Category — Foreign Policy

Bruce Bueno de Mesquita – The Predictionieer’s Game:

Conversely, the notion that the developments that make up history are primarily a series of chance events seems equally odd to me. Why fight over ideas, select governments, build armies, fund research, promote literacy, create art, or write histories if all we are doing is twiddling our thumbs while chance developments sund us bouncing around like the physicist’s particles? How can anyone deny strategic behavior and its consequences when we are surrounded by it in almost everything we do?

To be sure, the world as we know it could have swung one way or the other. That’s why neither the past nor the future follows an inevitable path. There are always chance elemnts behind which ways things, but those cahnce events rarely decide the future.

The US economy is reeling and we are all worried, many of us have lost their jobs or know several people who have. There are good economic arguments for trying to keep as much as possible of the economic stimulus inside the country (to maximize the impact of each dollar spent) while avoiding new protectionism that might spark a trade war. With all of us so focused on the domestic economy it is easy to forget that things are also happening in the rest of the world and that they aren’t that different from what we are going through here (and many of the problems like speculative investment in Eastern Europe are not at all the US fault).

However, if the current crisis has taught us anything, it is that nations are interlinked. The economic decoupling was a myth and the economic crisis is hurting everyone and endangering many US foreign policy priorities, including the recovery of Iraq. Because of this I was extremely shocked to see the following shortsightedness from Richard Posner:

I think the big foundations, such as the Gates foundation (the biggest), should be strongly urged to redirect their extensive foreign charity to the United States at this time of depression. I am not suggesting that his projects should “Buy American,” in the sense of buying U.S. products to give to foreign recipients of his charities. The point is rather that charity should begin at home when home is suffering.

I agree that in these tough times all of us who have steady incomes should help less fortunate ones by donating more to local charities. But taking away funding from the developing world would both be immoral and counter productive. These countries are already suffering immensely from a crisis that they did not create, the World Bank’s Chief Economist for Africa expects up to 700,000 additional infant deaths in Africa because of the crisis and an increase in conflict and decrease in governance quality. Ted Miguel and Ray Fisman have shown how economic shocks greatly increase the likelihood of civil wars and the same is true for a rapid fall in natural resource prices. Offering aid and then withdrawing it can be much worse than not giving anything in the first place. This decade has taught us that failing states, from Afghanistan, to Pakistan, to Somalia are real security problems, not just for their neighbors but also for the West.

If the Gates Foundation and others like it suddenly stopped funding projects in developing countries countless projects that have come to depend on their funds (many of which were started because of it) would have to shut down and it would take a long time for them to recover once the money becomes available again. The cutting of funds would worsen the impact of the crisis in affected countries, increase the time it will take for the global economy to recover, endanger long term research into tropical diseases, and produce a (potentially protectionist) backlash against the United States that we really don’t need right now.

This crisis and the way we get out of it is a chance for the US to show its leadership and creativity in the face of tough problems and together we can achieve that. If you as an individual want to help those less fortunate than you consider making a loan on Kiva or donating to a US charity.

Update: As Lauren pointed out in the comments you can also contribute by spending your time solving important problems and make a career out of making the world a better place.

Update 2: Richard Posner wrote another post supporting the elimination of tax deductions for charitable donations to foreign countries while Gary Becker (on the same blog) had a more nuanced opinion. Posner also maintains that we should regulate such giving which as an entrepreneur leaves me just flabbergasted. Many innovative non-profits started by young upstarts with great ideas such as Kiva, Forge, Face Aids, and Unite for Sight would never have been started under this plan and the world would be worse off for it. Let’s foster entrepreneurship in all sectors of the economy, not limit it without good reason.

I found a very interesting paper on the future of US military (ground) power by Thomas Donnelly in the Small Wars Journal through Tom Barnett’s blog. Like all SWJ papers it is relatively short (3-5 pages) and it’s well worth reading (one interesting bit: The US Military as a fighting force for use abroad didn’t really exist until WW1, before that it was more tasked with protecting people in the frontiers, etc.). What I found particularly interesting though was the following analysis of the role of the military in fighting ‘extremism’ and/or ‘terrorism’ (of some forms). The idea that groups like Hezbollah are turning into small “privatized” armies and how to countervail them is very interesting:

Even less persuasive is the idea that, because military power is not the only requirement for success, that we won’t need sufficient military power. Or that, because the enemy won’t mass forces the way the Soviets used to, that there won’t be significant “battles.” We’re not fighting a condition called “extremism,” we’re fighting a series of quite distinct enemies motivated by an extremist ideology and a vicious version of a faith that does not much distinguish between the personal and political, a backwards-looking travesty of Islam that not only elevates God’s law above man’s law but in fact finds the vary notion of man-made law to be illegitimate and blasphemous. Thus, Clausewitz still rules: these wars are politics by other means.

Consider the case of Hezbollah in southern Lebanon (read either the brief section on the 2006 war with Israel in Ground Truth or, for a more thorough and recent analysis, The 2006 Lebanon Campaign and the Future of Warfare by Steve Biddle and Jeffrey Friedman). The organizations are wrongly described as “non-state actors;” they are proto-states, or mini-states, but they are clearly entities that evince state-like behavior. And as they become moreso, their military behavior will become more conventional. We had better start counting and understanding Hezbollah-style “brigades.” The true answer to the irregular-verus-conventional argument is “both.”

I recently wrote a post about the Surge of Troops in Iraq and here is a follow up post with an excellent explanation of why the Surge was so effective that should also leave no doubt that it cannot be simply transferred to Afghanistan as is (though I have no doubt military commanders are fully aware of this). The core point is again that the additional troops helped implement a series of policies but that they were in not the central reason why the surge was successful. Here’s how the Washington Post article put it (article via Tom Barnett):

How did Gen. David H. Petraeus do it? My answer? Bottom line, for the first time since the war began, a U.S. leader decided to address the political motivations of the Iraqi combatants. Petraeus convened a study group that shrewdly analyzed the raging sectarian conflict, then came up with what he called “the Anaconda strategy” to address the underlying dynamic.

I think this is crucial to understand – more than playing politics, General Petraeus took time to understand the different forces at play and why they were fighting and then developed a strategy to counteract this.

On how the insurgency was created (in addition to not having enough troops to secure the situation on the ground and control weapons stashes and the border):

[...] disbanding Saddam Hussein’s Baath Party and the old regime’s security services — had helped create the Sunni insurgency. They produced a critical mass of angry men worried that the Sunnis who had run the old Iraq would wind up on the bottom in the new one.

Larry Diamond talks a lot about the problem of the overly deep debaathification where most of Iraq’s soldiers, civil servants, teachers, etc. were fired in his podcast on Stanford on iTunes U. While removing top level members of the Baath party from the public sphere was clearly necessary, many others were solely party members to be able to keep their jobs under Saddam’s regime.

The importance of winning over the alienated Sunnis:

On June 2, 2007, Petraeus gathered his commanders and told them to engage with influential Sunnis and insurgents and persuade them to stop fighting. “Tribal engagement and local reconciliation work!” he said. “Encourage it!”
[...]
As the Sunni insurgents switched sides, they passed vital intelligence to their U.S. partners and paymasters, which enabled Petraeus’s forces to target Sunni holdouts, including diehards affiliated with al-Qaeda in Iraq. U.S. soldiers also employed new techniques to control the Iraqi population and provide for its safety and to identify fighters hidden among the civilians.

How this was achieved:

Why were so many Sunnis — insurgents and civilians alike — ready to respond to the U.S. overture? Because they were getting desperate and saw Petraeus’s outstretched hand as their best chance of surviving a campaign of sectarian violence and ethnic cleansing led by the Shiites and fueled by neighboring Iran. The secular Sunnis’ alliance with the jihadist insurgents had always been an uneasy marriage of convenience, and it broke up when Petraeus made a better offer.

On how Moqtada al-Sadr and his Mahdi Army were brought under control:

That move has been widely misinterpreted as a spontaneous, unilateral gesture; in fact, it came after months of military and political pressure. Iraqi special operations forces, backed by elite U.S. combat advisers, conducted near-nightly raids against the most extreme elements of the Mahdi Army.
[...]
That said, the intra-Shiite competition for power will persist for years; the trick is to channel it into politics, not violence — and to continue to make use of the competition between Maliki and Sadr.

An excellent read.

One of my strongest convictions is that proper security (and probably foreign) policy should be driven by pragmatism, not ideology. This is one of many reasons I am very happy with Robert Gates, the current US Secretary of Defense. Here are some excerpts from a speech he gave at Oxford (via Tom Barnett).

In short, I believe the statesman would be well advised to listen, in contrast to the Roman emperors whose man in the chariot whispered “sic transit Gloria mundi” – all glory is fleeting – to listen to those who simply whisper, “Sir, we’re not sure what the hell is going on here.” 

Today, we face a set of global security challenges that may be unprecedented in complexity and scope – presenting dilemmas that do not lend themselves to a simple choice between popular conceptions of Churchill and Chamberlain.

The period following the collapse of the Soviet Union and the end of the Cold War unleashed old ethnic, religious, and nationalist hatreds and rivalries that had been largely buried since the Great War: The ethnic and religious slaughter in the Balkans; Russia’s seeming return to Czarist habits and aspirations; the fault lines between Sunni and Shia in Iraq and across the Middle East. The cast of characters sounds disturbingly familiar even at a century’s remove.

And after talking about more threats and problems:

Still, even given the jaded disposition of an old spy, there are ample grounds for optimism. First and foremost is the extraordinary growth of political and economic freedom around the world since I last served in government 15 years ago. 

But to secure these remarkable gains, and protect our most vital interests and aspirations in this global environment, the next American administration, working with our allies and partners, will need to employ a pragmatic blend of resolve and restraint to deal with the threats that confront us.

With the ongoing election there has been a lot of talk about the Surge in Iraq, mostly in the “They didn’t think the surge would work, bastards!” kind of way. I think that few people would look at Iraq today compared to Iraq 3 years ago and say that things have not improved. I think that very few people out there understand why and I think that understanding the reasons why the surge was successful is going to be extremely important in planning future military action. This has been something I have been interested in for a while and I’ll try to start writing more about this on this blog without veering into politics (which I like to avoid here).

I remember listening to experts around the time the idea of the surge first started circulating who mostly thought that it wouldn’t work due to a lack in sufficient number of new troops. If you compare the pre-surge numbers to the post-surge numbers (which I have to admit I don’t know exactly) you will see that the percentage difference is really not that great, mostly because more troops were simply not available. I think that everyone at the time already agreed that the proper way to go into Iraq (ignoring the question of whether that was a good idea) would have been with a number of troops comparable to what we had then to make sure that non of the instability started in the first place. AT the time of the surge it seemed difficult to fathom how a small increase in troops would be able to stop the insurgency that was then in full force.

I think this relatively small increase is crucial to understanding the actual process: most people think the surge simply meant ‘more troops’ and everything else happened magically. From my current understanding it was quite the opposite: a serious of new approaches that required more people to work but also meant changing the behavior of the troops that were already on the ground. David Petraeus’ counter insurgency manual gave the first indication of how one should deal with the problem and Tom Barnett points out two key reasons for its success:

The surge works for two key reasons, both of which couldn’t have been exploited to the point of solidification without additional bodies: 1) all Iraqis were tired of conflict and were looking for a way out: 2) the “awakening” due to al Qaeda’s over-reach. Fair enough.

Barnett then goes on to point out the lack of a ‘diplomatic surge’ on the political side to further help slow the insurgency and help American lives that I think points to a larger issue with US security policy:

I agreed with the logic of more troops (my SysAdmin-bias allowed me no other opinion). My problem with the surge was the lack of the diplomatic counterpart, now bequeathed to the next president, because I felt the lack of one meant—again—too many American lives needlessly lost and whatever gains we achieved logically held hostage to their neighbors and their willingness to wait us out and start trouble once we inevitably had to draw down, possibly making this whole success a complete illusion and thus wasting more American lives to no good end (not to mention those we waste in the future). 

The United States is fortunate to have an extremely capable military (with many brilliant leaders) that when faced with a new challenge/threat in the field is able to adapt to it and overcome it. David Petraeus deserves all the praise possible for fixing the military’s approach to Iraq, like many in the military he has done an exceptional job of taking a difficult situation and improving it. I think that US military commanders are generally very pragmatic once they are on their ground and troops lives are at stakes: they want to protect their soldiers and make their mission a success instead of worrying about particular ideological approaches. The real problem is what assignments and situations the military is given by its civilian leaders.

After reading Squandered Victory, Larry Diamond’s excellent book about his experience as an advisor to the CPA during the early days after the invasion I’ve found the topic of how American’s can work together effectively with the Iraqi administration very interesting. The book both strongly condemns many of the planning and strategic mistakes that were made both before (much discussed) and after the invasion (less well known) but also shows the efforts of people on the ground who are trying to bootstrap democracy in an unfamiliar and increasingly hostile environment. I recently found a great (and very short) article in the Small Wars Journal with advice to new Advisors in Iraq and wanted to link it here (click on the Apture link to read the Document).

Many of the lessons are relevant to working with any foreign government, especially the first one:

Since my first time in Iraq, in 2005, one essential fact on the ground has completely changed. While Coalition troops are still the most powerful fighting force in the country, the Coalition is no longer in control. The Iraqi Government is now exercising its sovereignty, and does not wish to be dictated to. This attitude filters down to the lowest levels and will color your interaction with Iraqis. You will only be able to perform your role as an advisor if you accept this fact and work with it. You are there to offer help, not to dictate, and your advice should be offered subtly and without appearing to be a demand.

I have been feeling ambivalent about the effectiveness of sanctions for longer than I can remember but have spend very little time reading about this topic. This is partially why two articles about the effect of sanctions on Sudan linked by Chris Blattman particularly struck my interest this week. While I’ve read Prunier’s book on Darfur I don’t spend too much time following the conflict but these are worth a read to anyone who is interested in whether sanctions can affect positive change in a country (e.g. Cuba, Myanmar, Iraq, …) though – sorry to disappoint – you won’t find any definite answer here.

High Time to Lift Sanctions by Ibrahim Adam (which I read first) makes some interesting points but left me unconvinced. The most immediately questionable claim is that removing sanctions would allow President Bashir the resources (financial and political) to affect change in Sudan:

So, what’s in it for either John McCain or Barack Obama to lift the sanctions from Sudan? Big dividends. It would give President Bashir political space to hasten changing Sudan to an equitable, democratic country, as specified by the landmark 2005 north-south Sudan peace agreement – the policy anchor of US government. 

I don’t think that affecting change is in Bashir’s interest and it certainly does not seem to be a priority and it doesn’t seem to be a good assumption to base an argument upon. The following section was, however, far more interesting:

Removing sanctions would help Sudan’s political institutions mature, too. The deafening criticism of Khartoum by Washington accompanying US sanctions often crowds out civil society and government discourse on other important, but ‘normal’, policy issues. Agriculture reforms, for example. US private investment into southern Sudan, thus far stifled by reputation risk fears, would also surely grow strongly following the abolition of the sanctions. 

While Daniel Millenson’s rebuttal (more on it below) questions the causality of the war, I do think that the argument below played a role in escalating some of the underlying issues:

US-led isolation meant the Sudanese government got, for example, just $56 million in foreign budgetary support during 1994-1998 according to IMF data. At roughly forty cents per person per year, that’s hardly enough for the government to build some roads and a couple of schools in Darfur, never mind cater for all Sudan. Protracted, severe constraints on public finances in one of the world’s largest (10th), but poorest countries (141 out of 176 in the 2006 UN Human Development Index) could only ever lead to one outcome. Crystallizing or, in the case of Darfur, reviving older badges of identification (kinship, religious, locality and ethnic ties), due to the collapse of public investment and welfare spending over most of the last two decades. 

Millenson’s explanation for the immediate causes of the war seems more accurate, but I was more interested in the exceptions to the sanction regime that he points out – I think that details like this are extremely important to understanding the impact of sanctions.

Darfur reached its staggering death toll primarily because al Bashir escalated the conflict, arming janjaweed militias to attack civilian populations. In a relationship exactly inverse to that described by Mr. Adam’s thesis, the war in Darfur was bankrolled by the very oil-driven foreign direct investment (FDI) inflows he praises.
…
While US sanctions have caused myriad headaches and missed business opportunities for the NIF/NCP regime, contrary to Mr. Adam’s claims, they have done little to further the plight of ordinary Sudanese. Then and now, US sanctions provide generous exemptions for food (which apparently even includes Coca-Cola’s syrup) and medical products to enter the country. It is hard to take seriously Ibrahim Adam’s claim that “‘excess’ deaths from US sanctions… probably runs into the hundreds of thousands.” Surely the government of Sudan, which provided the small arms and air force behind the initial and most violent 2003-2004 stage of the war (not to mention the North-South civil war), bears more direct responsibility for “excess” deaths. 

The central question is still if and when sanctions are an effective instrument for affecting change in countries with bad leaders and if not, what would more effective alternatives be? I hope to have better answers at some point in the future.