The Ron Paul Flap

The current controversy on the left about Ron Paul suggests a need to recall that old political maxim: “No permanent friends; no permanent enemies.”  Overall philosophical agreement is great, but the fact is that when it comes down to specifics, yesterday’s ally may just be tomorrow’s foe – whether we’re comfortable with that or not.  In the case at hand, for all of the issues on which Ron Paul is anything but our friend, when it comes to Afghanistan, or American foreign policy in general, he certainly is.  And if you have any doubt about that, you need only look at his antiwar ad, Chinese Army in Texas.

Does Paul’s antiwar stand matter?  Well, probably anyone concerned about America’s role in the world ought to at least watch his ad – it’s that good, particularly at a time when hardly anyone else is being heard on the topic.  And we just might want to ask ourselves how it has come to pass that a Republican presidential candidate is putting something like that out there and we’re not.  At the very least we shouldn’t pretend that the Ron Paul antiwar phenomenon isn’t happening simply because we don’t like the man’s stand on other things.

Really, this whole thing shouldn’t be that confusing to us in the first place.  Since we don’t have the tightly disciplined parties found in some other countries, this short of crossover phenomenon is a somewhat regular feature of American politics.  During the Vietnam War, for instance, liberal California Republican Congressman Pete McCloskey famously challenged his party’s sitting president, Richard Nixon, on the war issue in the 1972 primaries.  Of course, what’s set current antiwar activists in a tizzy about Paul is that he ain’t no liberal.

Still, the intensity of the debate over whether he is ultimately, on balance, a good guy or a bad guy seems somewhat misplaced, given how little it has to do with any likely set of events.   For one thing, few, if any, of those engaged in the argument are going to ever find themselves standing in a voting booth holding a primary ballot that includes Ron Paul’s name.  And so far as November goes, let’s face it – the Republican Party isn’t going to nominate him.

Better, perhaps, to direct this passion to analyzing how we might conceivably steal his thunder on the war issue.  For again, like it or not, the man has demonstrated an ability to attract political support among independents and young voters.  He drew 48 percent of the entire under-thirty vote in the Iowa Republican caucuses and 47 percent in the New Hampshire primary; and led with 44 percent of independents in New Hampshire and 32 percent in Iowa.  He also held a 34 percent plurality of first time participants in Iowa and was the top vote getter among those making less than $50,000, with 31 percent in both states.  He actually polled better among self described “moderates” than among those calling themselves “very conservative” – in Iowa by a factor of two to one.

We don’t want to make too much out of numbers from Republican voters, certainly, yet it’s hard to ignore those demographics.   And there seems little doubt that Paul’s anti-imperialist stance constitutes a very significant aspect of his appeal.  Unquestionably, Paul’s Republicanism has given him greater leeway on foreign policy than a Democrat or an independent from the Left might have.  It’s the Nixon-goes-to-China, Clinton-ends-welfare-as-we-know-it syndrome.  Even the Republicans who hate him don’t call him an “un-American” or a “terrorist sympathizer” – not yet, anyhow.

It’s also not the case that he’s saying things that we haven’t said.  What’s important though, is that he’s delivering that message to people and places that haven’t heard it before. What is ultimately so impressive about Paul’s Chinese in Texas ad is the empathy at its core.  Americans would resist foreign invaders, it argues, just as others do when it’s the Americans who are the foreign invaders.  Why, one might even conclude that the lives of people in strange countries are just as valuable as those of Americans!

(A Guardian article denouncing “Ron Paul’s useful idiots on the left” provides a useful contrast, as author Megan Carpentier berates said “idiots” for thinking that “people whose lives, safety, livelihoods and health depend on them [policies and programs opposed by Paul] should accept that they are trading their concerns for, say, the lives of Muslim children killed by bombs in Afghanistan” – the idea that the latter could approach the former in importance being so obviously ridiculous as to require no further comment.)

Who could have imagined that the best mass market educational material on American foreign policy would seen mostly by Republicans?  Perhaps if some of the vehemence currently displayed in rendering an overall judgement on Paul were redirected toward figuring out what we could do to change that situation, we just might have an antiwar movement worthy of the name.

The Arrogance of Power

“These people weren’t gathering for a bake sale … They were terrorists.”

So went the American response to Pakistan’s complaint that our drone-launched missiles killed mostly “peaceful citizens, including elders of the area” in an attack last week. Now, a decade of explanations that civilian deaths in Afghanistan, Iraq, and now Pakistan were a regrettable (but inevitable) part of our War on Terror have pretty well inured me to government mendacity. But somehow, this one – well you know, it took the cake. “A bake sale” – No, they probably weren’t there for a bake sale. Bake sales are what they hold here in America to run the schools we don’t have enough money for. Making new enemies for this country is pretty expensive you know.

The story this time is that the missiles apparently killed 26 of 32 participants in a “jirga” called to settle a local dispute between two tribes in North Waziristan over the operation of the chromium mine. Their target was the local Taliban officials expected there to mediate in their role as the de facto local government. Pakistan’s Gen. Ashfaq Parvez Kayani called the attack “carelessly and callously targeted with complete disregard to human life,” reporting that there were, in fact, 13 Taliban present, but 15 of those killed were not Taliban. Some locals claimed a death toll as high as 40. And the U.S. response was anonymous because officially we have never launched a missile into Pakistan. We’re not at war there, so that would be illegal. And the CIA would never do anything illegal.

If the military hasn’t yet created a decoration for arrogance, they should. Otherwise, a lot of lot of spectacular efforts – such as this one – will go unrewarded. Could we ever imagine another country killing American civilians because they were in proximity to government or military figures, and then telling the world, “Those people were criminals. That was no cattle show, you know”? Of course not – no country is capable of such an action, so why bother even imagining such a thing?

There may be no better measure of just how far this country has gone down the road of trying to bomb its way to peace and friendship in the Muslim and Arab worlds than our current decision to bomb another Muslim and Arab country. The proposition that Libya could do better than Muammar Gaddafi will get no argument here, nor will I try to predict the future. But consider the arrogance that it takes for us to decide that this latest attack constitutes a sensible American response to the situation.

The U.S. still maintains an occupying force of 50,000 troops in Iraq as a result of a war launched on grounds now generally conceded to have been fraudulent. A military force of over 100,000 is currently deployed in Afghanistan, even as the Secretary of Defense says that anyone who’d recommend an operation like that should “have his head examined.” As mentioned above, we are also waging undeclared war in Pakistan – and in Yemen, too, in similar fashion.

In the current political upheavals in the Middle East, American allies in the governments of Yemen and Bahrain have killed unarmed civilians – in the case of Bahrain with the aid of another ally – Saudi Arabia – none of which has moved our government to action. But when France and the United Kingdom, the former colonial powers in the oil-rich area, declare the need to aid a military uprising in Libya – obviously not an ally – why, the U.S. is right there.

Unfortunately, one of the most accurate reactions to recent events was probably that of the unnamed Pakistani resident who said of the missile attack on his region:

It will create resentment among the locals and everyone might turn into suicide bombers.

Meanwhile, they might want to get to minting those Presidential Medals of Arrogance.

An Obama Primary Challenge?

The last thing I want to see happen in the 2012 election is a Republican take the White House.  But the next-to-last thing is pretty important to me, too: I don’t want to see the President’s military policies go unchallenged.  Barack Obama is, after all, authorizing illegal military drone strikes in Pakistan and Yemen on top of running a war in Afghanistan that, among other things, even he has to know can’t succeed.  In real world terms these are not trivial matters – even if they go unmentioned in most assessments of how the President’s doing.  We – liberals, progressives, the left – can choose to ignore this if we want – that is, if we wish to be irrelevant in the next election.

It does look like there will be at least one candidate in next year’s presidential primaries opposing these policies – Republican Texas Congressman Ron Paul.  Paul, however, does not support the federal government taking a significant role in environmental protection, health care, reducing economic inequality and a lot of other things.  But unless antiwar Democrats do something, Paul’s libertarian campaign will represent the only significant 2012 primary season challenge to what he calls “America’s delusional foreign policy.”

It’s a year now since Harper’s Magazine publisher John R. MacArthur first publicly called for a challenge to Obama from the left.  And for a while the idea did gain a little traction, but it seemed to disappear when the President won a few legislative victories in the lame duck Congress.  Still, even those who hold fast to the Clinton-era “It’s the economy stupid” take on presidential politics can’t avoid asking to what better use the Afghanistan War’s $119 billion annual budget might be put in the midst of the greatest recession in seventy years.

The reason for the reluctance is, of course, to a great extent a legacy of Ted Kennedy’s 1980 primary challenge to Jimmy Carter followed by Ronald Reagan’s election.  Err in a hasty primary challenge and repent for a leisurely four years, the thinking goes.  Bill Clinton got a primary-free re-election in 1996 in some large part because of that take.  Longtime San Francisco community organizer Mike Miller sums up the current fear:

A perilous course being proposed by “progressives” that, if successful, will contribute to a Republican government—both houses of Congress and the White House—in 2012. That course is to nominate a ‘progressive’ to run against Obama in the primaries and, implicitly, sit out the election if Obama is the nominee.

If A, then B?  Is it impossible then to challenge the Administration in the way that really matters – electorally – without helping to usher in a President we’d find worse – both in domestic and foreign affairs?  Not an unreasonable fear, I’d say, yet not one that should prevent us from taking a broader look at the situation.

For one thing, while Clinton’s foreign policy may itself have left something to be desired (the U.S. did bomb Afghanistan, Iraq, Somalia, Sudan and Yugoslavia on his watch), nothing he did remotely approached the insanity of the current $1,000,000-a-year per soldier war with no perceptible goal other than to negotiate in the future with the Taliban enemy that we fight today.   So, in this case it’s not just nameless/faceless foreigners euphemistically referred to as “collateral damage”– there are Americans being asked to die.

As for the political dangers inherent in the enterprise, well Joe Biden ran against Barack Obama in 2008 and that seemed to work out all right.  To be sure, we would want a level-headed challenge, rather than one primarily fueled by personal anger at Obama.  Disappointment, sure, but even MacArthur’s initial appeal to those who “feel betrayed by Obama’s expansion of the war in Afghanistan and mercenary forces in Iraq” seems slightly off.  Those feeling betrayed by Obama’s expansion of the Afghanistan War really have only themselves to blame, in that he told us that this was precisely his intent.  But he also managed to accomplish what all successful presidential candidates do – he convinced a lot of voters that he really believed what they did, even when he said he didn’t.  People rationalized that he just said all that stuff about Afghanistan because he had to if he wanted to get elected.

Robert Naiman, Policy Director of the organization Just Foreign Policy, goes so far as to say that:

A key organizing principle of a progressive primary has to be something that many may find at first counterintuitive: it must not be directed against President Obama.

What it should be is directed at some of his policies and aimed at building and demonstrating a political base for a series of alternatives.

Over the last two years, many of us have heard more than one variation on the story of FDR telling those to his left that if they wanted him to do something, they had to go out and “make me do it.”  And surely there is something to that – you’ve got to somehow demonstrate a motivated constituency to be a political player.  This is precisely why we should be seriously thinking about what we can do during the upcoming primary season which seems, realistically, to be about the only time we’re going to have much chance of exerting pressure on Obama to rethink his wars.  What would be the goal of a primary challenge?  Several hundred delegates pledged to making the President do something different than he has been.

But, by the way, none of this is meant to suggest that foreign policy constitute the entire basis of a primary challenge, or even necessarily be its central element.  There seems little doubt that the basis for an antiwar candidacy exists – a December ABC News/Washington Post Poll found people answering “No” to the question “Do you think the war in Afghanistan has been worth fighting?” by a 60-34 percent margin (with only 25 percent of Democrats saying “Yes”) –  and this is with a minuscule amount of mainstream political opposition to the war.  Still, the cynical view that the domestic casualty rate – 500 U.S. military deaths and 4,500 wounded last year – is simply not high enough to turn this war into a mass issue may well be correct.

Either way, though, an ideal primary challenge would also take on the bank bailout, offer a broad government investment strategy and argue for improving the health care reform law as well.  And, of course, today’s wars represent only the tip of the iceberg: The U.S. currently maintains anywhere from seven hundred to a thousand foreign military bases and spends nearly as much as on its military apparatus as the entire rest of the world combined – because it is locked in a Cold War mindset in which Al Qaeda has replaced the Soviet Union.

In arguing that “Lefty focusing on Obama distracts us from the work we need to do,” New Left veteran Richard Flacks says:

Progressive organizations need to reinvest in college campus organizing.

And as far as focusing on Obama – the man goes, I think his critique is correct, but so far as certain of the President’s policies go, they seem to be precisely the thing that a progressive organization would organize against on a college campus.

As the man once said, “The times, they are a changing” and it seems a shame to let the libertarians be the only ones saying anything about that next year.

Why Are We In Afghanistan – Still?

You have to wonder what it might take to get the man in the White House to acknowledge just how absurd the current U.S. military effort in Afghanistan has become. Would the president of Afghanistan himself telling us to start getting our troops out do it?  Nah.  How about the leader of the last country to send its army there telling us “Victory is impossible in Afghanistan”?  Nope.  Finding out that some of the guards who protect NATO bases were Taliban – but the top Taliban guy we’d been negotiating with actually wasn’t?  Neither.  A Hollywood agent might push this story as farce.  But it’s real life and that qualifies it as tragedy.

Given that candidate Obama was so widely seen as a man of “new thinking,” one to deliver the country from tired old debates and morasses, one hoped President Obama would listen hard to what Mikhail Gorbachev had to say about the damage that a fruitless nine-years-plus war in Afghanistan can do to a country.  But if so, no evidence yet.

It probably didn’t help that the former President of the former Soviet Union was also impolitic enough to add that “We had hoped America would abide by the agreement that we reached that Afghanistan should be a neutral, democratic country, that would have good relations with its neighbors and with both the US and the USSR.  The Americans always said they supported this, but at the same time they were training militants – the same ones who today are terrorizing Afghanistan and more and more of Pakistan.”

Well, you know how policymakers in Washington hate being lectured on history — when you’re in the White House, you don’t read history, you make it.  Besides, by now we’ve been in Afghanistan longer than the Soviets were anyhow – so why should we listen to them?

So far as Hamid Karzai’s statement goes, the most remarkable aspect might not be the Afghan President actually telling the U.S. “the time has come to reduce military operations,” but just how little attention his remarks drew.  This is, after all, a man who owes his very political existence to the U.S. invasion.  At the very least it seems fair to say that the American news media would have given a lot more play to remarks like his had they come from the head of the Afghan “puppet” regime back in the days when the Soviet Union was the occupying power.  Of course, you could argue they are being nothing but realistic in giving Karzai short shrift since everybody knows the president of Afghanistan does not call the shots (literally) in his own country.

Karzai’s problem might be that he’s taking American intelligence reports too seriously: When CIA director Leon Panetta was asked earlier this year to assess Al Qaeda’s strength in Afghanistan – the prime justification for sending 97,000 U.S. and 48,800 other foreign troops there – he put it at “maybe 50 to 100, maybe less.”  You can see then how Karzai might get to saying that the U.S. was still in his country because “they like to conduct this thing that they call the war on terror, which we don’t call that anymore in Afghanistan. Because in my opinion and in the opinion of the absolute majority of the Afghan people, the war on terror cannot be conducted in Afghanistan because that isn’t here. It is somewhere else. We are only reaping the consequences of it here.”

WHAT’S IN A NAME?

And then besides the troops, there’s the additional 26,000 private security employees there, 90 percent of whom work for the U.S., directly or indirectly.  Some of them even provide security for the U.S. military.  And some of them also appear to work directly or indirectly for the Taliban as well.

By now we’re mostly past the initial surprise of learning that someone else besides the American military would be providing its security – it used to be considered pretty much what they did, after all.  So the nation appeared to pretty much take it in stride when it learned that in one case our leaner, meaner, partly privatized military had contracted with two Afghans it knew only as Mr. White and Mr. Pink – monikers taken from characters in the Quentin Tarantino movie Reservoir Dogs – to provide security for an American military base.

The real life Mr. White and Mr. Pink had a falling out, though, and Mr. Pink killed Mr. White, at which point he lined up with the Taliban for protection against Mr. White’s outraged relatives.  The U.S. military decided to keep him on, however, notwithstanding his new alliance with the principal force fighting the U.S. and its allies.

But while Mr. Pink unfortunately turned out to have Taliban connections, Mullah Mansour unfortunately did not – or at least the guy who said he was Mullah Mansour didn’t have quite the connections our side thought he did.
Talks involving the U.S., the Karzai government and the Taliban were officially secret, although U.S. General David Petraeus had actually publicly proclaimed their existence as evidence of the pressure the Taliban was feeling due to his forces’ recent increased military success.  After all, the talks were going particularly well in that the three-man Taliban delegation was demanding neither withdrawal of foreign forces nor a share of government power – things the Taliban had always insisted on in the past.  The White House even prevailed upon the New York Times to withhold the identity of the man leading the delegation – Mansour, widely assumed to be the Taliban’s number two man –  so as not to jeopardize them – until it was discovered that it wasn’t actually Mansour in the negotiations.

To be fair, we don’t actually know that the individual who led the talks on the Taliban side doesn’t have connections with the organization.  After the fraud was revealed, all one anonymous diplomat seemed to know for sure was “It’s not him.  And we gave him a lot of money.”   Call him Mr. Blue, maybe.  Names out of Reservoir Dogs; plot out of Clueless.

AND WE’RE THERE , WHY?

At this point, it seems hard to resist the conclusion that we are in Afghanistan simply because we have been there.  If it made sense to be there last year, or nine years ago, then it must still make sense to be there now, since we obviously still haven’t won.

The good news, however, is that there is a straightforward solution – withdraw outside troops, as Karzai and Gorbachev suggest, and deal with what emerges.  Yes, the results may not be to our liking.  But is there anything else we could possibly do that would enhance the Taliban’s popularity more that providing them the leading role in resisting yet another outside invasion of Afghanistan – as we are currently doing?  Besides, the powers in Washington have already acknowledged that this is precisely the outcome they anticipate.  In the words of Defense Secretary Robert Gates, “The Taliban, we recognize, are part of the political fabric of Afghanistan at this point.”

So why not just get on with it?  So far as Congress goes, the House of Representatives already has legislation in place to bring the war to a prompt end: H. R. 6045, filed by Barbara Lee (D – CA), would restrict the use of “funds for operations of the Armed Forces in Afghanistan” to “purposes of providing for the safe and orderly withdrawal from Afghanistan of all members of the Armed Forces and Department of Defense contractor personnel.”  The Senate still needs someone to step forward to file a parallel bill, but when it comes to the White House, the route to ending the war is simplest of all – the President can just stop it.

And the chances of that happening?  Well, obviously neither the current White House nor Pentagon leadership wants to admit that not only can’t the U.S. win this war, but at this point it’s hard to realistically imagine what “winning” a war in Afghanistan would even look like.  What they do know is that facing reality would surely mean being denounced as defeatists.  So lives will continue to be lost, amazing amounts of money squandered (it costs about a million dollars to maintain an American soldier for a year in Afghanistan), but face must be saved.

Back when he was running, Barack Obama used to say “We are the change we have been waiting for.”  Unfortunately, when it comes to Afghanistan, he does not count as one of the “we,” so the “we” who remain can expect no help from that quarter. Since it appears that the president is moved neither by the advice of foreign leaders, the logic of the situation, nor the feelings of his own base (Democrats oppose his Afghanistan policy by a 62-33 margin according to a November Quinnipiac poll), the only possibility for changing course lies in altering the domestic political equation, that is to say turning the status quo into a negative and making support for immediate withdrawal a positive.  And in the case of a sitting first term president, the most direct– and perhaps only way to do that seems to be a 2012 primary challenge.

Our Foreign Policy Minsky Moment

If there can be any kind of silver lining to our ongoing “Great Recession” it might be that it has elevated the level of economic discussion, at least slightly. For instance, when’s the last time you heard anyone talking about the “magic of the marketplace?”  On the contrary, a fair number of writers and economists seem to have experienced recovered memories of things the country once used to know – like that a capitalist economy is cyclical and inherently prone to crises such as the current one.  In this, the ninth year of our Afghanistan War, the discussion of our foreign policy cries out for similar flashes of enlightenment.

The most interesting economic concept to emerge from recent obscurity is the “Minsky Moment,” Hyman Minsky having been an economist who described a type of social amnesia that occurs as people will themselves into believing that business cycles are things of the past as they engage in riskier and riskier financial activity.  Admirers of Minsky, who died in 1997, named the point when the dream comes crashing down into the nightmare of the next financial crisis after him.  Minsky saw several stages to the process, as gradual societal memory loss of past depressions and recessions leads to something of a state of euphoria when we may hear arguments, such as heard only a few years ago, that transformative innovations like computerization and the Internet have created a “new economy” of permanent prosperity.

Looking at the course of American foreign policy from the Vietnam War to the current day, it is hard to miss a similar dream cycle playing out there.  After Vietnam, a new sense of modesty came over American foreign policy.  Yes, our military could unleash destruction upon southeast Asia that was in some respects unmatched in world history.  And, yes, we might be able to keep it up indefinitely – we would not be “defeated” in the conventional sense.  But the ultimate message of that war was No: No matter what our military might, we could not impose our will on a country that did not wish to have its system dictated by foreign armies from halfway around the world.

Not every one approved of this national dose of humility, of course.  The “Vietnam Syndrome” was roundly denounced in interventionist circles, as the new reticence toward foreign military intervention steered policymakers toward subversion rather than invasion.  Nicaragua can probably thank the Vietnam Syndrome for the fact that Ronald Reagan merely funded its government’s  political and military opposition rather than engaging in full scale invasion.

But slowly the memories faded and were replaced with new ones.  The first George Bush’s Gulf War did not turn into a quagmire. And Bill Clinton’s bombings of Somalia, Bosnia, Sudan, Afghanistan, and Yugoslavia sort of returned the country to its old habits. The euphoria stage surely arrived with the second George Bush when a senior adviser to the President could inform a reporter that he was merely ”in what we call the reality-based community” who ”believe that solutions emerge from your judicious study of discernible reality,” while the White House recognized that ”We’re an empire now, and when we act, we create our own reality.”

We have left that stage, clearly. A statement like the above now seems as unimaginable as it did in the first decades after the Vietnam War.  Yet the turnaround is obviously far from completed; the country has not really shed the omnipotence illusion.  For, while the rationale for the Iraq War may now be widely understood as farcical, the Afghanistan War remains on the upswing.

Every war is different, to be sure, and at one point the Afghanistan and Vietnam Wars appeared to have little more in common than the fact that they were on the same continent.  After all, who could be further apart than the communist Viet Cong and the fundamentalist Taliban?  But as time has passed an overwhelming resemblance has come to the fore: Both wars are attempts to “create our own reality” in countries that have many times demonstrated that they will not allow this to happen.

Our foreign policy Minsky Moment, if there is to be one, will certainly not originate in the White House or the Pentagon, though. The White House would be too afraid of the political consequences of facing the facts and the Pentagon would be too embarrassed to do so. We will have to figure out how some other way to wake the country from its dreams.

The Dilemmas of Democracy: Responding to Tainted Elections

After following Asian elections for the past year, I have noticed an emerging pattern that we are likely to see more of in the coming years around the world. Elections in Iran,  Afghanistan, and Sri Lanka have presented the international community with a thorny dilemma.

On the one hand, these elections were held under less-than-ideal circumstances. They were marred by inexcusable corruption, violence, vote rigging, and the silencing of opposition voices in the media and on the streets.

On the other hand, they also represent a process and an outcome that the international community and those living in these countries appear to have largely accepted and agreed with. While elections were not as free and fair as most would have liked or expected, they were elections that – for all their flaws – appear to have granted victory to the candidate who the most people voted for.

Yes, Ahmendinijhad in Iran, Karzai in Afghanistan, and Rajapaksa in Sri Lanka are all pretty unsympathetic figures and definitely played dirty to win the presidency in their respective countries. Yet there seems little doubt that they all won far more votes than their challengers – even given the doubts about the legitimacy of many of those votes. Even in Iran, Ahmendinijhad’s support has been widespread and not limited to rural areas.

So, what do we make of such elections? Foreign critics and the domestic opposition have good reason, as well as the right, to complain about the flaws and undemocratic tactics used by the winners to secure power. Their concerns after elections should certainly be heeded and investigated. Winning an election should not give the victor absolute power or the right to repress and persecute critics and minorities.

Yet, in the absence of evidence that an election was clearly stolen, the elected government – however odious – should also be respected and acknowledged as the legitimate voice of the people of that country. America’s strategic interests will surely color how the US government and public see such leaders (Ahmedinijhad = bad, a threat, Karzai = corrupt but tolerable, a needed partner, Rajapaksa = who cares?), but there should always be an awareness that elections often are contested, dirty things even the most robust democracies (in the US too – Florida 2000 anyone?).

The precarious balancing of these two realities will, I suspect, become essential as more countries embrace elections without being interested or even understanding the civil and human rights that many developed countries have traditionally expected to naturally go along with democracy. While the outcome of elections in places like the US, Canada, Europe, Japan, India (along with others) are not generally called into question, elections in many parts of the developing world are not as clear cut.

As citizens and as part of the international community how will we respond to such elections? How do such elections potentially change our relations with certain countries? Will the US government recognize such elections? How should we engage with corrupt leaders with no respect for the rule of law or human rights who have also won have seemingly won elections? How do we balance the importance of the process of having a free and fair election with the actual freedoms on the ground if one does not necessarily imply the other?

To deny the legitimacy of an seemingly fair election seems condescending and ignores the voices of millions of people who may legitimately disagree with us. To accept their legitimacy seems to deny the very real flaws of such a system and the hardships faced by its challengers. Such complex and obfuscated elections in many parts of the developing world who are beginning to experiment with democracy will undoubtedly complicate US (and other countries’) foreign policy in years to come.

Upcoming elections in places like Burma, Tajikistan, the Philippines, Sudan, Iraq, Egypt, Ukraine, and another in Sri Lanka, will test how the international community responds to potentially complicated and fraudulent elections. Democracy is far from robust in many of these countries, but it is still largely democratic compared to many neighboring countries. To challenge the legitimacy of these elections may risk indirectly leading to a collapse of any hope for future votes.

Of course, each election must be evaluated and responded to on its own terms, and it is important to consider democracy an ideal to strive towards, not a simple definition that invites a conclusive yes or no answer. Democracy is not black and white – there are many shades of gray. Elections serve a purpose, but are always flawed and complicated. Get used to it.

American Foreign Policy Scripted by Dead German Writers?

A recent headline, “Snuff out militant Islam’s lethal spark – kill bin Laden,” brought to mind a friend’s story about a graduate student he’d once had. This student had felt himself seriously wronged somewhere in the academic process and appeared obsessed with vindication. My friend’s prescription was that he should read “Michael Kohlhaas,” a novella by German writer Heinrich von Kleist.  Since the student’s field was modern American history, the main concern was not the study of literature but the story’s theme – the potential self destructiveness of the drive for revenge, even if a person is actually in the right. Joel Brinkley, the author of the article with the inflamed headline, looked like he might benefit from the same medicine.  And, unfortunately, he’s far from the only one.

When the legal system fails to provide Kleist’s protagonist (based on a real life figure of 250 years earlier) with proper redress after he is wronged by a minor noble, Kohlhaas decides to take matters into his own hands. Eventually he will burn the noble’s house down and raise a private army to repeatedly attack the city of Wittenberg in his attempt to capture the man. His wife will die of injuries sustained in the pursuit of his goal and Martin Luther and the Kaiser in Vienna will become personally involved in the matter. At the very end, he does find that some measure of justice has been done. Unfortunately, that realization comes as he is being led to his beheading.

There was a point when Brinkley, a former New York Times writer now teaching journalism at Stanford, would have raised few eyebrows in writing, “Right now, the most effective thing the United States could do to turn the tide in the so-called war on terror is to capture or kill Osama bin Laden, the terrorists’ shining symbol.” But that point was eight years, two wars, ten of thousands of casualties, and a trillion dollars ago. Today, such writing conveys the obsession of a real-life Michael Kohlhaas who wants to go on and on and on in pursuit of his concept of justice. Of bin Laden he writes, “We know where he is, more or less [sic],” but “Pakistan refuses to go after him.” His solution?  “I’m not talking about an invasion. Infiltrate the region with special-operations forces.”

How many countries can there be, I wondered, where a journalist writing that sending armed personnel into another country does not constitute an invasion will not be asked to seek professional help? But at least Brinkley does recognize that the Pakistanis might see things a little differently: “Let them scream,” he writes, “Over almost a decade, we have given Pakistan every chance to do the job. Now it’s time to do it ourselves.”

What seems to bother Brinkley most is that “Today, bin Laden must wake up every morning with a smile on his face for all he has inspired.” This he may well do, but probably not quite for the reasons Brinkley thinks.  Bin Laden’s stated goal, let us remember, it to maneuver the United States into a global war against Islam that will spiral out of control. So he’d have every reason to smile if he read an article like Brinkley’s. Ultimately, it’s not columnists like Brinkley who matter, though, but the Kohlhaasian spirit that seems to drive our foreign policy.  After all, while much of the country once dismissed George W. Bush as a hopeless, misguided warmonger and embraced Barack Obama as a peace candidate, this second post-9/11 President appears at least as committed to globalizing this war as his predecessor, if perhaps in somewhat different directions.  From the point of view of tying the U.S. down in endless war, what’s not to like?

But if the strategy of that war seem like something Kleist might have imagined, the tactics bring to mind a far better remembered German writer – Franz Kafka, the rare author influential enough to have his name turned into an adjective. While there are probably as many different definitions of “Kafkaesque” as there are readers of Kafka – and maybe more – “incomprehensibly complex, bizarre, or illogical” will probably do as well as any.  But whatever your personal definition of Kafkaesque may be, American military operations in and over Pakistan will probably fit it.

The current centerpiece of that campaign appears to be a program of missile strikes aimed at “terrorist leaders” from unmanned “Predator” drone planes flying above the country. Officially, though, there is no such program and as a spokesperson for the Chair of the Joint Chiefs of Staff says, “We do not discuss current operations one way or the other, regardless of their nature.”

The New York Times reports the strikes are “carried out from a secret base in Pakistan and controlled by satellite link from C.I.A. headquarters in Virginia.”  The government of Pakistan regularly denounces them as a violation of its sovereignty. Unnamed U.S. officials claim there is an understanding under which the Pakistani government allows the U.S. to carry out the strikes while the U.S. allows the Pakistanis to publicly denounce the attacks. The government of Pakistan denies this.

Unnamed U.S. intelligence officials frequently name figures they claim have been killed in the strikes. A recent target was Pakistani Taliban leader Baitullah Mehsud, whom, the Washington Post says, “a senior U.S. official, who spoke on the condition of anonymity” called “one of the worst people on the planet.”  As you might expect, this non-existent program is rather unpopular among the people of the country where its targets live: a Gallup Pakistan poll found it with 9 percent support among the Pakistani population.

The uncertain level of civilian casualties is a growing concern. A United Nations rights investigator complains that “the Central Intelligence Agency is running a program that is killing significant numbers of people and there is absolutely no accountability in terms of the relevant international laws.” Unnamed sources within the U.S. government privately assure reporters that civilian deaths are lower than reported. One unnamed government official told the New York Times that the drone strikes are “the purest form of self-defense.”  The C.I.A. had no comment on a report that the private security contractor formerly known as Blackwater – now Xe Services LLC – was involved in the work of actually placing the bombs on the drones.  An unnamed defense official denied it to The Nation magazine – “on background.”

In response to repeated questions about the unacknowledged drone strike campaign at a press conference in Pakistan, U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton would only say that “there is a war going on.” She did not specify to which war she referred. The United States Government acknowledges being at war in Iraq and Afghanistan, but not in Pakistan. Appearing at a memorial service for seven CIA operatives killed in Afghanistan, some of whom were thought to be involved in the planning of the Pakistan drone strikes, President Barack Obama exhorted hundreds of their colleagues “to win this war.”  He also did not specify of which war he was speaking.

In regard to the acknowledged war in Afghanistan, U.S. Defense Secretary Robert Gates recently said, “The Taliban, we recognize, are part of the political fabric of Afghanistan at this point.” He did not say at exactly which point this recognition occurred; the U.S. overthrew the Taliban government eight years ago and has been at war with the organization ever since. Gates went on to say that “The question is whether they are prepared to play a legitimate role in the political fabric of Afghanistan going forward, meaning participating in elections, meaning not assassinating local officials and killing families.” He did not say whether a simple denial of involvement in assassinations and other killings – on or off the record – would suffice in place of an actual cessation of such activities. Nor did he speak to the question as to when various Taliban officials might be removed from the United Nations “terrorist blacklist” that currently prohibits the Afghanistan government from negotiating with them.

I have to think Kleist and Kafka would have loved this material.

Secret New Weapon: Serena Sends Taliban Running for Hills

Inserting myself into one of the remotest regions of Afghanistan—and embedding myself with no one in particular except a sheep farmer named Tirkluckless—I interview him. I do this mainly because he can talk, unlike his sheep. The intelligence he provides me, however, is stunning. As a bandit in A Fistful of Dollars once stated, “In these parts, a man’s life can depend upon a mere scrap of information.”

“You seem pretty calm, Tirk,” I say. “The Taliban are howling at the door, and not a NATO soldier within 50 miles, yet you calmly tiptoe around the sheep dip without a care in the world. What’s that all about?”

“Did ye not know, oh infidel? The American drones circle above like eagles—I can certainly hear them, as they interfere with the bah-bah-ing of my sheep and therefore I cannot sleep when I’m trying to count my sheep. Anyway, there are not only drones but the CIA has also secretly inserted Serena Williams into the foothills of the Forbidden Mountains.”

“What? Serena Williams? Come on.”

“Indeed, it is true, oh unbelieving one. She has been sighted on several occasions, cursing the wolves and frightening them to death. She even outruns them and eats them for breakfast.”

“If this is true, Kirk, it’s still incredible. She makes the Special Forces look like girl scouts.”

“It’s Tirk, not Kirk. My full name is Tirkluckless. How many times must I remind you of that, oh clueless Trekkie nerd? Be careful or I shall smite you. I come from a rough neighborhood. Last week, down near the capital, I was watching a full-scale battle between NATO forces and Taliban insurgents, and a ladies’ tennis match broke out.”

“Good heavens, that is a rough neighborhood. I take it Serena was there?”

“Yes, she was. She is a one-woman Special Forces, to be sure. Already she has crushed many a Taliban with her powerful thighs and decapitated others by hurling tennis rackets with superhuman agility and accuracy. Still others she curses to death with unimaginable slurs calculated to defeat their manhood. Yes, oh beardless one, the mountain villagers sing folk songs about her. They call her the Wild Woman With Huge Haunches and Thighs That May Crush a Man into Ragged Pieces. Oh—I’m getting excited; I had better to stop now.”

“Uhm—no, please, go on. I’m sure you can control yourself.”

“She is also veddy beautiful, you know, and she’s having breasts like mangos!”

“I seem to recall that line from A Passage to India.”

“What, those Shiva-worshipping heathen?”

“Now, now, I think the Serena-lust is getting the better of you.”

“Well, there are always my sheep with which to—“

“Ahem. You were saying?”

“You must understand this is a lonely place, sahib. Indeed, before you there was ne’er a white man to be seen in these hills since the days of W.C. Fields in the 1930s. He had lost his corkscrew, you may recall, and was forced to survive on food and water.”

“Such a contingency would be unfortunate, yes.”

“The word in the hills is that Osama bin Laden watches ladies’ tennis on satellite TV and he shivers with fright as we speak. I have seen a sneak preview of a new video he will release, denouncing women in sport—and women in general, of course. He promises to hack off the arms of any female who dares to bare her arms, let alone use them to hurl tennis rackets at him.”

“How do you feel about this?”

“Well, he’s not all hell and brimstone, actually. He has a heart. He says the point is negotiable and that if the USA will call off Serena, he will settle for a ladies’ tennis referee position at the US Open.”

“He really is scared.”

“He said the officiating call was in error; there was no foot fault and therefore as punishment the referee’s tongue must be removed and Serena’s fine must be canceled.”

“A man of mercy, I see.”

“Praised be to the heavens, Serena shall return home and I shall return to my sheep in peace. If we run out of wolves and Taliban, she might develop a taste for lamb.”

Future of Afghanistan Complicated by Election Outcome

The Afghan presidential elections have ended. And I’m sure I’m not the only one to who finds the outcome thoroughly unsatisfying. After vehemently denying that his campaign had engaged in massive voting fraud, President Hamid Karzai essentially admitted to fraud, accepting the election commission’s revised vote tally. This revision dropped Karzai’s support from 54% to under 50%, triggering a runoff under the Afghan constitution. Karzai’s opponent in the runoff, Abdullah Abdullah, not in a position to actually win and fearing more fraud and violence with a second round of voting, dropped out of the contest, leaving Karzai the winner.

American officials act reasonably satisfied with these elections, though it’s hard to see why. They are now left with an Afghan partner in the escalating war against the Taliban that has run a shockingly corrupt and ineffective government, has garnered less than half the majority of votes cast in the election, and has committed large-scale fraud in a failed effort to win these elections. To sum up, Karzai has proven to be bad at governing Afghanistan, does not have the support of most of the Afghan people, and was caught trying to steal the election. While Karzai seems to have legitimately won a commanding plurality of the vote, his behavior indicates a blatant disregard for the electoral process and the rule of law that would be condemned by the US government had it occurred in a place such as Iran or Venezuela.

Though President Obama gave Karzai a scolding about improving his governance when he called to congratulate him on his victory, close US-Afghan cooperation is bound to continue. Indeed, if Obama has his way, it will increase (though he appears to be feeling less hawkish about Afghanistan than he was as candidate – perhaps because of this tainted election). And it should. The return of the Taliban poses a threat to Afghans, the region, and perhaps the world. After a decade of supporting violent religious fanatics (both Afghan and foreign) against the Soviets, and then walking away to let these extremists, drug kingpins, and warlords plunge the country into civil war, the US owes the Afghan people a serious commitment to rebuilding Afghanistan by providing security, promoting development, and nurturing a democratic government.

This means US military involvement is needed, but more importantly, it means overcoming the challenges of bringing things like water, electricity, roads, health care, education, and jobs to Afghans. Yet, hopes have been dashed that these elections would give Afghanistan a clear and legitimate democratic leader who was ready to work with the US and battle the Taliban with the support of the Afghan public. The muddied results will certainly make the work of the Afghan government, the US, NATO, and other foreign players more difficult. And the Taliban are already claiming victory, believing that their attacks stopped the second round of voting.

In the end, these elections give little hope for the immediate future of Afghanistan and the US mission there. By his own actions, Karzai has weakened his position vis-à-vis the Taliban, and the US will be hard-pressed to win Afghan hearts and minds while backing a largely discredited Afghan government and failing to follow through on efforts to improve the lives of Afghan people. US involvement is also becoming increasingly unpopular at home, and the longer US soldiers and aid workers are in Afghanistan, the more chances there are for casualties that may not be palatable to Americans who increasingly believe that there are unclear reasons to stay in Afghanistan.

The Obama administration is hopeful that Karzai will clean up his act and the UK is making threats that it can’t support a government that is so unapologetically corrupt. However, it is hard to imagine that the US or the UK – as heavily invested in Afghanistan as they are – will simply quit Afghanistan if Karzai continues running his government as is. The US certainly has some leverage over Karzai, but for now it has little choice but to put most of its eggs in one basket, hoping that he is the man best suited to improve life in Afghanistan and to fight the Taliban. Unrest seems sure to continue to plague Afghanistan, and US ability to win a counterinsurgency campaign in Afghanistan has been seriously compromised by this election’s outcome. How adeptly Obama’s strategy can adapt to today’s complex political situation in Afghanistan and how well US forces can work with other regional players (Pakistan, India, Russia, Iran, China) will be key to preventing Afghanistan and the entire region from becoming more dangerous and unstable than they are today.

This is the second article covering the Afghan election and the fourth in a series on major elections in Asia this year.

GOP Demands to see Nobel Committee’s Birth Certificate

When the news broke earlier that sitting American (or is it Kenyan or Indonesian?) President Barack Obama was bequeathed with the Nobel Peace Prize, I naturally assumed that the Rush Limbaugh’s head would explode and the Republican Party would be stuck with a gargantuan body instead of a party head. Moreover, I instinctively knew that the blogosphere would be buzzing with more Republican and Conservative invective than Democrat or Liberal encomium.

Am I really that prescient or do Republicans really hate Barack Obama that much that many would put breathing oxygen in abeyance in order to vituperatively criticize President Obama?

“This fully exposes the illusion that is Barack Obama,” said conservative talk show host Rush Limbaugh. Rush continued: “And with this ‘award’ the elites of the world are urging Obama, THE MAN OF PEACE, to not do the surge in Afghanistan, not (sic) take action against Iran and its nuclear program and to basically continue his intentions to emasculate the United States…. They love a weakened, neutered U.S and this is their way of promoting that concept. I think God has a great sense of humor, too.”

Oh Rush, did you run out of Oxycontin refills again? While we rational Americans have grown accustomed to the bile invective spewed daily from Mr. Limbaugh more effortlessly than potato chip crumbs, some Republicans decided that Rush Limbaugh is just too understanding and flirted with invective of their own.

Eric Erickson of the ever-so enlightening Red State.com had these encouraging words to say:

I did not realize the Nobel Peace Prize had an affirmative action quota.

Knee-jerk vitriol and racist commentary notwithstanding, the award is baffling some on the left as well.

Michael Moore, for example, offered his congratulations but boldly declared action as well.

Congratulations President Obama on the Nobel Peace Prize–Now earn it! Freedom can not be delivered from the front seat of someone else’s Humvee. You have to end our involvement in Afghanistan now. If you don’t, you’ll have no choice but to return the prize to Oslo.

Indeed, Obama may have made such lofty pronouncements such as closing Guantanamo, bringing the troops home from Iraq, wanting a nuclear weapon-free world, admitting to the Iranians that we overthrew their democratically-elected president in 1953, etc. But he has yet to follow through any of his pronouncements with concrete action and, worse yet, is risking escalating a lost cause in Afghanistan by extending our outstretched and vitiated troops in a purposeless battle.

Don’t believe me, just click here to read about the growing numbers of troops suffering from PTSD.

I realize that President Obama is looking to make up for the fact that Afghanistan and the “just war” was abandoned by the ruthless Bush Administration to pursue a petty vendetta in Iraq and make billions of dollars in no-bid contracts for their cronies. However, 6 years have passed since troops were shifted away from the Afghanistan conflict, and the situation has grown increasingly dire for our supposed mission. After all, the primary objective for going into Afghanistan was to kill and capture Osama bin Laden and his key associates, disrupt the vast Afghan terror network, and prevent Afghanistan from becoming another hotbed for terrorism.

Has blowback and the situation in Iraq taught us anything? The U.S. is  not in Afghanistan to police a nation beset by tribalism and internal conflicts. We cannot naively expect to train a miserably incompetent army at the aegis of a corrupt government,  an army that may ultimately joins the Taliban anyway.

Barack Obama winning the Noble peace prize–something that not even he expected–is certainly momentous and naturally is being lauded by the sane world. But it is imperative that we do not allow ourselves to get stuck in the warm and fuzzy clouds of this achievement as many did immediately following the election of Barack Obama. Intelligent critics must ensure that President Obama does in fact earn this prestigious prize.

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