas explores this idea of limited war more fully in a post from 2006.

How Obama reached his decision on Afghanistan

The New York Times has a long but interesting chronicle of the decision-making path President Obama took on the way to sending a big infusion of troops to Afghanistan. Good reading for a Sunday afternoon.

Thomas Friedman's foreign policy

Thomas Friedman has a great column that describes his common sense foreign policy beliefs, all of which argue against Obama's surge in Afghanistan.

My sense is that all of the people I hear speaking in opposition to Obama's plans are making a good case for their point of view, but they're arguing the wrong case. I don't believe sending more troops to Afghanistan is about Afghanistan. It's about Pakistan. But since the President is constrained in what he can say about Pakistan (because what we're doing there upsets Pakistanis on the street, and the Pakistani military is worried about what we might do), we have this whole discussion about the merits of "nation-building" and whatnot in Afghanistan. (Again, I recommend listening to Ted Koppel's "Talk of the Nation" interview regarding this topic.)

I guess this is one good reason that the framers put the executive rather than the legislative branch in charge of foreign policy...

One more try in Afghanistan

I find myself deeply conflicted about the war in Afghanistan and Obama's plans for ending it with a better outcome than simply bringing the troops home today. Underneath all of the talk about Afghanistan, my sense is that we're staying there mainly in order to maintain pressure on the forces that would de-stabilize Pakistan. And that is, after all, the only real danger (and even then, certainly not an "existential" one): the possibility of terrorists getting there hands on one or more of Pakistan's nukes.

We can't stay there indefinitely... we can no longer afford such an expedition. Perhaps the best we can do is stay for now, double down, and re-assess in a year and a half.

Andrew Sullivan wrote a thoughtful post on the President's strategy, which ultimately can be summed up as "one more try."

Ted Koppel on the war in Afghanistan

Neal Conan talked to Ted Koppel yesterday about the war in Afghanistan in advance of President Obama's address to the nation tonight. Koppel's thoughts on Obama being in an impossible situation--trapped between the domestic political reality and the multi-generational danger of a destabilized Pakistan--are worth a listen (or a read, the transcript is available at the same link).

JUAN COLE, meanwhile, writes about the lack of a functioning Karzai government in Afghanistan.

And on that note...

Ezra Klein is pretty damned good, too:

• One: Thoughts about the fact that neither the American people nor Congress are willing to actually pay for their wars.
• Two: The truth about political reporting. (And some evidence in support of his assertion here.)
• Three and Four: The limits of the modern presidency, and a House less powerful than the founders envisioned.

In praise of The Daily Dish

Andrew Sullivan is one of the most prolific bloggers around; he and his team post an amazing number of entries a day. Here are three from today's bunch that remind me of why blogging at its best is a valuable dialogue... and why The Daily Dish is clearly blogging at its best:

• One: A response to Dick Cheney's latest criticism of President Obama, and a comment on the failure of the media to question authority
• Two: A response from a reader which makes the point that in 1958, the financial sector's debt was 6% of GDP. Fifty years later it's 115% of GDP.
• Three: A re-post of a brilliant HIV/AIDS awareness ad.

Moral dilemma for our times: drone warfare

I've been worried about the moral and practical implications of relying on robots rather than soldiers for three years now (an old post here). Roger Cohen is on the same wavelength in his latest New York Times op-ed piece, and Jane Mayer has a recent article in The New Yorker which I'm reading now.

From Cohen's op-ed:

When the United States went into Iraq in 2003, it had a handful of pilotless planes, or drones; it now has over 7,000. The invasion force had no unmanned ground vehicles; the U.S. armed forces now employ more than 12,000....

But as [Jane] Mayer notes, “The embrace of the Predator program has occurred with remarkably little public discussion, given that it represents a radically new and geographically unbounded use of state-sanctioned lethal force.”

These are targeted international killings, no less real, and indeed more insidious, for their video-game aspect. The thing about robotic warfare is you can watch people get vaporized on a screen in Langley, Virginia, and then drive home for dinner with the kids. The very phrase “go to war” becomes hard to distinguish from going to work. That’s a conflation fraught with ethical danger. The barriers to war get lowered.

President Obama has apparently ordered as many Predator drone strike in his nine months in office as George W. Bush did in his last three years as president. That's not the kind of change I voted for.

UPDATE

I finished the Mayer article. An excerpt:

Peter W. Singer, the author of “Wired for War,” a recent book about the robotics revolution in modern combat, argues that the drone technology is worryingly “seductive,” because it creates the perception that war can be “costless.” Cut off from the realities of the bombings in Pakistan, Americans have been insulated from the human toll, as well as from the political and the moral consequences. Nearly all the victims have remained faceless, and the damage caused by the bombings has remained unseen. In contrast to Gaza, where the targeted killing of Hamas fighters by the Israeli military has been extensively documented—making clear that the collateral damage, and the loss of civilian life, can be severe—Pakistan’s tribal areas have become largely forbidden territory for media organizations. As a result, no videos of a drone attack in progress have been released, and only a few photographs of the immediate aftermath of a Predator strike have been published....

Critics have suggested that unmanned systems, by sparing these combatants from danger and sacrifice, are creating what Sir Brian Burridge, a former British Air Chief Marshal in Iraq, has called “a virtueless war,” requiring neither courage nor heroism.... Meanwhile, some social critics, such as Mary Dudziak, a professor at the University of Southern California’s Gould School of Law, argue that the Predator strategy has a larger political cost. As she puts it, “Drones are a technological step that further isolates the American people from military action, undermining political checks on . . . endless war.”

The article is worth a read considering the number of strikes and hundreds of people who are dying... they're not all terrorists, folks. What kind of people are we to simply turn a blind eye to a war being waged remotely in our names?

Also in the Mayer article, a quote from former Army Ranger Andrew Exum:

There’s something important about putting your own sons and daughters at risk when you choose to wage war as a nation. We risk losing that flesh-and-blood investment if we go too far down this road.

But on the other hand...

I completely agree with Pakistani (and Afghani) outrage over U.S. drone attacks that kill civilians. Secretary of State Clinton sat down with some Pakistanis to hear their concerns but didn't seem to acknowledge their validity.

Afghan strategy is coming together

The New York Times reports that our new strategy for Afghanistan is taking shape:

At the moment, the administration is looking at protecting Kabul, Kandahar, Mazar-i-Sharif, Kunduz, Herat, Jalalabad and a few other village clusters, officials said. The first of any new troops sent to Afghanistan would be assigned to secure Kandahar, the spiritual capital of the Taliban, which is seen as a center of gravity in pushing back insurgent advances.

But military planners also are pressing for enough troops to safeguard major agricultural areas, like the hotly contested Helmand River valley, as well as regional highways essential to the economy — tasks that would require significantly more reinforcements beyond the 21,000 deployed by Mr. Obama earlier this year....

“We are not talking about surrendering the rest of the country to the Taliban,” a senior administration official said.

Military officers said that they would maintain pressure on insurgents in remote regions by using surveillance drones and reports from people in the field to find pockets of Taliban fighters and guide attacks, in particular by Special Operations Forces. But a range of officials made the case that many insurgents fighting Americans in distant locations are motivated not by jihadist ideology but by local grievances and therefore are not much threat either to the United States or the Kabul government.

At the heart of this strategy is the conclusion that the United States cannot completely eradicate the insurgency in a nation where the Taliban is an indigenous force — nor does it need to in order to protect American national security. Instead, the focus would be on preventing Al Qaeda from returning in force while containing and weakening the Taliban long enough to build Afghan security forces that would eventually take over the mission.

News bites

The EPA plans to step up enforcement of the Clean Water Act.

The Karzai goverment admits that a runoff election in Afghanistan is now likely, possibly late this month or early next month.

And authorities in Pakistan have increasing concerns about the wave of attacks there.

Can we succeed with the current Karzai government as a partner?

Thomas Friedman makes some excellent points today about Afghanistan:

Independent election monitors suggest that as many as one-third of votes cast in the Aug. 20 election are tainted and that President Hamid Karzai apparently engaged in massive fraud to come out on top. Yet, he is supposed to be the bridge between our troop surge and our goal of a stable Afghanistan....

We have been way too polite, and too worried about looking like a colonial power, in dealing with Karzai. I would not add a single soldier there before this guy, if he does win the presidency, takes visible steps to clean up his government in ways that would be respected by the Afghan people.

If Karzai says no, then there is only one answer: “You’re on your own, pal. Have a nice life with the Taliban. We can’t and will not put more American blood and treasure behind a government that behaves like a Mafia family. If you don’t think we will leave — watch this.” (Cue the helicopters.)

So, please, spare me the lectures about how important Afghanistan and Pakistan are today. I get the stakes. But we can’t want a more decent Afghanistan than the country’s own president. If we do, we have no real local partner who will be able to hold the allegiance of the people, and we will not succeed — whether with more troops, more drones or more money.

I've been saying this same thing since the election...

One two op-ed punch

I've obviously been catching up on the news today after a week of being busy with guests here in Vegas.

I just read two op-ed columns that will appear in tomorrow's New York Times.

Frank Rich's made the case more convincingly than any I've read that sending more troops to Afghanistan would be a bad idea.

And my initial reaction Thomas Friedman's was, "Oh, I'm so tired of reading about Obama's Nobel Peace Prize," but then he got me with his suggestion for what the president should say when he accepts the award... on behalf of America's peacekeepers.

More on the election in Afghanistan

Monitors from Europe believe that up to one out of three votes for President Karzai may have been fraudulent:

Mr. Karzai, who is vying for a second five-year term, won 54.6 percent of the vote, enough to avoid a runoff election, according to the tally released by the country’s independent election commission. His closest challenger, former foreign minister Abdullah Abdullah, won 27.8 percent.

But the election was tainted by blatant evidence ofballot-box-stuffing and other frauds, and the country’s United Nations-backed Electoral Complaints Commission has ordered recounts and forensic examinations of ballot boxes in 10 percent of polling stations — involving at least 15 percent, and possibly a far higher proportion, of reported votes. The complaints commission, headed by a Canadian, is the ultimate arbiter of election results.

Some western officials say that if all fraudulent ballots were discarded, Mr. Karzai’s tally would drop below 50 percent, forcing him into a runoff against Mr. Abdullah. But it is unclear how many ballots might be ruled invalid in the recount, and even if Mr. Karzai were ultimately forced into a runoff, the harsh winter weather may prevent a second election from being held until April.

The election in Afghanistan

In the wake of the problems with the Iranian election, we now have widespread reports of fraud and corruption in Afghanistan's election. This time, though, the U.S. finds itself in a more difficult position.

There is increasing uneasiness on the left in America with respect to continuing the war in Afghanistan. And while I've been generally supportive of Obama's plans so far, I would not be able to get behind continued U.S. support for a Karzai government if the allegations that he stole the election are substantiated (New York Times, 9/1/09):

Just a week before this country’s presidential election, the leaders of a southern Afghan tribe called Bariz gathered to make a bold decision: they would abandon the incumbent and local favorite, Hamid Karzai, and endorse his challenger, Abdullah Abdullah.

Mr. Abdullah flew to the southern city of Kandahar to receive the tribe’s endorsement. The leaders of the tribe, who live in a district called Shorabak, prepared to deliver a local landslide.

But it never happened, the tribal leaders said.

Instead, aides to Mr. Karzai’s brother Ahmed Wali — the leader of the Kandahar provincial council and the most powerful man in southern Afghanistan — detained the governor of Shorabak, Delaga Bariz, and shut down all of the district’s 45 polling sites on election day. The ballot boxes were taken to Shorabak’s district headquarters, where, Mr. Bariz and other tribal leaders said, local police officers stuffed them with thousands of ballots.

At the end of the day, 23,900 ballots were shipped to Kabul, Mr. Bariz said, with every one marked for President Karzai.

“Not a single person in Shorabak District cast a ballot — not a single person,” Mr. Bariz said in an interview here in the capital, where he and a group of tribal elders came to file a complaint. “Mr. Karzai’s people stuffed all the ballot boxes.”

The U.S. is a dominant force in Afghani politics right now. If Karzai stole the election, it's our responsibility to take action, even if that means leaving.

UPDATE

A more recent roundup of election news from Afghanistan here.

Taking responsibility in Afghanistan

Sounds like the U.S. military is owning up to its mistakes that have resulted in civilian deaths:

A military investigation has concluded that American personnel made significant errors in carrying out some of the airstrikes in western Afghanistan on May 4 that killed dozens of Afghan civilians, according to a senior American military official.

The official said the civilian death toll would probably have been reduced if American air crews and forces on the ground had followed strict rules devised to prevent civilian casualties. Had the rules been followed, at least some of the strikes by American warplanes against half a dozen targets over seven hours would have been aborted.

The benefit of the doubt

I'm willing to give President Obama just that: the benefit of the doubt. As he confronts the difficulties and confounding shades of gray of governing--as contrasted with the clarity of campaigning--I know that he will make decisions that don't make everyone happy.

And "No, Ryan," I'm not cynical over DADT as I never expected Obama to turn over the ban on gays serving in the military right away.

My one issue: we can't kill civilians so blithely. If we're going to use our military in Afghanistan and Pakistan, they have to stop killing so indiscriminately. On that I'm unwilling to let Obama off the hook.