Matt Yglesias

Obey Calls for War Tax

Back in October, David Obey floated the radical idea that war spending in Afghanistan should be put in a “normal” budgetary context and put in the same fiscal constraints as health reform. Today he’s taken that idea one step further and said an escalation in Afghanistan should be paid for via a “war surtax” on high-income households.

It’ll be interesting to see how far he goes with this. Does he put together a bloc of progressive legislators who say they’ll only back a tax-financed version of the war? Would any Blue Dog budget balancers join such a group?

How Much Would Escalation in Afghanistan Cost

For a while now I’ve been saying that the fastest way to end the war in Afghanistan would be to to ask General McChrystal’s staff to produce a plan to make it deficit neutral and find sixty votes in the senate for his financing plan. Today, Spencer Ackerman points out that an excellent LA Times piece by Christi Parsons and Julian E. Barnes that digs into the issue of how much going bigger in Afghanistan would cost seems to indicate that the Pentagon agrees with me. Thus, they’re fudging the numbers to make their preferred policies look cheaper than they really are:

The Pentagon cost includes higher combat wages, extra aircraft hours and other operations and maintenance costs, but omits such items as new weapons purchases — one-time costs that vary by year — and support equipment like spy satellites and anti-roadside-bomb technology.

The Pentagon also does not try to estimate costs of new bases for additional soldiers.

But in a memo early this month, obtained by The Times’ Washington bureau, the Pentagon’s own comptroller produced an estimate that broke with the customary Defense formula and did include construction and equipment.

Estimating weapons and equipment costs is clearly going to be difficult. But it’s equally clear that $0 is the wrong estimate. And as we see, the DOD has some way of doing this for internal consumption.

Meanwhile, I’d like to see Paul Krugman or other advocates of more stimulus weigh-in on whether debt-financed escalation of military effort would have a beneficial impact on the labor market situation. I think it’s deplorable that U.S. political culture tends to regard military-related appropriations as exempt from normal budgetary considerations, but it’s possible that that’s a loophole worth taking advantage of in this case. All those new weapons purchases the Pentagon doesn’t want to estimate are manufacturing jobs for someone, right? Obviously this shouldn’t the primary consideration in dictating military strategy, but I do think a comprehensive look at the macroeconomic impact of defense policy choices—both the costs and benefits of hugely expensively military undertakings—is a necessary element of the strategic consideration.

Send Troops to Where in Afghanistan?

Afghanistan is a big country. So in addition to the question of how many resources should be sent to Afghanistan, there’s the question of where they should go. Recently, the tendency has been to throw additional resources at the parts of the country where things are worse. In his latest Carnegie Endowment report “Fixing a Failed Strategy in Afghanistan”, Gilles Dorronsoro argues that this would be a big mistake. The resources being contemplated, he argues, aren’t enough to win the war in the South. Sending them there would merely guarantee that we also lose the war in the North and the East, without making much progress in the South.

Instead, he prefers to adopt a more defensive posture in the South—securing main cities where the Taliban is disliked—and focus our attention on winning what he regards as the more winnable struggles in the North and East where the Taliban is making gains but isn’t deeply intertwined with local communities. I can’t really assess how true this analysis is, but he certainly seems to make a strong case. This also accords with my sense that the best case for staying in Afghanistan isn’t really scare stories about al-Qaeda but simply the fact that we have something of a moral obligation to help anti-Taliban Afghans defend themselves. That means in the first instance focusing both our troops and our reconstruction money on the places where we’re wanted.

Spending Trends in Afghanistan

Something that I think gets underplayed in coverage of the Afghanistan debate is the extent to which our commitment to Afghanistan has already escalated substantially in the recent past. In his recent report for the Carnegie Endowment, Gilles Dorronsoro cites this data from Amy Belasco’s classic September 2009 Congressional Research Service page-turner “The Cost of Iraq, Afghanistan, and Other Global War on Terror Operations Since 9/11″ (PDF):

One point here is that we now seem to be looking at the consequences of a penny-wise, pound-foolish approach to Afghanistan. Maybe if we’d just been spending $30-$40 billion a year from the get-go the situation never would have deteriorated to the point where we’re looking at appropriations of $170 billion and rising. Another point is that it’s a little bit odd that the big escalation debate is happening now, since any further increases in expenditures will probably be smaller than the increase that already happened back when nobody was paying attention.

A third, loosely related point, is that the question “how much are we spending on the war in Afghanistan” is a surprisingly difficult research question. You would think this would be the kind of thing that hardly requires a CRS report, but there’s no more straightforward way for members of congress to figure out what they’ve appropriated than to have someone research it. And it’s full of sentences like “In a recent report, GAO raised questions about whether DOD war cost reporting accurately captures the split between Afghanistan and Iraq” and so forth. The whole issue is surprisingly murky.

How Many Troops Can Be Sent to Afghanistan?

(DOD Photo)

There was some kind of effort underway in the military bureaucracy to portray sending an additional 40,000 or so troops to Afghanistan as a “middle” option, but Spencer Ackerman points out that something in the 30-40k range is at the very limits of what’s logistically feasible:

If President Obama orders an additional 30,000 to 40,000 troops to Afghanistan, he will be deploying practically every available U.S. Army brigade to war, leaving few units in reserve in case of an unforeseen emergency and further stressing a force that has seen repeated combat deployments since 2002. [...]

Obama would have something of a cushion, but not much, in the early months of 2010. An additional five brigades will finish their 12 months of so-called “dwell time” at home between deployments by April 2010, providing an additional 22,600 troops, but by that time, about 10,200 troops will be scheduled to leave Afghanistan, leaving available a net gain of 12,400. More brigades become available in the summer and fall, although others currently in Afghanistan will be ending their scheduled deployments then as well.

I don’t really think we need to worry too much about the possible lack of a contingency force to fight off an invasion from Mexico. But I think this underscores the fact that even though it’s annoying, from the point of view of a political observer in Washington, to see the internal administration Afghanistan debate drag on like this there’s no particular practical urgency to making a decision. The U.S. presence in Afghanistan has been scaled-up substantially in the two years, and further increases would need to be implemented over time.

Birth Control in Afghanistan

The underlying idea that lowering Afghanistan’s fertility rate would help it develop economically makes a lot of sense. Especially in an overwhelmingly rural country, the tendency is for a rapid increase in population to lead to falling living standards.

That said, the specific method of trying to do this by talking to male religious leaders about birth control seems to me to be at odds with most of what we know about this subject. As a recent Economist story on fertility trends emphasized, women in the developing world generally have more children than they want to. When we see falling fertility rates, it’s normally a result of women being empowered to make more decisions about their own lives:

A surprising amount is known about how many children parents want, thanks to a series of surveys by the Demographic and Health Surveys programme. The picture it paints is of huge numbers of unplanned pregnancies. In Brazil, for example, the wanted fertility rate in 1996 (the most recent year available) was 1.8; the actual fertility rate then was 2.5. In India the wanted rate in 2006 was 1.9, the actual one, 2.7. In Ghana the figures for 2003 were 3.7 and 4.4. The rule seems to be that women want one child fewer than they are having (except in some rich countries, where they say they want more). [...]

That points to another big reason why fertility is falling: the spread of female education. Go back to the countries where fertility has fallen fastest and you will find remarkable literacy programmes. As early as 1962, for example, 80% of young women in Mauritius could read and write. In Iran in 1976, only 10% of rural women aged 20 to 24 were literate. Now that share is 91%, and Iran not only has one of the best-educated populations in the Middle East but the one in which men and women have the most equal educational chances. Iranian girls aged 15-19 have roughly the same number of years of schooling as boys do. Educated women are more likely to go out to work, more likely to demand contraception and less likely to want large families.

Of course, the case of China and the one-child policy does show that massive coercion works as well. But the problem in Afghanistan is almost certainly the view that how many children a woman should have is a decision that should be made by men. Just talking to men about making that decision in a different way is unlikely to address the issue. Of course, sending girls to school is a controversial issue in Afghanistan, but if the Islamic Republic of Iran was capable of overseeing a massive increase in women’s educational opportunities, then such things can’t be inconsistent with culturally conservative Islamism in any particularly straightforward sense.

War as Stimulus

Like most progressives, I find it extremely annoying that Beltway conventional wisdom exempts military-related expenditures from the normal rules of budgeting.

At the same time, in these days of recession it does occur to me that to some extent this is a two-way street. I’ve been inclined to complain that most of these more ambitious visions for Afghanistan, for example, don’t seem to meet any kind of reasonable cost-benefit test. After all, they could use better security, a Provincial Reconstruction Team, and a “civilian surge” in Newark, New Jersey. But if you take the hypocrisy of the political system as a given, this looks a bit different. At the end of the day, war expenditures don’t trade off with domestic expenditures, they trade off with increased levels of public debt. Under normal circumstances, that still means that military operations should be (though they generally aren’t) subject to real cost-benefit scrutiny, since higher debt levels has real social costs. But the basic progressive analysis of the current economic situation is that higher short-term debt levels are socially beneficial, right? The story is that World War II—at least from the perspective of the American economy—wasn’t a huge economically wasteful use of resources. Sure it was more wasteful (in economic terms, obviously the “beating Hitler” benefits were quite real) than some other possible projects, but it still on balance was helpful in ending the Depression.

ADDITION! Just after I finished writing this post, but right before I put it up, I saw Christopher Drew’s NYT story “High Costs Weigh on Troop Debate for Afghan War”:

While President Obama’s decision about sending more troops to Afghanistan is primarily a military one, it also has substantial budget implications that are adding pressure to limit the commitment, senior administration officials say. [...] Senior members of the House Appropriations Committee have already expressed reservations about the potential long-term costs of expanding the war in Afghanistan. And Mr. Obama could find it difficult to win approval for the additional spending in Congress, where he would have to depend on Republicans to counter defections from liberal Democrats.

I think that to an extent invalidates my musings above. I assume the reference to “senior members of the House Appropriations Committee” refers primarily to David Obey who’s expressed concerns about this.

Public Skeptical of Afghanistan Troop Increase

Gallup’s latest polling reveals considerable public skepticism about the idea of sending 40,000 additional troops to Afghanistan:

It’s worth noting that the question, as worded, specifically mentions that a 40,000 troop increase is what “the U.S. commanding general there has recommended” and that increasing troop levels still doesn’t secure majority support. Especially complicating the situation is the fact that the median position—keep things the way they are—actually has very little support. An overwhelming majority either want fewer troops or many more troops.

Meanwhile, support for escalating is heavily concentrated among self-IDed Republicans who are unlikely to back Obama’s re-election no matter what happens:

This strikes me as a notably high level of ideological polarization for a foreign policy issue that hasn’t emerged as a high-profile partisan fight.

When gaming this out politically, however, as is often the case I think it’s worth being somewhat skeptical about the significance of these kind of questions. If the military is really solidly behind the idea of sending more troops, the real political issue is how damaging would a prolonged fight with the military be? Or how likely would such a fight be to emerged? One assumes that doing something that prompts General McChrystal to resign would be a big political problem. At the same time, that would be an extreme step for McChrystal to take.

Soviet Ink Spots

I don’t think I agree with the analytical conclusions of this item from the Ghosts of Alexander blog assessing the prospects for “A Hybrid Rumsfeld/Soviet Strategy for Afghanistan.” But it’s worth reading, and this map, originally from Gilles Dorronsoro’s Revolution Unending: Afghanistan, 1979 to the Present is very interesting in light of apparently ongoing disagreement in policy circles about how many population centers you really need to control to maintain a basic grip on Afghanistan. It shows what portions of Soviet-occupied Afghanistan were under effective government control:

The basic strategy reads pretty clearly off the map. It’s easier to hold cities than the countryside. So you try to put together a string of urbanized areas that leaves you in control of the main ring road through the country, plus via Jalalabad and Kunduz some key routes to the border. But the Soviets couldn’t quite make this work, and some serious portions of the road network remained out of their grasp.

Ambassador Eikenberry Dissents from Troop Surge Consensus

Before being appointed U.S. Ambassador to Afghanistan, Karl Eikenberry was a Lieutenant-General in the Army. That gives him perhaps an unusual sense of his own ability to make recommendations about military policy in the country. Recommendations that Greg Jaffe, Scott Wilson and Karen DeYoung are at odds with the idea of sending more troops:

The U.S. ambassador in Kabul sent two classified cables to Washington in the past week expressing deep concerns about sending more U.S. troops to Afghanistan until President Hamid Karzai’s government demonstrates that it is willing to tackle the corruption and mismanagement that has fueled the Taliban’s rise, senior U.S. officials said.

Spencer Ackerman reports that there’s considerable anger at the way this got leaked to the Washington Post but at the same time Eikenberry’s concerns are being taken seriously and the process seems to have been a bit derailed:

Despite the dissatisfaction with Eikenberry’s apparent leak, according to the staffer, Obama “demanded” an exit strategy for the war “after Eikenberry’s cables.” Certain members of the NSC dialed into the conference from the Fort Bragg, N.C. headquarters of the Joint Special Operations Command, which is playing a large if underreported role in shaping Afghanistan strategy. It would appear that much remains fluid in the administration’s strategy debates.

Helene Cooper has a good piece in the New York Times on the related issue that unless the United States is prepared to withdraw under some circumstances we have little practical leverage over Hamid Karzai. I think you can make the case that the alleged need to have Karzai clean up his act is overstated, but I think it’s true that if it’s genuinely necessary to get him to clean up his act then an unconditional commitment to pour more resources into the country is a poor way to produce that outcome.

Taliban and al-Qaeda

Joshua Partlow for The Washington Post reports on various indications that Mullah Omar and his Taliban are looking to distance themselves from al-Qaeda:

The shift appears to reflect Omar’s growing confidence that his group can operate on its own, without al-Qaeda as its patron. “The Taliban have got the expertise, they have got the resources, they have got the momentum,” said Richard Barrett, coordinator of the U.N. Taliban and al-Qaeda Monitoring Team. [...]

“We assure all countries that the Islamic Emirate of Afghanistan, as a responsible force, will not extend its hand to cause jeopardy to others,” Omar said in a written statement in September.

The messages from the Taliban leadership since the spring amount to something of a “revolution,” said Wahid Mujda, a political analyst who was a Foreign Ministry official under the Taliban government. “Al-Qaeda’s path is now different from the Taliban’s path, and they are growing more separated.”

Meanwhile, Spencer Ackerman says that Leah Farrell, former al-Qaeda specialist for the Australian National Police, has a blog that’s “attracting ever-more attention in U.S. defense circles.” That said, I think we can predict here and now that she’s going to stop attracting attention in U.S. defense circles since she thinks we should withdraw from Afghanistan and that al-Qaeda attacks on U.S. forces are a deliberate ploy “forcing a surge in American troop numbers” and creating a situation in which “Mullah Omar’s legitimacy would be jeopardised were he to publicly disassociate from al-Qa’ida and guarantee he would not again provide it sanctuary.”

She’ll stop attracting attention because, as Spencer writes in that very same post, there’s absolutely no constituency for withdrawal of American forces inside the Obama administration. Instead, the debate among civilians runs from “we should stick with the increase in troop levels that Obama has already executed” to “we should engage in large additional increases in troop levels.” And within the uniformed military it seems that everyone wants large additional increases.

I think we really saw this movie in Iraq already. Clearly, there’s a lot of uncertainty endemic to thinking about this kind of issue. What’s not uncertain, however, is that as long as U.S. troops remain in theater, we haven’t “lost”. It’s also clear that you don’t achieve “victory” by withdrawing under fire. Consequently, those considerations will predominate. As I’ve said before, it would be very different if military planners were expected to come up with deficit neutral proposals capable of attracting 60 votes in the Senate—that would end the war in the blink of an eye.

Special Ops Commanders Want Large Deployment to Afghanistan

Spencer Ackerman’s reporting on the role being played by Vice Admirals WilliamMcRaven and Robert Harward in the Afghanistan policy debate explains why Joe Biden wound up losing the argument over whether we should try to get by in Afghanistan with a “light footprint” and a narrow focus on counterterrorism. Basically, these are the guys who hold key special forces posts and would be largely responsible commanding counterterrorism operations in Afghanistan. And they want to see such efforts embedded within a larger counterinsurgency strategy. Thus you end up with a fairly united front of relevant military players in favor of COIN approach and a substantial additional deployment of forces.

One thing I think this highlights is the limits of conducting this kind of debate more-or-less entirely within the four walls of the military. After all, why wouldn’t the special ops guys want to see as much resources as possible put into Afghanistan? At the end of the day to get a real debate going about the wisdom of going big you need someone in the room who represents a competing claim on the resources at hand. Does it make sense to sustain tens of thousands of soldiers in Afghanistan at a cost of tens of billions of dollars a year in order to protect America from a group with “several hundred to several thousand members” and no heavy weapons? Well, I think that depends on what alternative uses of the resources are available. If the meeting also includes someone who needs to worry about the budget deficit, or about health care, or about child nutrition, or preventing bridges from collapsing then maybe this doesn’t look like such a great deal. But if it’s a meeting of uniformed military officers to talk about what’s the best way to handle the situation in Afghanistan, then even the guys who do counterterrorism still see the benefits of a broader approach.

What a Legitimacy Problem Looks Like

Atta Mohammad Noor, governor of Balkh province in Northern Afghanistan says:

“Karzai is a thief of people’s votes. Democracy has been buried in Afghanistan. He’s not a lawful president,” Mr. Atta said in an interview in his vast rococo-styled office, as turbaned supplicants lined up to petition for his help in resolving court cases and disputes with local authorities.

At the moment, the mainstays of the Karzai government in Afghanistan are the non-Pashto areas of Afghanistan where there’s a great deal of popular hostility to the Taliban. But its precisely for that reason that Karzai, a Pashto, was picked to lead Afghanistan. The view was that such a person would have the most legitimacy in the most contested areas. The risk with what’s now happened in the election is that Karzai will either start to lose his Tajik support and his government will become untenable, or else that to prevent that from happening the government will need to shift all the way in the direction of him basically being a frontman for a Fahim/Dostum Tajik/Uzbek warlord coalition that has no support in Pashto areas.

The Stakes in Afghanistan

Spencer Ackerman has a long-form piece on the evolution of the Obama administration’s thinking on Afghanistan. It includes this telling insight: “To a great degree, Afghanistan is a proving ground for what the United States will ultimately consider the true lessons of Iraq.”

To a great degree, this is what I find to be the most troubling thing about the counterinsurgency approach to Afghanistan. It strikes me as something that’s driven at least as much by a desire to win an argument in Washington, DC about the workability of counterinsurgency as by a thoughtful analysis about the costs and benefits of adopting such an approach. Precisely because of COIN’s ascendant-but-still-uncertain status in the American military toolkit, it’s very difficult for a COIN advocate to say “eh? this would be costly at best and it’s not clear it’s worthwhile.” Ultimately, I’d say I’m more sympathetic to the COIN crowd’s view of the world than to enthusiasts about air power or the need to prepare for naval battles with China. But these kind of intra-military disputes inevitably wind up creating a somewhat warped view of what’s going on in the world.

Reconstruction for the USA

Ryan Avent asks what would happen if for just one year we spent as much on infrastructure investments as we do on the Department of Defense:

With that kind of money you could entirely build out a national network of true high-speed rail. One year’s worth of defense spending gets you that. Which makes one wonder: where are all the economists, wringing their hands over cost-benefit analyses of these defense expenditures? Does anyone doubt that the net benefit of $100 billion spent on high-speed rail is easily higher than that for the last $100 billion spent on defense? Have a look at this if you’re unsure.

And while the gains to new investments in infrastructure (and not just in transportation) would be large, it isn’t as though we lack critical needs. What was the cost, human and economic, of the I-35 bridge collapse? Of the Metro crash and resulting limitations on service? Of the Bay Bridge shutdown? And of course, investments in infrastructure constitute positive contributions to the economy, which ultimately strengthen our ability to direct resources toward defense. Aimless defense spending, on the other hand, may well make us poorer and less secure.

Ryan’s link was to my post comparing America’s 2007 defense spending to other countries:

Under the circumstances, I think it’s clear that the marginal dollar spent on defense has a very low value. And of course though Ryan’s thought-experiment is a fun exercise, you couldn’t build out a national HSR network in one year no much how much money you spent. So the real point would be something like if we took 10 percent of the defense budget and re-allocated that to infrastructure, we could have a national HSR network in ten years. And we’d still be spending over triple what our nearest rival spends.

Something worth noting is that for a hegemonic power suffering from slow-but-steady (but very slow) relative decline, wasting money on national security expenditures actually erodes our hegemony. Meaningful U.S.-Chinese security competition is a generation or two away. By that time, money that was spent in 2009 on fighter planes or nuclear submarines or transportation infrastructure in Afghanistan isn’t going to be doing us any good. By contrast, spending money on preschool in 2009 does improve the U.S.-Chinese balance of power in 2049—investment in early childhood education pays enormous dividends, but it takes a long time to turn tiny babies into productive adults. And transportation is just the same. The construction of heavy rail mass transit in Boston, New York, Chicago, and Washington was extremely expensive but has paid consistent dividends for decades and if properly maintained will continue to do so forever.

I can’t vouch for the authenticity of the quote, but someone told me he heard a Chinese official tell him “over the past decade you’ve spent $1 trillion on Iraq and Afghanistan, we’ve spent $1 trillion building the future of China.” I don’t really think we should view that contrast in a paranoid light, but if you do want to take a paranoid view of the American national security situation it makes a lot more sense to worry about that than to worry that someone in a cave might build a bomb.

Pashto Language Ability

A colleague points me to this reporting from Gareth Porter back in April:

But according to an official at the State Department’s Bureau of Human Resources, the United States has turned out a total of only 18 Foreign Service officers who can speak Pashto, and only two of them are now serving in Afghanistan – both apparently in Kabul.

The Defense Language Institute in Monterey, California trains roughly 30 to 40 military personnel in Pashto each year, according to media relations officer Brian Lamar, most of whom are enlisted men in military intelligence.

I don’t think this necessarily needs to hobble our ability to achieve anything useful in Afghanistan. But I do think it illustrates that manipulating Afghan politics is not likely to be America’s strong suit. Foreign politicians usually understand how to manipulate US domestic politics much better than our leaders understand how to manipulate their domestic politics. We have a lot of strengths as a nation, but that sort of thing is not one of them.

Speaking the Language

To move beyond merely rhetorical question-asking, who is the highest-ranking American official who speaks the languages they use in Afghanistan? Moving quickly down the list, it seems that neither the President, the Vice President, the Secretary of Defense, nor the Secretary of State makes the cut. Nothing in the background of Assistant Secretary of State for South and Central Asia Robert Blake or Deputy Assistant Secretary of Defense for the Middle East Colin Kahl (oddly, State and DOD slice up the world differently) suggests that they do. Nor does Richard Holbrooke or Ambassador Karl Eikenberry or General McChrystal (or, for that matter, General Petraeus).

The leading contender that’s been suggested to me is Puneet Talwar, who does Iran-Iraq issues at the NSC and I’m led to believe knows Persian which (going under the name Dari) is used as a lingua franca in Afghanistan. But he works at a different desk. Spencer thinks Vikram Singh, who works for Holbrooke, may be the person I’m looking for.

At any rate, Americans are famously poorly endowed with foreign language ability, and the issue becomes especially acute as our national security policy becomes more-and-more focused on places like Afghanistan and Somalia rather than France and Germany.

Our Knowledge Problem in Afghanistan Won’t Be Solved in One Friedman Unit

Do we need to increase our efforts in Afghanistan or do we lack the sort of partner who can make counterinsurgency work? Maybe stringing things out for another Friedman Unit will resolve the matter:

“We’re going to know in the next three to six months whether he’s doing anything differently — whether he can seriously address the corruption, whether he can raise an army that ultimately can take over from us and that doesn’t lose troops as fast as we train them,” one of Mr. Obama’s senior aides said. He insisted on anonymity because of the confidentiality surrounding the Obama administration’s own debate on a new strategy, and the request by Gen. Stanley A. McChrystal, the American military commander in Afghanistan, for upward of 44,000 more troops.

Like Spencer Ackerman I’m skeptical. What can you really tell in six months? Karzai knows we’re considering sending more support to his government. He also knows we’re concerned about corruption. So he’ll almost certainly deliver on some kind of anti-corruption measure. But will it be effective? Will it even be intended to be effective? It would be the easiest thing in the world to make a big show of curtailing abuses by one or both of the other Karzai brothers, and then ease up as soon as attention drifts elsewhere.

The good news about this is that I think the significance of creating a corruption-free Afghan central government is being overstated in the American debate. But in terms of creating one, recall that US foreign policy is always at its least-effective when it comes to manipulating the domestic politics of other countries. We have more more than Karzai. And more guns than Karzai. And better satellites than Karzai. But we don’t have a better understanding of Afghan domestic politics than Karzai. On the contrary, Karzai—like most important foreign leaders—probably understands our politics a lot better than we understand his. Karzai, and lots of key figures around him, reads English and can fire up his web browser and see what’s going on in the New York Times or Politico or whatever. What’s the highest-ranking American official who reads Dari or Pashto?

Afghan Public Opinion

Mark Kleiman summarizes some key bullet points from the Asia Foundation’s most recent survey of public opinion:

— In 2009, 42 percent of respondents say that the country is moving in the right direction.

— This figure is higher than in 2008 (38%). Similarly, 29 percent feel that the country is moving in the wrong direction compared to 32 percent in 2008, signaling a check on the trend of declining optimism that had been evident since 2006.

—The main reason for optimism continues to be good security which has been mentioned by an increasing proportion of respondents each year, from 31 percent in 2006 to 44 percent in 2009. More respondents in 2009 also mention reconstruction and rebuilding (36%) and opening of schools for girls (21%) as reasons for optimism than in previous years.

— Insecurity also remains the most important reason for pessimism, cited by 42 percent of respondents. However, the proportion of respondents that highlight insecurity in 2009 has fallen since 2008 when half of respondents (50%) emphasized this factor.

— Insecurity (including attacks, violence and terrorism) is identified as the biggest problem in Afghanistan by over a third of respondents (36%), particularly in the South East (48%), West (44%) and South West (41%). However, concern about other issues such as unemployment (35%), poor economy (20%), corruption (17%), poverty (11%) and education (11%) has increased in 2009 compared to 2008.

I think you can use this data to support a variety of policy conclusion. But it’s striking that the US debate between escalation and scaling-back tends to proceed from a shared assumption that Afghanistan is in a crisis point. But Afghans seem to think things are improving. Note also that corruption, which has been talked about a lot over the past month, rates relatively low on the complaint scale. In terms of unemployment it seems to me that the most helpful thing we can do would be to revise trade policies. Allow the duty free importation of Afghan textiles to the American market. See what it takes to persuade Turkey and India to stop putting such high taxes on Afghan agricultural products.

This kind of thing is very boring to talk about and isn’t amenable to David Brooks writing columns about how the real issue is whether or not Obama is manly enough to demand victory. But it’s really important. Poor labor market conditions make people disgruntled. In stable democracies they vote for opposition parties. In non-stable places they may take up arms.

Conditions Deteriorating in Guinea

In my safe havens piece I wrote that “Broken states, alas, are not all that rare.” This is a difficult point to raise without coming across as glib, but it is the reality. Neither the American public nor the American press has much taste for foreign affairs coverage. We basically see media attention and political controversy attach to either Iraq or Afghanistan, but there’s not the bandwidth to cover both of them simultaneously, much less the whole wide world.

But read, for example, Elizabeth Dickinson’s post about how Guinea’s year-old junta is unraveling:

All the comes at a time when the junta itself is falling apart. Dadis comes across as crazy, drugged, or bi-polar in his interviews and TV spots. He has become increasingly fragile, observers say, as the pressures of patronage and a fractured junta coalition weigh on him.

And fractured the junta certainly is. The group of 30 or so soldiers who came to power, with the backing of about 500 more, make up just a handful of the armies 20,000 forces. Within the high ranks, the most obvious split has emerged between Dadis and his defense minister, General Sekouba Konaté. The latter was an important figure in the military prior to the coup as is largely percieved as the biggest “threat” to Dadis’s rule — an impression codified by the fact that, since earlier this year, Dadis has refused to let his defense minister out of his sight for more than a few moments (they are pictured together above). When Konaté left the country several weeks ago to Morocco (the rumor mill claims he was sent to procure arms), many in Guinea wondered if he would be let back in to the country. His whereabouts now are unknown.

There’s also this Human Rights Watch account of the premeditated murder of protesters in the country, but we can probably safely dismiss that as part of HRW’s vast anti-Israel conspiracy.

Anyways, none of this is to say we should withdraw all our forces from Afghanistan and invade Guinea instead. It’s just that the real humanitarian and security issues involved in weak or fragile states need to be kept in some kind of perspective and our actual policy commitment should be balanced.

America’s Role in Afghan Corruption

Joanna Nathan, who lived in Kabul from 2003 to 2009 working for the Institute for War and then the International Crisis Group, says the United States needs to clean up its own act if we want to improve the corruption situation in Afghanistan:

But before the U.S. administration is in any real position to make demands of the Afghan government, it needs to get its own act together. Over-reliance on expensive private contractors needs to be severely curtailed with the focus put on injecting money through Afghan government systems in a way that strengths local institutions rather than subverts them. The measure of effectiveness needs to be on impact on the ground rather than the sheer amounts poured in. Overarching this must be a cohesive approach across U.S. government agencies as to who is being engaged and ensuring that that no one has impunity.

Up on the 11th floor here at CAP Caroline Wadhams, Colin Cookman, and Christina Misunas recently did a piece on America’s faustian bargains with Afghan warlords that makes many overlapping points.

The Final Frontier

Today in The National I have a new article out arguing that the fear of safe havens doesn’t make a great deal of sense and is part of a lack of strategic priority setting. After all, the truth about Afghanistan is that it’s not so much “the graveyard of empires” as it is simply a place empires eventually realize isn’t very important.

What the piece doesn’t deal with is the idea that a large American military deployment in Afghanistan is necessary for the stability of Pakistan and a broader South Asian security context. I’m not sure whether I think that argument is right or not, but for what it’s worth it strikes me as a much more plausible idea. Which is to say that if it’s true that our efforts in Afghanistan are playing a crucial stabilizing role in Pakistan, then that definitely seems like the kind of thing we should be pouring a lot of resources into. My colleague Brian Katulis has a smart recent take on Pakistan, but it doesn’t really delve into the Afghanistan connection.

Ricks Suggests Obama is Stalling on Afghanistan to Help John Corzine

He doesn’t endorse it, per se, but Tom Ricks sort of uncritically passes on the following fairly serious—and seriously weird—accusation against the White House:

Last but most importantly: Nov. 3, gubernatorial elections in both Virginia and New Jersey. The latter of which is my reasoning why the decision was delayed this long. Corzine is in the fight of his life and Obama is going to piss people off either way. Important special elections also in California and New York.

I’m not going to shift into faux-naive mode and pretend it’s outrageous to even insinuate that the administration thinks about politics when it comes to national security. No doubt the president is aware of the general state of public opinion and thinks about how his decisions on Afghanistan will impact his ability to work on other aspects of his agenda. That said, the idea that a decision is being specifically pushed back until after the election because somehow that will help John Corzine is kind of bizarre.

I mean, there’s not even any reason I can think of for believing that delay is helpful to Corzine. This sounds like a person so eager to dream up insidious motives to attribute to the president that he’s come up with one that doesn’t even make minimal sense. Ricks himself has been sharply critical of Obama’s slow decision-making pace. If he wants to endorse the claim, that the “most important” factor in the delay is a cynical effort to intervene in the NJ gubernatorial election he should say so plainly and back the argument up. If not, he should withdraw it. Just passing this on as an “interesting analysis” from “My book researcher, Kyle Flynn, a two-tour vet of Afghanistan (with extra points for duty in Oruzgan, the Pashtun answer to Arkansas) and now a graduate student at Georgetown University,” doesn’t really cut it.

Effective Leadership

Obviously, this is a serious issue, but I just read Spencer Ackerman explain:

President Obama’s ordering up a province-by-province study to “determine which regions are being managed effectively by local leaders and which require international help.”

Mississippi 2008 Presidential Exit Poll

And looking that over, it seems to me that a province-by-province study to “determine which regions are being managed effectively by local leaders and which require international help” would be a good idea right here in the USA. Someone can finally do something about, say, Mississippi. It persistently lags on human development indexes, its governor is dogged by corruption allegations, and election results simply break down along ethnic lines and re-enforce entrenched divisions.

A joke, yes. But it’s a reminder that state-building involves a lot of large assumptions about the capabilities of our own public sector institutions. Providing good government is difficult, and providing it in a foreign country can be very difficult.

Hamid Karzai’s Other Brother

With Ahmad Wali Karzai in the news, let’s spare a moment of thought for the other Karzai brother, Mahmoud. As the CAP warlord cheat sheet explains:

Mahmoud Karzai retains a residence in Maryland and managed the family’s string of Afghan restaurants in the United States prior to the fall of Taliban. He currently heads the Afghan Chamber of Commerce. He has been accused of profiting through this position and his family connections, and holds interests in mining, a cement factory, the country’s dominant bank, and its only Toyota distributorship. Hamid Karzai has refused to take action against either brother, saying he has received no evidence, only allegations, against his family members.

It’s been years since I’ve visited either the Cambridge or the Baltimore branch of the Helmand franchise, but it’s worth noting that these are—or at least were—darn good restaurants. It has, however, long been my feeling that the rather extensive wine list tends to undermine the Karzai family’s Islamic cred.

Also note that when you hear about corruption in Afghanistan, we’re not talking about small stuff. The president’s brother heads the country’s chamber of commerce, dominant bank, and main car distributorship and he’s the less corrupt brother!