Category Archives: Not Europe

Not Really Good News for Anybody

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Hot off the wires, the US contraction is larger than expected.

Gross domestic product contracted at a 6.2 percent annual pace from October through December, more than economists anticipated and the most since 1982, according to revised figures from the Commerce Department today in Washington. Consumer spending, which comprises about 70 percent of the economy, declined at the fastest pace in almost three decades.

The annual decline in the previous quarter was much smaller (0.5 percent), so here’s hoping that this is data on the worst quarter. It may not be, though.

A European option in Afghanistan

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What to do in Afghanistan? It’s essentially impossible that there will ever be enough international troops available to mount a huge counter-insurgency effort to crush the Taliban; renewed big-scale civil war doesn’t bear thinking about. And at the moment, much of the international effort there is counterproductive and fairly immoral. Don’t ask me; ask hugely influential counter-insurgency expert David Kilcullen, who makes the obvious point that air strikes into the Hindu Kush probably aren’t helping win the support of the people.

Surely, what we need is a solution under which a reasonable Afghan government would be left in place, the intrusion of foreign forces, their road convoys, fortified camps, heavy weapons, and inflationary spending removed, and as many pieces of the diverse coalition of forces that make up the Taliban reconciled? Perhaps there is one; but first, it’s necessary to remove some of our preconceptions. Everyone knows about Afghanistan, right? Soviet invasion, daring resistance, Western secret aid, eventual withdrawal in 1989, mujahedin triumph, and then it all goes horribly wrong.

Well, this is actually quite misleading. The war began before the Soviet intervention, and in a sense even earlier, in the form of the bitter internal troubles inside the Afghan communist movement. More importantly, the mujahedin/future civil warriors/further future Taliban didn’t win in 1989. To considerable surprise, they failed to take even one town from the Afghan government until 1992. Many important mujahedin leaders were willing to be reconciled with the government as long as the Red Army was withdrawn and, of course, the government made it worth their while. The ones who fought on only succeeded because all assistance to the Afghan government was cut off at the end of the Soviet Union – which included things like wheat, diesel fuel, cash, and ammunition.

In fact, the withdrawal was about the best idea the Soviets had in Afghanistan. Having decided to go, they pursued a policy of building up the Afghan government, changing the military strategy to one based on defending the bulk of the population (to stop this happening) and leaving the mountain wilds to the enemy, pouring in aid of all kinds, negotiation with those who were willing, and leaving a strong advisory mission in place. Here is a US Army study of the withdrawal (pdf); I should hope we could avoid providing the Afghan police with their own ballistic missiles. Seriously – the Najibullah government insisted on having its own Scuds, and assigned them to a unit of the secret police. They eventually fired over 300 of the things.

But the principles apply quite well. Turn down the intensity of the war. Don’t state an explicit timetable, to retain bargaining power. Pursue population security. Build up Afghan authorities. Deliver aid and a strong advisory mission. Open all-party talks. And start removing foreign combat forces. Interestingly, polls of Afghan public opinion, for what they are worth, seem to suggest this may be a good idea.

According to the US Army study, the continuing assistance to the Afghan government cost the Soviet Union about $3-4bn annually – obviously those are 1989 dollars, but in the light of the huge cost of maintaining manoeuvre brigades in Afghanistan (twice as much as Iraq), that’s got to be better. The Soviet aid airlift consisted of 15 Il-76 aircraft a day; currently about 15 mixed Il-76 and AN-12 head to Afghanistan from the UAE a day from the private sector. You could call it a civilian surge if you like; you could also call it ending the Afghan war, if you’re a German Christian Democrat. Certainly, you’d have to involve Iran from the word go – after all, they have the only railhead near Afghanistan and plan to build the railway on into the country. It could be the shortest way from Europe.

It’s got to beat more wedding parties, with the twist that the Russians get to play politics with every transit shipment. Speaking of Russians, however, the man we want to hear from is Makhmut Gareev, who led the Soviet advisors after 1989. Call it the European option.

Experiment in Decoupling

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We’re about to find out whether the rest of the world is still dependent on demand in the US. If it is, better set those expectations down a bit further.

The U.S. economy contracted violently in the fourth quarter, with gross domestic product falling at its fastest pace in more than 25 years, economists said ahead of what promises to be a grim week of economic news. …

GDP is expected to have fallen at a 5.5% annualized rate in the final three months of last year, according to the median forecast of economists surveyed by MarketWatch. That would be the biggest decline since the 6.4% drop in early 1982 and one of the worst quarters in the post-World War II era.

h/t Atrios

“They Said This Day Would Never Come”

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“They said our sights were set too high. They said this country was too divided, too disillusioned to ever come together around a common purpose. But on this January night, at this defining moment in history, you have done what the cynics said we couldn’t do. … You have done what America can do in this new year, 2008.” – Barack Obama, January 3, 2008, on winning the Democratic Iowa caucuses

City on Fire

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On April 16, 1947, the SS Grandcamp exploded in the harbor of Texas City, Texas. The ship was carrying ammonium nitrate as part of Marshall Plan relief for post-war Europe. Ammonium nitrate is both an effective fertilizer and a potent explosive, and the Grandcamp was carrying more than 2300 tons of the substance when a fire below turned into an explosion that produced a mushroom cloud reminiscent of an atomic blast. The Texas City waterfront was also home to chemical plants, and storage facilities for numerous petrochemical products. Many of these also caught fire and exploded in part. Several hundred people died; the exact total is unknown because of the completeness of the destruction at the explosion’s center.
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Power and

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Last week, some US-based bloggers were talking about their dissatisfaction with the term, “soft power.”

Matthew Yglesias:

[C]an we retire the term “soft power” already? I always feel that it’s been popularized not so much by Professor Nye as by deranged warmongers who like the idea of terming every alternative to militarism as somehow “soft,” fluffy, and weak. Soft Power is a good book, but it’s a bad coinage for an era in which national security issues have returned as a partisan political topic, and I don’t think it’s an especially great label for what Nye’s talking about.

Here’s a suggestion cribbed from an adaptation of an old tabletop game: power and influence. Roughly speaking, power is the ability to make people do things (or suffer the consequences); influence is the ability to get people to do things on their own (to gain the benefits). NATO has lots of power (and a good bit of influence), while the EU has an enormous amount of influence, but less power. Pointy-haired bosses use their power; good businesspeople use their influence.

Influence is not a second-rate type of power (soft rather than hard); it’s a separate, if related, capacity. So: power and influence.

I wrote to some of the folks whose blogs I cited. Everyone who has replied has been positive about the suggestion. Now to see if they will actually use it, and whether we can change the usage ourselves or whether we need Joe Nye to write an article.

Mumbai

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Some bloggers’ thoughts and impressions concerning the horrible events in Mumbai that have me both horrified and puzzled. From Death Ends Fun:

Everyone around me is talking of the terrorism, but there’s an air of bonhomie about. Plenty of backslapping as friends catch sight of each other, good cheer and chuckling. Are we used to terror now, and is that a good thing or a bad thing?

From India Uncut:

Suddenly, what is familiar seems macabre.

From Known Turf:

This isn’t about the spirit of the people. It isn’t about people feeling secure either. I see all this terror and am just exhausted. I am not feeling spirited, not at all. Yet, the only desire I have right now is to be able to get all dressed up, step out of my house, catch a train, walk into a café, chat with friends, make plans, talk about books, watch a good play. And I will. We all will. Like we did after the last blast, and the blast before that one, and the one before.

If the frequency of the blasts is going up, and if there are annoying security checks even at hotels and cinemas and shopping complexes, well, we’ll go through the checks and go on living. There will be music and travel and art and blasphemy and new religions and old philosophies. There will also be territorial wars and faith-based conflict and bias and sycophancy and illegal immigration.

What kind of brainless twit cannot see that people do not change so easily? That no number of blasts can cure people of the desire for normalcy and fun. For beauty and passion and laughter. For money. And also for justice and truth.

From Random Thoughts of a Demented Mind:

In this light, the taking of American Jewish hostages may be of great importance. It may represent the changing alignment in the Pakistani terror movement as its leadership passes from a more South-Asia-focused leadership to a more Arab-focused one. This could be the unfortunate concomitant of the failed US war in Afghanistan as the old Al-Qaeda leadership, driven away from Afghanistan but made more powerful, has now taken over operations in Pakistan. Hence the attacks of November 26 are extremely similar to attacks on foreigners in Cairo and in Beirut, with the focus being to attack the US and Israel while humiliating India.

So when the Lashkar e Toiba say they are innocent, perhaps they are right. While their old cadre may be involved in the project operationally and the ISI may still be a major mobilizing and training force, the old brain-trusts of the LET are perhaps no longer in control of the Pakistani Jihadi movement. In other words, the actual Jihadis may be South-Asian but the ones pulling the strings thousands of miles away may be Arabs. Which is why they go out of their way to take a Jewish American hostage and that too a Rabbi.

The train and bus bombings were the “old” way of doing things. These endeavors meet their objectives in the following manner: 1) cause panic 2) make the Indian government make heavy-handed arrests 3) portray those arrested as innocents by “friends” in the media and 4) antagonize minorities who are fed the message that they are being targeted. This I expect will continue.

But November 26 has shown that there is a new kind of terrorism which has emerged—-the kind that does not make much attempt to hide its foreign bonafides, which seeks to effect a more direct toll by breaking international confidence in a country’s economic and political institutions, and which has multiple strategic objectives one of which is to promote and provoke sectarian violence.

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Between Asia and America

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James Fallows points out an interesting perspective on Tim Geithner, Obama’s pick to be US Secretary of the Treasury: experience with Asia and at the IMF. Both will be very useful in the current crisis.

When I was with a DC finance firm about a decade ago, my colleagues had fairly regular contacts with him. His reputation back then was every bit as solid as it is today.