UAE and Iran at odds

ARTICLE: Three Tiny Islands Pit Iran Against the Arab World, by Kourosh Ziabari, The Media Line, November 15, 2009

Makes you wonder if we have the PG makings of Quemoy and Matsu.

(Via WPR's Media Roundup)

A small Afghan victory

ARTICLE: Afghanistan exports apples to India, By Greig Johnston, Fruitnet, 13 November 2009

Recalling my wife noting way back when, in late 1990s, she started seeing Bosnian strawberries in the grocery stores in RI.

Note how Afghan apples sell for 4X the domestic price when shipped to India--a huge market almost right next door.

(Thanks: jarrod.myrick)

Tom around the web

+ Valin linked the TED video.
+ Joey K cited "Why We Should Stay in Afghanistan."
+ Whitney Leach cited "The Man between War and Peace."
+ HG's WORLD cited Tom on Chinese communists (to wit, there aren't any ;-)
+ Ergun Özgen cited PNM on the dollar and euro.
+ Nikolas K. Gvosdev linked The Next 'Berlin Wall Moment'.
+ Orhan Çelik cited PNM re: the 2010 QDR.
+ zenpundit is reading 'The Shia Revivial' on Tom's recommendation.

The basic reality of America's limits to do the SysAdmin work

Even if fewer troops are sent, or their mission is modified, the rough formula used by the White House, of about $1 million per soldier a year, appears almost constant.

So the math is easy: 40k troops for Afghanistan equals $40B.

This number has been around for a while, and I should have used it in all my books to make the point plain: We can play Leviathan given our force structure, but we are inherently limited by the same regarding the follow-on SysAdmin stuff, hence my oft-stated line that "America writes checks with its Leviathan that it can't possibly cash with its SysAdmin forces."

One answer is to build in the direction of the SysAdmin, of course, but to do so in sufficient fashion would make the Leviathan too small, thus my argument from day one that the answer is to shift the old burden sharing arguments from the Leviathan (where little exists anyway) to the SysAdmin (where our allies are far more comfortable operating anyway).

Extending the logic further: since our old allies (Europe, Industrialized Asia) typically can't muster the necessary ROE (rules of engagement), because SysAdmin work ain't all passing out food packets, we need to expand the pool of allies to include people willing to kill and sacrifice in defending globalization's expanding networks (colonialism to the small-minded who believe people should be left alone to enjoy their pristine poverty).

At that point, you're talking logically about the rising pillars with expanding economic interests--meaning the incentivized.

These states will typically claim, "I don't want to get involved with such nasty stuff. Everybody loves me! Leave it to the Americans."

But, in truth, if you're an agent of globalization's advance, eventually the enemies of that advance come looking for you, so given enough time and enough hassles, the motivation will arise. Why? You like your future more than you're willing to preserve THEIR past.

Then, in the final calculation, you get past the hyperbole and nonsense and realize that the opponents of connectivity fall into two, rather small but still potent camps: 1) the dictators that must maintain it to maintain their power; and 2) the fundamentalists who must detach from this "evil" assimilation process that liberates women, "ruins" kids, and gives people all sorts of "dangerous" ideas.

Do-able?

Not with our current set of allies. But when the entirety of the Core is considered? Absolutely.

Hard to strategize when you're freaking out

OP-ED: China Curbs Its Appetite, By PHILIP BOWRING, New York Times, November 16, 2009

Excellent piece on China's recent spending splurge that provides much needed perspective.

Opening line is a killer:

The bigger the doubts about the West's prospects, the greater become the assumptions about China's economic power.

A hard time to think in grand strategic terms, because the freak-out factor in America is so high and pervasive right now.

(Via WPR's Media Roundup)

Africa needs multinational economies

ARTICLE: Some African countries are just not viable, says philanthropist, By Daniel Howden, The Independent, 17 November 2009

Some truer words were never spoken:

A month after withholding a $5m African leadership prize because there was no suitable recipient, the wealthy philanthropist Mo Ibrahim has caused another stir by saying that some countries on the continent are too small to survive.

While most African leaders shy away from criticising each other, the telecoms billionaire, born in Sudan, has used his fortune to puncture this cosy consensus. "Something is drastically wrong. I think we have the right to ask our leaders: are they really serious?" he told a conference on good governance in Tanzania. "Who are we to think that we can have 53 tiny little countries and be ready to compete with China, India, Europe, the Americans? It is a fallacy."

Addressing an audience that included the Tanzanian President Jakaya Kikwete and the Senegalese singer Youssou N'dour, he added: "Some of our countries, and I'm really sorry to say this, are just not viable."

For Africa to thrive as it's progressively integrated into globalization's buyer and producer networks, countries there will have to avail themselves of opportunities for collective bargaining, meaning some sort of multinational architectures will need to be pursued. Forget the "state" concept, I say, and lead with the economics.

(Via WPR's Media Roundup)

I "read" Watchmen--finally

The ultimate cut of The Watchmen came out recently and we got it. Other than Star Trek, it's the only other movie that really caught my attention so far this year. I saw it twice in IMAX and then once on DVD when it came out a while ago.

I think I have seen Star Trek almost ten times already.

This ultimate cut version includes the "Black Freighter" comic within the comic as animated segments interspersed throughout the movie roughly as they were interspersed throughout the original 12 comics (later combined to make a graphic novel). It adds something, but not a whole lot to the movie, which I love more each time I watch it.

Then I find the additional bonus discs within this version (I already have the digital copy on my iPod) and come across the simply animated video version of the book, which replicates the original artwork, plus presents all the balloon text. It's read by a single narrator who does all the voices. The motion is minimal, meant to replicate the movement of your eyes over the original comic book pages. Each chapter is done up as a half-hour program, beautifully rendered. The total series runs six hours. It makes you realize what a straightforward adaptation the film was, and yet how some significant changes pop up here and there.

Watching the novel in this form is truly fascinating, especially Chapter IV: The Watchmaker. Amazingly, the crudely animated version of the original text is actually more mesmerizing than the truly poetic film version--especially in conveying Dr. Manhattan's experiencing of all time simultaneously.

So I finally get around to "reading" the original comix--or actually have them read to me (although I find I read all the balloons, just like I was reading the comic; it's just that I can actually hear the voice in my head--outside my head).

I can now see why the original comix excited people so much, and why filmmakers were drawn to the challenge. I appreciate the effort behind the film version all the more.

It's 12:12. In 56 minutes I will fall asleep. Six hours ago I put up the Christmas tree with Vonne Mei. I post this blog.

Vonne tells me tonight that my face has been subtly altered by my recent surgery. It's thinner and smoother than it has been in years, she says, making me look a lot more like I did when she met me. I am skeptical and yet cannot discount her perceptions. I think my face became increasingly subject to deep and pervasive inflammation over the past several years. I see pictures of myself from the past few months where I am shocked at how bloated my face had become and I can see what she's saying about its appearance now. It's as if reassembling myself was the first trick I learned after the surgery.

I tell Vonne I will love her always.

It's June 1982 and Vonne and I approach each other on our ten-speed bikes behind Witte Hall at the University of Wisconsin. It's 2pm on a Sunday afternoon and for the last time in my life, I experience loneliness. We circle each other in anticipation. We're meeting at this pre-arranged time to go see a movie. It will be our first date--Bladerunner.

It's late March 2004 and I'm typing one of my first blog posts after midnight from my father's hospital room in Madison WI. He will die days later. On 1 April I deliver his eulogy. Three weeks into the future I am describing him to Brian Lamb in a TV studio. The next day "The Pentagon's New Map" is published.

It's May 2026 and I'm watching my sixth child graduate from high school.

Twenty-seven years, five months, and seven days after dating Vonne for the first time, my face now suddenly resembles what it looked like in 1982--at least to her.

I tell Vonne I will love her always.

The photograph falls to the sand at my feet . . ..

Man, what a massive screw-up by the Secret Service!

I don't care what these two jokers plead. They should be arrested and charged.

It's not just willfully accessing an event with the president, but one featuring the leader of another country--one that has lost leaders to assassinations more regularly than we. This isn't Outer Slobovia but India, one of the top handful of powers in the world.

I say, to hell with the reality-show rationale offered up. Throw the book at these two, so that when they cash in with their movie and book deals, they have to turn all the money over in fines--following their stint in jail.

Why so harsh?

Do you want to witness these game being played over and over again? Making our country and government look stupid in the process?

The Secret Service really has to pick up its game, as that was a seriously embarrassing lapse of security.

Sure China's impacted Africa

OP-ED: China in Africa: Soft power, hard results, By Loro Horta, The Daily Star, November 16, 2009

Great summary of China's impact on Africa to date, and the growing friction from below:

Building upon interviews from a broad range of Africans, it is shown that elites generally favor China's presence in the region while the lower classes do not. Much of the local disapproval results from Chinese companies using limited amounts of domestic labor - particularly in relation to Western companies - as well as the flood of sometimes illegal Chinese immigrants to Africa selling cheap goods. Environmental degradation caused by Chinese companies is also an issue. Importantly, such divided opinions on China's presence in Africa, if not addressed, could have a detrimental effect on what could be a positive relationship - China has been investing in infrastructure in the region, while the West has not.

About as accurately succinct as you can get: Overall good impact--just not good enough.

(Via WPR's Media Roundup)

African problems that won't go away on their own

ARTICLE: Somalia's Islamist militants spill into neighboring countries, By Max Delany
and Scott Baldauf

Good exploration of why we needed an Africom: problems like Somalia don't go away on their own, even as we cannot commit significant resources to deal with them.

(Via WPR's Media Roundup)

T-day treat

At Nona's for dinner. No TV, so wait to relive Pack game via DVR once home.

Treat at Nona's: surprise visit by bro-in-law Mark, professional singer/cabaret artist who is 1-man band of instruments (he is Berkeley Jazz trained pianist)/samplers/feeds/etc. So we enjoy an opportunity for uber-pro karaoke over the day--rocking out with professional sound..

Boom boom boom with the Black Eyed Peas up now, with daughter dueling Mark on vocals. Pretty damn cool.

Another good sign on Taiwan-mainland relations

INTERNATIONAL FINANCE: "Taiwan, China Reach Finance-Sector Deals," by Perris Lee Choon Siong, Wall Street Journal, 17 November 2009.

Long awaited, these deals open each side's financial sectors up to the others' companies, a bit of globalization imported.

Why do Taiwanese banks want this: as a small island nation, their local market is already saturated, so to grow, Taiwanese banks need access to more potential customers, and the mainland is an obvious choice.

Sigh! What I wouldn't give for a good carrier-missile standoff in the Straits.

No surprise: this time the Alabama has a private security force

WORLD NEWS: "Armed U.S. Ship Repels Attack by Somali Pirates," by Sarah Childress, Wall Street Journal, 19 November 2009.

The Maersk Alabama suffers basically the same attack as last time, but this time a private security force does just enough to scare off the skiffs of pirates.

Nobody in the industry wants to go this route, but quietly, more and more do.

What is stategraft?

A more concise and revealing definition of Chinese soft-power statecraft.

If the New Core makes the new rules...

ARTICLE: Lula backs Iran's nuclear programme, Al Jazeera, November 24, 2009

Well, that's the final BRIC heard from. Now we know that none of them share our obsession with Iran's nuclear program.

Sadly, no surprise on Israeli settlements as Netanyahu blows Obama off completely

WORLD NEWS: "U.S.-Israeli Differences Widen Over Settlements," by Jay Solomon, Wall Street Journal, 18 November 2009.

Basically, our "widening differences" consist of Washington asking for a building freeze and Israel completely ignoring that call.

Meanwhile, we're encouraged to wage a pre-emptive war on Israel's behalf vis-a-vis Iran.

Man, I'm feeling incentivized!

Why it isn't worth worrying about Chavez

WORLD NEWS: "Chavez's Populism Faces Test As Venezuelan Economy Sinks," by Darcy Crowe and David Luhnow, Wall Street Journal, 18 November 2009.

Everybody around the planet is picking up steam as this economic recovery expands--except our top-down socialists friend in Venezuela, who continues to run his economy into the ground.

Chavez grabbed all the oil money and disincentivized anybody else in the economy to stick their necks out and take any risks in the meantime. So when oil prices collapse, he's got nowhere to turn.

So Chavez's approval ratings dip below 50%.

Expect more desperate acts designed to divert the public's attention and justify more state control as Chavez heads nervously toward legislative elections next year.

But no, no big whup in a strategic sense. Containment is not particularly required when you're talking an idiot of this caliber.

A sense of how deeply the Gap has permeated U.S. military thinking

PAPER: The MAGAI‚Ñ¢ Construct and the Northern Distribution Network, By Stephen Benson, Center for Strategic and International Studies, Nov 16, 2009

First, I get sent this piece by Stephen Benson, who makes a great case about an infrastructure "gap" that exists in the area around Afghanistan. Fits very nicely with my concept that Afghanistan could be an "Indiana" of RRs in that part of the world (see the embedded UN railroad map in the PDF).

Benson then combines his "modern activities gap" concept with the "arch of instability," which he incorrectly ascribes to Zbigniew Brzezinki (not in the sense that Brzezinski didn't describe an "arc," just that he called it an "arc" and not an "arch").

In figure 5 of the piece he overlays his MAG concept on the "arch of instability" depiction as presented by the Marines in pubs starting in 2009.

Here's where he mucks the pedigree:

A post-Cold War geopolitical construct called the "arch of instability" (AI) captures them. First articulated by former national security adviser Zbigniew Brzezinski in the 1980s, the AI has been depicted in a number of ways depending on the factors used to define instability. A clear representation of the AI comes from the U.S. Marine Corps' strategic perspective as expressed in its top strategic documents, shown in figure 5.

Take a look at the shape on the map: it's my Non-Integrated Gap to a "T": wrapping around to get Peru, Bolivia and Paraguay in South America but stopping short of Mexico, cutting through the Med but swinging around to get the Balkans (per my old depiction, but no longer on my updated map), and then rising to get the Caucasus and Central Asia but magically wrapping around India, only to swing back up to get the SE Asia littoral, then arcing around the island chains, cutting just above Australia, capturing all of Africa EXCEPT South Africa, and then swinging up in the Atlantic to come back to South America just above Brazil.

Where this "mistake"/deep absorption started was the Mark Mazzetti U.S. News & World Report piece of October 2003 called "Global Cops: Inside the Pentagon's New Plan to Police the World's Most Dangerous Places" (an interesting title to me, because our first draft of the PNM article for Esquire called it the "Pentagon's New Plan," later switched to "Map"). The piece was organized around a big, 2-page map spread of the world that reconstructed my Gap delineation exactly, citing me in the credits, but the name of the concept was the "arc of instability," furthering the conflation of ideas.

Brzezinki's idea was an arc running from the east side of Africa up through the Gulf and then into Afghanistan. It was Soviet centric and made no arguments about "connectivity" or anything like that (this was the 1980s). Since then, the "arc" concept often gets depicted as basically my Gap with the title "arc" and sometime as a more restricted region running from the Horn into Western-most China (so, including the Central Asian Republics).

But this was the first time I came across a use of the Gap map with the title "arch of instability," which Benson, again, incorrectly traces back to Brzezinski even though it's correct to state he first made arguments about a zone that included Afghanistan (again, WRT Soviet influence in a Cold War context) but incorrect to state that he ever made an "arc" map that included--say--Paraguay or the Balkans or West Africa, etc.

So I Google "arch of instability" with Marines and get a piece on Jim Mattis and his work at Joint Forces Command: http://www.nctimes.com/news/local/article_66919dbf-0a68-55ea-9e68-4b2d57380e5c.html

Mattis has been involved in the development of a Center for Advanced Operational and Cultural Learning for officers and senior enlisted men and woman. The center has divided the world into subregions that Mattis said are referred to as the "arch of instability."

And now I know how the message was translated and embedded to the point that it's basically how the Marine Corps now views the world.

As I've written many times, if you obsess over the credit, you'll limit the spread. Naturally, I very pleased to see the Gap concept live on in official USMC planning docs, whatever it's called. And having Mattis as the agent of translation is superb, because I respect him immensely.

I do get pissed when the concept is conflated with Brzezinski's "arc" because my concept is a lot bigger geographically and truly is a post-Cold War construct, when his was decidedly not, but given the overlap of geography at the center, such things are inevitable.

It's just when Benson trademarks the MAGAI concept (modern activities gap + arch of instability) and then cites Brzezinski and uses a concept that close to my definitions of the Gap (a place where there is a relative dearth of modern activities/connectivity/nets/etc.) that it gets a bit disappointing that Benson did not get the pedigree more correct.

Cops and judges who want to legalize drugs

Tom Angell wrote:

Tom,

Thanks so much for your great WPR piece on drug policy reform developments in Latin America.

I hope you'll continue to cover this issue as developments happen (more frequently now than ever, it seems), and I thought you might be interested in hearing about a group of police, prosecutors, judges, FBI/DEA agents and others from around the world who now want to legalize and regulate all drugs after they fought on the front lines of the "war on drugs" and saw that prohibition only serves to make addiction and market violence problems worse.

The 15,000 members of Law Enforcement Against Prohibition (LEAP) are actively working to change the debate on the drug policy issue so that options like legalization are on the table for serious discussion.

Just to give you an idea of a handful of our speakers and their perspectives:

* We've got Terry Nelson, who spent 30 years with Customs, Border Patrol and Homeland Security doing anti-narcotics work in the US and south of our borders, reaching down through Mexico and into South America, where he saw how keeping drugs illegal fills the pockets of some very dangerous international cartels and terrorists, just as alcohol prohibition funded Al Capone and other gangsters. Terry recently had an op-ed published in the Houston Chronicle: http://www.chron.com/disp/story.mpl/politics/6345180.html

* There's Norm Stamper, who immediately preceded Obama's White House drug czar (Gil Kerlikowske) as Seattle's chief of police. Norm is very concerned with the racism inherent in drug law formulation and enforcement, calling it "the single most devastating, dysfunctional social policy since slavery." He was featured in this Nicholas D. Kristof column in NYT: http://www.nytimes.com/2009/06/14/opinion/14kristof.html

* Neill Franklin is a 32-year law enforcement veteran who spent 23 years with the Maryland State Police (leading the drug division's education and training) and then moved to Baltimore PD. He's currently active duty with another Maryland agency. Like a character from HBO's "The Wire," he could tell you stories of colleagues being gunned down in the line of fire, as he did in this Washington Post op-ed: http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2009/08/16/AR2009081601758.html

* One more example would be our executive director, Jack Cole, who spent 26 years with the New Jersey State Police, including 12 years infiltrating drug gangs as an undercover narc. He was featured in this Leonard Pitts Jr. syndicated column: http://www.mcclatchydc.com/homepage/story/65265.html

We've also got judges, prosecutors, prison wardens and chiefs of police. All across the globe.

Tom Angell, Media Relations Director
Law Enforcement Against Prohibition
http://www.CopsSayLegalizeDrugs.com

Tom Barnett writes:

What I find fascinating here: cops and judges this organized on this issue that a media relations director pings me on the piece.

Shows you how far along this mobilization process-from-below has evolved.

The relevance of poli sci

ARTICLE: Field Study: Just How Relevant Is Political Science?, By PATRICIA COHEN, New York Times, October 19, 2009

The gist of the article's argument about whether or not modern political science, as practiced in universities, is particularly relevant:

What remains, though, is a nagging concern that the field is not producing work that matters. "The danger is that political science is moving in the direction of saying more and more about less and less," said Joseph Nye, a professor at the John F. Kennedy School of Government at Harvard, whose work has been particularly influential among American policy makers. "There are parts of the academy which, in the effort to be scientific, feel we should stay away from policy," Mr. Nye said, that "it interferes with the science."

In his view statistical techniques too often determine what kind of research political scientists do, pushing them further into narrow specializations cut off from real-world concerns. The motivation to be precise, Mr. Nye warned, has overtaken the impulse to be relevant.

In recent years he and other scholars, including Robert Putnam and Theda Skocpol, both former presidents of the American Political Science Association, have urged colleagues not to shy away from "the big questions."

Graduate students discussing their field, said Peter Katzenstein, a political science professor at Cornell University, often speak in terms of "an interesting puzzle," a small intellectual conundrum that tests the ingenuity of the solver, rather than the large, sloppy and unmanageable problems that occur in real life.

"This is the great divide on what we are doing," he said, adding that political scientists did not agree on the unit of analysis (whether the focus should be on the individual or social relationships), the source of knowledge or how to measure things.

I will say that I was--myself--deeply divided about the utility of the poli sci training I got at Harvard. I was lucky to have a grad seminar with Judith Sklar, take Michael Sandel's now legendary courses on poltical philosophy, participate in a grad survey seminar on comparative politics with Robert Putnam and Samuel Huntington, and serve as a teaching assistant in Joseph Nye's enormously popular core course on international conflict (Nye was also one of my three dissertation advisers). In short, I was spoiled. But there were also a lot of courses that I felt were a complete waste of time: the computer modeling stuff, the abstract game theory--all of it specializing in saying lots about little.

I know this: if I had stayed in academia, I never would have written anything close to the books I've produced. The ambition simply would have been beaten out of me.

I guess the biggest failing I see in political science is the way it makes a fetish out of so many things, treating them in odd, isolated detachment from the real world in which they exist. I read academic descriptions of political processes that I know well or have participated in and I find them completely alien--disembodied.

And so poli sci is typically trumped by your average Woodward book or any of the host of journalistic accounts of wars.

I know my type of work makes a dent in a lot of colleges, but it's typically only among younger profs. I feel like my generation and the one above mine (Nye-Putnam-etc) got weirded out by the Cold War. We just got so stale because the structure of international relations got so stale (a point I make early in PNM). That's why I was so GD grateful when the Wall fell. It was like being released from prison--for me!

I do have hope the field will improve as we move deeper and deeper into this era of expanding globalization. To me, there's just so much to study and learn about, although I have no idea what Katzenstein (older guy I read in grad school) is talking about with his "units," as I don't think my work falls into any of those categories. They just strike me as being in the weeds in an era of great structural change.