Obama, the political creature, surrounded by the same

ANALYSIS: "A fearsome foursome: America; As Barack Obama struggles to put his presidency on track, concerns are growing about the extent to which he relies on the views of a remarkably small number of loyal advisers," by Edward Luce, Financial Times, 4 February 2010.

The danger with this quartet: they don't know how to separate advice on policy from advice on politics.

And they're the key inner circle.

What constitutes U.S. leadership on new global bank regulations

WORLD NEWS: "US impetus drives bank regulators: Four main ideas are at the centre of proposed change," by Patrick Jenkins and Brooke Masters, Financial Times, 4 February 2010.

The four ideas:

1) the extension of existing regulatory initiatives

2) the rewriting of rules around different capital instruments (like bank bonds)

3) the introduction of contingency capital planning (e.g., putting bondholders at risk of conversion into equity if a bank's capital strength falls below a predefined level, although more radical proposals exist)

4) a full-scale adoption at the level of the Group of 20 countries of a form of the Obama levy (0.15% on any bank balance sheet above $50b--sort of a pre-tax to fund subsequent expected rescues).

The global levy is considered the one most likely to receive widespread and eager adoption.

China: peak saving?

WORLD NEWS: "China Aims to Transform a Nation of Savers Into Spenders," by Andrew Batson, Wall Street Journal, 7 January 2010.

With the worst of the crisis now past, we are told that "the government is putting more resources into subsidies to support consumer spending," shifting consumption in the future to consumption in the present, as one Chinese academic put it.

The average Chinese consumer, we are told, likes the subsidies, but is becoming increasingly demanding regarding the amounts. Whatever pent-up demand there was, observers agree, was consummated in 2009, so it'll be harder to get people to buy in 2010--all things being equal.

What the freak-out artists fear most: the passage of time that allows things to work out

OPINION: "Seven Myths About Iran," by Bret Stephens, Wall Street Journal, 2 February 2010.

WORLD NEWS: "US vows more help for allies in Mideast: Assistance to keep Iran threat in check; Defence to rely more on partners," by Daniel Dombey, Jeremy Lemer and Andrew England, Financial Times, 2 February 2010.

As readers will note, I sometimes find Stephens quite reasonable and other times a shameless fear-monger. This is his latest in his ongoing efforts to convince everybody that U.S. military strikes on Iran's nuclear facilities would simply be fabulous. Naturally, Osirak is invoked.

The list recast as affirmative statements, with some editorial comments:

1) strikes would accomplish plenty, buying years (difficulty is not discussed, nor collateral damage)

2) a strike would not rally anybody to the discredited regime

3) sanctions will work--this time!

4) we cannot live with a nuclear Iran, because it could cause Turkey and Saudi Arabia and Egypt to go nuclear too; best for Israel to maintain its WMD monopoly, because look at all the peace and stability that's achieved (actually, it meant Israel was never invaded again--a good lesson for Tehran)

5) it's not better to wait on regime change from within Iran; speed is preferred, no matter the cost (our record on this score in the region being so positive)

6) any support to Iran's demonstrators will help more than hurt (actually, I like this one)

7) Israel will eventually do the dirty deed for us (And be equally impotent, but hey! Let's get out in front of Israel on this one so we can emphasize our impotence on. the subject!).

If you read me regularly on this subject, you know I don't find anything magical or wobble-inducing about the Shia Bomb, or Tehran's tired authoritarianism, or Ahmadinejad's blowhard rhetoric, or other regional powers piling on once Iran gets the bomb. I leave such hyperbolic logic to the End Timers. I believe this pathway is beyond our control--all brave nonsense aside--and that this represents a familiar danger and familiar strategic journey, which we can handle, and will handle, because we have no choice. We made our choices and now we deal with them

I don't believe in making WMD the center of our foreign policy--much less our grand strategic take on the future of globalization. I think that approach is reductio ad absurdum.

I find no "global view" in this logic, despite the column's moniker. Stephens attempts to sell us a war that even the "threatened" Israelis (as in, Ahmadinejad's great diversion) are too smart to embrace.

But yeah, if I'm the Saudis (the real target of any influence derived from having nukes--a true chimera if ever there was one), I'm reaching all right, making whatever deals are necessary to line up cooperation with Turkey, who logically feels it should be at the resulting negotiating table.

And if it doesn't work out and Iran does something truly unforgivable? Then we simply torch the entire country, just like we said we would. And we get away with it just fine. Meanwhile, Israel, with its sophisticated missile defenses and several hundred warheads, stays on the map.

We're Americans, and we approve of this mission

DISASTER IN HAITI: "Most support long-term U.S. role," by Ken Dilanian, USA Today, 29-31 January 2010 International Edition.

As of a late-January poll, 60% of Americans said U.S. troops and relief workers should stay in Haiti "until life is more or less back to normal"--however crappily defined, one assumes.

Gates objects, courteously

ARTICLE: Gates Voices Concern About Warship Sale to Russia, By THOM SHANKER, New York Times, February 8, 2010

To me, this is Gates feeling the need, as SECDEF, to officially register our concern, but doing so in a restrained fashion because he knows how hypocritical it seems when we're selling plenty of the same sort of capabilities to Taiwan.

Does America still do bankruptcy better than anybody else?

BUSINESS: "Making a success of failure: America's enlightened treatment of bankrupt firms remains a model to the world," by Shumpeter, The Economist, 9 January 2010.

Banyan argues that "America's enlightened attitude to corporate bankruptcy is designed to put economic resources back to productive use as quickly as possible."

Chapter 11 allows the viable companies to restructure under court supervision, and Chapter 7 allows the "terminally ill" to liquidate and pay off creditors as quickly as possible.

The whole ethos is not penalizing but treating the offenders as "unfortunates who should be given a second chance." This is why we maintain such a high degree of entrepreneurism.

The good news? "A growing number of countries are following America's lead" (even China), once again proving my notion that America's most influential export is its rules.

Hard scientists = hard revolutionaries = harsh states

INTERNATIONAL: "Universities and Islam: Hearts, minds and Mecca; The rising profile of Muslim students in the Western world," The Economist, 9 January 2010.

We are told a new book will argue that a surprising number of terrorists are not poor and like to study engineering. Personally, I thought everybody already knew that, with this Abdulmutallab just the latest in a very long line.

Why not poor? Because they've got enough money to go abroad for an education they can't get in their repressive homelands--duh!

Hard scientists versus soft: the hard ones are far more likely to believe they can engineer (pun intended) great social change--the arrogant technocrat. The truth is, most social scientists know too much to act, while the hard ones know just enough--thus the frightening leap-frogging ambitions of most revolutions and their "scientific" ways. Let the social scientists take over and you're more likely to end up as Norway--pleasantly social-democratic and a friendly sort of mommy-state. Let the hard types take over and you can easily end up with a scary Big Brother with ambitions that require a totalitarian bent.

As this author (Steffen Hertog) rightly points out, it ain't about bomb-making, but a "mindset that likes rigidity and binary choices."

Redefining health aid

INTERNATIONAL: "Innovation in global health: A spoonful of ingenuity; New ideas for raising money for medical care--and spending it," The Economist, 9 January 2010.

The evolution of aid: it started with governments and inter-governmental bodies, then charities stepped in, often led by celebrities or entrepreneurs, and finally private donors stepped up, pooling their resources often with governments.

Not a lot of good accomplished, and the flow seems woefully insufficient.

A sense of the change: in 1990 2/3rds of $5.6B spend on health assistance came from governments. By 2007, the funding increased to $22M, with most still coming from the governments, but supposedly the "yeast" that leavened this bread was "non-traditional" private financing from foundations like the Gates and other charities, whose total was more than $5.6B.

In general, it's hard to argue against Sachs' notion that we need to spend more aid on health, prioritizing it (as I noted in Great Powers), so the more varied the fund flow, hopefully, the more competitive the ideas--as this piece argues.

How can you call JPII a saint?

ARTICLE: Pope Quiz: Is Every Pontiff a Saint?,
By DAVID GIBSON, New York Times, January 16, 2010

It is unimaginable to me that the Pope (John Paul II) who oversaw the sex-abuse scandal in the U.S. could ever be considered for sainthood.

Although John Paul II is a lock for sainthood, serious questions about his administration of the church are emerging as the clergy sexual abuse scandals reveal how he neglected the mundane but critical tasks of being pope.

Mundane? Neglected? What an amazing spin!

The guy sits atop a vast criminal conspiracy to deny justice to a stunning number of victims within his church, and this is slated to be just a footnote to his brilliant, "saintly" career?

If we want to fight them...

ARTICLE: Foreign Languages Fade in Class -- Except Chinese, By SAM DILLON, New York Times, January 20, 2010

Clearly a sign that the American people are cruising for a bruising with China!

Substandard NYT editorial

OP-ED: Iran's Two-Edged Bomb, By ADAM B. LOWTHER, New York Times, February 8, 2010

I have to admit, I find the logic here truly weird. I can't believe the NYT accepted this. It's like a poster-child for security analysts who step beyond their knowledge base.

(Thanks: Robert Frommer)

Mall of America: Nickelodeon indoor amusement park

A Bad Time to Wreck Our Relationship with China

Throughout its first year in office, the Obama administration has completed numerous course corrections across the breadth of American foreign policy. Demonstrating the power of a much-needed apology, President Barack Obama's new-look foreign policy was charming enough to earn him a Nobel Peace Prize. But it struck many observers as a change in style, not substance: Many of Obama's "changes" merely extended or expanded upon those made during the last two years of the Bush administration, following the repudiation of the 2006 mid-term Congressional elections.

Continue reading this week's New Rules column at WPR.

Great--inspiring--piece on China in Africa

THE WORLD 2010: "Chinese investment has put Africans in the driving seat: Africa; The continent can avoid the mistakes of the past," by William Wallis, Financial Times, 27 January 2010.

Very concise and dense in its useful info. Used it some in my Africa mining piece last week for WPR.

Bits:

• bilateral China-Africa trade rose tenfold 1998-2008, now over $100b

• Chinese funding of infrastructure in Africa now rivals the lending by the World Bank and IMF

• a line I lifted: "In some African countries there are now more Chinese immigrants than there were Europeans during colonial times."

• the West pulled back its growing African investments with the crash, but China pushed on, putting it in a great position now

• the more China values Africa, the more it's undervalued assets appreciate in the eyes of the rest of the world

• China's push has lured the rest of the BRICs to increase their own efforts

• all this Chinese infrastructure building does remove plenty of development bottlenecks

• the more the Chinese trade with Africa, the more competitive and middle-class African nations become, encouraging continued evolution toward democracy there--meaning China, while preferring autocrats, isn't actually exporting its one-party state model.

Great, tight piece.

End line: "This great game, however, is very much Africa's to lose."

Important take-away, in my mind: the "settlers" are already there, just waiting to be formally admitted into the economy, and China's providing that spark.

Whatever the missionaries are guilty or not guilty about, do not use the term orphans casually

WORLD NEWS: "Missionary Case Illuminates Plight of Haiti's Orphans," by David Gauthier-Villars, Joel Millman, and Miriam Jordan, Wall Street Journal, 4 February 2010.

Point is, not every kid in an orphanage is an orphan in the technical sense (i.e., one or both parents dead). A lot of kids in orphanages in developing and emerging economies are those abandoned by families that do not have the economic wherewithal to keep them--or the sort of orphans you'd find in a Dickens novel of Victorian England.

Calling them "economic" orphans, however, cheapens the distress involved. Abandoning is a tough call, but then so is watching your kid starve.

The (foreign) kids are alright!

U.S. NEWS: "U.S. Reels in Foreign Ph.D.s: Despite Fears of a Post-9/11 Drop, Most Science, Engineering Post-Grads Have Stayed," by David Wessel, Wall Street Journal, 27 January 2010.

At least until the recession started, foreign-born PhDs continued to stay here in droves after getting their degree. Rising Asia and the downturn will have naturally put a dent in that trend, but the numbers are impressive: 62% who got PhDs in 2002 were still here in 2007. Go back to 1997 and the percentage still here in 2007 is still 60%, so that seems like a pretty steady number.

Foreigners account for 40% of all science and engineering PhDs currently working in the U.S., with an even larger fraction found in math and computing.

Underlying truth, once you keep them for about a decade, you tend to keep them for good. The reverse culture shock is just too much to contemplate.

The particulars are interesting, suggesting we could endure quite a drop in our biggest sources (China and India) and still feature high percentages in both categories.

Of the 2002-to-2007 stay-behind cohort, China had the biggest number at over 2,100, Korea next at over 800, then India at over 600 and Taiwan at over 400. China's stay-behind percentage was 92% for that bracket, while India's was 81%.

And yet you look at the mature Taiwan and South Korea bonds, and there you find low 40s percentages.

Logically, India and China head in that direction, but are replaced in volume by the next wave of emerging economies.

Apply your realism to Iran's bomb pursuit

ARTICLE: Preparing for a Nuclear Iran, By Arash Aramesh, Diplomatic Courier, February 8, 2010

Reality begins to dawn, thus the discussion becomes less "defeatist."

"What, you want to just give Iran the bomb?!?!?!"

(Via WPR's Media Roundup)

Dogs and cats living together

ARTICLE: Iran's 30-Year War on Drugs, By Matthew C. DuPee, World Press Review, 10 Feb 2010

Fascinating piece on a little known phenomenon--and quiet point of cooperation between the U.S. and Iran on Afghanistan.

Really working with tribes in Afghanistan

ARTICLE: Jim Gant, the Green Beret who could win the war in Afghanistan, By Ann Scott Tyson, Washington Post, January 17, 2010

PAPER: One Tribe at a Time, By Jim Gant, 2 December 2009

I received a copy of the "One Tribe at a Time" paper a while back and found it compelling and straightforward, but wanted to wait on blogging it until I got some context via a third party. It comes now in a great piece by Ann Scott Tyson, who wrote on me back in 2005.

I excerpt a chunk here, because it's so good:

It was the spring of 2003, and Capt. Jim Gant and his Special Forces team had just fought their way out of an insurgent ambush in Afghanistan's Konar province when they heard there was trouble in the nearby village of Mangwel. There, Gant had a conversation with a tribal chief -- a chance encounter that would redefine his mission in Afghanistan and that, more than six years later, could help salvage the faltering U.S. war effort.

Malik Noorafzhal, an 80-year-old tribal leader, told Gant that he had never spoken to an American before and asked why U.S. troops were in his country. Gant, whose only orders upon arriving in Afghanistan days earlier had been to "kill and capture anti-coalition members," responded by pulling out his laptop and showing Noorafzhal a video of the World Trade Center towers crumbling.

That sparked hours of conversation between the intense 35-year-old Green Beret and the elder in a tribe of 10,000. "I spent a lot of time just listening," Gant said. "I spoke only when I thought I understood what had been said."

In an unusual and unauthorized pact, Gant and his men were soon fighting alongside tribesmen in local disputes and against insurgents, at the same time learning ancient tribal codes of honor, loyalty and revenge -- codes that often conflicted with the sharia law that the insurgents sought to impose. But the U.S. military had no plans to leverage the Pashtun tribal networks against the insurgents, so Gant kept his alliances quiet.

No longer. In recent months, Gant, now a major, has won praise at the highest levels for his effort to radically deepen the U.S. military's involvement with Afghan tribes -- and is being sent back to Afghanistan to do just that. His 45-page paper, "One Tribe at a Time," published online last fall and circulating widely within the U.S. military, the Pentagon and Congress, lays out a strategy focused on empowering Afghanistan's ancient tribal system. Gant believes that with the central government still weak and corrupt, the tribes are the only enduring source of local authority and security in the country.

"We will be totally unable to protect the 'civilians' in the rural areas of Afghanistan until we partner with the tribes for the long haul," Gant wrote.

A decorated war veteran and Pashto speaker with multiple tours in Afghanistan, Gant had been assigned by the Army to deploy to Iraq in November. But with senior military and civilian leaders -- including Defense Secretary Robert M. Gates; Gen. Stanley McChrystal, the top U.S. commander in Afghanistan; and Gen. David Petraeus, the head of U.S. Central Command -- expressing support for Gant's views, he was ordered instead to return to Afghanistan later this year to work on tribal issues.

"Maj. Jim Gant's paper is very impressive -- so impressive, in fact, that I shared it widely," Petraeus said, while McChrystal distributed it to all commanders in Afghanistan. One senior military official went so far as to call Gant "Lawrence of Afghanistan."

The abrupt about-face surprised the blunt-spoken major. "I couldn't believe it," Gant said in a recent interview, recalling how his orders were canceled just days before he was set to deploy to Iraq. "How do I know they are serious? They contacted me. I am not a very nice guy. I lead men in combat. I am not a Harvard guy. You don't want me on your think tank."

Gant, who sports tattoos on his right arm featuring Achilles and the Chinese characters for "fear no man," is clearly comfortable with the raw violence that is part of his job. An aggressive officer, he is known to carry triple the ammunition required for his missions. (One fellow soldier referred to this habit as a "Gantism.") But he is equally at ease playing for hours with Afghan children or walking hand-in-hand with tribesmen, as is their custom.

It is an old COIN lesson relearned time and again: you really have to connect with the locals if you want to fight alongside them instead of for them.

Gant seems like an amazing guy, but the U.S. military has a long and distinguished history of finding amazing people when it's absolutely needed.

A very gratifying story.

Gant's preamble in his paper gives you a sense of his direct tone:

I am not a professional writer. Any mistakes in formatting, spelling, quoting, etc. are mine alone.

I am not implying by writing this paper that anyone has "got it wrong" or that I have all the right answers. I don't.

I started writing this paper in January of '09 prior to the "New Afghanistan Plan." Much has changed since then. It is an extremely difficult and elusive situation in Afghanistan.

This paper is about tactical employment of small, well-trained units that, when combined with a larger effort, will have positive strategic implications.

As getting-into-the-weeds material goes, the paper is exceptionally easy to connect back to strategic considerations. It just has that very easily-accessed logic that's viral (the paper's motto is "fight tactically, think strategically").

Naturally, I find the "Sitting Bull" analogy fascinating.

Read through Gant's narrative and then remember that he had all his discovery and success working with just six U.S. personnel at his side.

(Via WPR's Media Roundup)