Archive for the 'Foreign affairs' Category

Afghanistan: Burke and Bergen on stopping the slide

Published
by
James Crabtree
on October 23, 2008
in Asia, Foreign affairs, In the news, Inside Prospect and Middle east
. 5 Comments

The rather splendidly named fighting season in Afghanistan is almost over. The relative calm of winter, as the Taliban retreat south, will provide a chance to rethink what increasingly appears like a lost, or fast losing, cause. The murder this week of a Christian AID worker in Kabul is only one in a lengthening line of indicators that the west is having its already weak grip on the country unpicked. To begin this process of rethinking, the Observer’s Jason Burke, who has spent much of the last couple of years in Afghanistan has written an article based on original reporting and interviews, criticising the US and its allies for misreading their Taliban opponents:

“The first error was thinking that the Taliban are somehow not “Afghan.” Speaking to Prospect in October, David Miliband, the foreign secretary, spoke of the west’s mission to “help the Afghan people defeat the Taliban.” In Berlin in July 2008, Barack Obama said that “the Afghan people need our troops… to defeat the Taliban.” This is a dogma that has been entrenched since 2001. It forgets that the Taliban are part of Afghanistan, not an outside scourge.”

Read the piece here.

We are also lucky enough to have a related piece on what to do next in Afghanistan, from CNN terrorism analyst and fellow at the New America Project, Peter Bergen. He quotes a source describing Nato operations in the south of the country as “mowing the lawn”—”every year, Nato forces go in and clear out Taliban sanctuaries, only to have to go back the following year and cut back the new growth.” Bergen’s piece gently disagrees with Burke’s contention that the Taliban are fundamentally an Afghan phenomneon, arguing that “the Taliban are not simply an Afghan movement. They are supported by a growing cast of foreign fighters, including Arabs, Uzbeks, Punjabi Pakistanis, and even Europeans.” He then goes on to speculate about how the coalition might attempt to transplant in Afghanistan the success of both the Iraqi surge, and the related Sunni awakening movements, which many cite as the key reason for the surge’s success. Read it here.

The Third Debate

Published
by
Erik Tarloff
on October 17, 2008
in United States
. 2 Comments

Before last night’s debate began, there were two questions dominating public discussion: First, will McCain come out swinging? And second, is there any way he might be able to alter the dynamics of the race?

The second question was always inherently a little fatuous, the journalese equivalent of a noisy promo for an otherwise dull television cop show. Sight unseen, one knew the answer: No, John McCain will not be able to alter the dynamics of the race with this one debate performance, regardless of how skilful. The final debate is inevitably going to be the least-watched, and the least likely to affect anyone’s perceptions of the contest. Even a thoroughly ignorant, hidebound American voter has been living with John McCain for over eight years now, and with Barack Obama for almost two. We’ve seen their speeches, we’ve watched them being interviewed, and before last night we had already seen them debate each other twice (and their primary opponents innumerable times). The impact of even a decisive debate victory for McCain — no matter how such a thing is defined — was likely to be minimal. In the first debate, such a phenomenon could arguably have made a significant difference, but not in the third, especially not when Obama was widely judged to have won debates one and two.

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The Presidential Election, Three Weeks Out

Published
by
Erik Tarloff
on October 16, 2008
in United States
. 1 Comment

During one of his more lucid moments, World Chess Champion Bobby Fischer observed, “People have been playing below strength against me for years.” It’s a shrewd statement that repays parsing; it essentially poses the question, Were Fischer’s best opponents playing, as their defenders alleged, at a lower than usual level when they lost to him, or was it instead that the intrinsic weaknesses in their technique were invisible until a genius of Fischer’s caliber came along to expose them?

A similar question is worth pondering now, three weeks before the presidential election…

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Power’s world - North Korea’s breakthrough

Published
by
Jonathan Power
on October 13, 2008
in Foreign affairs
. 1 Comment

One small step forward by North Korea and the US; one large step for mankind. The political fight to persuade North Korea to halt its nuclear bomb making activities seems at last, in the dying days of the Bush presidency, to be entering a serious phase.

The US has finally bowed to the North Korean request to remove it from the U.S. list of sponsors of terrorism—which will enable the renegade state to become eligible for international loans and sundry other economic benefits—in return for the North agreeing to re-allow inspections to verify a North Korean promise to freeze its nuclear activities, as it undertook last year and then withdrew from.

After nine years of erratic US policies—met by equally erratic and bellicose North Korean ones—the negotiations have ended up almost where they started after the highly fruitful diplomacy of the Clinton Administration that transformed North Korea from total intransigence to a willing and helpful negotiating partner. Indeed, by some counts, this was the Clinton Administration’s only substantial and productive foreign policy success.
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Prospect online this week

Published
by
Mary Fitzgerald
on October 9, 2008
in Africa, Foreign affairs, Inside Prospect and United States
. 14 Comments

Barack Obama has so far won the debates and is surging ahead in the polls—which is why he has more to fear from his opponents than than ever before, writes Susan Jacoby. For the past eight years, anti-rationalism of every sort been the defining strategy of right-wing American politics, so we can expect to hear a lot about how there’s something sinister and “un-American” about Obama’s education, reason, and logic in the weeks to come.

Meanwhile, Paul Collier looks at the impact that Jacob Zuma, South Africa’s president-assumed, might have on the future of African democracy and prosperity. With the spike in global demand for commodities, the continent as a whole has an unprecedented opportunity to lift itself out of poverty—but will bad politics get in the way?

Also, Anshuman Mondal defends his call for a “Muslim middle way” against criticism from the Quilliam Foundation’s Ed Husain. Husain, Mondal argues, seems to think that all Islamists eventually become terrorists. But why single them out? What about racists, left wing sympathisers, or even people who care about animals and the environment?

And Max Nathan of the IPPR takes aim at Prospect editor David Goodhart’s famous “diversity versus solidarity” thesis. A new IPPR study suggests that migration and diversity is benefitting Britain economically—with little sign that the country will suffer US-style racial divisions.

The Nashville Debate

Published
by
Erik Tarloff
on October 8, 2008
in United States
. 2 Comments

                Barack Obama didn’t have to win last night’s debate.  In fact, he could have afforded to lose it outright without doing serious harm to his chances in November.  Absent some earth-shattering mistake, the only debate that really matters in any given election cycle is the first one, and even there, it’s the theatrics rather than the substance that counts.  Does the perceived challenger (the younger, less-experienced candidate, say, or the representative of the party out of power) look more or less equal to his opponent?  Can one envision him as president?  If after the first debate the answers to those questions are affirmative, what the two candidates have said about policy and how they behave in subsequent debates won’t make much difference.   The image has been fixed.  To my eye, as reported in this space a fortnight ago, the first debate was a draw, but the public perceived Obama to have been the victor.   Whatever happened in the debates remaining was unlikely to affect the dynamics of the race significantly.

                That said, I still believe last night’s debate was close to a rout.  Obama didn’t need a victory, but he got a big one.  This was partly a result of his simply being the superior debater and the better candidate.  His answers were crisper and more cogent, his policies more realistic and thought-through, his mastery of the format — widely but foolishly predicted to play to John McCain’s forehand — overwhelming.  And in any case, his forensic burden was lighter, since he isn’t the nominee of the party that gave us George W. Bush and the concomitant catastrophe of the last eight years.  McCain has been forced into verbal jujitsu since before the campaign began, simultaneously defending his party’s policies and traditions while attacking its most prominent representative, and he hasn’t handled the challenge with agility.  It may be a challenge that defies agility.

                But McCain made matters worse for himself.  By initiating a really ugly advertising campaign against Obama in the week or so preceding the debate, and unleashing his disaster of a running mate in full demagogic McCarthyite fury, and promising his most rabid supporters that in this debate he would be “taking the gloves off,” he established an atmosphere and a set of expectations that could not, willy-nilly, work in his favour.  If he had indeed assailed Obama about his casual acquaintanceship with former radical William Ayers, or his former minister Jeremiah Wright, or any of the other ginned-up, racially-coded non-issues the McCain campaign has been furiously purveying in recent days, he would have alienated every independent voter watching.  And in the process he would have invited a potentially devastating counterattack he had every reason to know had been prepared for just such an eventuality.  But having introduced those kinds of attack into the public dialogue, and having promised supporters more of the same in a face-to-face setting, his decision not to follow through looked pusillanimous.  This was a quandary of his own making, and was only the latest in a series of other ill-considered tactical gambits that have turned around and bitten him on the ass.  Its inherent nastiness, along with its almost perverse obtuseness, makes it impossible to feel much sympathy;  McCain looks hapless, but he deserves to look hapless.

                All one can say in his defense is that he knew he was losing the election and decided his only hope lay in a reckless gamble.  But my saying something in his defense isn’t the same as suggesting he’s defensible;  he has, in the last week or two, succeeded in poisoning public discourse in a way that even political incendiaries Lee Atwater and Karl Rove never attempted.  And in a way that, had it worked, would have poisoned racial relations and much else in this country for years.  Fortunately, it has looked and smelled as desperate as it actually is, and seems, at least up to the time of this writing, to have achieved no resonance.  His unwillingness to follow through along these lines at the debate underlines its failure to persuade anyone other than those already persuaded, those troglodytes shouting for blood in Pensacola, Florida and Southern California.

                There may be a few more ugly arrows in McCain’s quiver, but their number must be dwindling, and the prevailing conditions do not favour their efficacy.  October, I think, will be a very long and frustrating month for John McCain.  And therefore, alas, also for the country he will not, ultimately, be governing.

                In closing, I want to say a word about one of Obama’s secret weapons, to wit, his smile.  It isn’t merely that it’s an extremely winning smile;  most politicians (although not, as it happens, John McCain) develop those.  But as evidenced during the debate, it’s the sort of smile I haven’t seen on an American presidential candidate since John Kennedy, a smile almost subversive that registers almost subliminally.  (You can probably find a few old examples on Youtube.com if you look for clips from JFK’s 1960 debates with Nixon.)  In both cases, it’s a smile flashed, with every appearance of spontaneity, when the candidate’s opponent is speaking.  A smile of serene self-confidence, an ironic but gleeful smile that both acknowledges the absurdity of the blather the political game imposes on its practitioners and simultaneously revels in it.  It’s a very private smile of very private amusement that nevertheless manages to invite the rest of us in to enjoy the whole crazy spectacle.

Power’s world: exiting Iraq and Afghanistan

Published
by
Jonathan Power
on October 7, 2008
in Foreign affairs
. 0 Comments

What is the exit strategy for Iraq now?, asks Leon Sigal in a prescient article in World Policy Journal. He goes on to tell the tale of how George Aiken, the Republican senator from Vermont, in a speech on the Senate floor in 1966, said the way to end US involvement in Vietnam was to declare victory and get out. Having declared victory in 2004 and not got out, it is too late for President George W Bush or his successors to do that now.

But Aiken had a riposte for that contingency too. A few years later, when it was impossible to declare victory, he was asked how to get out of Vietnam. “In ships,” he replied.

Both the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan are moving towards the only solution that will work—leaving. In Iraq, surely this is what Barack Obama, if president, must do, despite all the heavy advice trying to persuade him to drag it out until… until a miracle happens and the killing stops, the legal system functions and the “democracy” works. But the killing in this very disturbed society will go on for decades. US tallies of the Iraqi death toll, supposedly sharply falling, do not even count non-sectarian killings. Nor do they account for the rate of kidnapping, rape and pillage. The US authorities live in a cloud of self-deception.
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The view from Gary

Published
by
Avirook Sen
on October 3, 2008
in Elections and United States
. 0 Comments

The last time Indiana voted for a Democratic president was in 1964. But with McCain only 2 per cent ahead in the polls, it is increasingly becoming as a battleground state.

If Barack Obama is to win here, the 100,000 odd people of Gary, Indiana will have a lot to do with it. Gary’s mayor, Rudolph Clay, claims that there’s hardly a vote that won’t go to Obama. In the Democratic primary, the town turned out a nearly 100 per cent vote for him.

Part of this has to do with the fact that Gary has the highest proportion of African Americans (about 85 per cent) of any city in the United States with a population of over 100,000. It is a town that has changed colour dramatically over the last few decades. Unfortunately, almost everything else that’s changed during that time has changed for the worse.

In the 1960s, the steel mills that lie around the city began cutting jobs. So when Obama talks about people who grew up on food stamps near the shuttered steel mills of Chicago’s south side, it has resonance in Gary, which is just 40 minutes away.

Its politics changed during that decade as well. In 1967, it became the first major American town to elect a black mayor. In 1972, Gary hosted America’s first National Black Political Convention. What followed was “white flight”: money moved out. A quarter of the people here now live below the poverty line.

Almost every shop on the west side of Broadway, the main street, is shut, and has been for the last quarter of a century at least. At the Palace theatre, it still says the Jackson Five are playing tonight.

The Jacksons did live here once, but by the time Michael Jackson was recording Thriller, Gary was topping the US crime rate charts and seemed in terminal decline. It remains among the 20 most dangerous towns in America. Last year, there were 71 homicides. Nowadays, the only place with a buzz—and a queue outside it—is Payday loans.

Unsurprisingly then, Obama’s message of change has resonated here. But change doesn’t just mean electing a black man. It means jobs; fewer visits to Payday; the opening of shops on Broadway, and if all goes well, even the Palace theatre.

But should Obama win, Gary’s voters will place a crippling burden of expectation on Obama. They wait for November like they wait for that loan, and they will be intent on collecting on every promise. He is set up for failure like no other candidate could be.

Power’s world: America’s fading military dreams

Published
by
Jonathan Power
on September 29, 2008
in Foreign affairs
. 0 Comments

As said Mr Micawber: “Annual income twenty pounds, annual expenditure nineteen, nineteen and six, result happiness. Annual income twenty pounds, annual expenditure twenty pounds, nought and six, result misery.” If you can get past the Dickensian way of counting then there is a message for the US today. It no longer has the financial wherewithal to do what it wants to do.

If Barack Obama wins the election he has pledged to bring in a major reform of the health services and he has promised to cut the tax rate for the middle and working classes. He wants to expand the war in Afghanistan. If John McCain wins he wants to keep in place the tax breaks for the rich, fight to “victory” in Iraq, expand the war in Afghanistan and challenge Iran in such an assertive way that it could well lead to another war.

There is no chance that either candidate, after this financial disaster and the mammoth commitment to federal expenditure, can square the circle on future financial commitments.
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The First Obama-McCain Debate

Published
by
Erik Tarloff
on September 27, 2008
in United States
. 7 Comments

                The most interesting thing about last night’s presidential debate occurred after the debate itself ended.  Victory, as adjudged by a variety of different focus groups and snap polls, was awarded pretty decisively to Barack Obama.

                What makes this so interesting, I think, is that it isn’t true.  Obama had some strong moments, certainly, and was never less than competent.  But the same might be said for John McCain.  As is usually the case with these presidential debates (a tradition, leaving aside the Kennedy-Nixon encounters in 1960, dating back only to 1976), the result was essentially a rather colourless draw.  By the time the major party candidates reach those lecterns, their pitches have usually been honed and polished to the point where one candidate’s outright superiority over another is unlikely to be visible to any objective observer.  The exceptions usually owe more to happenstance — a gaffe, a slip of the tongue, a misreading of the mood of the room — than to anything intrinsic to the candidacies.

                This is not to suggest that the differences in the styles of last night’s participants weren’t telling.  McCain seemed grumpy, frequently flashing his trademark (and strikingly unattractive) smirk, and initiating most of the contentious exchanges.  If points are awarded for aggressiveness (and if strict accuracy is regarded as irrelevant), McCain scored more points.  He played fast and loose with some of his facts, but as chess players say, he seized the initiative early, and he succeeded in holding it for most of the debate.  It has been observed by experienced McCain-watchers in the past that the Arizona senator has an emotional need to turn his opponents into outright enemies in order to contend with them effectively, and that process was very much in evidence last night;  he was not merely aggressive, but often hostile and sneeringly dismissive.  By contrast, Obama was cool, unintimidated, crisp in diction, physically at ease.  He was also more gentlemanly, addressing McCain collegially by his first name (the Senate is by tradition a very collegial institution, often referred to as “the club”), readily, perhaps too readily, offering agreement and acquiescence.  Whether as a result of tactical choice or inadvertence, he relinquished several opportunities to take the battle to his opponent.  On the occasions when he did seize such opportunities, however, his aim was truer than McCain’s, and the evening’s few memorable zingers belonged to him.  Should the debate produce any “YouTube moments,” they will redound to Obama’s advantage.  Nevertheless, taken simply as a forensic exercise, the debate produced no clear winner.

                The MacLuhanesque side of things was more in Obama’s favour.  He looked better than McCain, not merely younger and taller and more energetic, as was inevitable given the actuarial data, but, ironically, with more of a soldier’s bearing.  His voice was stronger, his presence more commanding, stiller and more self-contained.  He had that reassuring quality Americans describe as “presidential.”  And while Obama actively sought to engage his opponent, McCain often angled his body away from Obama and consistently and deliberately avoided eye-contact.  This latter phenomenon may well have left the most memorable visual impression of the entire debate;  some commentators have attributed it to contempt, but to me it looked like fear.  By either token, it was jarring and unattractive, almost repellent on an atavistic level.  To the extent that such irrational impressions, deriving more from primatology than political disputation, affect voters’ choices, Obama was the obvious beneficiary.

                But to go back to my initial point, what is most striking and most significant about the evening is the way independent voters rated the two candidates in the immediate aftermath of the event (and even in real time in two separate cases, twisting dials in response to what was being said as the debate proceeded).  Obama consistently came out ahead, usually substantially ahead.  Since I don’t believe this accurately reflects what was happening on stage, it leads me to conclude that people wanted to see Obama victorious, they were primed to be convinced.  Which may explain the statement of experienced political operative Bob Shrum, offered only minutes after the debate had ended:  “I think we now know who the next president will be.”