Warblogging: Serious and Unserious

Serious first...

While I was traveling recently I picked up Dexter Filkins' "The Forever War" in Dulles while I was on a medium-sized layover, and it's an excellent book. Anyone who is interested in Iraq and Afghanistan, and really even in modern war generally, should read it. Filkins is not a leftist by any stretch, and anyone could probably find information in the book to support their political leanings if that's what they were looking for, but quite apart from any ideological importance the book bears witness to war as it really is and that's worth reading no matter what your convictions.

Now, putting on my Dirty Fucking Hippie hat:

It's once again my duty to point out as we read about the most recent improvement to the Awesome War of Good Neighborliness that the war in Afghanistan, despite being substantially less stupid on its face than the war in Iraq, is unlikely to ever produce any outcome that could reasonably be described as "good" and that any operation undertaken today is likely to have the long-term effect of killing a large number of people for no real reason at all.

If you read through the linked article, you might notice two things. One is that some pretty important strategic realities are papered over with Newspeak (emphasis mine):

That mistrust [of the Marines by the local Afghan population] stems from concern over civilian casualties resulting from U.S. military operations as well as from a fear that the troops will not stay long enough to counter the Taliban.

First of all, this use of the term "concern" reminds me of the way dentists love to use the word "discomfort" to mean "pain." "Discomfort" is when you're shifting in your bus seat because your ass is sweaty. A steel drill boring into your tooth is painful.

In the same way, if someone kills your brother with a big-ass bomb, and you happen to run into the bomber on the subway, it's unlikely the ensuing dialogue will prominently feature the word "concern." Presumably you'd be angry. In a murderous rage, even.

Meanwhile, it seems unlikely to me that the people who are "concerned" over the large number of locals being killed by the Marines are the same folks worried that the Marines won't stick around long enough to finish the job. It seems more likely that those are two distinct groups with distinct interests, who need to be approached in (at least) two different ways.

The second thing you might notice upon reading the article is that in an article of some 1500 words, one paragraph is spent actually describing the goals of the mission:

Once basic governance structures are restored, civilian reconstruction personnel plan to focus on economic development programs, including programs to help Afghans grow legal crops in the area. Senior Obama administration officials say creating jobs and improving the livelihoods of rural Afghans is the key to defeating the Taliban, which has been able to recruit fighters for as little as $5 a day in Helmand.

I'm tempted to say that the first clause in this graf is doing all the work, but actually I don't think that's the case. My limited but not totally impoverished knowledge of asymmetric warfare suggests to me that when the US military really focuses on restoring "basic governance structures," the results are usually pretty good. Marines grumble a lot when they're asked to do "nation building" (later caricatured in the article as eating goat and drinking tea with locals), but the results, tactically speaking, can often be surprisingly impressive.

The problem, almost always, comes next - "helping Afghans grow legal crops" and the like. International agricultural development is pretty good at solving technical problems - reducing transaction costs through the use of scrip, etc. - but it's not great at solving problems like "the entire economy of this country is based on the production of an illegal crop." There's just no sustainable path forward for Afghanistan to join the international economy as a normal agro-export country.

When the US leaves, whether that's in ten months or ten years, Afghanistan will revert to its natural state as a poor, landlocked country with a weak central government and constant warring factions that mostly operate by bribing each other's soldiers to change sides before any real battles can happen. If great powers would leave the place alone for fifty years, maybe something better would come along, but in the meantime it's all just wishful thinking.

The Afghani economy, outside of opium and pot production, doesn't really exist. Subsistence agriculture, a little wheat. . . there's just no there there. No platoon of Marines, however well-trained and well-intentioned, is going to fix that fundamental problem.

What they can do is kill a bunch of people for no good reason. And that, their training and intentions notwithstanding, is what they will do.

Raul's Reflection #5

One of the functions of wisdom is to serve as a corrective against certain tendencies. This is one reason that ideas that are said to be "timeless" are not so at all. While people are conditioned in a certain way, a wise saying may truly be wise - helping to bring humankind away from old patterns and into a new phase of thought and action.

When "wisdom" becomes merely a saying, which reinforces the way people already tend to think, it ceases to be wisdom and becomes at best a useless plaything and at worst an obstacle to further development.

A strong medicine, taken for too long after the passing of an illness, may make the patient sicker than he was to begin with.

Obama's Cairo Speech

Let me start this off by saying that I've been pleased by the first six months or so of the Obama administration. Obama is to my right on most issues, but then, that's elected officials for you. People to my left tend to get locked up in psych wards rather than elevated to political office, so I've gotten used to that.

Though there are lots of things I think Obama could be handling better for the most part he seems to be doing a decent job with a rough situation.

In that context let me also say that the Cairo speech last week was a pretty decent attempt to lay out some basic common ground between US foreign policy thinking and the thinking of the rest of the world's people who tend to take a dim view (as I do) of most of the core tenets of US foreign policy.

That said, there was one part of the speech that gave me a case of the disappointed-headshakes, which was paradoxically the part of the speech that's being most characterized as an "antiwar" sentiment.

Near the beginning of the speech, Obama had this to say:

The situation in Afghanistan demonstrates America's goals and our need to work together. Over seven years ago, the United States pursued al-Qaida and the Taliban with broad international support. We did not go by choice. We went because of necessity. I'm aware that there's still some who would question or even justify the offense of 9/11. But let us be clear. Al-Qaida killed nearly 3,000 people on that day.

Which is pretty standard boilerplate for US foreign policy discussions over the last eight years. The statement's main drawback is that it has only a very vague relationship with reality.

The truth is, the war in Afghanistan was a war of choice. We didn't HAVE TO go invade Afghanistan. It is undeniably true that many people (including many people who are generally antiwar) felt at the time, just a few weeks after the attacks on New York and Washington, that we had no option other than to invade. But that simply wasn't the case. There are many paths we could have taken with regard to pursuing the goals set forth at the start of the Afghanistan invasion.

This is one case among many where the really transcendent awfulness of the Bush administration has screwed up the entire context of our discourse. The Iraq invasion wasn't just a "war of choice." It was a self-evidently absurd and boneheaded policy choice that was at the time completely unmoored from any rational, ethical or moral foundation.

Compared to the Iraq invasion, though, Afghanistan is generally thought of in the US as "Bush's good war." So it generally gets the sort of treatment that it got in Obama's Cairo speech.

I just want to make a couple quick points about this. At a very minimum, if we're going to talk about whether a decision was correct or not we should compare the consequences to the probably consequences of the main alternative course of action (in this case, pursuing the 9/11 terrorists through an international criminal investigation rather than through military action), and also to what might have happened if we had done nothing.

The three primary goals set out in the early weeks of the war were the goals of apprehending Osama bin Laden, disrupting and restricting the activities of Islamist guerillas operating in Afghanistan, and ousting the Taliban in favor of a democratic, representative government.

On the first goal, obviously we failed utterly as bin Laden is as far as anyone knows still at large. It can't really be known whether he could have been apprehended by an international criminal justice effort but it's certainly the case that he wouldn't be less in custody than he is now. In fact, it's fairly clear we could have gotten the same result if we had done nothing.

On the second goal, people generally assume that the Afghanistan invasion has done a lot to restrict the movement of guerillas in Afghanistan, but the one specific investigation of that question that I know of (Hy Rothstein's "Afghanistan and the Troubled Future of Unconventional Warfare") concludes that the picture is at best mixed. The US effort in Afghanistan has been remarkably, and foolishly, focused on blowing things up rather than building the kinds of human networks that make it difficult for terrorist groups to operate, and thus it's not very clear how much we've really improved things with the invasion. Once again we can say that the international criminal investigation probably would have achieved at least the same result, if not a better one, and that doing nothing at all would not have been demonstrably worse than invading.

As for ousting the Taliban, we did that, but we never managed to replace them with anything particular, and thus in the judgment of most of the experts I've read if we were to withdraw from Afghanistan today the Taliban or some Taliban-like group would regain control of the country fairly quickly. This is the one area where you can say pretty definitively that the invasion came closer to achieving the goal than could have been achieved by doing nothing or by conducting a criminal investigation. It's not nothing, but given the costs of the invasion, high on the US side and immense on the Afghanistan side, it's pretty thin gruel.

Now, it's not logically impossible for something to have been completely necessary and yet failed to achieve any substantive positive results. There's an argument to be made that the Afghanistan war was necessary and correct despite having failed. It's just that I'd like to see someone actually MAKE that argument, instead of it constantly being assumed to be self-evidently true that a failed war was a good idea.

The Death of George Tiller

I rarely post about abortion. It falls squarely under the "dumb stuff I can't believe we're still arguing about" category.

However, after the death of George Tiller, by most accounts an extremely compassionate, courageous women's health care provider, I thought I would toss my basic thoughts on the matter out into the ether.

Many years ago, there was a consensus in this country that if a woman was pregnant she should be forced to carry the child to term and deliver it. There were laws against seeking abortions and laws against providing them.

As the rights of women advanced throughout the 60's and 70's, this consensus broke and eventually the Supreme Court recognized an affirmative right of doctors to provide abortions. Now, abortion is legal, and a comfortable majority of Americans consistently agree in polling that abortions should be legal and available to women who need them.

That's the state of play, though the large, vocal committed minority of people who want to make abortion illegal again do their best to obscure it. It is close to unthinkable that the old consensus, grounded as it was at least in part in the view that women were not fully citizens, will ever reemerge.

It's certainly possible that through the use of terrorist violence - gunning doctors down in church, say - some especially unbalanced abortion prohibitionists will be able to intimidate some doctors into ceasing to provide these procedures. What's much less possible is that Americans will ever again come around to the belief that women should be forced to carry to term pregnancies that they desire to terminate.

Given the roots of the anti-abortion coalition in the "born-again" social engineering movement sometimes called "evangelical christianity," I know as well as anyone that they will continue to fight on with whatever means are at their disposal - it is not in them to look around, consider the situation, and back down.

Count me as one lonely voice trying to wake a few of them up.

This one's over. You lost. If this truly is an inhuman horror, it is one that, despite your ironclad conviction to the contrary, your God can clearly abide.

Pick a different battle. The world is full of injustice.

Harsh Technique Blogging

Haven't updated in a while; for that reason I'm sure my readership has dwindled to the point where I'm basically telling this to myself. That's fine; I'm writing it mostly to get it out of my head where it's driving me a little crazy.

Tons of discussion once again of "the torture debate," which I put in quotes because from my perspective I haven't seen a lot of debate, just various people rehashing various ludicrous justifications, going around and around and periodically congratulating each other on how wonderful it is that in a free society we can have open discussion and blah blah blah.

Here's how I see it. The United States of America, a government that to an almost unique degree in human history depends upon the consent of the governed, tortured people as a matter of government policy. We put people in small, dark boxes with insects crawling on them. We strapped them to boards and poured water in their faces until they broke down crying and pleading in abject fear of death by drowning. We told people we had their children in custody and threatened to mutilate their childrens' genitals.

I could go on, but really, there's no point. This happened, in part at least, because the people who authorized these policies believed that if and when these practices came to light, a significant slice of the American electorate would have trouble coming to a clear conclusion about whether such conduct is wrong, and that as a result they would get away with it.

We have seen throughout the last several years that in fact these policymakers were correct in their belief. Given enough arm-waving and bloviation about ticking time bombs and other such nonsense, many Americans do in fact appear to be able to integrate the knowledge that the United States tortured people with their image of the United States as a just and lawful nation.

This problem has no immediate solution. People who lack the moral faculties to conclude that torturing people is wrong cannot develop these faculties by continuing to run their mouths about it, or by staining the pages of academic journals with beard-stroking foolishness. What is needed is a serious exercise in self-reflection and contemplation, which can happen only in the hearts of the people who need it.

The best the rest of us can do is to stop enabling this pathetic fiction that these people are engaged in something other than evil. I am not saddled with a Manichean view of humanity and thus I can say this without fear that I am saying that these people are evil. In each person's life constructive and destructive forces are at work always. The work of conscious, terrestrial humankind is to strive to enable the good within us and to control the evil.

Occasionally it is good for people to be shocked into looking in the mirror and seeing what they are really like. It may make them angry; they may dislike the mirror or the person who held it up, rudely, to their face in a vulnerable moment.

On TV, the great perils we face are gigantic, inhuman menaces like terrorism, global warming, pandemic disease. In real life what threatens humanity is that we will be too feckless, too deluded to look in the mirror and face who we are, and what may happen to us as a result.

Time is short. Start today.

Warren Mosler and the Value of Money

In this discussion on an Yglesias thread I was reminded by another commenter of the fascinating work of one of the big three modern economists who have most shaped the way I think about economics. Kuttner is one, Taleb is another, and this guy, Warren Mosler, is the third.

The linked post is called "The Natural Interest Rate is Zero," but what it's really about, like most of Mosley's work, is how the relationship between a government and its currency is fundamentally different from every other entity's relationship with that currency.

The point he makes many times that is really quite interesting when you turn it over in your mind is that if you pay the government with cash, whether you're paying taxes or buying securities, the government shreds the money.

He does a good job going into some of the implications of that fact, but it's also fun to just sit and thing about it.

Honest Men

I once heard someone say "An honest man never won anything in a fight." I think what the guy was driving at was something akin to "Nice guys finish last." He meant it, in other words, as a statement about the value, or lack thereof, of honesty.

It occurred to me today while I was out walking that there's another, more interesting way of looking at the statement. It could be a statement about the value, or lack thereof, of fighting.

The Power of El Rushbo

In my life as a Richmonder I've had occasion to know many a Rush Limbaugh fan. There are lots of reasons to like listening to Rush - I'll admit I used to find him mildly entertaining myself back in the day. But there is a certain type of person who really LOVES Rush, who is fanatically devoted to him and cannot allow himself to understand that the vast, vast majority of the "commentary" that Rush offers is just made-up inflammatory nonsense.

I knew a guy back when I was first starting out in the computer biz who was one of these Limbaugh dittoheads. His name was Nick and he was a little angry guy who was reasonably intelligent but not particularly curious and who had a massive Napoleon complex that required him to tell everyone what to do and how to do it at all times.

I remember once he gave me a ride somewhere in his little dirty white sedan and he had Rush's radio show on in the car. I, being young and arrogant myself, sort of thought that everyone must listen to Rush the same way I did - appreciating his cracked perspective, but understanding that his views didn't represent any coherent, serious political philosophy.

I made an offhand comment that somehow revealed my point of view, and Nick blew up. It was instant and impressive - his face got red, spit flew from his mouth, and he began an impromptu tirade about how I had been brainwashed by the liberal media to believe that Rush was a fool when in fact he was the only sane man in the entire media landscape.

It's important to reiterate - Nick was screaming at someone who, at that point in his life liked Rush Limbaugh. To him, nothing less than fanatical, unquestioning devotion was sufficient to separate me from the massing communist hordes poised to tear the country apart with their fascist campus speech codes and capricious environmental regulations.

Over time, as the old Republican base of old-style racist white male voters has aged and begun to die out, the GOP has become increasingly dependent on guys like Nick whose worldview is ENTIRELY shaped by talk radio, and Rush in particular.

The dilemma for the GOP is that there just aren't enough guys like Nick. As the years roll on, the Republicans are going to lose more and more elections as long as they cling to a narrative that most of the population finds moronic. The trouble is, Dittoheads now represent a decent chunk of the Republican coalition. They vote at a high rate, so it's possible that Rush Limbaugh fans represent a large plurality of the Republican electorate in many elections. If those people were to desert the party suddenly, the Republicans would be doomed.

Unfortunately, unless they can leave Rush behind somehow, or at least marginalize him to the point where he is no longer the de facto leader of the party, they're doomed anyway. I hope they keep him around - an extended run as a permanent minority party seems like the proper fate for the modern GOP.