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In Contentions, Max Boot responds to concerns about the rules of engagement in Afghanistan.
…The only way to win in a counterinsurgency — or just about any other war, for that matter — is to send infantrymen with rifles to occupy the enemy’s strongholds. In Afghanistan, those strongholds are among the population. That’s where our troops need to go. In the process of driving the insurgents out of the population centers, it is strategically smart to minimize civilian casualties because that will help us to win the allegiance of the wavering population. That is not an untested theory; it is the reality of successful counterinsurgency campaigns from Malaya to Iraq.
And, yes, our troops will be placed at risk in the process of protecting the population and defeating the insurgents. There is no other way to achieve our goals. In Iraq from 2003 to 2007, we tried the alternative approach of putting our troops into giant Forward Operating Bases and employing copious firepower. Because this strategy failed to defeat the insurgency, it actually resulted in more American casualties. Conversely the surge strategy of 2007, which placed our troops in more exposed Combat Outposts and Joint Security Stations in Iraqi neighborhoods, incurred more casualties in the short run but saved American (and Iraqi) lives in the long run by actually pacifying Iraq. That strategy is also our best bet in Afghanistan. That’s something that Gen. McChrystal realizes and that Stateside naysayers fail to grasp.
Charles Krauthammer’s take on the Afghan ROE.
… So even though I’m sort of instinctively very suspicious and worried about these very constraining rules of engagement, I would defer to the military here because they are making a calculation that this is the best way to win the war.
David Warren believes that Greece is only the first nation to reach a financial crisis.
…today the problem is that freely elected governments of socialist tendency have spent the country into perdition. …
…This is the reality, yet Europe’s finance ministers are still blathering assurance that the Greeks somehow “deserve” to be saved. This not out of any compassion, but from fear the whole European Union will begin unravelling when Greece comes apart.
Yet in this respect Greece is nothing special: a vast, unionized public bureaucracy, which is, under quaint Greek arrangements, paid 14 months a year (12 calendar months plus two of guaranteed annual bonus). The civil servants are going berserk because the Socialist government of George Papandreou is trying to cut them back to 13 months of payment. (And can’t afford that.) We have the spectacle of customs officials on strike, and tax collectors threatening to follow; of their trades union umbrella group declaring that the government’s austerity measures are “an act of war.”
…it is rather necessary to run a structural surplus, to prepare for the long rain of basic demographic facts: the usual aging population. …
In the National Journal, Clive Crook contrasts the US financial situation with that of Greece. Setting aside his assumption that tax increases will help, he has some interesting analysis.
…Perhaps that figure I just mentioned for U.S. general government debt struck you as high. The measure of public debt usually quoted in the U.S. excludes the debts of state and local governments. This and other statistical differences give you a debt ratio for 2010 of just over 60 percent — the figure you might be familiar with — not 90 percent. But it is not obvious why you would want to exclude the debts of state and local governments. Doing so is not standard international practice. If some states approach default, which is by no means unthinkable, some of those debts may end up on the federal government’s books anyway. Even if it does not come to that, the debts are still public obligations, and most countries would fold them into their overall measure of public debt.
Moreover, tunnel into the fiscal practices of America’s state and local governments and you find (as in most countries) plenty of “financial innovation.” Revenue bonds, for instance, securitize future cash flows from taxes, lease payments, lottery profits, federal aid, and what have you. Borrowing against these future income streams can be used to keep spending off the books: Lack of transparency is often part of the attraction. The maneuver also gets around constitutional and other restrictions on borrowing using general obligation bonds. While you’re at it, throw in generous tax advantages for state and local debt. And let’s not forget states’ unfunded pension and health insurance obligations. …
…Perhaps handing the problem off to a commission is as much as the politics will allow. President Obama has promised not to raise taxes on the middle class. He will have to break that promise. Realistically, this cannot happen before November’s elections, and when it does, Obama will need all the political cover he can find. Perhaps the budget commission can provide some. The president has said that the commission should consider all options: As it starts its work, he is not taking tax increases off the table. …
Christopher Hitchens has a send off for Al Haig.
“Nobody has a higher opinion of General Alexander Haig than I do,” I once wrote. “And I think he is a homicidal buffoon.” I did not then realize that this view of mine was at least partly shared by so many senior figures on the American right.
When I moved to Washington in the very early years of Ronald Reagan’s tenure, I was pretty sure that Haig, then secretary of state, was delusional (and not even in a good way). What I would not have believed then was what has become apparent since—that his boss, Ronald Reagan, often felt the same way. According to Douglas Brinkley’s splendid edition of the president’s diaries, Reagan wrote as early as March 24, 1981: …
Global analysis by Stratfor’s George Friedman is in Pickings sometimes. In Tablet Magazine, David Goldman (AKA Spengler) analyzes Stratfor’s work product. He is not impressed.
… Friedman is not selling sophistication. Subscribers to his premium service get more items in their inbox than the most avid geopolitics junkie could digest. Friedman’s private CIA, for that matter, isn’t much different from the official version. My old boss from Ronald Reagan’s National Security Council, Norman Bailey, always read the press himself to make sure he caught key items that the CIA analysts missed. Most of the cubicle-dwellers in the CIA’s Directorate of Intelligence are academics who didn’t get tenure and chose the government’s health and pension benefits over the uncertainties of adjunct teaching.
For all his commercial focus, Friedman does not pander to his readers’ prejudice. The Next 100 Years dismisses the stuff of scare scenarios—Islam taking over Europe, China confronting the United States, a failed Mexican state dumping its surplus millions over the American border—and offers an idiosyncratic vision that will leave most readers confused. Forget Russia and China, Friedman insists: they will collapse of their own weight during the next generation. The great powers of the future are Japan, Turkey, Mexico, and Poland. The great crisis of the mid-21st century, he believes, will be a war between the United States and a fearsome Turkish-Japanese alliance. …
…Warfare no longer depends on demographics, Friedman explains with exquisite patience. With precision-guided munitions and battlefield robotics, Japan can project military power without a large army. Israel, after all, is the biggest military power in the Middle East, and its demographic presence is trivial. “One computer scientist is worth a great many soldiers,” Friedman says. …
…I ask how many doctorates in computer science Mexico graduates each year. Friedman doesn’t know. The correct answer is nine. Japan is going to be a world power despite its vanishing population because it’s got the computer scientists, and Mexico is going to threaten the United States despite its lack of computer scientists because of its large unskilled population.
Doesn’t all of this seem inconsistent? “Not at all,” Friedman answers. “I look at the discrepancy between economic status and economic potential and draw conclusions from there.” And that, in essence, is what his method entails. He looks for countries with a high growth rate, like Turkey or Mexico, and projects this forward 50 years in a straight line. He is not trying to be sensational; he is simply being academic. Why a country like India, which now produces more graduate students in math and sciences than the United States, does not figure into Friedman’s vision of the future is perplexing. “You can’t speak of India as a unified country,” he says. “They have marvelous technology in Mumbai, and a hundred miles away they have Maoist guerillas. India was invited by the British. It has vast political diversity.”
The fact that India and China are graduating millions of bright young people trained at the cutting edge of technology and conversant with Western culture…doesn’t matter, for Friedman takes for granted that the world’s two largest nations will turn into failed states, while Mexico will become America’s geopolitical rival. …
A Corner post by Bill Burck and Dana Perino gives us the importance of the closing of the investigation parts of Bush’s legal team.
On February 19, Attorney General Eric Holder took part in the time-honored Washington tradition of dumping undesired news on Friday afternoons or evenings. After weeks of leaks, the Justice Department officially exonerated Bush-era lawyers John Yoo and Jay Bybee, the authors of the original legal opinions on the lawfulness of the CIA interrogation program, which are known pejoratively as the “torture memos” to critics.
This is bad news for Holder and certain other Obama appointees at Justice — it undermines the story they’ve been telling for years that the lawyers who found the CIA program lawful were sadistic criminals committed to torturing poor souls such as Khalid Sheik Muhammad — but it is a vindication of an important principle that, prior to the Holder reign, had been adhered to across administrations: honestly held legal and policy opinions are not cause for prosecution or professional discipline.
For years now this principle has been under sustained attack by hard-core left-wing congressional partisans such as Rep. John Conyers and Sen. Patrick Leahy. It’s not much of a stretch to imagine some of the more wild-eyed among them searching for ways to revoke the law licenses of conservative Supreme Court justices. Fortunately, this country is not Venezuela — at least not yet; we should not rest easy.
This was a very narrow escape that came down to the brave decision of a long-time career official at Justice named David Margolis. …
In the Times, UK, Christina Lamb looks at the trouble with the Obami.
…Obama relies on five people, four of whom are Chicagoans. They are Rahm Emanuel, his chief of staff, David Axelrod and Jarrett, his political advisers, and Michelle, while the fifth kitchen cabinet member is Robert Gibbs, his chief spokesman, who comes from Alabama.
The president consults them on everything. Military commanders were astounded when they participated in Afghanistan war councils and referred to them as the “Chicago mafia”. …
…The problem may go deeper. Douglas Schoen, former pollster for Bill Clinton, believes the Obama team misinterpreted victory as an endorsement of his liberal agenda when it was really a reaction against George W Bush and the credit crisis. “They need to recognise there is only one fundamental issue in America: jobs,” he said.
What no one disputes is that Obama is extremely clever. Were it not for losing the Kennedy seat and with it the Democrats’ 60-seat super-majority in the Senate, Obama would probably have signed healthcare into law by now. …