The Enlightened Despot

In Afghanistan, as it is everywhere, war is green, noisy, and difficult to follow:

UPDATE: The video seems to have disappeared. If a find a working link, I’ll fix it.

This amazing photograph comes via Michael Crowley. I’m speechless, so on to the links:

• Marc Ambinder reports that Obama will announce his nominee to replace Justice Souter sometime next week, probably toward the end of the week. I predict a week and a half of baseless speculation, followed by widespread outrage.
• Bill Clinton is being sent to Haiti, as good a place as any to keep him.
• His wife, meanwhile, is one of the subjects of a new J-Mart story. Supposedly, John Coale - Hillary in the primaries, Palin aide in the general, and Fox News in-law until death do them part - attempted to broker a deal in which Sarah Palin’s PAC (SarahPAC! Really!) would help out with Hillary Clinton’s campaign debt in exchange for which the Clintons would become her friends in a high-profile way, or make left wing Palin critics back off, or… something. Chalk full of sources-close-to-so-and-so, it’s the sort of piece that inspires outrage in the sorts of people who get outraged about journalistic practices.
• Speaking of Sarah Palin, over at the Mudflats, the results are in for the Name Sarah Palin’s Book competition. How Winkin’, Blinkin’, and Todd failed to win is beyond me. Carpe per Diem is also pretty clever.
• Maureen Dowd was busted stealing a paragraph from Talking Point’s Memo. Inexplicably, rather than going with the tried-and-true excuse that she meant to provide a citation, she claimed that she’d never seen the TPM post, and that she got the idea for the “line” from a friend who must have read it, which is a curious explanation for the near-verbatim reproduction of an over 40-word sentence.
• Jerry Taylor continued to be savaged by the rank-and-file over at the National Review. Today he is guilty of “pseudo-principled indifference to public opinion”, the eigth deadly sin.
• Ending two decades of civil war, and proving that these bullet points aren’t ordered by importance, the Tamil Tigers have been defeated, supposedly for good. Here’s hoping.

And, finally, our quote of the day, which is actually quite a few days old, from Matt Yglesias:

I’m actually 100 percent positive that were Oprah on the Supreme Court she would do a good job. In a lot of ways, it’s just not that difficult a job.

More effort is put into rebutting this notion than it deserves here.

I saw this from Jim Manzi just before I went away, and didn’t have time to comment on it, but it’s without a doubt the best pro-torture piece I’ve seen, despite being from someone who (I believe) is anti-torture:

Maybe I’m morally obtuse about this (again, I mean that non-rhetorically), but I don’t see how a non-pacifist makes the moral case against torturing captured combatants. Of course, there are at least two ways to interpret that. One is that torture of captured combatants is not morally wrong. The other is to see this as an example of why we should be skeptical about moral reasoning as a way to answer the question; that is, of why we must rely on moral intuition and the traditions of our society.

I’m broadly on Manzi’s side on moral reasoning in general, but I don’t think his case here holds up. I don’t have the stamina to get into it now, but for now, here are some reax.

Netanyahu’s government takes over in Israel today, and they aren’t wasting any time bringing the crazy. In an interview with Jeffrey Goldberg, Bibi warned Obama to shut down Iran’s nuclear weapons program within months, or else:

In an interview conducted shortly before he was sworn in today as prime minister of Israel, Benjamin Netanyahu laid down a challenge for Barack Obama. The American president, he said, must stop Iran from acquiring nuclear weapons—and quickly—or an imperiled Israel may be forced to attack Iran’s nuclear facilities itself.

“The Obama presidency has two great missions: fixing the economy, and preventing Iran from gaining nuclear weapons,” Netanyahu told me. He said the Iranian nuclear challenge represents a “hinge of history” and added that “Western civilization” will have failed if Iran is allowed to develop nuclear weapons.

…

Betanyahu offered Iran’s behavior during its eight-year war with Iraq as proof of Tehran’s penchant for irrational behavior. Iran “wasted over a million lives without batting an eyelash … It didn’t sear a terrible wound into the Iranian consciousness. It wasn’t Britain after World War I, lapsing into pacifism because of the great tragedy of a loss of a generation. You see nothing of the kind.”

He continued: “You see a country that glorifies blood and death, including its own self-immolation.” I asked Netanyahu if he believed Iran would risk its own nuclear annihilation at the hands of Israel or America. “I’m not going to get into that,” he said.

Some of his advisers are even worse, and not just Lieberman:

Neither Netanyahu nor his principal military advisers would suggest a deadline for American progress on the Iran nuclear program, though one aide said pointedly that Israeli time lines are now drawn in months, “not years.” These same military advisers told me that they believe Iran’s defenses remain penetrable, and that Israel would not necessarily need American approval to launch an attack. “The problem is not military capability, the problem is whether you have the stomach, the political will, to take action,” one of his advisers, who spoke on condition of anonymity, told me.

…

Ya’alon, a former army chief of staff who is slated to serve as Netanyahu’s minister for strategic threats, dismissed the possibility of a revitalized peace process, telling me that “jihadists” interpret compromise as weakness. He cited the reaction to Israel’s unilateral withdrawal from Gaza four years ago. “The mistake of disengagement from Gaza was that we thought like Westerners, that compromise would defuse a problem—but it just encouraged the problem,” he said. “The jihadists saw withdrawal as a defeat of the West … Now, what do you signal to them if you are ready to divide Jerusalem, or if you’re ready to withdraw to the 1967 lines? In this kind of conflict, your ability to stand and be determined is more important than your firepower.”

This will be the first disaster Obama owns lock, stock, and barrel, having inherited the economic crisis and both wars. I don’t see any good outcome here. The most important showdown here, though, is not the one between the U.S. and Iran, or between Israel and Iran, but between Obama and Netanyahu. It would be a disaster for us to launch any sort of strike against Iran. But a strike from Israel will also be a disaster for us if we don’t do everything we possibly can to distance ourselves from it. Obama needs to publicly oppose a preemptive strike on Israel’s part, and denounce one if it comes.

The domestic politics of this are obviously not great, but I don’t think they’re quite as terrible as they might seem. The AIPAC crowd dismiss the “Israel, Right or Wrong” portrayal of their views as a straw man, and in a way, I think they’re right. Unwavering support for Israel has been popular not because Americans support the Israelis even when they are doing things we disapprove of, but because so many people are convinced that whatever they are doing must be right. A more accurate slogan would be “Israel: Right”.

War with Iran, however, is not something for which Americans have any stomach right now. So I think it should be possible for the administration to oppose it in stark terms. Hopefully, that will convince Netanyahu to back down. But at the very least, it will help us to wash our hands of the attack if it comes.

Note: A lot of what follows is covered in earlier posts, in a few instances word-for-word. But some of it is new, and I had to write this up for something else (thus the lack of links, but take my word for it, it’s all true), so I figured I’d post it here as well.

President Obama has taken his first concrete steps toward fulfilling one of the key foreign policy promises of his campaign: improving America’s military efforts in Afghanistan. Over the next few months, 17,000 additional troops will be deployed to the region. This is welcome news, coming on the heels of news that over 2000 civilians were killed there in 2008. 39% of these casualties were inflicted by pro-government forces (that is, NATO and the Karzai government itself), and of those, two-thirds were killed in air strikes. Simply put, we do not have enough boots on the ground, and as a result, we have been forced to over-rely on air power, which is necessarily less precise.
As badly as these troops are needed, however, their chances of enabling us to defeat the Taliban and stabilize the region are vanishingly slim unless we radically reshape our strategy in Afghanistan, particularly with respect to its primary industry, opium. It is widely understood how central the opium issue is to the war effort. As National Security Advisor Jim Jones put it, “It is not the resurgence of the Taliban but the linkage of the economy to drug production, crime, corruption and black market activities which poses the greatest danger for Afghanistan.” Despite this, there is hardly any mainstream discussion of what our approach to the opium trade should be. Rather, debate is focused on the narrow tactical question of how best to dismantle the drug trade; the desirability of dismantling it simply goes without saying.
But like so many things that go without saying, this strategy is in fact too stupid for words. While the data is - naturally enough - spotty, opium production most likely accounts for around a third of Afghanistan’s GDP. This figure fluctuates a good deal from year to year, but the trade has been a major part of the country’s economy for over a quarter of a century. More than 10% of the population is directly employed in the production effort.
It can therefore be instructive - though of course somewhat hyperbolic - to substitute ‘the economy’ for ‘the drug trade’ in statements about our strategy for the region. So when Joe Klein, for instance, says that for success to be even conceivable “[t]he Karzai government will have to end its corruption and close down the drug trade”, he is saying something disturbingly close to “the Karzai government will have to shut down the economy.” Destroying the source of a population’s livelihood goes against the core of any sane counterinsurgency strategy. If we are working to win the hearts and minds (remember those?) of people who are growing a profitable crop, and if our enemy offers to purchase that crop for export while we offer to destroy it and shoot anyone who makes too much of a fuss, we are always going to come up short.
There is at least some indication that General Jones recognizes this, having assured a reporter that we “will not see NATO soldiers burning poppy fields.” And this is technically true: the bulk of the eradication effort involves Afghan soldiers destroying plants by hand, though there is enthusiasm amongst many in the U.S. military for greater reliance on a program of poisoning fields via aircraft. All of which has had a fairly typical degree of success for a supply-side drug reduction effort: opium output over the past few years has been higher than at any point in history.
Drug trafficking has proven time again to be something we simply can’t beat, and we all know what you’re supposed to do when you can’t beat ‘em. Which is not to say that we need to start supplying street corners worldwide. There are severe codeine and morphine shortages in many parts of the world. Due to extensive international regulation, the supply of legal opium is kept artificially low, and reforms would be needed before countries would be allowed to import the medication they need even once they were able to afford it. But creating a program for licit poppy growing on a significant portion of Afghanistan’s farmland would dramatically change the dynamic between pro-government forces and the Afghan people. We would have to overpay for the scheme to work; the price of opium on the legal market is far below its price in the heroin trade. But Afghanistan’s entire GDP is $10 billion. Pricing the Taliban out of the market for Afghan crops simply isn’t that expensive a proposition. As an added benefit, raising the country’s major industry out of the black market and into the daylight would remove the major cause of the government’s widespread corruption.
We have a war on drugs. We desperately need to get it off them and into recovery. There is simply no chance of succeeding in Afghanistan until our war kicks its opium habit.

That story about the drone strikes Pakistan was complaining about actually being launched from inside Pakistan with the cooperation of its government turns out not only to be true, but googleable. This is a screen capture from Google Earth back in 2006. In fairness, I’m pretty sure the text and arrow have been Photoshopped in, so you forgive the confusion. Dianne Feinstein still looks pretty terrible for blurting this out to the press, and I must say, she’s having a rough 2009 so far.

(h/t Danger Room)

The one thing that science-fiction his proved most prescient about is the importance of robots. (On the other end of the spectrum are flying cars. How ’bout it, science?) If you aren’t in one of a few narrow subfields within the military services or the sciences, you probably don’t have much contact with robots, but that won’t be the case for long. Since the military is absolutely dominating the field of robot research for now, you will no doubt see a rise of robot activity in news coverage of international affairs before you start seeing more actual robots in your daily lives - the drone strikes in Afghanistan and Pakistan are just the tip of the iceberg. The bad news about all this is that, presumably, these robots will eventually become self-aware and reduce humanity to a slave race. The upside is that they’re really cool. In any case, it’s best to be informed. So here’s a scattered round-up of robot activity:

Whatever happens in the ongoing debate over drone strikes into Pakistani territory, you are going to hear more and more about those drones, as the military’s use of unmanned aircraft is increasing rapidly. How rapidly? This rapidly:

Of course, you don’t rack-up 375,000 flight hours with the occasional attack on key Taliban leaders. So what exactly are flying robots doing with all their time? So far their most important function is surveillance, which is intuitive enough. Flying around monitoring things seems like just the sort of mission for which you wouldn’t want to waste a human’s time. Existing drones are already doing a great job for us in this department, but nothing compared to what we will be able to do within a few years when our A-160 T Hummingbird robot helicpoters will be fitted with the Autonomous Real-Time Ground Ubiquitous - Surveillance - Imaging System (ARGUS-IS), a 1.8 gigapixel cluster of cameras and the processing power to sort through all that data and transmit what the mere mortals on the ground need or want to see:

The Hummingbird is unique in its ability to hover at high altitude (over 15,000 feet) and its endurance of over 20 hours. This means it can park high in the sky and scan a wide area. Robo-chopper camera-maker BAE Systems says that its imager will be able to cover an area of over a hundred square miles. The refresh rate is fifteen frames per second and a “ground sample distance” of 15 centimeters –- this means that each pixel represents six inches on the ground. (The Darpa diagram, above, suggests a smaller area of coverage, 40 square kilometers or 15 square miles, at that resolution.)

The volume of data is too great to be completely transmitted, but users will be able to define at least sixty-five independent video windows within the image and zoom in or out at will. The windows can be set to automatically track items of interest such as moving vehicles. In fact, the resolution is good enough for it to offer “dismount tracking” or following individual people on foot.

In addition to the windows, ARGUS will provide “a real-time moving target indicator for vehicles throughout the entire field of view in real-time.” Basically, nothing can move in the entire area without being spotted. Unlike radar, ARGUS can zoom in and provide a high-resolution image.

The camera is pretty impressive, but it’s the processing and the software behind it that will make this such a capable system. It would take a human a very long time to scan the whole area under surveillance if they were looking for something – but this is exactly the type of task which the swarming software we looked at last week excels at. Luckily enough, that just happens to be a Darpa program too. The technique of looking at small windows of interest also means that it may be possible to speed the frame rate up considerably – we previously looked at a windowing system so fast it could follow speeding bullets.

What’s not to love, other than the terrifying prospect that your every outdoor action could soon be monitored? This is all very expensive relative to, say, buying that new hybrid you’ve been looking at, but in the scheme of defense spending, drones can be cheap. Russia is considering buying ’several’ new drones from Israel for a mere $100 million dollars. Several! As if you needed any more evidence that spending tens of billions per unit on stealth bombers in the hopes that an alien civilization comes along and offers to come down and fight a good old-fashioned conventional war with us.  And on the low-end, drones get so cheap that terrorists can afford them. Hezbollah has already flown a drone over Israeli territory, and Al-Qaeda has robot dreams of its own, though no actual history of deploying robots. Yet.

This is another downside to robots. Even if ours don’t turn on us, other people might use theirs to kill us:

They are small, cheap and you could buy one tomorrow. Short-range versions with video cameras are common, but thanks to GPS and Google Earth you can also put one to within a few yards of your aim point from long range. Very long range. In 2003 a TAM-5 UAV with a six-foot wingspan was flown over 1880 miles across the Atlantic Ocean. One scenario features a mass drone attack launched from a tanker or freighter well out in international waters.

Eugene Miasnikov of the Center for Arms Control, Energy and Environmental Studies at MIPT, calls the UAV a suicide bomber on steroids, basically. Unlike a suicide bomber, a drone can easily penetrate security and threaten otherwise safe areas (eg the Green Zone) or reach crowded public places like spots stadiums. Dense crowds would lead to large numbers of casualties from fragmentation bombs, and an attack by multiple UAVs could cause panic and further injuries in the crowd. And don’t even get us started about chemical, biological or dirty bomb radioactive payloads.

Yikes. How can we protect ourselves against OPR (Other People’s Robots)? Lasers, of course. Don’t you feel silly for asking now? Actually, so far we’ve had a hard time getting a workable anti-drone laser weapon up and running, but we did manage to take out a small drone with a Humvee mounted-laser under thoroughly rigged test conditions, so there’s hope.

At this point you’re probably asking yourself two questions: has the military looked into building some of this technology into living insects to create cyborg spy bugs, and can we build a robot chair that can rebuild itself if we blow it up in exactly the right way? The answers to your questions are ‘yes‘ and ‘yes‘.

The immediate goal of all this technology (well, maybe not the chair), as with any defense technology, is to increase our own military might. But there is a utopian dream here too: perhaps robo-centric militaries could reduce the human cost of war. Especially if we shoot what human soldiers remain with pain beams, rather than bullets. Probably not, but it’s a nice thought, no?

So, be nice to any robots you bump into, as they’re here to stay, and will only be gaining more clout going forward. I’ll leave you with a video of an Israeli kamikaze drone (the technical term is ‘loitering missile’) which flies around for hours at a time, in co-ordination with up to 53 of its buddies, looking for enemy radar systems to blow up:

Since everybody and their mother will be posting “I Have a Dream” - which is indeed a very fine speech - today, I thought I’d mix it up and give you this, which seems to be much less well known:

The frequency with which the word ’surge’ crops up in discussions about Afghanistan is a testament to just how few terms and ideas people are willing to worry about at once. It is the stated position of our incoming president that we need more troops in our fight against the Taliban and other militant groups in the region. Indeed, this has been conventional wisdom for some time now, and was a point of agreement between Obama and McCain during the election. Obama did not, however, use the word ’surge’ to describe what was needed in Afghanistan, at least initially. (He may never have done so, but the word has infected the discourse so thoroughly that I doubt he’s avoided it altogether.)

Of course, it shouldn’t matter what we call our military initiatives. A surge by any other name would work as effectively. But more and more, the use of this word seems to be feeding the mistaken notion that the desire to send more troops to Afghanistan is a reaction to the success of the surge in Iraq, or at least that the latter should serve as a starting point for our thinking about the former. Here’s Kevin Drum, who is actually at the sensible end of this sort of talk:

The theory behind the surge in Iraq was that a relatively small number of additional troops could make a difference if they were concentrated primarily in Baghdad, where three or four brigades would represent a near doubling of forces. Baghdad was considered so central to Iraqi security that if it could be pacified, it would make an enormous difference in the rest of the country too.

That’s not true of Afghanistan. Obviously Kabul has to be safe, but it doesn’t play the same outsize role that Baghdad does in Iraq. Nor are any of the other factors that helped the surge succeed present in Afghanistan. It’s just a mess. Denying al-Qaeda a safe sanctuary is an important goal, but if even Kabul isn’t safe anymore, it means we’ve got a very, very long road ahead of us before we can make that happen. I don’t envy Barack Obama the choices he has ahead of him.

As far as these things go, this is pretty sensible. Certainly we should draw what lessons we can from our experience in Iraq. But there is a suggestion here, explicit in much MSM reporting, that the wisdom of increasing troop levels in Afghanistan depends on the presence or absence of “the factors that helped the surge succeed”, and there is nothing sensible about that. The one truly relevant similarity is that in Afghanistan today, as was the case in Iraq before the surge, we don’t have enough troops to maintain order. But this has been true since before the surge even began, indeed since around the time the Iraq War itself began. Consider The Economist, writing in October of 2003:

(more…)

Via the Daily Dish, from Sex and War by Malcom Potts and Thomas Hayden:

Can all conflict be reduced beyond even team aggression and resource competition, down to the single factor of population growth?

Nope.

Here’s the text that supposedly takes Iraq off the table as an issue in American politics:

Article 24Withdrawal of American Forces from IraqAdmitting to the performance of Iraqi forces, their increased capabilities and assuming full responsibility for security and based upon the strong relationship between the two parties the two parties agreed to the following:

All U.S. forces are to withdraw from all Iraqi territory, water and airspace no later than the 31st of December of 2011.

All U.S. combat forces are to withdraw from Iraqi cities, villages, and towns not later than the date that Iraqi forces assume complete responsibility of security in any Iraqi province. The withdrawal of U.S. forces from the above-mentioned places is on a date no later than the 30 June 2009. The withdrawing U.S. forces mentioned in item (2) above are to gather in the installations and areas agreed upon that are located outside of cities, villages and towns that will be determined by the Joint Military Operation Coordinating Committee (JMOCC) before the date determined in item (2) above.

The United States admits to the sovereign right of the Iraqi government to demand the departure of the U.S. forces from Iraq at anytime. The Iraqi government admits to the sovereign right of the United States to withdraw U.S. forces from Iraq at anytime.

The two parties agree to put a mechanism and preparations for reducing the number of U.S. forces during the appointed period. And they are to agree on the locations where the forces are to settle.

Uncompromising stuff. Though I’m sure someone more knowledgable would have made a fuss about this by now if there were anything to it, I can’t help worrying about the opening: ‘the two parties agreed to the following’. This was an unofficial translation from the Arabic, so hopefully this was just a typo. But, wheras ‘the two parties hereby agree’ would actually be a declaration, the phrasing here makes the whole article just a factual claim.

Again, I’m pretty sure there is nothing to this. But, skimming over the rest of the document, I don’t see the same formulation elsewhere…

The Rand Corporation is advocating that the U.S. government drop the phrase ‘war on terrorism’ from its lexicon (h/t Ackerman). This is all to the good. As the study notes, struggles against terrorist groups are generally very different beasts than actual wars, and they tend to demand very different tactics. Talk of the ‘war on terror’ - much like talk of the ‘war on drugs’ or the ‘war on poverty’ - does more harm than good to the clarity of our thinking about these problems.

It seems to me, however, that the conceptual mistake of classifying too broad a class of struggle as wars is nowhere near as harmful as a related mistake in how we see the nature of wars themselves. One of the commonly raised objections to classifying, e.g. our efforts to curb drug use as a war is that it’s difficult to see how such a war might ever be won or lost. But this is just as true of conflicts which actually are wars. While the GOP had a lot of fun at the convention pointing out that the Democrats never talk about victory in Iraq any more, it seems pretty clear that almost everyone on both sides of the aisle agrees that wars are the sorts of thing that can be won and lost.

The folly of viewing wars in terms of winners and losers should be fairly obvious to anyone this side of 280 BC, when the battles that introduced the term ‘Pyrrhic victory’ took place. ‘Win’ is a very useful term when discussing baseball - it’s clearly defined by a set of universally agreed upon rules, and the question of who wins and who loses has by far more consequences within the context of the rules of the sport than any other individual outcome on the field. In wars, by contrast, groups of people fight for some period of time, then stop, gradually or all at once, but never according to clearly defined rules. How the fighting goes generally has various complicated consequences for the participants and spectators alike. Declaring a victory for some subset of the combatants is rarely a very useful description of those consequences.

Of course, there are exceptions. It’s pretty clear who won WWII, and it’s actually a somewhat useful, concise summary of the outcome, even if it’s lacking in nuance. But the reason for this is fairly obvious - that was a total war between organized governments that had no intention of stopping before the other side surrendered, nor any of continuing beyond that point. For all the idle comparisons between present day Iraq and the Germany or Japan of the late ’40s and early ’50s, our description of that war as a victory for the Allies has nothing to do with the reconstruction of the Axis states; had Germany degenerated into lawlessness and ethnic slaughter we wouldn’t have been thrilled, but we would still mark the date of our victory as we do now, and feel pretty pleased about it.

There was, of course, a government we went into Iraq to overthrow. We did just that within a few days. But none of the wars critics admitted they were wrong; nor did its advocates exchange high fives and bring the troops home. Years later, we’re still fighting the same war. A wide range of possible outcomes still exists.

Whenever we talk of ‘winning’ outside the context of an artificial contest in which that term is clearly defined, we are using a metaphor. In the case of most armed conflicts, and the Iraq War in particular, we are using a shitty metaphor.