30 November 2007
Defining the Job in Afghanistan
Before commenting on three elements of Hans Binnendijk's plan for winning the war in Afghanistan, “Finishing the Job in Afghanistan,” in the November 10-11, 2007, Wall Street Journal, I would like to help define the mission of NATO's International Security Assistance Force. If it is to prevent the Taliban from retaking power, that’s one thing. If it is to pacify the country with a semblance of Western democratic order, that’s quite another. Under the first definition, ISAF has an enemy to defeat; under the second, ISAF is in the business of building a new culture of democracy and the rule of law in Afghanistan.
It appears that Dr. Binnendijk favors the second definition--he believes that the U.S. can work with relatively moderate Taliban leaders. However, splitting one faction of the Taliban from another is different from playing the Iraqi Sunnis against Al Qaeda. If the U.S. wants to win allegiance to a democratic Afghanistan from those moderate Taliban, it will take a long public diplomacy effort.
U.S. goals in Iraq are, to say the least, conflicted. It backs the Shia-led government, while it has been trying to weaken Iran’s influence in Iraq. Iraqi Sunnis seem to have decided to cooperate with the U.S. against Al Qaeda in order to preserve a position of favor in an occupied country rather than to take their chances in a majority-controlled self-governed state. In any case, what is happening in Anbar province is simple power politics compared to the cultural transformation that will be required to make the Taliban partners in a democratic Afghanistan.
I agree that the key to economic development in Afghanistan is agriculture, and an essential element of that objective is to reduce dependence on the poppy trade. However, there seem to be vested interests in crop eradication as the vehicle for achieving that goal. This is apparently endemic in the European approach as much as in U.S. policy (cf. “The Taliban’s Opium War: The difficulties and dangers of the eradication program,” Jon Lee Andersen, The New Yorker, July 9 & 16, 2007). Common lobbying has to be directed at all NATO governments in order to alter that bias.
Finally, I don’t think that the major public-diplomacy effort in Europe should be aimed at getting NATO to fight in Afghanistan in significant numbers. Rather, what is needed to achieve a democratic and orderly Afghan state is economic growth. Afghans are a rational commercial people who will respond to incentives that lead to improvement in their material well-being.
Before commenting on three elements of Hans Binnendijk's plan for winning the war in Afghanistan, “Finishing the Job in Afghanistan,” in the November 10-11, 2007, Wall Street Journal, I would like to help define the mission of NATO's International Security Assistance Force. If it is to prevent the Taliban from retaking power, that’s one thing. If it is to pacify the country with a semblance of Western democratic order, that’s quite another. Under the first definition, ISAF has an enemy to defeat; under the second, ISAF is in the business of building a new culture of democracy and the rule of law in Afghanistan.
It appears that Dr. Binnendijk favors the second definition--he believes that the U.S. can work with relatively moderate Taliban leaders. However, splitting one faction of the Taliban from another is different from playing the Iraqi Sunnis against Al Qaeda. If the U.S. wants to win allegiance to a democratic Afghanistan from those moderate Taliban, it will take a long public diplomacy effort.
U.S. goals in Iraq are, to say the least, conflicted. It backs the Shia-led government, while it has been trying to weaken Iran’s influence in Iraq. Iraqi Sunnis seem to have decided to cooperate with the U.S. against Al Qaeda in order to preserve a position of favor in an occupied country rather than to take their chances in a majority-controlled self-governed state. In any case, what is happening in Anbar province is simple power politics compared to the cultural transformation that will be required to make the Taliban partners in a democratic Afghanistan.
I agree that the key to economic development in Afghanistan is agriculture, and an essential element of that objective is to reduce dependence on the poppy trade. However, there seem to be vested interests in crop eradication as the vehicle for achieving that goal. This is apparently endemic in the European approach as much as in U.S. policy (cf. “The Taliban’s Opium War: The difficulties and dangers of the eradication program,” Jon Lee Andersen, The New Yorker, July 9 & 16, 2007). Common lobbying has to be directed at all NATO governments in order to alter that bias.
Finally, I don’t think that the major public-diplomacy effort in Europe should be aimed at getting NATO to fight in Afghanistan in significant numbers. Rather, what is needed to achieve a democratic and orderly Afghan state is economic growth. Afghans are a rational commercial people who will respond to incentives that lead to improvement in their material well-being.
29 November 2007
Fair Burden Sharing
In his aggravating OpEd article, “The Truth About the Top 1%,” in the October 25, 2007, Wall Street Journal, Alan Reynolds badly defines the “fairness” that Democratic Party leaders seek through their tax proposals as “reducing the top 1%’s share of income.” No matter how you define the top 1% or how you calculate the distribution of the country’s income, wealth, tax payments, etc., the issue here is not equalization of incomes but fairness in allotting the burden of supporting the cost of governing our nation.
Mr. Reynolds concludes that behavioral responses to tax changes (i.e. tax avoidance schemes) will always result in shifting tax burdens down the income scale anyway. So his argument challenging the statistical basis of Democratic tax proposals turns out to be academic. On the other hand, he makes clear why the Alternative Minimum Tax needs to be drastically rewritten in order to achieve its original objective of effective burden sharing in our progressive democracy.
In his aggravating OpEd article, “The Truth About the Top 1%,” in the October 25, 2007, Wall Street Journal, Alan Reynolds badly defines the “fairness” that Democratic Party leaders seek through their tax proposals as “reducing the top 1%’s share of income.” No matter how you define the top 1% or how you calculate the distribution of the country’s income, wealth, tax payments, etc., the issue here is not equalization of incomes but fairness in allotting the burden of supporting the cost of governing our nation.
Mr. Reynolds concludes that behavioral responses to tax changes (i.e. tax avoidance schemes) will always result in shifting tax burdens down the income scale anyway. So his argument challenging the statistical basis of Democratic tax proposals turns out to be academic. On the other hand, he makes clear why the Alternative Minimum Tax needs to be drastically rewritten in order to achieve its original objective of effective burden sharing in our progressive democracy.
28 November 2007
Out of Rhythm
The essay by Jon Gertner in the October 21, 2007, New York Times Magazine, “The Future is Drying Up,” begs the question whether modern medicine has extended life and whether technology has extended history beyond the rhythm of the earth’s climate. There have been long periods of climate change in millennia past – not only ice ages, but also centuries of drought. Great migrations since the emergence of recorded history helped certain civilizations survive these adverse conditions. More commonly, migrations merely helped tribes escape extinction.
Now that advances in technology have stoked anticipation of future achievements for mankind, it will take a more drastic form of migration to escape the limitations of the earth’s natural climatic cycles. Of course, it is foolish to ignore the effects of mankind itself on the periodicity of those cycles. However, survival in the future may require migrations that go beyond mere geography. They may need to transcend physical existence itself.
The essay by Jon Gertner in the October 21, 2007, New York Times Magazine, “The Future is Drying Up,” begs the question whether modern medicine has extended life and whether technology has extended history beyond the rhythm of the earth’s climate. There have been long periods of climate change in millennia past – not only ice ages, but also centuries of drought. Great migrations since the emergence of recorded history helped certain civilizations survive these adverse conditions. More commonly, migrations merely helped tribes escape extinction.
Now that advances in technology have stoked anticipation of future achievements for mankind, it will take a more drastic form of migration to escape the limitations of the earth’s natural climatic cycles. Of course, it is foolish to ignore the effects of mankind itself on the periodicity of those cycles. However, survival in the future may require migrations that go beyond mere geography. They may need to transcend physical existence itself.
27 November 2007
Why Sunni Sheikhs Became Our Allies
After over four years since our invasion of Iraq, many of us are mystified that the leaders of the Sunni Arab community appear to have become allies of the U.S. occupiers. There are at least three reasons:
1) They wish to maintain a position of power in a united Iraq, and know that overwhelming force is needed to accomplish that.
2) They wish to counterbalance the threat of Iran’s regional dominance.
3) They have no confidence in the ability of the fractious Shia-controlled central government to establish order in the country.
If the surge of U.S. military force achieved anything, it convinced the Sunni sheikhs that Bush could be relied on to keep troops in Iraq as long as he could in order to avoid admitting the strategic blunder his administration had made. The American occupiers, therefore, are effectively hostages to the sectarian illogic of the Iraqi state. While we are there protecting our soldiers from dying in the sectarian violence, we only postpone the ethnic cleansing that will end the privileges Sunni Arabs have enjoyed in Iraq from the times of the Ottomans, the Hashemites, and Saddam.
03 November 2007
Statistical Punishment
The negative correlation of the number of executions nationally with the number of murders in the country over the past 15 years is a fact that conservative technicians Roy Adler and Michael Summers tout as proving the effectiveness of the death penalty as a deterrent to capital crime. This conclusion demonstrates the need to temper reliance on statistical wizardry with solid appreciation of underlying social realities.
To name just two concerns I have with their OpEd in the November 2, 2007, Wall Street Journal, it would be helpful if they had analyzed whether the increase in executions and the decline in murders nationwide might result from a common cause, like improved economic conditions or the rise of conservative values in public thinking. As people became weary with the nostrums of the New Deal, they demanded even the economically disadvantaged behave responsibly and act with self-reliance. They consequently insisted on severe sanctions on those who failed to meet that expectation.
But even more basic a concern has to do with the use of national statistics to analyze what is essentially a local phenomenon. Conditions and attitudes vary regionally. Most murders are prosecuted state-by-state, not by the federal government. And the related executions are authorized and performed by the governments of those states. The deterrence effect of capital punishment, therefore, must be analyzed within the context of those states and cannot be evaluated nationally. What is more, only 37 states even impose the death penalty, and each of them has individual characteristics for carrying it out.
It’s often said that you can prove anything with statistics. Not only is a narrowly ideological dedication of statistical methods to the argument in favor of taking the life of a fellow human being as a deterrent to murder an unworthy distortion of a respected academic discipline. It is a pathetic justification for relying on the judgment of our rational but not infallible system of justice to administer irreversible punishments for the always uncertainly determined commitment of crime.
