Resolving this crisis has taken years, and there’s a reason: a debt crisis has never really been solved this way before.  Here’s Zoe Chace of NPR’s Planet Money team.

[...]

CHACE: Usually, it’s like this: the countries default on their loans – then we talk.

It struck me upon hearing this that yes, that’s true.  The immediate example to me was Mexico in the early 1980s (and then several other Latin American cases that followed suit):  the countries in question basically came out and said one day:  we are suspending loan repayments because we cannot afford to keep paying.  This led to economic crisis (locally and regionally).  Then came the scramble to fix the problem which eventually led to structural adjustment of economies under the auspices of international lending institutions.

The Greek case is different:  instead of going off the cliff and then sending in the rescue crews, the goal here is to find a way to stop form going over the cliff.

Of course, this approach is driven by the fact that Greece is not only in the EU, but part of the Eurozone.   Its partners have every reason to avoid being dragged off the cliff too.

Greece’s parliament has passed a controversial package of austerity measures, demanded by the eurozone and IMF in return for a 130bn-euro ($170bn; £110bn) bailout to avoid default.

[...]

The austerity measures include:

• 15,000 public-sector job cuts
• liberalisation of labour laws
• lowering the minimum wage by 20% from 751 euros a month to 600 euros
• negotiating a debt write-off with banks.

Meanwhile,

The vote came amid some of the worst violence seen in Greece in years.

Protesters outside parliament threw stones and petrol bombs, and police fired tear gas. Several people were injured and buildings were set on fire.

Not only was their rebellion in the streets, but also inside parliament:  “Coalition parties expelled over 40 deputies for failing to back the bill.”

Yesterday, rumors swept the Internet, primarily via Twitter, that the new leader of North Korea had been assassinated in Beijing:

The claim that Kim, supreme leader of North Korea since the death of his father Kim Jong Il in December, had died apparently stemmed from a message sent out by a man who works near the country’s embassy in Beijing.

He posted on Sina Weibo: ‘Downstairs from the office, the cars at the Korean embassy are increasing rapidly, now there are over 30 cars. It’s the first time I’ve seen this situation, did something happen in Korea?’

This seemingly innocuous question, bolstered by other witnesses who saw an unusual number of cars at the embassy, was magnified by the power of internet gossip into a rumour that Kim had been assassinated by gunmen who burst in his bedroom and were subsequently killed by his bodyguards.

Wilder commentators even spun the supposed assassination in to a broader claim that a coup was underway in North Korea which could depose the Kim dynasty, rulers of the country ever since it split with the south in 1948.

But when ABC News asked U.S. officials for confirmation of the assassination rumours, one simply told them, ‘There’s nothing to this.’

Another official said: ‘Our experts are monitoring the situation and we see no abnormal activity on the [Korean] peninsula and nothing that credits that tweet as accurate.’

It was thought that the death of the elder Kim would herald a period of instability, potentially leading to regime change, but those expectations have not been fulfilled.

A less dramatic but equally bizarre explanation for the large number of cars at the North Korean embassy was suggested by Gawker and Chinese news agency Phoenix.

They pointed out that this month would have been the 70th birthday of Kim Jong Il, and a large number of events including tours of China and North Korea are set to mark the anniversary.

It sounds like a totally implausible story, of course. The idea that the leader of a foreign country could be assassinated in his own country’s embassy in the middle of Beijing and the only news about it would be on the Chinese equivalent of Twitter makes no sense at all. And yet, the story started getting repeated. Then, someone set up a fake BBC News account on Twitter yesterday afternoon that send out a “Breaking News” alert confirming Kim’s death. That story ended up getting repeated by thousands of people, and seen by thousands more. And it was all untrue.

Max Fisher offers an explanation for why people might have found a story like this believable despite the questionable sourcing:

The answer may have something to do with how Americans conceive of the difference between open societies, like ours, and closed societies, like those of China and North Korea. If a Western head of state had been assassinated in a neighboring Western capital, the news would saturate the globe within moments. We understand that information doesn’t work the same way in China or North Korea, that news is controlled and its flow regulated. But the Western imagination often sees Chinese and North Korean societies as something akin to George Orwell’s 1984, when the truth is much more complicated.

Information about what happens inside North Korea is, in fact, rare and often inscrutable. Kim Jong Il had been dead for hours and his country officially rudderless when the news finally broke, something that would likely have been impossible in any other country. Key events are rarely understood by the outside world, if we even find out. Last December, a freight train was derailed in a suspected attack; no one outside North Korea knows why or by whom. The hermit kingdom’s bizarre and Orwellian opacity has long fascinated the world. The images out of the country are so bizarre and hard information so scant that there’s little to prevent our imaginations from running wild. And the status of Kim Jong Un’s rule is still so uncertain (is he really in charge or is the military? does he maintain tight control or is the regime nearing collapse?) that we are ready to believe anything.

But China is not North Korea. Though it still sometimes appears that way in the Western conception, the country has transformed since the days of Mao Zedong, when they really were similar. Though the Chinese state is still one of the world’s most repressive, reliably ranking at or near the bottom of every list of countries by civil liberties or basic rights, Chinese society is vibrant and noisy, especially in the capital, where the “assassination” reportedly took place. Individuals may not be allowed to organize, protest, or discuss sensitive events, but they do it anyway, in small ways they expect will be tolerated. If they do any of them too much, they know, the consequences can be brutal. The Communist Party’s hand is heavy enough to prevent mass gatherings in Tienanmen Square, but not to keep hordes of witnesses to an assassination totally silent.

Beijing has almost 20 million people; maybe about half of its Internet users are on Weibo (the rate is 30 percent nationally). Why did only one of those witness the broad-daylight murder of a visiting head-of-state, who presumably would have been plowing through traffic with an enormous entourage? Why didn’t any of the many Western and other foreign reporters scattered across the city either see or hear anything? And why did no one report the massive security shut-down that Beijing’s army-sized police force certainly would have launched across the city?

These are all questions that a Chinese observer would have known to ask before quickly dismissing the story as an obvious fraud. But far-away Western bloggers and their readers, unfamiliar with the locations of China’s red-lines and perhaps a bit confused about the differences between Beijing and Pyongyang, might be willing to believe that Kim Jong Un’s assassination could really go unreported.

So perhaps people need to realize that Mao doesn’t rule China anymore, and that they need to learn a little bit more about Asia.

Greek PM Lucas Papademos has failed to secure the support of his coalition for a raft of new austerity measures, after more than seven hours of talks.

[...]

A statement issued by the prime minister’s office said the aim of the meeting with the troika – representatives from the European Union, the European Central Bank and the International Monetary Fund – was to "conclude the agreement" before Thursday’s meeting of eurozone finance ministers.

This is all part of the ongoing Greek crisis and the ball is now moving to the EU level.

The proximate cause of the current attempts at action is a pending March 20th debt payment deadline.

More on the subject here:  Why Greece won’t go away.

Italian Prime Minister Mario Monti admitted publicly what many have been whispering about: the fight over the eurozone crisis is opening some old wounds. Essentially, Northern Europeans, led by Germany, are angry at what they perceive as sloth in the South while Southern Europeans, particularly those Greece, Italy, and Spain, are resentful of being told what to do by those in the North.

Monti says, “the euro zone crisis has indeed brought about quite a bit of misunderstandings and the re-emergence of old phantoms about prejudices between the North, the South of Europe, and a lot of mutual resentment.” Taking this to its logical conclusion, he observed, “And it is very, very important that we all take this with great attention in order to avoid that something that was meant to be the culminating point of the European construction — namely, the single currency — turns out to be, through psychological negative effects, a factor of disintegration of Europe.”

In my New Atlanticist piece, “Italian PM Warns of European Disintegration From Mutual Resentments,” I commend Monti for speaking the truth. I close:

On the one hand, “Europe” will remain a fantasy so long as differences in cultures which have existed independently for centuries can not be accommodated. On the other, the common currency and deeper political integration can not work if Europeans don’t all play by the same basic sets of rules.

More at the link.

Photo credit: Reuters Pictures.

I speculated last week that, notwithstanding the American public’s rather obvious war wariness,  making the public case for military action against Iran wouldn’t be all that difficult given the three decades of antipathy between the United States and the Islamic Republic that started with the Iranian Hostage Crisis. A new poll from The Hill would seem to confirm that suspicion:

Nearly half of likely voters think the United States should be willing to use military force to prevent Iran from obtaining a nuclear weapon, according to this week’s The Hill Poll.

Forty-nine percent said military force should be used, while 31 percent said it should not and 20 percent were not sure.

Sixty-two percent of likely voters said they were somewhat or very concerned about Iran making a terrorist strike on the United States, while 37 percent said they were not very concerned or not at all concerned about it.

As Ed Morrissey notes, support for the idea of military action against Iran is at majority or near-majority levels across nearly all reported demographic groups:

Among the youngest voting set that would have to disproportionately contribute to that effort (18-39YOs), support is almost exactly equal to the overall survey, 49/30.  In fact, there is almost no difference between any of the three age demos.  Income demos are all in favor of it by majorities or large pluralities; the most supportive are the under-$20K demo (53/32) and $40-60K demo (56/27).  There is no real difference between those with children at home (50/28) and those without (49/32).  Democrats narrowly support the idea (41/37) although self-described liberals (32/42) do not.  In fact, the only real partisan difference in the entire poll comes on those who approve of Barack Obama’s performance.  The more people approve of it, the less likely they are to support the idea of attacking Iran to stop the nuclear weapon.

Of course, if the President making the case for military action at some point in the near future happens to be Barack Obama that last group is likely to come along with everyone else. There will be dissenters, of course, but what numbers like this suggest to me is that the idea of military action against Iran is already so engrained in the American psyche that it’s unlikely that any future President would have to worry about the legacy of the unpopular wars in Iraq or Afghanistan in making their case to the American public for action in Iran.

With the attacks on Syrian civilians seemingly getting worse by the day, the United Nations Security Council took up a resolution that would back efforts by the Arab League to bring an end to the crackdown, an effort that collapsed in failure as both Russia and China exercised their veto power:

UNITED NATIONS — A United Nations Security Council effort to end the violence in Syria collapsed in acrimony and a veto by Russia and China on Saturday, hours after the Syrian military attacked the ravaged city of Homs in what opposition leaders described as the bloodiest government assault in the nearly 11-month-old uprising.

The Security Council voted 13 to 2 in favor of a resolution backing an Arab League peace plan for Syria, but the measure was blocked by Russia and China, which opposed what they saw as a potential violation of Syria’s sovereignty.

Pressure had mounted on the Security Council to act as Syrian opposition leaders said more than 200 people were killed in the attack in Homs, and the White House accused Syria of having “murdered hundreds of Syrian citizens, including women and children.”

While the casualties were impossible to confirm, and were denied by Syria, reports of the bloodshed drew widespread international condemnation, and moved the Security Council toward a vote on an Arab League peace plan, despite new objections by Russia.

President Obama condemned what he called “the Syrian government’s unspeakable assault against the people of Homs,” saying in a statement that President Bashar al-Assad “has no right to lead Syria, and has lost all legitimacy with his people and the international community.”

The French foreign minister, Alain Juppé, said, “The massacre in Homs is a crime against humanity, and those responsible will have to answer for it.”

Protests broke out Saturday at Syrian embassies around the world, including in Egypt, Germany, Greece and Kuwait, and Tunisia expelled Syria’s ambassador there.

Security Council members met Saturday morning to try to resolve disagreements with Russia, Syria’s main ally, which had promised to veto any resolution that could open the way to foreign military intervention or insist on Mr. Assad’s removal.

But the resolution’s sponsors pushed the measure to a vote anyway, virtually daring Russia to exercise its veto and risk mounting international opprobrium for preventing action to stanch the escalating death toll in Syria. In the end, both Russia and China exercised vetoes.

Russia’s last-minute changes appeared to be another attempt to create equivalency between the Syrian government and the armed elements in the opposition, including by removing all the wording that detailed human rights violations by the Assad government.

Arab and Western ambassadors said they had compromised enough to meet the demands of Russia and other skeptics. The resolution that was defeated said that the Council “fully supports” the Arab League plan, which calls for Mr. Assad to cede power to his vice president and a unity government to lead Syria to democratic elections. But specific references to Mr. Assad’s ceding power and calls for a voluntary arms embargo and sanctions had been deleted from the Security Council resolution, and language barring outside military intervention was added.

Sergey V. Lavrov, the Russian foreign minister, said that Moscow still had two objections to the latest revised resolution: that it did not place sufficient blame for the violence on the opposition, and that it unrealistically demanded that the government withdraw its military forces back to their barracks.

If nothing else, this vote makes it plain that international action of any kind in Syria is not going to be nearly as easy to pull of as the Libyan operation was. In that case, the U.S. was able to get Russia and China to abstain from voting rather than exercising their vetoes. That’s clearly not going to happen this time.

Of course, the other side of the equation is what should happen in Syria, or at least what the West should do. International intervention along the lines of what happened in Libya wouldn’t seem to be the answer, especially considering that the Syrians don’t seem to be using air power against civilians and rebelling military elements the way the Libyans did. Instead, they’re engaging in large scale urban warfare in the cities that have been sympathetic to the rebels. That’s likely to be far more difficult to combat from the air, and I seriously doubt that there’s any nation on Earth that would be willing to send ground troops into Syria at this point. Then there’s the unknown factor of how Syria’s terrorist allies in Lebanon might react to outside intervention in Syria. In the long run, the Assad regime is clearly doomed, the question is how long they’re going to be able to hang on and how much damage they’ll be able to do on the way down.

Asked by the interviewer if she thought Egypt should use the Constitutions of other countries as a model, Ginsburg said Egyptians should be “aided by all Constitution-writing that has gone on since the end of World War II.”

“I would not look to the U.S. Constitution, if I were drafting a Constitution in the year 2012. I might look at the Constitution of South Africa,”

First, I would note that it is silly to take a statement given in a conversation tone that is qualified with “I might” and treat it as some ironclad declaration.

Second, while I suppose that one might get one’s patriotic hackles up because she is suggesting that the US Constitution isn’t the very paragon of constitutionalness, a pause for thought ought to disabuse the thoughtful person (yes, I know) of the notion that the US Constitution is an obvious model for other countries to adopt.

One fact that immediately strikes me about the notion that US Constitution ought to be some sort of standard blueprint is that the US Government certainly hasn’t thought so itself over the years.  The US government has had a direct hand (sometimes moreso than others) in the drafting of the Japanese, German, and Iraqi constitutions.  All of these document deviate rather substantially from the US Constitution.

Of course the reason this is the case is that any given political circumstances may require very different institutional needs.  Some countries have good reason to adopt federalism, others do not.  Likewise specific US constitutional structures and practices such as presidentialism (i.e. separation of powers), bicameralism, lifetime tenure of judges, the electoral college, etc. may or not be good ideas for a specific situation (or, indeed, good ideas at all*).  These are all factors that require thought and design for a specific circumstance, not rote copying.

We also have to remember that one of the most remarkable aspects of the US Constitution is that it is arguably the first constitution of its kind.**  Its longevity alone, with some bumps in the road, is amazing.  There is much good to say about the document, but going first means some wandering in the dark and guesswork.  There has been a lot of institutional innovation and understanding that has developed over the last two and a quarter centuries.   Put it this way:  Henry Ford may have pioneered mass production and automobile construction, but there are better modern examples to examine for someone starting out to build a new factory now.  While some of Ford’s principles no doubt are still relevant, we understand them better after a century of use.

I am guessing, by the way, that many people who have substantial pride in the US Constitution and who bristled at Ginsburg’s suggestion probably haven’t even read the entirety of the document (let alone having done so multiple times).  Beyond that, the odds that they have read the South African constitution (or really, any other constitution whatsoever) has to be almost zero.  One aspect of this conversation that truly irritates me is that is founded not on any kind of rational, empirical, scholarly understanding of the questions at hand, but rather on a purely jingoistic kneejerk reaction.

This topic is rather near and dear to me, in fact, as not only is the area of institutional design in democracies (which is reflected rather heavily in constitution writing) my major area of study for a couple of decades now, I am currently in the middle (indeed, well beyond the middle) of a co-authored work that touches on this very question of comparing constitutional order across democratic cases (including, oddly enough, the US and South Africa).  The honest truth is that there are any number of institutional innovations that have taken place over the last two centuries, and there are more models than just ours.  Further, the very nature of the US Constitution is that it is a fairly vague document.  As such it actually makes for a poor model as a result.  It does not, for example, actually tell us all that much about the functions of the Supreme Court.  Most more recent constitutions are far more fully developed on a host of issues, including basic rights.  As models go there actually are better examples than our own (given that a more iterated constitution would make, by definition, a more complete template).  But to know this requires an interest in knowledge and analysis coupled with actually, you know, reading other constitutions.

This all reminds me a quotation from Seymour Martin Lipset:  “…it is impossible to understand a country without seeing how it varies from others.  Those who know only one country know no country.”

Too many American know the US (and poorly at that, often) and think that they know all they need to know to make broad, global political judgments when in fact they do not have enough information to adequately evaluate the US, let to make statements about the rest of the world.

It also reminds me of something I wrote earlier today in another comment thread:  The US is, and has been for some time, one of the most powerful countries in all of human history and yet we can be a strangely insecure lot.

*The electoral college, as I have argued before is an ad hoc mess that does not even work as intended and by no means should be copied by anyone else.  I am also not so sure that lifetime judicial appointments are a good idea.

**The Articles of Confederation was actually more an agreement amongst 13 sovereign states and therefore not, strictly speaking, a national constitution.  Prior to the US Constitution the closest example would be state constitutions written in 1776 after the Declaration.  Previous famous document, such a Magna Carta, were not constitutions.  For those interested in this topic I would highly recommend:    Elkins, et al.  The Endurance of National Constitutions.  The book is written to an academic audience, and gets a but political science-y in places, but I think it is a pretty accessible text.

Andrew Exum notes that most analysts who call for military intervention–Syria is the particular case, but I’d argue it’s true in almost all cases–fail to specify the particulars.

I’m reminded of a line from Top Gun in which Goose exclaims, “Come on, Mav, do some of that pilot shit!”

On the one hand, it’s not a particularly useful bit of advice. The pilot is well aware of a need to do some of what it is he does and needs no additional encouragement. The problem is making a choice under the worst kind of  stress–when making the wrong one will get you dead.

On the other hand, it’s a perfectly understandable thing for Goose to say: he’s under stress, too, and perfectly helpless in dealing with the situation.

With respect to bad things happening across the world being shown on Western television screens,Don Snow, my major professor in grad school, coined “the Do-Something Syndrome.” Like Goose, they’re horrified with a situation and want America to do something–anything–to fix it. Naturally, that “something” is often coming to the rescue with our powerful military.

The problem, even aside from niceties like national sovereignty, the rule of law, and regional spillover effects, is that military force is very seldom the ideal tool to deal with the situation at hand. In the particular case of Syria, it’s not at all clear what form intervention would take. We could set up a no-fly zone and take out bad guys shooting at civilians–but we’d probably kill as many civilians as we’d save. We could send in ground forces. But to do what? A regime change? And then what? As we’ve seen recently, taking out a Ba’athist regime doesn’t necessarily mean the end to violence.

Exum adds,

A broader problem here, as I was discussing with both Adam Elkus and Robert Caruso, is that regional specialists rarely understand military capabilities and options well enough to make an argument for or against, and those who understand military capabilities and options rarely understand the regional dynamics well enough to make an argument for or against.

This is indeed problematic. I’m a former Army officer with a PhD specializing in national security policy and some 25 years experience in the field. I’ve got a reasonable clue about the nature of the military problem from both the 10,000 feet and the platoon view. But I’ve got only a tangential understanding of the nature of the opposition forces in Syria or the dynamics likely to play out if all the al-Assads were suddenly terminated.

Hardly a day goes by it seems without a news article, column, or statement from a prominent leader on the likelihood of war with Iran. Yesterday’s example was this column by David Ignatius:

Defense Secretary Leon Panetta has a lot on his mind these days, from cutting the defense budget to managing the drawdown of U.S. forces in Afghanistan. But his biggest worry is the growing possibility that Israel will attack Iran over the next few months.

Panetta believes there is a strong likelihood that Israel will strike Iran in April, May or June — before Iran enters what Israelis described as a “zone of immunity” to commence building a nuclear bomb. Very soon, the Israelis fear, the Iranians will have stored enough enriched uranium in deep underground facilities to make a weapon — and only the United States could then stop them militarily.

Mr. Ignatius is an opinion writer (it says so right below his name). His column does not offer an explicit opinion, an odd choice for an opinion writer. I do not know whether he has an opinion on the subject or has some reason to avoid taking a stand.

In the months before the U. S. invasion of Iraq, there were complaints, too few, unfortunately, of a “drumbeat to war”. I believe that columns of this sort are just that sort of drumbeat. By not taking an explicit position against a U. S. attack on Iran, a column like this renders the idea more acceptable, part of the prevailing wisdom. As I read Mr. Ignatius’s columns, he is the doyen of the prevailing wisdom.

I do have an opinion. I do not believe that, in the absence of a direct attack by Iran on the U. S. or U. S. interests, the U. S. should bomb or invade Iran. I know of no evidence that Iran is preparing to attack the United States. An attack by the U. S. in the absence of such evidence such an attack would be preventive in nature. Preventive war is immoral.

Furthermore, our on-the-ground intelligence in Iran is notoriously bad. I find it highly unlikely that limited strikes against presumed nuclear weapons development sites will do more than slow a nuclear weapons development program by more than a few years and it will certainly incentivize such a program. It also might rally the people to the present regime, very much the opposite of what we might wish to happen.

Finally, Iran is not Afghanistan or Iraq. Remember what Ralph Waldo Emerson wrote: if you strike at a king you must kill him.

I invite my colleagues at OTB to update this post with their own opinions on the subject. Commenters, weigh in in the comments. Please keep your remarks as succinct and dispassionate as I have attempted to keep mine.

UPDATE (James Joyner): Longtime readers will know that I oppose military intervention in Iran to prevent their acquisition of a nuclear weapon. Given the regime’s enmity toward the United States and history of promulgating terrorist violence  against the United States and its allies, I have no moral objections to doing so. Rather, I think there are no politically acceptable military solutions to the problem. Further, I’m not entirely convinced that an Iranian regime with a handful of nuclear weapons even constitutes a particularly significant threat to the United States.

Among people whose views on the matter I respect, few think we can significantly disrupt Iran’s nuclear drive from the air. The most notable exception is Chuck Wald, who made his case in an August 2009 WSJ op-ed. But even he allows that it would set of a perpetual game of cat and mouse rather than being a permanent solution.

We could, of course, follow an air attack with a ground invasion, decapitate the regime, and establish a long term occupation aimed at dismantling the nuclear program and installing a more friendly government. That option, however, is not only not politically viable at home but would almost surely create ripple effects in the region that would leave us less secure than we’d be if we just let Iran alone.

Finally, the notion that a nuclear Iran would pose some sort of existential threat to the United States–or even Israel–seems far-fetched. While the notion that the ayatollahs are a bunch of madmen eager for martyrdom may have been plausible 30 years ago, they’ve certainly demonstrated in the interim that they’re rational actors interested in long term survival. Frankly,  we’ve had some really bad actors in charge of significant nuclear arsenals over the years. Joe Stalin. Mao Zedong. Kim Jong Il. Not to mention the unstable morass that is Pakistan. None has ever launched a nuclear attack on their enemies.

Indeed, while my strong preference would be that Iran not get nukes, there’s an argument to be made that being a possessor nation would actually make them less threatening simply because they’d feel less threatened. Right now, they have to live under the constant specter of an Israeli, American, or Arab attack. As North Korea demonstrated, it’s better to be the nuclear end of the axis of evil than the non-nuclear end. And, as Libya demonstrated, it’s probably not a good idea to give up your nuclear program for a bag of magic beans.

Update (Doug Mataconis): I generally agree with James and Dave on this issue. Absent an attack or direct threat to the United States, or vital American interests, I see no justification for military action against Iran. Not only should our experiences in Iraq  and elsewhere educate us on this regard, but the rather obvious potential consequences of war should cause anyone in the “Bomb Iran” crowd to pause before pumping their fist in victory. Increased terrorism, threats to shipping in the Persian Gulf, and a massive oil spike are only the most obvious unintended consequences of military action, any one of which would turn an “easy” military strike into something that has long term consequences for the region and the world.

There are three dangers that we need to be aware of as we get closer to what seems like a final decision point. First, the antipathy toward Iran in the United States that goes back some three decades makes it far too easy for pro-war advocates to whip up war fervor among the public. Second, Iran itself seems intent on acting in a manner that provokes its enemies. Barring inspectors, war games in the Straits of Hormuz, and apparently plotting terrorism inside the United States are just a few of the actions we’ve seen most recently that seem guaranteed to help raise tensions to a tripwire level very quickly. Finally, this decision may not be entirely in our control. Israel is likely to strike out if it feels it has no other choice, and that is likely to lead to a wider conflict. So far, we’ve been successfully in convincing the Israelis to calm down vis a vis Iran but we may be nearing the point where those assurances aren’t going to be good enough. At that point, we may have war whether we want it or not.

My latest for The Atlantic, “Why Obama Is Right to Withdraw From Afghanistan Early,” has been posted. The lede describes a paradox: Everything the critics say about the decision is right–and so is the decision.

The Obama administration’s acceleration of its Afghanistan withdrawal deadline to 2013, a year earlier than planned, is a break with America’s commitment to its NATO and Afghan allies, an abandonment of a mission Obama deemed “essential” in his 2008 campaign, and kills any chances of negotiating an acceptable settlement with the Taliban. It’s also the right thing to do.

The next few paragraphs lay out in brutal detail what an abrupt turnabout this is from the NATO policy that Obama extracted through heavy arm twisting a mere 14 months ago, his Afghanistan goals as laid out in the West Point speech, and his campaign rhetoric about this being the “necessary” war that was derailed by the Iraq distraction. We’ve simultaneously undercut our allies and strengthened the hand of the Taliban. And yet:

[T]he alternative is to continue getting people killed — not to mention inadvertently killing innocents — in a fight we can’t win.

[...]

It’s become painfully obvious in recent months that the governments in both Kabul and Islamabad are, to put it mildly, less than reliable allies. There’s simply no reason to think staying another year is somehow going to turn things around.

Whether NATO’s goals are achievable with unlimited time and resources is debatable. It’s also moot. Most of our allies were going to have, at most, a token force in Afghanistan through the end of 2014. They were there largely at America’s urging and they’ll be happy to leave.

[...]

As with many other Obama foreign policy decisions, one might have wished for a better rollout. Consultation with our NATO allies and partners on the matter would have been good form. And, after a more than a decade of fighting, a presidential speech rather than a casual announcement by the defense secretary would have been more fitting.

Ultimately, though, hastening the day Americans stop dying for a lost cause is the right call.

Much more at the link.

Secretary of Defense Leon Panetta announced this afternoon that the timetable for U.S. withdrawal from Afghanistan is being accelerated:

BRUSSELS — In a major milestone toward ending a decade of war in Afghanistan, Defense Secretary Leon E. Panetta said on Wednesday that American forces would step back from a combat role there as early as mid-2013, more than a year before all American troops are scheduled to come home.

Mr. Panetta cast the decision as an orderly step in a withdrawal process long planned by the United States and its allies, but his comments were the first time that the United States had put a date on stepping back from its central role in the war. The defense secretary’s words reflected the Obama administration’s eagerness to bring to a close the second of two grinding ground wars it inherited from the Bush administration.

Promising the end of the American combat mission in Afghanistan next year would also give Mr. Obama a certain applause line in his re-election stump speech this fall.

Mr. Panetta said no decisions had been made about the number of American troops to be withdrawn in 2013, and he made clear that substantial fighting lies ahead. “It doesn’t mean that we’re not going to be combat-ready; we will be, because we always have to be in order to defend ourselves,” he told reporters on his plane on his way to a NATO meeting in Brussels, where Afghanistan is to be a central focus.

The United States has some 90,000 troops in Afghanistan, but 22,000 of them are due home by this fall. There has been no schedule set for the pace of the withdrawal of the 68,000 American troops who will remain, only that all are to be out by the end of 2014.

Mr. Panetta offered no details of what stepping back from combat would mean, saying only that the troops would move into an “advise-and-assist” role to Afghanistan’s security forces. Such definitions are typically murky, particularly in a country like Afghanistan, where American forces are spread widely among small bases across the desert, farmland and mountains, and where the native security forces have a mixed record of success at best.

The defense secretary offered the withdrawal of the United States from Iraq as a model. American troops there eventually pulled back to large bases and left the bulk of the fighting to the Iraqis.

This isn’t necessarily a surprise, of course. The President had previously announced that American forces would be out of the country by 2014, and there has been pressure from other participants in the NATO mission such as France to bring the mission to an end as soon as possible. Moreover, the war itself remains as unpopular here at home as it has been for a long time. Add into this the increasing tensions with Pakistan ever since the raid that got Osama bin Laden and last year’s mistaken drone strike that killed Pakistani soldiers, and this is probably the wisest decision at this point.

The BBC is reporting on a leaked NATO report claiming that elements of Pakistani intelligence are directly aiding the Taliban in Afghanistan even as the U.S.-led NATO forces are fighting them:

The Taliban in Afghanistan are being directly assisted by Pakistani security services, according to a secret Nato report seen by the BBC.

The leaked report, derived from thousands of interrogations, claims the Taliban remain defiant and have wide support among the Afghan people.

A BBC correspondent says the report is painful reading for international forces and the Afghan government.

(…)

The BBC’s Quentin Sommerville in Kabul says the report – on the state of the Taliban – fully exposes for the first time the relationship between the ISI and the Taliban.

The report is based on material from 27,000 interrogations with more than 4,000 captured Taliban, al-Qaeda and other foreign fighters and civilians.

It notes: “Pakistan’s manipulation of the Taliban senior leadership continues unabatedly”.

It says that Pakistan is aware of the locations of senior Taliban leaders.

“Senior Taliban representatives, such as Nasiruddin Haqqani, maintain residences in the immediate vicinity of ISI headquarters in Islamabad,” it said.

It quotes a senior al-Qaeda detainee as saying: “Pakistan knows everything. They control everything. I can’t [expletive] on a tree in Kunar without them watching.”

“The Taliban are not Islam. The Taliban are Islamabad.”

Pakistani official are not surprisingly dismissing the report as “old wine in an even older bottle”:

“We can disregard this as a potentially strategic leak,” [Pakistani Foreign Minister Hina Rabbani Khar] said, adding that Pakistan and Afghanistan should stop blaming each other for cross-border problems.

“These claims have been made many, many times. Pakistan stands behind any initiative that the Afghan government takes for peace,” she said. “We have no hidden agenda in Afghanistan.

“We consider any threat to Afghanistan’s independence and sovereignty as a threat to Pakistan’s existence.”

For their part, NATO officials are saying that conclusions should not be drawn from the report given that the source of much of the information contained therein came from highly motivated extremists:

KABUL, Afghanistan — A spokesman for the NATO-led coalition on Wednesday confirmed the existence of a report that summarizes the views of Taliban detainees, who claim that they are winning the war thanks to cooperation from some Afghan government officials and soldiers and who say their movement is controlled by Pakistan’s intelligence service.

But the official, Lt. Col. Jimmie E. Cummings of the International Security Assistance Force, disputed accounts of the NATO report that suggested the alliance’s analysts accepted the Taliban views as valid.

“This document aggregates the comments of Taliban detainees in a captive environment without considering the validity of or motivation behind their reflections,” Colonel Cummings said, in an unusually detailed rebuttal of accounts of the classified report’s contents. “Any conclusions drawn from this would be questionable at best.”

(…)

NATO’s response indicated it was more concerned at suggestions that Afghan officials and soldiers were demoralized and expected a Taliban victory once coalition troops pull out than about the claims of Pakistani collaboration.

“It is important not to draw conclusions based on Taliban comments or musings,” Colonel Cummings said. “These detainees include some of the most motivated and ruthless of the insurgents who are inspired to play up their success. It is what they want us to believe they think.”

“We also dispute the idea that somehow the Afghan national security forces might be working with the Taliban. Many dedicated patriotic Afghan security force members have lost their lives defending Afghanistan from insurgents.”

This is all well-taken, of course. However, given the other evidence we’ve seen over the years linking Pakistani actors to the Taliban and apparently al Qaeda, would it really be all that surprising if this was true?

The jobless rate in the 17 countries that use the single currency was 10.4% in December, unchanged from November’s figure which was revised up from 10.3%.

Some 16.5 million people were out of work in the eurozone in December, up 751,000 on the year before.

The highest unemployment rate remains in Spain (22.9%), while the lowest is in Austria (4.1%).

Unemployment has been rising throughout 2011, as the debt crisis in the region has continued. In December 2010, the unemployment rate in the euro area was 10%.

Unfortunately, the trend is currently in the wrong direction.

Overall EU unemployment (27 countries) is 9.9% in December.