Notes from an Accidental Blogger

Develop your hearts!!

2011-09-11T12:22:00.000+05:30

One of my great privileges of my work is that i get to meet, observe and know leaders at a wide variety of organizations, including businesses, governments, universities etc.

I've met a quite a few who exercise to keep their hearts and bodies fit for the long hours and no small number of them are also motivated by the desire to impress others with their presence, energy and competitiveness.

Regular physical exercise is certainly of value. What many leaders miss, however, is the need to develop their hearts in other ways beyond exercise that are even more important: ways that produce the character strengths of love, kindness, compassion, gentleness and empathy.

A leader whose character is missing these strengths may have power over others but will lead from influence that moves people to give their best efforts and align their behaviour with the leader's goals. This truth is expressed in sayings such as you have to "EARN THE RIGHT TO BE HEARD" and "People don't care what you know until they know that you care".

If you are a leader, you can develop the heart of the people you lead by bringing them together to serve at a local charitable organizations in your community that helps the less fortunate. By getting to know and serving the people in your life, your community and the world at large, you will develop the heart of a person others will want to follow.

Remember your Victory Dance

2011-05-11T22:20:00.000+05:30

BE brilliant at the basics. Be the change you want to see in the world. Be the first one. Be the only one. Be unforgettable. Be interesting. Be a sleeper. Be That Guy. Be That Girl. Be the world’s expert on yourself. Be better than yesterday, but not as good as tomorrow. Be confident enough to be humble. But be somebody who reminds everybody of nobody else in the world.

AND DON’T wish it was easier, wish you were better. Don’t sell, enable people to buy. Don’t let the bastards get you down. Don’t be weary in well doing, for in due season you will reap a great harvest if you faint not. And don’t wait for the mainstream to validate your voice. Don’t despise the day of small beginnings. Don’t be selfish with your knowledge. Don’t complain if you haven’t earned the right. And don’t be different, be unique.

BECAUSE YOU are what you charge. You are what you believe. You are the books you’ve read and the people you’ve met. And you are an empty sheet of paper in the minds of every person you encounter.

AFTER ALL, the world cannot resist a man on a mission. The best swimmers are always in the pool. The sculpture is inside the stone. And the two greatest days in your life are the day you’re born, and the day you realize why you were born.

AND if you are successful you will always have too much to do and too little time. If you aren’t being criticized, you aren’t doing much. And if everyone says you’re out of your mind, you just might be onto something.

EVEN THOUGH, it’s not easy being yourself. It’s not who you know, it’s who knows you. And it’s not the years, it’s the mileage.

SO, WORK hard, work long and work smart. Work like you don’t need the money. And work from technique, because you never know how you will feel.

AND DON’T FORGET THAT success leaves clues. That confidence is king. That credibility comes from specificity. That listening is not waiting to talk. And that a nice person who is mean to a waiter is not a nice person.

OR, TO tell the truth, to tell it all and to tell it now. To give value first. To paint yourself into a good corner. To allow customers to participate in your brand. To do the work once and benefit many times. To give yourself away. To respect people’s no’s. To take massive action. And to act as if you already were the person you’re trying to become.

THEREFORE, ALWAYS stand up, stand out or be counted out. Discover your Personal Differential Advantage. Learn to love your zone of discomfort. Greet each day with love in your heart. Show, don’t tell. Make daily appointments with yourself. Never apologize for your art. Remember your Victory Dance. Work harder on yourself than your job. Find your one big idea. And always validate your existence, be yourself and do something cool – every single day.

Source: http://curtrosengren.typepad.com/collectivegenius/2006/06/life_isnt_about.html

Growth in a Buddhist Economy (Jeffrey Sachs)

2010-08-31T16:02:00.000+05:30

I have just returned from Bhutan, the Himalayan kingdom of unmatched natural beauty, cultural richness, and inspiring self-reflection. From the kingdom’s uniqueness now arises a set of economic and social questions that are of pressing interest for the entire world.
Bhutan’s rugged geography fostered the rise of a hardy population of farmers and herdsmen, and helped to foster a strong Buddhist culture, closely connected in history with Tibet. The population is sparse – roughly 700,000 people on territory the size of France – with agricultural communities nestled in deep valleys and a few herdsmen in the high mountains. Each valley is guarded by a dzong (fortress), which includes monasteries and temples, all dating back centuries and exhibiting a masterful combination of sophisticated architecture and fine arts.

Bhutan’s economy of agriculture and monastic life remained self-sufficient, poor, and isolated until recent decades, when a series of remarkable monarchs began to guide the country toward technological modernization (roads, power, modern health care, and education), international trade (notably with neighboring India), and political democracy. What is incredible is the thoughtfulness with which Bhutan is approaching this process of change, and how Buddhist thinking guides that thoughtfulness. Bhutan is asking itself the question that everyone must ask: how can economic modernization be combined with cultural robustness and social well-being?

In Bhutan, the economic challenge is not growth in gross national product, but in gross national happiness (GNH). I went to Bhutan to understand better how GNH is being applied. There is no formula, but, befitting the seriousness of the challenge and Bhutan’s deep tradition of Buddhist reflection, there is an active and important process of national deliberation. Therein lies the inspiration for all of us.

Part of Bhutan’s GNH revolves, of course, around meeting basic needs – improved health care, reduced maternal and child mortality, greater educational attainment, and better infrastructure, especially electricity, water, and sanitation. This focus on material improvement aimed at meeting basic needs makes sense for a country at Bhutan’s relatively low income level.

Yet GNH goes well beyond broad-based, pro-poor growth. Bhutan is also asking how economic growth can be combined with environmental sustainability – a question that it has answered in part through a massive effort to protect the country’s vast forest cover and its unique biodiversity. It is asking how it can preserve its traditional equality and foster its unique cultural heritage. And it is asking how individuals can maintain their psychological stability in an era of rapid change, marked by urbanization and an onslaught of global communication in a society that had no televisions until a decade ago.

I came to Bhutan after hearing an inspiring speech by Prime Minister Jigme Thinley at the 2010 Delhi Summit on Sustainable Development. Thinley had made two compelling points. The first concerned the environmental devastation that he could observe – including the retreat of glaciers and the loss of land cover – as he flew from Bhutan to India. The second was about the individual and the meaning of happiness. Thinley put it simply: We are each finite and fragile physical beings. How much “stuff” – fast foods, TV commercials, large cars, new gadgets, and latest fashions – can we stuff into ourselves without deranging our own psychological well-being?
For the world’s poorest countries, such questions are not the most pressing. Their biggest and most compelling challenge is to meet citizens’ basic needs. But, for more and more countries, Thinley’s reflection on the ultimate sources of well-being is not only timely, but urgent.

Everybody knows how American-style hyper-consumerism can destabilize social relations and lead to aggressiveness, loneliness, greed, and over-work to the point of exhaustion. What is perhaps less recognized is how those trends have accelerated in the United States itself in recent decades. This may be the result of, among other things, the increasing and now relentless onslaught of advertising and public relations. The question of how to guide an economy to produce sustainable happiness – combining material well-being with human health, environmental conservation, and psychological and cultural resiliency – is one that needs addressing everywhere.

Bhutan has many things going its way. It will be able to increase exports of clean, run-of-the-river hydropower to India, thereby earning foreign exchange in a manner that is sustainable and that can fill government coffers to fund education, health care, and infrastructure. The country is also intent on ensuring that the benefits of growth reach all of the population, regardless of region or income level.

There are serious risks. Global climate change threatens Bhutan’s ecology and economy. Incautious and expensive advice from McKinsey and other private consulting firms could help turn Bhutan into a degraded tourist zone. One must hope that the quest for GNH will help steer the country away from such temptations.

The key for Bhutan is to regard GNH as an enduring quest, rather than as a simple checklist. Bhutan’s Buddhist tradition understands happiness not as attachment to goods and services, but as the result of the serious work of inner reflection and compassion toward others.
Bhutan has embarked on such a serious journey. The rest of the world’s economies should do the same.

India - a reluctant rising power

2010-04-20T16:50:00.000+05:30

Some countries are naturally at ease with the concept and the reality of strategic power. Such was clearly the case of France under Louis XIV, the Sun King in the seventeenth century, and such is the case today of China, whose leadership is comfortable with the balance-of-power games of classical Europe.

India is clearly in a different category. In economic terms, India’s confidence has been boosted by the way the Western world now looks at it with a mixture of respect and greed: “What kind of deals can I strike with such an emerging market, whose population will soon be the largest of any country in the world?”

Yet, in order to understand India’s political and diplomatic relationship with the outside world, the most enlightening comparison is with America in 1920. Like the United States after World War I, India is realizing that its status and role in the world have been deeply transformed in the last two decades. And, like America then, India is not naturally at ease with the notion of exercising global power.

India’s history and culture, from Asoka, its mythical emperor in the third century BC, to Gandhi, push it to emphasize ethics and to consider itself an “exceptional” nation in its relationship with the world. Contrary to China, India finds it difficult to adapt to its status as an emerging “Great Power.” It would be a gross exaggeration, of course, to speak of an Indian “inferiority complex.” And yet India constantly measures itself against China, remains obsessed with Pakistan, and has recently begun to look more critically at its relationship with the US.

It is natural for India to proclaim its “democratic” superiority to China while recognizing that on all strategic fronts it is not in the same league. But is it even possible to draw a comparison between what one Indian academic has called the “robotized Chinese man” and the vast human diversity of India?

India seems to worry more than ever about China’s evolution. China’s key role within the G-20, together with the relative if not absolute decline of the Western powers, seems to have reinforced the hard-liners in Beijing and the nationalism of a China that seems less ready than ever to accept any criticism of its human rights record. Viewed from New Delhi, the vision of a reasonable, prudent, and ultimately satisfied China – a vision “sold” to the world by the Minister Mentor of Singapore Lee Kuan Yew – appears less than obvious.

When it comes to Pakistan, too, India seems to lack confidence. On all fronts – demographic, economic, military, and political – India is far above Pakistan. But India does not seem to know how to deal with its northwestern neighbor, and even less whom to deal with in its government.

The largest democracy in the world cannot say openly that it almost preferred the military dictatorship of General Pervez Musharraf to the chaos of the current situation. In reality, what prevails in India is a deep sense of frustration with Pakistan. India’s overtures to Pakistan’s government have largely remained unanswered, and when Indian officials express their unease, the US, if not the international community, accuses them of behaving irresponsibly.

If India seems not to believe that America and its allies can really “succeed” in Afghanistan, nor is it willing to resign itself to a return of the Taliban to power, which could in turn lead to Talibanization of Pakistan. Yet India seems to behave in a very “European” way in Afghanistan; it is ready to send money and experts, but not troops.

India’s worries and frustrations in Afghanistan and Pakistan translate into a mixture of disillusion and irritation with an America that, seen from New Delhi, allows itself to be manipulated by Pakistani officials. Indians cannot quite decide whether the Americans are simply “naive” or duplicitous; either way, they are not reassured.

Whatever the case, the current warming of relations between India and Russia, symbolized by Prime Minister Vladimir Putin’s recent visit, does not translate into a grand reversal of alliances, as India’s break with Russia in the 1990’s did. India’s exchanges with Russia are only one-fifth of what they are with China. What prevails nowadays in New Delhi and Moscow is simple pragmatism.

While there is room for Europe in India’s view of the world, for India (as for China) Europe is above all an economic rather than a political reality. When it comes to politics, bilateral relations prevail, and from that standpoint France and Germany seem more important than Great Britain. The Raj era may be visible in the buildings of New Delhi and in the uniforms of the Indian army, but Britain has lost any competitive edge that it once had in India. The past is truly passed.

India’s unease about strategic power, and its resemblance to a gigantic European Union united only by the English language, reflects its ongoing search for a new international identity. In this quest, India is impaired by its lack of practice in the exercise of power on a grand scale. India is not about to become a second China – it lacks both the means and the ambition. That is a further reason for the West to engage and invest in India.

Afghanistan Woes

2010-04-09T18:04:00.001+05:30

``Failed state'' is a term applied frequently to Afghanistan and is often deemed the cause for why terrorists gained such influence there. But a country does not fail of its own volition, nor is it weakened by unknown causes. A country fails, when it fails, for definite, identifiable reasons. These must be addressed if Afghanistan is to be revived.

Twenty years of invasion, civil war, and drought have left Afghanistan's institutions in ruin. Millions of Afghans huddle in refugee camps or are displaced from their homes. Land-mines defile the countryside. Millions are sick and poor; many live at starvation levels. For these and many other reasons, rebuilding Afghanistan's economy will require not only economic reconstruction but an effort to reinvent the country's political and cultural institutions. Such a massive effort will be doomed to failure, however, if Afghanistan's neighbors intervene in ways that promote economic upheaval all over again.

Afghanistan is no place for quick fixes. Rebuilding the country cannot be done cheaply. Any thought that the anti-terror coalition will be able to bail out fast (as the West did when it abandoned Afghanistan to its fate after the Soviet withdrawal ten years ago) should be forgotten. The West must stick with Afghanistan until its reconstruction is established. Otherwise, it runs the risk of renewed chaos and violence, but this time in a more destabilized region, as Pakistan's current problems demonstrate.

Three problems are of immediate concern, the most important being feeding the Afghan people - both within the country and in refugee camps outside Afghanistan. Humanitarian aid is being delivered, but a distribution system safe from the predations of Afghanistan's warlords needs to be built. Indeed, the warlords have been given too big a say in distributing aid already, and it may be hard to strip them of this power. But stripped they must be.

The second problem involves relocating Afghan refugees now living in Pakistan and Iran, as well as those displaced within Afghanistan. To achieve this goal, the agricultural economy must be revived in order to revive this industry, providing jobs and food for people. A massive impediment here is the millions of mines left over from the Soviet invasion that must be removed.

The West has a big incentive to be generous to Afghanistan's rural poor. Starving farmers, if unassisted, may return to cultivating a very reliable cash crop: the opium poppy, long a staple of the warlord economy. Eliminating it will not only help farmers and the West as it tries to curtail heroin use, but also Afghanistan's infant government as it struggles to assert its national authority against the warlords. A bankrupt warlord, after all, cannot buy weapons or bribe people to maintain their loyalty.

Major infrastructure investments will also be needed if the economy is to be revived. Housing, particularly for returning refugees, will need to be constructed fast. Cities such as Kabul, Mazar, Herat and others will need to be rebuilt as centers of economic and cultural life. Village housing must be provided at a massive level.

Roads, airports and communications systems must also be revitalized if trade is to be restored. The educational system needs to be rebuilt almost from scratch, and with so many women anxious to return to teaching, a revived educational system will also help Afghanistan's democratic politicians gain a powerful lobby of workers. Particular attention should be given to elementary schools and libraries outside of cities.

Afghanistan poses particular difficulties in reconstruction, as it is not a society with a strong political center. Planners should take advantage of the country's decentralized nature and emphasize private sector participation in reconstruction. A decentralized system will respond better to local needs and avoid an over-bureaucratic public sector. But autonomous economic regions should be avoided as a threat to Afghan national unity because they would play into the hands of the warlords. Moreover, poorer regions would do badly in such a system.

In the long run, Afghanistan has resources that can be exploited. There is the potential for oil and gas exploration, and of mining iron ore and precious metals. These activities should be explored in a framework of economic development across Central Asia. Afghanistan, indeed, must be integrated into the regional pipeline and other development schemes. Afghans can contribute in a tangible way here by reopening the North-South route connecting the resource rich economies of Central Asia to densely populated India and Pakistan.

None of this will be possible unless Afghanistan's young males are disarmed and given productive work. Essential here, is to attract expatriate Afghans with skills and professional achievements to help in rebuilding the country by establishing small firms that will suck up the unemployed. Expatriate involvement will also likely support the rights of women to participate fully and legally in economic and political life, as was the case before 1978.

Finally, donor countries must apply the lessons learned in restoring the war-ravaged states of the former Yugoslavia. Grants and planning must be coordinated, and the consent of Afghanistan's neighboring countries assured. If the latter are ignored, regional interests can incite chaos once again. An international conference on Afghanistan should be called by the US and held under UN auspices. It must affirm not only Afghanistan's territorial integrity, but insure that donor commitments meet the scale of the job and that these promises are kept.

A decade ago, the West turned its back on Afghanistan and chaos ensued. To abandon the country again would be criminal folly.

No Time for a Trade War

2010-04-09T17:59:00.002+05:30

The battle with the United States over China’s exchange rate continues. When the Great Recession began, many worried that protectionism would rear its ugly head. True, G-20 leaders promised that they had learned the lessons of the Great Depression. But 17 of the G-20’s members introduced protectionist measures just months after the first summit in November 2008. The “Buy American” provision in the United States’ stimulus bill got the most attention. Still, protectionism was contained, partly due to the World Trade Organization.

Continuing economic weakness in the advanced economies risks a new round of protectionism. In America, for example, more than one in six workers who would like a full-time job can’t find one.

These were among the risks associated with America’s insufficient stimulus, which was designed to placate members of Congress as much as it was to revive the economy. With soaring deficits, a second stimulus appears unlikely, and, with monetary policy at its limits and inflation hawks being barely kept at bay, there is little hope of help from that department, either. So protectionism is taking pride of place.

The US Treasury has been charged by Congress to assess whether China is a “currency manipulator.” Although President Obama has now delayed for some months when Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner must issue his report, the very concept of “currency manipulation” itself is flawed: all governments take actions that directly or indirectly affect the exchange rate. Reckless budget deficits can lead to a weak currency; so can low interest rates. Until the recent crisis in Greece, the US benefited from a weak dollar/euro exchange rate. Should Europeans have accused the US of “manipulating” the exchange rate to expand exports at its expense?

Although US politicians focus on the bilateral trade deficit with China – which is persistently large – what matters is the multilateral balance. When demands for China to adjust its exchange rate began during George W. Bush’s administration, its multilateral trade surplus was small. More recently, however, China has been running a large multilateral surplus as well.

Saudi Arabia also has a bilateral and multilateral surplus: Americans want its oil, and Saudis want fewer US products. Even in absolute value, Saudi Arabia’s multilateral merchandise surplus of $212 billion in 2008 dwarfs China’s $175 billion surplus; as a percentage of GDP, Saudi Arabia’s current-account surplus, at 11.5% of GDP, is more than twice that of China. Saudi Arabia’s surplus would be far higher were it not for US armaments exports.

In a global economy with deficient aggregate demand, current-account surpluses are a problem. But China’s current-account surplus is actually less than the combined figure for Japan and Germany; as a percentage of GDP, it is 5%, compared to Germany’s 5.2%.

Many factors other than exchange rates affect a country’s trade balance. A key determinant is national savings. America’s multilateral trade deficit will not be significantly narrowed until America saves significantly more; while the Great Recession induced higher household savings (which were near zero), this has been more than offset by the increased government deficits.

Adjustment in the exchange rate is likely simply to shift to where America buys its textiles and apparel – from Bangladesh or Sri Lanka, rather than China. Meanwhile, an increase in the exchange rate is likely to contribute to inequality in China, as its poor farmers face increasing competition from America’s highly subsidized farms. This is the real trade distortion in the global economy – one in which millions of poor people in developing countries are hurt as America helps some of the world’s richest farmers.

During the 1997-1998 Asian financial crisis, the renminbi’s stability played an important role in stabilizing the region. So, too, the renminbi’s stability has helped the region maintain strong growth, from which the world as a whole benefits.

Some argue that China needs to adjust its exchange rate to prevent inflation or bubbles. Inflation remains contained, but, more to the point, China’s government has an arsenal of other weapons (from taxes on capital inflows and capital-gains taxes to a variety of monetary instruments) at its disposal.

But exchange rates do affect the pattern of growth, and it is in China’s own interest to restructure and move away from high dependence on export-led growth. China recognizes that its currency needs to appreciate over the long run, and politicizing the speed at which it does so has been counterproductive. (Since it began revaluing its exchange rate in July 2005, the adjustment has been half or more of what most experts think is required.) Moreover, starting a bilateral confrontation is unwise.

Since China’s multilateral surplus is the economic issue and many countries are concerned about it, the US should seek a multilateral, rules-based solution. Imposing unilateral duties after unilaterally labeling China a “currency manipulator” would undermine the multilateral system, with little payoff. China might respond by imposing duties on those American products effectively directly or indirectly subsidized by America’s massive bailouts of its banks and car companies.

No one wins from a trade war. So America should be wary of igniting one in the midst of an uncertain global recovery – as popular as it might be with politicians whose constituents are justly concerned about high unemployment, and as easy as it is to look for blame elsewhere. Unfortunately, this global crisis was made in America, and America must look inward, not only to revive its economy, but also to prevent a recurrence.

An interesting letter

2010-04-09T17:51:00.000+05:30

Hope you are doing well. Forgive me if the content of the talk hurts you in any manner. My intention is definitely not to embarrass you or put you in inconvenience. It’s been a while that I am encountering a very strange feeling that gives me immense joy and peace. I would like to share it with you – and to let you know that the source of the happiness is you. In the next few minutes, I am planning to put in plain words what I think about you and the feelings I have for you. You have the liberty to switch off or sign off from listening to this. The worst trait of mine is I may sound very boring to you. So it is solely up to you either listen or not.

First things first:

1. You are fine-looking in all sense of the word.
2. You have a comforting voice that brings peace most of the time.
3. You are elegant and charming.
4. You are woman of resilience, calm determination and display excellent judgment.
5. You bring providence and confidence to people who look up to you.

Frankly the above mentioned points are not the reasons why I become crazy for you. Probably those are good reasons to be a good friend. But there are things more than that.

I feel close to my mother whenever I think about you. I feel that you are my child whenever I speak to you. I feel that you are close to my soul whenever I am with you. In short, I feel the warmth as if I am in my mother’s womb with no tensions, fears or insecure feelings – only peace, joy and calmness. I feel that there is something more of poetry, more of melody and more of godliness whenever you talk to me. Somehow I think I am continuously trying to become acquainted with you.

I wouldn’t call it a feeling of love or lust. I don’t know what it is. I do not expect anything from you – nothing from your emotional side, none from your physical side, and none from your material side. I fully want the sacred side of you – and I am sure that is one pristine side which you have not shared it with anyone yet. And I want to explore that. That is the reason probably why I am interested to see the many facets of your personality, curious to know everything about you in-depth. Do you know, by trying to explore you, I started exploring myself deep down into my inner mind. Getting deeper into myself, I have started knowing my feelings, thoughts, deeper stirrings and I understood how ghastly one’s thinking could be. In fact, the picture I have about you may be different from what you really are. But that doesn’t matter.

In fact I had thought not to verbalize my thoughts, as I believed it has to be a silent commitment; eye to eye, being to being and soul to soul. It thought it has to be understood, not said. I don’t know why his urge to convey the thoughts to you at any cost suddenly arose.

All I can say now is you can count on me for any support. Until then God bless you and your boyfriend/partner.

HAPPY NEW YEAR

2009-12-31T16:12:00.000+05:30

The joy in the celebration of the New Year lies in the fact that each man, woman, and child is essentially reborn. All of the mistakes, the indiscretions, regrets and wrong turns of the previous year can, if we let them, fall away into distant memory.

Personally, I can absolve myself of the guilt I have over opportunities missed because I was too afraid of criticism or rejection. I can forgive myself for the times that I may have yelled at the friends, in the heat of anger and frustration. And I can vow that in 2010, I will do better. I will be better. Let us put the past behind us; forgive whenever we can and let us resolve to live the best and meaningful life ahead.

When we go to bed on December 31st, we awake with a whole new year ahead. There is just something about the new year, so fresh, so new, so unblemished that allows us to believe, if only for a little while, that we can again be anything that we want to be. We have three hundred and sixty five brand new opportunities to be a healthier person, a nicer person, a better person.

My wish for all of you is the health, strength and courage to live the best, happiest life that you can live as well.

Obama Undermines the UN Climate Process

2009-12-30T16:10:00.001+05:30

Two years of climate change negotiations have now ended in a farce in Copenhagen. Rather than grappling with complex issues, President Barack Obama decided instead to declare victory with a vague statement of principles agreed with four other countries. The remaining 187 were handed a fait accompli , which some accepted and others denounced. After the fact, the United Nations has argued that the document was generally accepted, though for most on a take-it-or-leave-it basis.

Responsibility for this disaster reaches far and wide. Let us start with George W. Bush, who ignored climate change for the eight years of his presidency, wasting the world’s precious time. Then comes the UN, for managing the negotiating process so miserably during a two-year period. Then comes the European Union for pushing relentlessly for a single-minded vision of a global emissions-trading system, even when such a system would not fit the rest of the world.

Then comes the United States Senate, which has ignored climate change for 15 consecutive years since ratifying the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change. Finally, there is Obama, who effectively abandoned a systematic course of action under the UN framework, because it was proving nettlesome to US power and domestic politics.

Obama’s decision to declare a phony negotiating victory undermines the UN process by signaling that rich countries will do what they want and must no longer listen to the “pesky” concerns of many smaller and poorer countries. Some will view this as pragmatic, reflecting the difficulty of getting agreement with 192 UN member states. But it is worse than that. International law, as complicated as it is, has been replaced by the insincere, inconsistent, and unconvincing word of a few powers, notably the US. America has insisted that others sign on to its terms – leaving the UN process hanging by a thread – but it has never shown goodwill to the rest of the world on this issue, nor the ability or interest needed to take the lead on it.

From the standpoint of actual reduction of greenhouse-gas emissions, this agreement is unlikely to accomplish anything real. It is non-binding and will probably strengthen the forces of opposition to emissions reductions. Who will take seriously the extra costs of emissions reduction if they see how lax others’ promises are?

The reality is that the world will now wait to see if the US accomplishes any serious emissions reduction. Grave doubts are in order on that score. Obama does not have the votes in the Senate, has not displayed any willingness to expend political capital to reach a Senate agreement, and may not even see a Senate vote on the issue in 2010 unless he pushes much harder than he has so far.

The Copenhagen summit also fell short on financial help from rich countries to poor countries. Plenty of numbers were thrown around, but most of these were, as usual, empty promises. Aside from announcements of modest outlays for the next few years, which might – just might – add up to a real few billion dollars, the big news was a commitment of $100 billion per year for the developing countries by 2020. Yet this figure was unaccompanied by any details about how it would be achieved.

Experience with financial aid for development teaches us that announcements about money a decade from now are mostly empty words. They do not bind the rich countries at all. There is no political will behind them. Indeed, Obama has never once discussed with the American people their responsibility under the UN Framework Convention to help poor countries adapt to the impact of climate change. As soon as US Secretary of State Hillary Clinton mentioned the $100 billion “goal,” many Congressmen and the conservative media denounced it.

One of the most notable features of the US-led document is that it doesn’t mention any intention to continue negotiations in 2010. This is almost surely deliberate. Obama has cut the legs out from under the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change, in effect declaring that the US will do what it will do, but that it will not become further entangled in messy UN climate processes in 2010.

That stance might well reflect the upcoming 2010 mid-term Congressional elections in the US. Obama does not want to be trapped in the middle of unpopular international negotiations when election season arrives. He may also feel that such negotiations would not achieve much. Right or wrong on that point, the intention seems to be to kill the negotiations. If soothe US does not participate in further negotiations, Obama will prove to have been even more damaging to the international system of environmental law than George Bush was.

For me, the image that remains of Copenhagen is that of Obama appearing at a press conference to announce an agreement that only five countries had yet seen, and then rushing off to the airport to fly back to Washington, DC, to avoid a snowstorm back home. He has taken on a grave responsibility in history. If his action proves unworthy, if the voluntary commitments of the US and others prove insufficient, and if future negotiations are derailed, it will have been Obama who single-handedly traded in international law for big-power politics on climate change.

Perhaps the UN will rally itself to get better organized. Perhaps Obama’s gambit will work, the US Senate will pass legislation, and other countries will do their part as well. Or perhaps we have just witnessed a serious step towards global ruin through our failure to cooperate on a complex and difficult challenge that requires patience, expertise, goodwill, and respect for international law – all of which were in short supply in Copenhagen

***Jeffrey D. Sachs is Professor of Economics and Director of the Earth Institute at Columbia University.

What Next in Afghanistan?

2009-12-29T15:46:00.000+05:30

Afghanistan’s future does not look good. The Taliban are gaining military and political strength, and President Hamid Karzai is losing support at home and internationally due to his administration’s rampant corruption and the obvious fraud committed in his re-election. Weariness with the war is spreading in the United States, where President Barack Obama finds it difficult to decide about an increase in troops, as demanded by his own generals. European NATO members with troops in Afghanistan would prefer to withdraw them today rather than tomorrow.

The West seems to have lost its orientation in the Hindu Kush – that “graveyard of empires,” as it was called after the British disaster in January 1842, when only one man survived an expedition 16,000. What, many people are asking, is NATO really fighting for in Afghanistan?

Europe remains silent on that question and has only one aim: to get out. In the US, the debate about the purposes being served in Afghanistan is at least still taking place. Follow it, and you will conclude that, ultimately, the war is all about the American superpower’s military victory over the Taliban, so that it can finally withdraw its troops – for a second time.

The source or meaning of the conflict in Afghanistan is impossible to find in the country itself. Afghanistan is the battlefield, but the causes of the wars that have devastated it since the mid-1970’s were and are still to be found beyond its borders. So an exclusively “Afghan solution” is not possible.

Three dates are central to understanding today’s Afghan quagmire: 1989, 2001, and 2003.

In 1989, when the Cold War ended, the Red Army had already withdrawn from the country, thereby admitting its defeat. Following the Soviet Union, the US withdrew from the conflict, too, and at that moment, the second Afghan war started – a proxy war between regional neighbors over power in the Hindu Kush, disguised as a civil war.

Supported by Saudi Arabia, Pakistan sought strategic depth against its arch-enemy India with the help of militant religious students from Afghan refugee camps. These “Taliban” were created and equipped by the Pakistani secret service, the ISI. Iran defended its own interests and those of the Shia minority in the west of the country. And in the north, the Tajik Northern Alliance and Abdul Rashid Dostum’s Uzbek militia were supported and equipped by Afghanistan’s northern neighbors and Russia.

In the shadow of this second Afghan war, Osama bin Laden established his terrorist organization in Taliban-ruled Afghanistan: Al Qaeda, which, on September 11, 2001, carried out its terrible terrorist attack on the US. A month later, the current war in Afghanistan started.

In March 2003, George W. Bush launched his invasion of Iraq, not only squandering America’s military strength, but also connecting all the individual crises between the eastern Mediterranean and the Indus Valley. As a result of America’s foreign-policy folly, Iran became the central geo-political player in the entire region, linking the western and eastern part of this long belt of instability.

So, those who are grappling with the Afghan riddle today should consider, first and foremost, the regional realities: can the West afford to withdraw? If so, we should pull out of Afghanistan immediately. If not, we should stop discussing an “exit strategy.”

The cost of the West’s retreat from this troubled region is predictable, since we must deal with several threats that endanger Western security, and that would not disappear with withdrawal from Iraq and Afghanistan: terrorism, Islamist radicalism, nuclear threats (Pakistan, Iran), proxy wars and regional conflicts (Israel-Palestine, Iraq, Afghanistan, and Kashmir), and looming disintegration (Iraq, Afghanistan, Pakistan, and in the longer term in the Persian Gulf and the Arabian Peninsula). This means that we cannot talk about withdrawing our troops, but only of redrawing the battle line farther West.

It is extremely doubtful that such a step would bring more security. On the other hand, the West’s strategy in Afghanistan up to now has also yielded little progress, only strengthening the Taliban day by day. So what should we do?

First, we need to define a clear political goal: a stable status quo in Afghanistan that will prevent the country from again becoming a battlefield of regional interests and an organizational base for Al Qaeda. Without a sufficient military presence, as well as improved and reinforced reconstruction efforts, this goal is not attainable.

Second, a renewed regional consensus on Afghanistan’s future would also help avoid further destabilizing nuclear-armed Pakistan. This requires that Pakistan’s and Iran’s interests be included in this consensus, as well as India’s, Saudi Arabia’s and probably also China’s. (The Kashmir conflict must, indirectly, play a role in this settlement, but the difficulties of including it should not be underestimated.) Forging this consensus will not be an easy diplomatic task. But it is feasible and should be the goal of a new conference on Afghanistan.

Third, a parallel effort at crisis containment – and perhaps even at finding solutions – is needed for the wider Middle East, Iraq, the Persian Gulf, and Iran. It’s an equation with very many known unknowns, but if we do not try at least to mitigate these issues, the known unknowns will continue challenging all partial solutions.

But the big question remains whether the US and its European allies still have the strength, perseverance and far-sightedness for such an undertaking. There are good reasons to doubt this. The alternative would be a chaotic and dangerous future in this large hot spot. Afghanistan may seem far away, but its chaos and violence are in fact just next door.

***Joschka Fischer, a leading member of Germany’s Green Party for almost 20 years, was Germany’s Foreign Minister and Vice Chancellor from 1998 until 2005***

Will Russia Save the West?

2009-12-29T15:44:00.000+05:30

Rapid changes in the global economy and international politics are raising, once more, an eternal issue in Russia: the country’s relations with Europe, and with the Euro-Atlantic region as a whole. Of course, Russia partly belongs to this region. Yet it cannot and does not want to join the West wholeheartedly – at least not yet. Meanwhile, this choice looks very different now compared to just a few years ago.

It is becoming obvious that the Euro-Atlantic world, whose economic and political model seemed so triumphant 20 years ago, is now lagging somewhat behind China and other Asian countries. So is Russia, where, despite encouraging talk about innovation-based development, the economy continues to de-modernize as corruption has been allowed to metastasize, and as the country relies increasingly on its natural-resource wealth. Indeed, it is Asia that has turned out to be the true winner of the Cold War.

These rising powers raise problems regarding Russia’s geo-strategic choices. For the first time in decades, the values gap between Russia and the EU appears to be increasing. Europe is overcoming state nationalism, while Russia is building a nation state. Broken by history and not wishing to be ravaged by war again, Europeans have embraced compromise and renounced the direct use of force in international relations.

Russians, on the other hand, emphasize their “hard power,” including military force, because they know that they live in a dangerous world and have no one to hide behind. And, because of the country’s comparative lack of “soft power” – social, cultural, and economic attractiveness – it stands ready to use the competitive advantages (i.e., its resource wealth) available to it.

Internal political developments in Russia are also pushing the country in a different direction from the West. Quite simply, Russia is moving away from democracy.

This emerging values gap is not an insurmountable obstacle to geostrategic rapprochement. But, coupled with mutual irritation, which is particularly strong in Russia, closing the gap is becoming much harder. For, while Russia ’s elite never considered itself defeated in the Cold War, the West essentially treated Russia as a defeated country – an attitude symbolized by NATO’s eastward expansion, which laid a deep foundation for ongoing tension. It was only after the West encountered an armed rebuff in South Ossetia that NATO expansion was stopped in its tracks. Yet NATO has not given up on further enlargement.

NATO expansion is nothing more than the extension of its zone of influence – and in the most sensitive, military-political sphere . And yet the West’s unwillingness to abandon that effort is coupled with a repeated refusal to recognize Russia’s right to have its own zone of interest.

So NATO expansion has left the Cold War unfinished. The ideological and military confrontation that underlay it is gone, but the geopolitical rivalry that it entailed has returned to the fore. Thus, the old mentality survived on both sides.

Energy debates are another example of this. Non-Russian Europe should thank the Almighty for the presence of energy-rich Russia at its borders, while Russia should be thankful for having such wealthy customers. But the natural differences in the interests of energy consumers and producers have been given a political/security twist – witness the discussions about an “Energy NATO.”

F aced with the impossibility of advantageous accession to Euro-Atlantic institutions, Russia is drifting fast towards alignment with China – a “younger brother,” though a respected one. Russia’s “Asian choice” of today is not the same as the Slavophile/Eurasian choice of the past. On the surface, it looks like a choice in favor of a rapidly rising civilization. But the current estrangement from Europe – the cradle of Russian civilization and modernization – threatens Russia’s identity and will increase its geostrategic risks in the future.

Europe does not benefit from this estrangement either. It will continue to move towards beautiful decay – Venice writ large. The United States also loses. Without Russia, which will remain the world’s third strongest power for the foreseeable future, it is impossible to solve the key problems of international security.

The current Euro-Atlantic security architecture seems to suit the majority of Americans and Europeans, though it is becoming increasingly fragile and counterproductive. So Russia will struggle to create a new architecture largely on its own – whether through a new treaty on collective European security, or even through its accession to NATO. This is not only in Russian political and civilizational interest, but it also reflects our duty to the entire community of Euro-Atlantic nations, which is being weakened by the “unfinished Cold War.”

The idea of a “Union of Europe” between Russia and the EU should be put on the long-term agenda. That Union should be based on a common human, economic, and energy space. The combination of a new security arrangement for the Euro-Atlantic community and the establishment of the Union of Europe could arrest the decline in the international weight of the West.

****Sergei Karaganov is Dean of the School of International Economics and Foreign Affairs of the Russian Research University – Higher School of Economics. This article is based on a report on Euro-Atlantic security prepared by the Russian group of the Valdai Club, of which Professor Karaganov is Chairman. ***

The Rising Sons of North Africa

2009-12-29T15:42:00.000+05:30

The role played by Libyan ruler Muammar al-Qaddafi’s son, Saif al-Islam, in gaining the release of the Lockerbie bomber Abdelbaset Ali al-Megrahi, and Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak’s state visit to Washington accompanied by his son, Gamal, suggest that dynastic successions are underway in both countries.

They are not alone. Mubarak and Qaddafi, along with Tunisia’s Zine el-Abidine Ben Ali and Abdelaziz Bouteflika of Algeria, are among the world’s oldest and longest-serving heads of state. All four face the ticklish problem of succession, and speculation has been mounting for some time of possible attempts to keep power in the family.

That solution is becoming pretty commonplace, from the Aliyevs of Azerbaijan to the Kims of North Korea to the Assads in Syria. Dynastic succession safeguards the immediate and frequently extensive interests of the ruling family as well as those of the wider political and business elite. But the possibility of near simultaneous successions in North Africa is striking nonetheless.

All four North African rulers have, to greater or lesser degrees, made themselves the center of highly opaque power structures. Everything in their countries depends on the person and family rather than the office. Yet, despite these authoritarian leaders’ apparently solid grip on power, ensuring that a relative takes over is not as simple as it seems. The problem boils down to overcoming possible resistance – from both the elite and the public – that could derail the handover or undermine the successor’s authority.

Dealing with elite interests requires ingenuity. Lucrative business opportunities can be allocated to soothe the successor’s political adversaries, while renegades can be targeted to discourage others – for example, by being stripped of property or dismissed from positions of influence.

Where members of the ruling family hold direct commercial interests – as in Libya and Tunisia – the political transition is certain to cause collateral economic damage. For example, if Qaddafi’s fourth son, Muatasim, emerges as the successor, he could take away Saif al-Islam’s business holdings and ability to profit from foreign contracts. In Tunisia, a successor from the Trabelsi branch of the Ben Ali clan – linked to the president through his second wife, Leila Trabelsi – could target the extensive interests of families related to Ben Ali’s daughters from a previous marriage.

Securing popular legitimacy requires equal dexterity, which has played an important role in preventing North African leaders and family members from openly admitting their preparations for dynastic successions.

In Egypt, where such preparations are the most obvious, Gamal and other senior figures have stubbornly denied his presidential ambitions. At the same time, room has been made for Gamal to build a public profile of his own through his senior role in the ruling party, and a constitutional framework has been put in place that will allow him to be elected in multi-candidate elections, thus establishing a façade of republican legitimacy.

This strategy may find imitators. Ben Ali’s son-in-law, Sakhr el-Materi, was last year elected to the central committee of the ruling Rassemblement Constitutionnel Démocratique party. In Algeria, Bouteflika’s brother, Said, has been linked to a “grassroots” movement that – it is rumored – could eventually serve as a basis for his succession bid. But these two cases are at much earlier stages, and their prospects for success more uncertain.

In Libya, Saif al-Islam has sought to distinguish himself as an agent of democratic change by setting up “non-governmental” organizations, establishing “independent” media outlets, and even sponsoring his own private drafting committee for a new constitution. But he has encountered stubborn resistance from key elite groups, who regard his agenda as a threat to their vested interests.

The legitimacy question is particularly problematic if the ruler’s biography or charisma is closely tied to the legitimacy of the regime. In Libya, the regime’s founding myth is inextricably linked to Qaddafi’s 1969 coup and his eclectic political theories. His departure would expose the anachronistic nature of the state’s ideological foundation; family ties will do nothing to protect his successor from the resulting shock to the system.

The Algerian situation is similar. The regime’s legitimacy is based on the war of independence, with all presidents to date having played important roles in it. But Bouteflika’s most likely successors, including his brother, almost certainly will not have this tie. As in Egypt, public opposition to a succession seen to threaten the republican order could sharpen the army’s understanding of itself as guardian of the state, prompting it to intervene. This is much more likely in Algeria than in Egypt.

Another public-relations problem concerns business interests. In Egypt, Gamal Mubarak will have to counter the widespread perception that his interests are aligned with close allies among the business elite, notably steel tycoon Ahmed el-Ezz. Gamal could seek to dispel this perception by publicly making examples of regime cronies involved in excesses. While business interests are not as openly discussed in Tunisia, they are no less unpopular. Ben Ali’s successor could raise his profile by clamping down on cronyism.

The four rulers have deliberately played their succession cards close to their chests. Keeping everyone in suspense helps prevent the emergence of organized opposition to a dynastic succession. Moreover, they may worry that heirs apparent will seek to force them out of office prematurely.

Thus, Ben Ali has demoted prominent politicians back when they attained sufficient influence to be considered potential successors. He is apparently concerned that one of them could imitate a coup like the one he led in 1987 that toppled Habib Bourguiba. (He has since changed the constitution to prevent a repeat).

In Libya, the fortunes of Saif al-Islam and Muatasim have waxed and waned as Qaddafi enforces his authority to prevent the emergence of a challenger. While few obstacles remain in Gamal’s path to power in Egypt, in Algeria, meanwhile, a bid to install Said would likely collapse against resistance from powerful regime interests.

***Excerpts from an Article written by Wolfram Lacher (senior analyst covering North Africa at Control Risks, a global business risk consultancy)***

Afghanistan’s Customary Laws

2009-12-29T15:38:00.000+05:30

When the problems riddling Afghan society are listed – violence, insecurity, corruption, religious fundamentalism – one dominating factor is usually left out: the influence of customary law. In Afghanistan, there are three principal legal references: constitutional law, the Koran, and the system of customary law known as Farhang , the most dominant and strictest version of which is called Pashtunwali (the way of the Pashtuns).
Originally an ancient honor code, Farhang ensures the dominance of the oldest male of any household, followed by married sons, unmarried sons, and grandsons, then wives (with the youngest at the bottom). Collective decisions are taken by patriarchs in councils called jirgas , where all have to be in agreement.

This agreement includes including collaborating or not with the Taliban, cooperating with the Coalition forces, accepting or refusing poppy eradication in a village. Everything else is left to patriarchal discretion. Here, no one will intervene except to reinforce the application of the patriarch's rights – say, in stoning a supposedly wayward girl, or turning a blind eye to so-called “honor killings” of women.

Every act of an Afghan male’s life is integrated in a form of reciprocity, in which nothing is free. Melmastia , the basic tenet of hospitality means “I will give you shelter if you ask me to, even if you are a fugitive murderer; but, in exchange, you fight my battles.” This sense of customary obligation is why so many of President Hamid Karzai’s cronies remain in place and Taliban leaders remain safe.
Women are excluded from collective decision-making, as they are mere objects. Girls are literally sold upon marriage (the father is paid money for his daughter’s labor and reproductive capacity) and join their husband’s household. The younger the girl, the higher the price. Marriage, especially in the provinces, is routinely consummated on pre-pubescent bodies.

Yet women are precious in their own way. A family’s principal “cultural capital” is its honor, which is ensured by denying women any opportunity to highlight male failings and therefore tarnish clan respectability. As a result, women must be strictly secluded and made invisible when in public, for they are personally responsible for the desire that they could ignite in schools, hospitals, parks, or markets. The all-covering burqa ensures sufficient anonymity to permit women a certain amount of freedom in public space.

Every female simultaneously carries her father’s and her husband’s honor, and will stoically submit to all forms of violence committed in its name. This may mean dying in childbirth rather than risking the “dishonor” of giving birth in a public place, a hospital, in front of strangers.

Going to court is practically unheard of, as it would mean renouncing family practices. From the male point of view, resorting to outside police or judicial intervention would signify an inability to fight one’s own battles – an admission of defeat and a symbolic castration.

This helps explain the intense corruption present in Afghan courts, where “honor” can be redeemed by bribing a judge to have a rapist or murderer released. As violence is strictly a private matter, relinquishing justice to state institutions could be an unacceptable humiliation.

Customary law is not rigid in that it is made to fit round the demands of global economy. It has become more rigorous in it s applications due to the influence of militant Islam, which seeks to use religious texts to legitimize escalating brutality, especially against women. However, Farhang and privatized violence are precisely what Mohammad sought to ban through Koranic law, which went beyond the personal domain and instituted a code that gave some rights to women.

For example, while the Koran allows for a measure of female inheritance, tribal custom does not authorize it, which explains the popularity of tribal councils to resolve inheritance problems and cheat women out of their rights. Similarly, whereas the Koran requires four eyewitnesses as proof of adultery, mere suspicion of some unregulated, potentially sexual conduct by a woman warrants stoning under customary law.

Yet an awareness of alternatives is seeping in through the media, even in remote provinces. Iranian films and the much loved Indian TV serials, not to mention the occasional American film, influence peoples' expectations. Add to that the experience of having lived abroad as refugees in Pakistan and Iran. Girls know that there are options to an unacceptable way of life: women are increasingly demanding more from life than what custom ordains.

This is especially true for those who have lived in Iran, a totally Muslim environment that allows women the freedom to study and work as well as access to adequate healthcare and family planning. Once back in rural Afghanistan, forced into brutal marriages, many desperate women – especially returnees from Iran – resort to self-immolation. Violence and murder of women are on the increase, perpetrated by men who feel that these alternatives pose a threat to their authority.

The West imagines that religion is the central issue in Afghanistan. But the heart of the matter is the preservation of ancient patriarchal rights that go back to Biblical times, reformatted to fit the demands of globalized capitalism. Governments and international aid organizations have failed to take into consideration the role of Farhang , perhaps because the power of unwritten law remains largely inconceivable in the West. But Afghanistan cannot begin to solve its many problems until it criminalizes the privatized violence of this antiquated code.

For a podcast of this commentary in English, please use this link: http://media.blubrry.com/ps/media.libsyn.com/media/ps/mann2.mp3

Measuring Economic Performance and Social Progress

2009-10-16T16:37:00.000+05:30

A recent report commissioned by the French government (mentioned previously on WorldChanging) foreshadows why and how GDP should be supplemented as the de facto measure of progress. The authors are world-class - Joseph Stiglitz was the chair, advised by Amartya Sen. Commission members included Nobelists and creative thinkers Kenneth Arrow and Daniel Kahneman, Nick Stern of Stern Review fame, and Robert D. Putnam.

We went through a phase transition a few years back, when the conversational zeitgeist moved from "is climate change really happening?" to "what do we do about climate change?" In the same way, the challenge is shifting from "is GDP good enough?" to how to implement broader measures of progress in our economies and political systems. This suggests questions like: Who are the early adopters? How will particular measures advance different social goals? What are the simplest useful advances to make?

In the edited highlights below, Stiglitz, Sen, and their companions weigh in with their perspectives and recommendations.

Key Messages

The seemingly bright growth performance of the world economy between 2004 and 2007 may have been achieved at the expense of future growth. It is also clear that some of the performance was a “mirage”, profits that were based on prices that had been inflated by a bubble.

The whole Commission is convinced that the crisis is teaching us a very important lesson: those attempting to guide the economy and our societies are like pilots trying to steering a course without a reliable compass. The decisions they (and we as individual citizens) make depend on what we measure, how good our measurements are and how well our measures are understood. We are almost blind when the metrics on which action is based are ill-designed or when they are not well understood. For many purposes, we need better metrics. Fortunately, research in recent years has enabled us to improve our metrics, and it is time to incorporate in our measurement systems some of these advances.

The first main message of our report is that the time has come to adapt our system of measurement of economic activity. There are now many products whose quality is complex, multi-dimensional and subject to rapid change. This is obvious for goods, like cars, computers, washing machines and the like, but is even truer for services, such as medical services, educational services, information and communication technologies, research activities and financial services. Capturing quality change is a tremendous challenge, yet this is vital to measuring real income and real consumption, some of the key determinants of people’s material well-being.
Another key message, and unifying theme of the report, is that the time is ripe for our measurement system to shift emphasis from measuring economic production to measuring people’s well-being. Changing emphasis does not mean dismissing GDP and production measures. They emerged from concerns about market production and employment; they continue to provide answers to many important questions such as monitoring economic activity. But emphasizing well-being is important because there appears to be an increasing gap between the information contained in aggregate GDP data and what counts for common people’s well-being.

To define what well-being means, a multidimensional definition has to be used. Based on academic research and a number of concrete initiatives developed around the world, the Commission has identified the following key dimensions that should be taken into account. At least in principle, these dimensions should be considered simultaneously:
i. Material living standards (income, consumption and wealth);
ii. Health;
iii. Education;

iv. Personal activities including work
v. Political voice and governance;
vi. Social connections and relationships;
vii. Environment (present and future conditions);
viii. Insecurity, of an economic as well as a physical nature.

All these dimensions shape people’s well-being, and yet many of them are missed by conventional income measures.

Recommendations

Recommendation 1: When evaluating material well-being, look at income and consumption rather than production. As statisticians and economists know very well, GDP mainly measures market production – expressed in money units – and as such it is useful. However, it has often been treated as if it were a measure of economic well-being. Conflating the two can lead to misleading indications about how well-off people are and entail the wrong policy decisions.

Recommendation 2: Emphasize the household perspective. While it is informative to track the performance of economies as a whole, trends in citizens’ material living standards are better followed through measures of household income and consumption. Indeed, the available national accounts data shows that in a number of OECD countries real household income has grown quite differently from real GDP per capita, and typically at a lower rate.

Recommendation 3: Consider income and consumption jointly with wealth. A household that spends its wealth on consumption goods increases its current well-being but at the expense of its future well-being. The consequences of such behavior would be captured in a household’s balance sheet, and the same holds for other sectors of the economy, and for the economy as a whole. Measures of wealth are central to measuring sustainability. What is carried over into the future necessarily has to be expressed as stocks – of physical, natural, human and social capital. The right valuation of these stocks plays a crucial role, and is often problematic. There is also a need to “stress test” balance sheets with alternative valuations when market prices for assets are not available or are subject to bubbles and bursts. Some more direct non-monetary indicators may be preferable when the monetary valuation is very uncertain or difficult to derive.

Recommendation 4: Give more prominence to the distribution of income, consumption and wealth. Median consumption (income, wealth) provides a better measure of what is happening to the “typical” individual or household than average consumption (income, wealth). But for many purposes, it is also important to know what is happening at the bottom of the income/wealth distribution (captured in poverty statistics), or at the top.

Recommendation 5: Broaden income measures to non-market activities. Many of the services people received from other family members in the past are now purchased on the market. This shift translates into a rise in income as measured in the national accounts and may give a false impression of a change in living standards, while it merely reflects a shift from non-market to market provision of services. Once one starts focusing on non-market activities, the question of leisure arises. Consuming the same bundle of goods and services but working for 1500 hours a year instead of 2000 hours a year implies an increase in one’s standard of living.

Recommendation 6: Quality of life depends on people’s objective conditions and capabilities. Steps should be taken to improve measures of people’s health, education, personal activities and environmental conditions. In particular, substantial effort should be devoted to developing and implementing robust, reliable measures of social connections, political voice, and insecurity that can be shown to predict life satisfaction. What really matters are the capabilities of people, that is, the extent of their opportunity set and of their freedom to choose among this set, the life they value. While the precise list of the features affecting quality of life inevitably rests on value judgments, there is a consensus that quality of life depends on people’s health and education, their everyday activities (which include the right to a decent job and housing), their participation in the political process, the social and natural environment in which they live, and the factors shaping their personal and economic security.

Recommendation 7: Quality-of-life indicators in all the dimensions covered should assess inequalities in a comprehensive way. Inequalities in quality of life should be assessed across people, socio-economic groups, gender and generations.

Recommendation 8: Surveys should be designed to assess the links between various quality-of-life domains for each person, and this information should be used when designing policies in various fields. It is critical to address questions about how developments in one domain of quality of life affect other domains, and how developments in all the various fields are related to income. This is important because the consequences for quality of life of having multiple disadvantages far exceed the sum of their individual effects.

Recommendation 9: Statistical offices should provide the information needed to aggregate across quality-of-life dimensions, allowing the construction of different indexes. While assessing quality-of-life requires a plurality of indicators, there are strong demands to develop a single summary measure. Several summary measures of quality of life are possible, depending on the question addressed and the approach taken. Some of these measures are already being used, such as average levels of life-satisfaction for a country as a whole, or composite indices that aggregate averages across objective domains, such as the Human Development Index.

Recommendation 10: Measures of both objective and subjective well-being provide key information about people’s quality of life. Statistical offices should incorporate questions to capture people’s life evaluations, hedonic experiences and priorities in their own surveys. Quantitative measures of these subjective aspects hold the promise of delivering not just a good measure of quality of life per se, but also a better understanding of its determinants, reaching beyond people’s income and material conditions.

Recommendation 11: Sustainability assessment requires a well-identified dashboard of indicators. The distinctive feature of the components of this dashboard should be that they are interpretable as variations of some underlying “stocks”. The assessment of sustainability is complementary to the question of current well-being or economic performance, and must be examined separately.To take an analogy, when driving a car, a meter that added up in one single number the current speed of the vehicle and the remaining level of gasoline would not be of any help to the driver. Both pieces of information are critical and need to be displayed in distinct, clearly visible areas of the dashboard. At a minimum, in order to measure sustainability, what we need are indicators that inform us about the change in the quantities of the different factors that matter for future well-being.

Recommendation 12: The environmental aspects of sustainability deserve a separate follow-up based on a well-chosen set of physical indicators. In particular there is a need for a clear indicator of our proximity to dangerous levels of environmental damage (such as associated with climate change or the depletion of fishing stocks.) Placing a monetary value on the natural environment is often difficult and separate sets of physical indicators will be needed to monitor the state of the environment. This is in particular the case when it comes to irreversible and/or discontinuous alterations to the environment.
The Commission believes that a global debate around the issues and recommendations raised in this report provides an important venue for a discussion of societal values, for what we, as a society, care about, and whether we are really striving for what is important.

"Go Big" or "Go Deep" - An Analysis of Strategy Options on Afghanistan

2009-10-16T16:21:00.000+05:30

Introduction

As this report is being written, there rages in the Eisenhower Executive Office Building in Washington and in various Army headquarters around the world an intense debate over what course the United States should pursue in regards to Afghanistan. The consequences of this debate will have ramifications for our country lasting decades; the cost of failing in Afghanistan is unknown but could be severe.

The debate has generally coalesced around two camps, one advocating a “Go Big” strategy involving an aggressive and fully resourced counterinsurgency (COIN) campaign and the other primary recommends a counterterrorist (CT) focus with a lighter footprint. Both have ardent and passionate defenders who claim that failing to follow their prescription will result in strategic catastrophe; neither argument is so obviously right that the President has an easy choice. This report proposes something of a hybrid alternative called “Go Deep” which eschews the so-called “minimalist” option as being too light to accomplish the President’s stated national security objectives and rejects the “maximalist” approach as being so big and intrusive that it would actually work against our intent.

These recommendations are based on my personal experience and observations in Afghanistan, on my own combat experience over a 20 year Army career, interviews with numerous people who have lived in or fought in Afghanistan, and significant research into the history of Afghanistan as well as a study of contemporary events.

This report does not claim that to follow the Go Big plan would unquestionably result in disaster because history is full of situations where superior leadership and execution rescued even flawed policy. Neither does it claim that if the President were to adopt this course of action we would definitely prevail; history is also replete with examples of otherwise solid plans failing. But it does claim that, for reasons provided throughout, Go Deep offers the best chance of success between the options currently being considered.

Many believe that assuring Go Big success is primarily a matter of deciding whether we are willing to spend the billions of dollars, suffer the casualties necessary, and invest the years most concede it will take. I contend that the culture, geography and history of Afghanistan, along with an examination of the nature of our enemy, argues persuasively against the certainty of an ultimate Go Big success, and following such a strategy may in fact actually reduce our chances.

We must also resist the temptation to go too small, as this could likewise result in an avoidable failure. Rather, it is crucial to analyze the history, geography, and people of Afghanistan, examine what has worked and what has failed in the past (paying particular attention to multiple repeating, failed patterns), and in particular study the motivations, characteristics, and tactics/strategy of our enemies in order to identify a course of action that has the best chance to safeguard America’s vital national interests.

Inherent in this process must be a willingness on the part of our leaders and idea-makers to approach this strategic problem without a requirement that a solution must be made to fit into pre-existing American molds. While there are many good things to be found in the Army’s newest Counterinsurgency Manual (FM 3-24), we must avoid the belief that all counterinsurgency strategies must be crafted by the formulae found therein. Perhaps even more critically, we must avoid the unquestioned belief that because a particular strategy worked in Iraq, it is certain to work in Afghanistan (covered in detail in the epilogue).

America’s leaders must be focused on practically identifying the path most likely to succeed after conducting thorough analysis of all the key factors involved, and be willing to craft policy that operationalizes the results. It is, of course, a requirement that we understand those concepts that may have universal application and operate within a loose framework that recognizes our own unique history, culture, and capability to wage war. But what ought to be a non-negotiable requirement is that we must concede that we will not always be able to achieve a certain outcome simply because we desire it to be so.

The recommendations that follow may not be what many policy-makers would ideally prefer, but it is my view that with proper leadership and resources, this plan has the best chance of success of anything currently being considered. The ultimate objective must remain rigidly focused on the attainment of the President’s strategic objectives:

“We have a clear and focused goal: to disrupt, dismantle and defeat al Qaeda in Pakistan and Afghanistan, and to prevent their return to either country in the future.” – President Obama.

Executive Summary

The main points of this report:

“Go Deep” is a comprehensive and pervasive strategy that incorporates critical components of the intelligence community, special operations forces, conventional military forces, military Advise and Assist units, governmental assistance and development, provides economic advisors, features educational development, and other elements of national power to form a unified, two-track objective: to 1) conduct an aggressive counterterrorist effort associated with 2) robust, focused support to indigenous governmental and military forces. Far from representing a “retreat” from Afghanistan, it “goes deep” into numerous elements of the country and region.

In its most basic form, Go Deep seeks to build and strengthen the Afghan government, help develop its economy, place an increased emphasis on drastically increasing literacy rates through targeted education programs, and invest in the development of its armed forces while simultaneously conducting an aggressive regional counterterrorist campaign. This plan completely agrees with the view that we cannot abandon Afghanistan. Where it differs with many well known opinion-makers, however, is in which levers of national power give us the best chance of achieving national policy objectives.

The “Go Big” strategy carries significant risk, little of which has been publicly considered or debated. Due to the fact that logistical constraints caused by the enormous, simultaneous redeployment from Iraq would delay the introduction of meaningful numbers of combat forces in Afghanistan, the insurgent forces will have a strategic window of opportunity to continue making gains. If we are unable to convince the people of Afghanistan to support our efforts, it won’t matter how many combat troops we introduce – just as it didn’t matter how many troops Britain had 150 years ago or the Soviets did in the 1980s.

In 2009 Afghanistan today, conditions on the ground are nothing like that of Iraq of early 2007 and there is little reason to believe the tactical success achieved by the Iraq surge could be repeated today in Afghanistan. There is presently no successful “Sons of Iraq”-type operation that would remove large numbers of enemy fighters from the streets, valleys and mountains. No large segment of the insurgency has indicated any interest in establishing a ceasefire with allied forces. The insurgency in Afghanistan today is spread over hundreds of thousands of square miles of inhospitable terrain and even 40,000 additional fighters would likely be insufficient to militarily stem the tide.

“Go Big” Analyzed

The recently leaked assessment written by the commander of NATO’s International Stabilization and Assistance Force (ISAF) General Stanley A. McChrystal is a very well written and reasoned document. On several levels it presents sound logic and advice. But the questions it does not address are as important – and in some cases more so – than those it does.

“Foreign Invaders”

The potential for the population to view the introduction of tens of thousands of additional troops as foreign “invaders” or “occupation forces” has received far too little consideration particularly given that US troops have already been there for eight long years and will remain for many years to come. The McChrystal report does at least mention the historic propensity for the Afghan people to view foreign troops as foreign invaders. He correctly writes:

An isolating geography and a natural aversion to foreign intervention further works against ISAF. Historical grievances reinforce connections to the tribal or ethnic identity and can diminish the appeal of a centralized state. All ethnicities, particularly the Pashtuns, have traditionally sought a degree of independence from the central government, particularly when it is not seen as acting in the best interests of the population. These and other factors result in elements of the population tolerating the insurgency and calling to push out foreigners (p.2-4).

But then inexplicably the report does not address how this danger will be mitigated once tens of thousands of additional troops are deployed. McChrystal’s report expressly states that, “To gain accurate information and intelligence about the local environment, ISAF must spend as much time as possible with the people and as little time as possible in armored vehicles…” Many experts in and from Afghanistan warn that our presence over the past eight years has already hardened a meaningful percentage of the population into viewing the United States as an army of occupation which should be opposed and resisted. Further, there is much evidence to suggest that a portion of the opposition we face is based simply on our presence. The introduction of upwards of 40,000 additional troops is almost certain to further exacerbate this problem. Ironically, however, there is another question that must be answered in regards to the troop increase: questions of second and third order effect problems aside, are that many troops even enough to accomplish the stated operational task?

Is 40,000 Enough?

To most, 40,000 additional troops seem like a large number, particularly when compared to the 20,000 of the Iraq surge, but according to high ranking officers who have previously commanded combat troops in

Afghanistan

, 40,000 is not enough. Marine Colonel Dale Alford said at a September counterinsurgency conference in Washington that it would require somewhere on the order of 10 brigades just to train the Afghan National Police (ANP) and another eight to work with the Afghan National Army (ANA) – on top of what we have today. Those 18 fighting brigades, totaling between 60,000 and 80,000, would also need an appropriate number of support units, probably in the neighborhood of 15-20,000. These 100,000 additional troops, he said, represent the minimum number of troops necessary to effectively conduct the COIN mission in

Afghanistan

If this highly regarded Colonel is right, the significance of his view cannot be overstated: if we attempt to execute a full-blown counterinsurgency fight, but deploy less than half the required number of troops, we may prove incapable of accomplishing the tactical mission necessary to accomplish the President’s strategic objective. During my time in

Afghanistan

I did not take part in combat operations but did travel through many parts of the country. I can tell you from what I did see, combined with the direct combat experience I have had in the past, that COL Alford’s assessment is dead on the mark. Recent combat action in

Afghanistan

only serves to reinforce this truth.

The battle last year at Wanat, which resulted in 36 US casualties (nine killed), and was repeated only days ago (3 October 2009) in a village called Kamdesh when eight Americans were killed, involved insurgent forces attacking Americans on a fixed base. In both cases the number of US troops was far too few to control the area of responsibility. Each base was situated in an isolated location distant from reinforcements.

In order to have adequately controlled either area the Army would have needed hundreds more troops – troops senior commanders simply didn’t (and still don’t) have. But this is the key point here: the location where the battles of both Wanat and Kamdesh took place are two tiny islands in the vast sea of the rugged mountains of Nuristan Province, as graphically seen in Figures 2 and 3 above: if it would have taken hundreds more troops to properly garrison these two isolated locations, how many more would it take to provide even minimal coverage for all the other important locations scattered throughout Afghanistan? Viewed in context, even the 100,000 troops COL Alford recommended might be too few; 40,000 certainly wouldn’t be enough.

Trust and Hope

A current US Government official who was born and raised in Afghanistan and has personal access to cabinet-level ministers of the Afghan government – but requested anonymity because he was not authorized to speak publicly on this subject – suggested that the number one problem facing the United States’ efforts in Afghanistan is the absence of hope among the people. On the surface this may sound like a minimal problem, but as this official explained (whom I’ll refer throughout this paper as “Mr. Rahimi”), “One of the most serious problems affecting the people of

Afghanistan

is the absence of hope. Hope in a viable Afghan state, hope in the prospects for a good life, hope that they can have justice.” Without this hope and belief in the

United States

’ ability to deliver results and a trust in the legitimacy of the Afghan Government, Mr. Rahimi explained, the population will never support our military efforts, and thus no counterinsurgency effort, regardless of how fully supported with troops, will succeed.

To underscore the importance of attaining the trust and rekindling the hope of the people, General McChrystal emphatically stated in his report that the people of

Afghanistan

represent many things in this conflict – an audience, an actor, and a source of leverage – but above all they are the objective… GIRoA (Government of the Islamic Republic of Afghanistan) and ISAF have both failed to focus on this objective. The weakness of state institutions, malign actions of power-brokers, widespread corruption and abuse of power by various officials and ISAF’s own errors have given Afghans little reason to support their government. These problems have alienated large segments of the Afghan population. They do not trust GIRoA to provide their essential needs, such as security, justice, and basic services. This crisis of confidence, coupled with a distinct lack of economic and educational opportunity, has created fertile ground for the insurgency.

But as Mr. Rahimi explained, the declaration made by numerous high ranking American officials that the next 12 to 18 months are probably a period in which this effort will be decided may have unwittingly undercut our ability to build that trust. “It was a serious problem that General McChrystal's report was leaked and this 12 month timeframe was mentioned,” Mr. Rahimi continued, “because this completely undercuts the ability of

Afghanistan

's citizens to foster hope. They believe right now that the West is not likely to succeed in 12 months and so will likely withdraw, leaving them in the lurch.” Further exacerbating the problem – and deepening the lack of trust the people of

Afghanistan

have in their government – is that the dearth of hope affects government officials as well. “I have talked to cabinet ministers of

Afghanistan

,” he began:

who hardly try to hide the fact that they are corrupt and try to get all the wealth they can for themselves and their families because they don't believe the US is going to see this through; they believe that they've got to get what they can now so that when things fall apart, they've got a 'parachute' to survive. Until we eliminate this pervasive attitude - and it is present at the highest levels of government all the way down to village residents - we cannot succeed in

Afghanistan

One of the first hard questions American decision-makers must answer, then, is what happens if we indeed deploy these 40,000 additional troops but are not able to gain the trust and hope of the people? By declaring this 12 to 18 month time frame, we have not only set expectations and caused trepidation among the people of Afghanistan, but perhaps more importantly have started a clock ticking in the minds of populations in key Western countries as well: if ISAF is unable to produce meaningful results in that time period – meaning generally by the end of 2010 – there will be increasingly intense pressure placed on the United States, Great Brittan, Germany, Italy and other Western capitols to cut the best deal possible and end the mission.

Unintended Consequences: Redeployment from Iraq & the Logistics Logjam

The danger of that possibility is made all the more stark when one considers the physical requirements of getting that many troops trained, deployed, and in the field conducting operations. If President Obama gave the order to deploy the troops by 1 November, it would likely be mid to late Spring before the first of those currently un-programmed units arrived in theater, and almost certainly about a year from now before all of them were on the ground. It is an enormous undertaking to alert, train, prepare, and then deploy that many troops on short notice. But our ability to even get them to Afghanistan would be greatly constrained because of another major operation that is already scheduled to take place at just the same time: the redeployment of upwards of 80,000 troops from

Iraq

What few have considered is that no major redeployments of US troops from

Iraq

are currently contemplated to begin until after the January 2010 provincial elections in that country. The President has already declared that all combat troops will be withdrawn from

Iraq

no later than August 2010. That means that between January and August 2010, the US will have to redeploy approximately 80,000 troops and their associated equipment – at precisely the same time they would have to deploy 40,000 to Afghanistan.

To suggest that such a requirement would strain the logistical system of the United States Military would be a gross understatement. Almost certainly we would be forced to either delay the redeployment of our forces out of Iraq or delay the introduction of forces into

Afghanistan

. Either of those possibilities opens our country to political and diplomatic – not to mention security – problems. But of primary concern in this report is the impact this logistical problem would portend for a “Go Big” strategy in

Afghanistan

. The October 12^th edition of the Army Times put the nature of the problem into stark relief:

A sustainable increase in Army forces in Afghanistan hinges on the drawdown in

Iraq

, a senior Army planner told the Army Times. The active Army now has 11 BCTs (brigade combat team) in Iraq and five in

Afghanistan

, and soldiers are getting, on average, a little more than 12 months at home between deployments… “We’ve increased forces in Afghanistan before we’ve reduced forces in

Iraq

in a meaningful way,” the planner said. “If they want forces sooner than 2010, there are no additional forces available. You’ll have to pull them from Iraq and put them in

Afghanistan

. I would not support making forces turn any faster than they are now.” The demand for ‘enablers’ is greater now than it was at the height of the surge in

Iraq

almost two years ago, he said.”

Even if we were able to get all the new units on the ground by October/November of next year, it takes time for them to get acclimated to conditions and adequately established on the ground to begin conducting effective counterinsurgency operations. Troops have to become acclimated to the altitude, they have to conduct thorough reconnaissance of the area of operations, and they have to develop an understanding of and a relationship with the local populations. All this takes time. Further, in the best of circumstances it would take four to six months for a

military unit to begin rolling back insurgent gains; longer if circumstances aren’t favorable. That would bring us to January or February of 2011 before it would be reasonable to expect our Armed Forces to begin showing success. And yet that will be four to six months after the just announced 12 month period has expired.

Enemy Actions and Strategy

All during the time between this hypothetical November 2009 public decision by the President to commit the troops and the completion of their deployment and preparation for combat, the insurgent enemies are certain to increase the pace of their operations with a sense of great urgency. They will be armed with the knowledge that Western publics have historically grown weary of inconclusive wars. Further, al-Qaeda and associated movements (AQAM) will almost certainly seek to conduct new, spectacular terrorist attacks against the nations they perceive are the most vulnerable to pressure from war weary publics.

Right now, according to numerous polls – all of which are read with great interest by terrorists who seek to harm Western interests – there are rising anti-war/anti-Afghanistan sentiments in the United States, Great Brittan, Germany, and

Italy

. If terrorist organizations know that there is a 12 to 18 month clock ticking for Western publics, the risk that they will seek to attack the interests of some or all of those countries increases. One has to look no further than the Spanish example of 2004 to see what would motivate terrorists to make such an attept.

Trust and Hope II

If the people of Afghanistan have no faith in their government today and no trust in the strength of Western military might (from their perspective, the most powerful military alliance on earth has proved incapable of defeating the Taliban after eight years of fighting), how will that faith and trust be prevented from further deterioration over the next 12 months, which will primarily be spent deploying and preparing for combat? Mr. Rahimi told me it is very unlikely the people will trust the

until or unless they see tangible success – something that would take considerably longer than 12 months.

“A ‘surge’ of forces designed to stay a couple of years won’t work in Afghanistan as it did in

Iraq

,” he said. “The people must know that we are committed to the significant amount of time necessary to turn things around, or they won't work with us and we won't succeed.” Most experts agree that a majority of insurgent forces are Afghan citizens. If those citizens do not come to believe that we will win, and thus “come to our side,” the insurgency will only grow in strength and effectiveness during this time of vulnerability. Acknowledging such a danger, General McChrystal wrote, “A failure to reverse the momentum of the insurgency will not only preclude success in Afghanistan, it will result in a loss of public and political support outside

Afghanistan

.”

The “Go Big” strategy carries significant risk, little of which has been publicly considered or debated. Due to the fact that logistical constraints caused by the enormous, simultaneous redeployment from Iraq would delay the introduction of meaningful numbers of combat forces in

Afghanistan

, the insurgent forces will have a strategic window of opportunity to continue making gains. If we are unable to convince the people of Afghanistan to support our efforts, it won’t matter how many combat troops we introduce – just as it didn’t matter how many troops

Britain

had 150 years ago or the Soviets did in the 1980s. It would indeed be a tragedy of historic proportions if the United States expended the enormous resources in time, money, and human life currently being contemplated, but proved unable to succeed and were later forced to withdraw in a Saigon-esque humiliating retreat.

Unfortunately, there is another major pillar necessary Go Big success that is unstable: the Government of Afghanistan.

Governmental Corruption

Much has been written about the 20 August Presidential Elections and the presence of widespread irregularities and ballot-box stuffing. As of this writing, the UN-backed Election Complaints Commission has yet to complete its investigation into the election and final results have yet to be certified. Much has been written about this issue and I will here only briefly address it. Rather, this paper will discuss what may be the greater, albeit less visible, concerns regarding Kabul’s ability to govern long term and its effect on the

strategy there.

In order to defeat the insurgency, the government of

Afghanistan

must become a credible, viable institution that is viewed as legitimate by its people. General McChrystal underscored the importance of that objective when he wrote: “Widespread corruption and abuse of power exacerbate the popular crisis of confidence in the government and reinforces a culture of impunity… The resulting public anger and alienation undermine ISAF’s ability to accomplish its mission.”

The last time there was effective governance in

Afghanistan

was the rule of King Zahir Shah who ruled from 1933 until deposed in a coup in 1973. During that 40 years the country was loosely ruled from Kabul, but the issues of day-to-day governance were primarily handled by the local tribes and regions. But given the geographical realities of the country and the near absence of a modern communications or transportation system, this arrangement worked very well. According to one Afghan citizen I spoke to who lived there during the reign of Zahir Shah, there was a strong sense of peace and security. “We didn’t even have to worry about locking our doors at night,” he told me. But after the King was deposed in the near-bloodless coup in 1973 that brought Daoud Khan to power things began to change.

The Afghan Communists that had helped Daoud come to power themselves overthrew the government in a very bloody coup in 1978. Less than two years later, however, the Communists were unable to placate their masters in Moscow and Soviet troops invaded on Christmas Day 1979. From that moment continuing through today,

Afghanistan

has been at war of one type or another and the people have become jaded at the parade of ineffectual governments that have been put in office by one power or another. Under the circumstances, it isn’t hard to understand why the current government enjoys such little support from its people. Without the active support of the people to oppose the Taliban and other insurgent groups, there is nothing the

United States

or any other external force can do to beat the insurgency.

One of the most crucial questions, then, is how do we eliminate this governmental corruption so that it can effectively govern, provide basic services for its people, and successfully defend them against insurgent violence. The answer: focused efforts, significant resources, and most critically, the passage of time – enough of which we may not have.

It is not enough to simply say the rulers are corrupt and “ought” not be that way. Due to the tribal nature of how

Afghanistan

has historically been governed, cutting deals, making temporary alliances, and sometimes the use of violence have been the norm. In order to bring about a change there’s got to be the creation of an entirely new cohort of leaders and rulers in

Afghanistan

The men who rule today have in most cases risen to power either through the application of violence or the application of money. For this dynamic to change, there must be an aggressive education effort (more on this later in the paper). But right now there are virtually no potential leaders in the education pipeline with which we could have near-term hope for meaningful change in how

Afghanistan

is governed.

It is hard to believe, but an astounding 72% of the adult population is illiterate, only 16% of high school-eligible children are in school, and less than two percent of college eligible students are in class. Until this deplorable state of affairs is addressed there is little hope that in the near future

Afghanistan

is going to be able to provide itself with adequately qualified men and women with which to govern. Regrettably, this dearth of educated elite also hamstrings

Afghanistan

in another important category: military leadership.

Growing the Afghan National Security Forces (ANSF): Who Will Lead – Who Will Pay?

Another of the major fundamentals upon which our eventual redeployment from

Afghanistan

is contingent, is the training, mentoring, and now growing, of the ANSF. In his report, McChrystal said the Afghan National Army (ANA) is scheduled to grow to 134,000 by the Fall of 2010 but recommended “a new target ceiling of 240,000” and that the Afghan National Police (ANP) “must be raised to 160,000” for a total force of 400,000. There are two significant problems with this proposal that must be addressed.

First, as noted above, the country is massively illiterate and presently no major effort has been started to redress that deficiency. Raising an army and police to those numbers requires not simply a bunch of men wearing uniforms, but capable leaders at multiple echelons. Even in the

United States

it takes more than 15 years to “grow” a battalion commander. It might be possible to field 400,000 men to fill the uniforms and physically create the huge number of companies, battalions, and brigades necessary to organize that many men. But without properly trained officers and non-commissioned officers to lead those men they will not be effective in combat. As a means of comparison, let us consider what happened when a similar effort was undertaken in

Iraq

Presently there are some 600,000 members of the various Iraqi Security Forces. We started building the Iraqi Army in 2004. Most remember the disastrous performance of the Iraqi Army in tough fights against the insurgency in Baghdad in 2005. Today, five years after the first units were formed, the Iraqi Army is finally able to minimally handle their internal security. But it is important to note that prior to our 2003 invasion,

Iraq

had an existing Army well over 500,000 strong for many years prior. Though we disbanded it in 2003, when it came time to rebuild it the next year, a significant number of the mid and senior level leaders already had years of experience in those roles. By contrast, we’re creating an Afghan Army where virtually none existed prior to our 2001 attack.

To now try and accelerate the creation of the ANSF by hundreds of thousands in order to help us with the fight is risky business. In order to undertake this mission we must do so with the tacit understanding that we will be signing up for well over a decade of mentoring, training and advising the ANSF; anything short of that will create the potential for disaster. A large number of ill-trained and poorly led soldiers have no chance against a much smaller, mobile, well led and highly experienced insurgent force. Consideration should be given to keeping the numbers smaller so that soldiers and leaders of the ANSF have the chance to gain the necessary level of experience and focused training from our limited number of advisors. Numbers of soldiers is only one reason to consider keeping the numbers smaller. The other: money.

By some estimates, increasing the ANSF to 400,000 would equal three to four times the country’s total GDP. Without question, then, if the President approves General McChrystal’s request to grow Afghan forces, someone is going to have to sign up to pay for those troops and commit to doing so for the duration they are at that level.

It would be irresponsible to increase the size of the military to that level, convincing hundreds of thousands of additional Afghan men to join, giving them field training and weapons, and then at some point suddenly cease funding, throwing tens of thousands out of work. The alternative is that some country or countries will have to commit for the foreseeable future to paying billions of dollars each year to maintain this force. What happens if, in a few years, no one wants to pay that money? What if the national economies of whatever countries agree to pay this bill come under domestic pressure to cease funding the ANSF because their own economies need the money? What will become of those 100s of thousands of military aged males who suddenly find themselves without a job in a nation that according to the CIA Factbook had an unemployment rate of 40% last year and is already the second poorest nation on earth? We’ve already seen what happened in

Iraq

when we disbanded their army in 2003: the birth of an insurgency we are still fighting six years later.

If the likelihood of fielding a poorly led, poorly manned unit is high, and the certainty that the country itself could never sustain that level of force, we must give serious consideration to choosing another way forward.

Go Deep: Setting the Conditions

Aggressive Intelligence-driven Operations

“Go Deep” is a comprehensive and pervasive strategy that incorporates critical components of the intelligence community, special operations forces, conventional military forces, military Advise and Assist units, governmental assistance and development, provides economic advisors, features educational development, and other elements of national power that are synthesized to form a unified, two-track objective: to 1) conduct an aggressive counterterrorist effort associated with 2) robust, focused support to indigenous governmental and military forces. Far from representing a “retreat” from

Afghanistan

, it “goes deep” into numerous elements of the region.

In its most basic form, Go Deep seeks to simultaneously build and strengthen the Afghan government, help develop its economy, place an increased emphasis on drastically increasing literacy rates through targeted education programs, and invest in the development of its armed forces while simultaneously conducting an aggressive regional counterterrorist campaign. This plan completely agrees with the majority of opinion-leaders that we cannot abandon

Afghanistan

. Where it differs, however, is in which levers of national power we should use to give us the best chance of achieving national policy objectives.

For reasons outlined throughout this paper, I believe that Go Big uses the wrong instruments and could unintentionally make our situation worse, while Go Deep uses a more nuanced approach – but one that is aggressive in its intent to attack and destroy America’s enemies while being equally aggressive in its support of America’s friends. To begin, I wish to examine a few of the arguments put forward by some of

America

’s most well respected opinion leaders on the subject.

In a recent Washington Post opinion piece Michael O’Hanlon ridiculed a counterterrorist approach in

Afghanistan

as being a “truly bad idea” which has already been “tried and discredited” and that the very idea should be refuted because it does “not deserve intellectual sanctuary.” It is curious that Dr. O’Hanlon, one of the more educated and highly respected writers in the country, would hold such a view on previous counterterrorist efforts, as an analysis of pre-9/11 efforts reveals that parts of our efforts were in fact remarkably successful. It was political decisions, in some key situations, that resulted in lost opportunities. As will be demonstrated, many of the previous failures of the intelligence community have already been remedied and if policy-makers enact some of the recommendations found later in this report, what was a weakness prior to September 11^th will in a Go Deep world become a source of strength.

What the 9/11 Commission Report Didn’t Say

One of the most common refutations today on the idea that anything short of applying massive combat power in an all-out counterinsurgency program can achieve success in

Afghanistan

, is the premise that a counterterrorist (CT) approach has already been unsuccessfully attempted. An editorial in the September 3^rd 2009 Washington Post opined that while critics of the Go Big plan oppose “what has yet to be tried” the alternatives have been tried and resulted in failure. “As for limiting U.S. intervention in Afghanistan to attacks by drones and Special Forces units,” the editors wrote, “that was the strategy of the 1990s, which, as chronicled by the Sept 11 commission, paved the way for al-Qaeda’s attacks on New York and Washington.” But did the 9/11 Commission really say that? An analysis of the report itself provides a rather different view.

Much has been made of the intelligence failures leading to that infamous day in 2001, but lost in the broad condemnation is that the intelligence community got some things very right, and had their advice been followed at a key moment, those tragic events might never have happened. But of greater significance to our discussion, the fundamentals of what went right during the period of time covered by the 9/11 Commission Report (hereafter referred to simply as “The 9/11 Report”), along with correcting what went wrong – provide compelling evidence that an effectively run counter terrorism program can indeed work today in Afghanistan.

“Jeff” and “Mike” with bin Laden in the Crosshairs

The Washington Post editorial referred to above reflects conventional understanding in today’s think-tank world that the 9/11 Report describes the failure of our intelligence and counterterrorism efforts of the late 90s and “proves” that a counterterrorism effort can’t work in Afghanistan today. Because the 9/11 Report did cite a number of intelligence failures, there is widespread belief that all intelligence operations of the time failed. That is not correct. In fact, despite the criticism leveled against the Central Intelligence Agency, there was one spectacular thing they got right. According to the report:

CIA’s intelligence assets were “near to providing real-time information about Bin Ladin’s activities and travels in

Afghanistan

.”… By the fall of 1997, the Bin Ladin unit had roughed out a plan for these Afghan tribals to capture Bin Ladin and hand him over for trial either in the

United States

or in an Arab country. In early 1998, the cabinet-level Principals Committee apparently gave the concept its blessing (P.110). CIA officers were able to map the entire site, identifying the houses that belong to Bin Ladin’s wives and the one where Bin Ladin himself was most likely to sleep. Working with the tribals, they drew up plans for the raid. They ran two complete rehearsals in the

United States

during the fall of 1997 (p.111-112)…

Nevertheless, after much debate in the Clinton Administration, a political decision was made not to go after bin Laden. Two CIA agents - “Mike” and “Jeff” (whose names were changed in the 9/11 Report to protect their true identities) - had been coordinating the effort to take bin Laden out. “On May 20

Director (of the CIA George) Tenet discussed the high risk of the operation with (National Security Advisor Sandy) Berger and his deputies, warning that people might be killed, including bin Laden. Success was to be defined as the exfiltration of Bin Laden out of

Afghanistan

. A meeting of principals was scheduled for May 29 to decide whether the operations should go ahead. On May 29 (1998), “Jeff” informed “Mike” that he had just met with Tenet, (James) Pavitt, and the chief of the Directorate’s Near Eastern Division. The decision was made not to go ahead with the operation… He had been told, he wrote, that cabinet-level officials thought the risk of civilian casualties – “collateral damage” – was too high. They were concerned about the tribals’ safety, and had worried that “the purpose and nature of the operation would be subjected to unavoidable misinterpretation and misrepresentation – and probably recriminations – in the event that Bin Ladin, despite our best intentions and efforts, did not survive (p.114).”

According to the 9/11 Report, it is uncertain who actually made the decision not to pull the trigger. Most evidence seems to suggest it was one of several high ranking officials in the Administration. Berger said the plan was never submitted to the White House for a decision. It is significant, however, that the intelligence apparatus was successful in its identification of the greatest terrorist threat to the

United States

and had developed and rehearsed a plan to take him out. Only a political decision prevented it from killing or capturing bin Laden three years prior to September 11^th.

Multiple Agencies, No Crosstalk

One of the other problems identified by the 9/11 Report was the lack of coordination between critical agencies. But the Report notes that individual agencies, nevertheless, did a commendable job. The report states:

In sum, in late 1997 and the spring of 1998, the lead

U.S.

agencies each pursued their own efforts against Bin Ladin. The CIA’s counterterrorist Center was developing a plan to capture and remove (Bin Laden) from

Afghanistan

. Parts of the Justice Department were moving toward indicting Bin Ladin, making possible a criminal trail in New York court. Meanwhile, the State Department was focused more on lessening Indo-Pakistani nuclear tensions, ending the Afghan civil war, and ameliorating the Taliban’s human rights abuses… (p.111)

Had the US Government at the time been properly focused these agencies would have worked together, compared notes, and likely would have provided the President a more comprehensive picture of the emerging danger to the United States than they did. Today that problem has been significantly reduced. Not only have we added an entire new department since then – Homeland Security – but we have taken action to coordinate the efforts and knowledge of all relevant departments and agencies through the auspices of the Office of the Director of National Intelligence (ODNI).

According to their web site, the mission of the ODNI is to “Integrate foreign, military, and domestic intelligence capabilities through policy, personnel and technology actions to provide decision advantage to policy makers, warfighters, homeland security officials and law enforcement personnel.” While the coordination issue between intelligence agencies has been largely resolved, the Report identified other impediments to effective action: politics.

Political Circumstances and Conditions

It would be easy to point a finger of blame at the Clinton Administration for failing to take Bin Laden out when they had the chance in 1998, but that is only easy with 20/20 hindsight. At the time of the events, conditions surrounding these decisions were convoluted and difficult, to say the least. Appreciation of those attendant conditions is important to understanding why the Clinton Administration didn’t make the decision to kill or capture bin Laden in 1998 – but more importantly for this discussion – it is also key to understanding why those same decisions wouldn’t be made in a future counterterrorism effort.

When “Jeff” and “Mike” recommended the strike against Bin Laden, the Clinton Administration had other significant international issues with which to contend: “After years of war in the Balkans, the

United States

had finally committed itself to significant military intervention in 1995-1996… Air strikes were threatened (against Serbia) in October 1998; a full-scale NATO bombing campaign against

Serbia

was launched in March 1999 (p.119).” In addition, the Clinton administration was facing the possibility of major combat operations against

Iraq

(P.118-119).”

Even after Bin Laden had attacked the two American Embassies in Nairobi and Dar es Salaam and the President had launched cruise missile strikes against him and his al Qaeda network, his Administration was attacked by many pundits who claimed his, “action was too aggressive” and would only further inflame Muslim anger towards the

United States

. Today, significantly fewer restraints exist. In the event that the

intelligence community gained information of an impending attack or located a known terrorist, corroborated through the DNI, the President would hesitation in ordering a strike.

As the 9/11 Report pointed out, the intelligence community – even in the pre-9/11 world – was fairly effective in identifying and tracking the world’s most dangerous terrorist. But due to competing international issues, lack of crosstalk, and a failure to appreciate the true danger posed by terrorist attacks, the US Government at the time did not take decisive action. Those problems and shortfalls have been reduced or eradicated in the post-9/11 world. The focus our nation has today, combined with the creation of the Homeland Security Department and the Office of the Director of National Intelligence and the cooperation of the Department of Defense makes a robust and effective counterterrorism effort a distinct possibility. But how should this effort be undertaken? Here is one idea.

What We Should (and are already organized to) Do: Going Deep

It isn’t enough to point out problems and throw rocks. I do not wish simply to say that “Go Big” would lead to a failure in

Afghanistan

for which we could perversely pay an increasing amount of blood and treasure for decreasing benefit. Rather, I seek to offer viable alternatives that are grounded on careful analysis, detailed study, and personal observation. I contend that evidence and historical precedent suggests that the following plan, would have a better chance of accomplishing American objectives than Go Big. Below I will lay out the general fundamentals of Go Deep, followed by a description of the risk involved for both options.

It is important to note that every option contains the potential for negative and unintended consequences. Though I wholeheartedly support Go Deep as the better alternative, I do not wish to convey that it will answer all the challenges without risk. It will not. There will still be no guarantees. What I do represent, however, is that when compared to the risk of the Go Big option, the risks of Go Deep are more manageable and portend a greater chance of success. One of benefits to the following recommendations is that most of the component parts already exist in our government in one form or another. Consequently we don’t have to “recreate the wheel” but make sure those existing capabilities and organizations are coordinated and synchronized to maximum benefit.

Jack Bauer

In August 2004, resulting from one of the key recommendations of the 9/11 Commission Report, the

United States

created an organization called the National Counterterrorist Center (NCTC). Answering to the President and the Director of National Intelligence (DNI), the NCTC was designed to correct some of the deficiencies previously cited of poor coordination between pertinent departments and agencies within the US Government. According to the organization’s web site, part of their core mission is to conduct “strategic operational planning for CT activities across the USG, integrating all instruments of national power, including diplomatic, financial, military, intelligence, homeland security, and law enforcement to ensure unity of effort.” While the mere existence of the NCTC represents an advancement from where we were on September 10, 2001, it falls short of where we need to be in today’s increasingly complex CT world heading into 2010.

The reality is that the NCTC is not adequately empowered to accomplish its assigned mission. When it was first publicly recommended by the 9/11 Commission in Congressional testimony in April 2003, it was designed primarily to synthesize information between and across various departments and agencies, but not with the power to coordinate action. According to the hearing records, Michael Wermuth of the RAND Corporation, testifying for the Commission, said

The panel recommended the creation of something that it called the "National Counterterrorism Center" an all source intelligence fusion analysis and dissemination center that would be comprised of pieces of the various agencies directly involved. The Central Intelligence Agency, the Department of Justice, other components of the intelligence community, to bring together all of the raw intelligence data, if you will, and to try to make some sense out of that in a comprehensive fashion. To include in that process, representatives of states and localities that would also help to inform through their resources, all the way down to the local beat cop on the street, and to develop the best possible intelligence products for dissemination to people who have need to know that information (

The genesis of this organization came in the still-smoldering aftermath of the 9/11 attacks – and critically – before terrorist organizations were present in Iraq (which did not come until early 2004 by most accounts) and during a time when

Afghanistan

was mostly docile. Today things are obviously very different. The NCTC must do more than simply conduct “fusion analysis,” it must also be empowered to coordinate action. It needs a Jack Bauer-like capability.

Jack Bauer’s “Counterterrorism Unit (CTU)” of the hit TV show “24” fictitiously included a robust intelligence capability but also coordinated operations to take action on that information. The NCTC should therefore be empowered to synthesize intelligence, but also to conceive, develop, and recommend action which will ultimately be approved/disapproved by one of its two bosses (the President or the DNI). The NCTC must work very closely with both the Departments of Homeland Security and Defense – and frequently with the DoD’s Special Forces – to detect, locate, track, and when a political decision is made, to destroy terrorist groups and/or individuals.

Today there is no coordinated effort to synthesize the information with the action necessary to track and neutralize both domestic and international terrorism. Within the Department of Defense alone there are various agencies and organizations with responsibility to conduct counterterrorist operations. Combatant Commands and field commands in both Iraq and

Afghanistan

have some responsibility – in addition to their war-fighting requirements. Also within DoD there is the Special Forces which conduct a number of different counterterrorism-related operations while the CIA and FBI conduct independent operations of their own. It isn’t enough to have a single organization – the NCTC – integrate information; there must also be a single entity also coordinate counterterrorist operations. Eight years after 9/11 and five years after the release of the 9/11 Report, we still have no unity of effort regarding action. This must change.

Going Deep in Afghanistan

Far too often the advocates of Go Big deride anything as a minimalist approach which “relies on drones and missile attacks from off shore.” In fact, Go Deep – while exploiting all the capabilities resident in both the striking and ISR (intelligence, security, and reconnaissance) features of unmanned aerial vehicles (UAV) – relies on a full range of capabilities resident in the United States Department of Defense and Central Command.

We will use covert agents, in conjunction and association with locals to develop (and expand) human intelligence resources that help to identify the Taliban and other insurgent leaders from the non-insurgent people – no easy task. We will indeed make extensive use of unmanned aerial vehicles for intelligence and reconnaissance as well as Predator missile attacks once the enemy is positively identified. We will continue to exploit all technical means of tracking them, to include cell phone intercepts, satellite imagery, and other tools of the intelligence world.

Going Deep means the NCTC-led effort will coordinate with other allied nations, the ANSF, the US Army, Air Force, Marines, and Navy when appropriate to relentlessly disrupt, attack, and destroy those who seek to oppose the United States and its vital national interests. This tactic has been much more effective against Taliban and other terrorists in Pakistan than has been generally understood and there is reason to believe that as we continue to refine the process and gain experience we will be more successful in the future, particularly in Afghanistan.

Counterintuitively, our efforts are currently complicated by the number of conventional troops we have on the ground, as in many cases our mere presence fuels the insurgency by playing directly into the insurgent propaganda efforts painting the

United States

as a “foreign occupation.” By removing the bulk of those forces, we deny the Taliban a key Information Operations (IO) success, we deny them the moral strength of fighting the occupation – because there will no longer be one (or at least a significantly reduced one). Thus far we have given far too little consideration of how our presence fuels the insurgency. Perhaps a little look back at our own history might prove instructive.

When we launched a rebellion against the British Crown in 1775 many of our leaders and people committed themselves to winning their freedom no matter what the cost. All 56 men who signed our Declaration of Independence did so with the understanding that they would be executed if captured by the British. Still one of our favorite quotes from the Revolutionary War is Patrick Henry’s famous “give me liberty or give me death!” Neither the threat of imprisonment, the loss of property, nor the risk to life dissuaded the bulk of patriotic Americans of that era. Few Americans realize, however, that after the British withdrew our country almost disintegrated because of significant internal disputes between the various states and political organizations.

Less well known among most in

America

today, was the experience of the British in the First Anglo-Afghan War of 1839-42. That, frankly speaking, is ancient history to most of us and of little interest. To the average Afhan citizen, according to Mr. Rahimi, it carries the same emotional baggage as events that happened yesterday.

After the British invaded

Afghanistan

in 1839, they struggled for three years to bring the country under control. After attempts to reach accommodation with multiple Afghan tribes failed to produce fruit, London ordered its troops to withdrawal. In January 1842 upwards of 15,000 British Soldiers and their families left Kabul heading for another British garrison in Jalalabad. Afghan mujahedeen began attacking them all along the way and less than 15 people ultimately survived. According to the 1986 publication of the US Army’s Afghanistan: A Country Study, “The destruction of the British garrison prompted brutal retaliation by the British against the Afghans and touched off yet another power struggle among potential rulers of

Afghanistan

.” This had consequences lasting decades and helps to explain how and why it still resonates so strongly in the people of

Afghanistan

today.

“Although the foreign invasion did give the Afghan tribes a temporary sense of unity they had lacked before,” the book continues, “the accompanying loss of life and property was followed by a bitterness and resentment of foreign influence that lasted well into the twentieth century and may have accounted for much of the backlash against the modernization attempts of later Afghan monarchs.” This feeling of bitterness and resentment was deepened during the Second Anglo-Afghan War several decades later. Another noteworthy repetition of the temporary nature of the unity of the Afghan fighters was to take place almost a hundred years later.

After the Soviets withdrew from

Afghanistan

in 1989 the years-long unity of the Mujahedeen evaporated and without their unifying hatred of the foreign invader they fought each other. We already know that the insurgency that exists today is unified in its hatred of the American “invaders” but is composed of a patch-work of groups with sometimes wildly divergent agendas. As with the British in the eighteenth century and the Soviets in the twentieth century, absent the unifying focus of attacking American ground forces there is every reason to believe that the insurgent enemy will again fragment into feuding bands, creating enormous opportunity to reach accommodation with numerous individual tribes. In that case the only unified organization existing in

Afghanistan

will be the GIRoA and the ANSF. Thus, the charge by those who strongly support Go Big that a “retreat” will result in the Taliban marching on Kabul are exaggerated and anything but certain. I contend that with removing the bulk of our ground forces combined with an aggressive accommodation campaign could actually weaken the enemy and give us a better chance of success.

ANSF and the Redeployment of US Conventional Forces

In the 5 October edition of Newsweek, an article entitled “The Taliban in Their Own Words” provided a remarkable view into the thinking of the Taliban going all the way back prior to 9/11. It is clearly evident throughout the five accounts provided by authors Sami Yousafzai and Ron Moreau that the presence of American forces in

Afghanistan

played a significant role in the revival of the Taliban in the years after the October 2001 attack.

All five of the Taliban members interviewed for the article gave dark accounts of gloom and despair following our October 2001 attack. It was noteworthy how helpless they felt and how deep into depression many of the fell. “I never thought the Taliban would collapse so quickly and cruelly under

U.S.

bombs. Everyone began trying to save themselves and their families,” said Maulvi Mohammad Haqqani. “When the bombing started, I was commanding some 400 fighters on the front lines near Mazar-e Sharif,” recalled Maulvi Abdul Rehman Akhundzada. “The bombs cut down our men like a reaper harvesting wheat. Bodies were dismembered. Dazed fighters were bleeding from the ears and nose from the bombs' concussions. We couldn't bury the dead. Our reinforcements died in their trenches.”

But then things began turning for the Taliban in 2004 because of an unexpected boon to them from the US war in

Iraq

. Haqqani explains that “Arab and Iraqi mujahedin began visiting us, transferring the latest IED technology and suicide-bomber tactics they had learned in the Iraqi resistance during combat with

U.S.

forces. The American invasion of

Iraq

was very positive for us. It distracted the United States from

Afghanistan

. Until 2004 or so, we were using traditional means of fighting like we used against the Soviets—AK-47s and RPGs. But then our resistance became more lethal, with new weapons and techniques: bigger and better IEDs for roadside bombings, and suicide attacks.” From this point it becomes clear that the Taliban started to gain momentum and motivation on the presence of American forces in

Afghanistan

“The Afghan Taliban were weak and disorganized. But slowly the situation began to change,” remembered Mullah Aga Mohammad. “American operations that harassed villagers, bombings that killed civilians, and Karzai's corrupt police and officials were alienating villagers and turning them in our favor. Soon we didn't have to hide so much on our raids. We came openly. When they saw us, villagers started preparing green tea and food for us. The tables were turning.” Demonstrating not only their motivation, these Taliban members also exposed the matter-of-fact willingness to use horrific tactics to accomplish their goals. Said Qari Younas:

Our real jihad was beginning by the start of 2005. Jalaluddin Haqqani's tribal fighters came actively back to our side because the Americans and the Pakistanis had arrested his brother and other relatives He appointed his son Sirajuddin to lead the resistance. That was a real turning point. Until then villagers in Paktia, Paktika, and Khost thought the Taliban was defeated and finished. They had started joining the militias formed by the Americans and local warlords, and were informing on us and working against us. But with the support of Haqqani's men we began capturing, judging, and beheading some of those Afghans who worked with the Americans and Karzai. Terrorized, their families and relatives left the villages and moved to the towns, even to Kabul. Our control was slowly being restored.

Haqqani ended his interview with Newsweek by explaining why he believed the Taliban would continue to succeed. His is a single voice, but evidence suggests his views are indicative of a general truth among his fellow fighters. “I admit Taliban commanders are being captured and killed, but that hasn't stopped us, and it won't,” he said. “Our jihad is more solid and deep than individual commanders and fighters—and we are not dependent on foreigners, on the ISI [

Pakistan

's intelligence agency], or Al Qaeda. Personally I think all this talk about Al Qaeda being strong is

U.S.

propaganda. As far as I know, Al Qaeda is weak, and they are few in numbers. Now that we control large amounts of territory, we should have a strict code of conduct for any foreigners working with us. We can no longer allow these camels to roam freely without bridles and control.”

Certainly the views of five Taliban fighters relating anecdotal evidence is insufficient upon which to build a military strategy, but it is significant in that it corroborates a number of other pieces of evidence which together paint a similar picture. I believe evidence suggests that had the bulk of American Forces redeployed from

Afghanistan

in late 2002/early 2003, the Taliban very possibly would never have returned as a coherent fighting force. The Taliban interviews include numerous accounts of fighters who initially were despondent after they were so quickly and utterly destroyed by US-led forces in 2001, with many succumbing to depression.

It was only after the passage of two or three years without a redeployment of American troops – along with the failure of US/NATO forces in providing an improved quality of life for the Afghan citizens and in the corruption of the Afghan government – that disgraced former Taliban fighters and leaders began to find reason to return to the struggle, and equally important, to find people willing to support them. As I demonstrated in an Armed Forces Journal article in April of this year, an examination of attack trends and troop levels over the next several years showed that as we sent more US fighting troops to

Afghanistan

, the Taliban was able to recruit more fighters and inflict more damage.

One of the biggest fears voiced by many adherents of the Go Big theory is that if the US Military withdraws, the Taliban will overcome the ANSF and take Kabul. But the Go Deep concept does not envision the complete withdrawal of American and NATO military forces. Go Deep recognizes that the training of the ANSF continues to be an important component of an eventual strategy resulting in the complete withdrawal of American military forces from

Afghanistan

. In the near term, however, the plan would be to set an 18 month time frame during which the bulk of American and NATO combat forces would be withdrawn from the country. Concurrent we would focus on training the ANSF to continue deepening and broadening their abilities. But I recommend that we limit the number of Afghan National Security Forces to the numbers approved by the September 10, 2008, Joint Coordination and Monitoring Board (JCMB): 134,000 members of the ANA and 80,000 members of the ANP.

Even these numbers will exceed the amount of money the Afghan Government can sustain by itself over time, but it will be closer than the 400,000 combined members of the ANSF currently being recommended by some, which will cost up to five times the country’s total GDP. However, by focusing international efforts on increasing the capability of the existing ANSF – and not in adding more than 200,000 additional forces from a resource pool of largely unqualified personnel – we will produce a more highly qualified security force that can successfully conduct internal security for its people and government.

Meanwhile, the

United States

and/or NATO would establish a base of Special Operation Forces which would continue working with the ANSF throughout the country to continue developing Human Intelligence sources by which kinetic operations against irreconcilable or unrepentant insurgent and/or terrorist forces would be identified, targeted, and killed or captured.

Reconciliation

One area that seems consistent among adherents both of Go Big and CT strategies is the expectation of negotiations or attempts at reconciliation with willing members of the insurgency who are willing to cease fighting and come to accommodation with the government. Go Deep wholeheartedly endorses this view. Not only is it generally a good idea, but an integral part of Afghan culture is the propensity of various groups, tribes and individuals to be pragmatic in their support of whom or what they believe will lead them to success. They are used to making deals to better themselves, and we should exploit this propensity for the good of all. Since this report agrees with the consensus of opinion on this topic, I will not here discuss it further.

The Pakistan Factor

When discussing the conduct of political and military operations in Afghanistan it is an unavoidable requirement to also consider the ramifications on neighboring

Pakistan

. As is well known to most of those who are reading this report, the border between Pakistan and Afghanistan exists for the most part only on a map (to get a sense of the genuine difficulty of even identifying the border, much less defending it, see below the satellite photo of the border and the view from the ground in Figures 7 and 8), and it is virtually impossible to prevent cross border foot traffic. Regardless of which course of action the President ultimately chooses, the United States will have to devise an effective policy for dealing with terrorist elements on both sides of the border, and in coordination with the governments of both Afghanistan and

Pakistan

According to numerous public reports, diplomatic and military cooperation between Washington and Islamabad have made notable advancements in the past couple of years. This type of cooperation must continue to develop under any scenario. Reports indicate that the joint US-Pakistan counterterrorist efforts in the most isolated and inhospitable parts of that country – where the majority of Taliban and al Qaeda fighters are currently believed to live – have begun to reap occasionally significant benefits, as one major terrorist leader after another has been killed or captured.

As described previously in this paper, while the majority of conventional US forces would be redeployed from

Afghanistan

, a meaningful number of Special Operations forces would remain, along with a robust UAV capability and a US Air Force presence. With the absence of American troop concentrations on the ground, the Taliban would be denied easily identifiable and lucrative targets against which to launch attacks. We must not lose sight of the fact that the insurgency typically gains nothing tactically from attacking American positions: their objective is to gain an “information operations” victory.

The attack against the

outpost at Wanat last year and at Kamdesh last week resulted in a total of 17 American Soldiers killed in action. Strictly from a tactical point of view, this number is comparatively small and gained the enemy little. But due to the enormous international media exposure to the attacks, especially in the

United States

, they benefited enormously. Imagine, now, if we removed those isolated troop locations, denying the Taliban the ability to conduct hit-and-run attacks in areas where it’s almost impossible to find them – and instead conduct a more aggressive Special Operations-centric campaign where we strike them using UAV and Air Force assets.

We know from numerous interviews with insurgent fighters that one of their greatest sources of discouragement is when bombs and missile suddenly rain from the sky killing them and destroying their camps. Their frustration is multiplied immeasurably when they don’t even know where the attack came from and are unable to return fire. We will continue to conduct these types of operations in cooperation with Islamabad inside Pakistani territory and expand their use throughout

Afghanistan

Beyond question

Pakistan

is a volatile country with many internal problems. Many reports suggest that their premier intelligence service – the ISI (Inter-Service Intelligence) – sometimes operates on its own agenda and outside the purview of government control. Further, beginning as far back as the Soviet/Afghanistan War, the ISI is reported to have actually helped support certain elements of the Afghan Taliban and might still do so. Regardless of what we want to do, however,

Pakistan

is a presently a sovereign state and there are limits to what we can do. Nevertheless we have a great stake in stability there and must therefore do all we can to help Islamabad maintain legitimacy and remain in control of its country. Go Deep envisions continuing, if not deepening, cooperation and assistance to

Pakistan

Economic Development

Beginning immediately and continuing beyond the redeployment of the conventional forces, other countries and international organizations would continue to work with the Afghan government to foster, facilitate, and fund projects designed to assist in the development of a sustainable economy in

Afghanistan

. The US State Department, United Nations, and other NGOs would coordinate efforts in this area to give the Afghan citizens a chance for success. Nations such as

Japan

have already shown an interest in increasing their involvement in economic development.

Education

As pointed out earlier in this report, until Afghanistan can develop a cohort of educated, qualified citizens, any sort of governmental reform, sustainable economic development, or scientific advancement will be impossible unless there is first educational reform. To date this has been one of the most crucial elements of rebuilding a viable

Afghanistan

and one of the least seriously addressed issues. This must change. Thus far improving the education has been considered and partially funded, but for success we must change the level of effort from moderate to ‘fully engaged.’ An extremely aggressive international plan must be put in place that funds and supports the type of education that the Afghan people support. It can’t be dictated from outside, it must be chosen from within.

This means that we must be willing to accept some things we might not otherwise like. I’m not suggesting we fund a Madrassa that teaches ‘Islam is wonderful and all infidels should be executed’ but neither can we expect to dictate that

Afghanistan

citizens adopt a classic Western education. This has to be a long term commitment. Evidence suggests that the better educated a country is, the better its chances of improving its quality of life and creating a peaceful future.

Government

As has been mentioned throughout this report, one of the biggest weaknesses in

Afghanistan

today is the lack of a credible government. It is riddled with corruption, filled with cronyism, and generally staffed by incompetent leaders. Whether the US Government eventually decides on a Go Big strategy or adopts the Go Deep recommended by this paper, the Afghan Government is the same weak link. In either case we have no choice but do our best to reduce corruption and facilitate viable leadership.

In recent days we have seen the limits of our best efforts towards rehabilitating the Afghan government with the disaster that was the 20 August presidential elections, most infamously represented by the public firing of former

Ambassador Peter Galbraith by his UN boss Kai Eide over allegations of massive voter fraud. This state of affairs must be turned around as the cost of government failure is too high.

Even if we have to roll back some of the sovereignty we previously gave to the Afghan Government, we must do so in order to establish credible, functioning institutions, without which the people of

Afghanistan

– and indeed even the governing ministers – will never develop a sense of trust in their rulers. We must make significant demands of reform and progress from governing officials and hold them accountable for accomplishing them. If they fail, there must be consequences. On this point Mr. Rahimi said:

We must absolutely make Afghans accountable for what they do and what they don’t. Our failure to do this is one of the greatest points of frustration Afghan citizens have with the West in general but the

in particular. Most people in

Afghanistan

know what’s going on, they know of the vast corruption at every level, particularly in the national government. They see the

United States

as being the world’s preeminent military power, with the ability to do whatever it wants, and yet it does nothing to force the Afghan politicians to do what is right. Therefore, they conclude, the Americans are complicit in the corruption and knowingly permit it. This must stop; the

must hold these people accountable.

Many will complain that we are moving backwards by placing demands on the government and then forcing them to comply if the fail, but to persist in granting no-strings-attached permission for Afghan officials to continuing with their corrupting ways we inadvertently become complicit in their failure. We must take the risk in requiring more accountability from their leaders. As time goes by and they demonstrate effectiveness, we will gladly return full sovereignty. If we do this we actually have the chance to regain a degree of trust and confidence from the people of

Afghanistan

. By making an aggressive commitment to demand accountability from Afghan leaders while training their security forces to adequately defend the Afghan people, we will have a chance to create the hope necessary upon which success in

Afghanistan

can be built.

Risk

Whether the President eventually chooses Go Big or Go Deep, he will have to accept risk. If it’s Go Big, he risks the dangers cited throughout this paper. But even if he were to agree with the recommendations of “Go Deep,” he accepts risk. In my view if things went bad for Go Big, the cost to the

United States

would be enormous and have far reaching consequences, likely for many years to come. If he chooses Go Deep and things don’t go well, however, the consequences, while real and significant, would cause less harm to the

United States

and give us a better chance of walking away with a few bruises – as opposed to the broken limb or a sucking chest wound I believe would result from a bad Go Big.

Go Big Risk

COIN v. CT

The first major risk from Going Big occurs if the President agrees to pursue a counterinsurgency vice a counterterrorism strategy. If he agrees with General McChrystal and sends in 40,000 additional troops, we will likely exacerbate the anti-American feelings as we will strongly fuel the historic fears of the people of yet another long term occupation; this would be very hard to refute given we’ve already been there eight years. But another significant risk to accrue is that analysis suggests that even the high number of 40,000 is about 60,000 too few to provide the minimum necessary force levels to successfully accomplish a counterinsurgency strategy. By inserting 40,000 we risk upsetting the local population upon whom we rely for support but providing too few to militarily defeat the Taliban.

ANSF

By promising to train 400,000 ANSF we risk trying to create too big of a force too quickly, putting soldiers into the field to protect the Afghan people who are not adequately trained, thus potentially causing more harm than help. Already there is growing anecdotal evidence that part of the increase of support for the Taliban has been anger at the unprofessionalism and abuse of power affecting many in the Afghan National Police. As previously pointed out, it takes seven to 10 years to ‘grow’ an effective company commander and upwards of 15 years for a battalion commander. By putting literally hundreds of new battalions and thousands of new companies into the field without a properly educated and experienced leadership, we increase the risk of fielding an incapable force that makes matters worse.

In addition to the issue of ability and leadership, however, is what happens to these 400,000 men when we eventually leave? It is unlikely that the international community is going to pay into perpetuity the billions of dollars each year necessary to keep these men under arms. What happens if there is a deepening of the international economic crisis and suddenly all that money dries up as individual Western nations find it impossible to continue funding the ANSF? There will be potentially hundreds of thousands of military aged males, flush with military training, suddenly out of a job in a country that presently has a staggering 40% unemployment. We saw what happened in 2003

Iraq

when hundreds of thousands of military aged males were suddenly thrown out of work: the birth of an insurgency.

Government

As has been addressed in several sections of this paper, the risk of failed government is real regardless of which strategy is chosen. I will point out, however, that if the Go Big strategy does not include the aggressive insistence on our part of holding the Afghan Government responsible for their actions and demands more effective governing from them, the risk of failure will be greater. The greatest failure we should fear, however, is not necessarily the fall of this government, but rather their continuing to operate as a corrupt organization that is not viewed as legitimate by their people. In that case, even if they stand we will lose.

American Control of Terrain: boon to Taliban?

One of the unquestioned assumptions is that if we send 40,000 more combat troops we will gain the upper hand against the insurgent forces. I contend it is not the iron-clad truth most believe. By sending in large numbers of “foreign” troops, we unwittingly play directly into the historic fears of the Afghan people and appear to validate the Taliban’s IO campaign. Evidence suggests many of the insurgent fighters gain their reason for living from our presence and from fighting us. They possess the ability to view themselves in heroic, patriotic ways in this existential struggle, much as did the Partisan movements in France, Yugoslavia, and White Russia during World War II. The underground fighters of World War II were willing to endure any hardship, pay any price, and sacrifice their lives to gain their freedom. We must deny the Taliban this huge psychological advantage.

Presently the number of bases and outposts in

Afghanistan

are fairly limited and well known to insurgents. They are able to plan and prepare for attacks at their leisure. Not surprisingly, the

units that endure the greatest number of attacks are those located in the mountains near the Afghan/Pakistan border. If we deny them the easy targets we presently do in the form of large troop concentrations, they will be thrown off balance. If we remove the large unit presence but instead become a shadowy, elusive, and hard to find enemy – who are able to find the insurgents where they live, never giving them sanctuary, and denying them the honor of fighting against the superpower, many of them will again suffer the depression and distress that was described in the October 5^th 2009 Newsweek article previously cited.

But if the United States increases its troop strength by upwards of nine additional combat brigades, it will provide an increase in the number of targets the Taliban can attack, it will increase their sense of obligation to answering their generation’s call to oust a major power, and it will strongly reinforce the sense of patriotism they gain from engaging in an existential struggle on their home soil.

Consider our own insurgent experience against the British Crown and the passion with which we were willing to sacrifice everything we had to defeat the colonial power and force them from our land. We can argue that the reasons for rebellion were different, and of course they were, but the fervor that Afghan people love their land and want the ‘foreign invader’ to leave is just as strong as was our desire to kick the Red Coats back to

England

. Just as we were willing to risk annihilation against the world’s greatest power of that age, so too are many in

Afghanistan

Troop Exhaustion

It must be frankly stated that to Go Big will almost certainly result in significant numbers of American combat troops remaining deployed in

Afghanistan

for another five to 10 years. The significance and difficulty of that fact cannot be casually dismissed: the continued deployment of

America

’s combat forces year after year with no end in sight will, at some point, create genuine damage.

In an October 8^th article in the London Times, two US Army Chaplains told reporters that the troops in their unit were becoming increasingly jaded. According to the article, “American soldiers serving in Afghanistan are depressed and deeply disillusioned, according to the chaplains of two

battalions that have spent nine months on the front line in the war against the Taleban. Many feel that they are risking their lives — and that colleagues have died — for a futile mission and an Afghan population that does nothing to help them, the chaplains told The Times in their makeshift chapel on this fortress-like base in a dusty, brown valley southwest of Kabul. ‘The many soldiers who come to see us have a sense of futility and anger about being here. They are really in a state of depression and despair and just want to get back to their families,’ said Captain Jeff Masengale, of the 10th Mountain Division’s 2-87 Infantry Battalion.”

I returned from combat duty in

Iraq

only months ago (leading an advise and assist team training Iraqi border forces) and I witnessed precisely this attitude among more Soldiers than most realize. After eight years of combat, the mental strain of deployment after deployment has taken a toll. Already our fighting troops know that this situation is going to persist for two more years at a minimum since we know we aren’t going to leave

Iraq

until the end of 2011. Moreover, combat troops are painfully aware that even absent a decision to further increase troops in

Afghanistan

there is no end in sight for that mission. If we were to increase the number of our troops by more than 10 brigades (as General McChrystal recommends), the ‘deployment after deployment’ scenario will effectively become a permanent feature of being in the military for the foreseeable future, the consequences of which are difficult to predict.

There is no historical precedent with which to compare our current situation. As has been noted in several articles on the subject, this war in

Afghanistan

will soon be the longest running in American history. But even the current occupant of the top spot –

Vietnam

– was fought with a different Army. At that time the size of the US Army fluctuated between one million and over two million from which deploying Soldiers could be pulled, and of course, there was a draft that constantly replenished the pool of those eligible to be sent to combat zones. Today’s force, by contrast, is substantially smaller and filled with volunteers.

Already, troops in the combat divisions and brigades are deploying once every 12 to 18 months; this pace simply cannot be maintained indefinitely. It is a testament to the patriotism and loyalty to country possessed by the men and women of our Armed Forces that even after eight years of fighting we have seen neither a precipitous drop in retention nor an inability to meet recruiting quotas. But how much longer will that remain the case?

If we Go Big, it must be done with the understanding that we are taking a risk that an unknown number of additional years of wear and tear on the force will not cause an exodus of troops and a serious diminution of its ability to defend the nation. I first joined the Army as a Private First Class almost 25 years ago, and the level of frustration and anxiety I see in the Force today far exceeds what I saw even as recently as my 2005 deployment to Afghanistan. If, when the end appears in sight for deployments to Iraq we commit to maintaining over 100,000 in

Afghanistan

for years into the future, we subject our Armed Force to an unknown but significant risk. No one can predict when our Force will reach the “deployment exhaustion” tipping point, but we play a dangerous game if we assume one will never occur.

Looking for the Lost Quarter: Increased Global Freedom of Maneuver for Terrorists

Finally, we must consider the opportunity costs Go Big will impose on our country. We are all familiar with the old story of the man looking for the quarter he lost under a lamp post because the light was good there – despite the fact he dropped it elsewhere. With the enormous amount of national power we are focusing on Iraq and

Afghanistan

, we limit considerably our ability to hunt for terrorist organizations and personnel elsewhere. That is one of the least-considered but potentially greatest strategic mistakes we are making today.

While we intensely focus on Iraq and Afghanistan, spending tens of billions of dollars each month, have hundreds of thousands of military and civilian personnel physically deployed there, and devote the efforts of thousands of members of the intelligence community in the United States to finding and fighting insurgent and terrorist organizations and fighters, terrorists have scattered to locations all over the globe, where they are far less disturbed – or even unconstrained – by our counter-terrorist efforts.

We know, for example, that presently terrorist groups and individuals already operate in Kazakhstan, Uzbekistan, Kyrgyzstan, Tajikistan, Turkmenistan, Afghanistan, Pakistan, parts of India, Azerbaijan, Georgia, Chechnya, Dagestan, Ingushetia, Sudan, Yemen, Somalia, Oman, Horn of Africa, UAE, Algeria, Mali, Niger,

Mauritania

, and certainly many others. With the enormous resources we are devoting to the fights in Iraq and

Afghanistan

, we have far too few assets, personnel, and money remaining to properly search the rest of the globe. It is beyond doubt that those terrorist organizations that genuinely wish to harm the

United States

and its allies will go to parts of the world to plan and train for their attacks that have limited access, are generally inhospitable, and have little to no governance.

Giving just a glimpse of how pervasive terrorist links are, the 9/11 Report included a passage explaining how bin Laden’s network had operational nodes throughout the globe. Note how pervasive and extensive this network was – but then consider also that this is only one terrorist group:

Al Qaeda continued meanwhile to collaborate closely with many Middle Eastern groups – in Egypt, Algeria, Yemen, Lebanon, Morocco, Tunisia, Somalia, and elsewhere – with which it had been linked when Bin Laden was in

Sudan

. It also reinforced its London base and its other offices around Europe, the Balkans, and the Caucasus. Bin Ladin bolstered his links to extremists in South and Southeast Asia, including the Malaysian-Indonesian JI and several Pakistani groups engaged in the Kashmir conflict. The February 1998 fatwa thus seems to have been a kind of public launch of a renewed and stronger al Qaeda, after a year and a half of work. Having rebuilt his fund-raising net6work, Bin Ladin had again become the rich man of the jihad movement. He had maintained or restored many of his links with terrorists elsewhere in the world (p. 67).

One of the strongest arguments made by many supporters of Go Big is that we can’t “quit”

Afghanistan

or the risk to our country of new terrorist attacks will increase. I argue that to the contrary, we currently accept considerable risk in that we are myopically focused on these two areas at the expense of the rest of the world, and if we increase our involvement in Afghanistan we make it more likely that terrorist organizations will take advantage of the opportunity to plan and train elsewhere for the next big attack. It is common sense, really: if a bad guy knows the huge numbers of cops are looking for bad guys in areas A and B, they’ll go to X, Y, and Z – where there is little to no police presence – to plan their evil deeds far from anyone’s view.

Go Deep Risk

Taliban Control of Terrain: boon to al Qaeda?

It is certain that if the recommendation to redeploy the bulk of American troops is accepted that Taliban fighters will occupy parts of

Afghanistan

. One of the greatest charges against Go Deep is that the Taliban will give safe haven to their ideological brothers Al Qaeda where they own the ground. But is that a safe assumption? I contend it is not.

One thing the 9/11 Commission Report unambiguously states is that prior to our October 2001 attack into

Afghanistan

the Taliban gave considerable aid and comfort to al Qaeda:

The Taliban seemed to open the doors to all who wanted to come to

Afghanistan

to train in the camps. The alliance with the Taliban provided al Qaeda a sanctuary in which to train and indoctrinate fighters and terrorists, import weapons, forge ties with other jihad groups and leaders, and plot and staff terrorist schemes… (bin Laden) also provided support to and benefitted from the broad infrastructure of such facilities in

Afghanistan

made available to the global network of Islamist movements. U.S. intelligence estimates put the total number of fighters who underwent instruction in Bin Ladin-supported camps in

Afghanistan

from 1996 through 9/11 at 10,000 to 20,000 (p.66-67).

Would the Taliban, then, open those same doors in areas they may control in the future? That outcome is anything but certain. In the October 5^th Newsweek article previously cited it is instructive how the Afghan Taliban members now refer to Arab al Qaeda. An insurgent named Maulvi Mohammad Haqqani said of al Qaeda: “We gave those camels [a derogatory Afghan term for Arabs] free run of our country, and they brought us face to face with disaster.” While the Taliban certainly have no love for the

United States

, neither do they feel any sense of obligation to paying for an al-Qaeda launching pad with their blood. They described in excruciating detail the horror they experienced and the slaughter they suffered from American attacks in October 2001 when they ruled the country.

The Taliban knows well that dispersion and being ghost-like are the only things keeping them alive today. From painful experience they know that if they come out into the open for any length of time in numbers, they become vulnerable to precision attack. In the event they were ever to return to power, they would be fully aware that they would again become easy targets to precision attacks by unseen American planes and missile fire. Ironically, we gain a meaningful amount of leverage over the Taliban movement the day they exist in large numbers in known locations (i.e. government buildings). What possible motivation, then, would the Taliban have in providing al Qaeda safe haven if they know such an act – which we would communicate in the clearest of terms – would result in helpless slaughter of the type suffered in October 2001? While conventional American military might is vulnerable to insurgent warfare, it is devastating to any force that can be identified on the ground.

Defeat the Taliban?

One of the first questions a reasonable person would ask when considering my recommendation to redeploy the bulk of our conventional forces in 18 months is how will we be able to defeat the Taliban? Short answer: we won’t. Not completely, at least.

Certainly if we could determine the outcome of things simply by making declarative statements we would require that we deal both al Qaeda and the Taliban a decisive defeat, handing the Afghan government the keys to a secure and docile country on our way to the airport for the trip home. Unfortunately, reality is a messy thing. Because of all the historical baggage of the region and the cultural factors that are irrevocably attached to both insurgent fighters and Afghan citizens, the presence of the hundreds of thousands of American and Western troops makes it virtually impossible to “defeat” the insurgents because historically speaking, the presence of so many foreign troops over such a long period of time creates the very insurgents from which we are trying to defend the population.

What we must strive to do, then, is to train and mentor the Afghan Police and Army to become a capable force that respects the rule of law and assist them in protecting their civil population. Their mere presence, as contrasted with ours, does not itself create more insurgents. It is crucial, nevertheless, that the policemen and soldiers genuinely respect the population. Evidence suggests that corrupt officials and ANSF personnel have, in too many cases, turned some Afghan people against the government because of the unjust and corrupt way they have dealt with the population.

We have to work very hard to eliminate this behavior because, no matter which strategy one chooses, it will ultimately be the ANSF that either makes or breaks peace in

Afghanistan

. If their security forces follow the rule of law and protect the population, then the number of Taliban fighters will dwindle to manageable numbers as those presently filling their ranks will no longer be motivated to fight but will return to their centuries-old traditions of taking care of their families; they desire to live in peace, raising families like many in the West.

ANSF

In recommending the ANSF keep its forces at the presently agreed number of 134,000 for the Army and 80,000 for the Police, Go Deep accepts risk that such force levels will be sufficient to defend the government and protect the people. This risk is minimized by the presence of American intelligence units, Special Forces, Air Forces, and robust and focused Advise and Assist combat units. There is also the assumption that with the removal of most US combat units, the insurgency will lose some of its steam as it loses some significant IO leverage in that it will be hard to argue that

America

is an occupying power when our physical presence there dwindles. Nevertheless, even these force enablers and mitigating factors do not guarantee that the Afghan National Security Forces will prevail.

Government

In addition to the list of risks previously cited that apply to the GIRoA regardless of which strategy the President chooses, Go Deep entails a unique risk of its own. If the

United States

withdraws most of its combat troops then the Afghan Government will undoubtedly feel less secure. As specified, however, Go Deep does not envision a complete withdrawal for the foreseeable future as some degree of capable combat forces will remain in Kabul to ensure the safety of American personnel (Air Force, Special Forces, State Department personnel, other civilians, etc). The GIRoA will also, of course, have its own Army and Police Force. Thus the danger to the government physically located in Kabul will be mitigated but not eliminated.

Conclusion

One of the greatest features of our country is the limitless ability of its people to imagine the impossible and then turn it into reality. Creativity and imagination borne of intelligence, knowledge, and passion can lead us to extraordinary accomplishments, but if the work is not done with a healthy dose of realism and humility could lead the visionary to catastrophe. There is no doubt that in a world without constraints, the United States government would desire to defeat the Taliban, fully eradicate the al Qaeda network, establish a functioning democratic government, introduce a sustainable economy, provide for women’s rights, significantly reduce illiteracy, and leave Afghanistan in the near future as a viable state, able and willing to live with its neighbors in peace. Regrettably, we live in a world most assiduously filled with constraints.

We must at all costs avoid the danger of “believing our own press” as it were, and fall victim to the belief that we can accomplish in Afghanistan whatever we want simply by declaring our intentions. Every problem cannot be solved with brute force. With a sober mind we must instead thoroughly analyze all relevant aspects of the mission in Afghanistan, recognize the limits of our power, and use our extraordinary imaginative powers of our people to find unique and viable solutions. After such an analysis, it is my opinion that Go Big contains far too many risks, is based on some dubious assumptions, and could actually result in a worsening of the situation. Going Deep, however, acknowledges that some circumstances favor the enemy, seeks to mitigate those disadvantages, identifies our advantages and seeks to exploit them to our maximum advantage to recommend a course of action that, while containing manageable risk, gives us the most realistic chance of accomplishing the President’s stated objectives.

Epilogue: Surging Misconceptions

Though this report has primarily focused on Afghanistan, I would like to conclude with a brief word about

Iraq

. Many well known defense and international affairs experts have filled the airwaves and opinion pages in an effort to weigh in on this debate. There is one argument being used by advocates of Go Big making the rounds right now which seems to have near universal acceptance: that the surge in Iraq was a meaningful success and ought to serve as a model in certain regards for our current efforts in Afghanistan. But this argument makes a number of assumptions about the Iraqi surge which are inaccurate. If these erroneous assumptions are not exposed and corrected they could lead political leaders to reach flawed decisions with potentially serious repercussions in Afghanistan.

The reigning conventional belief in Washington is that the successful 2007 surge in Iraq was primarily the result of General David Petraeus imposing his will on the enemy, changing on-the-ground tactics with the publication of a new counterinsurgency manual (which he wrote), pushing the troops off the secure bases and out into the cities and villages to protect the people, and above all, empowered by the deployment of 20,000 ‘surge’ troops. There is no doubt that all of those factors played a meaningful role in the tactical success of the surge. There is likewise no doubt, however, that those factors did not alone account for the success and much evidence suggests that they were not even the primary reasons.

Had it not been for the presence of three factors external to the United States, the introduction of those surge troops and the changing battle tactics would have had little to no real effect on the insurgency. These factors were 1) when a tipping point was reached by the people of Iraq when they turned against al Qaeda and the foreign fighters for conducting a campaign of terror not only against the Western coalition, but also the civilian population; 2) the resulting formation of what became known in the West as the “Awakening” movements; and 3) the unilateral cease-fire announced by firebrand insurgent leader Muqtada al Sadr and his Jaysh al-Mahdi (JAM) fighters.

Apparently little known by most outside of the US military, the Awakening movement started originally in Anbar province, not by General Petraeus, but by Arab tribal leader Sheik Abdul Sattar Buzaigh al-Rishawi. The Shiek had become so enraged when al Qaeda, infamously led at the time by Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, murdered his father and killed or kidnapped his three brothers that he approached American forces and offered to form an armed wing to kill al Qaeda fighters in 2005. His efforts became so successful that Marine and Army leaders began expanding the program to other areas in 2006, more than a year before General Petraeus took command of

Iraq

. To his credit, Petraeus recognized the utility of the program and wisely sought to expand it by paying, by some estimates, 100,000 former Sunni insurgent fighters to protect their neighborhoods – and not fight against US Forces. He called the program “Sons of Iraq”.

But it is crucial to understand that the Awakening Movement and Sons of Iraq were only possible because the Sunni population in

Iraq

had passed a tipping point in regards to their willingness to support al Qaeda and other foreign fighters. Remember that the insurgency effectively started in the fall of 2003. From that point until the formation of Shiek Abdul Sattar’s

Fighters, most of the Iraqi population – including most of those who would later join the various anti-al Qaeda movements – fought against the American coalition. The Iraqi population didn’t like the foreign fighters even in the beginning, but initially their dislike of the invading US Army trumped their disdain for al Qaeda. Had those foreign fighters not alienated the Iraqi population it is very unlikely the Awakening movement would ever have started.

This significance of that fact cannot be overstated. Over the next year and a half, the Awakening Movement and Sons of Iraq (SOI) programs would take an estimated 100,000 fighters off the street – men who had been fighting against the

. Absent the SOI program, those fighters would have continued resisting Coalition efforts.

Additionally, the cease-fire unilaterally announced by al-Sadr’s Iranian-backed, Shiia-dominated JAM removed an enormous source of violence from the heart of Baghdad. It is estimated that JAM fighters numbered in the tens of thousands at the time of the ceasefire. This ceasefire was not initiated by the

United States

but announced unilaterally by al-Sadr. There were many reasons for this declaration – his desire to gain power through political means and the fact that he lost hundreds (if not thousands) of men in battle against US Forces – but the fact that it occurred at the same time the SOI program removed so many Sunni fighters it combined, in a remarkably short period of time, to remove upwards of 120,000 insurgent fighters from the COIN battlefield.

Moreover, particularly in any discussion of a similar ‘surge’ effort in Afghanistan, it is important to note that the vast majority of the 20,000 surge forces in Iraq were sent to the single city of Baghdad, not spread around the country. At that time the greatest concentration of enemy fighters was without doubt centered in the capitol. Had the SOI not taken so many fighters off the streets in Anbar Province and other Sunni-dominated areas, 20,000 would have been far too few to stem the insurgent tide.

These facts are critical when considering what impact the imposition of an additional 40,000 surge troops might have today in

Afghanistan

. First, while numerous reports confirm that few Afghan citizens have any love for the Taliban, there is little to suggest that they are widely despised and none to suggest the population as a whole has reached a tipping point whereby they are ready to support the coalition against the Taliban. Instead, as Mr. Rahimi emphatically told me, with the current lack of faith in and hope in either the GIRoA or the United States, the majority of its people are riding the fence and unwilling to support NATO efforts.

Second, due to the history and geography of Afghanistan, there is little prospect that an “SOI” program in Afghanistan can be formed to replicate the success enjoyed in

Iraq

. Unlike in Anbar where a single leader or tribesmen could be found to rally large segments of the population to his cause,

Afghanistan

is far more fragmented and isolated. Many former combat leaders have told me that they could control the valley where they were garrisoned, while the valleys on either side could be dominated by the Taliban. In order to see success on the range of getting 100,000 al Qaeda/Taliban insurgents out of the fight, we would have to convince not a handful of tribal leaders, but hundreds. There is very little reason to believe we’ll see that level of success anytime soon.

Finally, and perhaps most importantly, in Iraq the heart and soul of the insurgency was unquestionably centered in Baghdad in 2007. Thus, sending 20,000 troops there provided COIN operations with real teeth and had a reasonable chance of making a positive influence on operations. No such concentration exists in

Afghanistan

today. As can be seen from the below map, insurgent groups are spread throughout the country, imbedded in mountains, valleys, and within thousands of otherwise peaceful-looking villages. In the context of this map and the photos previously shown demonstrating the remarkably complex geography of Afghanistan, one comes to understand why Marine Colonel Alford insisted that even 100,000 additional troops would represent a bare minimum necessary to train the ANSF and defeat the insurgency.

In Afghanistan today, even the most optimistic supporter of Go Big would not suggest that the people have passed any tipping point leading to a willingness to oppose the Taliban and offer even tepid support for the coalition. There is presently no successful “SOI”-type operation that would remove large numbers of enemy fighters from the streets, valleys and mountains. No large segment of the insurgency has yet to announce a ceasefire with allied forces. The insurgency in

Afghanistan

today is spread over hundreds of thousands of square miles of inhospitable terrain and even 40,000 additional fighters would likely be insufficient to militarily stem the tide. In short, conditions on the ground in Afghanistan of late 2009 are nothing like that of Iraq of early 2007 and there is little reason to believe the tactical success of the Iraq surge can be repeated today in

Afghanistan

Lieutenant-Colonel Daniel L. Davis earned his Master’s Degree in International Relations from Troy University and over the past several years has been a frequent contributor to Armed Forces Journal, the Washington Times, Defense News, and other publications. He is a Cavalry Officer who fought in Desert Storm in 1991, served in Afghanistan in 2005, and in Iraq in 2008, 2009. The opinions expressed here are entirely his own and in no way represent the views of the Defense Intelligence Agency nor the Department of Defense.

The Afghanistan muddle

2009-10-15T22:04:00.000+05:30

MOST minds are now concentrated on the implications and consequences of the Afghanistan war. It is in its eighth year and no end seems to be in sight. American public opinion is now veering away from supporting the war, and a majority seems to prefer its coming to an end no matter how. Obama, whose popularity is at stake, is being assailed by the Republican right for being soft. The Pentagon is also pressing for extending the war's scope by augmenting American troops by 40,000 and keeping Nato there.

The American administration is in the process of devising a new strategy because the Af-Pak strategy of March last does not seem to have produced encouraging results. Indeed, the western generals in Afghanistan are signaling that a victory is no longer possible. The best thing to do is to augment the American force by another 40,000 and keep pressure on Nato to also stay the course. With better situation on the ground, it will be possible to end the war by finding an honourable exit strategy.

The new strategy that America may adopt might itself be a major factor in the war's continuance. Thus, it is too early to say anything about it. American public opinion is now a cognisable factor in addition to the Pentagon's recommendations. Britain has already ended its participation. Other Nato allies are also disheartened. This is the background against which, on the battlefields of Afghanistan, the awesome western military machine has not gained a decisive advantage in virtually eight years, and most thoughtful people are recommending an exit route. The Taliban are resurgent and they have fought the western military to a stalemate. (There is no question of Taliban defeating the western military machine as a whole.)

European and American forces have been unable to subdue Afghanistan as a whole even by imposing a government of their choice. The outside world is also keenly interested in the outcome of the Afghanistan war. China, for instance, has come out with a forthright statement: US should wind up its war in Afghanistan and get its forces out as quickly as possible. There is no talk of victory or any conditions. The Chinese saying something so clearly is a major development, and they may not be alone in demanding America's withdrawal.

This is also the time when Shanghai Cooperation Organisation (SCO) is going to meet. It reflects the interests of many Asian powers, including that of Russia. No one wants the war to continue. The SCO meeting is almost certain to echo the Chinese view. No one seems to have the stomach for a continuing war like this any more. It is possible to conclude that SCO will also reflect the Chinese demand on the West to stop fighting and get itself out.

Their security is threatened by the designs of the proponents of a new Islam that is more militant, more extreme, more violence prone and is, on the whole, oriented to re-creating conditions that obtained in Saudi Arabia 1500 years ago. Women's and human rights are anathema to them. But is the fearsome version based on Islam's own principles? They are taking some of the Islamic teachings to an unnecessary extreme. No one had in the past gone so far to recast Islam like this. China's Xinjiang is threatened by this distorted Islam. Other Muslims states in Central Asia are also threatened by it, as is Russia.

Many may ask that if the west withdraws from an inconclusive war at this stage, what will happen in Afghanistan. That strategic piece of land cannot be left to its own civil wars. Isn't there any international effort to ensure that some order stays after a new government comes into being? Can that happen in the absence of foreign "occupation troops?"

The Chinese appear to think that there should be an international conference in which representatives of all the Afghan factions should attend. The world would recommend a consensus kind of government, which would include the Taliban, warlords, pro-Pakistanis and anti-Pakistanis and a smattering of Afghan intelligentsia. They have to agree on basic terms. The difficulty arises because of the claims of pro-Pakistan and anti-Pakistan Taliban.

They talk in terms of Islam demanding, that its Shariah should be enforced and a typical Islamic State should be formed. The typical Islamic State today would be an approximate copy of the Taliban rule in Afghanistan from 1996 to 2001. This appeals to many Afghans, particularly Pushtoons. The Taliban also happen to subscribe to Pushtoonwali, which gives them legitimacy as Afghan nationalists who are fighting against an occupation army, and it becomes a national liberation struggle insofar as the Pushtoons are concerned.

But there are variants. Militant Islam is the only Islam they claim. Islam does not mean anything else, they hold. Those who differ fromthe Taliban are in grave error. It is this Militant Islam which is a threat to the stability and security of all the Central Asian states and China's Xinjiang province. Russia is threatened because of its numerous Muslim minorities, particularly in Chechnya. But all Muslim states are prone to be attracted to the appeal of the Taliban.

It is a piquant situation, no doubt. The UN has also called for an international conference on Afghanistan sometime this year. But the UN conference requires agreement among the Big Five, and there is some doubt that the Taliban and others in the Afghan imbroglio will listen to the demands for tolerant plurality that has obtained even among the Pushtoons. More specifically listen to Russia, China and other Central Asian states.

Afghanistan is the gateway to Central Asia. All Central Asian states are liable to be threatened by the Taliban Islam. There are other important neighbours of Afghanistan: Pakistan and Iran. India is nearby and looms fairly large in Afghanistan, especially after its vastly improved relations with the Americans. The Taliban need to listen to the outside world. But will they? This is not certain.

Pakistan has particular relevance to Afghanistan. First, because there is an overlap of Pushtoon population between Afghanistan and Pakistan. The Pushtoons in Pakistan are concentrated along the uncertain Durand Line that never was enforced in the sense the international frontiers are. The Pushtoons were allowed throughout the last 250 years or so to go across and come back without any documentation. This is much too porous a frontier.

There also used to be a dispute between Afghanistan and Pakistan because Pakistan insisted that the Durand Line be recognised as the final border and the Afghans said that Pushtoon areas in Pakistan were basically part of Afghanistan and Pakistan should have nothing to do in the areas west of river Indus. Pakistanis, including many Pushtoons, laugh at the idea.

Pakistan has had influence in Afghanistan throughout the last 30 years or more. Pakistan played a part in all the wars that have taken place in Afghanistan in recent years: one known as jihad in the 1980s and the other were the many sided civil wars in the 1990s and now in the open-ended War against Terror by America. The question is, how are the competing interests of various warlords, Afghan Taliban, Pakistani Taliban and Pakistan and India going to be accommodated for a solution? The solution has to satisfy the minimal interests of the west but is nowhere on the horizon.

Without some kind of an end result in sight, the fighting forces cannot be separated. All three groups in Afghanistan -- warlords (district commanders), Taliban and so-called central authority -- have to agree to something. Afghanistan has to be reinvented. It will take much ingenuity and international networking by various governments before any formula can be evolved.

M.B. Naqvi is a leading Pakistani columnist.

A Regional Summit on the War in Afghanistan?

2009-10-15T21:58:00.000+05:30

As President Obama and his advisors debate a strategic change in the war in Afghanistan, it has become increasingly clear that this war has become a regional conflict that stretches into Pakistan, and even India and beyond. While the original rationale for the war was the elimination of a sanctuary for Al Qaeda, the conflict has now broadened into threats presented by a Taliban-controlled Afghanistan and, even more ominously, by a nuclear-armed and destabilized Pakistan.

While the recommendation by General Stanley McChrystal to bolster the counterinsurgency effort represents an advance in tactical military thinking, it ignores some of the fundamental political realities of the conflict. A lengthy and focused counterinsurgency effort might eventually produce results, but its chances of success are greatly diminished by the political climate in Afghanistan. Given the difficult choice between a Taliban that offers security and justice in countryside - albeit in the most harsh and backward forms - and a central government that is distant and corrupt, most Afghans outside of Kabul are forced to choose the Taliban. No foreign counterinsurgency effort can combat that kind of logic, especially when classic counterinsurgency tactics would call for more than 600,000 troops to do the job, a level that few Americans would support.

One of the early mistakes, among many, of the Bush administration in its invasion of Iraq was the failure to develop an international and regional consensus for action. The rationale was that most nations would not support the invasion, and it was a waste of time to focus on international cooperation. Thanks in large part to the insistence of Colin Powell, the Bush administration did take its case to the United Nations, where Powell presented trumped-up intelligence to sell the UN on the Bush plan. However, history has shown that no sincere effort was ever made to include our allies or the nations in the region in the decision to go to war.

As the years have gone by - Afghanistan is now the longest war in American history - it has become clear that the stakes are no longer the continued existence of Al Qaeda or even the stability of Afghanistan, but rather the dangers presented by a crumbling, nuclear-armed Pakistani state. To complicate matters further, the Pakistanis themselves have not - until very recently - perceived Afghanistan and the Taliban as a regional threat. In fact, elements of the Pakistani government, including the ISI intelligence service, have continued to provide strategic support to the Taliban insurgency.

Before the United States implements a unilateral change in military and political strategy in Afghanistan, wouldn't it be a good idea to seek regional cooperation for the strategy? This means not only Afghanistan and Pakistan, but also India, China and Russia. Certainly there are dangers in a regional summit, and it clearly should not be a public summit. But the idea that the United States can go it alone yet again without some kind of regional support is highly doubtful. Can't the Obama administration - with all its powerful persuasive tools - hold the feet of the regional players to the fire and mold a common strategy? Perhaps not, but without some consensus, the chances of failure in our longest war are even greater

Indian Hegemony?

2009-10-15T14:41:00.000+05:30

Nobody can deny that today's India is a power. In recent years, Indians have become more narrow-minded and intolerable of outside criticism as nationalism sentiment rises, with some of them even turning to hegemony. It can be proved by India's recent provocation on border issues with China.

Given the country's history, hegemony is a hundred-percent result of British colonialism. Dating back to the era of British India, the country covered a vast territory including present-day India, Pakistan, Myanmar, Bangladesh as well as Nepal. India took it for granted that it could continue to rule the large area when Britain ended its colonialism in South Asia. A previous victim of colonialism and hegemony started to dream about developing its own hegemony. Obsessed with such mentality, India turned a blind eye to the concessions China had repeatedly made over the disputed border issues, and refused to drop the pretentious airs when dealing with neighbors like Pakistan.

Many Indians didn't know that Jawaharlal Nehru, the first Prime Minister of India, had once said that India could not play an inferior role in the world, and it should either be a superpower or disappear.

Although the pursuit of being a superpower is justifiable, the dream of being a superpower held by Indians appears impetuous. The dream of superpower is mingled with the thought of hegemony, which places the South Asian giant in an awkward situation and results in repeated failure.

Throughout the history, India has constantly been under foreign rule. The essence for the rise of India lies in how to be an independent country, to learn to solve the complicated ethnic and religious issues, to protect the country from terrorist attacks, to boost economic development as well as to put more efforts on poverty alleviation.

Additionally, the hegemony can also be harmful in terms of geopolitical environment. The expansion of India is restricted by its geographic locations. It has Himalaya Mountain to its north, a natural barrier for northward expansion; it has Pakistan to the west, a neighbor it is always at odds over the disputed border issues.

To everyone's disappointment, India pursued a foreign policy of "befriend the far and attack the near". It engaged in the war separately with China and Pakistan and the resentment still simmers. If India really wants to be a superpower, such a policy is shortsighted and immature.

India, which vows to be a superpower, needs to have its eyes on relations with neighbors and abandon the recklessness and arrogance as the world is undergoing earthshaking changes. For India, the ease of tension with China and Pakistan is the only way to become a superpower. At present, China is proactively engaging in negotiations with India for the early settlement of border dispute and India should give a positive response.

Who is gambling on Afghanistan?

2009-10-15T14:32:00.000+05:30

Robert D. Kaplan, a senior fellow at the Center for a New American Security and a correspondent for The Atlantic magazine, published on Oct.7 a signed commentary entitled Beijing's Afghan Gamble in New York Times, in which he stated that "America is sacrificing its blood and treasure (in Afghanistan), the Chinese will reap the benefits."

He specifically singled out a Chinese state-owned company, which has been on the war-torn soil for years exploiting copper. And meanwhile, he said, China has been coveting Afghanistan's other yet-to-be tapped deposits like iron, uranium and precious gems and "is willing to take big risks in one of the most violent countries to secure them." He stressed all that China "has its eyes on" would draw upon the security provided by the U.S. troops.

Indeed, American combat troops are risking their lives fighting terrorist militant in a far-flung corner of the world and the Nobel Laureate for peace and the U.S. President Barack Obama, who now has two wars in his hands, is struggling to send a "surge" of 40,000 more troops in Afghanistan to fight the die-hard Taliban insurgents.

Be that as it may, the U.S. is by no means cast in the role of the Savior, saving the entire world from extinction. Think of one question: What if the America decided to leave, or to drastically reduce its military deployment on the Afghanistan-Pakistan border? Would the radical Muslims conquer the region or even the world as a whole simply due to the absence of the U.S. military might?

Counterterrorism is a global mission involving multilateral cooperation and coordination at varying levels and in various forms, and all the forces involved in the anti-terror crusade are interdependent with shared interests. Take China and the U.S.: In Afghanistan, Chinese and American interests converge----By exploiting Afghanistan's mineral reserves, China can provide thousands of poverty-stricken Afghans with jobs, thus generating tax revenues to help stabilize an already volatile Kabul government. This also echoed America's global strategy----creating a relatively stable Afghanistan which will cease to be a haven for extremists.

The U.S. is not fighting for others' geopolitical benefits, but for its own, for the enhancement of American footprint in the strategically critical region and for a "momentous moral victory" in its dire need at the time to boost the morale of its crestfallen soldiers. This is exactly why America chose to stay and act as a land-based meddler in such a far-off corner. It is highly dubious to think the U.S. is doing so only to help the "strategic ambitions" of the Chinese and others. Likewise, it is absurd for some U.S. Hawks to say China is hiding in the wings of the U.S., free-riding on the best the U.S. offers.

That the U.S. is exhausting its national energies in the 8-year war in an attempt to put a stable Afghanistan in place resonates with the bursting expectations of the new administration. Also, it is the burgeoning hope for triumphing over the radical Muslims and winning over the world that would prompt President Obama to add troops and continue to fight.

" We have no choice in Afghanistan," as put it in Mr. Kaplan's article, "one could make an excellent case that an ignominious withdrawal from Afghanistan is precisely what would lead to our decline, by demoralizing our military, signaling to our friends worldwide that we cannot be counted on and demonstrating that our enemies have greater resolve than we do."

In this view, the U.S. is also fighting to save its face, far from generously allowing others to take advantage of its war trophies.

In all farness, President Obama, as the recipient of the lofty honor for peace, is facing a tough test for his decision-making ability and leadership in terms of adding combat troops in Afghanistan. To the rookie American president barely 9 months on the job, what concerns him most is what he could do to impress the world.

Well-documented records have manifested that in the U.S. only war and peace, the eternal theme running through the human history, can work as the yardstick for the public assessment of a president. For instance, Franklin Roosevelt's New Deal salvaging the U.S. from being further bogged down in a sweeping economic crisis somehow cannot rival the glory he brought to the whole nation by his leadership in ending up the World War II with a complete victory.

Another case involves former President Lyndon B. Johnson, who signed the Civil Rights Bill in his term creating equal rights covering the general public regardless of race, color, religion and national origin. Despite the landmark progress in civil equality he had achieved, people would prefer to remember more of his decision dragging the country deep into the mire of Vietnam War.

History at times repeats itself, but the pitfall is conspicuous, as President Obama is mulling what to do next. But now that the Nobel Committee bet such a great deal on him, President Obama must turn out to be a good gambler in return.

Beijing’s Afghan Gamble

2009-10-14T21:06:00.000+05:30

In Afghanistan’s Logar Province, just south of Kabul, the geopolitical future of Asia is becoming apparent: American troops are providing security for a Chinese state-owned company to exploit the Aynak copper reserves, which are worth tens of billions of dollars. While some of America’s NATO allies want to do as little as possible in the effort to stabilize Afghanistan, China has its eyes on some of world’s last untapped deposits of copper, iron, gold, uranium and precious gems, and is willing to take big risks in one of the most violent countries to secure them.

In Afghanistan, American and Chinese interests converge. By exploiting Afghanistan’s metal and mineral reserves, China can provide thousands of Afghans with jobs, thus generating tax revenues to help stabilize a tottering Kabul government. Just as America has a vision of a modestly stable Afghanistan that will no longer be a haven for extremists, China has a vision of Afghanistan as a secure conduit for roads and energy pipelines that will bring natural resources from the Indian Ocean and elsewhere. So if America defeats Al Qaeda and the irreconcilable elements of the Taliban, China’s geopolitical position will be enhanced.

This is not a paradox, since China need not be our future adversary. Indeed, combining forces with China in Afghanistan might even improve the relationship between Washington and Beijing. The problem is that while America is sacrificing its blood and treasure, the Chinese will reap the benefits. The whole direction of America’s military and diplomatic effort is toward an exit strategy, whereas the Chinese hope to stay and profit.

But what if America decides to leave, or to drastically reduce its footprint to a counterterrorism strategy focused mainly on the Afghanistan-Pakistan border? Then another scenario might play out. Kandahar and other areas will most likely fall to the Taliban, creating a truly lawless realm that wrecks China’s plans for an energy and commodities passageway through South Asia. It would also, of course, be a momentous moral victory achieved by radical Muslims who, having first defeated the Soviet Union in Afghanistan, will then have triumphed over another superpower.

And the calculations get more complicated still: a withdrawal of any kind from Afghanistan before a stable government is in place would also hurt India, a critical if undeclared American ally, and increasingly a rival of China. Were the Taliban to retake Afghanistan, India would face a radical Islamistan stretching from its border with Pakistan deep into Central Asia. With the Taliban triumphant on Pakistan’s western border, jihadists there could direct their energies to the eastern border with India.

India would defeat Pakistan in a war, conventional or nuclear. But having to do so, or simply needing to face down a significantly greater jihadist threat next door, would divert India’s national energies away from further developing its economy and its navy, a development China would quietly welcome.

Bottom line: China will find a way to benefit no matter what the United States does in Afghanistan. But it probably benefits more if we stay and add troops to the fight. The same goes for Russia. Because of continuing unrest in the Islamic southern tier of the former Soviet Union, Moscow has an interest in America stabilizing Afghanistan (though it would take a certain psychological pleasure from a humiliating American withdrawal).

In nuts-and-bolts terms, if we stay in Afghanistan and eventually succeed, other countries will benefit more than we will. China, India and Russia are all Asian powers, geographically proximate to Afghanistan and better able, therefore, to garner practical advantages from any stability our armed forces would make possible.

Everyone keeps saying that America is not an empire, but our military finds itself in the sort of situation that was mighty familiar to empires like that of ancient Rome and 19th-century Britain: struggling in a far-off corner of the world to exact revenge, to put down the fires of rebellion, and to restore civilized order. Meanwhile, other rising and resurgent powers wait patiently in the wings, free-riding on the public good we offer. This is exactly how an empire declines, by allowing others to take advantage of its own exertions.

Of course, one could make an excellent case that an ignominious withdrawal from Afghanistan is precisely what would lead to our decline, by demoralizing our military, signaling to our friends worldwide that we cannot be counted on and demonstrating that our enemies have greater resolve than we do. That is why we have no choice in Afghanistan but to add troops and continue to fight.

But as much as we hone our counterinsurgency skills and develop assets for the “long war,” history would suggest that over time we can more easily preserve our standing in the world by using naval and air power from a distance when intervening abroad. Afghanistan should be the very last place where we are a land-based meddler, caught up in internal Islamic conflict, helping the strategic ambitions of the Chinese and others.

* Robert D. Kaplan is a senior fellow at the Center for a New American Security and a correspondent for The Atlantic.

On Cluttered Ballots of India, Families Proliferate

2009-10-12T21:22:00.001+05:30

Democracy is built on the oft-tarnished ideal that any man or woman can get elected, but in India, home to the world’s biggest democracy, it helps to be part of a political family. The Nehru-Gandhi dynasty, scions of the governing Congress Party, is India’s version of the Kennedys. But other political dynasties, large and small, have proliferated so rapidly that many analysts believe nepotism is corroding the political system.

India’s chaotic politics can sometimes seem democratic to a fault: the election cycle rarely pauses and the country has roughly 1,050 registered national and regional political parties. But most of the major parties, including the majority Congress Party, are internally undemocratic; there are no primaries and party leaders discourage public dissent. Party bosses select candidates and have shown an increasing tendency to select their own relatives.

Across India, political families are entrenched at every level of government and politics. At least nine of the 32 members of Prime Minister Manmohan Singh’s cabinet either descended from political families or have children seeking or holding office. Parliament is littered with political families; a recent study found that 31 of the 58 women elected had a husband, brother, father or father-in-law in politics.

The trend is even more glaring at the state level. In Maharashtra, analysts estimate that 30 or more party candidates running this month are from political families. The state’s chief minister, the top executive post, is the son of a former chief minister. This is also the case in two other states while the Congress Party is strongly considering replacing the late chief minister of Andhra Pradesh with his son.

“It has gotten into the DNA of the Indian political system,” said Jagdeep Chhokar, a founding member of the Association for Democratic Reform in New Delhi. “To control the workings of the party, the leader depends on trusted people. And one of the traditions of Indian culture is that you trust family members more than outsiders.”

Indian politics have a high turnover rate and voting blocs can be defined by region, religion, caste or community. Yet analysts say Indian voters favor a familiar family pedigree, partly because of a cultural reverence for the family and because of habits in some regions that trace back centuries. Several of the royal families who ruled over feudal states have today evolved into political families.

Modern India’s political marketplace is so crowded with parties and candidates that the “brand” of a familiar family name can bring an advantage, several analysts say. And the closed nature of political parties often perpetuates the dynastic problem; in several cases, rebels who broke from one party have formed their own and installed relatives around them.

Few political families are eager to step away from the power and lucre of office. In the state of Haryana, which has several local political dynasties, a recent study concluded that incumbents running for re-election had increased their personal wealth, on average, by 388 percent during their five years in office.

“Every political family these days is keen to keep someone in the field,” said Suhas Palshikar, who teaches politics at Pune University in Maharashtra. “Lots of resources are involved. Lots of networks are involved. And to put it crudely, a lot of money is involved.”

A Nobel prize for hope

2009-10-12T19:51:00.000+05:30

President Obama's efforts to achieve a comprehensive peace agreement between Israel and the Arab states, including a Palestinian state, received a much appreciated, if surprising, boost with the awarding of the Nobel peace prize to the US president. It's fair to assume that the Nobel prize committee is hoping that the award will promote Obama's diplomatic efforts across a range of issues.

President Obama said he considered the award support for American leadership on behalf of international aspirations and "as a means to give momentum to a set of causes". He also made it clear that a top agenda item, along with nuclear non-proliferation and climate change, is achieving peace for Israelis and Palestinians. In fact, it was the only conflict he mentioned by name, noting: "We must all do our part to resolve those conflicts that have caused so much pain and hardship over so many years, and that effort must include an unwavering commitment that finally realises the rights of all Israelis and Palestinians to live in peace and security in nations of their own."

As in his UN general assembly speech last month, where the president devoted 559 words out of 5000, more than on any other issue, to ending the occupation and achieving a comprehensive peace, Obama again made it clear that this conflict is central to his vision for a transformed Middle East.

The Israeli and Palestinian public will no doubt be skeptical, and understandably so. Events on the ground continue to move in the opposite direction and have even begun to spiral back towards violent confrontation, as evidenced by Friday's clashes in occupied East Jerusalem and outside Ramallah. Yet on both sides polling consistently shows the desire for a very different, more peaceful future. Obama's Nobel prize, and his highlighting of Israeli-Palestinian peace in responding, provides an injection of that most precious of commodities: hope.

The Israeli president and Hamas leaders both welcomed the announcement: Shimon Perez with a typically poetic flourish – "You gave us a licence to dream and act in a noble direction." Hamas senior official Ahmed Yousef with the more down-to-earth, "[w]e know he is somebody different from past leaders who supported Israel economically and militarily." The Gaza-based Palestinian prime minister Ismail Haniyeh added for good measure, "We are in need of actions, not sayings…."

What is fascinating is that even hardened foes from both sides of the divide see in President Obama a potential positive game-changer. Given the realities today, it is not reasonable to expect the parties to generate a solution of their own volition. Israelis and Palestinians both have dysfunctional politics, and suffer too great an asymmetry in power to be able to successfully conclude bilateral negotiations. American leadership has become the essential ingredient to delivering a way out of this conflict. And that requires presidential will and determination.

Certainly a part of the Nobel award was an acknowledgement of what Barack Obama's election has already achieved in embracing a global agenda of engagement and partnership, in doing more to rekindle hope for a better world than any other event this past year, and yes – frankly – in not being George Bush. But this was also an anticipatory or aspirational peace prize – front and center of the anticipation is Israeli-Palestinian peace. From day one in office, President Obama has made achieving a two-state solution a priority, appointing a special envoy to the region and setting out expectations in his remarkable Cairo speech.

This nudge of encouragement from Oslo comes at an important moment, when a sense of lost momentum was beginning to set in. The Nobel committee is signalling that it too is placing its hopes in the new American president. Other supportive, international interventions will not doubt be needed along the way.

The world should enthusiastically and constructively line up behind President Obama's goal of ending this conflict.

Acknowledging the role Obama's leadership will need to play is a recognition not only of the two sides' inability to end this on their own. It also recognises that unlike in almost any other conflict, the US in a way supports and has significant leverage over both sides of this divide. And President Obama individually has the commensurate moral weight to complement America's sole superpower status.

Such expectations, embellished with Friday's Nobel announcement, can be daunting – but they can also help fortify and mobilise the presidential determination and will needed to get this done.

Obama and Human Rights

2009-10-12T12:38:00.001+05:30

"Our concern is that the Obama administration is perceived to be softening on human rights."

If that comment came from a human rights lobbyist, you might not pay too much mind. But I heard it from Anwar Ibrahim, a Malaysian leader who is one of the world's foremost spokesmen for Islamic democracy -- and who is himself under threat from authorities at home. If Anwar says that people throughout Asia and the Middle East are wondering about President Obama's commitment to human rights, the administration ought to pay attention.

Obama has committed himself to the cause of democracy in every major foreign policy address of his young presidency. He has met with freedom fighters, in Moscow and elsewhere. In announcing Friday that he would accept the Nobel Peace Prize, he saluted, obliquely but unmistakably, the democracy marchers of Tehran and a former Nobel laureate, Aung San Suu Kyi, who, for her courageous advocacy of democracy, languishes under house arrest in Burma.

But Obama's choice last week not to meet with the Dalai Lama, an advocate of freedom, broke with bipartisan tradition and -- following several other seemingly small decisions and ambiguous administration statements -- reverberated across the globe. In an odd way, it showed the flip side of the willingness that he expressed, especially during the campaign, to meet with the enemies of freedom.

Both positions in their way reflect the president's self-confidence, his impatience with show and pretense, and his disdain for aspects of his predecessor's policy. Both have a compelling logic. But both also carry dangers.

When Obama suggested early on that he would meet with an Ahmadinejad or a Kim Jong Il, he was rebuking what he saw as George W. Bush's diplomatic arrogance. But he was also rejecting protocol and hang-ups about status: If America is so powerful, why should we be afraid to meet with anyone? And why would anyone worry that meeting with Hugo Chávez, or accepting an anti-American book from him, could influence Obama for the worse?

But Obama discovered quickly that, whatever it meant to him, allowing Chávez to shake his hands and press him with gifts had significance throughout a continent. A meeting with Obama would be a coup for Kim, not to be given away for nothing. A debate, as proposed by Ahmadinejad, would benefit Iran's regime but not America. And so the administration, like that of Bush's second term, is trying to steer the bad guys of the world into discussions with the United States and its allies -- the six-party talks on Korea, the P-5 plus 1 on Iran -- and away from one-on-one diplomacy.

Some of the impulses behind the non-invitation to the Dalai Lama are similar. It's not that they've given up on the Tibetan cause, administration officials say, but that they want achievements, not gestures. Bush could feel good about himself for inviting dissidents into the White House, but what did he accomplish? By postponing a meeting that administration officials fear would inflame China's leaders, Obama will get a chance to raise the issue with them in quiet conversation. If he gets nowhere, officials say, there will be ample time to welcome the Dalai Lama to the White House.

That again may reflect Obama's self-confidence: He knows how he feels about human rights, so why should he have to thump his chest and prove it to the world? Why not try to get something done?

Yet as with Chávez's small public relations coup, such calculations on the Dalai Lama may underestimate the impact in the world. China unabashedly browbeats other governments that dare meet with the Dalai Lama or other dissidents. When Denmark once supported a U.N. resolution criticizing China's human rights record, a Chinese government spokesman likened Denmark to "the bird that pokes out its head" and said the resolution "will, I think, in the end become a rock that smashes on the Danish government's head."

Once they see Washington deferring, fewer governments elsewhere may dare poke up their heads. On such matters, many nations still look to America to lead.

Throughout the autocratic world, there are people fighting back -- priests and poets, honest reporters, incorruptible lawyers. Most of us will never know their names. But they watch what happens in the White House. When a dissident is turned away, they take note. When a dissident is welcomed, they take heart. To them, no gesture is empty.

"Of course, your government has to decide what is the best strategy," Anwar said during a visit to The Post last week. "But the perception also is important. Because once you give a perception that you are softening on human rights, then you are strengthening the hands of autocrats to punish dissidents throughout the world."

China's class ceiling

2009-10-11T23:09:00.000+05:30

That the current ruler of the People's Republic of China, Hu Jintao, is a bore will no doubt be a relief to most people, including 1.3 billion Chinese. Hu's dullness is remarkable given the high drama of China's fairly recent transformation from a poor, blood-soaked totalitarian country to a rich (in patches) superpower aspiring to take over America's lead in the not-so-distant future. But perhaps his lack of charisma is part of the point. The first 27 years of the People's Republic, under Chairman Mao, when millions died in almost constant purges and upheavals, and tens of millions died of starvation in bizarre economic experiments, were so awful that most Chinese are quite sick of charismatic leadership.

China is the only ancient civilization in human history to have reemerged as a major force in the world. And Chinese are rightly proud of this. So why rock the boat? It is better to be ruled by boring technocrats like Hu who will keep things nice and steady.

This is not the story one might hear from unemployed workers in the rust belts of northeastern China, or from rioting farmers in Guangdong province who have been pushed off the land by greedy developers working in tandem with corrupt party officials. Nor is this view necessarily shared by the brave lawyers willing to take on some of those corrupt officials, or intellectual dissidents who still get arrested for arguing that Chinese should be entitled to basic democratic rights.

But it is the common line taken by people who benefit most from the current wave of fun, fashion and prosperity -- the new urban elite, some of whom are pampered children of Communist Party bosses. None are communist ideologues. All have taken the late leader Deng Xiaoping's "To Get Rich is Glorious" slogan seriously. And not a few of them, now in their 40s, were among the Tiananmen Square demonstrators in 1989 who demanded democratic freedoms and an end to corruption.

One pokes into this contradiction at one's peril, especially if one is a foreigner. A prominent figure in the new Beijing elite, a highly sophisticated woman who personifies the glories of getting rich in today's China, also happens to be a daughter of the Communist aristocracy. Hong Huang is a round-faced, expensively dressed media mogul who runs a string of trendy magazines. Her mother was Mao's English teacher. Her stepfather was Mao's minister of foreign affairs. Hong was partly educated in New York, and one of her husbands was the filmmaker Chen Kaige, another player in Beijing's gilded age.

A few years ago, I was taken to Hong's lovely country house in the mountains. I had been introduced by a mutual friend, the avant-garde poet Yang Lian, who lives in London with his wife, Yo Yo, a novelist. Neither Yang Lian nor Yo Yo are, strictly speaking, political dissidents. They don't write about politics much, but they are free-spirited authors who chose not to put up with the restrictions of an authoritarian society.

The evening started off amicably, with gossip about acquaintances on the Beijing scene. Then Hong started giving Yang advice. Why was he still living abroad? Why didn't he come back home? Things were great in China now. Lots of money to be made. Yang should get with the program. All that modernist poetry might fool foreigners, but life had moved on in Beijing. He should do some advertising, or maybe pop lyrics. There was no need to worry about censorship and all that, if you knew how to play the game.

A certain edginess crept into the bracing mountain air. Hong's advice began to sound more like bullying. Tiananmen had not been mentioned, but it was the elephant in the room. It was one of the reasons Yang and Yo Yo opted for residence abroad. Suddenly, Hong brought it up, turning to me as well. "Tiananmen, Tiananmen," she said, "foreign journalists are always going on about Tiananmen. I think it's time to forget about all that. We should move on and feel proud of our country. Foreigners just use it to bad-mouth China."

I felt I had to say something, but I didn't feel like picking a fight as Hong's guest. So I put it to her that the Chinese still insist on remembering the Nanking massacre of 1937, when Japanese troops went on an orgy of rape, looting and murder in what was then the Chinese capital. Indeed, this terrible event is a central part of what is now called "patriotic education." Japanese nationalists, on the other hand, want young Japanese to forget about it because they feel that it is time to move on and that the young should feel proud of their country.

Of course, I had picked a fight. And I will never forget the way Hong -- charming, cosmopolitan, New York-educated -- turned into a ranting Red Guard, screaming abuse at me, at foreigners in general and at Yang Lian and Yo Yo for defending me. Clearly a very raw nerve had been touched.

Yes, what Hong said was true. People, especially educated people with a certain cosmopolitan style, were doing all right in post-1989 China. There was money to be made, a lot of money. Fashion was booming. And so on. But at a price. And that price is what Hong called "playing the game" -- knowing what subjects to avoid, how to trim your views, how to stay out of politics. Let the dull technocrats rule China with a velvet glove -- and an iron fist for those who refuse to play the game.

To opt for this is entirely understandable. Exile is tough. And who wants to go to prison? Besides, life really is sweet for those who have made enough money and the necessary compromises. But they are compromises.

Because most foreign journalists, businessmen, diplomats and academics tend to meet educated, privileged Chinese like Hong, most reports from China reflect their views: that soft authoritarianism is good for China; that the Chinese masses are not ready for democracy; that to give them the right to vote would only create chaos. But the main argument for technocracy, heard not just from the Chinese elites but increasingly in Western countries too, is that it is more efficient. Once the rulers put their minds to something -- the Olympic Games, birth control, economic reform, perhaps even tackling pollution -- nothing and no one stands in the way of success.

People who like the idea of strong central government and top-down change are often attracted to the Chinese model. And so are businessmen who would much rather deal with authoritarian party officials than independent trade unions. China is often favorably compared with India, with its gross inefficiencies, dire poverty and huge problems with illiteracy, corruption and organized crime. Messy democracy, it might seem, is holding India back, while China is forging ahead with ever more impressive statistics.

There is some truth to this view. When I first saw Shenzhen in the 1970s, it was a tiny village across the border from Hong Kong. Since Deng Xiaoping declared, in 1982, that a new economic zone should arise there, his will soon became reality. It is now an industrial metropolis with a population of, give or take, 10 million people.

Technocracy, however, has great drawbacks too. Authoritarian technocrats are not very good in emergencies. When a devastating earthquake hit Sichuan province in 2008, killing about 70,000 people and leaving 10 million more without homes, China was much praised for its speedy and compassionate response. What has been mentioned less is that a disproportionate number of victims were children because schools collapsed. Developers had used shoddy materials and paid officials to look the other way.

Perhaps one cannot blame the technocrats in Beijing for this. But the central government should not be praised too highly either. Much of the early help came from ordinary Chinese who sped to the scene, and they were actually hindered by officials in the beginning. Later, when citizens, helped by lawyers, tried to investigate the corrupt practices that had led to the catastrophic number of children's deaths, they were blocked and, in some cases, sent to prison.

The other thing government-by-experts is singularly bad at doing goes to the heart of politics: solving conflicts of interest. Individual liberties have increased without the benefits of political liberties. The state will no longer decide whom a person can marry, where he can live, what kind of job he can seek. But any effort to further collective aims in an organized fashion independent from the state will be ruthlessly crushed. This leads to what old-fashioned Marxists called contradictions. What is good for the business elite of Shanghai may not be good for the peasants in Sichuan.

To justify its monopoly on power, the Chinese technocracy relies on the promise of order and constant economic growth, and the claim of patriotism. Supporting the government is patriotic, and criticism is unpatriotic or, if voiced by foreigners, "anti-Chinese."

But in the end, the greatest flaw in the system is that China's boring rulers are self-perpetuating. They cannot be punished by the ruled for their incompetence. Great blunders go unchecked. Conflicts of interest fester or erupt in violence. China's technocracy might well look stable and successful for a while to come, but it is unlikely to last without basic political reform. Some think the new wave of technocrats, the ones who went to Harvard or Yale, can bring this about themselves. One never knows. But as long as they haven't, I'd still put my money on messy democracy any day.

Ian Buruma is a professor of human rights at Bard College and the author of, most recently, "The China Lover."

BANGLADESH ELECTIONS

2008-12-27T12:05:00.001+05:30

Will politics interrupted since January 11, 2007 by Emergency Rule be finally giving way to resumption of democratic politics, come parliament election day on December 29, 2008.

Intellectuals, constitutional experts and journalists will continue to argue with points and counterpoints about the sagacity of declaring emergency under pressure from the army. These two years, a caretaker government administered the country backed by the army. The performance of the government should certainly be audited by the public. It will be a lesson for all, including the armed forces, to learn from.

True, there were shortcomings. Corruption shifted from one interest group to another. Too many experiments were made with lofty ideas, including Army Chief General Moeen U. Ahmed’s vision of “Democracy with Bangladeshi Characteristics”. The idea did not hurt the nation. But nothing went to the purgatorial depth of the BNP-JEI rule of 2001-2006.

Those in Bangladesh now criticizing the “January 11” emergency may like to revisit the situation prevailing then. Prime Minister Khaleda Zia’s most notorious and corrupt older son, Tareque Rehman Zia had tried to initiate a military coup through his army friend and a captive president. It was thanks to General Moeen and his colleagues that disaster was averted. For this one single act, the Bangladeshi people should thank them.

The political divide was also moving fast towards a major bloodletting which was unlikely to remain confined to Dhaka. The country is yet to come out of the trauma of the killing fields of 1971. While the Pakistani army is not there now, their old murderous squads like the AL Badr, the Al Shams and the Razakars have revived to great strength in the form of Bangladesh Jamaat-e-Islami (BJEI), IOJ (Amini) and a host of others including terrorist organizations like the Jamatul Mujahidin Bangladesh (JMB) and the Harkat-ul-Jihal al-Islami (HUJI).

For a variety of reasons including international warnings especially from UN Secretary General, the armed forces desisted from instituting a martial law government. That would have been a disaster. Someday, perhaps, General Moeen, Lt. General (Retd.) Masududdin Choudhury and some other officers who made very critical decisions at that time, would come out on record on their thinking. It would go a long way to help the armed forces officers in the future to introspect about action such as military rule. One may, however, be assured that the military will never be too far away. In a democracy this is bad news. But then the politicians who sit in Jatiyo Sangshad (Parliament) must conduct themselves sensibly. They cannot rape and loot the country and expect others to look away.

Notwithstanding the fact that the military-backed caretaker government could not finally achieve what they had set out to do with the political class, the politicians as a whole should have come out greatly chastised from the events of the last two years. Some of them have been convicted on corruption and other crimes, some are being still tried in courts, some others are absconding, and a number of them are contesting the elections after a close shave with the law under emergency rule. There was wheeling and dealing, political adjustments and fall outs, threats of blackmail not to contest the elections unless the government agreed to certain demands from particular political parties. In the end a patchwork arrangement was arrived at to lift emergency to allow free and fair elections with observers from the European Union, the USA and the UK monitoring the polls.

A word about foreign observers. With all their noble intentions, they have never really been able to reach the real trouble spots and rural areas where the majority of the votes are cast. The 2001 elections were rigged with impunity by the BNP-JEI led 4-party alliance. Large sections of minorities were not allowed to participate in the polling. The army and most other security agencies did not give a damn about who was observing the elections. But the foreign observers certified the elections as free and fair. The foreign observers apparently had a political strategy to work with the BNP and the JEI for reasons not really a secret. The Americans were looking for moderate Islamic political parties across the world to support, to wash off the opprobrium they had earned of being anti-Islamic in the Islamic world. The 2001 political situation in Bangladesh does not obtain at the end of 2008.

Nevertheless, lessons of the past must not be forgotten. Gen. Moeen would recall the message sent from the Army GHQ Dhaka, to the GOC 24 Inf. Division, Chittagong, directing to provide all assistance to the JEI leader and candidate Shahjahan Choudhury. When all mobile telephones were shut down officially a few days before the 2001 elections, Choudhury, who is in jail now, was provided with a communication set from the army’s holding to help him to keep in touch with his murderous hoodlums.

The Chief Advisor and Advisors (Cabinet Ministers) of the caretaker government, as per the constitution, are supposed to be politically neutral persons or, rather, apolitical persons. Except for a few, most were anything but apolitical. Maj. Gen. (Retd.) M.A.Matin, Advisor to the Home (Interior) Ministry exposed himself as a hardcore Jamaati and of an ideological persuasion that could very well resonate with the ideology of the banned terrorist organizations like the JMB and the HUJI.

Looking from a traditional point of view, the parliamentary elections would be fought mainly between the right wing BNP and the left-of-center Awami League (AL) which still enjoys secular credentials among Bangladesh watchers. In the 1996 elections, however, the AL came to an understanding with the JEI. This was broken in 2001. But the AL President Sheikh Hasina Wajed again made an attempt to forge an alliance with an Islamic group which preaches everything that the AL is supposed to be against including women leadership.

It is a serious concern that regressive and obscurantist Islamic groups are becoming more important in electoral politics in Bangladesh. Nomination of the number of minority candidates by the political parties for the December 29 elections fell far short of their population ratio. A number of Bangladeshi newspapers pointed this out. There is no time to review this. From all indications, fielding as few minority candidates as possible even by the AL was a hard, conscious decision from the top of the party. About 10 percent to 12 percent population of Bangladesh are, therefore, becoming irrelevant. Will they also become dispensable, eventually?

A number of linked developments need mention in terms of Bangladesh’s politics. Self-styled Mufti, Amini, head of the faction of the Islamic Oikyo Jote (IOJ) aligned with the BNP-JEI combine could stop the construction of Baul sculptures near the Dhaka International airport because idols are “un-Islamic”. The government bowed to Mufti Amini’s threat. An effort was made a couple of months ago by a section within the Home Ministry to give the banned terrorist group HUJI a moderate political face.

It is still being talked that the BNP has 74 sure constituencies, and the AL about 33. This position is unlikely to hold any longer. Both the BNP and the AL have been weakened significantly, but the BNP more so. It has also suffered desertions. It, however, still holds the numbers and political profile to keep the JEI in alliance with it.

The JEI suffered the least in the anti-corruption drive by the caretaker government. To remain with the BNP is an astute, long-term, strategic decision. The BNP is losing, centrist heavy weights like Abdul Mannan Bhuyian and Col. (Retd) Oli Ahmed among others. This gives the JEI the space to grow within the BNP rightists and Islamists. From here on, one would expect to see the original BNP wither slowly and the JEI to grow within the BNP. In the next 10 years, the JEI should be expected to take control of the Khaleda Zia controlled JEI.

Finally, what has happened to the Freedom Fighters? They were given some hope by the Army and the AL. But as expected, they have been dumped. The Freedom Fighters (Mukti Joddhas) represent something that does not fit even into the paradigm of the AL top leadership. It is the Islamist rightists the AL wants to win over.

The December 29, 2008 Jatiyo Sangshad appears to have acquired a lot of issues that will come into play in Bangladesh’s politics soon after a new elected government comes into place. It is difficult to speculate anything definitely at the moment. But some issues not really visible have been raised in this commentary. They are of utmost importance.

Footnote: Bangladesh politics and elections are moving towards a situation where moderate and humanist Islam and secularism are being pushed aside to ameliorate intolerant Islam. As the JEI leaders had stated a few years ago their strength cannot be measured by the number of seats they have in Parliament. It can only be fathomed by the growth of their ideology among the people of Bangladesh. Time is on the side of the JEI and the opponents of liberation unless those who style themselves as secular political leaders wake up soon.

UN & INDIA'S WAR ON TERROR

2008-12-27T12:03:00.000+05:30

In the past few days, the events that have been triggered by the UN sanctions within Pakistan can be considered as significant, as the global view of Pakistan and the terror outfits working from its soil seems to have altered. Four Pakistani militants were added to UN terrorism sanctions list. They were added to a pre-existing list called the 1267 committee of people and firms facing sanctions for ties to Al-Qaida and Taliban. Muhammad Saeed, Zaki-ur-Rehman Lakhvi, Haji Muhammad Ashraf and Mahmoud Mohammad Ahmed Bahaziq, these names have become well known across the globe and so has the outfit Jamaat-ud-dawa. The UN’s action came through after evidence and pressure from America in concern to the 26/11 incident . The sanctions led to the house arrest of the listed terrorists. Reports claimed the sanction to be too late as the outfit was provided considerable time to accumulate and safeguard its assets.

The Questions that can be raised are-

Has the sanction been effective?

The answer is Yes and No both. Yes, as it has brought considerable global attention to India’s outcry in concern to terrorist organizations working from Pakistan. But the sanction hasn’t been as effective as it should be as the organization had considerable time to safeguard its funds and operations and clean its tracks. Most outfits in Pakistan also have the advantage of working under different pseudonyms with the support of the parent organization. This strategy aids them in closing and abandoning the parent organization and starting anew under a different name albeit with the same goals. Even though the UN sanction lists a number of alternative names and spellings, it still raises doubt of whether the whole ground has been covered. The sanction covers organizations with ties to Al-Qaeda and Taliban, but there may be many outfits that have little association with theses groups or may be acting independently.

What kind of action did the sanction trigger in Pakistan?

Actions undertaken by Pakistan have borne out of the fear of being tagged as Terrorist State. Pakistani Defence Minister has been quoted in a PTI report as stating that the crackdown on JUD was to make sure that the country isn’t labeled as a terrorist state which leads to an economic downslide for the nation.

What is the significance of the sanction and how UN’s role can aid India in this war on terror?

The UN’s action will open door for further actions by the International organization but it will also provide an avenue for India to approach and pressurise Pakistan. Under the UN charter if a country does not comply with the UN’s demands, the actions taken against Pakistan may include complete or partial interruption of economic relations and of rail, sea, air, postal, telegraphic, radio, and other means of communication, and the severance of diplomatic relations under article 41 of the UN charter under Chapter VII, “Action with respect to threats to the peace, breaches of the peace, and acts of aggression”. The persistent use of this article can be demanded and a case can be built strongly for the use of it by India. Senior leaders of the US administration have already spoken on the UN Dias for stronger actions by Pakistan and severe actions against it for not complying with it. But most of these demands have been just vocal as Pakistan is defiant. The meeting of 120 Indian envoys in New Delhi this week to lay out the plans for vigorously gathering international support against Pakistan’s denial to eliminate terrorist groups within the country seems to be one of the few last diplomatic actions considered by India.

The Chapter VII provides every country the right to defend itself and retaliate in self-defence, that opens a entirely different option for any nation. Pakistan’s defiance can turn out be a critical point for UN to act. There has been a strong opposition against the ban on Jamaat ud Dawa within the country that can turn the tide in favour for India in the UN and garner support for its war on terror with other nations in the General Assembly. The present scenario in concern to Pakistan has led to both countries testing the war preparedness on the borders. There has not been any intervention from the UN or any key countries such as US or UK that may lead to a serious standoff on the borders by both the nations. The diplomatic pressures being exercised by India can be fruitful with the help of UN and the backing of US and UK, but the saturated responses from Pakistan and reactions from the US aren’t helping the situation. The UNSC’s complete backing is needed for bans or embargoes to be imposed on Pakistan and that may become difficult to obtain with China as a permanent member on the Security Council. These doubts also raise the pertinent question of how UN actions could be effective and the answer lies in the fact that in the present global circumstances, India seems to be on its own to fight its war on terror. US is on the crossroads as it considers Pakistan a strong ally in its fight against terrorism but in the recent past Pakistan has become less of an ally as its northern and western frontiers have become a safe haven for many terrorist groups. The US responses are measured and calculated leading to an unsatisfied India. The global war on terror has been in the Indian backyard for a very long time but the international support has arrived late for the nation and the country’s patience seems to be running out.

BANGLADESH ELECTIONS AHEAD

2008-12-27T12:02:00.000+05:30

Bangladesh Jamaat-e-Islami leaders’ involvement in war crimes and crimes against humanity have been recorded in many books, journals and periodicals since the liberation of Bangladesh. The present head of the Islamist party in 1971 as head of Jamaat’s student wing Islami Chatra Sangha vowed to protect "every inch of Pakistan’s land". Jamaat's present Secretary General was heading the Al-Badr Bahini, built to resist freedom fighters, allegedly led those who were involved in the killing of the intellectuals days before the victory of Bangladesh on 16th December 1971. Crimes committed by Jamaat-e-Islami aptly fits the Nuremberg Principles as violators of laws or customs of war which include but are not limited to murder, ill treatment or deportation of slave labor or for any other purpose of the civilian population of or in an occupied territory. They can also be accused of crime against humanity defined as murder, extermination, enslavement, deportation or other inhumane acts done against any civilian population or persecution on political, racist or religious grounds.

Rome statute of the International Criminal Court significantly broadened the definition of crimes against humanity. Jamaat-e-Islami’s crimes would fit those described by Leila Nadia Sadat of Washington University while interrogating the concept of extra-ordinary rendition as implicating in multiple human rights abuses including torture and death. Additionally Genocide Convention of 1948 and the four Geneva Conventions of 1949 regarding capture, detention, treatment and trial of prisoners of war and civilian internees provided rules the breach of which would be considered as war crimes.

International Human Rights Law and International Humanitarian Law forbid torture as illegal and extra ordinary rendition combined with aggressive interrogation technique are described war crime under the Geneva Conventions. Unfortunately for us the Genocide Convention had not then come into effect nor was the concept of responsibility to protect developed. Derek Chollet (In defense of values-Stanley Foundation) considers that responsibility to protect is a transformational concept in international relations. The concept was given global approval by the 2005 UN Summit of world leaders that held that with sovereign rights came sovereign responsibility to the people of ones own country and to ensure that they were not subjected to genocide or mass killing or ethnic cleansing. Should a country is unable or unwilling to do so then the international community is obligated to step in to correct the situation. The world does not want to see a repetition of the massacre of Rwanda or Srebrenica. The venality seen by the world after the holocaust of Nazi Germany further helped evolve international law in the form of transitional justice.

The concept of transitional justice refers to a field of activity and inquiry focused on how societies address legacies of past human rights abuses, mass atrocities or other forms of severe social trauma including genocide or civil war in order to build a more democratic and peaceful future. The creation of tribunals for the former Yugoslavia and Rwanda enhanced transitional jurisprudence and visible accountability of the perpetrators. Today the greatest worry of the international community on both side of the digital divide is the terrorism spread in the name of a twisted interpretation of Islam that is refused by the Muslims throughout the world. Yet suspicion about Muslims lingers on among those not lettered in the verses and the spirit of Islam. Samuel Huntington believes that the contribution of Western culture is in the separation of the church and the state. It is thought that religious institutions should not have the power to tell the democratically elected people how the country should be run. Contemporary English philosopher John Rawls urged to take the truths of religion off the political agenda. Besides for democracy to flourish twin toleration --minimal boundaries of freedom of action that must be crafted for political institutions vis-a-vis religious authorities and for religious groups vis-a-vis political institutions has been ensured.

Though Jamaat-e-Islami was banned in the initial days after the liberation of Bangladesh the leaders of the party were rehabilitated after the assassination of the Father of Bangladesh Bangabandhu Sheikh Mujibur Rahman. Yet one wonders whether a political party that bases its loyalty to a particular religion and has alleged transnational links with terrorist organizations should not be banned. In 2002 the Spanish Parliament banned the Batasauna Party for being the political arm of the militant Basque nationalist. France dissolved Unite Radicale when a member of the party tried to kill President Chirac. A 1936 law empowers the government to dissolve any movement "that resembles in its form and military organization a combat group of private militia whose aim is to undermine the national integrity".

Way back in 1951 German Federal Constitutional Court (FCC) at the request of then Chancellor Conrad Adenauer declared the Socialist Reich Party as unconstitutional on the ground that German Basic Law( Constitution) held that "political parties shall participate in the formation of the political will of the people" and that political parties’ main internal structure "shall conform to democratic principles". FCC also banned the Communist Part of Germany (West Germany) on the ground that the party advocated the overthrow of constitutional order. FCC upheld administrative limitations put on National Democratic Party in the Holocaust Denial Case (German Law Journal-vol-1. November 2000) In the US where the First amendment ensured practice of all religions the Supreme Court had struck down as unconstitutional the nondenominational prayer in New York public schools. In 2004 Belgium’s highest court ruled the xenophobic Vlaams Volk was guilty of "permanent incitement and segregation". The ruling was based on based on 1981 Anti-Racism Act that had made punishable under the law an act of incitement to discrimination, segregation, hatred or violence against a person. In 1998 Dutch Court ruled in favor of banning Nationale Volkspartije for inciting hatred, racial discrimination and xenophobia.

In general Muslims were critical of Western attitude towards Hamas who had won the elections in Gaza. The Western argument rested upon the Oslo Accord that prohibited advocacy of "racism or pursue the implementation of their (political parties) aims by unlawful or non-democratic means". Hammas’ Charter, interalia, declares: "We must spread the spirit of jihad among the Ummah (Muslim nation), clash with the enemies and join ranks of the jihad fighters". Given Israeli occupation of territories since 1967 and untold miseries inflicted upon the Palestinians the Oslo Declaration may appear to be knit picking. Because this brings up the question of the right of self-determination, failing which armed conflict as had happened in the case of Bangladesh where international jurists resolved the fight for independence as the freely expressed desire of the people of then East Pakistan being the will of the "people" because only the people, and not ethnic communities, can express such will to be free. The people of Bangladesh shall have the opportunity to register their preference for secular or religion based political parties in the forthcoming elections to be held on 29th December termed by some as "transformational". One hopes that the international community, and particularly South Asia, assailed by Islamic extremism would get the signal from the people of Bangladesh that Muslim countries can be moderate denying political and territorial space to terrorists to create havoc to innocent lives.

FAILURE IN THREAT ASSESSMENT - INDO/PAK RELATIONS

2008-12-27T12:01:00.000+05:30

As Pakistan’s civilian government took a dangerous step forward to reign in the militants its state helped to create, US continued its bombardment inside its territory, and India announced a complete overhaul of its system, ‘terrorists watch’ and warned its citizens that they may have to give up some of their 'freedom' if they want the terrorists defeated. The UN Ambassador for Pakistan explained it would have been declared a ‘terrorist state’ and the sanctions would have crippled its economy, if Pakistan didn’t agree to ban the organisations accused of the recent ‘barbaric attack’, as Dr. Manmohan Singh put it, on India. Unfortunately, Pakistan has been a cripple inside long before the Islamists started to vie for power than being just partners to military dictatorships or the occasional civilian governments, and the butchering started in earnest in Afghanistan. India’s Foreign Minister pledged for a resolute campaign for an international agreement on ‘terrorism’ and the Prime Minister gave it credence by promising, "India would not show double standard on the issue". These are of course serious statements of intent on top of the policy shift India has made in recent times about its region.

After the LeT lead raid on Mumbai, “the rape of India” described with his paintings MF.Husain one of India's greatest painters, who lives in exile for ‘artistic-transgression’, Indians unlike any other times have been discussing about Project-India with an earnest and critical eye. Questions hitherto too sensitive are asked openly, and people of all walks of life give their uncompromising responses without fear. In some cases they wore ugly masks; when equating the Muslims with Pakistan, and the Pakistanis with terrorism, whipped up by some sections of the media and political parties. Indians in general remained restrained and composed, and discussed about India, not Pakistan, analytical in their assessment of their long march, and their responsibilities as one of the leading Global players; “hatred and anger into productiveness” as Ho Chi Minh had suggested.

Their questions fall into two categories. One, immediate in nature and about the systematic approach to protect India and those who serve it, and the consequences of the steps they could take. Two, how India can avoid such events, organised within or externally, and are really about “how inclusive India is” not 'just for itself' but for the entire region. Inevitably they lead to the questions about the 'Nehru-Ambedker' political and 'Gandhi-Tagore' spiritual visions as reference axes, mapping the recent historical events as correlation points. One can understand the range of emotions and anxieties, and their extremities: they are angry at the lack of spontaneous outpouring of emotions when outrages are committed in less fashionable poorer neighbourhoods or Imphal or Guhawati compared to the noise made after Mumbai; they are confused and suspicious about their media, quick to extol the virtues of their braves, the soldiers, but only a few months ago cast them in less appealing light when they demanded some financial recompense in exchange; they were full of praise of the bravery of their guardians yet, were enraged to see them walking into the terrorist dens with five-inch pistols where well-kitted out 'modern-terrorist' waited; etc.

Indians seem are sincerely beginning to think about the Other-India, and seek a relationship with it. If this is true, then as outsiders with many expectations, and were to answer the questions India is asking itself, how would we fair? Where would our answers lead us?

Q: Does India have the right to defend itself?

A: Yes it does, without any preconditions.

Q: Does it have to worry about taking action because both India and Pakistan are nuclear powers?

A: This is a specious question.

The knowledge that India is a Nuclear power doesn’t deter Pakistan from taking actions like in Mumbai, Bangalore, etc. Why should it bother India?

The rules of engagements are different here; both don't want to use nuclear weapons even as a threat, but want to probe each other without any other conditions, or with conditions the other doesn't accept.

The whole point of Pakistan’s outward exercises are not about India, but about Pakistan itself. Just as it implodes, it explodes outwardly as a means of rightful expression of anger and injustice, but in reality searching for its own self, a sense of purpose.

It is about its survival as a state, its territorial integrity, its status as an aspiring middle ranking power with Iran challenging, and immediately, prevention of an economic meltdown.

As for India, it is about its position in the region as the superpower, not as a regional power in the region, and about its unity.

Q: Doesn’t India ripping itself apart in some of its regions?

A: Yes, true. However, the questions within India are towards unity, about inclusiveness, and empowerment.

But, the questions over its Western-border are about the nature of the state and the meaning of Pakistan itself.

We may add, it is also a process in Afghanistan, and on India's Southern flank, Sri Lanka; India is surrounded by failing or failed states. But, India cannot allow them to be completely unaccountable.

Q: Can India make much of the non-state actors, while it has swathe of territories conceded to non-state actors?

A: Yes it can. Firstly, it means many things, different type of actors. Secondly, some of the non-state actors in Pakistan and Afghanistan are involved in cross-border terrorism, and India cannot be accused of the same, the easy answer. Complicating any process towards a solution is the involvement of some elements of the Pakistani state apparatuses that either encouraged or lost control over these groups; no one is in a position to accept responsibility for such actions. In this respect, accountability may also mean several things.

Q: Aren't these superfluous arguments? Justifying India’s present positions and to mask its past involvement in the region? For example, didn’t Tamil militant groups receive India's help a while ago?

A: Yes, they did.

No, masking or justifying India’s present or past policies or involvements is not our job.

Our objective is to see whether there are any real shifts in the Indian foreign policy, particularly after the demise of the bi-polar world? And to search these changes are real and tangible or temporary and dishonest?

India has sharply changed its policy towards all its neighbours. Security and development seem to be the main planks of this drive. Which comes first depends on the quality of involvement and, more importantly, all these policies are implemented through the existing and recognised institutions. In this context, it is aggressively pursuing a friendly Statist policy towards every country in the region.

As for practical evidences of these changes, one can see that in the recent history of the civil war in Sri Lanka and the tilting of the military balance in favour of the state away from the LTTE. Indian policy changes are so fundamental and drastic the Sri Lankan military chief could not resist making derogative comments about Tamil politicians in India and taunt them to change the course directed by Delhi. Even after facing serious protests from Tamil Nadu at the provocations, and ignoring the ploy to test the unity of India, the Indian state's unflinching support for the Sri Lankan state clearly illustrates our point. Its refusal to get involved in the events to dislodge the military dictatorship in Myanmar, despite push from the West and pressure from inside shows consistency of its application. Even the Maoist takeover in Nepal didn't make its knees tremble and act as though was, "here, we may need to think differently".

Q: What has been achieved by these policy changes?

A: Evidently, nothing.

Pakistan continues its attack on India though non-state actors or directly, whenever it feels the need to. To deflect the tension it has on its Pashtuns borders, with tribal loyalties to its majority in Afghanistan, which has claim on the territory, and the pressure from the US and the West on terrorism, it would want to open its Eastern frontier time to time, a well documented ploy.

In Sri Lanka, the state now assured of itself, go on in its way to disregard what are decent and principled for India in exchange for what is needed by India; and Tamils and other minorities are at its mercy. Though much was expected from India’s Foreign Minister expected visit, now we learn that is also being cancelled, to the disappointment of Tamils.

Hardly anything worth mentioning has happened on India’s Eastern or North-eastern borders, except for the maintenance of status quo.

However, beneath this docile looking expression, India is stirring and marking a few reference points, which cannot be easily itemised, only in time will of their benefits of them. For example, what has been a thorny issue of ownership about its North Western territories has now reduced to an issue of security and terrorism.

Q: Can India be secure by investing the entire sovereignty of the people in a state?

A: No. India's sovereignty comes from its people and instituted in a very complex way. Firstly, as a country it derives its sovereignty through its regional 'nation' states, and directly though elected representatives to the centre. Secondly, at the centre these arrangements are reorganised according to the coalition put together as the government of the day. In theory and practice, whatever people think or however much it is corrupt, the present system is a guarantee that at least the nominal sovereignty of the individuals remains with the people locally.

It may be a case in point if India were going through a civil war such as that US endured, or an invasion such as Nippon devastation China encountered. However, the greatest trauma, the vast majority of the great Indian people experience, is the condition they are living in and watching their pain and sacrifice exchanged for the benefits of those already in power and economic control of their lives, other than the colonised era and the partition that followed in the North and East sixty years ago.

Policy makers, distracted by the turmoil on its western borders are increasingly becoming Statists in their arguments. Strangely, they have assigned the job of preserving the state, which they never invented or made into being, and turned their duty of 'maintaining' a state functions into an ownership and therefore, making the whole project into a state orientated regressive task. They have stopped realising their own private experiences that tells them, "when we loose sight of the pleasures the simple natures greatest assets freely give, we become attached to tasks and stop living, and everything thereafter become work".

India's assets are its multitude of people, their imagination and their perceptions of the world in all its aspects, their ability to absorb anything thrown at them and make something of it, crudely speaking in modern palaver, the human-resources. If Statism is to be the mere response to their real anxieties, and it is to be superimposed on all discussions to satisfy the urgency of today, then the danger is the true India sliding into an argument of a state rather than of its peoples.

Q: Isn't the state responsible for peoples' safety and security?

A: Yes, but it can't be everywhere.

Furthermore, it is the peoples' safety and security and not that of the state. This is semantics for the stakeholders, who have a sense of ownership and control over the state, and their lives. But, for those alienated from power, not really reaping the development dividends, those feel that they can have no effect in the society, it makes full sense.

No one is suggesting that the people themselves can run their affairs without a centrally organised regulatory body, except 'free marketers' and anarchists. Every country profess to have a democratic system are beginning to ask these same set of questions at some point; "How do we defeat the terrorists?"

What is never seems to be a question is, "What does winning or defeating means?"

When the poor, semi-illiterate and highly indoctrinated jihadi young men left Pakistan, they knew they would not return, as there is nothing worth returning to. Their lives meant nothing more than their handlers would have told them and that is in their deaths those values are found: a place in paradise, and financial compensation for their relatives. Their mission was to reduce their 'enemies' to the value of their lives, not by killing every person, which is impossible, but by making the rest broken inside and lose confidence in themselves, and perhaps making them as violent Nihilists as they were.

When a community feels it cannot function without protection, it is not a community at all. If a community feels it can trade its freedom for security or it cannot fully exercise its freedom collectively or as individuals then it has already begun to lose the sight of freedom. We are not talking about abstract or absolute freedom here, but those values any given community feel it has.

If terrorism by any means worth its salt, it would be to achieve precisely these objectives to make us loose what we hold valuable as principles and beliefs about humanity and ourselves as a first step. Perhaps if they had a second step, they may want to negotiate a political settlement, whatever that is.

Pakistan's rulers have been true Statists, and have been telling their 'citizens' why the repressive political and military conditions and why they have to sacrifice their freedom: for the safety and security it wanted for them from its enemies, especially India.

Have the Pakistanis got any form of security and safety promised for so long? How long before they are likely to enjoy the freedom Indian take for granted? Is Pakistan in a position to stop US bombing its ‘people’?

Many think India is a weak state, but how many would be prepared to live in China, which undoubtedly exhibits overt strength and resolve in order to have safety and security for its state, and very little of people or freedom?

The questions and arguments may be the same in the West, but the conditions are drastically different. Most in Europe are nation-states with homogenised population, except for 3-6% immigrants. They are economically advanced, and have some form of welfare system, that ensures dispossessed young don't end up in Madarassa equivalents. Their concepts of freedom evolved as small nation-states and are constructed through institutions during the last three centuries, largely influenced by the interactions between neighbours and therefore, administrated by the states. For the majority obedience to the centralised authority is as normal as speaking about freedom.

The people in US however, are vastly different. In their own convoluted way they are looking to be free as the Indians. Unfortunately, largely due to being European descendants they have no other knowledge, but to construct their way towards it.

Q: Then, where does India fit in, when it has so expansive an understanding on the subject of freedom?

A: India’s suffering from foreign orchestrated terror and destruction, which are fronted by non-state actors, naturally leads to the Statist logic. Its demand for institutional accountability of the non-state actors through states or other recognised forums, UN, regional bodies is reasonable and emotionally sound.

Yet there is no denying, that this all encompassing new terminologies and arguments give the state wider powers. It can now deal with any in the same manner, if they were terrorist fronts or liberation groups or other NGOs, or provide assistance to other states, which has civil conflicts. However, even this Statist perspective can offer some hope for ordinary people if as Dr. Manmohan Singh suggested, we can underpin real and practical values of human-rights, as a program of empowerment along with the issues of security. This thought, not a promises, alone give us confidence that India wouldn’t conclude that state alone can be the way with it all. We are sure India would insists human-rights as one of its basic principles to define the terminologies ‘security’ and ‘non-state actors’, as any state's dealings with its 'citizens', including its own.

Q: If the political classes in all the leading countries become Statists, what happen to the basic rights of people?

A: Disaster.

Everyone agrees, in the failing states the governments at the centre cannot and don't represent all the communities, and in fact, would be in conflict with many of them. Therefore, the non-state actors by choice or force become part of peoples’ daily live. While we accept all non-state actors must be accountable, our question is about how it should be done? How is it possible for a state to account for something, which it disregarded, campaigned against the people and causes it represented be the only institution to account for it without destroying?

What about the ‘Fund Mangers’ of the ‘money market’, who have brought the world economic system to a stand still? The world has suffered greater disaster from the terrorists than these grey, invisible men? These wo/men who manage other people’s money are more powerful non-state actors as any, but can they ever be accounted through a single state?

Q: What happens to the agreements the non-state actors may have had or precedents established with existing institutions?

A: In Sri Lanka, the Tamils are in conflict with the island’s Sinhala state for a long time, long before the rise and fall of many terminologies that describe them. Though, the present phase is presented, as a conflict between a group, the LTTE, and the state, one cannot undo all the history just by evoking a terminology. It is not just a history written in blood, sweat, and sacrifice, but murder mayhem and genocide.

Ignoring all this, for the purpose of argument, we recall it is also a history of peace talks and agreements, whether implemented or not, between a people and various groups and parties represented them over the past sixty years, thereby making the entire people as non-state actors during this period of time. Can this fact, the history, be also wiped out by this terminology and the people forced to return to the fold of the very state, which says, they do not have any demand as it belonged to the majority people, the Sinhalese?

Q: Do the non-state actors have a role to play in the future?

A: The role of the non-state actors is as vital as the centralised power India, for the people of India as much as for all other in the developing world. It is this element, as enterprisers, social-consciousness raisers, developers and empowering merchants who have brought the development India has witnessed. And it is these elements with the support of the centralised authority, which can take the development and empowerment deep inside the hinterlands, guaranteeing peace and security everyone wants.

In this sense, it is not the total loyalty what is required by any centralised authority from these non-state actors, but agreements towards peaceful co-existence and development and accountability to those effects.

The development India sees is largely induced by private enterprise and private capitalism, in which the state has a vested interest, and acts mainly as a regulator. It social policies fail to fully materialise as the politicians and the establishment ensure the allocations and provisions trickled nowhere below. The disparity and polarity in development is vast, and the predictions between the North and Southern parts of India are not promising. Even within the states, between the urban and rural developments, the disparity is growing wider in the North than in the South, where the politicians for all their corruptions and villainous behaviour seem socially more aware and accountable.

Yet, development has brought greater stability within India and considerable political unity, and has raised the quest for psychological unity, thereby more security. It can therefore argue and assert from its own experience, "What is true and worked for many of its people can also be true for others who haven't been touch by development whether they are in or outside its borders".

Q: Does it mean India helping Pakistan to become economically viable?

A: Yes, a healthy and developed Pakistan and Afghanistan is the best guarantee to prevent cross-border jihadi terrorism, not just in India, even in Europe. And a healthy caring India is absolutely vital as an immune system to prevent any infections from such interactions.

He same attitude and actions are also needed on its Southern region, where the long suffering masses in the island of Sri Lanka are waiting for their turn to develop and prosper. Having lost two or more generations to state-terrorism and counter-terrorism, and civil war, the communities are at a loss with third grade politicians and fifth grade bureaucrats managing the affairs, where the military leaders on both sides determines the real say. This is a matter that can be easily taken care of by India's Southern states, if so delegated, for the benefit of all the communities big or small, Sinhala or Tamil speaking.

Conclusion:

Project -India isn't limited within its colonial borders, and terrorism for one cannot be allowed to set the framework for Indian policies for itself or for its region.

India has seen off many devastative phases throughout is mythical existence, but this is the generation that feels it has "more to loose" than others in the past, which faced much harsher conditions than a failing state can throw at them. With this new mood, will India be prepared to be in connection with its past, and suffer more for the sake of humanity? Or could this be one of many foolish notions of India, from those looking in but not experiencing it? These questions may seem philosophical or idealistic, but we believe the answers India will arrive have serious implications for those sincerely concerned about the human-condition.

India's complexity and diversity as a people are gigantic compared to Africa, which has almost the same population. Africa has only two major religions, Christianity and Islam, and three main languages, English, Arabic and French, except for a few who spoke Spanish on its west coast. Because of these two-pronged successful cultural subversions, the African social-transformation has staggered, and is very much tribalistic than nationalistic. Imagine Africa as whole trying or forced or feel the need to live as 'one country'? It isn't strange that JBS Haldane described India “as the closest approximation to the Free world” and verified the meaning of his citizenship, “proud of being a citizen of India, which is a lot more diverse than Europe, let alone the USA, USSR, or China, and thus a better model for a possible world organization. It may of course break up, but it is a wonderful experiment. So I want to be labelled as a citizen of India (not as citizen of the world as suggested).” In these moments of fury, the tendency would be to dismiss a scientist or historian like Haldane and EP Thompson, as eccentrics incredulous to the rigours of the real world, mere idealists living in their own imagined space.

The grey clouds during Mrs. Gandhi’s emergency time, and India’s darkest hour in its modern history, the military assault on one its spiritual home, and the continuing endemic corruption in the socio-political system are all too much to account for all of us, and some started to have doubts about the ideals of the Indian-project altogether. Are we then reappraising something that is already dead? Are we simple peddlers of yesterday’s ideals when, death to all ideologies is the prediction? We wonder, can the past be so clinically cut off; to trace them and to make any deductions from them can be accused of being unscientific, unrealistic, bordering naivety?

Many historians and pundits have done India’s burial many times over. Only a few years ago we watched a documentary in which a well-spoken West Bengali Marxist expert welcomed its disintegration within a decade or two, with his own merry way to analysis. We now watch their followers violently fight their own peasants to bring in the ultimate Indian institution, the Tatas, to make economic progress to the state. Beyond all the venom of these contemporary punditry, India has survived the most turbulent of its period, the cataclysmic colonial era, and absorbed all its worth to reassess and, today reassert itself as a world economic power, a position it held prior to that time. Yet it was they, the colonialists, who had brought in the political union it never had, but its unity still to be achieved. Those of us who feel raped, helpless, and angry, can we imagine how our forefathers felt when they watched their resources being plundered, some times for no use than pure fun, animals the generations of Indian civilisation helped to preserve wiped in the name of 'sport', and beyond all these injuries, the men and women of one of the oldest civilisation treated like children, not citizens or slaves.

Today as One India demanded respect and dignity for its people from outsiders, without flexing the extra muzzles the modern India has acquired, while many in the Other-India and around its borders are left wanting, expecting India will also address them with the same favour.

Not single Indian or a government can claim to have created the Indian state. What the Northern or Southern-Tamil Emperors could not do, British achieved it; what was always there, the basic universality of an Indian, Gandhi among many others rekindled it, and the economy, the new sense of purpose for the middle India, happened not because of the state, but of globalisation. Any evolutionary process has its own course; one cannot make too much work out it. India that is imagined was there before the Brits arrived, it survived and continued its journey after they had left, and it will still be there on its way when we are also dead and gone. Even the Intelligence Report 2025 says so; they should know a thing or two better than some of us, the US for while was hell-bent on testing the Indian concept of unity and its peoples' resolve with a few test of its own.

We are convinced the ultimate destination of project-India, therefore, we don't worry about its survival or India’s unity as the self-doubts of some of those who have taken charge of its state. India is not an accident, but an evolution of a continent of people, far ahead in many aspects in perception of human condition, and their social relationships than economically advanced nations and continents. It is a people who know their beginning and end, but continually suffer as impediments are placed on their way to confuse and complicate their journey. If invasions and raids and barbaric attacks on its people are the impediments, some form of tests, then the reactions in the same vein would be an attack on India's universal-self, its soul; no outsider, but themselves can undermine that fundamental notion of Indianess.

It is logical and practical to propose its systemised security can only be implemented through regional hubs. It is a fact and an evolving historical perspective that Indian concept of democracy, freedom and empowerment are all intertwined are developed and instituted through its local and regional socio-economic structures. The so called external events that affect the Indians as a whole originate, felt more seriously and suffer the consequences more within its regions than those living on the other end. Isn’t it therefore, logical and practical that the so called external policies are done through its regional institutions under the centralised bodies?

It is with this confidence we ask India, what are its future decisions going to be? Not the immediate policy directives on cross-border terrorism, TADA, its proposals to ‘deter’ terrorism and the like, but about itself in connection to the region around it? Can modern India build high iron-fences around its shiny new citadels to keep its own 'unwanted' and the poor away? In the manner, can it build a security-wall around its seas and land borders to keep the people out, who are in every sense connected to it, in the name of terrorism?

We wait with confidence than mere hope.