Newshoggers.com

By Steve Hynd

I'm not the only one to worry that that the gap between COIN theory and COIN practise will cost both lives and dollars. On paper, "people centric counter insurgency" looks great - so great that some interventionists see it as giving a whole new lease of life to the idea of successful colonialism. But the concept of winning hearts and minds keeps hitting up against an institutional aversion to U.S. combat deaths in the form of devastating airstrikes on civilians; the notion of targeting terrorists through better intelligence hits up against unchecked $5,000 bounty payments, indefinite detention and torture for the crime of "walking while Moslem"; and reconstruction efforts hit up against rampant corruption, bribery of even military officers and an institutional aversion to detailling soldiers as oversight beancounters. And the trouble with COIN is that it is "whole war" theory - if one bit doesn't work, you as often as not might as well not have bothered.

Today there's yet another indication that the gap between theory and practise is a vast chasm, unlikely to be meaningfully bridged anytime soon despite Gate's pro-COIN budget. This time, from the Government Accountability Office. It's entitled "Actions Needed to Improve Oversight and Interagency Coordination for the Commander’s Emergency Response Program in Afghanistan" (PDF) and slams the military for underresourced, inadequate oversight of reconstruction contracts worth billions.

Although DOD has used CERP to fund projects that it believes significantly benefit the Afghan people, it faces significant challenges in providing adequate management and oversight because of an insufficient number of trained personnel. GAO has frequently reported that inadequate numbers of management and oversight personnel hinders DOD's use of contractors in contingency operations. GAO’s work also shows that high-performing organizations use data to make informed decisions about current and future workforce needs. DOD has not conducted an overall workforce assessment to identify how many personnel are needed to effectively execute CERP. Rather, individual commanders determine how many personnel will manage and execute CERP. Personnel at all levels, including headquarters and unit personnel that GAO interviewed after they returned from Afghanistan or who were in Afghanistan in November 2008, expressed a need for more personnel to perform CERP program management and oversight functions. Due to a lack of personnel, key duties such as performing headquarters staff assistance visits to help units improve contracting procedures and visiting sites to monitor project status and contractor performance were either not performed or inconsistently performed. Per DOD policy, DOD personnel should receive timely and effective training to enable performance to standard during operations. However, key CERP personnel at headquarters, units, and provincial reconstruction teams received little or no training prior to deployment which commanders believed made it more difficult to properly execute and oversee the program. Also, most personnel responsible for awarding and overseeing CERP contracts valued at $500,000 or less received little or no training prior to deployment and, once deployed, received a 1-hour briefing, which did not provide detailed information on the individual's duties. As a result, frequent mistakes occurred, such as the omission of key clauses from contracts, which slowed the project approval process. As GAO has reported in the past, poorly written contracts and statements of work can increase DOD’s cost risk and could result in payment for projects that do not meet project goals or objectives.

While mechanisms exist to facilitate coordination, DOD and USAID lack information that would provide greater visibility on all U.S. government development projects. DOD and USAID generally coordinate projects at the headquarters and unit level as well as through military-led provincial reconstruction teams which include USAID representatives. In addition, in November 2008, USAID, DOD and the Department of State began participating in an interagency group composed of senior U.S. government civilians and DOD personnel in Afghanistan to enhance planning and coordination of development plans and related projects. However, complete project information is lacking, because DOD and USAID use different databases. USAID has been tasked to develop a common database and is coordinating with DOD to do so, but development is in the early stages and goals and milestones have not been established. Without clear goals and milestones, it is unclear how progress will be measured or when it will be completed.

Striped of the government-speak: the military is spending billions in Afghanistan on projects it doesn't even know the status of, and could care less. It's deja vu all over again. In Iraq, oversight was so awful that entire big-rig vehicles went missing, the police academy had to be rebuilt from scratch and the US embassy ended up years late and millions over budget. Now, years later, the same mistakes are being made. And like Iraq, the primary benefactors are US-based companies, not Afghans. As expert Anand Gopal recently explained in an interview:

All of the problems that existed in Iraq--fraud, lack of oversight, backroom dealing, etc.--exist here, and possibly to an even greater degree.

While the world is mired in an economic crisis, Afghanistan is one place where business is booming--if you're foreigner or high-level government official. It is astonishingly easy to land a contract if you have the right connections. If you have any expertise in law, finance, engineering, governance, education, health care, etc.--or even if you just pretend to--you can take home a six-figure salary as a consultant.

Much of the U.S. aid and development programs here bypass the central government. While some feel that this weakens the authority of the state, this most likely wouldn't be an issue if the money was actually spent constructively--since the central government would only stand to gain from the economic development of the countryside.

The real problem is that most of the money spent here ends right back in American coffers, not in Afghanistan. This is something that deeply upsets Afghans.

The GAO sets out the consequences clearly enough:

The expected surge in troops and expected increase in funding for Afghanistan heightens the need for an adequate number of trained personnel to execute and oversee CERP. With about $1 billion worth of CERP funds already spent to develop Afghanistan, it is crucial that individuals administering and executing the program are properly trained to manage all aspects of the program including management and oversight of the contractors used. If effective oversight is not conducted, DOD is at risk of being unable to verify the quality of contractor performance, track project status, or ensure that the program is being conducted in a manner consistent with guidance. Without such assurances, DOD runs the risk of wasting taxpayer dollars, squandering opportunities to positively influence the Afghan population and diminishing the effectiveness of a key program in the battle against extremist groups including the Taliban.

Costing not just dollars galore, but also American and Afghan lives.

By Steve Hynd

Political rhetoric avoids inconvenient facts, again. From the WaPo, via Robert Dreyfuss, a report on a study by a joint panel of US and Russian scientists who concluded the "imminent threat" of a nuclear Iran is a chimera:

The U.S.-Russian team also judged that it would be more than five years before Iran is capable of building both a nuclear warhead and a missile capable of carrying it over long distances. And if Iran attempted such an attack, the experts say, it would ensure its own destruction.

"The missile threat from Iran to Europe is thus not imminent," the 12-member technical panel concludes in a report produced by the EastWest Institute, an independent think tank based in Moscow, New York and Belgium.

...The year-long study brought together six senior technical experts from both the United States and Russia to assess the military threat to Europe from Iran's nuclear and missile programs. The report's conclusions were reviewed by former defense secretary William J. Perry, among others, before being presented to national security adviser James L. Jones and Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov.

The report acknowledges dramatic technological gains by Iran, and it predicts that the country could probably build a simple nuclear device in one to three years, if it kicked out U.N. inspectors and retooled its uranium-processing plants to make weapons-grade enriched uranium. Another five years would be needed to build a warhead that would fit on one of Iran's missiles, the panel says. U.S. intelligence agencies have made similar predictions; Israel maintains that Iran could build a bomb in as little as eight months.

The U.S.-Russian experts say Iran faces limits in developing ballistic missiles that could someday carry nuclear warheads...

As a result, the missiles have inherent weaknesses stemming from such aged technology, despite some improvements in their range, the report states. Moreover, the country lacks "the infrastructure of research institutions, industrial plants, or the scientists and engineers that are needed to make substantial improvements."

They conclude that it would take Iran at least another six to eight years to produce a missile with enough range to reach Southern Europe and that only illicit foreign assistance or a concerted and highly visible, decade-long effort might produce the breakthroughs needed for a nuclear-tipped missile to threaten the United States. [All emphasis mine - S]

Note that key phrase "if it kicked out U.N. inspectors and retooled its uranium-processing plants to make weapons-grade enriched uranium". Iran has shown absolutely no signs of doing either - and in the meantime all their uranium stock and enrichment facilities are subject to 24/7 monitoring by the IAEA. The clock on that entirely hypothetical 6-8 year nuclear missile program isn't even ticking yet.

As far as anyone, including US intelligence, can see Iran's nuclear program is currently entirely civilian and thus something it is allowed by right under the NPT. So what's with Clinton, Obama, Panetta and Hill Democrats joining with the right's bloodthirsty hawks in talking about the urgent need to stop an Iranian nuclear weapons program that doesn't, in fact, exist?

Sanity, please?

Commentary By Ron Beasley

The current economic mess is as much the result of too much credit as creative financial instruments.  I got my first national credit card in the mid 70s.  I got it because I had a steady work history for several years and had payed off couple of two year car loans.  I had money in both my checking and savings accounts.  Twenty years later my sons were in college, had never had a steady job but were being bombarded with pre-approved credit card applications.  In spite of my warnings they both took full advantage of those offers and found themselves in financial distress early in their lives. 

So why did this happen?  Beginning with Ronald Reagan we began to see a steady decline and the major driving force of the US economy - the middle class.  Their disposable income declined but US corporations still needed customers.  The solution was easy credit.  As we are finding out now that couldn't be sustained. 

So what we need is a middle class with more disposable income and less credit.  This will be a success if it reduces the amount of consumer credit available.

 Credit Card Industry Aims to Profit From Sterling Payers

Credit cards have long been a very good deal for people who pay their bills on time and in full. Even as card companies imposed punitive fees and penalties on those late with their payments, the best customers racked up cash-back rewards, frequent-flier miles and other perks in recent years.

Now Congress is moving to limit the penalties on riskier borrowers, who have become a prime source of billions of dollars in fee revenue for the industry. And to make up for lost income, the card companies are going after those people with sterling credit.

Banks are expected to look at reviving annual fees, curtailing cash-back and other rewards programs and charging interest immediately on a purchase instead of allowing a grace period of weeks, according to bank officials and trade groups.

“It will be a different business,” said Edward L. Yingling, the chief executive of the American Bankers Association, which has been lobbying Congress for more lenient legislation on behalf of the nation’s biggest banks. “Those that manage their credit well will in some degree subsidize those that have credit problems.”

I don't often agree with Fausta but she gets it right here, pay cash then.

I’m one of the people who pay their entire credit card balance in full every month.

Here’s what I’ll do if/when credit cards charge interest immediately:

pay cash

Cash. What a concept.

A great concept for everyone.  Now Fausta would not agree with this but the explosion in credit concealed the failure of supply side economics.  Growth is the result of demand and the only way demand was maintained as the middle class continued to slide was credit.  Less credit will force a reevaluation of supply side economics.  If the economy is to continue to grow more not less money must find it's way into the hands of the customers.  Continued off shoring to save labor costs will only destroy demand.

Less credit is good - Pay Cash.  Now loans for housing and automobiles will still be necessary but what's wrong with requiring that people prove their responsibility by saving for a few years so they have a 10 or even 20 percent down payment.  That will of course require that people have some disposable income to save. 

By Steve Hynd

The headline comes via Andy Worthington, who notes a London Times article on how detainee attitudes have soured since their intial euphoria at Obama's election. Andy goes on to note that, in the 115 days of Obama's presidency and despite the rhetoric of closing Gitmo for good, only two prisoners have been released: Binyam Mohammed and now Lakhdar Boumediene. Twenty-one other prisoners cleared for release by the courts are still incarcerated. Andy writes that "both President Obama and Attorney General Eric Holder have failed to turn their words into actions" and continues:

As ever, the Obama administration needs to show that it has been listening to officials in the intelligence agencies who have been stating, for many years, that no more than a few dozen prisoners had any meaningful connection to al-Qaeda, and that, with the exception of most, or all of the 14 “high-value detainees” transferred to Guantánamo in September 2006, none “could possibly be called a leader or senior operative of al-Qaeda,” and to Lawrence Wilkerson, Colin Powell’s former Chief of Staff, who recently stated that “no more than a dozen or two of the detainees” had any worthwhile intelligence.

Obama and Holder also need to listen to the judges who, little by little, and despite willful obstruction by the Justice Department, are, as Judge Gladys Kessler demonstrated in the case of Alla Ali Bin Ali Ahmed, destroying the cases against the majority of the prisoners, for one simple reason. In the absence of any knowledge about them when they first came into US custody (because they were mostly bought from the US military’s Afghan and Pakistani allies, because the military was prohibited from screening them in Afghanistan to ascertain whether they were combatants or civilians, and because the Bush administration equated Taliban foot soldiers with al-Qaeda terrorists) the cases against them are, for the most part, built on a web of lies produced by prisoners who were tortured, coerced or bribed into making false confessions, and on a “mosaic” of intelligence that is based on second- or third-hand hearsay, guilt by association and unsupportable suppositions.

That would be logical, yes - but then partisan politics and the Democrat's urge to cave gets involved.

President Barack Obama's allies in the Senate will not provide funds to close the Guantanamo Bay prison next January, a top Democratic official said Tuesday.

With debate looming on Obama's spending request to cover military and diplomatic operations in Iraq and Afghanistan, the official says Democrats will deny the Pentagon and Justice Department $80 million to relocate Guantanamo's 241 detainees. [...]

It appears to be a tactical retreat. Once the administration develops a plan to close the facility, congressional Democrats are likely to revisit the topic, provided they are satisfied there are adequate safeguards.

As Steve Benen writes, the notion that closing Gitmo would be "putting terrorists in U.S. "neighborhoods," as Republicans have spun it, was always absurd. But the Dems caved anyway, because they felt that spin would lose them votes.

I'm told by an insider that the White House plan is still to close Gitmo no later than January next year, but that no-one should expect "we'll close the prison" to mean "we'll release the prisoners who are found innocent".

Commentary By Ron Beasley

Torture in general and water boarding specifically are good for one thing - false confessions.  There has been a lot of talk that Dick Cheney forced the GITMO interrogators to use torture to find a tie between Saddam and al-Qaida.  The MSM has been silent on this but this McClatchy article spells it out.

Cheney said in 2004 Gitmo detainees revealed Iraq-al Qaida link

The head of the Criminal Investigation Task Force at Guantanamo from 2002-2005 confirmed to McClatchy that in late 2002 and early 2003, intelligence officials were tasked to find, among other things, Iraq-al Qaida ties, which were a central pillar of the Bush administration's case for its March 2003 invasion of Iraq.

"I'm aware of the fact that in late 2002, early 2003, that (the alleged al Qaida-Iraq link) was an interest on the intelligence side," said retired Army Lt. Col. Brittain Mallow, a former military criminal investigator. "That was something they were tasked to look at."

He said he was unaware of the origins of the directive, but a former senior U.S. intelligence official has told McClatchy that Cheney's and former Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld's offices were demanding that information in 2002 and 2003. The official, who wasn't authorized to speak publicly on the matter, requested anonymity.

During the same period, two alleged senior al Qaida operatives in CIA custody were waterboarded repeatedly — Abu Zubaydah at least 83 times and Khalid Sheik Mohammed at least 183 times.

A 2004 Senate Intelligence Committee report said that the two were questioned about the relationship between al Qaida and Iraq, and that both denied knowing of one.

A U.S. Army psychiatrist, Maj. Paul Burney, told the Army Inspector General's office in 2006 that during the same period, interrogators at Guantanamo were under pressure to produce evidence of al Qaida-Iraq ties, but were unable to do so.

"The more frustrated people got in not being able to establish that link . . . there was more and more pressure to resort to measures that might produce more immediate results," Burney said, according excerpts of an interview published in a declassified Senate Armed Services Committee report released on April 22.

But it wasn't just GITMO:

One al Qaida detainee, Ibn al Sheikh al Libi, claimed that terrorist operatives were sent to Iraq for chemical and biological weapons training, but he was in CIA custody, not at Guantanamo.

Moreover, he recanted his assertions, some of them allegedly made under torture while he was being interrogated in Egypt.

"No postwar information has been found that indicates CBW training occurred, and the detainee who provided the key prewar reporting about this training recanted his claims after the war," a September 2006 Senate Intelligence Committee report said.

Although the Defense Intelligence Agency questioned it at the time, former President George W. Bush cited al Libi's claim in an October 2002 address, and former Secretary of State Colin Powell used in his February 2003 speech to the United Nations.

A Libyan newspaper last week reported that al Libi committed suicide in a Libyan jail.

Well at least Cheney/Bush administration used torture for what it's good for - to obtain false confessions/intelligence.

By BJ Bjornson

A pretty good article in the Washington Post regarding the high cost of being poor. They leave out the real biggie of health care, which costs those without insurance far more than what those with insurance pay for the same services, but they do a decent job of noting a lot of the day-to-day costs that come from not having enough money.

Like food: You don't have a car to get to a supermarket, much less to Costco or Trader Joe's, where the middle class goes to save money. You don't have three hours to take the bus. So you buy groceries at the corner store, where a gallon of milk costs an extra dollar.

A loaf of bread there costs you $2.99 for white. For wheat, it's $3.79. The clerk behind the counter tells you the gallon of leaking milk in the bottom of the back cooler is $4.99. She holds up four fingers to clarify. The milk is beneath the shelf that holds beef bologna for $3.79. A pound of butter sells for $4.49. In the back of the store are fruits and vegetables. The green peppers are shriveled, the bananas are more brown than yellow, the oranges are picked over.

(At a Safeway on Bradley Boulevard in Bethesda, the wheat bread costs $1.19, and white bread is on sale for $1. A gallon of milk costs $3.49 -- $2.99 if you buy two gallons. A pound of butter is $2.49. Beef bologna is on sale, two packages for $5.)

This sounds not too dissimilar to the situation where I live, right down to the crappy fruit and veggies, where the entire territory can be considered a poor neighbourhood, with a small population and isolation conspiring to ensure costs are very high.  There are two major ways to beat these high prices up here. The first is a federal program called food mail, which subsidizes the rate the airlines charge for freight on perishable, nutritious foods.  But in order to use the program on an individual basis, you basically need a credit card or another banking arrangement not available in many communities or to those in without steady income.   Northern retailers also use the program, but a recent report noted that they aren’t terribly good at passing their savings on to the consumers.  (Weirdly, the same report recommended cutting the individual orders from the program, as apparently the best way to convince northern retailers to pass on the savings is to further eliminate any competition they face. One really has to wonder at the Conservative view of the free market sometimes.)

The other method is to bring up bulk shipments of non-perishable goods on the summer sealift, particularly those not covered by the food mail program.  (A true must if you have pets. I usually save enough on the dog food alone to pay for the shipping of the entire order, and my understanding is the costing of cat litter is even worse.)  The issue here is that you’re facing a large up-front cost to save money over the rest of the year.   Even some people who aren’t poor have difficulties with that one.

The end result of both methods is that you need money to save money.

The laundromat example they use is another I recognize.  I used to hate even living in an apartment without in-house laundry.  Fortunately the only time the machines where I was staying broke down, I was only a couple of blocks from the laundromat, but hiking over with the dirty laundry was most definitely a pain, not helped by the fact that my only previous experience with said service was during my short stint working the oil patch, where I was advised to take my grease and oil-soaked clothes down to the laundromat to clean rather than muck up the home machines.

But it is the last example of Marie Nicholas that really gets me.  Rather than the caricature of the lazy and shiftless poor, here is someone working their ass off to get ahead and finding themselves in even worse shape than had she just stayed at home.  It is the mark of the poor design of many of the programs that target the poor that there is a pretty significant swath of income levels where the cut-offs for those programs are actually a disincentive to going out and getting a job. (This also makes the whole living wage argument a lot more relevant as well, don't you think?)  Add that to the above problem of paying more for things when you don't have the money to save money, and you get a really good idea how poverty can become chronic.

By Fester:

For the past year, I have been banging the drum that governments that depend heavily on energy exports would be facing a significant cash flow and potentially balance sheet issue.  Energy prices were declining, and traditional forms of bridge capital were being shut down by the global credit crisis.  Even well hedged states such as Mexico had only short term hedges for FY09 and would be facing market exposure in FY10. 

The drum banging may need to quiet down a little bit as the dip down back to the mid 30's per barrel looks to be over and even reduced demand caused by the global recession is creating significant seasonal price pressures as the Northern Hemisphere high demand driving season starts this weekend. 

From the LA Times:

Most of the oil exporting nations' budgets balance at a price between $ 50 per barrel (Saudi Arabia) and an estimated $80 per barrel (Iraq FY 10).  Oil moving back into the this zone reduces significant stress for oil exporting nations that do not have large foreign reserves as they no longer need to make as many tough decisions between attempting to access foreign capital or reducing spending and pissing off local elites whose patronage machine is being squeezed. 

By Fester:

I'm taking Ron's piece, but I just saw a couple of things that I want to highlight on young voters as I am one of those and I think the implications will become amazingly evident over my lifetime. 

First, let's start with the very useful Gallup graphic of net partisan identification by age cohort as determined by partisan control of the White House at the age of 18.  Democrats have a generic advantage of a couple of points no matter what, but identification share is positively correlated with partisan presidential evaluation.  Good Democratic presidents boost the young voter cohort's Democratic affiliation, while weak Democrats or successful GOP presidents weaken the affiliation.  Not a surprise there.  People lock in their preferences early and hold onto them unless there is a significant shock. 

TPM is passing along some more Gallup info:

A new analysis by Gallup, compiled from their national polling done all this year, shows just how extensive the Republican Party's drop in voter self-identification has been, with decreases in nearly every demographic.

Compared to 2001, when George W. Bush first took office as president, GOP self-identification has fallen by ten points among college graduates, nine points among those 18-29 years of age, nine points in the Midwest, six in the East, five in the West, and even four points in the South....

The only bright spots for the GOP are three base groups: Frequent churchgoers, with no decrease at all; conservatives, with only a one-point decrease; and voters 65 years of age or older, with a one-point decrease.

The nickel version is the Republican Party's internal dynamics are massively dysfunctional as the groups that are proportionally growing the fastest (and absolutely shrinking the least) within the coalition are the groups that either will be dying off or piss off the rest of the country.  This is the positive feedback dynamic that I have been pounding on for three years now. 

Finally, Ruy Texeria looks at the Millenials, of which I evidently am a borderline member of (that changes every couple of weeks as to whether I belong to Y or the Millenials)

And in 2020, the first presidential election where all Millennials will have reached voting age, this generation will be 103 million strong, of which about 90 million will be eligible voters. Those 90 million Millennial eligible voters will represent just under 40 percent of America’s eligible voters....

The survey included a battery of 40 statements, each of which was a positive expression of either a conservative or progressive argument, with an even mix between conservative and progressive arguments.

Overall, Millennials expressed far more agreement with the progressive than conservative arguments. Indeed, of the 21 values and beliefs garnering majority support in the survey, only four can be classified as conservative.

By Fester:

Tomorrow is the Pennsylvania judicial and other local offices primary day. As you can imagine, absolutely no one but super-voters vote in these elections as no one has any useful information on candidates and they can not or will not tell you anything about themselves other than they like puppies, ice cream and dancing babies. Chris Briem noted that the Allegheny County primary electorate is overwhelmingly ancient (using 2003 data):

Basically for every voter under age 30 (not under 20.. under Thirty) there are 8 voters age 60 and over. There were actually two voters over 80 for everyone under 30 who cast a ballot. That really is an amazing ratio. And this is for the county as a whole. There are parts of the county much older than the average. Can you imagine what this pie chart looks like there?

Primary campaigns target only the most reliable voters.  Super-voters is a term of art in politics.  It usually means someone who has cast a ballot in the last eight straight elections of any sort (primary, general, special, bond referandum etc.).  Those voters by definition will show up no matter what.  So in low information and excitement elections, they are about the only voters who are not immediate family members of the candidate who will show up.  Identifying supervoters is fairly easy as most county or state parties and some governments maintain detailed voter rolls which contain address, phone number, name, party registration and voting history data.  Writing a script that culls all names who have voted in 75% of the past five years worth of elections is easy.  After that it is just a grind to mobilize and bank those votes. 

I'm a supervoter (as the robo-call on the hour, every hour for the past five days reminds me.) I have voted in every election at the same polling place since 2005. I am an oddity as I am too damn young to be a statistically likely supervoter. I am a political junkie who lives two blocks from my polling station where there is good coffee and cookies if I vote at 7:15 in the morning (yeah, cookies work very well as a motivational tool). But I will be massively outnumbered by old people (especially since the senior citizen tower is half a block from the polling location).

I think there is a massive and fairly low cost opportunity for progressive and youth orientated political groups to create a long term structrural change in the political landscape over a three to five year period here.  The campaigns do not have the resources or the interest hook to draw new or marginally attached voters into the process.

If organizations like America Votes or the League of Young Voters take their 2006 and 2008 federal election lists to search for voters who voted in the four big elections (both primaries and both general elections) that creates a pool of interested and involved young voters. From this pool, contacts should be made to push people to vote in the off-year municipal primary and general election. This will be rather expensive on a per new voter basis but if this program could be maintained for two off-year cycles (2011 and 2013), the pool of super voters will be greatly expanded and it will be significantly younger.

At that point, the voter universe that these off-year, low turn-out, low information campaigns is signifcantly younger, and if the targetting is down a quarter strategically, a bit more liberal. The younger and newer super-voters are now on the campaign's radar screens as a valuable voting bloc and they will stay on the radar screen. And as the cohort ages, they naturally are more likely to maintain either 'pure' super voter status or become an effective 80% or 90% of the time voter.

And at that point, the low information primary campaign, which is often the only contested campaign for candidates begins to structurally produce results that are more in my favor...

By Steve Hynd

Over at NRO's The Corner today, James S. Robbins extols Sri Lanka's strategy as "the right way to win against terrorists".

This win came with no thanks to the United States. As the end-game developed and the Tigers were finally cornered in northeast Sri Lanka, the State Department tried its best to broker a ceasefire to let the terrorists off the hook. Thankfully, the Sri Lankan government ignored pleas from western governments with no skin in the game and pushed ahead for total victory. Sri Lanka proved that insurgents can be beaten.

Robbins is the Senior Editorial Writer for Foreign Affairs at the Washington Times when he isn't indulging his bloodlust at The Corner. He continues in this short Corner post to suggest that Sri Lanka's experiences hold "lessons for Afghanistan and Pakistan, if we are willing to learn them."

Apparently, these lessons include creating a desert of 7,000 civilian dead and calling it peace - even while still shelling hospitals and refugees. And, of course, the Tigers will now simply go back to insurgency/guerilla tactics instead of trying to take on the Sri Lankan military head on. Final victory? Not so much.

The battle has also created 250,000 refugees, many of them wounded, who cannot return to homes and lives that in most cases had been the property of an all-consuming military regime that no longer exists. They are victims of both the LTTE's strict and punitive regime and of Colombo's military, and their future lives are tragically uncertain.

In the final hours of the struggle yesterday, LTTE forces had resorted to a tactic they had introduced to the world decades ago, the suicide bombing, and there are fears that vestigial squads of Tamil separatists will soon launch a terrorist campaign across the island.

This has led the government to restrict the freedoms of the refugees, locking them behind barbed wire and strictly controlling movement. There are grave fears of a self-perpetuating spiral of violence and ethnic polarization that could prove worse than the civil war itself.

The lesson we should learn from Sri Lanka is that treating an entire ethnic group as combat enemies, collectively punishable for the atrocities of the few, turns the welcome end of a horrible regime into a humanitarian tragedy - not to mention a strategically self-defeating mistake. We should have learned that lesson from Iraq already, but apparently Robbins hasn't.

By BJ Bjornson

This is just too damned funny. Andrew Breitbart saw a bunch of marchers protesting something to do with war, and making a few leaps to the conclusion that these must be a bunch of dirty anti-American hippies, jumps up to place himself beside an American flag and gives the protesters the middle finger, holding the pose for the photographers in attendance.

The punchline? The protesters were marching in solidarity for the children forced to fight for the LRA in Northern Uganda and Congo, which Breitbart found out from one of the photographers, whose email continued,

"I believe most people in America are in agreement that human slavery, genocide and child soldiers are a terrible thing. This event was hardly controversial. The protest marched by 'Shutters on the Beach.' After reviewing the photographs I was taking for the event and confirming the facts (you were in Santa Monica at the date and time) I realized you were flipping the protesters off. I am curious to why this is the case."

I suppose we can give the benefit of the doubt that he was being a dick out of ignorance, which is what makes the whole thing rather amusing.

Though I do have to wonder at one thing. Not all that long ago, most people in America would have been in agreement that torture was a terrible thing, and that protesting such would hardly be controversial. Do you think Breitbart would apologize for flipping off protesters marching against it?

By Steve Hynd

Veteran journalist Eric Margolis, who reported from among the mujahedeen when they were fighting Russia and holds three degrees in foreign affairs to boot, says the U.S. is "stirring a hornets nest" in Pakistan through "profound ignorance" of the ethnic and cultural truth on the ground and through "gung ho military arrogance".

Washington's ham-handed policies and last week's Swat atrocity threaten to ignite Pakistan's second worst nightmare after invasion by India: That its 26 million Pashtun will secede and join Afghanistan's Pashtun to form an independent Pashtun state, Pashtunistan.

This would rend Pakistan asunder, probably provoke its restive Baluchi tribes to secede and tempt mighty India to intervene militarily, risking nuclear war with beleaguered Pakistan.

The Pashtun of NWFP have no intention or capability of moving into Pakistan's other provinces, Punjab, Sindh and Baluchistan. They just want to be left alone. Alarms of a "Taliban takeover of Pakistan" are pure propaganda.

Lowland Pakistanis repeatedly have rejected militant Islamic parties. Many have little love for Pashtun, whom they regard as mountain wild men best avoided.

Nor are Pakistan's well-guarded nukes a danger -- at least not yet. Alarms about Pakistan's nukes come from the same fabricators with hidden agendas who brought us Saddam Hussein's bogus weapons.

The real danger is in the U.S. acting like an enraged mastodon, trampling Pakistan under foot, and forcing Islamabad's military to make war on its own people. Pakistan could end up like U.S.-occupied Iraq, split into three parts and helpless.

The Punjabi and Sindh populations have always regarded the Pashtun as mountain wild men, bandits and reivers. The Pashtun have always regarded their neighbours as prey for their raids. It's been that way since before the British arrived and shows no sign of abating anytime soon. The Pashtun were only forced at gunpoint into accepting the splitting of their traditional tribal ranges by the Durand Line in 1893. The situation is entirely analogous to the old border reiver clans of the English/Scottish border - another bunch of inter-related hill country wildmen who raided their neighbours irrespective of nationality for over 300 years before finally calming down and accepting imposed nationality. That territorial stramash was only solved by exiling the worst offenders to the American colonies.

But waiting another 200 years, or exiling Pashtun militants to America, aren't options. And I think Margolis is wrong somewhat about the helplessness of a Pakistani state without the Pashtun or Balochis. Afghanistan wouldn't suffer unduly from losing its Pashtun segment either. The only real hurt would be national pride - and that's the real stumbling block to offering the Pashtun either greater self-determination or full independent status. If that pride could somehow be overcome by an appreciation of reality, then it'd be up to the Pashtun whether they wanted Taliban rule or not, and the rest of the world would at least have a containable border for Taliban expansion if they did.

That's a pretty big if, though. As my friend Zenpundit pointed out to me recently by email: "The Taliban created many enemies by casually killing people whose clan members then became motivated to avenge them" under the pushtunwali honour code. That's probably not enough to outweigh the wish for revenge on US or Pakistani attackers, but once they are removed from the local equation that's an exploitable fault line. More, with the Pashtun in their own homeland free from outside overlords their reason for supporting the Taliban politically would disappear and the incompatibility between the Taliban's extreme form of Islam and the Pashtun's own traditional religious forms would put the two at odds more often than not.

Rather than insisting on fighting the Pashtun, the amswer in Af/Pak may lie in giving them back the independence they once had.

Commentary By Ron Beasley

A recent Rasmussen Poll indicates that the nation is split:

43% Say CIA May Have Misled Pelosi, 41% Disagree

Forty-three percent (43%) of voters nationwide say that it’s at least somewhat likely that the Central Intelligence Agency misled Nancy Pelosi about the use of waterboarding when interrogating prisoners.

But the latest Rasmussen Reports national telephone survey also found that 41% say it’s not likely the CIA did so.

I was somewhat surprised that only 62% of the Republicans took the side of the CIA.  Torture was still thought to be effective by 60% of the population.

This brings us to an interesting post by Matt Yglesias where he says the Republican's attack on Pelosi may backfire.

What conservatives are missing here is that this is a fight they were winning before they started gunning for Pelosi. Their best ally in this fight was Barack Obama, whose desire to “move forward” rather than focusing on the past had been the subject of much consternation. Had conservatives simply reached out to grab the hand that was being extended to them, they could have gotten what they wanted.

But in their zeal to score a tactical win, the right has made a truth commission more likely not less likely. Obama wanted to avoid a backward-looking focus on torture in part because it distracted from his legislative agenda. But if we’re going to be looking backward anyway, thanks to conservatives’ insistence on complaining about Pelosi, then the move forward strategy lacks a rationale. And far from forcing a standoff in which Pelosi will abandon her support for an investigation, the right has forced her into a corner from which she can’t give in to moderate Democrats’ opposition to such a move without looking like she’s cravenly attempting to save her own skin.

I suggested here that Pelosi bru ha ha made a torture investigation inevitable.  Such an investigation will not be good for the pro-torture GOP.  Yeglesias agrees.

I’ve seen polling which suggests that the public is reasonably sympathetic to the pro-torture position. But I’m quite certain the public isn’t generally aware of facts that would certainly come out in a truth commission process. For example, that the Bush administration’s torture techniques were specifically modeled on techniques employed by Chinese forces during the Korean War for the purpose of extracting false confessions. That the experts in the techniques whose advice was sought in designing the torture program warned interrogators that the methods were illegal and unlikely to produce reliable information. That one principle purpose of the torture program appears to have been to generate false information about links between al-Qaeda and Iraq. Or that abusive detention practices occurred far beyond Abu Ghraib and have led to the deaths of many people.

Cheney and the Republican's "bring it on" may work about as well on torture as it did in the war on terror.

Update

Steve M. at No More Mister Nice Blog disagrees with Yeglesias and thinks the Republicans can win this.  I am more inclined to go along with Matt, this isn't the Republican Party of a few years ago.   

Commentary By Ron Beasley

No surprise here - this was expected and predicted.

Separation Anxiety As U.S. Prepares To Leave Sadr City

The unthinkable is happening in Sadr City as the U.S. military begins to shut down its outposts to meet a June 30 deadline to withdraw from Iraqi cities.

Separation anxiety is growing among residents, local leaders and American soldiers in the sprawling, impoverished Shiite district that was once the most dangerous battlefield in Baghdad for U.S. troops.

"When the Americans leave, everything will be looted because no one will be watching," an Iraqi army lieutenant newly deployed there said. "There will be a civil war -- without a doubt," predicted an Iraqi interpreter. Council members have asked about political asylum in the United States.

Mohammed Alami, a local leader who calls himself the U.S. Embassy's unofficial representative in Sadr City, is among those expecting mayhem.

"This is the most dangerous decision being made," he said recently after a meeting at a U.S. outpost in Sadr City. "We will lose the security. The insurgents will come back. I will be the first one targeted."

The deadline, the first of three that chart the withdrawal of U.S. troops, will test Iraqi forces and Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki's assertion that his government stands ready to assume primary control over security. The Iraqi government insisted on the deadlines last year during the negotiation of a security agreement.

This was going to happen if we left two years ago or if we leave five years from now.  There will be a limited civil war.  As Robert Dreyfuss wrote before the surge it will be bloody but not an apocalypse. 

Second, although battle lines are hardening and militias on both sides are becoming self-sustaining, the civil war is limited by physical constraints. Neither the Sunnis nor the Shiites have much in the way of armor or heavy weapons—tanks, major artillery, helicopters, and the like. Without heavy weaponry, neither side can take the war deep into the other’s territory. “They’re not good on offense,” says Warren Marik, a retired CIA officer who worked in Iraq in the 1990s. “They can’t assault positions.” Shiites may have numbers on their side. But because the Sunnis have most of Iraq’s former army officers, and their resistance militia boasts thousands of highly trained soldiers, they’re unlikely
to be overrun by the Shiite majority. Equally, the minority Sunnis won’t be able to seize Shiite parts of Baghdad or major Shiite cities in the south. Presuming neither side gets its hands on heavy weapons, once you take U.S. forces out of the equation the Sunnis and Shiites would ultimately reach an impasse.

While Bush broke it we can't fix it.  No matter when the US gets out violence will increase for a period so the sooner we leave the sooner the Iraqis can move forward after a stormy period.

Even the Bush administration knew this was going to happen and the surge was nothing more than an attempt to push the chaos forward when it would be on someone else's watch.  In that sense the surge was a success.

H/T to commentor GreenDreams at The Moderate Voice for the Dreyfuss quote. 

By Ron Beasley

Well I can't compete with the drama of Anderson's photo here but I've got one anyway.

 

Click on picture for larger image.

By BJ Bjornson

Like everyone else here, I haven't been too fond of Obama's flip-flop on releasing a number of torture photos.  It is also pretty easy to fall into outrage over anything to do with this issue.  As such, I have to recommend Jim Hoagland's take on the issue, which, while noting it is a mistake to not release the photos, moderates that position with notes on why the decision isn't a simple one.

President Obama's effort to block the release of photographs of U.S. prisoner abuse is a mistake that can be corrected. The president acts with good intentions -- and a profound understanding of the overstimulated times and society in which he lives. That alone represents progress at the White House.

. . .

Make no mistake. Many of those ferociously condemning Obama and pushing for release of at least 44 photographs that the government wants shielded seek to do more than inform the public. They also hope to pressure the administration into prosecuting Bush administration officials and operatives by stirring public disgust, even if the photos contain no new direct evidence of high-level complicity in abuse or torture. Allied with this campaign are dissidents who oppose Obama's deepening involvement in Afghanistan and see the torture issue as a handy club.

There is a fair bit of truth in that, I think.  Certainly the idea that this would up the pressure on accountability is one the reasons I would use for wanting the pictures released.  The more people understand just what was being done to the prisoners in American care, the more likely they are to demand some accountability for the whole mess.  I didn't link the Afghan mission to this, as that will likely succeed or fail based upon its own strategic situation regardless how the accountability for torture works out, (though more attention to the Bagram prison complex and the prisoners there would be welcome).

However, Hoagland does note that there is some linkage between the release of these photos and the mission in Afghanistan.

He demonstrates that it was the latter by following his commanders' entreaties not to cooperate in the publication of images that will serve primarily to inflame emotions as 21,000 additional U.S. troops deploy to Afghanistan. A commander in chief putting U.S. forces in harm's way should do no less.

Add to that the still very large number of US forces hanging around in Iraq.  As noted here most recently by Steve, the torture and abuse of prisoners led to greater recruitment of suicide bombers by the insurgencies.  Such considerations do have to be taken into account.  In the end, however, it is not enough to suppress the images outright, and Hoagland does a good job of arguing for the release.

But blanket suppression of words or images is bad policy, even if intentions are good. Censorship always stirs greater distrust than does disclosure. It can also be used to shield wrongdoers.

Of course, the shielding of wrongdoers is one the biggest peeves this flip-flop on Obama's part has caused most of his supporters, but the first point is significant as well.  The cover-up is going to cause more damage than the disclosure, so just get the disclosure over with.

By Steve Hynd

Noted COINdinistas David Kilcullen and Andrew Exum have an op-ed today in the NYT calling for the end of drone attacks in Pakistan on the grounds that they are entirely counter-productive. It's an argument others outwith the COIN firmament of stars have been making for some time too, often against COINdinista pressure, although Kilcullen has been arguing this for some months.

Imagine, for example, that burglars move into a neighborhood. If the police were to start blowing up people’s houses from the air, would this convince homeowners to rise up against the burglars? Wouldn’t it be more likely to turn the whole population against the police? And if their neighbors wanted to turn the burglars in, how would they do that, exactly? Yet this is the same basic logic underlying the drone war.

The drone strategy is similar to French aerial bombardment in rural Algeria in the 1950s, and to the “air control” methods employed by the British in what are now the Pakistani tribal areas in the 1920s. The historical resonance of the British effort encourages people in the tribal areas to see the drone attacks as a continuation of colonial-era policies.

The drone campaign is in fact part of a larger strategic error — our insistence on personalizing this conflict with Al Qaeda and the Taliban. Devoting time and resources toward killing or capturing “high-value” targets — not to mention the bounties placed on their heads — distracts us from larger problems, while turning figures like Baitullah Mehsud, leader of the Pakistani Taliban umbrella group, into Robin Hoods. Our experience in Iraq suggests that the capture or killing of high-value targets — Saddam Hussein or Abu Musab al-Zarqawi — has only a slight and fleeting effect on levels of violence. Killing Mr. Zarqawi bought only 18 days of quiet before Al Qaeda returned to operations under new leadership.

But KJilcullen and Exum seem to be unable to think outside the "Awakening" box in thinking what to do instead.

The goal should be to isolate extremists from the communities in which they live. The best way to do this is to adopt policies that build local partnerships. Al Qaeda and its Taliban allies must be defeated by indigenous forces — not from the United States, and not even from Punjab, but from the parts of Pakistan in which they now hide.

How this might happen they fail to explain and in all fairness that's not the point of the op-ed - if every avenue was explored in detail, every newspaper article or blog post would be a book instead. But some short indication of how the expect "indigenous forces" in Pashtun lands to overcome the pashtunwalli honour code and declare civil war on a Pakistani Taliban movement that has increasingly become the Pashtun Liberation Front might have been useful. After all, the Pakistani military keeps the 20% or so of its Pashtun troops well out of the area of conflict precisely because it fears they wouldn't obey orders to fire upon other Pashtuns on behalf of Punjabi or American self-interest. Without some explanation of how Kilcullen and Exum expect this Pashtun "awakening" to occur against the prevailing local customs and current affairs, their prescription takes on a hue of "you and who's army?"

Indeed, it seems to me that the viable solutions are all non-military. The shortest term option would be to finally consign the Durand Line to history and to carve an independent Pashtunistan out of Pakistan and Afghanistan, over those two nation's protestations. Then the Pashtuns can decide, on their own behalfs, whether they're happy with Taliban rule. The Taliban have little or no interest beyond their own root ethnic region and both the West and the neighbours could focus on containing the rump of Al Qaeda in its safe havens through international counter-terrorism and law enforcement efforts. Still, such a solution would come with its own set of problems, not least the howls of protest from Afghanistan and Pakistan. Neither would be likely to agree to it, so it would have to happen by fiat, possibly by UN mandate (like Israel).

The other solutions involve the classic true COIN strategies - ethnic cleansing or genocide - or waiting out the Taliban's popular support among Pashtuns until such a time as the Pashtuns themselves force their insurgency's leaders to the negotiating table for real. They'd both take a very long time (look at Sri Lanka's 25 year Tamil insurgency) and the collateral damage would be high. Yet one or the other seems to be the endgame current Pakistani and US startegies are really aiming for.

Commentary By Ron Beasley

Frank Rich referred to Bush biographer Robert Draper's column in GQ this morning but I think it deserves more attention.  It is an attempt to blame as many of the failures of the Bush administration as possible on Donald Rumsfeld.  Now don't feel sorry for Rummy, much of the blame is certainly deserved, but it is an attempt to deflect well deserved criticism from others.

My conversations with more than a dozen Bush loyalists, including several former cabinet-level officials and senior military commanders, have revealed another element of this legacy-building moment: intense feelings of ill will toward Donald Rumsfeld. Though few of these individuals would speak for the record (knowing that their former boss, George W. Bush, would not approve of it), they believe that Rumsfeld’s actions epitomized the very traits—arrogance, stubbornness, obliviousness, ineptitude—that critics say drove the Bush presidency off the rails.

Many of these complaints are long-standing. Over the past three years, several of Bush’s former advisers have described their boss’s worst mistake as keeping Rumsfeld around as long as he did. “Don did not like to play well with other people,” one cabinet official told me—stating a grievance that nearly everyone in the White House seemed to share, except for Bush himself. “There was exasperation,” recalls a senior aide. “‘How much more are we going to have to endure? Why are we keeping this guy?’” 

Now blaming him for the setbacks in Iraq is nothing new but the debacle after Katrina is Rummy's fault too?

a final story of Rumsfeld’s intransigence begins on Wednesday, August 31, 2005. Two days after Hurricane Katrina made landfall in New Orleans—and the same day that Bush viewed the damage on a flyover from his Crawford, Texas, retreat back to Washington—a White House advance team toured the devastation in an Air Force helicopter. Noticing that their chopper was outfitted with a search-and-rescue lift, one of the advance men said to the pilot, “We’re not taking you away from grabbing people off of rooftops, are we?”

“No, sir,” said the pilot. He explained that he was from Florida’s Hurlburt Field Air Force base—roughly 200 miles from New Orleans—which contained an entire fleet of search-and-rescue helicopters. “I’m just here because you’re here,” the pilot added. “My whole unit’s sitting back at Hurlburt, wondering why we’re not being used.”

The search-and-rescue helicopters were not being used because Donald Rumsfeld had not yet approved their deployment—even though, as Lieutenant General Russ Honoré, the cigar-chomping commander of Joint Task Force Katrina, would later tell me, “that Wednesday, we needed to evacuate people. The few helicopters we had in there were busy, and we were trying to deploy more.”

And three years later, when I asked a top White House official how he would characterize Rumsfeld’s assistance in the response to Hurricane Katrina, I found out why. “It was commonly known in the West Wing that there was a battle with Rumsfeld regarding this,” said the official. “I can’t imagine another defense secretary throwing up the kinds of obstacles he did.”

Though various military bases had been mobilized into a state of alert well before the advance team’s tour, Rumsfeld’s aversion to using active-duty troops was evident: “There’s no doubt in my mind,” says one of Bush’s close advisers today, “that Rumsfeld didn’t like the concept.”

The next day, three days after landfall, word of disorder in New Orleans had reached a fever pitch. According to sources familiar with the conversation, DHS secretary Michael Chertoff called Rumsfeld that morning and said, “You’re going to need several thousand troops.”

“Well, I disagree,” said the SecDef. “And I’m going to tell the president we don’t need any more than the National Guard.”

It would be two more days before Rumsfeld released the troops.

So why did Bush keep Rumsfeld around for so long?  It is here that Draper is somewhat critical of Bush.

Nonetheless, as conditions in Iraq worsened throughout 2005 and early 2006, removing Rumsfeld was a “rolling -conversation” with Bush and top aides. One adviser recalls bringing up the matter twice. Each time, says this adviser, Bush shrugged and said, “Who’ve we got to replace him?” The adviser wondered why the president never initiated a search process.

By the spring of 2006, Bush at last seemed receptive to relieving Rumsfeld. But in April, when a half-dozen retired generals voiced their beliefs that the SecDef should be fired, Bush dug in his heels. That same month, Bush invited several of his top advisers to a meeting at the White House, where a show of hands went in favor of removing Rumsfeld before the ’06 midterm elections. “There were plenty of substantive reasons given for why he should be fired,” recalls a participant, “and not one substantive reason for why he should stay. People said that it would look bad to fire him after the retired generals said he should be fired, but no one offered any defense of Rumsfeld at all.”

Rumsfeld kept his job for six more months while midterm-threatened Republicans clamored for his head. Politicizing the issue by replacing Rumsfeld during the electoral cycle was precisely what the president refused to do, say aides. These same aides were deluged with calls from angry Republicans when Bush announced the day after the election that Bob Gates would be replacing Rumsfeld. “A lot of people on the Hill were pissed,” admits one such adviser.

What Draper fails to mention is Dick Cheney's part.  I think it was Cheney who insisted that Rumsfeld be kept on.  When Gates, a "realist" from the George HW camp, replaced Rumsfeld it marked the end to much of Cheney's influence.  We can be thankful that this occurred before Cheney could bomb Iran. 

While Rumsfeld deserves the criticism it shouldn't be allowed to mask the failures of others.

Read the entire thing here - there is much more

By Steve Hynd

The New York Times editorial today is oh-so-respectful in it's first sentence: "We do not envy President Obama as he tries to undo George W. Bush’s illegal and shameful detainee policy". Then it gets down to the nitty-gritty. The bold emphasis is mine.

Mr. Obama was wrong when he flip-flopped and decided to resist orders by two federal courts to release the photos. We fear he is showing the same lack of resolve when it comes to Mr. Bush’s kangaroo courts — the tribunals at Guantánamo that Mr. Obama denounced passionately and frequently during the 2008 campaign.

On Friday, the president said he would seek a further continuance in several cases before the tribunals. And he proposed changes that would make the commissions’ procedures a less outrageous miscarriage of justice: among them, banning testimony obtained through abuse and torture; tightening rules on the admission of hearsay; and expanding prisoners’ access to counsel.

Unfortunately, that is not enough. The entire edifice must be scrapped and the laws that long governed military and civilian criminal trials put back in force.

...Mr. Obama was elected in part because of his promises to correct these lawless policies. He must create clear rules to deal with prisoners. And there must be a full accounting of what went so horribly wrong and how. Otherwise, Mr. Obama risks turning Mr. Bush’s mistakes into his own or, in the case of the photographs, turning Mr. Bush’s cover-up into his own.

That's pretty strong stuff for an Establishment Democratic voice, especially since it also has a sideswipe at Hill Democrats for throwing up roadblocks to shutting Gitmo purely for political reasons. It's a major attack, by Establishment standards, on the conventional wisdom about Obama's detainee policies.

But describing Bush's actions as "mistakes" doesn't yet go nearly far enough. They were crimes, and Obama's complicity is therefore criminal complicity, making him an accessory after the fact. As Glenn Greenwald notes today, though, the Democratic Establishment are largely shutting their eyes to this blatant truth.

As usual, what must never be mentioned are the torture victims themselves, including the 100 or so that were actually killed while in U.S. custody. It can't be overstated how self-centered, petty and amoral it is for the Tim Kaines and Erica Williamses of the world to insist that their little partisan desires justify telling the victims of our torture regime that it's time for them to pipe down and accept that there will be no accountability for what happened to them because we have Important Things to do and can't and don't want to be bothered by "looking back."  What kind of a country commits brutal crimes and then insists that they can't be burdened with disclosure and accountability because they're too busy or because it's too burdensome?

Still, this NYT editorial and other pieces Glenn notes written by VSPs like Frank Rich and Maureen Dowd recently suggest that even some VSPs are coming around to the notion of a full investigation of Bush era "mistakes" - although heaven forfend that investigation also include their own defense of those "mistakes" at the time. There's still a big gap they won't admit between "mistakes" and "deliberate criminal acts" too, but it's a start.

The Deproliferator

President Obama's Prague speech has inspired a flurry of opposition from nuclear weapon proponents. Among their arguments, that old chestnut deterrence still holds pride of place. But another seeks to shoulder it aside. In The Trouble With Zero, the lead article of the May 10 New York Times Week in Review, Philip Taubman writes:

If arsenals are drastically reduced, the next steps toward abolition could be even trickier. Since scientific and engineering knowledge cannot be expunged from mankind’s memory, the potential to build weapons will always exist.

Does this rationale, aka You Can't Put the Nuclear Genie Back in the Bottle, succeed in its intended purpose of making a mockery of disarmament? Whirled View's Cheryl Rofer, a former chemist at Los Alamos National Laboratory, wrote to us in an email:

Most of us know how to waterboard now, and we don't have an epidemic of neighborly waterboarding, or even by local law-enforcement authorities. … We can't eliminate the knowledge of how to waterboard, either, but we can outlaw it. And, since building a nuclear weapon takes a bit more than a piece of cloth and a pitcher of water, there are effective choke points to limit building nuclear weapons. … It's not the knowledge, it's what we do with it.

And so far the opponents of setting zero as a goal haven't done much with their knowledge. If future proliferators follow their lead, we have nothing to worry about.

Along with the choke points to which Ms. Rofer refers, improved tools for monitoring and verifying compliance with treaties stand ready and waiting to be used to prevent proliferation, as are ever-more intrusive inspections. Still, short of burning the papers of nuclear scientists, confiscating their hard drives, and injecting them with memory-erasing drugs, their research won't disappear into the recesses of time anytime soon.

Normally, it's to mankind's credit when knowledge is archived and endures. But, while nuclear knowledge in its resting state is a form of potential energy, it yearns to be made kinetic. Is there a way for us to keep it down on the archive after its seen the testing grounds?

Convincing Nuclear Aspirants to Step Away from the Nukes

Blissfully unhaunted by the Cold War, states that long for nuclear weapons view them as essential to security. Little do they know that, once armed, the honeymoon period is all too brief before a state -- India and Pakistan come to mind -- discovers that it's in no less peril than before it developed them.

To prevent non-nuclear states from realizing its aspiration, nuclear states need to think outside the monitoring and compliance box, or at least supplement it with more tools. Nuclear-aspiring states might respond to the same encouraging, proactive steps that Lewis Dunn proposes in the recent Arms Control Today for dealing with nuclear states like Russia and China. These include:

Information, data exchanges, and transparency measures;
Joint studies, experiments, and planning;
Personnel exchanges, liaison arrangements, and joint military staff bodies; Joint activities, programs, systems, and centers; and
Unilateral initiatives and coordinated national undertakings.

As for the individuals who become nuclear scientists and are hired by the nuclear-aspiring state, is there any hope of inducing qualms in them about working on nuclear weapons? Unfortunately, they're often indisposed to not only politics but ethics. In addition, they're likely to be susceptible to the nationalistic exhilaration that accompanies their state's own version of the Manhattan Project.

The work-around, though, is obvious. Offer nuclear-aspiring states assistance with projects that will quicken scientists' pulses even more than developing nuclear weapons -- after all, enriching uranium with its endless rows of centrifuges quickly becomes tedious. Alternative energy, for example. Still, that will likely be insufficient to divert a state from developing nuclear weapons.

In regard to inducing states in possession of nuclear weapons to intensify their disarmament measures, Taubman writes:

One solution suggested by abolition advocates would be a form of latent or virtual deterrence, based not on weapons all but ready to launch, but on the ability to reassemble or rebuild them.

Needless to say, latent deterrence doesn’t apply to non-nuclear states, because they have no weapons to disassemble. But that positions them to enact another, more sophisticated form of deterrence than latent. Let's call it pregnant deterrence. We'll define it as possessing the knowledge and ability to develop nuclear weapons, without bringing their development to fruition.

But everyone knows how long it takes to develop the fuel cycle. What state inimical to the one in question, especially if it's both equipped with nuclear weapons and a non-signatory to the Treaty on the Non-Proliferation of Nuclear Weapons, will be shaking in its boots about the other's ability to develop nukes five years down the line?

Pregnant deterrence can only work if a state's neighbors think the state is able to accelerate completion of the fuel cycle. That can only come to pass if a nuclear state not only provides the nuclear aspirant with all the knowledge needed to develop nuclear weapons, but, nuclear umbrellas aside, promises to help facilitate said development in the event of a imminent nuclear threat to the aspirant. Wait -- what NPT nuclear state (or states) in its right mind would consider making such a commitment?

Nuclear weapons proponents claim that disarmament does nothing to stop other states from arming. But, it's disingenuous and an abdication of the position of leadership implicit in a state's position as an NPT nuclear state to contend that disarmament should start with anyone but the haves. Thus, the only way to make pregnant deterrence work is for nuclear weapon states to couple the promise of assistance with a sure-fire way of preventing the need for that from ever arising.

Maybe pregnant deterrence is best filed under the category of: "We can dream, can't we?" But setting a deadline for significant disarmament and sticking to it just might buy the time needed to keep a nuclear state from threatening a state that's in a state of pregnant deterrence. There will then be no need for the latter to induce labor and give birth to a bouncing, baby nuclear weapons program.