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.

Time features an article on the “Five Things the U.S. Can Learn from China” that I can only characterize as surreal. Here are the five lessons:

1. Be Ambitious
2. Education Matters
3. Look After the Elderly
4. Save More
5. Look over the Horizon

For the details you’ll just have to read the article.

On ambition, the article’s author, Bill Powell, returns to a theme often sounded by Tom Friedman which I would summarize as how much you can accomplish when you’ve got an authoritarian government.

On education, the United States spends more on it than any country in the world, more per student, and more as a percentage of GDP than France, the United Kingdom, or China. Whether the money is well spent is another question entirely. We misspend. It is the American way.

However, when you’re a country of more than a billion people you’re bound to have a lot of smart, talented people and the Chinese authorities see the future of a lot of those smart, talented people being in science and engineering so they’re emphasizing it. In the United States opportunities in science and engineering are doubtful, Americans are savvy readers of the market, and, consequently, American students aren’t pursuing science and engineering (except in healthcare where there is clearly a future).

However, China’s elite don’t represent the whole story. China has millions and millions of people who are illiterate and are likely to stay that way, perhaps 30% of the population or more (there are some claims that the rate of illiteracy in China is much, much higher). How should we learn from the Chinese on education? Should we abandon universal education?

Look after the elderly! Forsooth. China has no national system of social insurance. In China looking after the elderly means in the family. Were we to emulate China in this we’d abolish Social Security and Medicare outright. Note: I don’t advocate this. I think that properly constructed social insurance and subsidizing healthcare for the elderly is freedom-enhancing. Needless to say what we’ve got now is not properly constructed.

And that’s intimately related to why the Chinese save. The Chinese save because they’re afraid of the future and because they have little choice. Were we to heed the lesson of the Chinese in this we’d reduce our social safety net rather than extend it.

I do think that there are lessons we should learn from China and many of them are object lessons. China is a great country with great people hobbled by cultural baggage and a corrupt, evil, authoritarian government whose oligarchs hoard the bulk of China’s wealth for themselves and their families. The notion that China is to be emulated is nuts.

Inspired no doubt by President Obama’s visit to China, American editorial writers and columnists are seizing on the opportunity to pile on China. In his column today Paul Krugman takes China to task over its policy on its currency:

Despite huge trade surpluses and the desire of many investors to buy into this fast-growing economy — forces that should have strengthened the renminbi, China’s currency — Chinese authorities have kept that currency persistently weak. They’ve done this mainly by trading renminbi for dollars, which they have accumulated in vast quantities.

And in recent months China has carried out what amounts to a beggar-thy-neighbor devaluation, keeping the yuan-dollar exchange rate fixed even as the dollar has fallen sharply against other major currencies. This has given Chinese exporters a growing competitive advantage over their rivals, especially producers in other developing countries.

What makes China’s currency policy especially problematic is the depressed state of the world economy. Cheap money and fiscal stimulus seem to have averted a second Great Depression. But policy makers haven’t been able to generate enough spending, public or private, to make progress against mass unemployment. And China’s weak-currency policy exacerbates the problem, in effect siphoning much-needed demand away from the rest of the world into the pockets of artificially competitive Chinese exporters.

I think that Dr. Krugman is right about this and further believe that the asset inflation that has put us into the fix that we’re in right now can be traced to China’s decision to establish an effective peg of the yuan to the dollar by using the earnings it derived from its export to buy dollars and dollar-denominated securities. This decision followed a recession in China which underscored for them their problems in controlling their currency in the absence of such a peg.

That policy has been abetted by American politicians of both parties who’ve shrewdly observed that borrowing has been politically less painful than raising taxes or curtailing spending. That’s a process that may be grinding to a halt as observed by Niall Ferguson and Moritz Schularick:

Intervening in the currency market served two goals for China: by keeping the renminbi from rising against the dollar, it promoted the competitiveness of Chinese exports; second, it allowed China to build up foreign currency reserves (primarily in dollars) as a cushion against the risks associated with growing financial integration, painfully illustrated by the experience of other countries in the Asian crisis of the late 1990s. The result was that by 2000 China had currency reserves of $165 billion; they now stand at $2.3 trillion, of which at least 70 percent are dollar-denominated.

This intervention caused a growing distortion in the global cost of capital, significantly reducing long-term interest rates and helping to inflate the real estate bubble in the United States, with ultimately disastrous consequences. In essence, Chimerica constituted a credit line from the People’s Republic to the United States that allowed Americans to save nothing and bet the house on … well, the house.

[…]

Given the bursting of the debt and housing bubbles, Americans will have to kick their addiction to cheap money and easy credit. The Chinese authorities understand that heavily indebted American consumers cannot be relied on to return as buyers of Chinese goods on the scale of the period up to 2007. And they dislike their exposure to the American currency in the form of dollar-denominated reserve assets of close to $2 trillion. The Chinese authorities are “long” the dollar like no foreign power in history, and that makes them very nervous.

Writing in The Guardian Ambrose Evans-Pritchard draws what I think is the correct conclusion about China’s policy:

It is fashionable to talk of America as the supplicant. That misreads the strategic balance. Washington can bring China to its knees at any time by shutting markets. There is no symmetry here. Any move by Beijing to liquidate its holdings of US Treasuries could be neutralized – in extremis – by capital controls. Well-armed sovereign states can do whatever they want.

If provoked, the US has the economic depth to retreat into near autarky (with NAFTA) and retool its industries behind tariff walls – as Britain did in the 1930s under Imperial Preference. In such circumstances, China would collapse. Mao statues would be toppled by street riots.

The editors of the New York Times are also correct in reminding us that China’s trade policies aren’t the only issue we need to discuss with them:

Ever since Richard Nixon opened the door in 1972, all presidents have faced a balancing act with China. For President Obama, who arrived in China on Sunday, the challenge is even tougher and more urgent. He needs Beijing’s help on a host of hugely important and extremely difficult problems, including stabilizing the global financial system, curbing global warming, prying away North Korea’s nuclear weapons, and ensuring that Iran doesn’t get to build any.

To do that he needs to encourage China to play an even stronger international role — but also curb some of its darker instincts, including its mistreatment of its own citizens, its less than savory relationships with countries like Sudan and its tendency to bully its neighbors.

If you need an illustration of the urgency of encouraging China’s leaders to take environmental considerations more seriously, this photo essay on pollution in China should be enough a chamber of horrors to convince you. I don’t believe this is something we can be satisfied with leaving to China as a purely internal matter for several reasons. First, Americans and Europeans have been complicit in China’s environmental degradation by exporting our heavy industry to China; many of those polluting companies in China have American and European parents. Second, Chinese air pollution crosses the Pacific to pollute our air and our water, too. Further, as long as China maintains its present course there are no steps we can take which will reduce our carbon production enough to avoid serious effects. That is not to say we should not use resources more efficiently: we should. However, no plan which doesn’t include China is worth a damn.

The picture at the right has created something of a kerfuffle in the blogosphere. It captures President Barack Obama being introducted to Japanese Emperor Akihito and bowing profoundly. Scott Johnson is overly exercised:

Obama’s breach of protocol is of a piece with the substance of his foreign policy. He means to teach Americans to bow before monarchs and tyrants. He embodies the ideological multiculturalism that sets the United States on the same plane as other regimes based on tribal privilege and royal bloodlines.

Kathy Kattenburg is flat out wrong:

Once again, Barack Obama has demonstrated his appalling hatred for America, and his elitism, and his arrogance, and his tearing down and bashing of his country and his predecessor’s foreign policies, by greeting Japan’s prime minister with a deep bow in a culturally appropriate way.

This was definitely not “culturally appropriate” and was definitely a breach of protocol.

In Japan bows are culturally appropriate, the rough equivalent of a handshake. However, the depth of the bow is carefully calibrated, reflecting the status and stations of the two parties, and President Obama’s bow is far too deep. Rather than appearing cultural appropriate I suspect that to most Japanese he would merely look clumsy.

I was in the process of collecting a sampler of picture to demonstrate that it was, in fact, a breach of protocol but I quickly found that HotAirPundit had beaten me to it. Browse on over and you can see Vladimir Putin, Manmohan Singh, and other world leaders greeting the emperor appropriately. I’ll contibute this picture:

I believe this represents Japanese Prime Minister Yukio Hatoyama greeting the emperor, possibly presenting his credentials. Should the president of the United States bow more profoundly than the prime minister of Japan to the Japanese emperor?

My reaction to this is much what it was to other, previous goofs: I think the president is being very poorly served by his advisors. He needs a protocol advisor that he’ll pay attention to and who has the courage to tell him what to do and what not to do in order to avoid looking foolish. In this case he looked foolish.

In the final analysis this is a very minor matter. The Japanese are forgiving people and I have little doubt that they’ll be polite enough to overlook the clumsiness of President Obama’s attempt at cultural sensitivity. I doubt that most Americans really care.

I’m a Democrat but, as I’ve said before, I’m a republican (note the small “r”), too, and it nettles me to see the president of the United States making obeisances to foreign royalty. But it’s not the end of the world and I doubt that it means much more than that President Obama is trying to do the right thing but doesn’t know what the right thing is.

The scuttlebutt that’s coming out now in Washington is that President Obama doesn’t much like the plans for Afghanistan offered by his advisors:

WASHINGTON – President Barack Obama does not plan to accept any of the Afghanistan war options presented by his national security team, pushing instead for revisions to clarify how and when U.S. troops would turn over responsibility to the Afghan government, a senior administration official said Wednesday.

That stance comes in the midst of forceful reservations about a possible troop buildup from the U.S. ambassador in Afghanistan, Karl Eikenberry, according to a second top administration official.

In strongly worded classified cables to Washington, Eikenberry said he had misgivings about sending in new troops while there are still so many questions about the leadership of Afghan President Hamid Karzai.

Despite his having campaigned for two years on the urgency and necessity of the war in Afghanistan, it’s not difficult to see why President Obama would have misgivings on doubling down there. Victory at a cost and in a timeframe acceptable to the American people is far from assured and may even be impossible. And then there’s domestic criticism along the lines of Nicholas Kristof’s column in the New York Times today:

So if President Obama dispatches another 30,000 or 40,000 troops, on top of the 68,000 already there, that would bring the total annual bill for our military presence there to perhaps $100 billion — or more. And we haven’t even come to the human costs.

As for health care reforms, the 10-year cost suggests an average of $80 billion to $110 billion per year, depending on what the final bill looks like.

Granted, the health care costs will continue indefinitely, while the United States cannot sustain 100,000 troops in Afghanistan for many years. On the other hand, the health care legislation pays for itself, according to the Congressional Budget Office, while the deployment in Afghanistan is unfinanced and will raise our budget deficits and undermine our long-term economic security.

So doesn’t it seem odd to hear hawks say that health reform is fiscally irresponsible, while in the next breath they cheer a larger deployment of troops in Afghanistan?

Meanwhile, lack of health insurance kills about 45,000 Americans a year, according to a Harvard study released in September. So which is the greater danger to our homeland security, the Taliban or our dysfunctional insurance system?

It seems to me that similar criticisms could be made of all of our military spending, our overseas military bases, our foreign aid, of supporting embassies in other countries, and so on. Are those really the alternatives or is it a false choice? Might we withdraw from Afghanistan only to find ourselves spending even more on defense a couple of years down the road?

I think I’ve made my own views pretty clear. I think that there are tactical, strategic, legal, and moral reasons for not simply withdrawing from Afghanistan but, following the lead of Afghanistan authority Rory Stewart, I think that we need to take a longer, more modest, and less military view. I think that we’ll need what Ralph Peters has described as “a compact, lethal force” in Afghanistan for the foreseeable future but I’m skeptical of any large force of ours in Afghanistan whether for counter-terrorism as has been suggested by Vice President Joe Biden or counter-insurgency as Gen. Stanley McChrystal’s plan that’s on the president’s desk now provides.

What will the president do? What should the president do?

Please leave your policy prescriptions in the comments including the strategic objectives, how you’d accomplish them, the relationship between your preferred approach and the strategic objectives, and how you would mitigate the risks of your approach.

The editors of the Washington Post articulate a position similar to the one that I took yesterday:

The Obama administration and European governments have set the end of the year as a deadline for the transfer of the uranium out of Iran and for progress in the overall negotiations. But the administration must consider whether it makes sense to grant the regime two more months of grace. On Tuesday, after all, Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei publicly rejected the overtures he said he had received from President Obama, declaring that negotiating with the United States was “naive and perverted.” On Wednesday, the opposition protesters chanted: “Obama, Obama — either you’re with them, or with us.” Sooner rather than later, Mr. Obama ought to respond to those messages.

Sometimes “No” is, in fact, the answer and it certainly seems to me that it’s the answer that the Iranian regime has given to President Obama’s overtures.

The picture that is emerging of Maj. Nidal M. Hasan, the American-born Army psychiatrist who killed 13 people and wounded dozens of others at Fort Hood yesterday is of a deeply troubled and conflicted individual:

As authorities scrambled to figure out what happened at Fort Hood, a hazy and contradictory picture emerged of this son of Palestinian immigrants, a man who received his medical training from the military and spent his career in the Army, yet allegedly turned so violently against his uniformed colleagues.

Hasan was born in Arlington and grew up in the Roanoke Valley of southwestern Virginia, a bookish young man who, his father hoped, would go on to significant professional achievement. He spent nearly all of his Army medical career at Walter Reed Army Medical Center in the District, caring for the victims of trauma, yet he spoke openly of his deep opposition to the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan.

[…]

A longtime Walter Reed colleague who referred patients to psychiatrists said co-workers avoided sending service members to Hasan because of his unusual manner and solitary work habits.

[…]

Hasan “did not make many friends” and “did not make friends fast,” his aunt said. He had no girlfriend and was not married. “He would tell us the military was his life,” she said.

The psychiatrist once said that “Muslims should stand up and fight against the aggressor” and that the United States shouldn’t be fighting the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan in the first place, according to an interview with Col. Terry Lee, a co-worker, on Fox News.

Press releases today indicate that Maj. Hasan was shot four times, was initially believed to be dead, but is now in stable condition.

Army Col. Steven Braverman said during a morning news briefing that the alleged shooter, military psychiatrist Maj. Nidal Malik Hasan, hadn’t been a disciplinary issue since recently being transferred to Fort Hood from Walter Reed Medical Center in Washington. Col. Braverman declined to elaborate on the man at the center of the rampage, noting that a detailed probe was ongoing.

“We had no problems with job performance while he was working with us,” said Col. Braverman, one of Maj. Hasan’s superiors.

Army Col. John Rossi called Thursday’s shooting a “tragic incident” and said that investigators had spent the night carefully interviewing witnesses. Officials disclosed that one of the 13 killed in the shooting was a civilian, while the rest were members of the military.

As Col. Rossi noted, this was clearly a tragic incident all around. I certainly hope that the military takes steps to identify and head off potentially deadly problem situations such as this lonely, conflicted, probably terrified and angry man obviously (in hindsight) presented. I make no excuses for the perpetrator. He should be prosecuted to the full extent of the law and, if convicted, pay the price whether being committed to a mental institution, a prison sentence for the rest of his life, or greater. As the conflicts in Iraq, Afghanistan, and, potentially, elsewhere stretch on the strains on individuals and families will become greater rather than less and special care will need to be taken to prevent repeats of this tragedy.

Seven people are reported to have been killed and twenty injured in a shooting at Fort Hood in Texas:

At least seven people are dead and 20 wounded in a mass shooting Thursday at Fort Hood, Texas, and at least one suspect is believed to be holed up in a building and shooting at SWAT team members, NBC News and affiliate KCEN reported.

It was unknown whether the victims were all soldiers or civilians at Fort Hood, one of the largest military complexes in the world.

One gunman was reportedly in custody and another was on the loose, NBC News said. A third shooter may be involved, according to NBC News affiliate KCEN in Waco, which said the person was holed up in building 42006 on the base and had opened fire on SWAT team members. KCEN quoted a source as saying the shooter had a high-powered rifle.

Not a great deal more is known at this time. It is being said that the shooters wore military uniforms but it’s not known whether they were military personnel. Live coverage is currently saying that two shooters have been apprehended.

UPDATE

Sources on the post are being quoted as saying that the number of confirmed dead is 9 and the wounded as many as 30.

UPDATE 2

Gen. Bob Cone, commanding general at Fort Hood, has just made a statement. He said that the shooter was a soldier and has been killed; and that there are also two other suspects. 12 are dead and 31 are wounded. A civilian police officer is among the dead.

UPDATE 3

ABC News is reporting that the shooter has been identified as Maj. Malik Nadal Hasan, an Army psychiatrist.

UPDATE 4

ABC News is now reporting that Maj. Hasan survived the gunfight and is in custody:

The shooter was initially reported to have been killed, but Lt. Gen. Robert W. Cone told a late night news conference that the suspect was wounded and in custody. Cone would not say what Hasan’s medical condition was, but said the suspect was not in danger of dying.

Hasan is not talking to authorities, said Cone.

The officer emphasized that there was only one gunman. Two other soldiers were taken into custody, but were later released.

Hasan allegedly opened fire and killed 12 people on the post before he was shot several times. Among the wounded was a female police officer who exchanged gunfire with Hasan and shot the suspect.

The female police officer also survived the shooting, said Cone.

Today marks the 30th anniversary of the seizing of the U. S. embassy in Tehran by factions of the revolution that overthrew the shah. President Obama has issued a statement on the occasion which I will reproduce in full here:

Thirty years ago today, the American Embassy in Tehran was seized. The 444 days that began on November 4, 1979 deeply affected the lives of courageous Americans who were unjustly held hostage, and we owe these Americans and their families our gratitude for their extraordinary service and sacrifice.

This event helped set the United States and Iran on a path of sustained suspicion, mistrust, and confrontation. I have made it clear that the United States of America wants to move beyond this past, and seeks a relationship with the Islamic Republic of Iran based upon mutual interests and mutual respect. We do not interfere in Iran’s internal affairs. We have condemned terrorist attacks against Iran. We have recognized Iran’s international right to peaceful nuclear power. We have demonstrated our willingness to take confidence-building steps along with others in the international community. We have accepted a proposal by the International Atomic Energy Agency to meet Iran’s request for assistance in meeting the medical needs of its people. We have made clear that if Iran lives up to the obligations that every nation has, it will have a path to a more prosperous and productive relationship with the international community.

Iran must choose. We have heard for thirty years what the Iranian government is against; the question, now, is what kind of future it is for. The American people have great respect for the people of Iran and their rich history. The world continues to bear witness to their powerful calls for justice, and their courageous pursuit of universal rights. It is time for the Iranian government to decide whether it wants to focus on the past, or whether it will make the choices that will open the door to greater opportunity, prosperity, and justice for its people.

I find the statement strangely detached. In every action and statement, including its non-responsive retort this very week to the offer to end its nuclear enrichment program made by the governments of the United Kingdom, France, Germany, Russia, and the United States, the leaders of the Iranian government have demonstrated that they have already made their choice. Ray Tayekh of the Council on Foreign Relations states the situation quite plainly:

Dealing with Iran has always been a complicated enterprise with moral hazards. The persistent mistake that the West has made is to place the nuclear issue above all other concerns. The Iran problem is not limited to illicit nuclear activities, and it is somewhat incomprehensible that the United States and other nations can contemplate nuclear transactions with a regime that maintains links to a range of terrorist organizations and engages in brutal domestic repression. Western officials would be smart to disabuse Iran of the notion that its nuclear infractions are the only source of disagreement. Iran’s hard-liners need to know that should they launch their much-advertised crackdown, the price for such conduct may be termination of any dialogue with the West. Only through such a policy can the United States advance its strategic objectives while standing up for its moral values.

Iran’s support for terrorist organizations and domestic repression are manifest this very day. Its leaders have made their choice and the time for counter-offers is over while the time for consequences has arrived.

We should implement consequences for Iran as stern as we can make them, non-violent in nature but punitive in quality. We should muster all of the permanent members of the Security Council to participate in these measures but be prepared to proceed without them. A peaceful, prosperous, and just Iran is in Russian and Chinese interests as it is in ours and, if they elect to support tyranny in Iran, Russia and China should be made aware that this latest tyranny in Iran will eventually end and the Iranian people will know who supported the tyrants and who opposed them.

In her address yesterday to a joint session of Congress German Chancellor Angela Merkel reiterated her country’s insistence that Iran suspend its uranium enrichment program in compliance with multiple United Nations Security Council resolutions:

Angela Merkel, the German chancellor, yesterday delivered a stern warning to Iran’s hard-line leader amid signs that the west’s patience with Tehran’s prevarication on its nuclear programme was running out.

In a speech to the joint houses of the US Congress, the first by a German chancellor in more than half a century, Mrs Merkel aligned Germany closely with the US drive to tackle a range of threats such as global warming, international terrorism and climate change.

Her comments on Iran signalled Germany’s determination to press ahead with a new raft of sanctions against the Tehran regime if, as is now expected, it fails to enter into negotiations on its nuclear programme.

“Zero tolerance needs to be shown when there is a risk of weapons of mass destruction falling, for example, into the hands of Iran and threatening our security,” Mrs Merkel told Congress. “Iran needs to be aware of this, Iran knows our offer but Iran also knows where we draw a line.”

The editors of the Chicago Tribune have encouraged the United States government to support a new round of sanctions against Iran, especially a ban on exporting gasoline to Iran:

The U.S. is reported to be forming a set of much harsher sanctions against Iran, targeting the country’s energy, transportation and financial industries. Good. But Iran is already under several sets of sanctions by the U.S. and U.N. Security Council. These have pinched, but not enough to stop Iran’s nuclear program.

The best option now is a ban on gasoline imports. Even though it produces crude oil, Iran must buy about 40 percent of its gasoline. Any jolt to that supply would have an immediate effect on the streets of Tehran and on every Iranian motorist.

The Iranian people may blame their government. Or they may blame the U.S. and its allies. Either way, Iran’s leaders, already loathed at home, will come under immense new pressure to yield on their nuclear ambitions.

The U.S. and its European allies can’t make a gas embargo stick without help from Russia and China. They’re reluctant. But now’s the time to make the case that an embargo is a better strategy than a military strike on Tehran.

Most of all the members of the Security Council must decide whether their resolutions are proposals in a negotiation or not. If they are not, Iran should not be allowed to to turn them into a negotiation. If they are, clearly the UNSC will need to up the ante.

If it were me, in exchange for 10% of Iran’s enriched uranium I would lift 10% of the sanctions I’d impose on Iran which would include a ban on gasoline exports and a ban on Iranian financial transactions in international banks, in exchange for 20% of Iran’s enriched uranium, I’d lift 20%, and so on. But that’s just me.

However, we need to ask the Russians and the Chinese the question outright: are the resolutions for which they’ve voted merely bargaining points in a negotiation or not?

There’s a fascinating article in Spiegel Online (in English) on “Operation Orchard”, the operation in September 2007 in Syria in which the Israeli air force destroyed what many have termed a “nuclear plant”, what the article calls “Syria’s Al Kibar nuclear reactor”, and the Syrians have characterized as a conventional military facility. Spiegel has interviewed Syrian, Israeli, and American leaders as well as confidential Syrian and Israeli sources to compile a mosaic of espionage, intrigue, assassination, and general international shenanigans.

Was it a nuclear plant, in which scientists were on the verge of completing the bomb? Were North Korean, perhaps even Iranian experts, also working in this secret Syrian facility? When and how did the Israelis learn about the project, and why did they take such a great risk to conduct their clandestine operation? Was the destruction of the Al Kibar complex meant as a final warning to the Iranians, a trial run of sorts intended to show them what the Israelis plan to do if Tehran continues with its suspected nuclear weapons program?

In recent months, SPIEGEL has spoken with key politicians and experts about the mysterious incident in the Syrian desert, including Syrian President Bashar Assad, leading Israeli intelligence expert Ronen Bergman, International Atomic Energy Agency head Mohammed ElBaradei and influential American nuclear expert David Albright. SPIEGEL has also talked with individuals involved in the operation, who have only now agreed to reveal, under conditions of anonymity, what they know.

These efforts have led to an account that, while not solving the mystery in its entirety, at least delivers many pieces of the puzzle. It also offers an assessment of an operation that changed the Middle East and generated shock waves that are still being felt today.

The article has enough suggestions, claims, and innuendos to give nearly anyone food for thought at the very least.

The picture above is a satellite image of the facility that was destroyed.

President Karzai narrowly won a clearly fraudulent election. His main challenger, Abdullah Abdullah, has withdrawn from consideration as a candidate, ruling out a run-off election. That leaves us with an Afghan government of little or no legitimacy, unworthy of our confidence or that of the Afghan people. Classical counter-insurgency strategy requires a government with the support of the people. We don’t have such an ally in Afghanistan.

What next? The Los Angeles Times editors put in their two cents:

The status quo cannot continue. Obama has yet to decide whether he will heed the call of the U.S. commander in Afghanistan, Gen. Stanley A. McChrystal, for up to 40,000 more troops, but he has said he will not walk away from the country altogether. If that’s the case, it seems Obama has no choice but to hold his nose and press on with a weakened ally. Given that, he must push for a national unity government in Kabul to broaden its base of support and, at the same time, help develop a more decentralized administration of a land that has always been a loose collection of tribes and districts. Decentralization would allow the West to spread its resources to regional leaders rather than concentrating them in the hands of Karzai and his clique. Any U.S. strategy for stabilizing Afghanistan and drawing support away from the Taliban depends on a political leadership perceived as legitimate and a government that serves its people.

The editors of the Christian Science Monitor offer a similar prescription with a little more flesh on the bones, proposing five ways for us to move forward:

1. Strongly encourage him [i.e. Karzai] to form a new “unity government” that includes Mr. Abdullah, who on Sunday graciously removed himself from the runoff race. Karzai needs a government with wider appeal and greater credibility if he is to effectively influence the entire country.

Abdullah, who was formerly Karzai’s foreign minister, contributes on both of those counts. He ran the race (and quit it) on an anticorruption message. He hails from the Northern Alliance that helped topple the Taliban (Karzai comes from the dominant southern Pashtun ethnic group).

2. Apply quiet behind-the-scenes pressure on Karzai. The tough-love public criticism of Karzai has worked mostly to ostracise the Afghan president. Sen. John Kerry’s more subdued, but still firm, weekend of persuasion last month produced the desired effect – Karzai’s agreement to a runoff.

3. Washington should move quickly to influence selection of the Kabul government’s new cabinet. Certainly America’s contribution of troops and treasure gives it that right.

Karzai will be tempted to reward friends with high-profile posts, but what matters is competency in governance, especially in three key jobs: defense, interior, and finance. The US has successfully urged competency before – for instance, in backing the current finance minister (and prime minister) of the Palestinian Authority, Salam Fayyad.

4. Shift aid and relationships to local and regional leaders. This point counts as much as the first three combined – probably more. Insurgents do their courting outside Kabul, and the US should, too.

For 1,000 years Afghanistan has been ruled with tribal, decentralized government. Experts suggest a constitutional change that takes some powers from the president and gives them to the parliament (one idea even considers the Swiss model of semi-sovereign cantons).

But the US shouldn’t wait for such a formal change. If insurgents are to be won over (or bought), if aid is to be turned into roads and schools, if trust and a justice system are to be regained – that must happen at the local and regional level. This strategy has the added benefit of a certain independence from Karzai – but it has to be managed carefully so as not to openly insult him.

5. Finally, the US and its allies need to provide the resources and commitment to support good governance and security at the national, provincial, and local levels. For instance, it does no good to train police if the Taliban lures them away with many more times the pay. And once Afghan security forces have been trained, they need their foreign “teachers” to follow up with them on patrol. That’s a people-intensive effort.

While I think that many Americans are tired of the war in Afghanistan and skeptical both of the support of our NATO allies and the confidence of the Obama Administration in the effort, I also think that withdrawing from Afghanistan presents tactical, strategic, legal, and moral problems. I would rather that we had never invaded Afghanistan. I would rather that we would have completed our objectives there by now. However, having invaded and not achieved our objectives I think that we need to find a set of objectives and a strategy for which the American people will at least tolerate a continuing involvement with the country.

If, alternatively, the Obama Administration is insistent on pursuing the old objectives and the stated strategy, it should be fully resourced and engaged in with confidence. It certainly won’t be a classic counter-insurgency strategy.

Columnist Thomas Friedman has put in his vote for what we should do in Afghanistan: Don’t Build Up

It is crunch time on Afghanistan, so here’s my vote: We need to be thinking about how to reduce our footprint and our goals there in a responsible way, not dig in deeper. We simply do not have the Afghan partners, the NATO allies, the domestic support, the financial resources or the national interests to justify an enlarged and prolonged nation-building effort in Afghanistan.

His view is founded in three principles:

1. Whatever happens in Afghanistan must come from the Afghans themselves. We can’t force anything on the Afghans (or Iraqis) that they don’t want themselves.
2. Be patient.
3. The world needs us.
   

   My last guiding principle: We are the world. A strong, healthy and self-confident America is what holds the world together and on a decent path. A weak America would be a disaster for us and the world. China, Russia and Al Qaeda all love the idea of America doing a long, slow bleed in Afghanistan. I don’t.

The short version of my reaction is that I agree.

The longer version of my reaction is that we have a much more difficult challenge ahead in Afghanistan than many seem to be crediting. We need to find a way to continue to provide support to Afghanistan over a long period of time as we did Germany, Japan, and South Korea. I believe that experience suggests that support will only continue as long as we have troops in Afghanistan. Consequently, I believe that we need to find a way to maintain some troops in Afghanistan, albeit fewer than we have now and with a significantly more limited mission than our current forces have.

I welcome my fellow OTB contributors updating this post with their own views on this subject.

Month to date there have been four U. S. casualties in Iraq. Each death remains a tragedy but that’s a far cry from a year ago or two years ago. Fatalities in the Iraqi security forces have declined, too, each month of this year seeing fewer casualties than in the corresponding month of last year. Things are far from quiet in Iraq but are clealry much better than they were and than they might have been. As U. S. casualties ratchet up in Afghanistan, largely proportional to the increasing U. S. forces in Afghanistan, we seem to hear less and less coverage of Iraq.

In today’s column, lest we forget about Iraq entirely, Tom Friedman warns of Iraq’s continuing significance and its strategic importance relative to Afghanistan:

Watching Iraqi politics is like watching a tightrope artist crossing a dangerous cavern. At every step it looks as though he is going to fall into the abyss, and yet, somehow, he continues to wobble forward. Nothing is easy when trying to transform a country brutalized by three decades of cruel dictatorship. It is one step, one election, one new law, at a time. Each is a struggle. Each is crucial.

This next step is particularly important, which is why we cannot let Afghanistan distract U.S. diplomats from Iraq. Remember: Transform Iraq and it will impact the whole Arab-Muslim world. Change Afghanistan and you just change Afghanistan.

I think he’s simultaneously right and wrong. Real change in Iraq in the direction of liberal democracy would have enormous significance. I’m not entirely sure whether that’s what’s happening or whether we’re merely seeing the emergence of Saddam Lite.

And I think that he’s largely wrong about Afghanistan through oversimplification. It is impossible to change Afghanistan at all in isolation. Afghanistan and Pakistan are the Corsican Brothers, each feeling the other’s pain, and their fates are inextricably entwined. I seriously doubt that we can prevail militarily in Afghanistan in the absence of a legitimate, decent government there and that will be impossible without a legitimate, decent government in control of the territory it claims in Pakistan, too. And that, in turn, would have tremendous implications for the entirety of south and central Asia.

And can whatever we see as the desired end state in each of Iraq and Afghanistan be maintained without an ongoing commitment to both countries?

Over at The Glittering Eye I muse in a related vein over the interrelationship between our military and our grand strategy. Is there an intrinsic conflict between nation-building and having the biggest, toughest military in the world? How should we be using our military and what are our interests?

Stephen Coll, president of the New America Foundation, has an article in Foreign Policy making the case for more humble objectives in Afghanistan. In the article he criticizes both the counter-insurgency strategy advocated by Gen. Stanley McChrystal, the commander of U. S. forces in Afghanistan:

To succeed, counterinsurgency approaches require deep, supple, and adaptive understanding of local conditions. And yet, as General McChrystal pointed out in his assessment, since 2001, international forces operating in Afghanistan have “not sufficiently studied Afghanistan’s peoples, whose needs, identities and grievances vary from province to province and from valley to valley.” To succeed, the United States must “redouble efforts to understand the social and political dynamics of…all regions of the country and take action that meets the needs of the people, and insist that [Afghan government] officials do the same.”

and the counter-terrorism strategy advocated recently by Vice President Joe Biden:

There are narrower objections that should be registered about the “counterterrorism-only” or “counterterrorism-mainly” argument. It is probably impractical over a long period of time to wage an intelligence-derived counterterrorism campaign along the Pakistan-Afghan border if a cooperating Afghan government does not have access to the local population; if American forces are not present; and if the Pakistani state has no incentive to cooperate. This is exactly the narrative that unfolded during the 1990s and led to failure on Sept. 11 for the United States.

The article is chock-full of intriguing observations about the situation in Afghanistan and is well worth your attention. I certainly agree with him that we should focus our energies in Afghanistan on objectives we can actually accomplish and that further real American interests. In the light of this I wonder if the bar has not been set too low for Gen. McChrystal? I read Gen. McChrystal’s report as a recommendation for averting defeat. Are they the same as the requirements for achieving success? Or will that require significantly more resources? Gen. McChrystal does say that both more resources and a definite change in strategy are necessary for success:

Success is achievable, but it will not be attained simply by trying harder or “doubling down” on the previous strategy. Additional resources are required, but focusing on force or resource requirements misses the point entirely. The key take away from this assessment is the urgent need for a significant change to our strategy and the way that we think and operate.

and

Resources will not win this war, but under-resourcing could lose it. Resourcing communicates commitment, but we must also balance force levels to enable effective ANSF partnering and provide population security, while avoiding perceptions of coalition dominance. Ideally, the ANSF must lead this fight, but they will not have enough capability in the near-term given the insurgency’s growth rate. In the interim, coalition forces must provide a bridge capability to protect critical segments of the population. The status quo will lead to failure if we wait for the ANSF to grow.

However, I don’t see a commitment in the report that if the general receives what he’s requested that it will achieve the desired outcome. Am I being too critical? Or, as Stephen Coll proposes, should we be seeking more humble objectives in Afghanistan?