The Middle East after Iraq

Very nice World Politics Review piece by Gregg Carlstrom.

The premise:

In dozens of statements, interviews and news conferences since taking office, Obama has been adamant about sticking to the withdrawal timetable, which calls for removing all U.S. combat troops by August 2010 and a complete U.S. withdrawal by the end of 2011 . . . 

And Obama is by no means bucking domestic public opinion in holding so steadfastly to that promise now. A CNN/Opinion Research Corporation poll released in January found that 62 percent of Americans support his timeline for withdrawal . . . Domestic politics, in other words, argue strongly against delaying the withdrawal. 

And yet, the prospect of doing just that continues to be a hot topic in Washington. Tom Ricks, a senior fellow at the Center for a New American Security, published a paper in February urging the Obama administration to scrap the timeline. Conservative commentators and analysts -- Max Boot, for example -- think the U.S. should maintain a long-term military presence in Iraq. Lawmakers routinely ask civilian and military officials whether the deadlines are flexible. 

At times, the Pentagon has also seemed far more circumspect than the White House about the timetable.

Publicly, the Iraqis take great pride whenever US troops pull back or out of a city or region, but privately, Iraqi officials are more circumspect, says Carlstrom.

Internally, the future is rather bright:

"What's left of the insurgency is pretty quiet these days," said Michael Wahid Hanna, a fellow at the Century Foundation. "And there's never going to be a time when they have a greater motivation to attack than now."

Why now at the end?  Insurgencies always ramp up violence when the occupier is leaving, in order to claim "victory!" So expect some additional effort.

The real concerns are "external":  e.g., the internal border with the KRG (Kurds) and the real one with Iran and Syria (but more so Iran).

I certainly agree with Carlstom here about the look of an inevitable post-2011 presence:

But most analysts say that any American presence will look much different after 2011 than it does today: A few thousand troops, mostly serving in an advisory and training role, or performing functions that Iraqi forces can't yet handle. The Iraqi military is also executing an ambitious procurement plan, with the air force, for example, planning to purchase more than 400 new planes over the next decade. U.S. troops will certainly help train the military on its new hardware. 

Regionally speaking, it is as I've long argued, a question of competing Shia-Sunni poles potentially using Iraq as a proxy-war site.  But Carlstrom reassures here:

Iran's role in Iraq does continue to grow, as evidenced by the parade of Iraqi officials visiting Tehran before and after the parliamentary election. Saudi Arabia represents the other pole, a Sunni Arab counterweight to the Persian Shiites in Iran. But both countries are mistrusted by a plurality of Iraqis -- and not always for sectarian reasons. For instance, the Shiite Sadrist movement, with its staunchly nationalist views, often holds Iran at arm's length. Against that backdrop, some analysts say, the U.S. could carve out a durable diplomatic role in Iraq. 

What may temper Obama on all this:  Bob Gates fears a final-scene-of-Charlie-Wilson's-war outcome, as in, penny wise and pound foolish.

I agree and don't see how Obama can stick with his zero troops notion, unless it naturally incorporates several thousands of non-combat personnel--essentially pure SysAdmin.

Brazilian favelas: subject to modern COIN reformating?

By way of Craig Nordin, a post on Tech Crunch by Sarah Lacy.

Gist:

While it’s hard to match the lack of infrastructure like water and sewage systems in an Indian slum, there’s little that can compare to the violence of a Rio favela. So it was understandable, as I entered a Rio favela a few weeks ago that my guides kept impressing on me that a year ago I couldn’t under any circumstances have come here. One year ago, a cab wouldn’t have taken me here. One year ago, no one would even deliver pizza here.

What’s changed in a year? Specifically, the city is doing something about the problem, embarking on a project of “pacification.” As it was explained to me, newly-trained, SWAT-style cops take each favela back, driving out the drug dealers, by any means necessary, in a recognition that the situation isn’t just a bad neighborhood, it’s an urban war-zone. Being new to the force, these police officers have a clean slate with the residents of the favela, and so are able to continue to protect it, keeping the peace. So far, eight favelas have been pacified. Residents I spoke with talked about the relief of being out from under the daily violence: Suddenly they can be a part of the city. But many are still wary. “This is the best I’ve seen the community in a long time, but I’m still scared,” said Nivea Mendes of the pacified favela Babilonia. “Very few people trust the government. They are just out for an election. I’m still skeptical.” Put another way, even though they’re physically gone, the drug dealers still have power in these neighborhoods—for now.

There’s another tactical problem with pacification that never would have occurred to me: Violence aside, the move basically shoved the richest people – the criminals -  out of the favela, creating a need for a new livelihood for merchants and survival-level entrepreneurs (like the boy to your right and his family) in these neighborhoods. This is where technology is coming in.

For more than ten years a non-profit organization called CDI has been giving favela residents a different kind of freedom, setting up computer labs and offering training in everything from basic computer services to IT skills.

What caught my eye:  this is peacetime COIN or SysAdmin at its best.

Chart of the day: which airlines actually let you use FF miles

In a nutshell, why I love Southwest, fly it whenever possible, and use two of its Visa cards (one biz, one personal).

I have used maybe 40 free flights in the last 5 years, to include flying my entire brood of 4 kids + spouse + me on multiple family vacations.  I once got a SWA flight in 5 mins at the airport after USAirways screwed me sideways, and left 45 minutes later.

Yes, I have used FF awards on damn near every airline, recently flying USAir to Capetown this way (and flying to London next month via Delta), but that's only because Jennifer Posda, my agent, is a wizard at making that happen.  For mere mortals, you want to stick with Southwest as much as possible.

How big the shift with this election?

Trio of WSJ pieces

Joe Sestak ends Spector's long career that goes all the way back to the Warren Commission (and please people, stop calling it the "magic bullet" theory, because the latest computer modeling shows that it wasn't magical in the least!), exploiting the current anti-incumbent mood.

I knew Sestak as an admiral and I've testifed in from of him.  He is as slick as they come, and I mean that in a good way. Outsider? Definitely fresher than Spector, let's say.

He's definitely a liberal, holding a 100% rating from NARAL on being pro-choice.  We also share a bond:  both our first-born girls survived cancer in childhood.

Sestak is also incredibly smart, in my opinion, so he'd be one to watch in the Senate, just like he was in the House.

So with all this talk of voter shifts, what does this latest batch of primaries say?  We should see a lot of new faces in Congress next January, and this is good.  Place is too easy for incumbents as a rule, and we should take pride in moving new brains into the mix.

But you have to remember, midterm primaries are the stuff of the party loyalists.

It's the changing mix of loyalists that bodes well for the GOP.

MSNBC/WSJ poll on party affiliation changes since start of Obama administration:

• Dems stay at 43%
• GOP goes from 30 to 37%
• That comes out of Independents (20-->16%) and others (7-->3%).

So you have to believe that the Tea Party movement is strengthening the GOP and hardly represents the rise of a viable third party.

Nanotech manufacturing: are you small enough for the industry?

Pic here

WSJ story leveraging a Nature feature about researchers who create atomic-scale assembly line where DNA robots at 1/100,000th a human hair width can make 8 products--nothing too complex but still!

For the first time, microscopic robots made from DNA molecules can walk, follow instructions and work together to assemble simple products on an atomic-scale assembly line, mimicking the machinery of living cells, two independent research teams announced Wednesday.

Until this, most of the nanotech breakthroughs were novelty demos, like putting sunglasses on a dust mite--that sort of gee-whiz stuff.

Now, we're talking nano robots that crank chem compounds or do a Fantastic Voyage job on your body (BTW, Paul Greengrass is doing a 2013 remake!).

Today, nano-materials have been exploited in hundreds of products, but this is the first time production was achieved by "exotic man-made DNA objects" so small that their instructions had to be encoding in the world around them (e.g., chemical markers that direct their movements).

Still think nuclear weapons are going to define WMD and the world of security in the 21st century?

Being realistic about Russia's need to reassert itself

Dominic Lieven op-ed in FT.

Nice logic: natural to expect Russian reassertion of influence after the long hangover of lost empire. Tease the bear, like Georgia did, and you get a nasty reply.

How much to worry over Ukraine-Russian relations, now that Moscow has secured long-term naval access (always revocable by successor Kiev govs) to the Black Sea?  Do we want to be in the geopolitical business of denying Russia such access?

Key point:

Shedding a land empire is always harder than letting go of overseas colonies.  Britain had an empire but Russia was one:  abandoning one's property is easier than facing challenges to one's identity.  It is easier for London to take a relaxed attitude to events in Asia or the Middle East than for Moscow to remain aloof from chaos in the Caucasus.

Comparison:  when land empires were involve (Ireland for London, Algeria for Paris), retreats were very painful.

Fortunately, Russia holds onto Siberia and seeks to reassert itself primarily through energy vice military power or territorial annexations.  Please remember what a huge improvement that is for the global security environment.

Piece ends with the usual comparison:  is China playing Germany to today's Britain--America?  In that working-out process, keeping on good terms with Russia is more than useful.

My point:  Russia needs globalization to work as part of its reassertion, just like China needs it badly for its growth trajectory.  There is no need to choose but definitely no need to freeze anybody out over current behavior.  Gotta keep the big picture in mind. 

Southern Sudan's nation will be built around agriculture as much as oil

The Dinka (Christian) of southern Sudan are built around cattle.  They are the south's largest tribe, and like all cattleman, they fret primarily over their herds' access to water and grazing.  The Dinka will dominate any new southern Sudan state--yet to be named.  If the state happens, it'll be Africa's first new one since 1993 (Eritrea), but hardly its last.

The issue:  the lands of the Dinka are vast and fertile but flat.  When rain happens, it pools for months, creating a lot of marshes, mosquitoes, etc.

The fear:  without the north to hate anymore, the tribes might turn on each other over water.

Dinka ministers in Juba talk grandly of bringing in tractors and turning virgin land into a breadbasket.

The trick?  Dinka men despise such labor, preferring the traditional herding route.

Sounds to me like southern Sudan might soon be on the block for having a lot of its potential farm land leased to, and worked by, foreigners.

When civil strife actually improves ground-floor connectivity

Per my recent feature for WPR on telecoms, warlords are pretty good for cellphone connectivity--as in, they want it and everybody whom they either put on the run or force into fending for themselves want it.

Somalia appears to be the classic example here:

Banks barely existed in this war-torn African nation a decade ago.  Now, Somali residents can bank over their mobile phones.

The rapid evolution of technology in Somalia--and people's access to it--comes as several telecommunications companies here jockey for customers amid the absence of any government-regulated phone or Internet-access.  The competition to supply phone service has stoked the nascent revival of Somalia's shattered economy, and it shows that some complex business can thrive even in one of Africa's least developed markets.

Technology players moving in come from China, Korea and Europe, or basically New Core Asia in sub-Saharan Africa and established Euro players in the north.

My bit with the Core-Gap map has always been:  this is globalization's frontier and where it's moving is where you'll find churn and violence and frontier-integration, meaning both the good and the bad concentrated.  It is its own socio-economic revolution on top of whatever else is going on--both good and bad.

Naturally, Al Shabaab, the local radical Islamic group, fights this trend, saying such connectivity violates sharia. Oh, but they'll allow it if you pay them "taxes" and let them dictate its spread.

Classic stuff.

As DVDs decline, globalization comes to Hollywood's rescue

Conflicting messages from Variety and The Economist.

Variety points out that the great initial wave of DVDing the back catalogue (all those movies from the past) is winding down, especially as people move toward digital access and services like Netflix).

The pic in 2006 was about 2/3rds retail DVD, 1/5th DVD rentals and all the rest.  But by 2013, the all-the-rest will dominate to the tune of 2/3rds.  All-the-rest is online video, Pay-per-view & video-on-demand, DVD by mail, and rental and retail Blu-ray. 

Pretty big and fast shift in revenue sources, although one can argue that the generation shift from DVD to Blu-ray isn't really that profound as far as customer is concerned.  If you add up the rental and retails of DVDs and Blu-Rays in 2013, it's more like 3/4ths--so not such a huge drop from 2006.  Still, clear that digital access is rising as a model.

Meanwhile, the box-office revenue is doing great, off-setting the slight decline in domestic retail product sales ($27B in 2006 to predicted 25B in 2013, because the digital access involves a tighter margin).  Worldwide box office hit $30B last year, up 8% from 2008.  Domestic BO was only 1/3rd that total. 

So Hollywood, left to domestic sales only, would be a $35B-$37B business.  But add in overseas and you're talking a $55-57B business, meaning globalization works just fine for Hollywood.

Another sign of Turkey's diplomatic ambitions?

The nature of the problem is familiar enough:

With the backing of 7,000 African Union peacekeepers, a mission known as Amisom, the transitional government controls only an area around the presidential palace in the capital, Mogadishu, the airport and the seaport. 

Lawlessness across much of the rest of the country allows pirates to launch raids on shipping passing through the Gulf of Aden and far out into the Indian Ocean. In 2009, 47 vessels with 837 crew members were taken, despite the presence of an international naval force. 

Violence, poverty and drought have spawned a humanitarian crisis that has seen almost two million Somalis displaced within the country. There are overcrowded Somali refugee camps in nearby Kenya, Yemen, Ethiopia and Djibouti.

What interested me was Turkey's recent hosting of a 3-day conference designed to inject new thinking into possible solutions:

The Turkish hosts of a conference to be held in Istanbul this week on conflict, piracy and the deepening humanitarian crisis in Somalia say the event will offer policymakers an opportunity to “rethink” solutions for the war-torn nation.

But even the UN officials helping Turkey arrange the three-day summit that begins on Friday have reminded delegates not to expect any “magical negotiation” that will resolve Somalia’s long-running problems.

I mean, this is beyond Turkey's recent activity in its neighborhood (the zero-problems-with-neighbors policy). This shows some genuine great power ambition.

I say, the more, the merrier.  We're talking another New Core player with growing economic networks and a sizeable military force willing and able to go places and do things.

Very good sign, whatever the short-term outcome.

There has never been any mystery to me why I have immediately sold the foreign rights to all my books to a Turkish publisher.  Like China, where this has also happened, Turkey is naturally a rising power on the make. It is in the zone where thinking about grand strategy holds great appeal, like a rising America in the late 19th C.

Jaffe portrait of the quintessential SysAdmin officer

Nice piece by Greg Jaffe in WAPO that explores what it means to be a frontline SysAdmin-style officer: part-warrior, part-diplomat, part-anthropologist, part-nationbuilder . . . just a lot more moving parts than the usual Leviathan role of ass-kicker-and-then-leave.  Focus is Lt. Col. Robert Brown.

Story comes in two parts.

The career background is classic:  This guy has been SysAdmin his entire career, just missing out on the Leviathan's last great romp.

Brown was commissioned as an armor officer in 1991 just months after U.S. tanks sliced through Saddam Hussein's Republican Guard in a demonstration of the post-Vietnam Army's raw power.

Two Iraq tours in 2004 and 2007 opened Brown's eyes to the limits of his Army and himself. He avoided "we can do the impossible" pep talks that other commanders used to fire up their troops. His goal was to build the Afghan government and bring his soldiers back alive.

The vast majority of his time was spent quizzing Afghan elders and officials on decades-old tribal disputes and intrigues. In the evenings he scoured the Internet for information on the HiG and its history in Nurestan province during the Soviet era. "There is so much here that is opaque to us," he said.

The dances-with-wolves isolation and vulnerability:

The outpost, surrounded by soaring mountains on all sides, was isolated and hard to defend. "It felt like we were living in the bottom of a Dixie cup," one of Brown's soldiers said.

Brown eventually decides that his unit's presence is uniting two wings of an insurgency that could otherwise be split.  He asks to close the outpost and the decision to do so takes a while.  In the meantime, his unit suffers a massed attack by local insurgents:

Eight U.S. troops were killed in the Oct. 3, 2009, battle at Combat Outpost Keating, making it one of the deadliest fights for Americans of the Afghan war. For soldiers, the harsh reality of combat has scarcely changed in the decades since Vietnam. To survive, the outnumbered Keating grunts relied on their mutual devotion and marksmanship.

What makes Keating different from past battles is what happened afterward. A decade of fighting in Afghanistan and Iraq has forced battlefield commanders to accept that victory in today's wars is less a matter of destroying enemies than of knowing how and when to make them allies. This new kind of war has compelled midlevel officers such as Brown to take on new roles: politician, diplomat, tribal anthropologist.

"My goal is to get people to stop shooting at my soldiers and support government," said Brown, a wiry, quick-talking officer whose three combat tours have imbued him with modesty, skepticism and a little self-doubt.

After the Kamdesh battle, an insurgent leader known as Mullah Sadiq sent word to Brown that he wanted to drive his more radical Taliban rivals from the area around the Keating outpost. Sadiq, who had been on U.S. kill-or-capture lists for five years, needed money and Brown's help brokering a peace deal with Afghan government officials in Kabul. The offer was Brown's chance to ensure his eight soldiers didn't die in vain.

"We don't think Sadiq is a Jeffersonian Democrat," Brown wrote of Sadiq in a February e-mail from Forward Operating Base Bostick in Naray. "But he is rallying public support to the Afghan government and against the Taliban. . . . And frankly, that may be good enough."

From part two:

Sadiq wanted 50 assault rifles, $20,000 and a promise that U.S. forces would not kill him. In return, he promised to turn against more-radical Taliban insurgents and to begin to work with the Afghan government.

Sadiq's proposition gave Brown a chance, however tentative, to achieve a victory of sorts in his corner of Afghanistan and redeem the loss of his men.

"This has the potential to work," Brown told his commander.

It has become a given within the U.S. military after nearly a decade of grinding battle in Afghanistan and seven years in Iraq that U.S. forces cannot kill their way to victory. Enemies must be persuaded to lay down their weapons through a mix of negotiation and force. Grievances must be understood and wherever possible addressed. These principles are at the core of the military's coming campaign in Kandahar, which U.S officials are touting as the most important battle of the nine-year war.

Brown is a firm believer in this new American way of war, one that has forced him to puzzle through dauntingly complex tribal feuds and to overcome a fractured Afghan government that often prefers to fight enemies, such as Sadiq, rather than cede influence to them.

Brown, 41, has struggled to make sense of Sadiq, who insists on dealing with the Americans solely through intermediaries. Some Afghans describe Sadiq as a religious scholar and brave commander. Others maintain that he is a warlord and extremist.

"The bad guys aren't bad because they were born bad," Brown said from his base in Naray. "What no one ever teaches you is how to get to the bottom of the story. No one ever teaches you to ask, 'Why is Mullah Sadiq the way he is?' "

 The deal struck sounds right out of Anbar in Iraq:

Every few nights, one of Sadiq's deputies telephoned Brown to work out the terms of the deal. By March, the insurgent commander had assembled an informal police force of about 230 locals, some of whom had probably taken part in the Keating attack. Brown arranged for the United States to pay the men about $25,000 a month until the Interior Ministry formally accepted them as police.

But the problems are two-fold: 1) does the Afghan government really want to broker such deals? and 2) what's the nature of US staying power?

In early April, the deal with Sadiq began to fall apart. Senior Afghan officials in Kabul banned Zaman (local PD chief) from sending any of his forces to meet up with Sadiq's fighters.

"They are worried that we are trying to give Kamdesh district to the HiG," Zaman said. "They don't want us to give these guys a say in the government."

The hedging in Kabul also unnerved Sadiq, whose representatives immediately called Brown. "We are surrounded by 1,000 Taliban, but our government doesn't accept us!" one of Sadiq's deputies screamed over the satellite phone. He demanded Brown's help in acquiring 600 assault rifles, 16 Ford Ranger pickup trucks and two dozen machine guns and grenade launchers for the new Kamdesh police force.

Brown explained that the weapons had to come from the Afghan Interior Ministry, which was refusing to send any arms to Kamdesh. Sadiq's representative hung up on Brown in mid-sentence.

To get the deal back on track, Brown and George pressed the Afghan officials to write a letter to the central government in Kabul detailing the need to move forces into the valley and to better arm Sadiq's police force.

"After much cajoling, we have gotten all the Afghan players supporting the resources for the police in Kamdesh," Brown wrote in an e-mail in early May. Sadiq didn't get all the weapons he wanted, but he got some.

A new U.S. unit was scheduled to replace Brown's cavalry squadron at the end of May. He knew the next U.S. commander wouldn't have the same incentive to close the deal with Sadiq. Brown also had ample reason to question Kabul's commitment to working with Sadiq.

"We want this to happen more than the Afghans do," he said he often worried.

The reconciliation ceremony has not been held, but in recent days hundreds of Afghan army and police forces have been inching along the perilous road to Kamdesh to link up with Sadiq. Taliban commanders have been assembling a force to stop them.

Brown said he does not know exactly what to make of the maneuvering, although he detects signs of progress. "The momentum change has been significant," he wrote in an e-mail.

He expects to be home in Colorado in about two weeks. Kamdesh will be a new commander's fight.

The usual problem of being there only so many months, learning enough to start working the situation, and then being yanked out just as things might mature into something better.  Here, they don't for reasons beyond Brown's control.

Nice reporting by Jaffe, showing the great difficulty and complexity of the task, but also highlighting, in an anecdotal way, how Afghanistan probably won't work out, COIN-wise, like Iraq.  Just too many competitors fighting for influence in a zero-sum manner.

Private contractors as spies? Welcome to the frontier

The gist from the NYT story:

Top military officials have continued to rely on a secret network of private spies who have produced hundreds of reports from deep inside Afghanistan and Pakistan, according to American officials and businessmen, despite concerns among some in the military about the legality of the operation.

Earlier this year, government officials admitted that the military had sent a group of former Central Intelligence Agency officers and retired Special Operations troops into the region to collect information — some of which was used to track and kill people suspected of being militants. Many portrayed it as a rogue operation that had been hastily shut down once an investigation began.

But interviews with more than a dozen current and former government officials and businessmen, and an examination of government documents, tell a different a story. Not only are the networks still operating, their detailed reports on subjects like the workings of the Taliban leadership in Pakistan and the movements of enemy fighters in southern Afghanistan are also submitted almost daily to top commanders and have become an important source of intelligence.

The American military is largely prohibited from operating inside Pakistan. And under Pentagon rules, the army is not allowed to hire contractors for spying.

Military officials said that when Gen. David H. Petraeus, the top commander in the region, signed off on the operation in January 2009, there were prohibitions against intelligence gathering, including hiring agents to provide information about enemy positions in Pakistan. The contractors were supposed to provide only broad information about the political and tribal dynamics in the region, and information that could be used for “force protection,” they said.

Some Pentagon officials said that over time the operation appeared to morph into traditional spying activities. And they pointed out that the supervisor who set up the contractor network, Michael D. Furlong, was now under investigation.

The private players were organized under a Lockheed Martin contract.  Why resort to this effort?

The private contractor network was born in part out of frustration with the C.I.A. and the military intelligence apparatus. There was a belief by some officers that the C.I.A. was too risk averse, too reliant on Pakistan’s spy service and seldom able to provide the military with timely information to protect American troops. In addition, the military has complained that it is not technically allowed to operate in Pakistan, whose government is willing to look the other way and allow C.I.A. spying but not the presence of foreign troops.

So a classic improvisational response to a frontier integration situation:  normal bureaucratic channels don't work (bit too "out there" for the CIA, apparently) and the lack of full-up connectivity (i.e., technically, our military cannot operate there) pushes the Pentagon to outsource the function to the private security sector.

Simply put: the frontier lies just beyond the normal rule-set, so you get this working-for-the-gov-but-not-belonging-to-the-gov result.  Read your history of the American West, it happened all the time.

Chart of the day: China's internal immigration rule-set clash

Great piece in The Economist about the hukou registration system that classifies all Chinese are either rural and urban--and only stealthily shall the two meet.

Current purpose is simple:  keep rural folk from migrating to cities too fast.  China is urbanizing at a rate never before seen in history.  In fact, it's the single biggest migration in human history--by sheer size.

What the chart shows:  Officially in Chongqing, roughly 24m people live in the countryside and maybe 9m live in the cities.  But in truth, the cities hold more like 19m, meaning 10m rural folk have migrated there "illegally."

The system is sort of China's internal immigration process: the richer city folk holding off the poorer rural migrants who move in and take all the 3D jobs (dirty, dangerous, difficult). Like the US and its immigration issues, this system is failing to work as intended, hence the many calls for reform.

Classic rule-set clash:  government wants to control the people flow, but the economic development says otherwise.

China's rise must be stopped! In fact, our entire military should be shaped to this end!

Mark Helprin in the WSJ by way of James Riley, plus a couple of NYT pieces on Gates fighting his budget battles with Congress, which, for some reason in this day and age, seems desperate to outspend his wishes.

Here's a projection from the National Intelligence Council's 2020 look-ahead report. If you go with the high-estimate line (always a safe bet with such a secretive government), then you come up with a number in the same range as Helprin's ($115-120B). By 2025, then, we're looking at a PLA that spends about a quarter-trillion dollars a year.

For comparison, check out US spending over the past decade, by way of the Center for Arms Control and Non-Proliferation.

My point here: our baseline spending grew almost as much as China's total budget should be in 2025:  $220B. Our top-line budget grew $373B, but you have to consider the war-spending as more subtractive than additive, even as it means our military now has a long recent combat experience base while the PLA really hasn't fought a conflict of any length since the early 1950s, or almost six decades ago.

What are we likely to spend in 2025? Probably in the range of a trillion a year, or still 4X China's total.

Now, if you follow the great projections on China, you would likely have their defense budget catch ours sometime before 2050, but that stuff gets awfully iffy, because it assumes that China will keep up the build-up despite the stunning aging of their population--to wit, in 2050, we'll have a relatively young total population of 400m and China will have 400m-plus over the age of 60.

That's just the background. Now, on to Helprin's scare-mongering piece.

He says we rationalize our growing weakness relative to China's growing strength, telling ourselves that we'll never fight two major adversaries at the same time (our dream of a WWII-redux). Okay, who else are we going to fight at the same time as China? He doesn't say.

Helprin says we delude ourselves by thinking conventional war is a thing of the past, citing "the growth and modernization of large conventional forces throughout the world." That line is just pure bullshit based on nothing.  

Here's the SIPRI numbers:

Note two things:  1) It took the world 20 years to get back to the peak spending at the end of the Cold War, and that was across a time period in which wars declined dramatically while numerous great powers rose, a trend that historically results in greater defense spending; and 2) the great growth from the trough of the late 90s to now is about $400B. Well, guess who did most of that additional spending? Duh! The United States. No one is modernizing like we are or racking up huge operational experience at the bleeding edge.

Helprin goes on to say that "appeasement and compromise" isn't turning our enemies into friends. Really? Seems like we just went through a rerun of the start of the Great Depression and what kind of cooperation did we get from all our "enemies" around the world? Actually, pretty damn nice.

Then we get the usual decline-of-the-Roman-empire stuff. Impressive.

So we're told that we've ceded the Western Pacific to the Chinese, meaning, at the very least, we're supposed to hold it ad infinitum. Why? Taiwan could be absorbed by China militarily. And if that happens, "America's alliances in the Pacific will collapse."  

Brilliant logic there. China forcibly invades a country it's trying to sign a free trade deal with it and you expect the rest of Asia to suddenly want nothing to do with America. Is this guy high?

From that domination of the Western Pac, China will soon begin to dominate all of Latin America, says Helprin--our China station replaced by China's America station.  

Why will China make this supreme effort? I have no idea. China doesn't seem to have any problem buying whatever it wants from Latin America, but apparently the Chinese people will want this more than environmental cleanups or old age pensions. They will go along with any government push to propel China into constant military standoffs with the US on the other side of the Pacific, because Chinese history is so full of such examples.

Me?  I see China logically building a naval presence and power-projection capability in the direction of its energy supplies--i.e., the Persian Gulf. I don't see them wasting time and money on regions that are stable suppliers. Of course, if China pushes its way into the Gulf military, pretty soon they'll find themselves involved in all the same Leviathan-SysAdmin work we do there now. And frankly, that would make some sense, given that Asia takes out the bulk of the oil the Gulf provides, while the US can get along without it easily (the PG ranks behind Africa, Latin America, Mexico and Canada, and the US itself as our 5th most important supplier of oil). 

And how threatening will a China be that bears this incredible burden? How many costly wars will the Chinese people support in distant lands? Hmm. We shall see.

But this is all silly conjecture on my part. Clearly, the Chinese will do whatever it takes to drive us completely out of the Pacific. Helprin says, we have "perhaps five or ten years" in which we can accomplish a "restoration."

Get used to this logic. Gates is working hard to get the Pentagon and Congress realistic about what we can and cannot afford in the future. We can either pull out of the world and stockpile our brilliant, uber-expensive Leviathan weaponry in anticipation of getting it on with China or we can be more realistic about our Leviathan hedge given our SysAdmin workload. Mr. Helprin believes we can have it all and do it all, and I think that's truly nutty.

But again, the quickest way to bog down the Chinese would be to abandon the Middle East and let them manage it on their own. Any takers on that score?

The Chinese give every indication of wanting to secure their trade networks with the world and no indication of being willing to fight for anything beyond that. Hell, they don't give any indication of wanting even to fight for their trade networks. All they really give as an indication is that they will not tolerate Taiwan declaring independence--their own, whacked-out mania.

We are deep into an age in which our old friends will spend less on their militaries and rising new competitors will spend more on theirs. We can either seek cooperation with these rising powers on mutual economic interests or we can try to hedge against them all, demanding that only America can decide such things.

The fixation with China is convenient for US military hawks, because the Chinese Communist Party will rule in a single-party state, with no serious challengers, for the next two decades or so. Of the other rising great powers, we don't really fear any of them, because they're close enough in their political pluralism--save demographically collapsing Russia--to avoid such suspicions on our part. Now, we can pretend that this crew of rising great powers will prefer a world run predominately by the PLA over one more dominated by the US military, but I think that's a paranoid assumption. I think the alleged Beijing consensus only works so long as China stays out of wars, which is why I'd love to see them sucked into a few.

Mr. Helprin sees a clear and clean route to the top of global military domination for the Chinese. I don't. I see a surfeit of hidden domestic debts and a public with no stomach for military adventure. I also see a single-party state that could not politically survive a single military defeat, and hence it will risk none. China cannot free-ride its way to the top and then dominate with no resulting exposure to draining wars. To believe in such a trajectory is, in my mind, truly ahistoric.

Helprin likewise sees China's defense rise as a pure zero-sum---as in, they gain and we lose. I do not. I see the Chinese arriving just in time.

We will either convince the Chinese to cooperate with us on global security or we will cede the burden to them. Either way, China is going to get dramatically bogged down by all its burgeoning global network connectivity. To believe otherwise is sheer fantasy.

There ain't no such thing as a free lunch. We've never gotten one, and neither will the Chinese.

Zakaria at his best on Pakistan

Trust an Indian to deliver the goods on Pakistan.

The British government has estimated that 70 percent of the terror plots it has uncovered in the past decade can be traced back to Pakistan. Pakistan remains a terrorist hothouse even as jihadism is losing favor elsewhere in the Muslim world. From Egypt to Jordan to Malaysia to Indonesia, radical Islamic groups have been weakened militarily and have lost much of the support they had politically. Why not in Pakistan? The answer is simple: from its founding, the Pakistani government has supported and encouraged jihadi groups, creating an atmosphere that has allowed them to flourish. It appears to have partially reversed course in recent years, but the rot is deep.

For a wannabe terrorist shopping for help, Pakistan is a supermarket. There are dozens of jihadi organizations: Jaish-e-Muhammad, Lashkar-e-Taiba, Al Qaeda, Jalaluddin and Siraj Haqqani's network, Tehrik-e-Taliban, and the list goes on. Some of the major ones, like the Kashmiri separatist group Lashkar-e-Taiba, operate openly via front groups throughout the country. But none seem to have any difficulty getting money and weapons. 

The key problem:  Pakistan allows terror groups that target outsiders--especially India, and really only go after ones that attack the people of Pakistan.

Zakaria cites Ahmed Rashid in noting that Pakistan is leveraging the Afghan Taliban for their own purposes and not to foster any peace with Kabul.  The military still runs Pakistan, and its "strategic depth" mania holds sway.

Fareed ends the piece by noting that virtually all of the big transnational terror of the past years have stemmed from Pakistan and Saudi Arabia.  Abdullah is working the change in the latter country, but Pakistan's military is stockpiling nukes and fighter jets with the money we send them.

We are backing the wrong horse here.

The BO balance for Hollywood

Scanning the weekly BO report.

Of the 55 films listed, only 14 have bigger foreign BO than domestic, which isn't surprising, because the list is US-centric.

But the foreign-heavy numbers appear primarily in the tent-pole, or blockbuster films, such that, when you add up the total BO for all of the 55 films, the foreign revenue accounts for almost exactly 1/2 of total BO, or $4.4B out of $8.9B).

Those tent-poles films with higher international BO are:

1. How to Train your Dragon
2. Clash of the Titans
3. Alice in Wonderland
4. Avatar
5. Percy Jackson and the . . . Thief
6. Alvin . . The Squeakquel
7. Sherlock Holmes.

In that septet, the foreign share is 66%.  That means their foreign audiences pay the bulk of the tab for the prestige films back here.

There are only 10 blockbusters (over $200M) listed.  Besides the 7 above, there's Shutter Island, Blind Side and Valentine's Day.  Only Blind Side is primarily US BO (85%). The other two are slightly US-heavy.  Blind Side is unlikely to do well overseas, because the football theme doesn't travel.

The Taliban-After-Last

Good feature in Newsweek.

Key bits:

The old generation of fighters is mostly gone from the battlefield; most were killed, captured, or disabled before they reached their late 30s. And yet by all accounts the number of insurgents on the ground keeps rising, with ever-younger recruits joining the fight. Malik and Khan had scarcely been born when Baradar took up arms against Soviet invaders, and they hadn't yet reached their teens when Mullah Omar's fighters seized Kabul from feuding mujahedin factions in 1996. According to a senior Taliban intelligence officer, speaking to NEWSWEEK on condition of anonymity, roughly 80 percent of the group's fighters are now in their late teens or early 20s, and half the commanders in the field are 30 or under. The best young fighters tend to be promoted quickly, thanks to combat losses.

The young guns are a breed apart from earlier Taliban generations. In a series of interviews for this story with more than a dozen young insurgent leaders over the past three months, they showed themselves to be more hotheaded and less respectful of authority than their elders. War against America has steeled these young fighters in combat with an enemy that employs more accurate and lethal firepower than the Russians or the anti-Taliban Northern Alliance ever had. The experience has only made them tougher and more uncompromising, in the judgment of veteran Taliban members. "The difference between these young Taliban and those of us who fought against the Northern Alliance or even the Russians is huge—like between earth and sky," says the senior intelligence officer who is in his mid-40s, but knows many commanders in their 20s. "These young men have seen and suffered more, and have a much stronger emotional and religious commitment than we ever did."

They're also impulsive and lacking in discipline. 

The usual evolution (more commitment, less talent), not necessarily in our disfavor.  It's just the generational perversion created by long-term conflict.

Many older Taliban seem to value the young guns' fighting spirit enough to tolerate their blatant disdain for the chain of command. But it's not so easy to accept the new generation's attitude toward traditional authority. Three decades of war have shattered the centuries-old system of tribal rule that has been the only functioning law in large parts of Afghanistan. In the wake of the Taliban's collapse, some local chieftains turned against villagers who had sided with Mullah Omar's regime. "Some elders went too far," says Bari Khan, a subcommander in his early 20s in Ghazni province. "They insulted, mocked and abused Taliban supporters, thinking the winds had changed." Now the winds have shifted again, and the old men are finding themselves at the mercy of cocky young fighters and commanders. "This poor young boy whom village elders may once have ignored or humiliated now has the power to step on their throats, so they'd better listen to him," says the senior intelligence officer.

But their behavior is making enemies among the civilian population. "The Taliban's older generation was tough, too, but it respected elders and had some humanity," says a 45-year-old school principal in Helmand province, asking not to be named out of fear for his safety. "These younger guys are arrogant, radical, and show no respect for white beards." The principal says late last year he was arrested by a young subcommander for no discernible crime other than being a schoolmaster. As he was being led away, the principal produced letters from both Baradar and Zakir testifying to his good character and saying he ran a proper Islamic school. The commander threw the letters in his face and hauled the principal before an Islamic court, where he was fined $6,000—a fortune for an educator whose living depends on contributions from villagers. "They listen to no one," the principal says of the Taliban's new generation. "They're like the Afghan police—they only want to make money." They even confiscated the school's desks and chairs and sold them off at the local market.

Soon afterward, U.S. Marines drove the subcommander and his fighters out of the district—at least temporarily. The principal has cautiously reopened his school, but with no furniture, the students have to sit on the dirt floor. He's disgusted with the Taliban, but he's equally unhappy with the Kabul government and the Americans.

So basically a lose-lose for the population, with the US winning few hearts and minds.

Unless the Obama administration somehow regionalizes this mess a lot more than just relying on the Pakistanis, it's hard to see how this ends in anything but failure.  I mean, it's our corrupt allies versus Pakistan's brutal proxies, with the people trapped in between.

Turkey, on the march!

You can almost hear Ed Herlihy narrating a 1940s newsreel WRT Turkey's busy diplomacy, deal-making, etc. This is a rising great power on the make.

Several energy agreements inked in latest Erdogan-Medvedev meet, where the Russian president lauds the "full-scale strategic partnership."

Hmm.  Be nice to have one of those with Turkey.

Results include visa-free travel, Turkey's first nuclear power plant (take note) and an oil pipeline construction-boosting accord. Trade is pledged to increase 3-fold to $100B.

Seems possible enough, given recent growth.

The pipeline deal is a tricky one:  Turkey wants fewer-to-no oil tankers in the Bosphorus (which I got to cruise last year with the head of the Turkish navy), and it's easy to see why--just too narrow and too winding.

Yes, the two are competitive over who gets to become the bigger natural gas hub (Russia has a competing pipeline--South Stream to Turkey's Nabucco), but they also share a lot of frustration with the EU.

So it seems that Russia relented some on oil pipelines in order to get the nuclear power plant deal signed.

US accounts for 1/2 global defense spending; China the same in RR

Map found here

FT story on Bank of China investing $1.1B in China railway per government direction, resulting in 15% stake. This just after announcement of $900M investment in high-speed Shanghai-Beijing line, something on which the BoC may actually get its money back.

China is spending $120B on RRs this year.  The most fantastic estimates of Chinese defense spending land in the same range.

The US spends in the range of $600-700B on defense and nowhere near any such number on RRs, which get less maintenance money each year that the interstate system does.

One World Bank expert says China's RR expansion is the biggest thing since the US built its interstate highway system.  China, BTW, is just finishing up its own such system.

"That'll do PIIGS. That'll do."

Chart per Bloomberg BusinessWeek story.

The PIIGS acronym refers to financially troubled Portugal, Ireland, Italy, Greece and Spain.

What I found interesting:  the IMF telling an Old Core country that it needs to cut spending substantially, to include defense spending (WSJ story).

But the Greeks don't get the memo, avoiding the subject in a recent summit with Turkey designed to improve relations.  Turkey is in better shape, and as a rising power, naturally spends more on defense.

A lesson there, perhaps, for the US vis-a-vis China.  We can obsess over the growth of Chinese defense spending or we can realize that we don't need to outspend them as excessively as in the past.  Even at the highest credible estimates, we outspend the Chinese military by 6-fold.

Of course, Greek defense spending isn't the big issue; it's all the social spending.

Still, the lesson hangs there, waiting to be absorbed by the Old Core:  we cannot rebalance and age and continue to outspend every targeted rising great power at the same old levels.