Afghanistan policy fail

I am extremely troubled by the Obama administration’s approach to Afghanistan – I don’t see a list of clear, achievable goals or anything approaching an exit strategy, and simply throwing more troops at the situation sounds more like the failed policy in Iraq than anything else. The following quotes from an interview with Rory Stewart, an adviser to the administration on Afghanistan and Pakistan, at least indicate that there are at least some people relatively close to Obama who see the same problem:

“It’s like they’re coming in and saying to you, ‘I’m going to drive my car off a cliff. Should I or should I not wear a seatbelt?’ And you say, ‘I don’t think you should drive your car off the cliff.’ And they say, ‘No, no, that bit’s already been decided – the question is whether to wear a seatbelt.’ And you say, ‘Well, you might as well wear a seatbelt.’ And then they say, ‘We’ve consulted with policy expert Rory Stewart and he says …’”

…

“The policy of troop increases will look ridiculous in 30 years,” he says. “They’re not going to make America safer from al-Qaeda. The theory of state-building is suspect. I’m not sure that the state they aim for is conceivable, let alone achievable. We should be pursuing a much more conventional development strategy in Afghanistan. And, if you want to combine that with a Special Forces unit that would make things uncomfortable for Osama bin Laden, then so be it.” He sighs. “But you can’t say that sort of thing to the policymakers. They’re grand, intelligent, busy people who have no interest in this kind of abstraction. They’re not interested in values, virtue, outlook … ”

I think the conventional development strategy that Stewart speaks of in relation to Afghanistan should also be implemented in Pakistan – schools, roads, and better employment opportunities will do a lot more to sap support for the Taliban than – for example – reckless drone strikes.

Oh, and that car driving off a cliff analogy KILLS.

Things are really, really bad in the Congo

It is with considerable reluctance that I recommend reading this NYT article on the newest atrocity that has sprung up in the Congo – male rape. While the United Nations already considered the eastern Congo the rape capital of the world, this certainly underscores the ratcheting up of the violence against civilians in the area. Apparently joint Congo-Rwanda military operations against rebels along the border have triggered horrific retaliatory attacks on civilians, resulting in half-a-million civilians being driven from their homes, dozens of villages burned, rape, massacres, and a host of other atrocities. Congolese soldiers have been getting into the act too, according to human rights groups.

And on top of the actual act itself, male rape victims also face considerable stigmatization as they recover. From the article:

The male rape cases are still just a fraction of those against women. But for the men involved, aid workers say, it is even harder to bounce back.

“Men’s identity is so connected to power and control,” Ms. Walker said.

And in a place where homosexuality is so taboo, the rapes carry an extra dose of shame.

“I’m laughed at,” Mr. Mukuli said. “The people in my village say: ‘You’re no longer a man. Those men in the bush made you their wife.’ ”

Aid workers here say the humiliation is often so severe that male rape victims come forward only if they have urgent health problems, like stomach swelling or continuous bleeding. Sometimes even that is not enough. Ms. Van Woudenberg said that two men whose penises were cinched with rope died a few days later because they were too embarrassed to seek help. Castrations also seem to be increasing, with more butchered men showing up at major hospitals.

I think the ‘bush wife’ thing is particularly telling, here (though completely unsurprising). But, as Lynn Harris points out over at Salon, the bush wife insult isn’t ‘just’ a gendered insult – it goes deeper:

The Times doesn’t go into this, but as a gendered insult, “bush wives” is even worse than it sounds. It’s not just “little wifey,” or some such. As described in the Christian Science Monitor, it refers to the widespread, entrenched practice of forcing women to become wives of African soldiers. (Given that the women are expected to stay with — and serve — the men for life, an international criminal tribunal now recognizes this as its own crime, separate from rape and sexual violence.)

So these men in Congo are seen as not just “women” or “wives”; they are “wives” who themselves are “weak” and victimized. Double-whammy, lowest-rung.

I don’t know much about the history of rape and war (I know it’s been used as a weapon in war for time immemorial, but I don’t know if that includes male rape – anybody else know?), but this definitely denotes a new, gruesome low in this seemingly endless conflict.

*Image taken from the NYT article.

High Frequency Trading

There has been a lot of chatter of late about high frequency trading (from here on HFT – it’s basically the use of super fast computers to get an edge on trades and deals) and whether or not it’s a good, or bad, or inconsequential practice, and what to do about it. As of right now, I’m a little undecided on where it falls on the good/bad/inconsequential scale. On the one hand, like Matt Yglesias, I’m of the mind that whatever edge Goldman Sachs or whomever is getting for now with their nifty computers, it won’t be there for now. On the other hand, I certainly haven’t been convinced that they are not bad, and we should probably have figured out by now that financial innovations aren’t always as innocuous as they might seem at first glance. As Felix Salmon points out:

My bottom line is that HFT is a black box which very few people understand, and that one thing we’ve learned over the course of the crisis is that if there’s a financial innovation which doesn’t make a lot of sense and which is hard to understand, there’s a good chance there’s systemic risk there. Is it possible that HFT is entirely benign and just provides liquidity to the market? Yes. But that seems improbable to me.

Furthermore, as Kevin Drum argues, the burden of proof shouldn’t be on ‘us’ to point out that HFT is bad, or should be regulated, or should be paid closer attention to. It’s on ‘them’ (Goldman Sachs) to prove that it is as harmless as they claim. And until they can, I think the criticism is entirely warranted.

And, finally, I think the hoopla around this could be easily addressed by a financial transactions tax. Even slapping as small a sum as a penny on each financial transaction will raise a ton of money without reducing any necessary or desirable activity, while it will raise plenty of money – like $100 billion, according to the Center for Economic and Policy Research – for tons of necessary and desirable things, like schools, and infrastructure creation/management, and hospitals, etc. And it would also have another benefit – it would be a financial burden only on those who engage in HFT, and if that financial burden isn’t worth it for them to continue such trading, then their trades likely aren’t creating anything good in the first place.

Middle East Push

The NYT has a piece on the Obama administration’s push for peace in the Middle East, and it notes – among other things – the perception that the strategy is alienating Israelis while failing to sway Arabs. Here’s an excerpt:

In Israel, public opinion toward Mr. Obama, which was skeptical to start with, has soured because of the tension over settlements. In the Arab world, there is little evidence of a change of heart toward Israel.

Saudi Arabia, by all accounts the central player in developing a consensus among Arab countries, appears utterly unmoved by the American argument that “confidence-building” gestures can open the door to more substantive negotiations between Israel and the Palestinians.

“Incrementalism and the step-by-step approach have not, and we believe will not, achieve peace,” the Saudi foreign minister, Prince Saud al-Faisal, said after meeting Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton. “Temporary security, confidence-building measures, will also not bring peace.”

Aside from the fact that it’s a little early to be sounding the fail bell on the push – as George Mitchell himself already noted, it took him 700 days of hard work to bring about the Good Friday accord in Ireland, but I suppose the NYT has to fill all those pages somehow – I also think the chief reasons the push is coming up short thus far, and will continue to do so in the future, is more because of deep-rooted problems than the day-to-day quibbles of the stakeholders. Two things to note here:

1) Incrementalism, in some ways, could be a good strategy to help bring about some type of settlement. But not here, anymore. The U.S., which has already burnt its bridges as an honest broker in the conflict with its decades-long too-close relationship with Israel, is finally figuring out that it can’t just say ‘Trust us’ anymore. It used to work, but the rest of the region has caught on to the fact that Israel is just going to keep on building settlements, proffering dead-end deals, and palming an olive branch with one hand while wielding a cudgel with the other. Incrementalism has left the future Palestinian state in fragments, a non-descript combination of cantons (or bantustans, if you wish) carved up and bisected by a mishmash of settlements that continue to grow by the day. So, yeah – color me unsurprised that the Arabs are no longer buying the incrementalism game.

2) Who is going to negotiate for the two sides? The NYT article mentions that the hard work begins once Netanyahu and Abu Mazen sit down at the table together. And yeah, one would imagine the hard work would really begin there – precisely because Netanyahu has no interest in a peace deal and Abu Mazen doesn’t have much of a dog in this fight anymore. For Bibi, if his disdain for the Palestinians and any reasonable two-state solution wasn’t evident enough already, even his father has admitted that he has no interest in a peace deal. From Tony Karon:

On Israeli TV last week, the 100-year-old historian and stalwart of the Israeli right, Ben-Zion Netanyahu, was blunt when asked whether his son now supports the creation of a Palestinian state: “He does not support it. He supports such conditions that they [the Palestinians] will never accept it. That’s what I heard from him. I didn’t propose these conditions, he did. They will never accept these conditions. Not one of them.”

And for Abu Mazen, who exactly does he represent at this point? Palestinian civil society has been absolutely shattered over the last couple of years, and the shards of it left are divided between a hodge-podge of groups, with a good chunk of them sitting in the Hamas camp. Keeping in mind that Abu Mazen was a more-than-willing conspirator in the failed anti-Hamas coup of a couple of years ago, it is unlikely that any watered down peace deal he accepts would in turn be accepted by a majority of the Palestinians. Any potential peace deal has to a) probably not include Netanyahu and b) definitely include Hamas. As far as I see, this plan is 0/2 thus far.

Suffice it to say, I’m not too optimistic about the chances of the Obama administration’s push for peace – but for different reasons, and more troubling reasons, than in the NYT article.

Hendrik Hertzberg is smarter than you

He is. Just read this. Here’s an excerpt:

The American health-care system is bloated, wasteful, and cruel. Under the health-insurance-reform package now being bludgeoned into misshapen shape on Capitol Hill, it will still be bloated, wasteful, and cruel—but markedly less so.

…

The most consequential opposition to the reforms now under consideration is coming from a small group of Blue Dog Democrats, who protest that the plan does too little to control costs. To the extent that their concern is genuine, and not just a reflexive deference to wealth (they vociferously oppose a modest surtax on the top one per cent, whose effective tax rates have dropped by fifteen per cent since 1979, while their after-tax incomes have more than tripled), they have a point. But it’s a minor point. The prospective reform has more cost-containment provisions than past attempts, and, thanks in part to those same Blue Dogs, it is acquiring more such elements by the day—for example, the proposal for an independent commission able to set Medicare payment rates, which Obama has also embraced.

But the Blue Dogs are playing a dangerous game of chicken. Even if they’re right that reform would do too little about costs, the alternative—which, as the President has repeatedly pointed out, is the status quo—would do nothing. Ultimately, real cost control will require a strong push away from fee-for-service medicine.

I think that’s right on – the result of health care reform will likely be a markedly better, but still by almost all accounts inefficient and wasteful, health care system. This time. And that’s key – this time. There’s a lot of misinformation out there about health care reform, and that – combined with an understandable reluctance amongst those currently covered to drastically change the system and a political system dead set against such drastic change – means that the best path to a workable health care system is in stutter steps. And if Obama can make one stutter step (and any such step will extend coverage to millions, making their lives significantly better) then he’ll have done his job. It’s just a frustrating process, and with important legislation like this (and anything dealing with global warming, for example) it can have very real, very disastrous consequences.