Go Big or Go Home

With the troubling situations in both North Korea and Somalia, many people are thinking about how to handle these situations. The answer must be the old adage "go big, or go home".

After the successful rescue of a captured American ship captain, Somali pirates have vowed to step up their efforts and get revenge upon western vessels for the loss of their kinsmen. Just today, we've already seen an escalation in hijackings including the first night-time raid and another attack on a US ship. At the same time, North Korea has yet again abandoned the 6-party talks, kicked out IAEA inspectors, restarted it's nuclear programs and swore that it would start production of another nuclear bomb.

So, what is to be done about all of this? Some have come up with a variety of possible ways forward, including several task forces in the Department of Defense. The problem, in the end, boils down to a repeat of similar problems in the past. Are we willing to sacrifice what it takes to fix the problem in order to fix the problem? Is our policy going to be based on what we want, or by what we're willing to pay?

If we rewind the clock 10 to 15 years, we can clearly see that we've had this problem before. Somalia had collapsed and was threatening both US interests and a vague sense of moral indignation at mass slaughter. At the time, the Clinton policy was driven not by a strategy that looked at the end goal (fixing things) and deciding how to take the steps necessary to that end. Instead, it was driven by the amount of political capital, money, and American blood that the president was willing to spend. The strategists had to do the best with what they had, rather than getting what they needed to do the job. In the end, the plan unsurprisingly fixed nothing AND shed much more political capital AND American blood than was allowed for at the outset.

The second big situation of the 90's, of course, was Iraq. Iraq, for a time, was developing nuclear weapons (until their facilities were turned into blasted heaps of rubble by the Israelis). Likewise, Saddam endlessly threatened his neighbors and the US. The diplomatic confrontation went on and on. Year after year, the US would provide support for Iraq, only to have it's chain yanked. Oil for food turned into money for Saddam. A tightly-controlled, autocratic regime knew how to play America to get what it wanted, every time, and make Clinton look like an ass, every time. A political cartoon that ran in my local paper showing Saddam with a paddleball with the ball replaced by the head of Bill Clinton was tragically appropriate.

So what happened in the end? With Iraq, people were so fed up with Saddam (especially in the government) that the president fabricated and embellished a case for war against our enemy that we were just frankly sick of having to deal with (so much so that the government nearly unanimously approved of war). Because we were jerked around so much for so long, we eventually snapped and were willing to put the resources on the line to fix the situation (by ousting Saddam). Likewise, when we failed to do anything about the situation in Somalia, the situation in Somalia continued. The piracy we're dealing with is a direct result of having failed to deal with the situation in the first place.

Thus, it can be clearly seen that by caring about a situation, but taking action based on cost, not results, leads us inevitably to a situation where we're going to pay the cost anyway (if not moreso) in the end. Thus, no matter how uncomfortable things are, we need to be willing to "go big". If we really care about North Korea's nuclear weapons program, we've got to be willing to destroy the government of North Korea. If we really care about Somali pirates, then we're going to have to put the proper amount of resources on the line to actually do the nation-building required to get the job done. Otherwise, we're just going to have to do this later, at greater cost.

Of course, there is one out to this all. That is, of course, that we could stop caring. If we simply forbid American vessles to travel through the Suez canal, or simply handed complete worry and responsibility of a nuclear North Korea (or Iran for that matter) to local powers and totally washed our hands of it, then we wouldn't need to spend any resources at all. Sure, the problems wouldn't be fixed (as if they would through a tempered response), but they wouldn't be our problems any more. This is the "go home" option, where we solve our problems by simply refusing to care about them. Of course, this option would throw away any moral obligatiojavascript:void(0)n to any human being outside of the borders of the United States.

Otherwise, to take a middle road means cost for no results. It means a tragic reliving of the Clinton years of foreign policy that will ultimately end with a president like Bush who will actually act to try and solve problems rather than letting them fester. If Obama decides to break from the Bush way of thinking and adopt the Clinton, he's just setting himself up to be replaced by another Bush. Hopefully we can have the clear-sightedness to actually cut losses where they should be cut, and do the proper actions to fix things, rather than just more unpopular, or unproductive squandering of American blood, treasure, credibility, and respect.

A Failure of What?

As Somali pirates continue to hijack more and more vessels, fingers are being pointed, but who's really to blame?

Piracy off of the horn of Africa has been rife over the past few months, but with the capture of an American vessel and the first of many British warships entering the area, the issue is once again heating up. While the temporary solution to the problem seems to be clear, the causes and thus the long-term solutions seem to be muddled and unknown.

When I was driving home today, I heard a guest on "The World" give what must surely be the most western version of the story. Namely, Somalia is chugging out pirates because it has a failed state. Because there is no overarching coercive force to force the law on desperate Somalis, they are behaving so reprehensibly. Notwithstanding that coercion doesn't work, the feeling is that if the Somalian state is unable to beat it's own citizens into doing what's right, other states will send their navies in to beat up Somalian citizens into doing what's right (we insist).

But, of course, the whole point of a state is not to force it's population into a certain set of behavior patterns through force. It is unsurprising that those states who have held such to be their mandate have all invariably failed. Put otherwise, it is the attempt to mete out law at all costs that causes states to fail, rather than the failure of a state that causes lawlessness. After all, there are many communities in the world that don't have direct, external, state-sponsored law that do just fine (like the Amish, for example), and to think that men are naturally savage and require strong governance over them to prevent rampant anarchy and death may be surprised to know that their philosophical roots were already cut out nearly 400 years ago...

The particular guest then went on to say that another reason for Somali piracy is the desperate condition of Somalis. Specifically, because they have a failed state, they don't have education, roads, or welfare. Simply put, without government giving you what you need, you are left in a world of squalor. Of course, this idea is actually absurd. People have gotten on well enough without states providing infrastructure or medical bill reimbursement or factory-produced government schools for millennia. If this hyper-statist point of view were accurate, then the entire world, pre-westphalia, would have been nothing more than barbarity and mass butchery: something we know to be patently false.

We know as fact that people can take care of themselves without a government handing them everything without immediately resorting to things like piracy. The overbearingly western idea that the failure of the state has transitively caused the problems is clearly confused. Thea idea that Somalis are risking their lives for $10 million in one go when they otherwise might make $10 over their entire lifetime seems much more at heart in this issue. We could just lump this all into a category of mass greed if it weren't for the fact that Somalis do suffer SO much and are in SUCH a state of destitution. Such want undoubtedly would drive people to float rafts hundreds of miles away from shore just for a chance at relief.

This brings us to another thing that this particular guest noted. Somalis are in a very desperate state, and we know this because almost everyone there is reliant on food aid. Once again, there is reason to believe that this line of thinking has been turned on its head. It is assuming that the Somalis are desperate (perhaps due to lack of an overbearing government), that they are required to take food aid in order just to get out of the worst of their deprivation. In fact, it may be that the opposite is true: food aid is CAUSING the worst of the deprivation.

Foreign aid is often channeled into the hands of governments who simply divert the funds for themselves. Somalia was no exception to this in the early 1990's. Those resources that DO manage to make it down to regular people undermine the fledgling ability for the people to provide for themselves. After all, what Somali farmer or pastor can possibly compete against free food from the rest of the world? What you wind up with is with a bunch of out of work farmers swelling the need for more aid, while no longer being able to help free their country from their need of it. Add to that interest payments on loans, and we can begin to see a fundamental factor for the worsening of the situation in Africa since we've started giving out aid.

So, in the end, if it's not a matter of a failure of state or a failure of aid that's causing the conditions which breeds piracy, then the question is, "this is a failure of what?" Firstly, and most clearly, this is a failure of Somalians to provide well enough for themselves. If they grew enough food, and desired political unity and economic stability (rather than the tribalism and looter-take-all attitude which has been rife in Somalia for the past few thousand years) enough, they would be able to MAKE an environment in which piracy was no longer such a good-seeming option. While a state may very well be helpful, all states rest on the consent of the governed (they are made for the people BY the people), and the governed seem to have no will to make a state. It requires little imagination to consider what would happen were a state forced on them from outside...

While the Somalis should take a lion's share of the blame (but if they don't feel guilty, then what good will it ultimately do?), the outside world certainly hasn't helped. Rather than encouraging entreprenurialism, or civil society, it encourages dependency (which, in the end is really another word for slavery), and attacks civic institutions as harbingers of terrorism. We want Somalia to step in line, and do things our way. After all, there's a profit to be had.

If we want to have any hope to change this situation, there seems to be only two real options. The first is to swarm the Gulf of Aden with warships and murder anyone caught in a boat, while at the same time colonizing Somalia and giving (forcing on) them a state which they were unable to make themselves. Extreme order through extreme coercion. Welcome to the 1800's. The second, of course, is to stop half-assedly engaging with Somalia in a system which is ultimately propagating the problem. By this, I mean that we need to wean Somalia off of its dependency that is ultimately its ruin, and we need to stop behaving like we can control a Somali state (or even that we know what it should look like), and let Somalia grow up into a strong, independent nation. Stiflement begets destitution begets retribution, now as in the past, and to simply state that Somalia has "failed" to make a state in our image that follows our laws and norms is simply continuing the problem to the indefinite future.

Marching to a New Tune

With the events of the past few days, it appears that there has been a real change in the way the United States handles it's defense policy. What direction is our military taking into the future?

Only a few hours ago, the Secretary of Defense Robert Gates announced a new direction forward for the Pentagon. In it was not simply a change of rhetoric, but a change in direction. Because the change came from a bureaucrat, it is possible that much more of the change will actually be implemented, which means that we might very much see some real changes to the U.S. military in the next few decades.

The change is moving things forward in a few different ways. The biggest is that it is reversing the long-standing trend of cuts to active-duty military personnel. No longer is the path toward eventually phasing out the human aspect entirely, but rather it is realizing the extensive needs of the human element in the irregular wars we've been fighting (after all, drones can't go house to house and ask residents to give out names of terrorists like real people can). As well, there's a focus of moving towards increasing special ops, as well as more translators, and social studies majors embedded in military units.

But what's more important than what's put in is what's left out. The highlight of the chopping block was the Future Combat Systems program. Basically, for the first time since the New Model Army, a major military was being redesigned from the ground up in a cohesive way. One protocol for networking vehicles together, one protocol for weapon specs and military doctrine to use them. Rather than being hodge-podge upgrades, this was going to be a clean-sweep, followed by a set-piece American army.

The problem, other than it's massive budged overruns and startling lack of progress, was what it was designed to do. Specifically, it was designed to fight a major war with contemporary major powers.

The problem, of course, is that none of the other major powers have made any real strides in their military capabilities in over 20 years. The U.S. ended the Cold War 2 or 3 steps ahead of everyone else, and, due to research over the past 20 years, are now more like 10 or 12. In short, the U.S. already HAS the ability to crush any possible combination of major powers in a conventional war, and that would only happen in the first place once it somehow became okay to engage in such a war in the age of nuclear weapons.

There is still, however, the vague threat of developing industrialized powers. Iran, for example, could be persuasively argued to be trying to make a nuclear weapon while North Korea just attempted another ballistic missile test.

The thing we have to remember, though, is that the U.S. as far as military technology is concerned, is where it is due to 50 YEARS of cold war defense spending as the most productive nation on the planet. North Korea, on the other hand, is using a way smaller resource base, and has spent much less time. The U.S., for example, was able to put a satellite into orbit after 10 years of trying. North Korea, on the other hand, has spent the past 10 years since their first disastrous taepodong test (that blew up less than a mile off the launchpad) reworking the rocket into one that can unreliably fail and discharge its payload somewhere in the Pacific Ocean.

This new move by the pentagon shows that someone down there understands that we already have the ability to crush everyone, and the most threatening states (conventionally speaking), are ones that are so far behind our current capabilities that if we stopped now, it would take centuries for them to catch up.

But what does this all mean? Firstly, it means that the Department of Defense is FINALLY coming to the realization that, even though we've had a long time since our last major war, the next major war is still an impossibly long way into the future. As well, it signals a turning away from the idea that technology wins wars to the idea that technique wins wars. It's going to be the trained counter-insurgent, not the trained F-22 Raptor pilot that will really be winning our wars in the future.

As such, with a change in doctrine, capabilities, and funding, the U.S. will be much better handled to win wars like Iraq and Afghanistan in the future. Of course, in theory, it also gives everyone else a chance to catch up to us, military-technology-wise. Once a relative single, overarching hegemon in the field of global power is gone, conflict among major powers is not only possible, but likely. This conflict, however, would still be deterred by the threat of nuclear weapons (unless people have actually gotten rid of them in the far future). As such, major war will only be possible if several major actors catch up AND technology neutralizes nuclear weapons.

Given the fact the the U.S. is the only country seriously attempting to neutralize nukes (through it's variety of anti-missile systems), and it's joining the rest of the developed world that isn't really making conventional weapons upgrades, a move in the direction that the Pentagon is currently taking seems more than prudent.

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Terrorism? Let us help (we insist)!

As Pakistan continues to crumble, it's ability to handle sworn enemies of the United States is decreasing. Will we insist on helping out like we've done in the past?

Today's attacks in Pakistan have thrown yet another point on the line that is pointing to Pakistan's downfall. As terrorism has been ramping up along with political corruption, paramilitary groups are staging even more and more flagrant attacks (if they can shoot up and capture a police barracks in broad daylight, how much more flagrant can they get?), while the government is less able to stop them. While the US may be able to otherwise overlook internal gubernatorial collapse of a third-world nation, this time the bad guys are people who we have sworn to destroy. This time, it's personal.

The US has had a long history of intervention in foreign countries where direct national security is possibly at stake. Can't stop the Zapatistas who are flooding Texas with gang violence? Don't worry, Mexico, we can take care of that problem for you... we insist. Don't care to take out Al Quaeda, Taliban? Don't worry, let us take care of them for you... we insist. Over the past century, there have been dozens of countries that the US has sent boots into from the more obvious (like the invasion of Afghanistan), to the dubious (like the invasion of Lybia), to the blatantly unnecessary (like the invasion of Iraq). No American president (including the current one) has been able to fully resist the seductive call to send American troops places where they're not really needed in order to fix a problem that someone else should have.

The real question, then, is how does the president handle this call? The last one clearly made no qualms about turning his desires into action. The current one, however, has chosen a more Clinton route of under-the-radar, more secretive things that ultimately yield far fewer results, but do so at far less liability. Rather than spending real money and putting real lives on the line, the strategy basically involves things like arming rebel groups that are fighting whoever we're also fighting, or launching a few missiles in and hoping for the best. At the most, US involvement involves dragging dozens of other countries into UN pacts (or NATO, in the case of Clinton in the Balkans) to help us fix other people's problems.

Of course, unlike Operation Desert Fox, Obama has a lot more technology to do the secret dirty work. Specifically, we have lots of unmanned aerial drones, the use of which has escalated since Obama's taken over. Of course, it's still an egregious breach of international law, but we haven't felt we need permission for these kinds of attacks in the past, and we certainly don't feel like we need it now.

Of course, with all of these "limited liability" strategies, they tend to be horrifically short sighted. Was it really a good idea to accidentally lose a bunch of stinger missiles for Islamic Afghan fighters to use against the soviets? Was it really a good idea to give Saddam Hussein a bunch of weapons to use against Iran? History is flooded with examples of limited liability tactics that both don't achieve the desired effect, but also are ultimately counterproductive.

And here we are shooting drones into Pakistan. If Israel has been able to teach us anything over the years, it's that aerial bombardment does NOT destroy terrorist networks (if anything, it has the opposite of the desired effect). Likewise, the flagrant disregard for Pakistan's sovereignty is further weakening the state, making them LESS able to handle the problem by itself which will require MORE American involvement down the road. If committing acts that we knew would cause a future environment that would allow us to invade Pakistan was the point of all of this, we're definitely on the right track.

Because once the Pakistan state looses it's last shred of legitimacy (no matter how much money we give to corrupt government officials in civilian aid), then the problem over there is going to get much worse, and we're going to feel obligated to handle the mess that the Pakistani's might have been able to fix, without our help. In all likelihood, we're going to put boots on the ground because the problem will feel like it needs to be fixed, and we'll insist that we're the ones to fix it.

The Obama War

With Bush gone, and Obama in, the war in Afghanistan is set to go off in a new direction. What will this direction likely mean for the ultimate outcome?

Earlier this morning, Obama gave a speech outlining his plan for the war in Afghanistan. As the conflict was a key part of his campaign, it makes sense that he was going to unveil something different than his predecessor's strategy of "do nothing and hope it works out".

His plan basically breaks down into two big camps. The first prong of the strategy is to throw more troops and more money at the problem by simply increasing the number of both that the US is to put into Afghanistan. The second is to go in with a second army: one of clerks, bureaucrats, engineers, teachers, and other civil servants to do some serious, hardcore nation building.

Obama was mocked during the campaign for following his party ('s leadership's) line that the surge in Iraq had failed. While towing the party line may be forgivable, it seems that it has betrayed a real lack of knowledge of why the surge worked, and why the first prong of the new strategy in Afghanistan is doomed to fail.

In Iraq, after the crushing victory over the Iraqi army, there was this definite sense that the US should just stick around for a little while, taking an unobtrusive role, but to get out as soon as possible. The strategy was one of handover: hand over security responsibility to the Iraqi police, hand over nation building to the fledgling Iraqi republic, and hand over a stunning victory for the US without handing over the mess. As such, the general Casey way of doing things was to take a very backseat role as an advisor, training Iraqi forces from the safety of their bases. When things would flare up, the army would go in for a quick strike, and all of the insurgents would just move somewhere else.

Under this strategy, the war in Iraq failed. The basic screw-up was believing that a weak state can provide security, rather than the correct view that a weak state requires security as a prerequisite in order to be able to do anything at all. Handing over responsibility to someone who couldn't be responsible ended, predictably, in failure. Obama is currently set up to repeat this mistake. The plan is to send in a bunch of observers and trainers for the explicit strategic purpose of handing control of security over to the Afghanis. If this failed in a country with a weak state, I fail to see how this will work in a country that has almost never even had a centralized state in its entire history.

The second prong of the new strategy is basically to give the Afghanis a government. The officials there are all apparently so corrupt, and have such a little idea of what governance should actually look like (once again, because they've had virtually no experience), that the so-called government really isn't doing anything but funneling American dollars into their Swiss bank accounts. This, however, is the very definition of occupation in everything but name. If we're sending in our army, and our foreign government officials are actually creating a nation by themselves, then any Afghani who stands on top is really more of a symbol. Needless to say, if the plan was to create an environment to hand over political control to the Afghanis, is seizing political control over the Afghanis the way to do it?

I would personally say that after a few decades of showing the Afghanis how to run a proper centralized bureaucracy, they'd catch on and do okay, but is that really what Obama is setting out to do? Likewise, can a true Afghani government ever exist if the state is under constant security threats (the kind likely to be perpetrated by the military arm of this strategy)?

I very much applaud Obama's clear thinking with regards to the fact that nation building is a better long-term strategic goal than hoping it all just works out by itself. However, the end result will not be good if the plan forward is worse than just doing nothing. If we've learned anything from Iraq it's that security must come FIRST before anything else can be done. This means that Obama needs to have taken the real lessons from the surge to heart. He needs to place a lot of troops in harm's way (in order to actually engage in the communities that they are in), even if Obama needs to abandon his foolish idea of working with other nations that have no real interest in the conflict's result. He needs to be willing to spand a lot of money in bribes, which will have a direct effect, unlike when the money goes into the same accounts anyways through corruption. He also needs to understand that the Afghani army is nowhere NEAR close to providing security for Afghanistan, and taking the standpoint of "the more that indigenous guards take over the better" is only going to end in disaster, just like last time.

The last thing left to see is if Obama will make good on his repeated threats to invade Pakistan if it can't stop the terrorists hiding just across inside its borders. If so, then Obama would truly, and, I might say, miraculously, be repeating every single major foreign policy mistake of the Bush administration. Until then, it's just time to break out the popcorn and see how this show plays out.