Nation-Building

John McCain:

"I think the great danger now is a half-measure, sort of a - you know, try to please all ends of the political spectrum," McCain told CNN chief national correspondent John King. "And, again, I have great sympathy for the president, making the toughest decisions that presidents have to make, but I think he needs to use deliberate speed."

Many people assume McCain's comments only apply to the left, but the fact is that they also apply to the right, and it's precisely because Obama has in fact taken the right VERY seriously indeed that he's in so much hot water with the Progressives (who I admit in the interest of full self-disclosure I do not self-identify with; I am a liberal on a elliptical orbit around the center of political mass, thus I drift rightwards in a very predictable fashion.)

Much of the critique of Obama from the right comes via political scoring rather than a genuine critique of policy; a great example is the replacement of Gen McKiernan by Gen McChrystal. McChrystal's background is special operations, commanding JSOC for five years (and capturing Saddam under his watch). The man is as much an expert in SO as Petraeus is in COIN. That strikes most principled observers as significant, though obviously it's not officially commented on by the White House. The implications of policy shift are clear. That is the President's prerogative; note that he has retained Secretary Gates from the previous Administration (again, a sore spot for lefties, and utterly ignored by righties intent on scoring points).

President Obama has asked for Gen. McChrystal's assessment and he has received it in detail. Now, McCain woudn't be doing his job if he didn't pressure the President to act quickly, but the truth is that when you request a gigantic policy review from your top commanders, you do so because you want to make a decision, not a rubber stamp. President Bush was content to leave broad strategy to Gen. Petraeus and that was also his prerogative, but righties have assumed that this is the normal course of things. It's not; the President, the Commander in Chief, is a civilian. It's the President's prerogative to give a general free reign, but it extends only as far and as long as the Commander in Chief wills it so. In Iraq, that free reign by Petraeus was one thing; in Afghanistan it is quite another. Afghanistan is not Iraq.

No General will ever - if he is competent and values his career - ask for less troops. That Gen. McChrystal would ask for more was a given, but if you read the report you find he makes a very different argument. In General McChrystal's own words:

Success is achievable, but it will not be attained simply by trying harder or "doubling down" on the previous strategy. Additional resources are required, but focusing on force or resource requirements misses the point entirely. The key take away from this assessment is the urgent need for a significant change to our strategy and the way that we think and operate.

Emphases mine. I've spent enough time reading and analyzing it that I refuse categorically to discuss it with someone who hasn't bothered with due diligence; I care enough about the outcome that I take it more seriously than my political allegiances*.

The bottom line is that Obama has already sent more troops to Afghanistan than President Bush did. And Obama has taken reducing the troops serving there off the table. The question now remains, will President Obama send more troops, and if so, how many? That's a decision Obama must make in context of the entirety of the United States security needs, not just in Afghanistan. Gen. McChrystal, on the other hand, makes his recommendations with the Afghanistan theater alone in mind.

And truth to tell, there's a very good argument for not sending any more troops - one acknowledged by McChrystal himself. ending more troops amounts to raising expectations, in the face of increasing public distaste for the war. The amount requested by McChrystal are not a panacea in themselves; to really do secure-and-hold (as opposed to secure-move on-revisit as we do now), you'd need not 40,000 more troops, but 400,000. McChrystal knows this full well, and anyone reading the report in full will understand his reasoning. In a lot of ways more troops as requested wouldn't really improve that much on the ground, but would buy make things easier. The cost would be increased public patience ; the challenge is to find a middle ground between these opposing forces and realities. McChrystal is not only aware of these tensions but states them explicitly in his report - the number of 40,000 quoted is in my opinion a brilliant gift to the President which gives him the executive operational freedom he needs to find that balance. I'm kind of in awe.

The mission in Afghanistan does not hinge upon the number of troops sent, but on the "change in thinking" alluded to above by McChrystal. Marc Lynch lays out the case for simply "muddling through":

Sending more troops may in fact be the right call -- I'm open-minded on that question -- but the attempts to bull-rush the process are problematic on their face.

"All in or get out" is a typical false choice offered by advocates of any position who support the "all in" option in question, since it's so much easier to argue the risks of "getting out" than it is to argue against intermediate options. And as for the rush, why make such a momentous choice precisely at a moment of total political chaos in Afghanistan and the near complete absence of a legitimate partner on which to build due to the rampant fraud which eviscerated the Afghan election?

This is particularly problematic because, as the President's advisers clearly understand, there is absolutely no reason to think that Gen. McChrystal's current request is really "all in". McChrystal's review is admirably clear and quite honest that even with such changes, the policy may not succeed.

The overwhelming odds are that if the escalation option is chosen, in a year or two we will be confronting the exact same questions. More troops will once again be needed, a new strategy will once again be demanded, we'll still be reading about how the Taliban is out-communicating us and about how the corruption of the Karzai government poses a serious challenge. And then the exact same debate will recur… the Kagans will demand more troops, dark mutterings about tensions between the administration and the generals will roil the waters, the Washington Post editorial page will publish debates where everyone is on the same side, the smart think-tankers will agonize over the tough choices but ultimately come down on the side of escalation. Might as well have this debate now, and get it right.


[...]


what's so terrible with muddling through for a while, giving the new tactics a chance to work at the local level while preventing the worst-case scenarios from happening? Why choose between escalation or withdrawal at exactly the time when the political picture is at its least clear? Why not maintain a lousy Afghan government which doesn't quite fall, keep the Taliban on the ropes without defeating it, cut deals where we can, and try to figture out a strategy to deal with the Pakistan part which all the smart set agrees is the real issue these days? Why not focus on applying the improved COIN tactics with available resources right now instead of focusing on more troops? If the American core objective in Afghanistan is to prevent its re-emergence as an al-Qaeda safe haven, or to prevent the Taliban from taking Kabul, those seem to be manageable at lower troop levels.

Good for the President's team to take the time to have a serious debate about this and not give in to the politically expedient path (in either direction). The readouts on yesterday's big Afghan strategy meeting reflect exactly what you want to see from a President making a tough call.

Let's also note something very important here - if you are absolutely against the practice of aerial bombardment and collateral damage - which I am also strenuously on the record about - then Biden's preferred policy (persuasively argued in the LRB by Rory Stewart) of reducing troops and relying heavily on COIN/SO alone is indeed "Chaosistan". There's a direct, causal inverse relationship between number of troops and collateral damage casualties. This is a paradox that no one on the left is willing to grapple with, but must factor into any principled assessment or policy prescription.

My own prediction and preference is that Obama will send more troops, in the range of 5-10,000. More importantly, the budget for Afghanistan is going to rise as the Iraq war winds down - Obama will not spend any more money in total between these two wars, but will shift the expenses from one to the other. The difference is that the same money won't go into funding a huge force of boots on the ground (as in Iraq) but will be channeled into the "change in strategy" of which McChrystal spoke. Call it the "$urge 2.0," because money matters as much if not more than men, this time. If politics truly stopped at the water's edge, this would be a strategy that everyone could agree on. Unfortunately, Obama has a fight on multiple fronts, abroad and at home. McChrystal has a much easier job by far.

*I remind the gentle reader that while I was against the Iraq War, I also was against total withdrawal.

Labels: Afghanistan

Continue reading/discuss Obama takes troop reduction n Afghanistan off the table ...

President Obama is now a Laureate of the Nobel Peace Prize. There's enough in that statement alone to drive rightwing conservatives insane. And insane they certainly are, as others are ably and gleefully documenting. The general gist of the response by the Right is twofold, and predictably schizophrenic: 1. Obama has not accomplished enough in office to deserve the NPP, and 2. the NPP only awarded it to Obama because he is a. not-Bush and b. he is African-American. In essence, this means that they are arguing that the Nobel Peace Prize is both a farce and sacred at the same time. Of course, conservatives' enmity for the Peace prize is longstanding, given that it was awarded to Yasser Arafat, Jimmy Carter, and Al Gore, even as they pine for it's omission to George W. Bush.

While the conservatives' newfound concern for the integrity of the NPP is certainly touching, the same critique coming from the Left carries more weight. But to address this, you have to consider the intention of the Peace Prize. And for that, we can look to the wishes of Alfred Nobel himself. In his will, he stipulated that the Nobel Peace Prize shall be awarded to

"to the person who shall have done the most or the best work for fraternity between nations, for the abolition or reduction of standing armies and for the holding and promotion of peace congresses."

Now, there's nothing in there about solving the Middle East conflict or riding the world of nuclear weapons, though certainly progress towards these goals would count. But the secific language used to define the concept of "peace" itself is interesting. The NPP is to be awarded for 1. doing work towardds fraternity of nations, and promotion of peace congresses. These are process, not end-result, statements. The sole end-result qualification listed in "reduction of armies" which I don't think any winner has ever managed to achieve, though President Obama's renewed attention to nuclear non-proliferation is relevant here (and explicitly quoted by the Nobel Committee as part of their justification for awarding it to him).

First, consider the process-oriented criteria. What has Obama achieved along these lines? Glenn Greenwald offers a summary of how Obama has "promoted peace" and "fraternity between nations":

Obama has changed the tone America uses to speak to the world generally and the Muslim world specifically. His speech in Cairo, his first-week interview on al-Arabiya, and the extraordinarily conciliatory holiday video he sent to Iran are all substantial illustrations of that. His willingness to sit down and negotiate with Iran -- rather than threaten and berate them -- has already produced tangible results. He has at least preliminarily broken from Bush's full-scale subservience to Israel and has applied steadfast pressure on the Israelis to cease settlement activities, even though it's subjected him to the sorts of domestic political risks and vicious smears that have made prior Presidents afraid to do so. His decision to use his first full day in office to issue Executive Orders to close Guantanamo, ostensibly ban torture, and bar CIA black sites was an important symbol offered to the world (even though it's been followed by actions that make those commitments little more than empty symbols). He refused to reflexively support the right-wing, civil-liberty-crushing coup leaders in Honduras merely because they were "pro-American" and "anti-Chavez," thus siding with the vast bulk of Latin America's governments -- a move George Bush, or John McCain, never would have made. And as a result of all of that, the U.S. -- in a worldwide survey released just this week -- rose from seventh to first on the list of "most admired countries."

That's an impressive list, though the caveats about rendition are noted. Some righties argue Obama should only be "eligble" for his actions as President in the 11 days he was in office prior to the NPP nomination deadline of Feb 1st - which is silly, since the actual deliberations took seven months. Why wouuldn't Obama's actions over that time be relevant to the decision? But it's still worth pointing out that Obama's executive orders on his very first day in office about torture and Guantanamo alone represent as significant an ideological change in direction for America as Mikhail Gorbachev's perestroika did (earning him a NPP in 1990, even though the actual and unanticipated breakup of the Soviet Union didn't happen until the following year).

It's clear that Obama meets the process-oriented criteria. But what about "reduction of standing armies" and its nuke proxy? The Nobel Committee explicitly lauded Obama's commitment to nuclear non-proliferation, especially recently at the United Nations. However, the truth is that Obama remains wedded to the double standard on nuclear power, holding Iran and India to one standard while looking the other way when it comes to Israel's obsolete "strategic ambiguity". A genuine commitment to "zero nuke" policy would entail no favoritism, and insisting all nuclear-capable nations sign the NPT, Israel included. The hypocrisy on this does not go unnoticed and the threat of Israeli nuclear power is what drives the nuclear arms race in the middle east.

However, all of this is really beside the point, since it assumes that the Nobel Prize remains an "award" when in fact it is no such thing. It is actually a shrewd vehicle for influencing the power elite, and as such represents an attempt to lobby Obama and influence him over the course of his next term(s). The decsion of who gets a Nobel Peace Prize, and just as importantly who doesn't, is an explicit editorial statement. That President Bush was not awarded one* was a rebuke of the unilateral, pre-emptive, diplomacy-averse doctrine that bears his name. But with Obama, it is an attempt to shape the doctrine yet to be.

Richard Silverstein makes much the same point:

I think this award is really a shot in the dark. A big gamble. They're telling Obama and the world that they have enormous hopes for him. They're also telling us what deep straits the world is in. From Gaza to Teheran to Kabul to Baghdad, things are a mess. A military attack against Iran hangs like a question mark over the Middle East. The committee is essentially saying that tough times demand risk and this award is a risk. It could be that Obama will merit it over time. It could be that the award will make it that much easier for him to achieve some of his agenda. If so, the Swedes are telling us that's all to the good.

Lately, Obama has taken hits both at home and abroad. This award is meant as a shot in the arm, a bit of courage for the tough times ahead. He'll need it.

I hope against hope that this award will encourage the realist camp in dealing with Iran. I hope it will give pause to the Israeli adventurists gunning for a fight with Iran. I do think it will make it that much harder for Obama himself to turn hawkish, as he has intimated he might do if negotiations fail. So maybe there's some shrewdness to this award as well.

Indeed. Liberal critics like Greenwald** point to the Afghanistan War as evidence Obama doesn't "deserve" the prize, but General McChrystal's public call for more troops seems to have influenced Obama to take a troop reduction off the table. This represents a success for McChrystal, who may not (probably won't) get his full requested 40,000 troops, but also won't face the Biden-advocated strategy of reducing troops still further in favor of purely couunter-terrorism operations. The Nobel Peace Prize applies pressure on Obama from the opposite end. Like it or not, Obama has to factor the potential of headlines like "Obama wins Peace Prize, extends War" into his political calculus; the Afghanistan people themselves are making the case already.

I think that the best interpretation of the Nobel Peace Prize is the single word response from Barack Obama's official Twitter account: "Humbled." In his public response, President Obama said, "I do not view it as a recognition of my own accomplishments. But rather as an affirmation of American leadership. ... I will accept this award as a call to action."

Indeed, recognition that the award represents global aspirations for peace and an expectation of American leadership should be a heavy burden that weighs on Obama's soul as he occupies the most powerful office in the world, at a time when the world is arguably at its most uncertain and strife-laden. Let's hope that the intentions of the Nobel Committee, if not their specific agenda, come true. As Obama charts the way forward in Afghanistan, pursues non-proliferation, engages Iran and North Korea, promotes a two-state solution, and more, the heavy weight NPP around his neck will hopefully inure him to short-term political distractions and focus him on the end goals, and question whether the conventional wisdoms he so far has largely hewn to will indeed be sufficient for the task.

Related: Mixed responses to Obama's Peace Prize from the streets of Iran, Iraq and Gaza. Also, see the usual lively discussion at Talk Islam. Also, I found Al Gore's comments of interest.

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*For what it's worth, if I were eligible to nominate, I'd have nominated Bush, for the sole reason of deposing Saddam. That doesn't mean he'd have won, of course.

**Arguably, though Greenwald won't agree, Obama's decision to send 17,000 more troops to Afghanistan in March has actually lessened the need for aerial strikes. The truth behind the troops debate is that the fewer troops we have, the heavier reliance on drone attacks will be and thus the more civilian casualties. This is a fact that lefty critics of Obama's war must accept.

Labels: Obama Derangement Syndrome, President Obama

Continue reading/discuss Deserve this! The Nobel Peace Prize Agenda for Obama ...

This is the second part of my series in anticipation of the upcoming Copenhagen conference. The previous post in this series was a defense of the scientific method.

So, what do I think about global warming? The consensus is a powerful one, and it's not built upon one tree ring or one temperature reconstruction, it's been built upon thousands of independent studies by thousands of different authors. That said, there are some valid critiques on methodological issues. Even if those critiques are fully accurate, that isn't enough by itself to warrant throwing out the entire body of literature, which over the years of reading both Climate Audit and Real Climate I've seen extends far beyond just one paper by Mann et al or one set of trees at Yamal. The very fact that there is a controversy, and both sides are able to endlessly rebut the other in a seemingly-never ending cycle of rebuttal, proves that there is indeed more to the story. Like blind men in a room with an elephant, the dissenters and the keepers of orthodoxy have valid observations and methods. Reconciling them requires moving forward, not standing still.

I've watched An Inconvenient Truth and I've seen A Convenient Fiction. I've read the Wegman Report and the RealClimate folks' highly-convincing response on the technical merits. I read Climate Audit and now, thanks to suggestions from others here, will also check out Watt's Up With That, but I also cross-check dissenters' arguments against the RC Archive and RC Index. I think I am doing due diligence here. The consensus for global warming remains robust, despite the dissenters' well-publicized arguments. Until the dissenters repudiate their partisan political fellow-travelers who engage in irresponsible rhetoric about GW being a "massive lie" or the "greatest hoax ever perpetrated on the American people" they will never attain the credibility they require to persuade and influence the concensus the way it has always been done.

Fundamentally, however, the basic goal of those who advocate anthropogenic global warming is simple: to reduce carbon emissions worldwide. The single best route to doing that is to make our civilization more energy efficient and less polluting. Technologies to make this so represent as much of an immense, industry-creating opportunity as the semiconductor industry or the space program. One of Al Gore's maxims is that you should never underestimate human ingenuity; to this, I would also add the corollary, never underestimate the ability of Americans to make a profit off it, either. Those who argue that the Kyoto Protocol or the upcoming Copenhagen treaty would bankrupt the business world sound to me like Malthusian alarmists, without faith in the genius of men like Norman Borlaug to find ways of escaping the constraints. The business world itself is on board with the opportunity ahead. In that sense, the scientific world has fallen behind. It's time to catch up... to the Chinese and the Indians. They see the writing on the wall - in terms of threat to their own territory from increased sea levels, but also from the basic security/economic perspectives of needing less oil imports and having greater energy to fuel their growing societies.

So, count me as convinced that GW is real and requires action. The dissenters are important, as they provide a needed critique from within. But they cannot and should not be the cause for holding back on moving ahead full speed.

Labels: environment, global warming

Continue reading/discuss Copenhagen dreaming II: global warming as opportunity ...

As the Copenhagen conference on the successor to the Kyoto Protocol draws near, I want to lay some meta-thoughts out about the scientific method which I think are important, as a context for my general support of the theory of global warrming and the need for decisive action by our own nation to reduce carbon emissions and embrace alternative forms of energy (including nuclear). The next post in this series will then lay out my position on global warming specifically.

The debate about Global Warming, not unlike that regarding AIDS, or evolution, boils down to this: the Scientific Method is an attempt by human beings to establish rigorous theories drawn from empirical observations, for the purpose of creating models of reality, so that these models may be employed in some pragmatic fashion. When this method is applied to a topic that is insulated from what I call the Political Method, there's not much controversy to be had. However, the "employed in some pragmatic fashion" part above is where the outcomes of the SM start encroaching on the PM and then battle lines are drawn.

Science is not a clean affair. Its hard, for one thing, and it requires a lot of art in some ways. The basic task of taking measurements is pretty consensus-prone, but everything downstream to that is subject to the old adage, TMTOWTDI. In science, the way things are done usually settles on what has worked before. Science is conservative that way.

The SM method provides an internal mechanism for disputes, however - publishing. Proponents of a minority view who are challenging an orthodoxy often tend to scream conspiracy and exclusion from the literature, but the fact remains that the scientific literature is by far the most open system for dissent that the human race has ever devised. This is because, fundamentally, science rewards its iconoclasts instead of punishing them. The reason for this is a function of the funding system, which penalizes anything that isn't "novel".

The reason that orthodoxy develops in science is because of the mass of literature that accretes over time. Anyone trying to challenge an orthodoxy who simply waves away pre-existing literature as being corrupt or dishonest or conspiratorial is essentially repudiating the system at a fundamental level. Are only the dissenters against orthodoxy the ones with a professional ethos, with ethics and pride in their work? To hear the dissenters gripe, you'd think that they were the sole bearers of the flame of Science and everyone else is a charlatan. Any argument which strays into this territory not only can be dismissed, it must be dismissed. Anyone willing to burn the system down is someone whose own motivations are far more suspect than the thousands of scientists who have dedicated their lives to their field and are willing to play by the rules.

The single biggest (and potentially most cogent) critique that the dissenters make is that the peer review system is essentially a "social network". Well, they're right. It is indeed a social network, of experts in a field. But if you don't do science you can be forgiven for assuming this makes everyone in a field, esecially a small one, seem like pals on facebook all playing the same inane games and joining the same groups and causes ad infinitum. In reality, the smaller the field, the more concentrated the competition. Every research group tries to outdo the other, because the funding game (again, which only cares about "novelty") is literally zero-sum. That said, for the good of the field, everyone does come together and write joint papers for special issues of various journals, review papers and collaborations on multi-center trials or studies. That's part of paying your dues for the good of the field as a whole. But having written a paper with someone - even ten papers - is not an abdication of your ethical responsibilities. Nor would it be very good for your career to be someone else's "yes man". In fact, you'd lose funding and be out of a job if all you ever did was agree with your peers. Very few people outside the system really understand just how precarious most research groups' existences really are, or just how unbelievably damaging it would be to scientists' livelihoods to act in such a cartoon fashion. Indeed, you cant teach a man a thing if his career depends on him not knowing it, but in science the opposite is true - you can't stop a man from learning something in science, because his career depends on him learning it.

Are there flaws in peer review? Oh, Yes. And it's scientists who are at the forefront of self-evaluation and addressing those flaws. If scientists were all Vulcan or robots it would be a non-issue; instead, they are just human beings, and that means they have to accept some basic level of fundamental flaw, and seek to minimize the damage as best they can. The peer review system is not static, it's continually being refined and tweaked, and like democracy it may suck at times but still remains better than anything else by a longshot.

We don't do science by press release. We do it by trial, error, and publishing. If you can't get your amazing challenge to the orthodoxy published, its not because "They" are silencing you, its because you don't have the data. If you are right - and you may well be! - then doing the due diligence is your responsibility.

Fundamentally, the consensus in science isn't an illusion or a conspiracy. It has meaning, and it has validity, and deserves to be taken at face value. That's not to say that the dissenters should be ignored, but until such time as they are able to change that consensus by the virtue of their evidence and their arguments, they cannot be allowed to impede progress.

Labels: global warming

Continue reading/discuss Copenhagen dreaming: In defense of the scientific method ...