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.

Rosen writes,

Westby was trying to be a good soldier in the COIN spirit. But the fact is that once you get down to the rifle squad, COIN does not make any sense. Soldiers, whose greatest concern is living through their deployments, are being asked to mix Wyatt Earp and Mother Theresa. In public they pay lip service to COIN because that is the way to advance. Less publicly, officers speak of going in to villages and “doing that COIN shit.”

He continues,

The troubles with COIN are institutional. The American military and policy establishments are incapable of doing COIN. They lack the curiosity to understand other cultures and the empathy to understand what motivates people.

Consider two of Rosen’s suggestions: first, for COIN to be successful, soldiers must believe in its merit, and, second, it is a point of fact that the soldiers in Afghanistan do not. Neither, however, is fully true. If COIN is to work in Afghanistan, no doubt foot soldiers, military strategists, and administrative officials must collectively believe that it has some chance of success. If everyone believes that it is damned, then it is reasonable to assume that a joint lack of commitment to COIN will ensure its failure. Does COIN require a soldier’s approval over-and-above following orders? Approval cannot hurt: foot soldiers who are convinced that they can successfully train an Afghan army will probably be better trainers. Their fully convinced state of mind, however, is not necessary to get the job done.

What are the actual attitudes of those soldiers after all? Is it merely true, as Rosen claims, that, “in public they pay lip service to COIN because that is the way to advance”? I find it a stretch to believe that if soldiers embrace COIN they do so for purely Machiavellian reasons. It is, after all, possible for a soldier to be cynical about COIN—and the politicians who promote it—and still be committed to the basic principles of COIN. One military blogger has concluded, for instance, that Obama’s recent decision to increase troop levels in Afghanistan was the “right strategy” while maintaining that his optimistic speech sent the “wrong message”.   Another journalist claims that the military is still fairly unschooled in COIN, but that the “stigma” is changing.  In short, a person can express cynicism in all sorts of ways, and some cynicism about COIN on the part of soldiers doesn’t entail that they reject the entire project.

Immigrants, of course, aren’t the only victims in this story. Law enforcement has been hard-pressed to keep up with the growing influx of ‘criminal-aliens’ since the 1980s. In its effort to reign-in the overflow, the Departments of Homeland Security and Justice have turned to private firms, at the expense of struggling rural towns. These corporations have come under fire in recent days with the unfolding story of Michael Hinton – an ex-con caught defrauding the small Montana town of Hardin in an alleged scheme to operate its local prison. Sordid as it is, his story is quite common. Ostensibly sanctioned by law enforcement officials, these private firms have sought out small, impoverished, predominantly South Western towns for which the building of prisons would guarantee jobs and steady incomes. Promising greater and greater efficiency at a minimum of the cost necessarily comes at the expense of something else – such ‘nonessential’ services as in-house medical and psychological staff. All this begs the question, at what point do civic and humanitarian concerns outweigh efficiency arguments? More important still, how does a society reconcile its public duty to uphold and enforce the law – a task most of us agree that society alone can exercise – against an increasingly privatized corrections industry?

The Obama administration continues to tread lightly – holding their predecessor’s line under the guise of preserving ‘law and order.’ Perhaps that’s a rationale which voters are willing to accept for the moment, but all that clamoring for change back during the campaign will come back to haunt the President and his congressional allies in 2012 unless they actually follow through. In preparation for the coming immigration debate, Homeland Security Secretary Napolitano spoke on Friday, November 13th at the Center for American Progress on the issue of reform, broadly defined. While it’s encouraging to see some movement on this front, any part of a workable solution will require a reassessment of the draconian public-private prison scheme. Talk only goes so far before voters begin to wonder whether they’ve backed the wrong horse. Ball’s in your court, Mr. President.

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.

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.

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 Convention on Climate Change (UNFCC), will provide an opportunity for him to distinguish himself from his predecessor.

As the world’s largest consumer of coal after China, the U.S. has yet to reflect seriously on how to cut emissions –and this in the era when the European Union is already phasing out inefficient light bulbs. Yet, as Victor and Morse point out, coal is “abundant, cheap, and indispensible.” It’s not clear what Obama meant when he said, in June “”For what everyone here believes, even as views differ on many important issues, is that the status quo is no longer acceptable.” We’ll have to wait and see.

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. Those are the people who are reparably confused. But it’s important to understand that Americans are confused about the very basics, about even the terminology that they are supposed to use when chatting at the water cooler. Most importantly, they don’t know what the public plan is, and the phrase itself is open to Rorschach-style projections. The famously salesman-like Obama failed to frame his product in the most basic way: giving it a good name.

In 2005, you could be for or against “the privatization of Social Security.” In 1995, you could be for or against “welfare reform.” In 1965, you could be for or against “guaranteed health insurance for the elderly” and the “Voting Rights Act.”

What are you supposed to be for in 2009’s health care debate? What simple, easy-to-understand, attractive phrase did Democrats pick to encapsulate their plan? The “public plan” was it, but “public plan” is a terrible political phrase. “Public” conveys the idea of something that everyone uses, provided by the government: public transportation, public parks, public roads and bridges and beaches. How easy to believe that the public plan entails “government-run health care,” or a “government takeover”! Only recently have the Democrats started saying “public option,” but “public plan” has already stuck.

But wait, you say, the public plan is actually popular! A recent NY Times poll found 66% favoring “a government administered health insurance plan.” First of all, I’d love to see what the same sample of people thought about the “public plan.” I’m confident we would have seen a different, and lower, level of support, which reflects the fact that Republicans and Republican-leaners know they’re supposed to hate the public plan, and also the fact that it’s such an easy thing to believe the worst about.

Second, support for the public plan is extremely shallow. The same poll found 69% of Americans feeling concerned that the quality of their health care would drop. That’s a powerful concern. The same Kaiser poll from before showed that support for the public plan plummeted when it was suggested that it would give government an unfair advantage over insurance companies and be the first step towards single-payer. Granted, support rose when people were told it would provide choice and bring down costs by increasing competition. But Obama didn’t want (or shouldn’t have wanted) competing narratives about a public plan. You don’t want the mushy middle to be prepared to believe anything they’re told, not on an issue as sensitive as health care. You don’t want to count on their believing your side of the story.

Third, remember the 27% statistic from before. A successful political endeavor has a tagline that the other 73% can get behind, because the 73 percenters are the air that the 27 percenters breathe: they are friends, family members, colleagues, and interview subjects for journalists. What they think is at least as important as what the well-informed think.

Ironically, I believe that the way to solve this problem would have been to use an even vaguer phrase than “public plan,” which is now coming into vogue, from the start. It always should have been “health insurance reform.” Get “health care” out of it. Nobody feels any love for Aetna and Blue Cross, but people like their “health care”: they like their doctor, they like their local hospital, they like their kids’ pediatrician, and they like their pills. Threaten those things with reform (read: change) and you’re bound to scare people. Throw in language about a “public plan” and you’re bound to confuse people. But “health insurance reform” isn’t the type of thing you can easily believe bad things about. It suggests change, which people overwhelmingly desire, and probably to a much firmer degree than they support any particular kind of change. And it focuses the attention on the insurance companies and on the consumer-friendly regulations Obama is pushing. Obama and his PR team have realized their mistake, and their new eight-point list of reforms is supposed to rectify it. It might work, but it would have saved us a lot of pain if he had thought through the sales job in the beginnning.

I have to agree with Maureen Dowd, who writes today that “the president’s overconfident Harvard Law Review side, expecting a high-minded debate, prevailed.” (An even more cynical observer might say that the President’s accommodationist, business-friendly side prevailed.) But the root problem isn’t that Obama’s failing to “squash” his nutty opponents, as Dowd says. He is trying and trying and trying to do that, but he will keep failing because the terms of the debate have been set, perhaps irreparably, in his opponents’ favor.