There Is No Plan

It's the most famous house in Pakistan. It could have been just another house for sale in Abbottabad.

It’s becoming increasingly clear that making the killing of the Jihadist Porn King public was a big mistake. Thereisnoplan has been saying this since the attack, generating much mirth amongst friends and associates. But I stand by the notion. Obama screwed up.

If you remember, on the big night back in May, Obama made an unscheduled late night White House appearance to give us all the good news and earn a nice little approval bump in the process. Great theater. Great Politics. Sure, that poll bump has gone, but at least now nobody can accuse the President of not being decisive. He rolled the dice on the killing of UBL and won.

Unfortunately, basking in the glow of the biggest targeted assassination in history has one major strategic downside; as a result, the wheels are definitely coming off the crucial relationship with Pakistan. It needn’t have been so. Read the rest of this entry »

I am looking good.

Having essentially capitulated to the GOP / Corporate agenda on health care, financial reform and the nation’s debt “crisis”, Obama is now ‘rising above’ the fray with a savvy opening salvo in the 2012 campaign. It was a good ‘un too. Assassinating Bin Laden has bumped him up a dozen approval points in 48 hours, and put any GOP contenders on the defensive.  They can’t accuse him of being a wuss anymore.

Remove your weakness. That is what good politics is all about.

If only Obama had used more (now demonstrably popular) muscularity to do something useful when he had control of both Houses of Congress, like insist on a public option, cripple the Wall Street succubus when it was down, or raise taxes on the wealthy when he had the chance. Because that would have been ‘change’.  Sadly, instead he prefered to do things the old fashioned, unreconstructed, neo-conservative way, with a big, fat, meaningless statement that makes him look like the tough guy that everyone thinks he isn’t. Putting a bullet in the bad guy’s head is nothing if it’s not Bushlike business as usual.  Wrapping himself in the flag with a completely gratuitous visit to Ground Zero is pure Bush. It’s “Mission Accomplished” all over again, with the slight, but all important difference, that the mission – a far simpler mission – actually was accomplished.

Karl Rove must be proud. This comes right from his playbook.

Read the rest of this entry »

As Cairo explodes, it’s worth looking more closely at Pakistan for one potential trajectory that Egypt could take. Pakistan is deeply unstable, an impoverished nation torn asunder by clashes between militancy, the middle class, the army and a ruling elite.

The similarities between the two nations is quite striking.

Both Egypt and Pakistan…

…were born out of British colonial rule.

…are intensely religious states.

…have an educated elite with limited political power.

…have spent decades surpressing and appeasing their Islamic militants.

…share a border with a militarily powerful state with whom they have an uneasy peace.

…are seen as strategic lynchpins in the worldwide fight against Islamism.

…are dominated by their armies, which are the source of political power in the country.

…have limited natural resources and rely greatly on aid (Egypt’s tourism gives it the edge)

…have profound levels of poverty that no government can fix in anything like an acceptable period of time.

…have or will have weak civilian governments.

Does all this mean that Egypt will become as unstable as Pakistan? Read the rest of this entry »

India should be our bestest friend

Okay, so maybe it wasn’t the move of the century to ditch our wounded republic for a far flung developing nation that’s trying to put us away. And maybe the idea of going to India to jinny up jobs for America seems a bit of an “uhh?” to use a technical term, considering they’re outsource central, but this apparently dry-as-a-bone trade visit could have been made just a little more exciting with just a tad more thought.

India has long regarded the US as it’s natural trading (and not just outsourcing ally). After all, we speak the same language, well most of the people who we’d want to do business with anyway, and we’re both democracies, even if India has a far larger ‘demos’ to deal with.

Now of course, India would say all that wouldn’t they.  They want our business and they really hate the Chinese our go-to cheap labor source, with whom there’s been a simmering cold war for a very long time. Read the rest of this entry »

Shout it out. Pakistan is priority number one.

Nothing in Foreign Policy is simple, but problems don’t get any thornier than what do about Pakistan.

One of the most perplexing elements of the discussion surrounding the current hand-wringing over what to do in Afghanistan is how little Pakistan is mentioned as ‘the reason’ for our Afghan policy. This despite the coining of a racy new phrase to describe US policy in that arena “Af-Pak” (mainly for use on Twitter) as well as clarion calls from lots of Foreign Policy Wonks (FPWs) that Pakistan is where the action is.

So why is this? Why is Pakistan the nexus of US foreign policy in the region?

There’s really only one reason for this.  Pakistan has nukes, and the word around Washington is that those nukes are less than secure.

Sure, the rise of the Pakistani Taliban is a deeply unsettling development for the US. But a little perspective is useful here. They are not a threat to the US homeland unless they get access to a usable nuclear weapon. But if they do, they represent probably the single most dangerous threat that the world has faced in this short and already violent century.

The Taliban’s success in sequestering power in Pakistan is a product of many factors, but despite being medieval thugs, we, America are seen in a lesser light. The truth is that body politic in Pakistan is a strange and unpredictable beast indeed. Most Pakistanis distrust the militants almost as much as they hate America or India, while their government stumbles on, loathed, despised and ineffective. It’s hard to for America to make national security judgments when Pakistani society seems to be in constant state of an odd mix of utter and post-colonial good sense.

Meanwhile, the real power broker in Pakistan, the Army, is itself weak.  The Taliban absorb the body blows of their brutal campaigns to quell the insurgency, and attack the heart of the Army establishment at will. The US has tried – rightly – to build a strong relationship with the Pakistani army but the results have and will continue to be disappointing. Distrust reins supreme.

So what’s a superpower to do?  The answer is not too much. Read the rest of this entry »

time to talk to the taliban. (eye patches are optional)

Talking to moderate elements of the Taliban in order to undermine its unity is a great second prong of attack – to be combined with a more money-driven attack on Taliban control of Afghan opium. Obama was wise to caution that the complexities of Afghan tribal culture made the mapping of such talks much harder than even in Iraq. There are a number of interesting points embedded in the concept and Obama’s response.

Firstly, the Taliban rose to prominence precisely because they were able to bridge tribal divisions. Clearly they are suscepible to a divide and rule strategy, but we have to get a far better of idea of how to create it. Asking Americans on the ground to accurately understand and act on the landscape of highly complex tribal rivalries might be asking a little too much. And then there’s the question of the time it will take to build this system, and whether picking off local Taliban leaders piecemeal approach is the best way (after all, from then on they will have to be protected).  The best means may be to short-circuit that with standard procedure bribery. After all, the Sons of Iraq turned on the more extreme (Al Qaeda) elements of the Sunni insurgency because they were paid to do so. Read the rest of this entry »

gitmo - where america creates the terrorist role models of the future

Among the many black marks on the Bush Administration will be the following; they sure were talented at getting us into jams we couldn’t get out of. Iraq, and Afghanistan are top of the list, but just below them is Gitmo. Opened at a time when Bush and the neo-cons really did think that the War on Terror was going to be a real live war with stacks of POWs, the detention facility at Guantanamo Bay was to put it mildly a total and utter disaster. Bush is clearing Cedar brush back in Crawford, but like a bad dream, Gitmo is still there, yet another piece of heavy luggage that the new President’s got to haul around with him.

Obama is rightly dedicated to totally overhauling America’s image abroad, especially in the Muslim world. And a big blot on relations with Arab countries is Guantanamo. So it would seem to be a no brainer to shut the damn place as quickly as possible. The President wants the doors closed on that particular PR nightmare within a year. Nice idea. Very nice idea.

There’s only one slight problem. It’s not going to work. Read the rest of this entry »

it all starts right here

The Neo-Cons are dead. Long live the Neo-Libs.

It’s not just conservatives who believe that the continued hegemony of the United States is critical to the wellbeing of human-kind.  But the Neo-Lib prescription veers from the Neo-Cons very substantially after that. We neo-libs do not feel that military power is the key to our continued dominance. Instead Neo-Liberalism calls for a Wilsonesque revival of America’s power through goodwill and largesse, backed by  a Rooseveltian (and I mean Teddy) “big stick”. For too long, under the Neo-Cons, we talked loudly and carried a stick that frankly got smaller and smaller the deeper we fell into the morass of Iraq and Afghanistan.

It may seem like an odd time to be talking about American hegemony.  Our nation is in an economic crisis unlike any it has experienced in decades. The threat to our continued power is probably at its highest point since the Second World War, which would seem a perfect time to reassert it. Fortunately, our adversaries around the globe aren’t in any better shape than we are, and in many respects have further to fall. Even more fortuitous is the presence of a new President who could be the beacon for Neo-Liberalism. While Obama may have shown some early weakness on the domestic policy front, particularly with his reluctance to detach himself from tried-and-failed centrism, but on the foreign stage, he has an opportunity to rebuild and reinvigorate US power.

So let us begin to forge a plan for the rebuilding of American power. Here’s how. Read the rest of this entry »

do we look like we're joking?

From a superficial perspective, the idea of diverting US forces to Afghanistan as we draw down troops in Iraq seems like a good idea. But Afghanistan is a deeply inhospitable, corrupt, backward, and highly unstable failed state with an almost feudal social structure. It’s been resisting modernity and foreign control for millenia.

Before we do anything we need to make a strategic decision about our goals. It’s clear that the Taliban must go, but forget democracy, stability is just fine. It’s equally clear that increasing US ground forces by a few combat brigades will not do the job. The war would slog on for many years at great cost in lives and treasure. The Kush would be a graveyard for our grunts. There has to be another way. And there is.

There are two connected ways to beat the Taliban. We need both to win. Read the rest of this entry »

scotland the brave

It was British Labour Prime Minister Harold Wilson who coined the term “A week is a long time in politics”, and while Gordon Brown’s astonishing turnaround as British Prime Minister has taken a little longer than that, it has been truly remarkable.

When the British public turn on their leaders, they do it with a viciousness that’s positively medieval. A year ago, Gordon Brown was political poison. In the great tradition of British politics, his Labour Party was openly plotting his demise in the tea rooms and bars of Westminster. His demise was expected in a matter of weeks, and his stoic Scottish demanour combined with an almost uncanny lack of political savvy conspired to hasten it.

But then something happened. Gordon found his mojo. Starting with an unexpectedly stirring keynote speech at the Labour Party Conference in September, Brown began to take on his critics in the best way a leader can, by being exactly that – a leader. The speech was a dignified mea culpa of his mistakes and failings, combined with a cogent vision for the future, and it stopped the bleeding.

The speech was followed by another masterstroke. Amid the flailing response by Hank Paulson, the Bush Administration and Congress to the galloping credit crisis and precipitous market collapse, it was Gordon Brown’s plan to buy stakes in the UK banks that, overnight, calmed the waters. First, the Euro-zone and then, unwillingly, the US, followed the Brown plan, and the immediate panic dissipated, virtually overnight. Brown’s status as British political whipping boy was replaced by a standard grudging acceptance by the grudging Brits that he did, well, okay. Read the rest of this entry »