In a recent post James returned to a subject he’s mentioned frequently, his dissatisfaction with the security measures we’ve got in place for commercial air passenger security:
Presuming that Osama is still alive and the tape is genuine, it’s quite interesting that he’s now reduced to bragging about horribly botched operations to bolster his credibility. It would be funnier, of course, if we weren’t massively overreacting to the plot and further snarling our transportation system and curtailing the liberty of our citizens.
and I’ve observed substantial dissatisfaction with our current measures from the OTB commentariat.
Partially in reaction to James’s observation, I’ve posted a short history of air hijacking over at The Glittering Eye. I conclude that post with an attempt at soliciting the opinions of readers on the subject. Is our current approach too hot, too cold, just right? Should we be doing nothing whatever? What should we be doing?
How long will it take the Naval Expeditionary Combat Command to open up the port in Port-au-Prince?
How effective will the helicopter operations of the USS Carl Vinson (CVN 70) be in meeting the demands of this crisis? Will the decision by the US Navy not to build a medium lift helicopter carry significant consequences regarding the capacity for the US Navy to respond to this disaster?
Has SOUTHCOM responded sufficiently with US assets, specifically assets carried forward by the MSC related to supporting over the shore logistics? Will SOUTHCOM insure enough pipelines are available from sea to sufficiently meet the quantity of aid that will be required to support a humanitarian operation of 3 million people in a timely manner?
Can only three amphibious ships provide enough capability to support the over the shore logistics requirements for a large city without a functioning sea port? How influential would the capabilities of the proposed, but rumored to be canceled in FY2011 budget, Sea Basing concept be to this operation?
How proactive is SOUTHCOM being in preparing follow on assets that may be necessary before full awareness is determined regarding the requirements? Are we accurately predicting events before they unfold, controlling the chaos as necessary as we place assets?
Why is China kicking the State Department’s ass in strategic communication in Haiti?
There’s lots more. He also points out the possiblel political hazards of the situation for the Obama Administration:
Things are going to get a lot worse in Haiti before they get better, and that was never clearly articulated by the President, State Department, SOUTHCOM, or Rajiv Shah to the American people, who may begin to doubt our governments efforts in the very near future. President Obama is positioned to take a political hit for what happens over the next 48-72 hours for apparently having advisors who are treating Haiti as anything but the most important event of his political career to date.
In my opinion, and I will let time determine the accuracy, so far it is my impression the Obama administration appears to be completely unaware of how much trouble Haiti can bring upon his Presidency. I’ll bet a Heineken keg that if the President attends a Martin Luther King event Monday instead of focus on what is going to be a political public relations nightmare unfolding in Haiti on television, it will cost the President 5 points in his approval ratings and he will be dogged by claims from his own political party that he is as distracted with Haiti as Bush was during Katrina.
President Obama has made the right noises so far but so did President Bush in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina. It’s what happens that matters and not necessarily the statements made at the outset.
In this handout image provided by the U.S. Navy, the Nimitz-class aircraft carrier USS Carl Vinson (CVN 70) departs Naval Station Norfolk January 12, 2010 off the coast of Norfolk, Virginia. Carl Vinson is underway following a four-year refueling and complex overhaul to take part in Southern Seas 2010. After completing Southern Seas, Carl Vinson will change homeport from Norfolk, Va. to San Diego, Calif. (Photo by Petty Officer 2nd Class Rafael Martie/U.S. Navy via Getty Images)
Amid looting of United Nations and other food stocks in Haiti, international relief agencies struggled Friday to find alternative routes for aid in the face of survivors’ angry criticism that no help was getting through, threatening them with a second catastrophe after Tuesday’s earthquake.
With relief flights snarled at Port-au-Prince airport, officials at international aid organizations in Geneva and Rome said in telephone interviews that the likely alternatives included a land-and-air bridge between Port-au-Prince and Santo Domingo in the neighboring Dominican Republic and the deployment of roll-on, roll-off vessels capable of unloading supplies at the badly damaged port in the Haitian capital.
Much of Haiti’s civil infrastructure, fragile to start out with, has been damaged by the earthquake. Aid workers on site at the time of the quake are themselves its victims. Aid workers attempting to get in are running into obstacles presented by the lack of functioning transport systems. Regardless of the need The Haitian government has stopped accepting flights:
The Haitian government stopped accepting flights Thursday because ramp space at the airport was saturated and no fuel was available, said Federal Aviation Administration spokeswoman Laura Brown.
There’s only one institution in the world that is capable on short notice of bringing an airport, a water purification plant, a major hospital, and workers complete with the facilities to support themselves to the site. The institution is the U. S. Navy and the name of the airport and water purification plant is the USS Carl Vinson:
USS CARL VINSON, At sea (NNS) — The Nimitz-class aircraft carrier USS Carl Vinson (CVN 70) arrived off the coast of Port-Au-Prince, Haiti Jan. 15 to commence humanitarian assistance and disaster relief operations.
Carl Vinson received orders from U.S. Southern Command to deliver assistance to the Caribbean nation following a 7.3 magnitude earthquake which caused catastrophic damage within the capital city Jan. 12. The aircraft carrier’s speed, flexibility and sustainability make it an ideal platform to carry out relief operations.
“Our initial focus is to concentrate on saving lives while providing first responder support to the people of Haiti. Our assistance here reflects our nation’s compassion and commitment to those impacted by this tragedy,” said Rear. Adm. Ted Branch, commander of the Carl Vinson Carrier Strike Group and the U.S. Navy’s sea-based humanitarian support mission of Haiti.
The carrier arrived on station with a robust airlift capability, picking up extra helicopters while in transit that will will prove essential during the mission.
Within hours of the earthquake a Coast Guard C-130 had already landed in Port-au-Prince, bringing the equipment to set up field hospitals and communications centers. Four large Coast Guard ships are already in Haiti.
This is not an isolated instance. Following the Indonesian tsunami in 2004 American aircraft carriers were among the earliest to arrive on the scene. In the aftermath of the earthquake in Pakistan in 2005 the U. S. Navy became the largest healthcare provider in the country for more than a year.
The ability to project force also gives us the ability to project aid. Europe’s wealthy nations in eschewing the ability to project force have not substituted a commensurate capability of projecting aid.
I have been consistently critical of our large military expenditures and I remain so. It is simply unconscionable that we spend so much on our military. However, the reason that we spend nearly as much as the rest of the world combined may be that our European allies aren’t spending enough.
I will continue to be critical of our large military expenditures but in circumstances like these I can only say thank God for the U. S. Navy. And thank God for the Coast Guard.
There’s a wisecrack attributed to Lenin to the effect that the capitalists would sell them the rope with which they would hang them and I honestly can’t say that I have a great deal of sympathy for Western companies that find themselves on the short end of the stick when dealing with the Chinese authorities. They’re notoriously unimpressed by the intellectual property rights of others, why should you expect them to respect yours? There’s another saying: he who sups with the devil must use a long spoon.
The press is abuzz this morning over the news that Google (GOOG) could pull out of China over a hacking attempt. The Wall Street Journal explains that the large-scale cyber attack “has been under way for weeks.” The paper continues, “Google said it suffered a ‘highly sophisticated and targeted attack on our corporate infrastructure originating from China’ in mid-December, which it said resulted in ‘the theft of intellectual property.’ The company said it found evidence to suggest that a primary goal of the attackers was accessing the Gmail accounts of Chinese human-rights activists.” The attack may be the last straw for Google in China, since the search engine has begrudgingly put up with Chinese censorship policies for a while. The Times notes, “Since arriving here in 2006 under an arrangement with the government that purged its Chinese search results of banned topics, Google has come under fire for abetting a system that increasingly restricts what citizens can read online.”
Refusing to abet the Chinese authorities in their efforts to restrict what the Chinese people know and can believe would have been an act of virtue for Google; moving to protect its intellectual property (its primary asset) or improve its image is merely good business.
In looking at the commentary on China from professional journalists lately I think its worthwhile to contrast two approaches: that of James Fallows with that of Tom Friedman. James Fallows, whom I consider a reasonably informed source on the subject of China, has this to say about China:
I have long argued that China’s relations with the U.S. are overall positive for both sides (here and here); that the Chinese government is doing more than outsiders think to deal with vexing problems like the environment (here); and more generally that China is a still-poor, highly-diverse and individualistic country whose development need not “threaten” anyone else and should be encouraged. I still believe all of that.
a view which I endorse. I think his position would be more balanced if he took note of the fact that strident Chinese saber-rattling in our direction on the part of China’s military higher-ups is epidemic. If American generals said things as intemperate about China in public as Chinese generals routinely say about us, our European allies would be in a panic.
Mr. Fallows goes on to say this about the Google affair:
But there are also reasons to think that a difficult and unpleasant stage of China-U.S. and China-world relations lies ahead. This is so on the economic front, as warned about here nearly a year ago with later evidence here. It may prove to be so on the environmental front — that is what the argument over China’s role in Copenhagen is about. It is increasingly so on the political-liberties front, as witness Vaclav Havel’s denunciation of the recent 11-year prison sentence for the man who is in many ways his Chinese counterpart, Liu Xiaobo. And if a major U.S. company — indeed, Google has been ranked the #1 brand in the world — has concluded that, in effect, it must break diplomatic relations with China because its policies are too repressive and intrusive to make peace with, that is a significant judgment.
All the long-term investments that China has made over the last two decades are just blossoming and could really propel the Chinese economy into the 21st-century knowledge age, starting with its massive investment in infrastructure. Ten years ago, China had a lot bridges and roads to nowhere. Well, many of them are now connected. It is also on a crash program of building subways in major cities and high-speed trains to interconnect them. China also now has 400 million Internet users, and 200 million of them have broadband. Check into a motel in any major city and you’ll have broadband access. America has about 80 million broadband users.
Now take all this infrastructure and mix it together with 27 million students in technical colleges and universities — the most in the world. With just the normal distribution of brains, that’s going to bring a lot of brainpower to the market, or, as Bill Gates once said to me: “In China, when you’re one-in-a-million, there are 1,300 other people just like you.”
I see that in his praise for China he has ignored the, literally, hundreds of schools that collapsed in last year’s earthquake killing the schoolchildren, the Chinese authorities’ imprisonment and execution of dissidents and minorities, China’s failure to live up to the obligations it undertook when it joined the WTO by which membership it continues to benefit, and China’s notoriously opaque and corrupt financial system.
If China is to be part of the modern world and continue to grow and prosper, there will be great and grave changes ahead for the country. It can’t maintain its “beggar they neighbor” economic policies which, while irritating or even painful for us, are disastrous for other developing countries notably Mexico and the struggling countries of Africa.
It needs to start cultivating its own internal markets to a significantly greater degree and allow foreign competitors to share equitably in those markets.
And it can’t hope to control the thoughts of the Chinese people even in an attempt to maintain harmony by which is generally meant the power of the Chinese authorities.
In the aftermath of the apprehension of “underwear bomber” Umar Farouk Abdulmutalib and the revelation of his connection with Yemen, a spotlight has been shown on the poor country of 30 million people at the tip of the Arab Peninsula. Today Secretary of State Hillary Clinton has warned that the situation in Yemen has “global implications”:
WASHINGTON — Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton says internal unrest and a surge in Al Qaeda activity in Yemen pose a global threat that is being met by U.S. support for the Yemeni government’s efforts to fight extremists.
Clinton told reporters Monday the situation in Yemen has “global implications” and the government must take actions to restore stability. Her comments came as the U.S. Embassy in San’a remained closed for a second day in response to Al Qaeda threats and ahead of a London conference later this month on Yemen.
Threats from Al Qaeda have prompted the U.S. and the U.K. to shutter their embassies in Yemen — and Obama’s top counterterrorism adviser says the U.S. does not plan to open a new front there. Do you think U.S. troops should organize an offensive in Yemen in response to the terror group’s growing presence?
and opinion is running decidedly in favor of such an action.
In my view the idea of U. S. forces mounting an offensive in Yemen is patently absurd. For an informed opinion on the subject, let’s turn to Col. Pat Lang:
I was Defense and Army Attache in the US Embassy in Sana, North Yemen in 1981 and 1982. I have been back several times. most recently three or four years ago. The same man, Ali Abdullah Salih, is president of a united north and south Yemen. He was merely president in the north when I lived in Sana. There have been no “breaks” in his service.
The country is an example of tribalism run riot. Except for the coastal plains the terrain is a wilderness of dissected mountain ridges, each of which is topped by a very defensible village.
The tribal structure is very complex and divided into; confederations, tribes, clans, families, etc. In the north of the country live Zeidi (Fiver) Shia. Their type of Shiism is the closest to Sunni Islam. Their jurisprudence is actually based on Mu’tazilism. The rest of the country is largely inhabited by Sunni Shafa’i.
There is constant war in Yemen, war over women’s honor, water rights, land, beasts or just for the fun of it. The government does not exercize any substatial control over most places outside the cities. The tribesmen are both in the army and out of it and a favorite political move is for some dissident officer to desert taking many of his men and such odds and ends as; small arms; artillery and tanks to his home district after proclaiming “come and get me.” The tribesmen are heavily armed. An AK-47 is a standard accessory in personal fashion, and they DO shoot at each other a lot.
Salih has turned milking foreign powers into a fine art.
In my view the underlying problem being exposed is weak, incompetent, corrupt government in the Middle East. Is there any way to address this problem other than by stronger, more competent, less corrupt government? Is that something that can be created by mounting an offensive? And have we learned nothing?
Recent events are eerily reminiscent of the revolution that displaced the monarchy in 1979: A fragmented, illegitimate state led by cruel yet indecisive men is suddenly confronting an opposition movement that it cannot fully apprehend. It is premature to proclaim the immediate demise of the theocratic regime. Iran may well be entering a prolonged period of chaos and violence. In the aftermath of recent disturbances, however, it is obvious that the lifespan of the Islamic Republic has been considerably shortened.
In his view the present regime is in much the same state that the Shah was in 30 years ago: unwilling to broaden his political base and not decisive enough to take action against those who opposed him.
If this report is correct and the regime has purchased anti-riot armored vehicles (pictured above) from China, deliveries of which having now begun after a four month wait, it would seem to indicate that the regime is not so indecisive after all and is preparing itself to oppose the protesters more effectively.
That would be consistent with my view: that the Iranian regime has the cashflow and the will to avoid being removed by a velvet revolution. Without an organized opposition and a visible leader to serve as a rallying point and with the means and international support to maintain its hold on power, any notion that we may be seeing the last of the reprehensible Iranian regime may be so much wishful thinking.
If the report is true, it would also seem to cast some doubt on any ideas that the Chinese are prepared to support anything that would resemble effective sanctions against the regime. Contrariwise, the Chinese authorities seem to be doubling down.
And, as a veto-wielding permanent member of the United Nations Security Council, China must support any measures for them to be put in place.
While we’re on the subject of China and trade policy, I wonder why more attention hasn’t been paid to China’s failure to live up to all of the commitments it made when it was admitted to the WTO back in 2001? As I calculate things China has yet to meet the obligations it made in freight, telecommunications, and, notably, banking, among others. All of these reforms were to have been completed by the end of 2006.
As I understand it China was to have introduced substantial transparency into its banking system, to have removed all barriers to foreign ownership in its banks, and actually to have a certain level of foreign ownership of its banks, all of which it has failed to meet. Instead China has retained limits on the foreign ownership of its banks and restricted foreign ownership to its least profitable areas.
If the intent of the recent tariffs on Chinese imports were to improve the U. S. position in trade negotiations with China, you’d think that more of these issues would have been raised publicly than they apparently have.
For more on China’s banking and more general trade obligations see here and here.
(Bloomberg) — The U.S. will impose duties on $2.8 billion in steel-pipe imports from China after saying subsidies on the products may harm American steelmakers, a move that threatens to escalate trade tensions between the two countries.
The U.S. International Trade Commission voted 6-0 today in Washington. The Commerce Department set duties in November ranging from 10.4 percent to 15.8 percent, subject to the ITC’s ruling, on Chinese pipes used in oil wells. A preliminary ruling by the ITC in May led Chinese producers to halt exports to the U.S., state-owned Tianjin Pipe Group Corp. has said.
The tariffs are being imposed under the terms of the agreement that China made when joining the WTO which allowed other countries to impose tariffs on Chinese goods legally, unilaterally, and without recourse if the goods were found to cause substantial dislocation in a domestic industry. This is the second time since taking office that the Obama Administration has used this provision to impose tariffs on Chinese imports, the first time being on tires imported from China.
I think that this move requires a certain amount of untangling. Jurists may ask is it legal? It apparently is. Economists may ask is it beneficial? That depends on whether you’re a U. S. producer of steel pipe or a consumer of steel pipe as the Wall Street Journal hastens to remind us:
The reality is that the domestic steel industry produces about two-thirds of what the U.S. consumes each year. The rest comes from foreign suppliers, and the competition results in products that would otherwise be more expensive. China is by far the world’s leading producer of drill pipes, and a Goldman Sachs analysis last month that anticipated the ITC decision says that it could result in a shortage of the pipes in the U.S. by the second half of next year. Never mind that making domestic gas-and-oil exploration more expensive would seem to be at cross purposes with making the U.S. less reliant on foreign energy.
By the way, the U.S. steel industry also made a fat profit of $3.9 billion from 2006 to 2008. China will no doubt respond to this latest protectionism with more tariffs of its own against U.S. products or investment, further increasing the cost of this protectionism.
U.S. trade laws aren’t about “fair trade” or “leveling the playing field,” or the other cliches of protectionists. They have become tools of political income redistribution, protecting certain industries at the expense of others and the larger U.S. economy.
A politician may ask is it popular? There are a lot more U. S. consumers who are likely to be injured by this move than there are domestic U. S. producers who are likely to be helped.l However, the producers will know that they’re being helped while the consumers are significantly less likely to realize that they’re being hurt.
Is this protectionism? It absolutely is. Is it justified? That’s a question so impossible to untangle that I’m afraid it’s beyond my powers. So many countries including China, South Korea, Japan, and India have been subsidizing their own domestic steel industries via tariffs, quotas, and direct subsidies for so long that at this point it’s impossible to disaggregate their competitive advantages from the results of government subsidy.
And the WSJ is correct to suggest that this move is likely to increase the cost of steel in the U. S. even more broadly than just among the manufacturers of steel pipe. That’s a puzzling move at a point at which the U. S. taxpayers via their government is moving to increase their stake in the U. S. auto industry, among the largest consumers of steel.
The foreign policy scholar may well ask is it good policy? It is well known that free trade benefits the trading partner with freer trade. However, that finding is dependent on comparative advantage. Whether imposing tariffs on Chinese steel pipe is a good policy here in the United States and now remains to be seen. Frankly, I doubt it.
In the years following the invasion of Iraq I frequently read claims that there had been a long “drumbeat to war” in advance of the invasion. When I asked those making such claims to substantiate them, I was invariably disappointed. I can only interpret this op-ed from Alan J. Kuperman, director of the Nuclear Proliferation Prevention Program at the University of Texas at Austin, as a drumbeat to war:
Since peaceful carrots and sticks cannot work, and an invasion would be foolhardy, the United States faces a stark choice: military air strikes against Iran’s nuclear facilities or acquiescence to Iran’s acquisition of nuclear weapons.
The risks of acquiescence are obvious. Iran supplies Islamist terrorist groups in violation of international embargoes. Even President Ahmadinejad’s domestic opponents support this weapons traffic. If Iran acquired a nuclear arsenal, the risks would simply be too great that it could become a neighborhood bully or provide terrorists with the ultimate weapon, an atomic bomb.
As for knocking out its nuclear plants, admittedly, aerial bombing might not work. Some Iranian facilities are buried too deeply to destroy from the air. There may also be sites that American intelligence is unaware of. And military action could backfire in various ways, including by undermining Iran’s political opposition, accelerating the bomb program or provoking retaliation against American forces and allies in the region.
But history suggests that military strikes could work. Israel’s 1981 attack on the nearly finished Osirak reactor prevented Iraq’s rapid acquisition of a plutonium-based nuclear weapon and compelled it to pursue a more gradual, uranium-based bomb program. A decade later, the Persian Gulf war uncovered and enabled the destruction of that uranium initiative, which finally deterred Saddam Hussein from further pursuit of nuclear weapons (a fact that eluded American intelligence until after the 2003 invasion). Analogously, Iran’s atomic sites might need to be bombed more than once to persuade Tehran to abandon its pursuit of nuclear weapons.
As for the risk of military strikes undermining Iran’s opposition, history suggests that the effect would be temporary. For example, NATO’s 1999 air campaign against Yugoslavia briefly bolstered support for President Slobodan Milosevic, but a democratic opposition ousted him the next year.
He concludes:
We have reached the point where air strikes are the only plausible option with any prospect of preventing Iran’s acquisition of nuclear weapons. Postponing military action merely provides Iran a window to expand, disperse and harden its nuclear facilities against attack. The sooner the United States takes action, the better.
That’s completely unambiguous. He’s urging us to go to war with Iran.
I think that Dr. Kuperman is too quick to dismiss Iran’s likely responses to such an attack and too optimistic about its prospects for success. We should keep in mind that attacking Iran would be yet another “war of choice” for us but the present Iranian regime would be fighting for its survival. We should expect it to respond commensurately.
Contrary to the title of Dr. Kuperman’s op-ed, I no longer believe there is any way to “stop Iran” and we should be devoting our energies to evaluating how to contain it and moving to do so. Unfortunately, I don’t believe we have the stomach either to stop or to contain Iran.
Just in time for the Iranians’ latest dilatory reaction to the IAEA’s draft response to its nuclear program, the Times of London has reported that it has obtained documents that prove rather clearly that Iran has continued its nuclear weapons development program:
Confidential intelligence documents obtained by The Times show that Iran is working on testing a key final component of a nuclear bomb.
The notes, from Iran’s most sensitive military nuclear project, describe a four-year plan to test a neutron initiator, the component of a nuclear bomb that triggers an explosion. Foreign intelligence agencies date them to early 2007, four years after Iran was thought to have suspended its weapons programme.
An Asian intelligence source last week confirmed to The Times that his country also believed that weapons work was being carried out as recently as 2007 — specifically, work on a neutron initiator.
The technical document describes the use of a neutron source, uranium deuteride, which independent experts confirm has no possible civilian or military use other than in a nuclear weapon. Uranium deuteride is the material used in Pakistan’s bomb, from where Iran obtained its blueprint.
This would contradict the finding of the now notorious 2007 National Intelligence Estimate that found that Iran had ended its nuclear weapons development program in 2003, a finding questioned by other Western intelligence services.
Assuming the report is true while it dispels some of the ambiguity about Iran’s nuclear program, it doesn’t make Iran more likely to respond to the overtures of the West or others trying to induce them to end their nuclear program, I doubt that it will make sanctions more likely to be imposed, and it doesn’t render a military strike against Iran more effective in forcing the Iranians to end their nuclear weapons development. Primarily, it means that we’ll know what’s happening while it’s happening.
Sky News foreign affairs editor Tim Marshall said: “Sources confirm that the document is genuine. However, the Government and the US will be reluctant to wave it about just yet.
“There’s three weeks to go until President Obama’s end-of-the-year deadline for his policy of engagement with Iran.
“The big push for sanctions will not begin until January. No-one wants to pre-empt that.”
Anticipating the end of America’s brief post-war nuclear monopoly, Churchill also declared: “We ought not to go jogging along improvident, incompetent, waiting for something to turn up, by which I mean waiting for something bad for us to turn up.” Sixty years later, that is precisely what Western diplomacy is doing.
Columnist Gail Colllins asks “When did we decide that letting private contractors stand in for our military in sensitive and dangerous situations was a good plan?”:
When did we decide this was a good plan?
Let’s pretend for a minute that it is not stupendously irresponsible to let private contractors stand in for our military in wildly sensitive and dangerous situations abroad. Even if it was a terrific idea, we would still have to ask whether huge government agencies, which frequently have a difficult time finding cost-effective ways to order a hammer, know how to purchase services that actually work.
[…]
There’s no reason to believe the government has the capacity to determine how well all these private contractors are doing their jobs. And it’s doubtful that if the government did know, it could do much about it.
I’ll answer the question. We decided that using civilian contractors to perform functions that had previously been performed by soldiers in uniform was a good idea when we decided to reduce the size of our military without an accompanying commitment to reduce the number of things we’d be asking our military to do. In 1992 the end strengths of our military forces were:
Army
610,450
Navy
541,883
Marines
184,529
Air Force
470,315
In 2000 the end strengths of our military forces were:
Army
481,669
Navy
373,692
Marines
173,371
Air Force
354,321
Each president since then, William Clinton, George W. Bush, and Barack Obama, has decided to undertake new commitments without increasing the size of the military to the point that the commitments could be sustained. Once they’d decided to do that, the decision to hire civilian contractors to make up the difference was a foregone conclusion.
I have no problem with reducing the size of the military. I think that doing so without re-aligning commitments is irresponsible. I also think that civilian contractors should be held to the same standards of conduct that our soldiers in uniform are.
NATO Secretary General Anders Fogh Rasmussen has announced that NATO members will deploy an additional 7,000 troops to Afghanistan:
Twenty-five countries have announced that they will deploy additional troops next year, and more contributions are expected “during the coming weeks and months,” said NATO Secretary General Anders Fogh Rasmussen.
However, officials were still trying to nail down some of the promises.
And well they might. At least 700 of the “additional troops” that Britain will supply are the 700 that were already deployed in Afghanistan to provide security for the elections. Holland and Canada continue to say that they plan to remove the troops that they currently have in Afghanistan. France and Germany continue to demur, saying that they’ll wait until after the meetings in late January of next year:
There are currently roughly 4,300 German soldiers in Afghanistan, and Berlin says it won’t consider increasing that figure until after an international conference in January. Holbrooke, in turn, has insisted that the US is not disappointed with Chancellor Angela Merkel: “The German army has lost more than 30 soldiers in Afghanistan, and that is historic. So I understand the chancellor’s stance. Germany’s presence in northern Afghanistan is extremely important. It remains up to the Germans themselves to determine what further actions they will take.”
Italy has committed an additional 1,000, fewer than the 1,500 for which it was asked:
On Thursday, Italian Defense Minister Ignazio La Russa confirmed that Rome would send around 1,000 extra troops to Afghanistan, raising its presence to roughly 3,700. La Russa told the Corriere della Sera newspaper that the previously reported figure of 1,500 extra soldiers was “a maximum quota which we would never reach.”
Portugal has committed to sending an additional 150 soldiers from its rapid deployment force.
ANKARA, Dec. 3 (Xinhua) — Turkey responded coolly to the United States’ request for more Turkish forces to be deployed to Afghanistan as officials emphasized the country’s policy of keeping its troops out of combat operations in the war-torn country, said local Hurriyet Daily News on its website on Thursday.
Turkey increased its troops in Afghanistan by sending 958 more soldiers last month, said Turkish Defense Minister Vecdi Gonul late Wednesday.
“We maintain our reservations about Turkish troops’ involvement in military operations and combat in Afghanistan,” Gonul said.
In a written statement late Wednesday, the Turkish Foreign Ministry expressed hopes that U.S. President Barack Obama’s new strategy would bring peace and stability to Afghanistan and vowed to increase its contribution, but in terms of “training and reconstruction works.”
“Obama is asking for combat forces who will engage in armed clashes. But it is clear-cut that we do not have such an opportunity,” a Turkish diplomat, who asked not to be identified, said Thursday.
I’m surprised at how little attention this particular news item has received in the United States.
The Turkish soldiers currently in Afghanistan are primarily providing police protection in Kabul.
NATO has 28 member countries. With Germany, Britain, France, the Netherlands, and Canada all unlikely to provide additional troops, particularly combat troops, that accounts for the richest and/or largest countries in the alliance (other than the US). President Obama’s speech on Tuesday may well have been pragmatic but it was certainly ambivalent, one foot poised on the entrance with the other foot headed for the exit. Not exactly the St. Crispin’s Day speech from Henry V, not a call to arms, and not very likely to promote confidence among our NATO allies. Support for the war in Afghanistan has been flagging among Americans for some time and it’s even less popular among our NATO allies.
U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton speaks during a hearing before the Senate Foreign Relations Committee December 3, 2009 on Capitol Hill in Washington, DC. The hearing was to examine President Obama's plan to send more troops to Afghanistan. (Getty Images)
I suspect that the White House is not particularly feeling the love in the reactions of various different pundits to President Obama’s announcement that he will send an additional 30,000 U. S. troops to Afghanistan.
Note what’s going on here: Obama’s efforts to persuade enough skeptics — especially in his own party — by placing a limit on how long we will stay and by trying to separate Afghanistan from Iraq earned him only reproofs from the other party. Heads, Obama loses with the doves; tails, he loses with the hawks. There is not a large market for owls claiming the wisdom of the middle way.
Under the guise of cleaning up Bush’s mess, Obama has chosen to continue Bush’s policies. No doubt pulling the plug on an ill-advised enterprise involves risk and uncertainty. It also entails acknowledging mistakes. It requires courage. Yet without these things, talk of change will remain so much hot air.
President Lyndon Johnson doubled down on the Vietnam bet soon after he inherited the presidency, and Mikhail Gorbachev escalated the Soviet deployment that he inherited in Afghanistan soon after he took over the leadership of his country. They both inherited a mess — and made it worse and costlier.
As with the Americans in Vietnam, and Soviets in Afghanistan, we understate the risk of a nationalist backlash; somehow Mr. Obama has emerged as more enthusiastic about additional troops than even the corrupt Afghan government we are buttressing.
The president’s party will not support his new policy, his budget will not accommodate it, our overstretched and worn-down military will be hard-pressed to execute it, and Americans’ patience will not be commensurate with Afghanistan’s limitless demands for it. This will not end well.
The president can take some solace in the fact that the prevailing wisdom in the form of the editors of the New York Times and the Washington Post has already provided its imprimatur to the plan. The American people? Not so much:
Before the president’s speech, voters were essentially evenly divided over whether the United States could still win the war in Afghanistan and whether all the troops there should be brought home within a year. Forty-five percent (45%) favored bringing troops home immediately or within a year while 43% opposed such a timetable.
The number of those questioning America’s ability to win and of those supporting a troop withdrawal had been increasing steadily since September when the internal Obama administration debate over Afghanistan became public. That debate was prompted by a request from General Stanley McChrystal, the chief commander in Afghanistan, for a troop surge, but politically speaking, particularly in the president’s own party, an expansion of the war wasn’t a hugely popular idea.
Prior to the speech, Democrats were far more supportive of a troop withdrawal and less confident of winning in Afghanistan than were Republicans and voters not affiliated with either major party.
At the same time, overall voter confidence in America’s conduct of the War on Terror has now fallen to its lowest level since the first week of January in 2007.
Success has many fathers while failure is an orphan. If President Obama’s Afghan surge succeeds, he will be hailed as courageous and statesmanlike, braving the political winds to pursue an ultimately victorious policy. If it fails, he’ll be a goat.
If, as is more than likely, it neither succeeds nor fails but continues the stalemate along the Durand line, partisans of all stripes will seize the opportunity to point out that whatever happened fully justifies the position they held to begin with.
U.S. President Barack Obama speaks to cadets at the U.S. Military Academy in West Point, New York, December 1, 2009. Obama plans to send 30,000 more U.S. troops to Afghanistan over six months in a bid to beat back the Taliban and bring a quicker end to a costly and unpopular eight-year war. REUTERS/Jim Young
Let me start with the bottom line and then tell you how I got there: I can’t agree with President Obama’s decision to escalate in Afghanistan. I’d prefer a minimalist approach, working with tribal leaders the way we did to overthrow the Taliban regime in the first place. Given our need for nation-building at home right now, I am ready to live with a little less security and a little-less-perfect Afghanistan.
I’m in somewhat less agreement with the route by which he reaches this conclusion—my reasoning is closer to James’s—but I think that’s the right conclusion. Have none of President Obama’s advisors told him that, unlike in Iraq, Afghanistan’s population is predominantly rural and the country cannot be secured by securing a few large cities?
Otherwise where they stand largely depends on where they sit. The editors of the New York Times agree both with President Obama’s decision to commit additional troops to Afghanistan:
In his speech Tuesday night, President Obama showed considerable political courage by addressing that pessimism and despair head-on. He explained why the United States cannot walk away from the war and outlined an ambitious and high-risk strategy for driving back the Taliban and bolstering the Afghan government so American troops can eventually go home.
and to President Obama’s commitment to a date certain for withdrawal whether that’s a commitment that he can make good on or not:
We are eager to see American troops come home. We don’t know whether Mr. Obama will be able to meet his July 2011 deadline to start drawing down forces.
For that to happen, there will have to be a lot more success at training Afghan forces and improving the government’s effectiveness.
Still, setting a deadline — so long as it is not set in stone — is a sound idea. Mr. Karzai and his aides need to know that America’s commitment is not open-ended. Mr. Obama’s generals and diplomats also need to know that their work will be closely monitored and reviewed.
Mr. Obama’s troop decision is both correct and courageous: correct because it is the only way to prevent a defeat that would endanger this country and its vital interests; and courageous because he is embarking on a difficult and costly mission that is opposed by a large part of his own party. Importantly, the president did not set an end date or a timetable for the mission beyond July 2011; the pace of extracting U.S. forces will depend on developments on the ground.
Obama has made the right decision: The only viable “exit strategy” from Afghanistan is one that starts with a bang — by adding 30,000 more U.S. troops to secure the major population centers, so that control can be transferred to the Afghan army and police. This transfer process, starting in July 2011, is the heart of his strategy.
Military commanders appear comfortable with Obama’s decision, although they wish it hadn’t taken so long. Adm. Mike Mullen, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, is said to be especially pleased that Obama decided to rush the additional troops to Afghanistan in just six months, sooner than Gen. Stanley McChrystal had requested. The speedy deployment “gets McChrystal the most U.S. force in the fight as fast as possible and enough to help him gain the initiative,” said one senior military officer.
But politically, it’s an Afghanistan strategy with something to make everyone unhappy: Democrats will be angry that the president is escalating a costly war at a time when the struggling economy should be his top priority. Republicans will protest that by setting a short, 18-month deadline to begin withdrawing those forces, he’s signaling to the Taliban that they can win if they just are patient.
We support Mr. Obama’s decision, and this national effort, notwithstanding our concerns about the determination of the President and his party to see it through. Now that he’s committed, so is the country, and one of our abiding principles is that nations should never start (much less escalate) wars they don’t intend to win.
[…]
Above all, as a war President, Mr. Obama will have to spend more of his own political capital persuading the American public that the Afghan campaign is worth the price. One speech at storied West Point isn’t enough. The President needs his own political surge.
Even as President Obama announced an escalation of the war in Afghanistan, he focused on plans for getting out. At the same time that he ordered an additional 30,000 U.S. soldiers and Marines to the front, he said he would start bringing them home in July 2011. And while assuring neighboring Pakistan of America’s long-term commitment to South Asia, he also sought to reassure Americans that there are limits to U.S. military involvement in the region.
We appreciate the president’s rhetorical prowess. Tuesday’s speech was clear and cogent. Yet we can’t help but wonder if he will be able to keep so many seemingly contradictory promises made to so many different audiences. We understand that Obama inherited a neglected war and was presented with an array of bad choices, and we certainly hope he is making the right decision to double down in Afghanistan. But frankly, we have grave misgivings about the cost and likelihood of success.
If this op-ed in Der Spiegel is any gauge President Obama’s move won’t be met by similar gestures from our NATO allies:
Never before has a speech by President Barack Obama felt as false as his Tuesday address announcing America’s new strategy for Afghanistan. It seemed like a campaign speech combined with Bush rhetoric — and left both dreamers and realists feeling distraught.
One can hardly blame the West Point leadership. The academy commanders did their best to ensure that Commander-in-Chief Barack Obama’s speech would be well-received.
Just minutes before the president took the stage inside Eisenhower Hall, the gathered cadets were asked to respond “enthusiastically” to the speech. But it didn’t help: The soldiers’ reception was cool.
One didn’t have to be a cadet on Tuesday to feel a bit of nausea upon hearing Obama’s speech. It was the least truthful address that he has ever held. He spoke of responsibility, but almost every sentence smelled of party tactics. He demanded sacrifice, but he was unable to say what it was for exactly.
An additional 30,000 US soldiers are to march into Afghanistan — and then they will march right back out again. America is going to war — and from there it will continue ahead to peace. It was the speech of a Nobel War Prize laureate.
For each troop movement, Obama had a number to match. US strength in Afghanistan will be tripled relative to the Bush years, a fact that is sure to impress hawks in America. But just 18 months later, just in time for Obama’s re-election campaign, the horror of war is to end and the draw down will begin. The doves of peace will be let free.
The reactions of columnists in The Guardian are similar. Simon Jenkins:
Barack Obama’s announcement of an Afghan “surge” is his frantic bid to rescue what promises to be a stumbling re-election campaign that must start in 2011. It oozes with his desperation not to be in Afghanistan. The question is how best to disengage. As in Vietnam and as the Russians found, withdrawal tends to be possible here in Afghanistan only after the generals on the ground have been given a last chance to claim victory.
These are important goals. The political establishment of the US is quite focused on them. The American people, however, are not. And so Obama, trying to placate both, has a very narrow needle to thread: he must show seriousness of commitment, but he must also show that commitment isn’t forever.
That’s why he placed emphasis on the speed with which the new troops would be deployed, the need for a greater Nato commitment and – most of all – the timetable for stopping the whole business. “These additional American and international troops will allow us to accelerate handing over responsibility to Afghan forces, and allow us to begin the transfer of our forces out of Afghanistan in July of 2011. Just as we have done in Iraq, we will execute this transition responsibly, taking into account conditions on the ground,” he said, before concluding: “But it will be clear to the Afghan government – and, more importantly, to the Afghan people – that they will ultimately be responsible for their own country.”
It’s not exactly “blood, toil, tears and sweat” against a “monstrous tyranny never surpassed in the dark and lamentable catalogue of human crime”. But the words matter less now than the actions. America, the president said, is “passing through a time of great trial”. And so is he.
I haven’t fully digested the commentary in Pravda but a first glance suggests that the Russians’ reaction is pretty cynical.
Dean Baker offers one of many, many alternative responses we could take to China’s policy of an undervalued yuan. As has been pointed out attempting to apply rhetorical pressure to the Chinese authorities is counter-productive but such a move need not require putting overt pressure on the Chinese nor would it require their cooperation:
Just as China can set a value of its currency against the dollar, the US government can set a value of the dollar against the yuan. The Chinese government currently supports an exchange rate at which the dollar can buy 6.8 yuan. This high value of the dollar makes US goods uncompetitive relative to China’s. To make US goods more competitive, the US could adopt a policy through which it will sell dollars at a much lower price, say 4.5 yuan.
The difference in exchange rates would provide an enormous incentive for Chinese businesses and individuals to exchange their yuan at the Treasury rate rather than the official Chinese rate. While this may violate Chinese law, the enormous potential profits would make the law difficult to enforce. In a relatively short period of time, the US exchange rate is likely to become the effective market exchange rate.
Of course, this situation of warring exchange rates would lead to a period of instability and unnecessary hostility between the two countries. However, it would send an important signal that the US government is in control of its dollar destiny: Washington has the ability any time it chooses to push the dollar down to a more reasonable level against the yuan.
As Dr. Baker points out, such a course of action would have a price, and several generations of American politicians, Republicans and Democrats, have shown little appetite for paying a political price in dealing with China, preferring to let the country pay an economic and social price.
