Three Opinions from Today's Washington Post

(source: Defining Moments of The Washington Post's 140-Year History)
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Three opinions from today's Washington Post, focusing on hot topics in the American political landscape, written by David Ignatius, Fareed Zakaria and Robert J. Samuelson. I don't agree - sometimes partially, sometimes more, sometimes much more - with their views, while always reading their editorials with much attention.

Opinion | We’re entering a new phase of the Trump-Russia investigation https://t.co/XYhwJ2qgIh

— Pierre Radulescu (@pierreradulescu) February 15, 2019

Opinion | Anti-Semitism has spread through the Islamic world like a cancer https://t.co/myFnpG1tny

— Pierre Radulescu (@pierreradulescu) February 15, 2019

Opinion | Most of the Green New Deal is make-believe https://t.co/q1PdrWi347

— Pierre Radulescu (@pierreradulescu) February 15, 2019

(Zoon Politikon)

Jamil Mroueh: The Army Is Middle Class in Camouflage

Alexandria, Egypt: Demonstrators demanding the ouster of President Mubarak gather around the statue of Alexander the Great
(AFP / Getty Images)

From what happens these days there are at least two certitudes: the Arab revolution is spreading and the most important broker of the situation is the army. What will ultimately the army do? Will it fraternize with the protesters?

The army is middle class in camouflage, says Jamil Mroueh, the editor in chief of The Daily Star in Beirut. As I passed through the experience of the 1989 revolution in Romania, I think this is very true and very well said.

What will be the future position of the Arab states towards US? Towards Israel? Nobody can give here a definitive prognosis.

For David Ignatius, that's why Assad today is less vulnerable than Mubarak was: his regime is at least as corrupt and autocratic, but it has remained steadfastly anti-American and anti-Israel; hard as it is for us in the West to accept, this rejectionism adds to Assad's power, whereas Mubarak was diminished by his image as the West's puppet (The Arab Revolution Grows Up in today's W. Post).

Roger Cohen has another perspective: one way to measure the immense distance traveled by Arabs over the past month is to note the one big subject they are not talking about - Israel; for too long, the Israeli-Palestinian conflict has been the great diversion, exploited by feckless Arab autocrats to distract impoverished populations (Exit the Israeli Alibi in NY Times). He can be right, as well as it can be wishful thinking. One thing is for sure: the reality in Mid East will be totally different from now on, and all players there need to understand the new situation and to accommodate with the new reality.

(Zoon Politikon)

David Ignatius: Between Red Alert and Perilously Uninformed

French Soldiers Patrol Under the Eiffel Tower on Monday
(photo: Francois Mori / AP)

The public needs to understand that terrorism nowadays is a fact of life and not an existential disaster, considers David Ignatius. The public must be informed: there is a fine line between leveling about threats and scaring.

Here's David Ignatius' opinion in today's Washington Post...

(Please send your comments at davidignatius@washpost.com)

(Zoon Politikon)

The Russian Spy Ring: a Good News / Bad News Story

For Tom Friedman the Russian spy ring story is a good news / bad news one (NY Times). The good news is that another country still believes it's worth spying on America. After all that blah-blah with Post-American era and stuff, this is really refreshing. The bad news is that the country that still believes it is Russia. Neither Finland to spy on the American school system, nor Hong Kong to steal American secrets on regulating financial markets.

Why were Russians interested in spying American secrets? For Tom Friedman the answer could be found in that taste for old-boys games. Building such a sophisticated spy ring in DC and NY gives you the illusion that you still are in the epoch of two super-powers, one on the Potomac and the other on Volga. It's the nostalgia for those times when the KGB agent was meeting sometimes the CIA agent. on the stairs in front of Lincoln Memorial, both of them slightly blasé, both of them slightly tired, both of them aware that the fate of the world was lying on their shoulders, sometimes friends, most of the time enemies, players in the great comedy of history.

Actually you don't need spies to get the American secrets. All you need is a tourist guide to DC. It costs less than $10 (and I can give anyone such a guide for free). The American secret is to be found in the great hall of the Archives, on Constitution Avenue: it's the Bill of Rights; which means, as Tom Friedman puts it, a commitment to individual freedom, free markets, rule of law, great research universities and a culture that celebrates immigrants and innovators.

-----------------------

Well, Mr. Friedman has a great sense of humor. Is he also right? Up to a certain point, I think. Russia still matters and it's not only vodka, balalaika and Kalashnikov. And American-Russian relations are still very relevant. I'd like to invite you to read also an op-ed of David Ignatius, from Washington Post: In From the Cold? U.S. - Russian Relations.

(Zoon Politikon)

David Ignatius: European Bailout Only Postpones Day of Reckoning

David Ignatius in W. Post:

Europeans just did something that they talk about endlessly in the abstract but rarely achieve in practice: They took collective financial action in a crisis.

The Europeans unveiled a big, bold package of rescue measures that caught some Euro-skeptics off guard. We were looking for Armageddon, the manager of one big hedge fund confided. Didn't happen. Instead, the Europeans assembled a creative bailout policy that's reminiscent, in some ways, of what the Federal Reserve hammered together during the Wall Street panic of 2008.

The problem with the European package is that it postpones problems rather than resolves them. It will delay Eurobond defaults another year or two, and it will add some fiscal discipline that could eventually make the 16 Eurozone nations operate more like one economy.

But there's nothing to address the deeper structural imbalances between high-saving northern Europe and the spendthrift Club Med countries of southern Europe that used the Euro as a credit card. Basically, the north's abundance created a low-interest Eurobond market that underpriced the risk of investments in the south.

The centerpiece of the rescue package agreed to in the wee hours of Monday morning is the $560 billion special purpose vehicle to guarantee new loans to Portugal, Italy, Spain and other needy members of the Eurozone if they're about to default on their existing debts. (Greece had already gotten its $146 billion bailout a week earlier, but it can presumably sup at this new trough, too, if the earlier package isn't enough.)

What's innovative (and potentially destabilizing) about this rescue plan is that in exchange for bailout loans, the European Commission will be able to demand austerity measures to, say, cut salaries and pensions in debtor countries. This is the sort of conditionality that comes with aid from the International Monetary Fund to destitute Third World countries. And in fact, the IMF will be kicking in an additional $321 billion in bailout money, with the usual strings attached.

The good side of the austerity measures is that they are a step in the direction of economic integration, which has been the missing link in the Eurozone since the Maastricht Treaty of 1992. The conditionality of the rescue plan opens the possibility for a common European fiscal policy that, over time, would make the common currency sustainable.

But the austerity measures have two big drawbacks, one economic and the other political. The economic problem is that imposing harsh budget cuts and other belt-tightening on the Club Med countries, while appealing to German workers, may not make sense when the European recovery is so fragile.

The trickier problem is building political support for the austerity measures that are coming. Looking at Greek rioters chanting about demon bankers and government ministers who threaten their pensions is a reminder that Europeans believe in the welfare state as a matter of social entitlement. A different social contract may need to be written, more in line with economic and demographic realities. But that won't be any easier in Europe than in the United States.

The unfairness of the rescue process is galling, as it was in the United States in 2008. A speculative panic forced central bankers to come up with a scheme that, in effect, socialized the costs of the bad decisions made by private bankers and government officials. Such actions create long-running social discontent, of which the Greek riots may be just the beginning.

It doesn't help the Greek worker who may be out of a job soon, but the `underlying problem here is the global imbalance that produced a savings glut in some parts of the world (China, Germany) that, in turn, fueled low interest rates that understated the riskiness of some investments (subprime mortgages, Greek bonds).

Until those imbalances are checked, we can look forward to new asset bubbles and new panics. The wolf pack, as the Swedish finance minister described the rapacious market, is just resting, waiting to pounce on the next overvalued sector or part of the world.

I don't envy the Chinese authorities. They're sitting atop what is arguably the last big bubble. Bloomberg News reported Tuesday that China's inflation accelerated in April, its bank lending exceeded forecasts and its property prices jumped by a record amount. As the Chinese watch rioters in the streets of Athens, they get a stark reminder of the cost of getting economic policy wrong -- and of allowing too much free-flowing capital to distort the real risks of economic activity.

(Please send your comments at davidignatius@washpost.com)

(Zoon Politikon)

Pitfalls in Kandahar

David Ignatius in W. Post:

The coming battle for control of this ancient crossroads city will be the toughest challenge of the war in Afghanistan -- not because it will be bloody, necessarily, but because it will require the hardest item for U.S. commanders to deliver, which is an improvement in governance.
Kandahar is the heartland of the Pashtun people -- a place of competing tribes and clans, of hidden wealth accumulated from drug trafficking and smuggling, and of notorious power brokers symbolized in the public mind by Ahmed Wali Karzai, the leader of the provincial council and brother of Afghanistan's president.
Reforming the local government is like disassembling a pyramid of pick-up sticks. One wrong move and the whole pile collapses. Yet if the United States accommodates the existing power structure, it will appear to be condoning corruption here -- a bad message for the public in Afghanistan and America alike.
Talking with U.S. officials about the coming campaign, I heard a range of good ideas but not a clear strategy. The American officials know they can't deliver on their counterinsurgency promise of protecting the population without breaking the hold of the local chieftains. Yet they are wary of toppling the system and opening the way for what might be even worse chaos -- and new resentment at American meddling.
The Kandahar campaign will have a military component as U.S. troops clear Taliban strongholds surrounding the city, such as Zhari, Panjwai and Arghandab. But in Kandahar, the problem isn't the enemy so much as our nominal friends such as Ahmed Karzai. The battle for the city will be political more than military -- and it will require skills and expertise that are in short supply.
It's amazing what we don't know about Kandahar, says one of the top U.S. military commanders. He just supervised a special push to gather intelligence about power brokers, tribal leaders and their grievances and, as he put it, "who's who in the Kandahar zoo.Unfortunately, the United States is starting from a low base after years of intelligence collection that was only marginally relevant to the overall strategy, according to a report in January by Maj. Gen. Michael Flynn.
Recognizing the severe gaps in their knowledge, U.S. commanders have adopted what might be described as operational humility. They know they can make big mistakes if they aren't careful. Shaking up the power structure might put the United States on the side of the Pashtun man in the street, but it would open a power vacuum that could be exploited by the Taliban. Given the planned July 2011 start for withdrawal of U.S. troops, there isn't time for risky experiments in Kandahar. American officials worry, quite sensibly, about the law of unintended consequences.
So commanders are opting instead for an approach that one calls re-balancing the Kandahar power elite. The idea is to open up political space to tribes and clans that have been left out of the spoils system. The basic problem in Kandahar is that you have a disenfranchised population, says Frank Ruggiero, a State Department official who is the top U.S. civilian representative in southern Afghanistan.
The tool that U.S. strategists hope to use to broaden the political base in Kandahar is the traditional Afghan forum known as the shura. Officials are encouraging these gatherings regularly in the city and the surrounding districts, and urging local Afghan officials to make them more inclusive and a better forum for redressing grievances. They want to combine the shuras with better policing, aided by embedded U.S. trainers, and with new economic development projects.
Traveling here with Adm. Mike Mullen, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, I attended a shura hosted by Tooryalai Wesa, the governor of Kandahar province. This was not exactly a gathering of the dispossessed. The most emphatic speakers around the table warned that the United States shouldn't go after Ahmed Karzai. If he's not here, the balance will be unbalanced, Wesa said after the meeting.
Curbing corruption in Kandahar may be mission impossible. But it's the task that the United States has set for itself, by promising through its counterinsurgency campaign that it is working for a better and more just Afghanistan than what the Taliban offers.
It's this dissonance between ends and means that worries a visitor here this week. The hardest part of this war, paradoxically, isn't the fighting on the ground, which the U.S. military conducts brilliantly, but the struggle in the Afghan political sphere, where we know precious little.

(Please send your comments at davidignatius@washpost.com)

(Zoon Politikon)

2010 According to Ignatius

David Ignatius in W. Post:

The headlines at year's end conveyed the eerie feeling that the world is running on replay: Terror plots aboard airliners, strikes against al-Qaeda training camps and an Iranian nuclear program that rolls on despite nearly a decade of efforts to stop it.

You never cross the same river twice, as the saying goes. History is always moving and changing. But the problems the United States faced in 2009 in the Muslim world were deep and intractable, and less amenable to solutions than the Obama administration might have hoped. We can remind ourselves that Islam's adaptation to the modern world (which is at the root of much of this violence) has been far less bloody than was Europe's in the 19th and 20th centuries. But that's little comfort in the airport security line.

It was telling to read the comment by Sen. Dianne Feinstein, chairman of the Senate intelligence committee, about how tougher policies might have stopped accused Christmas Day bomber Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab: I'd rather, in the interest of protecting people, overreact rather than underreact. Honestly, isn't that something Dick Cheney might have said back in 2001?

Here are some of the puzzles I'll be trying to understand better in the year ahead:

-- Are we beginning a new counterterror war in Yemen? The answer seems to be yes, but the Obama administration is wisely following the model of Afghanistan 2001 by using proxy forces (in this case, the Yemeni government) to attack al-Qaeda. That's a lot better idea than sending in U.S. combat troops.

The partnership with Yemen is delicate, which is why U.S. officials have said so little about it. But there's a growing American program to aid Yemeni counterterrorism forces, and it appears that U.S. precision-guided weapons were used in a Dec. 17 attack on three al-Qaeda hideouts, killing 34 operatives. This is precisely what America should have done against Osama bin Laden in the 1990s, before Sept. 11, and it's the right policy now.

Yemen is the scene of a second proxy war, this one by Saudi and Yemeni forces against the al-Houthi rebels along the northern border, who have Iranian support. Again, the sensible U.S. course is to help others do the fighting.

-- Can we curb Iran's nuclear program? The clock on President Obama's timetable for engagement was supposed to run out New Year's Eve. But the administration is adding a little extra time by keeping the door open for talks before a vote on new U.N. sanctions, probably in March or April.

Diplomacy shows little promise of stopping Tehran, but neither does anything else. So the administration has encouraged Turkish mediation efforts to find a compromise on the Oct. 1 plan for enrichment of Iranian fuel outside the country, which Tehran appeared to accept and then rejected. The White House has also approved Sen. John Kerry's idea of visiting Tehran, but Kerry has wisely dropped that for now, when the Iranian regime is killing protesters.

Is regime change in the air in Tehran? Last weekend's demonstrations revived that hope, but it's premature. The regime is expanding its network of repression while the opposition -- lacking a strong leader -- remains unable to mount sustained, organized protests.

-- Will Iraqi democracy be 2010's big success story? Visiting Anbar province several weeks ago and listening to the governor of Ramadi talk about his big development plans, I found myself wondering if maybe the cruel Iraq story might have a happy ending after all. This was the province where al-Qaeda declared its first emirate, just a few years ago, and now the governor is handing out a special Financial Times report on business opportunities there.

When I meet Iraqis these days, they all want to talk politics: Which party is ahead in the March parliamentary elections? Can Interior Minister Jawad al-Bolani or Vice President Adel Abdul Mahdi unseat the incumbent prime minister, Nouri al-Maliki? It's the kind of freewheeling political debate you can't find anywhere else in the Arab world. I want to believe it's real, even as the terrorist bombs continue to explode in Baghdad and other cities.

What I know about 2010 is that it will be another year of ebbs and flows in the Middle East. It will be another year of American expeditionary wars and anti-American bombings. If there's one perverse positive sign out there, consistent over most of the past decade, it's the failure of al-Qaeda's extremist ideology. We have an enemy that makes even more mistakes than we do.


(Please send your comments at davidignatius@washpost.com)

(Zoon Politikon)

Surge in Afghanistan

(video by Big3News)

From now on, Afghanistan is absolutely Obama's war. His decision is criticized both by Republicans (why did he speak about a withdrawal timetable?) and Democrats (this would be Obama's Vietnam). Why should Obama refuse to think at an exit strategy? Taliban will still be there in ten years; does it mean US should still be there in ten years? Why should Obama downplay now the US military presence? Now Taliban has the initiative in the war; does anyone in US believe Obama should consider the war lost and start withdrawal?

Any decision is risky and regardless of anything Obama decided, any scenario for the outcome remains on the table.

I looked in US press for the opinions of some well-known political pundits. David Ignatius considers Obama's decision the only possible. David Brooks analyzes the differences between applying a COIN strategy in Iraq and Afghanistan, and ultimately stands near the President. Bob Herbert considers the decision a tragic mistake. Thomas Friedman believes surge should be rather focused on development of new green technologies: the best way, he thinks, to defend US status. Michael Gerson is more concerned about present developments in Iran. Niall Ferguson is preoccupied more by the financial crisis: he sees here the greatest risk for US empire: banking crisis followed by fiscal crisis would lead to impossibility of maintaining the military might, then end is near.

It is probably impossible to bring all these opinions in this post. I would rather select David Ignatius and Niall Ferguson. You can read the others by clicking on their names: that will lead you to their columns.

David Ignatius in W. Post:

President Obama has been deliberating for months over his Afghanistan strategy. But when it came time to explain that decision Tuesday, he was cool and analytical -- and seemed almost serene about a policy that he knows will be attacked from both sides of the aisle.

I am painfully clear that this is politically unpopular, Obama told a small group of columnists. Not only is this not popular, but it's least popular in my own party. But that's not how I make decisions.

Obama spoke during a lunch in the White House library. Shelved on the walls around him were books recording the trials and triumphs of his predecessors, who waged wars with sometimes agonizing consequences. But this president doesn't do agony -- at least not in public.

His lunchtime presentation of the details of the new strategy was focused and precise. He didn't talk about victory, and he didn't raise his voice. He did not attempt to convey the blood and tears of the battlefield, or the punishing loneliness of command. Even in this most intense and consequential decision of his presidency, he remains no-drama Obama.

The president made his case on a grand stage Tuesday night at West Point, facing the Corps of Cadets. But it was less a call to battle than, as he put it in his speech, to "end this war successfully."

Obama has made the right decision: The only viable exit strategy from Afghanistan is one that starts with a bang -- by adding 30,000 more U.S. troops to secure the major population centers, so that control can be transferred to the Afghan army and police. This transfer process, starting in July 2011, is the heart of his strategy.

Military commanders appear comfortable with Obama's decision, although they wish it hadn't taken so long. Adm. Mike Mullen, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, is said to be especially pleased that Obama decided to rush the additional troops to Afghanistan in just six months, sooner than Gen. Stanley McChrystal had requested. The speedy deployment gets McChrystal the most U.S. force in the fight as fast as possible and enough to help him gain the initiative, said one senior military officer.

But politically, it's an Afghanistan strategy with something to make everyone unhappy: Democrats will be angry that the president is escalating a costly war at a time when the struggling economy should be his top priority. Republicans will protest that by setting a short, 18-month deadline to begin withdrawing those forces, he's signaling to the Taliban that they can win if they just are patient.

Obama insisted Tuesday afternoon that "given the circumstances, this is the best option available to us."At another point, he conceded: "None of this is easy. I mean, we are choosing from a menu of options that are less than ideal.

There has been much talk about how this war is Obama's Vietnam, but the president rejected the analogy. The Vietnamese never killed 3,000 people in America, as al-Qaeda did; we aren't fighting a nationalist movement in Afghanistan; and he isn't making an open-ended commitment.

To pretend that somehow this is a distant country that has nothing to do with us is just factually incorrect, he told the columnists. I agree with him -- Afghanistan is vital to U.S. security interests. But I don't think he will convince many House Democrats.

The most important question about Obama's strategy isn't political but pragmatic: Will it succeed? He has defined success downward, by focusing on the ability to transfer control to the Afghans. He shows little interest in the big ideas of counterinsurgency and insists he will avoid a nation-building commitment in Afghanistan. That will make it easier to declare a good enough outcome in July 2011, if not victory.

When I asked Obama if the Taliban wouldn't simply wait us out, he was dismissive: This is an argument that I don't give a lot of credence to, because if you follow the logic of this argument, then you would never leave. Right? Essentially you'd be signing on to have Afghanistan as a protectorate of the United States indefinitely.

Obama thinks that setting deadlines will force the Afghans to get their act together at last. That strikes me as the most dubious premise of his strategy. He is telling his adversary that he will start leaving on a certain date, and telling his ally to be ready to take over then, or else. That's the weak link in an otherwise admirable decision -- the idea that we strengthen our hand by announcing in advance that we plan to fold it.

(Please send your comments at davidignatius@washpost.com)

Niall Ferguson in Newsweek:

Call it the fractal geometry of fiscal crisis. If you fly across the Atlantic on a clear day, you can look down and see the same phenomenon but on four entirely different scales. At one extreme there is tiny Iceland. Then there is little Ireland, followed by medium-size Britain. They're all a good deal smaller than the mighty United States. But in each case the economic crisis has taken the same form: a massive banking crisis, followed by an equally massive fiscal crisis as the government stepped in to bail out the private financial system.

Size matters, of course. For the smaller countries, the financial losses arising from this crisis are a great deal larger in relation to their gross domestic product than they are for the United States. Yet the stakes are higher in the American case. In the great scheme of things—let's be frank—it does not matter much if Iceland teeters on the brink of fiscal collapse, or Ireland, for that matter. The locals suffer, but the world goes on much as usual.

But if the United States succumbs to a fiscal crisis, as an increasing number of economic experts fear it may, then the entire balance of global economic power could shift. Military experts talk as if the president's decision about whether to send an additional 40,000 troops to Afghanistan is a make-or-break moment. In reality, his indecision about the deficit could matter much more for the country's long-term national security. Call the United States what you like—superpower, hegemon, or empire—but its ability to manage its finances is closely tied to its ability to remain the predominant global military power. Here's why.

The disciples of John Maynard Keynes argue that increasing the federal debt by roughly a third was necessary to avoid Depression 2.0. Well, maybe, though some would say the benefits of fiscal stimulus have been oversold and that the magic multiplier (which is supposed to transform $1 of government spending into a lot more than $1 of aggregate demand) is trivially small.

Credit where it's due. The positive number for third-quarter growth in the United States would have been a lot lower without government spending. Between half and two thirds of the real increase in gross domestic product was attributable to government programs, especially the Cash for Clunkers scheme and the subsidy to first-time home buyers. But we are still a very long way from a self--sustaining recovery. The third-quarter growth number has just been revised downward from 3.5 percent to 2.8 percent. And that's not wholly surprising. Remember, what makes a stimulus actually work is the change in borrowing by the whole public sector. Since the federal government was already running deficits, and since the states are actually raising taxes and cutting spending, the actual size of the stimulus is closer to 4 percent of GDP spread over the years 2007 to 2010—a lot less than that headline 11.2 percent deficit.

Meanwhile, let's consider the cost of this muted stimulus. The deficit for the fiscal year 2009 came in at more than $1.4 trillion—about 11.2 percent of GDP, according to the Congressional Budget Office (CBO). That's a bigger deficit than any seen in the past 60 years—only slightly larger in relative terms than the deficit in 1942. We are, it seems, having the fiscal policy of a world war, without the war. Yes, I know, the United States is at war in Afghanistan and still has a significant contingent of troops in Iraq. But these are trivial conflicts compared with the world wars, and their contribution to the gathering fiscal storm has in fact been quite modest (little more than 1.8 percent of GDP, even if you accept the estimated cumulative cost of $3.2 trillion published by Columbia economist Joseph Stiglitz in February 2008).

And that $1.4 trillion is just for starters. According to the CBO's most recent projections, the federal deficit will decline from 11.2 percent of GDP this year to 9.6 percent in 2010, 6.1 percent in 2011, and 3.7 percent in 2012. After that it will stay above 3 percent for the foreseeable future. Meanwhile, in dollar terms, the total debt held by the public (excluding government agencies, but including foreigners) rises from $5.8 trillion in 2008 to $14.3 trillion in 2019—from 41 percent of GDP to 68 percent.

In other words, there is no end in sight to the borrowing binge. Unless entitlements are cut or taxes are raised, there will never be another balanced budget. Let's assume I live another 30 years and follow my grandfathers to the grave at about 75. By 2039, when I shuffle off this mortal coil, the federal debt held by the public will have reached 91 percent of GDP, according to the CBO's extended baseline projections. Nothing to worry about, retort -deficit-loving economists like Paul Krugman. In 1945, the figure was 113 percent.

Well, let's leave aside the likely huge differences between the United States in 1945 and in 2039. Consider the simple fact that under the CBO's alternative (i.e., more pessimistic) fiscal scenario, the debt could hit 215 percent by 2039. That's right: more than double the annual output of the entire U.S. economy.

Forecasting anything that far ahead is not about predicting the future. Everything hinges on the assumptions you make about demographics, Medicare costs, and a bunch of other variables. For example, the CBO assumes an average annual real GDP growth rate of 2.3 percent over the next 30 years. The point is to show the implications of the current chronic imbalance between federal spending and federal revenue. And the implication is clear. Under no plausible scenario does the debt burden decline. Under one of two plausible scenarios it explodes by a factor of nearly five in relation to economic output.

Another way of doing this kind of exercise is to calculate the net present value of the unfunded liabilities of the Social Security and Medicare systems. One recent estimate puts them at about $104 trillion, 10 times the stated federal debt.

No sweat, reply the Keynesians. We can easily finance $1 trillion a year of new government debt. Just look at the way Japan's households and financial institutions funded the explosion of Japanese public debt (up to 200 percent of GDP) during the two "lost decades" of near-zero growth that began in 1990.

Unfortunately for this argument, the evidence to support it is lacking. American households were, in fact, net sellers of Treasuries in the second quarter of 2009, and on a massive scale. Purchases by mutual funds were modest ($142 billion), while purchases by pension funds and insurance companies were trivial ($12 billion and $10 billion, respectively). The key, therefore, becomes the banks. Currently, according to the Bridgewater hedge fund, U.S. banks' asset allocation to government bonds is about 13 percent, which is relatively low by historical standards. If they raised that proportion back to where it was in the early 1990s, it's conceivable they could absorb about $250 billion a year of government bond purchases.But that's a big if. Data for October showed commercial banks selling Treasuries.

That just leaves two potential buyers: the Federal Reserve, which bought the bulk of Treasuries issued in the second quarter; and foreigners, who bought $380 billion. Morgan Stanley's analysts have crunched the numbers and concluded that, in the year ending June 2010, there could be a shortfall in demand on the order of $598 billion—about a third of projected new issuance.

Of course, our friends in Beijing could ride to the rescue by increasing their already vast holdings of U.S. government debt. For the past five years or so, they have been amassing dollar--denominated international reserves in a wholly unprecedented way, mainly as a result of their interventions to prevent the Chinese currency from appreciating against the dollar.

Right now, the People's Republic of China holds about 13 percent of U.S. government bonds and notes in public hands. At the peak of this process of reserve accumulation, back in 2007, it was absorbing as much as 75 percent of monthly Treasury issuance.

But there's no such thing as a free lunch in the realm of international finance. According to Fred Bergsten of the Peterson Institute for International Economics, if this trend were to continue, the U.S. -current-account deficit could rise to 15 percent of GDP by 2030, and its net debt to the rest of the world could hit 140 percent of GDP. In such a scenario, the U.S. would have to pay as much as 7 percent of GDP every year to foreigners to service its external borrowings.

Could that happen? I doubt it. For one thing, the Chinese keep grumbling that they have far too many Treasuries already. For another, a significant dollar depreciation seems more probable, since the United States is in the lucky position of being able to borrow in its own currency, which it reserves the right to print in any quantity the Federal Reserve chooses.

Now, who said the following? "My prediction is that politicians will eventually be tempted to resolve the [fiscal] crisis the way irresponsible governments usually do: by printing money, both to pay current bills and to inflate away debt. And as that temptation becomes obvious, interest rates will soar."

Seems pretty reasonable to me. The surprising thing is that this was none other than Paul Krugman, the high priest of Keynesianism, writing back in March 2003. A year and a half later he was comparing the U.S. deficit with Argentina's (at a time when it was 4.5 percent of GDP). Has the economic situation really changed so drastically that now the same Krugman believes it was deficits that saved us, and wants to see an even larger deficit next year? Perhaps. But it might just be that the party in power has changed.

History strongly supports the proposition that major financial crises are followed by major fiscal crises. On average, write Carmen Reinhart and Kenneth Rogoff in their new book, This Time Is Different, government debt rises by 86 percent during the three years following a banking crisis. In the wake of these debt explosions, one of two things can happen: either a default, usually when the debt is in a foreign currency, or a bout of high inflation that catches the creditors out. The history of all the great European empires is replete with such episodes. Indeed, serial default and high inflation have tended to be the surest symptoms of imperial decline.

As the U.S. is unlikely to default on its debt, since it's all in dollars, the key question, therefore, is whether we are going to see the Fed printing money—buying newly minted Treasuries in exchange for even more newly minted greenbacks—followed by the familiar story of rising prices and declining real-debt burdens. It's a scenario many investors around the world fear. That is why they are selling dollars. That is why they are buying gold.

Yet from where I am sitting, inflation is a pretty remote prospect. With U.S. unemployment above 10 percent, labor unions relatively weak, and huge quantities of unused capacity in global manufacturing, there are none of the pressures that made for stagflation (low growth plus high prices) in the 1970s. Public expectations of inflation are also very stable, as far as can be judged from poll data and the difference between the yields on regular and inflation-protected bonds.

So here's another scenario—which in many ways is worse than the inflation scenario. What happens is that we get a rise in the real interest rate, which is the actual interest rate minus inflation. According to a substantial amount of empirical research by economists, including Peter Orszag (now at the Office of Management and Budget), significant increases in the debt-to-GDP ratio tend to increase the real interest rate. One recent study concluded that "a 20 percentage point increase in the U.S. government-debt-to-GDP ratio should lead to a 20–120 basis points [0.2–1.2 percent] increase in real interest rates." This can happen in one of three ways: the nominal interest rate rises and inflation stays the same; the nominal rate stays the same and inflation falls; or—the nightmare case—the nominal interest rate rises and inflation falls.

Today's Keynesians deny that this can happen. But the historical evidence is against them. There are a number of past cases (e.g., France in the 1930s) when nominal rates have risen even at a time of deflation. What's more, it seems to be happening in Japan right now. Just last week Hirohisa Fujii, Japan's new finance minister, admitted that he was highly concerned about the recent rise in Japanese government bond yields. In the very same week, the government admitted that Japan was back in deflation after three years of modest price increases.

It's not inconceivable that something similar could happen to the United States. Foreign investors might ask for a higher nominal return on U.S. Treasuries to compensate them for the weakening dollar. And inflation might continue to surprise us on the downside. After all, consumer price inflation is in negative territory right now.

Why should we fear rising real interest rates ahead of inflation? The answer is that for a heavily indebted government and an even more heavily indebted public, they mean an increasingly heavy debt-service burden. The relatively short duration (maturity) of most of these debts means that a large share has to be rolled over each year. That means any rise in rates would feed through the system scarily fast.

Already, the federal government's interest payments are forecast by the CBO to rise from 8 percent of revenues in 2009 to 17 percent by 2019, even if rates stay low and growth resumes. If rates rise even slightly and the economy flatlines, we'll get to 20 percent much sooner. And history suggests that once you are spending as much as a fifth of your revenues on debt service, you have a problem. It's all too easy to find yourself in a vicious circle of diminishing credibility. The investors don't believe you can afford your debts, so they charge higher interest, which makes your position even worse.

This matters more for a superpower than for a small Atlantic island for one very simple reason. As interest payments eat into the budget, something has to give—and that something is nearly always defense expenditure. According to the CBO, a significant decline in the relative share of national security in the federal budget is already baked into the cake. On the Pentagon's present plan, defense spending is set to fall from above 4 percent now to 3.2 percent of GDP in 2015 and to 2.6 percent of GDP by 2028.

Over the longer run, to my own estimated departure date of 2039, spending on health care rises from 16 percent to 33 percent of GDP (some of the money presumably is going to keep me from expiring even sooner). But spending on everything other than health, Social Security, and interest payments drops from 12 percent to 8.4 percent.

This is how empires decline. It begins with a debt explosion. It ends with an inexorable reduction in the resources available for the Army, Navy, and Air Force. Which is why voters are right to worry about America's debt crisis. According to a recent Rasmussen report, 42 percent of Americans now say that cutting the deficit in half by the end of the president's first term should be the administration's most important task—significantly more than the 24 percent who see health-care reform as the No. 1 priority. But cutting the deficit in half is simply not enough. If the United States doesn't come up soon with a credible plan to restore the federal budget to balance over the next five to 10 years, the danger is very real that a debt crisis could lead to a major weakening of American power.

The precedents are certainly there. Habsburg Spain defaulted on all or part of its debt 14 times between 1557 and 1696 and also succumbed to inflation due to a surfeit of New World silver. Prerevolutionary France was spending 62 percent of royal revenue on debt service by 1788. The Ottoman Empire went the same way: interest payments and amortization rose from 15 percent of the budget in 1860 to 50 percent in 1875. And don't forget the last great English-speaking empire. By the interwar years, interest payments were consuming 44 percent of the British budget, making it intensely difficult to rearm in the face of a new German threat.

Call it the fatal arithmetic of imperial decline. Without radical fiscal reform, it could apply to America next.

(Please send your comments at nfergus@fas.harvard.edu)

(Zoon Politikon)

Ignatius: The Jobless Scary Movie

David Ignatius in W. Post:

For a political horror show, fast-forward to the summer of 2010: The unemployment rate is stubbornly high, hovering between 9.3 and 9.7 percent. Companies are wary about hiring more workers because the economy remains soft. Small businesses, which normally power a recovery, are caught in a credit squeeze.

In this scenario, the jobs outlook will remain bleak for another year. The unemployment rate will remain well above 8 percent in 2011. And the economy won't bounce back completely for five years after that.

The Democrats, in our scary 2010 movie, will be heading toward the midterm elections hoping to preserve their 81-seat margin in the House. Vulnerable incumbents will be clamoring for more economic stimulus, but the Obama administration will be constrained by the huge budget deficits needed to bail out the economy after the 2008 financial crisis.

I wish that this economic forecast were just a bad dream after too much Thanksgiving turkey. But it's drawn from the minutes of the Federal Reserve's Nov. 3-4 meeting, released last week. It's a genuinely troubling document, as much for its political implications as for its number-crunching. It draws a picture of a nation of unfair and unequal sacrifices, where Wall Street is recovering even as Main Street continues to pay the bills.

If the Fed's projections are right, the public is going to be very angry next year -- at big business and at the elected officials who have spent trillions of dollars without putting the country fully back to work. Lou Dobbs, the voice of populist anger, may become the nation's hottest politician. President Obama, who has struggled to find a centrist consensus for economic policies, may be tossed like a cork on a stormy sea.

The Fed struggled to answer the basic question that is haunting administration policymakers: Why has unemployment remained so high, even as the economy has started to grow again and the stock market has been on a tear? The Fed's answer is that businesses, having been burned by the recession, are wary about adding more workers or making new investments. Like consumers who have just discovered the virtues of saving, their prudence -- however sensible on an individual basis -- is a collective drag on the economy.

Business contacts reported that they would be cautious in their hiring, the Fed minutes note. Indeed, participants expected that businesses would be able to meet any increases in demand in the near term by raising their employees' hours and boosting productivity, thus delaying the need to add to their payrolls.

If hiring hasn't bounced back, neither has lending. Bank loans continued to contract sharply in all categories, the Fed reports. Big businesses may be able to get money, but smaller firms "faced substantial constraints in their access to credit."This credit squeeze, in turn, will "restrain hiring at small businesses, which are normally a source of employment growth in recoveries.

Putting the numbers together, the Fed predicts that despite a growing economy, unemployment will be 8.2 to 8.6 percent during 2011, down only about a percentage point from 2010. And here's the scariest line of all in the Fed minutes: Most participants anticipated that about five or six years would be needed for the economy to converge fully to a longer-run path and a normal job market.

Looking toward next year's congressional elections, strategists will have to calibrate the politics of high unemployment. The four states with the highest jobless rates as of October are all Democratic strongholds: Michigan, at 15.1 percent; Nevada, at 13 percent; Rhode Island, at 12.9 percent; and California, at 12.5 percent. And if you look at the states where Democrats gained their 21 House seats last year, the list includes eight states where unemployment in October was above the national average of 10.2 percent.

The politics of rage aren't pretty. But in this case, it's hard to argue that the anger isn't justified. The Fed's analysis shows what we see in the daily stock market summaries. People on the top are recovering their losses; people on the bottom are out of work and out of luck.

I admire Obama's effort to make responsible economic choices in this environment and his refusal to demagogue issues such as financial reform. But he will need all the political genius he showed during the 2008 campaign -- and which he has displayed too little lately -- to handle what's coming at him next year.

(Please send your comments at davidignatius@washpost.com)

(Zoon Politikon)

David Ignatius: Obama's Skeptic in Chief

David Ignatius in W. Post:

With President Obama finally ready to announce his decision about Afghanistan, it's a good time to examine the role played by Vice President Biden, who emerged during the policy review as the administration's in-house skeptic -- the questioner in chief, as one insider puts it.

Biden has been the point man in challenging some premises of Gen. Stanley McChrystal's strategy, according to civilian and military officials involved in the review. He was dubious about committing more troops when the administration announced its initial strategy in March, and over the months his doubts came to be shared, increasingly, by the president.

Biden's questions sometimes peeved advocates of the military buildup -- one official describes a process of discussion that resembled bashing a piñata -- and they added weeks of delay. But administration officials argue that the review, protracted and painful as it has been, will produce an Afghanistan policy that can better withstand public scrutiny.

Obama is still working on the final details, and one participant describes the narrow balance as 51-49. Officials predict that he will send some additional troops to secure Afghanistan's population centers, though probably not the full 40,000 McChrystal requested. Obama's support for the mission will be hedged and time-limited, as Biden has urged.

Biden won his case against an open-ended commitment to a policy that, as even its strongest advocates concede, may not work. Instead, the president appears to have embraced Biden's demand for a proof of concept to test the strategy in the populated regions where the United States added troops this year. The time limit for this experimentation isn't clear yet, but it's likely to be less than the three to five years U.S. commanders think is needed.

Obama is said to be confident that the military can succeed in the clear and hold part of the strategy but less certain about the subsequent build and transfer phase, where the Afghans take control of cleared areas. That's where Obama will apply his benchmarks and testing: Can the United States mount a civilian surge of aid workers? Can President Hamid Karzai curb corruption and improve governance? Can Afghan security forces expand rapidly enough to take over responsibility?

U.S. military commanders don't disagree with the need to test the counterinsurgency strategy and see what works. They're doing plenty of experimentation already -- organizing governance and development projects, and bolstering Afghan tribal forces. This kind of trial-and-error approach worked in Iraq, commanders note, but only when it was coupled with sufficient military power. What has frustrated the military has been the political hesitation and uncertainty in Washington when they're fighting a war.

Biden and the other skeptics are said to have focused on some key assumptions in McChrystal's strategy that, on examination, they found to be weak:

-- The relationship between the Taliban and al-Qaeda. Military strategists had argued that gains for the former would lead to a resurgence by the latter. But the skeptics argued that most Taliban commanders, while opposing U.S. troops, don't want to join al-Qaeda's global jihad.

-- The relationship between Afghanistan and Pakistan. Proponents of a troop surge contended that it would help Pakistan battle its own Taliban insurgency. But critics cautioned that the evidence was mixed. While the Pakistanis certainly don't want the United States to leave Afghanistan, they're also worried that more American troops next door would drive Taliban fighters back into Pakistan.

-- The feasibility of creating a 400,000-man Afghan army and police force. McChrystal's plan proposed roughly doubling the Afghan security forces. But the skeptics argued that the forecasts for recruitment and attrition were unrealistic, and they seem to have convinced Obama. The final strategy probably won't make a specific force projection.

Biden and the other doubters have warned against an ever-growing cycle of escalation in Afghanistan. What they want instead is for the military to consolidate its forces where they're already deployed -- and demonstrate that the strategy can work. Even Biden seems to accept that this means some increase in troops, because the force now isn't sufficient to consolidate its hold.

We'll find out next week how Obama has decided to marry the battle plan of his commanders with the exit strategy of his vice president. Straddling yes and no is never a good idea. But if the long review produces a sharper and more realistic plan, it will have been worthwhile. Obama's obligation is to give the military enough resources to succeed at the mission he assigns them.


(Zoon Politikon)

David Ignatius On Reforms in Afghanistan

A classic American dilemma: how does a superpower fix problems in a faraway country without dictating policies in a way that ultimately enfeebles the very people we are trying to help?

David Ignatius in W. Post:

With the reelection of President Hamid Karzai, if that's the right word for a process that featured fraudulent balloting and a canceled runoff, the United States now confronts the hardest puzzle of all about Afghanistan: How to improve governance -- which most experts agree is essential to defeating the Taliban -- without taking even more control from Afghan officials?

President Obama took the first step on this tightrope Monday with a congratulatory phone call to Karzai that was at the same time a backhanded slap. He urged the Afghan president to launch a much more serious effort to eradicate corruption. Karzai responded Tuesday by promising that, in unspecified ways, he would eradicate this stain.

It's a classic American dilemma: How does a superpower fix problems in a faraway country without dictating policies in a way that ultimately enfeebles the very people we are trying to help? Over the years we've gotten this wrong in Vietnam, the Middle East and Latin America.

The governance issue comes up in nearly every conversation with U.S. officials in Afghanistan. The problem is partly the corruption and inefficiency of the Karzai government, and partly the primitive state of Afghanistan's legal and political institutions. It's the weakness the Americans most want to fix, but where they are least certain about the solution.

Many favor a dramatic U.S. intervention that forces Karzai to make the necessary reforms. But some U.S. policymakers fear that such an attempt to impose policies will only make matters worse -- by offending Afghans and undermining the country's frail efforts at self-government.

The idea that you can just order Karzai around is wrong, insists one senior U.S. official. He has to feel that it's his idea.

Various proposals are circulating for how to tackle the governance mess. One suggestion is a council of elders, including prominent Afghans and international figures, to assist Karzai. Another idea is a top consultative position, a national security and economic adviser. A third proposal would gather a new constitutional convention to widen the political circle and write new rules for governance.

But is Karzai capable of reform? Some American experts argue that Karzai's government is, in effect, a criminal enterprise with billions of dollars at stake in the status quo. Customs fees collected privately at the Torkham Gate crossing into Pakistan total an estimated $13 million a month. Then there's skimming from the billions in military and economic aid. And finally, there's the narcotics trade, from which sophisticated cartels rake in several billion dollars a year.

The corruption helps fuel the Taliban insurgency -- not just through illicit revenue but by discrediting American talk about the rule of law. The Taliban's appeal at the grass-roots level, experts warn, comes from the fact that it offers an austere contrast to the Mafia-like network in Kabul and its American backers.

In visits last week to a half-dozen U.S. bases, I heard plans for improving local governance at every stop. U.S. soldiers and aid workers are meeting in weekly "shuras" with local, district and provincial councils to hear what people want. But one American aid coordinator cautions that right now, the linkages between these local efforts and the national government are nonexistent.

Creating good governance projects is a growth industry in Afghanistan. Every briefer has a pitch about how his unit is building trust and enabling local decision-makers. But frankly, there's an air of unreality to some of these presentations. There's a plan to train 10,000 competent Afghan civil servants annually, and another to recruit 3,500 honest policemen every month, and a third to nearly double the monthly recruits into the Afghan army. Plans call for mobilizing 32 percent of the available military-age males.

But setting such targets in a PowerPoint slide and achieving them are two different things.

When the United States goes to war on the scale it has done in Afghanistan, it creates a kind of alternate reality. America is so big and powerful (and often, arrogant) that most people go with the flow and let Uncle Sam do it. A defiant few protest the foreign occupation with roadside bombs and suicide vests. That's the syndrome of dependency and rage that the United States now faces in Afghanistan -- and must break.

The best message for Karzai is the truth: Unless he improves governance, the massive American effort won't last more than another year. We can't do it for him. For the Karzai regime, the political calculus is brutally simple: It's reform or die.

(Zoon Politikon)

David Ignatius on Surge in Afghanistan

David Ignatius in W. Post:

Kandahar, Afghanistan: here's what you would see if you traveled this week to Kandahar and Helmand provinces, the two big battlegrounds of the Afghanistan war: a conflict that is balanced tenuously between success and failure. The United States has deployed enough troops to disrupt the Taliban insurgency and draw increasing fire, but not enough to secure the major population centers. That's not a viable position.

I visited four U.S. bases in the two provinces this week, traveling with the military. I was able to hear from local commanders and talk with a few Afghans. I'll describe what I learned, positive and negative, so readers can weigh this evidence from the field. Then I'll explain why my conclusion is that President Obama should add some troops.

We began in Kandahar city, at the headquarters of what's known as Regional Command South, which oversees the battle in the two provinces. It's a city on the edge of the desert, surrounded by jagged, slate-gray mountains. Just over the border to the east are the Taliban's supply lines in Pakistan.

America's NATO allies have been running the war in Kandahar province, but they have been badly outgunned. So several months ago, the United States sent an Army brigade of about 4,000 troops with Stryker armored vehicles. That disrupted the Taliban insurgents, but they have responded with more roadside bombs along Highway 1, the main route that connects Kandahar to Afghanistan's other major cities.

The day before we arrived, a large bomb destroyed a Stryker vehicle in Arghandab, a Taliban stronghold northwest of Kandahar city, killing seven U.S. soldiers. That loss of life cast a shadow over my visit, and it highlighted the vulnerability of U.S. troops as they push deeper into Afghanistan. More coalition soldiers unfortunately represent more targets for the enemy.

Kandahar city remains insecure, especially at night. And 15 miles west of the city, the line of Taliban control begins. Coalition forces conduct punishing raids there, but there aren't enough troops to clear and hold the area.

A U.S. success story in Kandahar province is Spin Boldak, a town on the border with Pakistan. The Stryker brigade has launched an array of economic development projects there. A recent poll showed residents were worried far more about clean water than security. But the Taliban continues to infiltrate fighters and supplies through rat lines north and south of Spin Boldak, bypassing this small ink spot of progress.

In Helmand province to the west, the story is much the same. We visited Camp Leatherneck, where about 10,000 U.S. Marines are based near the provincial capital of Lashkar Gah. The Marine surge, which began last year, has sharply improved security in Garmsir and Nawa districts, south of the capital.

But in the middle of Helmand lies a Taliban sanctuary called Marja. To clear the insurgents there would require about 2,000 more Marines. That's beyond the current U.S. troop ceiling, so Marja remains a cancerous sore in the middle of our lines, according to one American officer. He explains: We can't do Marja with what we have now.

The Marines in Helmand, like U.S. forces throughout the country, have embraced counterinsurgency methods to befriend and protect the local population. They carry cash to buy sodas and food in the local markets. They work with the provincial government and tribal leaders to provide services for the people. I've bought more friggin' pomegranates than you can imagine, says the Marine commander, Brig. Gen. Larry Nicholson.

It's too early to be sure, but this people-friendly strategy seems to have helped. The local provincial governor, Gulab Mangal, says security is better now in some areas of Helmand than it has been in a decade. We need the Americans at this moment, he told me.

So what should Obama do? I think he should add enough troops to continue the mission he endorsed in March to reverse the Taliban's gains and improve security in Afghanistan's population centers. I don't know whether the right number is the roughly 40,000 that Gen. Stanley McChrystal has recommended, but it should be the minimum number necessary. The additional troops will come at a steep political price, at home and abroad.

The goal isn't to transform Afghanistan into a 21st-century showplace but to buy enough time for the country's army and government to fight their own battles. A year from now, that may seem like an impossible mission, but the evidence from Kandahar and Helmand this week suggests that it would be a mistake not to try.


(Zoon Politikon)

David Ignatius on Obama's Peace Prize

(Image from Middle East OnLine)

Comments from US mainstream media on President Obama's Nobel Prize cover the whole spectrum, as expected. I chose here the opinion of David Ignatius from W. Post: it seems to me very pertinent, as the well-known political pundit analyzes the reasons behind Nobel Committee's decision.

The Nobel Peace Prize award to Barack Obama seems goofy -- even if you're a fan, you have to admit that he hasn't really done much yet as a peacemaker. But there's an aspect of this prize that is real and important -- and that validates Obama's strategy from the day he took office.

The Obama team came to the White House convinced that one of America's biggest problems in the world was reflexive anti-Americanism, as Obama put it in his speech to the U.N. General Assembly two weeks ago. They saw America's unpopularity as a big national security problem, and they were right.

So they set about winning hearts and minds (the Nobel judges among them) from Day One. Obama gave a series of speeches calculated to position him as the Un-Bush. He listed his achievements in that U.N. speech -- halting torture, ordering the closure of the prison at Guantanamo Bay, withdrawing from Iraq, backing negotiations on climate change and paying America's debts at the United Nations itself.

Europeans liked it, too, when the president picked a fight with Israel over settlements and when he showed himself so determined to negotiate with Iran that he overlooked the fact that its government had stolen an election.

That's what he's being honored for, really: reconnecting America to the world and making us popular again. If you want to understand the sentiments behind the prize, look at the numbers in the Transatlantic Trends report released last month by the German Marshall Fund of the United States. Obama's approval rating in Germany: 92 percent compared with 12 percent for George Bush. In the Netherlands, 90 percent to 18 percent for Bush. His favorability rating in Europe overall (77 percent) was much higher than in the United States (57 percent).

Obama's achievements are in the good intentions category, but that doesn't mean they are insignificant. America was too unpopular under Bush. The Nobel Committee is expressing a collective sigh of relief that this country has rejoined the global consensus. They're right. It's a good thing. It's just a little weird that they gave him a prize for it.

(Zoon Politikon)

David Ignatius: Listening in Kabul

John Moore (Getty Images)
U.S. Marines leaving an airfield in Kandahar, Afghanistan, for distant outposts

David Ignatius in W. Post:

Try to picture the unlikely scene here Monday: A brash U.S. diplomat and America's top military officer are sitting at a conference table with a ferocious-looking delegation of bearded and turbaned Afghan tribal leaders, including one man who spent two years as a prisoner at Guantanamo Bay. And they are soliciting the tribal chieftains' advice on U.S. policy options in the Afghanistan war.

A weathered man from Paktia province, the spokesman for the group, fixes the American dignitaries with an unblinking gaze that seems to come out of another millennium. The United States once helped Afghanistan fight against Russian invaders, he says, but now it is walking in the Russians' shoes. America should stop killing Afghan civilians and start talking with some of the Taliban insurgents about how to end the war, he recommends.

And the Americans nod. Richard Holbrooke, the special envoy to Afghanistan and Pakistan, and a man sometimes known for being headstrong and pushy, asks the tribal leaders sweetly, what attracts people to the Taliban? Adm. Mike Mullen, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, admits to the group that it took the military too long to recognize the damage we've done with house searches and bombings and promises that he will consider new ways to limit such harm for the civilian population.

So it went over two days here, as the American officials took the Obama administration's new Afghanistan policy on the road to Kabul. The centerpiece of the plan, announced late last month, is 4,000 more U.S. troops to train the Afghan army and police. In addition to briefing the tribal elders, the two met with delegations of dissident politicians, female parliamentarians, agricultural experts and Muslim leaders from a council known as the Ulema.

To each group, Holbrooke and Mullen repeated the same message: The United States isn't supporting or opposing any candidate in the August presidential election; it is spending billions to train Afghanistan's army and police so that U.S. and coalition forces can leave sooner; and it is seeking dialogue with some of the adversaries America is now fighting on the battlefield.

It was a bravura diplomatic show, and it seemed to have the desired effect. This is exactly what we've been waiting for, said Hanif Atmar, Afghanistan's minister of the interior. He described the Obama policy as Afghanization of the war, and he predicted that most of his countrymen would wholeheartedly support it. President Hamid Karzai, who rated little more time with the American visitors than did the Ulema, may not have been so enthusiastic, given America's neutrality in the election.

Some common messages emerged: Many Afghans specifically blamed Pakistan and its intelligence service, known as the ISI, for funding the Taliban insurgency; they criticized the Karzai government's corruption; and they lauded Holbrooke's pet project for sharply boosting aid to Afghanistan's agricultural sector.

The Afghanistan visit was an unusual exercise in strategic listening for a superpower that during the Bush years treated communications strategy as a problem of talking more loudly. It was especially interesting to see Holbrooke in listening mode. Give us advice on reconciliation with the Taliban, he implored the religious leaders. What other suggestions do you have? he asked the tribal chiefs.

The upbeat tour was deceptive, in a way, in its suggestion that Afghanistan's problems can be fixed by more open talk. An illustration of how hard it will be to turn the war around comes in a security map displayed in Atmar's office. Districts where the insurgency poses a high threat are colored in red; those that are enemy controlled are black. There is an arc of nearly unbroken red and black across the southern half of the country, where more than half the population lives.

Across town, in the U.S. military commanders' conference room, the headline on a PowerPoint slide reads: The Glass Is Half-Full! Maybe so, but there's a summer of heavy fighting ahead, and Obama's war may get worse before it gets better.

Watching Holbrooke make nice with the Afghans, the headline that occurred to me was: Bulldozer Meets Quagmire. A diplomat who began his foreign-service career in Saigon was here searching for a pathway to avoid another Vietnam.

And Afghanistan isn't even the biggest worry for Holbrooke and Mullen. What scares them more is the Taliban insurgency in neighboring Pakistan, where they landed late Monday night on the next stop on the policy road show. As one of the wizened Afghan tribal elders admonished: Fix the ISI and you will solve the problem.

(Zoon Politikon)

David Ignatius: Rolling Out Obamanomics

David Ignatius in W. Post:

As President Obama takes his seat at the Group of 20 summit in London today, the world's leaders will be curious what economic philosophy he represents. Is this the same America that celebrated go-go capitalism and resisted regulation of global financial markets, or is it a chastened nation? Is America still from Mars, to use the shorthand of the Bush years, or has it moved to Venus?

I was curious about the vision that animates Obamanomics, so I put the question last week to David Axelrod, the president's senior adviser. He enumerated the usual list of specific policies -- health care, energy, education. When pressed for an overall conceptual framework, he described an effort to create a new balance in the country and a new foundation for economic growth.

Things have been out of balance for the last decade, Axelrod said. We want to restore that sense of balance, that we're all in this together. We're not doing this right if we have a small group of people who are benefiting while most aren't. The president wants to create a prosperity that is broadly held.

We talk about the new foundation, he continued. You can build a lovely house, but if it's built on a soft foundation, it's going to collapse. The foundation to us is energy, health care and education.

That's why Obama has been so reluctant to give up these policy reforms, even as critics chide him for trying to do too much. The new programs are the reward for all the pain the country is experiencing -- the insurance policy for future prosperity.

Axelrod explains the link this way: The president's main focus is developing an economy that is not rooted in the bubble and bust, not rooted in an overheated housing market or maxed-out credit cards. He sees a future where we're a leader in energy technology, where we once again have the best-educated workforce in the world, where health-care costs are not on a disastrous trajectory.

What Axelrod described represents a different economic approach from Obama's recent predecessors. And it should reassure a world that is worried about American leadership. This White House is speaking an economic language that Europe and Asia understand -- more regulation, more government intervention, a more generous safety net -- without abandoning America's commitment to free markets.

We walked into a triage unit, Axelrod says. He argues that because of Obama's efforts during the frantic first 60 days, people are beginning to believe in the country again. A Post-ABC News poll this week seems to bear him out, with a tripling since December of the number of Americans who think the country is heading in the right direction.

If you're looking for a more conceptual phrase than new foundation, you could describe Obama's approach as post-globalization or post-liberalism.

When Americans spoke of globalization, they meant that U.S. ideas about free markets and capital flows were becoming universal. But in Europe and Asia, you sometimes heard a different term. People spoke of the U.S.-led system as liberalism, and it wasn't a compliment. They were anxious about a process of globalization that was sweeping away traditional rules and cultural values. In the name of efficiency, this liberalism seemed to put their way of life on the knife-edge of the market.

This suspicion of Anglo-Saxon economic liberalism cut across the usual political boundaries. Right-wing industrialists disliked it, but so did left-wing labor unions. Chinese communists felt threatened, but so did Green Party activists in Germany. Facing this voracious economic machine, the rest of the world was basically conservative. People liked things the way they were; they didn't want their lives turned upside down by the free market.

The critique of American liberalism underlies the London summit. It's shared by a diverse group that includes French President Nicolas Sarkozy, German Chancellor Angela Merkel, Chinese Premier Wen Jiabao and Russian President Dmitry Medvedev. None of them wants America to abdicate its position as global leader; they know there's no alternative. But they do want America to get its house in order -- to stop lecturing other people and fix the problems that created the financial crisis.

The G-20 summiteers should find Obama and his vision of a new foundation reassuring. This president is in the repair business. He's smart, solid, practical -- to the point of occasionally being boring. He understands that America made a mess, and he's trying his best to clean it up.

(Zoon Politikon)