Two big crises for Washington: Financial meltdown and Af-Pak escalation

Washington’s decisionmakers are today confronted with two huge and hard-to-handle crises. On Wall Street the large brokerage firm Lehman Brothers declared bankruptcy, after Treasury Secretary Hank Paulson decided the US taxpayer couldn’t afford to bail it out Merrill Lynch and the insurance firm AIG are also in very bad trouble. And in Afghanistan and Pakistan, tensions between the US and anti-US forces, primarily the resurging Taliban, have escalated to a point where they now pose a serious political crisis to the broadly pro-US (and nuclear armed) government of Pakistan.
Each of these crises points out the extent to which Washington, on its own, is no longer able to exert control over aspects of international life that until recently it was easily able to dominate.
Regarding the Wall Street crisis, the actions and preferences of foreign investors– primarily those from East Asia– has been crucial. The timing Paulson’s actions regarding Lehman– where he intensively explored a number options before he finally decided not to intervene– and earlier, in the case of Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, was reportedly chosen to allow him to have the maximum impact before the Asian and European stock markets opened after their weekend. One of the banks he was hoping could help bail out Lehman was Britain’s Barclay’s Bank; and one of the other chief candidates to help out was reportedly a South Korean investment entity. But he was unable to clinch any of these deals.
Meanwhile, in the single, rapidly agglomerating crisis zone that I am tempted to call Af-Pakistan, it is becoming increasingly clear that the US– even with its NATO allies– is quite unable, without the help of the world’s other big powers, to calm the tensions and start to resolve the deep political problems that underlie the present crises in both constituent parts of Af-Pakistan. (I made this argument, regarding Afghanistan, in this early-August CSM piece.)
Some of the most thoughtful, up-to-date, and consistent reporting on Af-Pakistan is that provided by Joshua Foust at Registan.net. Today he writes this about the latest reported US raids into Pakistan:

    I really don’t understand how the U.S. can be expected to craft an appropriately subtle policy for the area—even if CJCS Mike Mullen is at the helm (I have tremendous respect for Adm. Mullen). For one [thing]… there is the messy problem of sovereignty—like it or not, whether you agree with how it’s being handled or not, that is sovereign Pakistani territory.
    Pretending the Pakistani government has done nothing about the tribal areas is daft: at American insistence, they have lost nearly 1,000 troops trying to quell the uprising there since 2004—about double what NATO and Coalition nations have lost in Afghanistan since 2001. Though only now, since removing the odious Pervez Musharraf, has the government been trying negotiations not with the militant leaders but the few tribal leaders left alive who are willing to take a stand, these have not been given a chance to succeed. It takes time—during the war against the Faqir of Ipi from 1936-1947, the British had miserable luck even getting the local maliks to tamp down on anti-British violence, though on occasion it worked. But the Faqir was only undermined after Partition, when agitating for a Muslim State became unnecessary…

Foust very helpfully reminds us that anti-Islamabad, anti-western agitation in Pakistan’s tribal areas “is not a new problem—there is no reason to re-invent the wheel or hyperventilate while pretending it is.”

I certainly agree it’s not a new problem. However, if the tribal agitations– and also, the US’s violent over-reactions to them– succeed in seriously destabilizing the Pakistan government, then that has huge further political ramifications for the entire strategic situation in that very sensitive part of the world.
Actually, the stance and policies that the US is now adopting towards Pakistan look somewhat comparable to the stance that Israel adopted for many long decades towards Lebanon, which was also a US ally.
Both in the days when the PLO had an armed presence in Lebanon, and later, when Hizbullah grew up there, Israel would (and still does) claim the “right” to launch “punitive raids” into the country, whether under a doctrine of “hot pursuit” or some other pretext. Indeed, some of those raids sent ground forces deep inside Lebanon, where they would stay and run an occupation regime for some length of time: most famously, the 22-year occupation of the so-called “security zone” in South Lebanon.
All this though Israel prides itself on being a law-abiding nation and a US ally, and while Lebanon was also a US ally…
In Af-Pakistan, the structure of the conflict is a little different. It is the US occupation force in Afghanistan, not the Afghan government, that is undertaking the raids into Pakistan. And Pakistan is directly an ally of the US. Go figure.
This morning, the BBC reported this:

    Pakistani troops have fired shots into the air to stop US troops crossing into the South Waziristan region of Pakistan, local officials say…
    It emerged last week that US President George W Bush has in recent months authorised military raids against militants inside Pakistan without prior approval from Islamabad…
    In the latest incident, the tribesmen say they grabbed their guns and took up defensive positions after placing their women and children out of harm’s way.
    Pakistan’s army has warned that the aggressive US policy will widen the insurgency by uniting the tribesmen with the Taleban.
    Last week the army chief declared that Pakistan would defend the country’s territorial integrity at all cost, although the prime minister has since said this would have to be through diplomatic channels rather than military retaliation.

It is possible to conjecture that the US military’s current round of stepped-up operations inside Pakistan may be connected to the Bush administration’s desire to capture Osama Bin Laden before the US election, November 4. But whether that’s the case or not, the operations are certainly doing a lot to destabilize Pakistan’s already fragile governance system– while they have done nothing at all to improve a situation inside Afghanistan that the EU’s outgoing envoy has now described as “the worst since 2001.”
It is hard, at this point, to figure out how these two big crises might affect the election here in the US.
On the economy, McCain yesterday continued to insist that “the fundamentals of the US economy are strong.” He looked as though he was trying to run on a bit of an anti-Wall Street, populist platform? Obama, more seriously and more plausibly called the fall of both Lehman Brothers and Merrill Lynch “the most serious financial crisis since the Great Depression” of the 1930s.
He also took the opportunity to criticize McCain’s broader economic philosophy:

    “It’s a philosophy we’ve had for the last eight years — one that says we should give more and more to those with the most and hope that prosperity trickles down to everyone else.”
    “It’s a philosophy that says even common sense regulations are unnecessary and unwise, and one that says we should just stick our heads in the sand and ignore economic problems until they spiral into crises…”

Not a lot of detail there yet on the specifics of how Obama would deal with the country’s roiling financial instability. However, he has given enough specifics about his tax policy and other aspects of economic governance to show he has a good grasp of how the economy actually works. (Unlike McCain.)
On Af-Pakistan, Obama’s has been quite clear for many months now that he supports the use of US military power against suspected terrorist targets inside Pakistan, even without gaining the permission of Islamabad.
This is just one of the ways in which, as Dan Eggen writes in today’s Wapo, “Bush’s overseas policies [have begun] resembling Obama’s.”
Eggen writes that Obama’s aides say that some of the recent foreign-policy moves Bush has taken

    complicate matters for McCain, who is more hawkish than his opponent on issues including the crisis in Georgia and the war in Iraq.
    “What we have here, in many ways, is that a McCain presidency would look a lot like a Bush first term and a move back in that direction,” said Rand Beers, who.. is now an unpaid adviser to the Obama campaign. “The flip side of that is that John McCain is therefore to the right of George Bush, which I don’t think is the way he conceived of his campaign.”

But the Af-Pakistan situation– like the Wall Street crisis– could still get a lot worse in the six weeks between now and the election. At a first guess, that would seem to be bad for McCain’s chances, and good for Obama. Except that in a situation of acute foreign-policy crisis, US voters might well show a strong tendency to seek a sense of security from a “trusted, older white guy” person.
It certainly wouldn’t be the first time that’s happened here…

Realism, war, and pacifism

Is pacifism the new Realism? Or is Realism the new pacifism? I’ve been toying with both arguments for a while now, including back in June when I made the first of them in connection with the panel discussion I did at USIP on ‘Foreign Policy and the next US administration.’ That was linked to my growing, evidence-based conviction that foreign wars have been become growingly unwinnable.
Okay, so then came the Russian-Georgian War. Russia to a great extent (though not wholly) “won” that war. So if we judge that Georgia is “foreign” for Russia–as by and large I think we must– then they had waged a foreign war and won it.
(Some Russians might perhaps argue that Georgia is not actually foreign for them, and/or that they engaged in the war to save the lives of the Russian citizens– both Ossetians and Russian peacekeeping troops– who were getting badly attacked in Ossetia. Neither is a trivial argument, but on balance I don’t think either of them holds up sufficiently.)
What is much more the case, it seems to me, is that long-distance foreign wars have become very nearly or wholly unwinnable. I argued one part of this when I blogged about ‘The Return of Geography’, a couple of weeks ago.
I would like to note now, though, that some of the most serious and cautious thinking about the Georgia-Russia war– as, earlier about the US invasion of Iraq– has come from pillars of the Realist and “Old” (paleo-)conservative movements in the United States. That, while Obama and many other Democrats have been bending very strongly toward a McCain-like level of pro-Georgian partisanship and anti-Russian outrage over the whole Georgian issue– and while Obama and many other Democrats have been worryingly belligerent in arguing for escalations of US force deployment and use in Afghanistan and also against Pakistan..
In this recent article (PDF, and registration required) in The American Conservative the paleocon former CIA officer Philip Giraldi wrote candidly that,

    The fighting between Georgia and Russia is yet another foreign-policy disaster in which Washington might have encouraged a war where there was no conceivable American interest. It is also, by all accounts, the latest intelligence failure…

(He also wrote that when the Russians invaded, the 130 US military advisers– serving soldiers and DOD-financed contractors– who were in Georgia immediately regrouped to Tbilisi, while the many US-paid Israeli mercenaries working as ‘trainers’ there were evacuated back to their country so rapidly “that they abandoned their classified training manuals.”)
Giraldi’s piece is well worth reading. We should remember, too, the excellent and very constructive role that he and other paleocons have played for some years now in running the Antiwar website and making other contributions to the battle of ideas against neocon militarism.
In that same issue of The American Conservative Pat Buchanan’s take-down (PDF, registration also required) of McCain’s lead foreign-policy adviser, Randy Scheunemann is also worth reading. Scheunemann is the same man who, as a well-paid lobbyist for Georgia’s president Mikheil Saakashvili, has had as one of his primary missions the winning of US support for Saakashvili’s reckless war venture into South Ossetia.
Buchanan doesn’t mince his words when he writes about Scheunemann:

    He is a dual loyalist, a foreign agent whose assignment is to get America committed to spilling the blood of her sons for client regimes who have made this moral mercenary a rich man…
    Scheunemann came close to succeeding. Had he done so, U.S. soldiers and Marines from Idaho would be killing Russians in the Caucasus and dying to protect Scheunemann’s client…
    Now Scheunemann is the neocon agent in place in McCain’s camp. The neocons got their war with Iraq. They are pushing for a war on Iran. And they are now baiting the Russian Bear. Why would McCain seek foreign-policy counsel from the same discredited crowd that has all but destroyed the presidency of George W. Bush?

It is possible to argue that Buchanan and his colleagues at The American Conservative are more paleocon than they are ‘Realist’… and that perhaps their flavor of paleoconservatism comes with more than a dash of isolationism. (Though compared with the bellicose zeal of the neocons and their friends among the liberal hawks, isolationism looks like a distinctly preferable alternative these days.)
So the main place where Washington’s Realists hang out is at, guess where, the Nixon Center. And there, too, there has been some good, solid thinking going on about the Georgia crisis. For example, in this (Word doc) testimony that Center director Paul Saunders delivered to the U.S. Commission on Security and Cooperation in Europe September 10, he shared the following lessons:

    First, the Bush Administration has profoundly over-personalized U.S. relations with Georgia…
    Second, U.S. officials must be much more careful when and how they put American credibility on the line…
    Thirdly, it is now clear that Russia’s commitment to and interests in Georgia and other former Soviet Republics along its southern frontier exceed our own… [Return of Geography, anyone?]
    Fourth, we should learn a powerful lesson about “precedents” and “vetoes”. American officials and others argued vociferously that NATO military action against Serbia without approval of the United Nations Security Council, and American and European recognition of Kosovo’s independence without Serbia’s consent, did not establish a precedent because Kosovo was a unique case. The problem with this is that we are not in charge of what others interpret as a precedent. We decide on our national interests, the best policies to advance them, and the best arguments to explain them. We don’t get to decide how others see what we do or how they decide to respond…
    Finally, we should remember what NATO did right during previous rounds of enlargement: insist that prospective new members resolve internal problems with their ethnic minorities…

Well, there’s a lot more good sense in Saunder’s testimony, as well. And I see that The National Interest, which is the Nixon Center’s flagship publication, has a lot of other good analysis of the Georgia crisis, too.
So what I want to note here, firstly, is that all this good sense from the Realists is pushing clearly toward a much less belligerent and more diplomacy-focused policy toward Russia than either McCain or Obama is currently espousing. Secondly, I’d note that many of these same people were also against the invasion of Iraq, back in the day.
Historically, in this country, the ‘Realists’ have been people who took a big-picture look at the balance of power in world politics and argued for robust– often very belligerent– action by the US government, using all its many levers of power, in order to maximize a version of “the US national interest” that was chauvinistic and was generally dominated by the interests of US corporations, not necessarily the US citizenry.
Looking at the “global balance of power” in the way they did most often meant that they respected the traditional, post-Westphalian view of national sovereignty, which is more or less that whatever a government does inside its own country is its own business and not that of anyone else.
The neocons and their allies among the liberal hawks broke clean away from that view, arguing that the US could and should use all the elements of its national power (including, if necessary, military power) to end dictatorships and to “bring” human rights to populations formerly denied them.
How “rights” could ever meaningfully be “brought” to long-oppressed populations by outsiders, and on the tips of cruise missiles, was a conundrum they never satisfactorily solved.
Personally, having lived for six years in a situation of active war, in Lebanon, I have quite a bit more sympathy with the Westphalian model than most of my colleagues in the western rights movement. I have seen at first hand the degree to which warfare is itself a massive motor for the abuse of the rights of all persons living in its path. The idea that westerners might fairly easily go to war in an effort to improve the rights situation of others is one that could only be dreamed up in salons thousands of miles distant from any actual war zone.
Also, though it is true that, under the Westphalian model, there are high “walls” of sovereignty around each country that protect the ability of dictators to carry on oppressing the subjects trapped behind them, throughout history those walls of sovereignty have also– much more significantly– protected the ability of settled and more liberal-minded populations to progress toward greater democracy, and respect of human rights, without the various despots who were their neighbors having any recognized “right” to intervene to abort their liberal project. Too many of the neocons and liberal hawks have forgotten that aspect of Westphalia’s history.
So personally, I see some things of value in the position of the Realists– historically, and even more so today, when the raw pragmatism and respect for empirical ground truth that underlie their approach has brought them to a situation of extreme caution in their attitude toward war.
So maybe pacifism is becoming the new Realism, as well as the other way around?
I think what my form of Quaker pacifism adds to the traditional Realist way of looking at things, though, is that it adds a commitment to caring about and according equal respect to every one of the world’s people, not just those who happen to be my compatriots, and a commitment to undertaking the kinds of nonviolent mass actions and other nonviolent initiatives that by themselves, without the use of arms, can actually transform political realities towards a greater respect for everyone’s rights.
I like to think that these are very pragmatic, or one could even say ‘Realist’, ways to look at the world, too…

Palin’s performance: Insulting and very scary

McCain’s choice of Sarah Palin as his vice-president is an insult to all American voters, regardless of gender. It also raises the disturbing prospect– in the event she becomes President– that the country would once again, as through much of the past eight years, be effectively ruled not by the elected president but by a group of unaccountable people who operate in the shadows around the White House.
The depth of the insult that McCain’s choice of Palin represents to the American people was revealed even more clearly yesterday in the clips that ABC News aired of the interview that Charlie Gibson conducted with her earlier in the day. (Partial transcript here. You can also see the video on that ABC News site.)
The interview showed a tightly scripted, generally extremely controlled woman who was nonetheless quite unable to answer a question about one of the principal strategic issues our country faces– whether in fact the President should continue to claim, as President Bush did in his National Security Strategy of 2002, that the US has the right to engage in “preventive” military action whenever it perceives a threat might arise. Asked about this by Gibson, Palin blustered and shifted uneasily in her seat as she tried to avoid revealing her ignorance of what the ‘Bush Doctrine’ actually is. The incident is recorded on page 4 of the transcript.

Continue reading “Palin’s performance: Insulting and very scary”

September 11 and the war in Afghanistan

For many Americans, including many who have seen the war in Iraq as unjustified and unwise, the war in Afghanistan has until now had a very different aura. In the US, Afghanistan has generally been thought of (sometimes in direct contrast to the war in Iraq) as “the Good War.” It has, after all, always been presented to the US public as both

    (a) directly justified as being the entirely legitimate response to Al-Qaeda’s heinous attacks against America, and also
    (b) laudable in a more general sense because it has “saved” the hard-pressed Afghan people from the desperately repressive and backward-looking social policies of the Taleban.

This year, seven years after the horrendous killings of September 11, it is a good idea to subject both these justifications for our country’s 2001 invasion of Afghanistan to serious examination. I shall make my contribution by undertaking the following review of the Afghan situation:
1. How the US went to war.
Yesterday, I went to a great session at the New America Foundation where former Senator Lincoln Chafee talked about his new book Against the Tide: How a Compliant Congress Empowered a Reckless President. Until he was defeated in the 2006 elections, Chafee was one of the last (very) few liberal Republicans in either house of Congress. The whole of his book is worth reading. It is steeped in a deep sense of regret for where our country is heading. The book’s sub-title more or less tells you what his main theses are.

Continue reading “September 11 and the war in Afghanistan”

US’s global dominance ‘Reduced’: It’s nearly official!

Thomas Fingar, the U.S. government’s highest ranking intelligence analyst, recently told a semi-public audience that he envisions a steady decline in U.S. dominance in the coming decades, according to this intriguing report in today’s Wapo.
Joby Warrick and the venerable Walter Pincus wrote the WaPo piece. They add that the still unpublished report that Fingar was previewing in his recent speech,

    also concludes that the one key area of continued U.S. superiority — military power — will “be the least significant” asset in the increasingly competitive world of the future, because “nobody is going to attack us with massive conventional force.”

This argument that raw military power– the one area in which the US still quite clearly outpaces all other world powers– has rapidly declined in significance (or, one might say, in utility) in recent years is a very important one. It is certainly, an argument that the country’s legislative as well as executive branches should take into good consideration as they ponder the priorities for the already deeply in-the-red US federal budget over the years ahead.

Continue reading “US’s global dominance ‘Reduced’: It’s nearly official!”

JWN redesign update #1

Big thanks to everyone who sent comments in response to the post I put up recently on my desire to upgrade several aspects of the blog. If you’re reading this post on the JWN site you will already have seen that the design is changing a bit. Bear with this process as it continues. I decided that rather than spend time discussing with a web designer what I wanted to do it might be a lot easier to start trying to do as much of the redesign myself as I am able. Especially as I now have quite a lot of experience of tweaking my own Movable Type.
In this first step, I reorganized the front page into a two-sidebar format, since the old sidebar had become ways long, crowded, and clunky; and I tweaked other design elements quite a bit along the way. However, the visual redesign of the site is by no means finished yet. I think I’m going to look for something ‘cleaner’ and classier. I really don’t like the blue I have on the banner right now. Ways too bright and perky!
I would love to have a well designed JPG-imaged banner, though I haven’t found anything I like yet. Can anyone out there make one for me? I’m thinking something classy, lots of white, some blue, possibly some greys… an image of the world, a peace dove or something… and of course the text that we have on the banner now. If you can make one for me, please send it along!
Also, any comments you have about the redesign to date. Giving the main blog text a fixed 55-px width rather than a proportional width was a suggestion from Bill the spouse. I have yet to implement that in the archived versions of the posts. Does anyone else have thoughts on that?
Onward and upward.
Update, Sept. 11: Sorry about any strange effects you might experience. I’m trying to keep them to a minimum. ~HC.

Oliver North???

You know there’s been this long-running dispute between, on the one hand, the US military command in Afghanistan and on the other, the Afghan government and the United Nations, over the number of civilians killed in a controversial US air attack near Azizabad, Afghanistan on August 22.
According to this story in today’s London Times it turns out the US military was relying to some degree in its repeated confirmation of its original (very low) casualty estimates on the say-so of– guess who– that infamous trickster Oliver North.
Hat-tip to Siun of Firedoglake.
I completely concur with the judgment Siun expressed there: “Pardon me while I throw up.”

Continue reading “Oliver North???”

J. Diehl criticizing Saakashvili

WaPo columnist Jackson Diehl is a quintessential liberal hawk. So when he expresses open criticism of Georgian president Mikheil Saakashvili, as he did today, that means there are serious cracks in the coalition of supporters that Saak had hoped to protect himself with, in Washington.
Diehl’s column was titled “The Trouble with Saakashvili.”
He writes,

    The irony is that, beneath that overweening campaign [I think he means ‘overarching’ not overweening? ~HC] to contain Russian belligerence, American officials are still seething at Saakashvili. His impulsive and militarily foolhardy attack on the South Ossetian capital of Tskhinvali on Aug. 8 opened the way for Putin’s aggression. True, provocations by Russian-controlled Ossetian militias preceded the Georgian move, and Russian troops’ subsequent takeover of much of Georgia was clearly planned and prepared well in advance. But the mercurial Saakashvili disregarded direct American warnings that he not fall into Putin’s trap. He embarrassed his staunchest defenders in Washington and plunged both his country and the United States into what has been a costly — and so far losing — battle.

I actually want to write a lot more, as soon as I can, about the nature and size of the costs that Saak’s adventurism inflicted on the United States’ posture of military ‘deterrence’ all round the world.

Continue reading “J. Diehl criticizing Saakashvili”

Peres warns against attacking Iran

This is a story everyone in the US– but especially all those members of Congress who line up behind AIPAC’s warmongering– needs to read. Israeli president Shimon Peres tells the London Sunday Times that, regarding Iran, “The military way will not solve the problem… Such an attack can trigger a bigger war.”
How’s that again?? In all the anti-Iran propaganda with which AIPAC lards its public communications, it forcefully makes the argument that the US and Israel should be prepared to use military attacks against Iran to prevent it ever getting a nuclear weapon… because such a capability could be fatal for Israel.
And now Peres, who was the father of Israel’s own nuclear weapons program back in the 1950s and 1960s, tells us that an attack might actually be harmful, not helpful?
We might remember, too, that during the few months in 1995-96 when Peres was Israel’s prime minister, he launched his own fateful war of choice against Lebanon. That was April 1996, and it did not turn out well for Israel, at all. Peres had launched it partly as an election ploy. It didn’t work out well for him, either. He lost that election– due in good part to the fact that his war in Lebanon persuaded large numbers of Palestinian-Israelis not to vote for him…
And now, the Sunday Times’s Uzi Mahnaimi is writing this:

    Peres also criticised American foreign policy in highly unusual terms for an Israeli leader, saying it relied too much on military force in attempts to impose democracy on the Middle East.
    …“In my opinion, the Americans are making a mistake in their foreign policy.
    “When they intervene abroad, they’d do better using the economy, which doesn’t provoke such antagonism.”

Words of wisdom, spoken very late in the guy’s life, indeed. (When I interviewed him in Tel Aviv back in 1998, he still forcefully defended his decision to launch the 1996 war.)
So, late in the day, yes. But still, words that people in the US policy elite definitely need to hear.

Georgia-Hizbullah: Dept. of Delicious Ironies

So today, Wired’s Noah Schachtman draws attention to the fact– as indeed, I suspected might well happen– some strategists in the ‘west’ have started to recommend that, as it rebuilds its military, Georgia should use “a Hizbullah model”, rather than the earlier US-Israeli model.
Hizbullah, the latest model for pro-western militaries!
One article Schachtman quotes from is this one, by Greg Grant of DoD Buzz.
Grant wrote:

    The U.S. military has been advising and equipping the Georgian military for some time. I saw Georgian soldiers over in Iraq and they appeared competent enough. The American officers I talked to who worked alongside them there held them in high regard. So what, if anything, does the Georgian military performance say about the training we provided? Did we train the Georgians for the wrong type of war, too much irregular war focus and not enough big battle emphasis?

Continue reading “Georgia-Hizbullah: Dept. of Delicious Ironies”