Do soldiers believe in counterinsurgency tactics?

In the second of his two recent contributions to the Boston Review, Nir Rosen describes his experiences following a team of marines in Afghanistan who trained and fought alongside a force of Afghans. For most of the article, Rosen sticks to the facts and avoids drawing many explicit conclusions. However, it is reasonably clear that Rosen is skeptical of the ability of the US to succeed in Afghanistan, and he suggests several views in the article: first, it is misguided to optimistically compare the counterinsurgency (COIN) efforts in Afghanistan’s to those in Iraq, second, the state of Afghanistan’s police and armed forces is very poor, and third, the military does not fully support COIN. This last suggestion is unfair.

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‘Getting Tough’, All Over Again

In spite of what you’ve heard before, there isn’t any one ‘third rail’ in politics. If social security reform is the partisan lighting rod du jour, then immigration reform is a close second. Moreover, if Tom Barry’s piece in the November issue of the Review is any indication, it may well be gaining. Writing about a little-known area of law he calls ‘criminal-immigration’ whereby immigrants – legal and otherwise, convicted of non-violent crimes and possessing legal family members in the US – are sentenced to jail time in so-called ‘public-private prisons’ before their inevitable deportation. Part of a ‘get tough on crime’ mantra coming out of the Bush administration – and one the Obama White House has been reluctant to modify in the midst of an already thorny healthcare battle – these newly rebranded ‘criminal-aliens’ face sentences lasting anywhere from a few days to several years before deportation, thus effectively punishing offenders twice for the same crime. So much for the Fifth Amendment. Read the rest of this entry »

“An Ugly (and Untenable) Peace”

As violence diminishes in post-civil war Iraq, sectarianism is becoming entrenched in the political institutions of the country according to the first of a two-part series by Nir Rosen in our November/December 2009 issue.  What does this say about Iraq’s future?  A government rife with corruption and authoritarian tendencies begins to appear increasingly threatening when sectarianism is thrown into the mix.  Although the decrease in violence over the past two years is certainly something to be happy about, it shouldn’t cloud the necessity to foster minority protection rights.  Sunnis and Shias have tired of violence and recognized the legitimacy of the central government for now, but ten years down the road, when Shias are receiving all the civil service jobs and Iraqi schools are imposing a Shia-based education on its Sunni students, can we be sure that another civil war won’t break out?  And this isn’t even considering the volatile north, where the central government stands by watching the Kurdish authority committing human rights abuses against Shabaks, Yazidis and other minority ethnic groups.

The Obama administration’s attention is currently solely fixed on Afghanistan, and understandably so.  The President has rejected all of the proposals set before him by his war council and continues to ponder over whether or not to employ an Iraq-styled “surge” in Afghanistan.  While considering the question of whether to increase troops or not, he should also ask if the “success” he would be looking to replicate with the surge is the type of success he wants.  The decision facing Obama has been compared to the dilemmas faced by Lyndon Johnson in 1964 with respect to Vietnam.  “Eikenberry’s stand” gives the President some time to continue to weigh the pros and cons of a troop increase.  During this time, he should not only refer back to the consequences of Johnson’s decisions in Vietnam, but also to what is shaping up to become an untenable peace in Iraq.

Ezra Nawi’s Sentencing Postponed

In BR’s web-only feature, The Trial of Ezra Nawi, David Schulman reports that peace activist Ezra Nawi was scheduled for sentencing on September 21. According to Nawi’s support site, the sentencing has been postponed. Nawi faces incarceration for an act of civil disobedience in 2007: resisting Israeli border police who were bulldozing a Palestinian home in Um al-Kheir. BR will stay abreast of Nawi’s sentencing and notify readers once it is rescheduled.

Meanwhile, Obama’s meeting on Tuesday with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas reached no firm conclusion. Speaking to the UN, Obama insisted that peace negotiations should resume without preconditions–thereby sidestepping the Palestinian demand for a freeze on Israeli settlement construction in the West Bank. Obama impatiently pushes ahead, but might do well to consult another piece from the BR archive (one of my favorites): Joseph Levine’s History Matters, in which he dissects the historical claims and current status of the Israeli/Palestinian conflict. Contrary to the U.S.’s current easing up on Netanyahu, Levine asserts:

As the occupier and principal aggressor, Israel must demonstrate good faith by taking significant actions to meet Palestinian demands. If Israel does not enact such measures, then the world community, especially the United States and the United Nations—the external parties chiefly responsible for the terrible situation in the first place—must employ sanctions to ensure Israeli compliance.

Strong words, but I encourage you to read the rest of Levine’s argument and reflect as we wait for negotiations to commence.

Coal: The Most Inconvenient Truth

Today’s New York Times discusses a coal mining accident which has killed 35 miners and trapped 44 in Pingdingshan, in China’s Henan province. The accident came only three days after Chinese Deputy Prime Minister Zhang Dejiang announced that coal miners’ safety was a priority. But coal endangers more than just those who excavate it. In the latest edition of Boston Review, Victor and Morse examine the perils of the status quo and the improbability of dramatic change.

In their article, V&M note that “every stage of the coal business is hard on the environment.” They contend that to check the progress of global warming, scientists estimate that emissions need to be halved by 2050. “For countries that care the most about global warming,” they argue, “a global halving of emissions means making much deeper cuts of their own so that developing countries that put a lower priority on the problem have room to grow.”

As the Kyoto Protocol, an international and legally binding agreement to reduce greenhouse gas emissions worldwide, nears expiration in 2012, global leaders can only confront or postpone grim choices. The Bush administration did not send delegates to Kyoto, and Obama supported clean coal technology as part of his campaign. In December, international climate talks in Copenhagen, hosted by The United Nations Framework Read the rest of this entry »

The Optics of “Public Plan”

The new explanation for the mounting resistance to Democratic health care proposals is that people are confused, they don’t know what we’re getting into, and they prefer the devil they know. I think all that is true. But you have to follow up: why are people confused?

Obviously part of the problem is that they are being deliberately lied to. But there are probably relatively few people out there swallowing and regurgitating all the lies.

Why? Simple: relatively few people pay much attention to politics, and most people have a very low level of familiarity with the specifics of any particular issue. According to a recent Kaiser poll, only 27% of Americans are following the health care reform debate closely. There are strong believers on both sides of the issue, but the key, as it always is in American politics, is the mushy, ill-informed middle. Read the rest of this entry »

Obama the Pragmatist: Winning on Abortion, Losing on Torture

McGurn’s recent Wall Street Journal op-ed on Obama’s Notre Dame speech makes an interesting point, namely that Obama “wins” on abortion by simply going on stage and saying “Let’s talk about it.” Any debate about abortion necessarily undermines the pro-life’s best hand — the firmly ideological belief that the sanctity of life is all-important and non-negotiable; we cannot even begin to discuss any compromises.
Now to torture. In this case, the Left holds the more firmly ideological position: torture is unequivocally wrong because as Americans we value freedom and justice. In rhetoric, Obama supports the Left, but in practice, Obama’s military tribunals and other measures look more and more like Bush’s policies (only with better legal grounding. Great article from the Financial Times here). Obama’s pragmatism undermines his ideological position — that freedom and justice are sacrosanct and non-negotiable — and puts him on defense. Why else would the President’s speech outlining his torture positions have to “compete” with an incredibly unpopular ex-Vice President’s speech?