Secretary of Defense Leon Panetta was in Australia this week to increase the already strong defense relationship with that marvelous country. That is about the best news coming out of Washington in many a moon. Since it lost its empire, The United Kingdom has always thought of itself, in Harold MacMillan’s phrase, as “punching above its weight.” That is a somewhat dubious claim for the Brits (although their army is certainly topnotch), but it is certainly not the case for the Aussies. In every American war since World War II, Australia has sent troops. Given its small population, the contribution has been sizable and each soldier himself punches above his weight.
More than that, its troops receive full political support from its political leaders. When I was in Afghanistan, the German Army was prohibited by German law from operating, even patrolling, more than five kilometers from a full field hospital, making it impossible for its troops to range far enough to be effective in the province it was assigned to protect. Even more limiting, the French army was prohibited from leaving the City of Kabul. This has nothing to do with the troops. The young German soldiers I met were very frustrated with their “rules of disengagement” and I worked with a brilliant young and very frustrated French Captain, the liaison to the Ministry of Tribal Affairs in Kabul, who was prohibited from visiting the very tribes he was supposed to be familiar with.
The Australian Army suffered none of those limitations. Armies, like the government for which they work, reflect their culture, the culture of their institution and the culture of the country they serve. The culture itself comes from the people themselves and a healthy culture will recognize the necessity of its young men to risk their lives for the common good.
A few days ago, I had dinner with two World War II veterans, both of whom had served in the South Pacific. There was an American who had served on the USS Honolulu and had a number of stories about life in the U.S. Navy, most of them involving the large team of supplies and support every U.S. serviceman received. There was also an Australian, named John, who had served in the Australian Army. Although brimming with the confidence which is a trademark of his stereotypical countrymen, he wasn’t the sort to brag about himself, but his war was a rugged one.
The Australian army would give him a bag of food and a rifle, put him on a boat and drop him off alone hundreds of miles behind Japanese lines, where he was expected to work his way inland and harass enemy camps. Must have been rough work, I said. Not really, he replied, I had a jungle to hide in; the trick was to have an escape route. That is one of the admirable things about the Australians. Nothing is too difficult.
It is simply a matter of thinking through the problems and devising solutions for them. John became a sniper at the age of 16. Imagine how many 16 year olds today would accept being dropped off alone, vastly outnumbered by a tough and efficient foe, with a sack of food, a bandolier of ammunition and a dense, disease ridden jungle to protect you.
This toughness is a reflection of the culture and the traditional wanderlust of the Australian. I’ve been to a number of places – Syria, Burma, Ethiopia, for instance – where I’ll never see another Westerner except for a group of Australians, quaffing the local brew in some wayward saloon.
This toughness seems to be in the water. When a young Australian graduates from high school or college, it is traditional for them to go on a “walkabout” for a year or two. This is not an organized stay in Europe, with Daddy a phone call away ready to wire money. It seems to be an opportunity for them to test their mettle and their self sufficiency.
A few years ago, my wife and I were taking a ferry from the Island of Rhodes into Turkey. We got to talking to two young Australian women on their walkabout, neither more than 22 years old. One of them was tall, blonde and very beautiful and her mate was short, dark and a little on the stocky side. They had just hitchhiked across the Sahara Desert. Now apparently, when you hitchhike across the Sahara, your ride will occasionally dump you off at the next oasis and you wait there alone until another ride shows up.
So these young women were all alone at an oasis awaiting their next ride, when in came about ten heavily armed Arab traders leading a long line of camels heavily burdened with goods. The Australian girls were invited to tea and while they were struggling over the language barrier, the Arab chief took aside the short, dark Aussie and indicated that the Arabs would like to buy her girlfriend.
Now the average 22 year old woman in other parts of the world – the average 22 year old civilian no matter what their gender, in fact – would consider herself to have three options: scream, run or fight. This young woman just coolly looked at the chief and asked “how much?” The chief gave a number and the young woman took a minute or two to think before rejecting the offer.
The chief went back to his fellow traders and shortly came back with a higher price. The Australian took just a little longer to think about it before saying “no.” All the while, the blonde was totally oblivious to the fact that her freedom was up for sale. This went on into the evening, until the final offer was for all of the camels, all of the goods on the camels and a sum of money. This time the young Australian took a good half hour examining the teeth and hooves of the camels and inspecting the goods.
Finally, she turned to the chief and apologetically rejected the offer not because it wasn’t generous enough but because the two young women had been mates for so long. The chief, accepting defeat, prepared them dinner and by first light, the camel train went off in one direction and the Aussie girls caught a ride to the coast.
There is something wonderful about a pair of youngsters, barely out of their teens, with the presence of mind and the toughness of character to defuse a situation like that. They managed to get what they wanted, while giving the natives the satisfaction of thinking that they were setting the rules of the transaction. It is even more admirable that they were women. Women create and preserve the culture and the tough mindedness in those young women augurs well for the future of Australian culture.
There is another curious element to this. Most Australians don’t dwell on their heritage. It matters little to them whether their ancestors were Irish or English or Italian or Greek. What matters is that they are Australians. That, too, is part of the strength of the culture.
Australia may very well become the last civilized country on earth.
Thomas F. Berner
www.WeThePeopleBlog.net
comments@wethepeopleblog.net
Showing posts with label FOREIGN. Show all posts
Showing posts with label FOREIGN. Show all posts
Friday, September 16, 2011
Friday, September 9, 2011
THE END OF THE US HEGEMON ….. By Dick Shriver
The US was not set up to become a hegemon, nor did it ever express or display any official desire to become a hegemon in the sense of controlling others. Serious Hegemaniacs require a great deal of government control over citizens’ daily lives along with, especially, an overbearing influence on foreign nations.
Our founders fought for guarantees that the US would not become a hegemon. The span of control of the federal government was carefully circumscribed by a fine Constitution. These principles were gradually eroded away by the cuts (but not in spending) of a thousand Congressional knives over the past two centuries, but especially since the Great Depression of the thirties. ….and even more especially since the start of the present century.
Meanwhile Russia has sought to become a hegemon since the 14th century when the Mongols, weary of slaughtering and plundering, and lacking a long range plan, assimilated with, and largely subordinated themselves to, those they had conquered. Russia under the Tsars was every bit as aggressive territorially as the Soviets were during the twentieth century …. until August, 1991, when the world’s only true hegemon at the time came apart at the seams, yielding up 14 new independent states as well as freeing up some dozen countries in Eastern Europe.
Despite the dire predictions of many, the US, led by President George H. W. Bush, had no desire to gloat or take military or diplomatic advantage of the broken giant. The Cold War that had dominated world affairs for half a century just went away, exposing a whole different world that had been neglected, a world of famine, civil wars, atrocities, disease, and abject poverty.
What was left of the Russian hegemon at the end was a disciplined, well-paid, military-industrial complex. When the source of sustenance to this huge complex collapsed, and Moscow no longer sent money out to pay the military-industrial complex, the husk of a country that was left was that of basic consumer needs, and those that controlled them (largely women) began to prosper … food supplies, candy, bottled water, private transportation, and agriculture … all sectors of the economy whose vitality had been sapped by the Soviet system that put as much as 40 % of its GDP into defense spending. The Soviet military and its research laboratories and manufacturing facilities were alive and well, even prospering, right up until president Boris Yeltsin climbed atop one of his military tanks and declared the hegemon at an end.
The economic and social shock to the system was palpable … men who no longer had status, or who continued to preside over shells of companies that began to pay their workers in groats, vodka and very cheap wine, drank themselves into oblivion by lunchtime; many simply died early, reducing the average lifespan of Russians from 63 to 58 years in only five years, 1989 - 1994.
Now we have the decline of the American hegemon. Interestingly, the only major sector of the economy which is operating effectively today is also the US military … and to a decreasing extent the industrial complex that supplies it. Eisenhower warned us.
The consumer sector is on life support. Politicians decided we should no longer include food or gasoline when calculating inflation, as if these were no longer important factors to American families, and thus hiding and disguising warning signs of doom. The commanding heights of America’s economy … finance, housing, health, and energy …. have all been neutered by the intervention of big government. And so much for self regulation, especially of the financial industry where “True Grit” was replaced by “True Greed”.
Careers in public service are amply rewarded by early retirements and life-long health care and pensions thereafter, paid for by a declining segment of the population who continue to apply what remains of venture capital to fewer and fewer good ideas. 40 million people are on food stamps. The poverty line in the US is drawn at 20 to 50 times the average income of most of the people in the rest of the world. 50 million wage earners pay no taxes.
We are not sustainable.
We brought it on ourselves. The ideals of Horatio Alger are long gone from memory. Keynes’s “animal spirits” of investor optimism are about to sink beneath the surface for the third and final time. Adam Smith's "unseen hand" has been lopped off. The prescience of Alexis de Toqueville comes to haunt: "A democracy cannot exist as a permanent form of government. It can only exist until the voters discover that they can vote themselves largesse from the public treasury”.
The hubris of today's presidents and their cabinets. all too eager to write their own legacies while still in office, has replaced the humility, brilliance, patriotism, critical thinking and patriotism of a Harry Truman.
So what will be the result? A long-term decline of the US private sector, perhaps haltingly at first with an occasional victory by a pseudo conservative presidential candidate, an occasional up-tick in the financial markets supported mainly by memories of a glorious past, but with a steadily downward trend nonetheless until bloated government, obsolete entitlements, and a currency of declining value and importance, brings us to the same place as the Soviet Union in 1991.
The final sector to expire before the rise of an agrarian subsistence economy will be the world’s finest-ever military force, and then even our military, with signs of decline beginning to show even today, will be eclipsed. China, the world’s next hegemon, will miss us … as supplicant borrowers and as customers.
Many who survive will continue to give thanks on the last Thursday of each November.
Friday, August 26, 2011
Hard Power, Soft Power and No Power By Thomas F. Berner
The collapse of the Qaddafi Regime was heralded by the Left as a triumph of “soft power” which was somehow a vast improvement over the “hard power” we employed in Iraq. Just what soft power is was not well explained, although it seemed to boil down to “not Bush.” Although it was embarrassing to think that “leading from behind” is anyone’s idea of leadership, it certainly was refreshing to see the Europeans take the lead on a military venture.
One result of soft power is that we have no idea who will take over Libya. Oh, The New York Times is gah gah over the quality of the front men for the transitional party, but given the track record of The New York Times, that is more a cause of concern than comfort. There are reports that the CIA had a team with some of the rebels in Benghazi, but the CIA has shown itself all too often to be vulnerable to a peculiar form of xenophilia which makes them fall prey to the con jobs of fast talking foreigners.
One thing is clear: the current unity of the anti-Qaddafi crowd is already falling apart and that we have no influence over who will come out on top of the internecine battles to come. With no troops on the ground and with no visible role in liberating Libya, we will have to “lead from behind” again as the Europeans, who are practitioners of hard power even as they have gutted their own armies. They will get Libya’s oil and we will get the bill.
In truth, we have not practiced real “hard power” since the Spanish American War, when we took over Spain’s colonies as one of the fortunes of war. Since then we have only had versions of soft power, no matter how much blood and treasure we committed to a war. Hard power was the Soviet Union, dismantling East Germany’s industrial plant brick by brick and moving it to the USSR. Soft power was our building up West Germany, creating a formidable competitor to our own industry.
Today, as we scramble to abandon Iraq, a fragile but real democracy in the heart of the Middle East, we are committing to staying in Afghanistan until 2024 even though – or perhaps I should say precisely because – the United States has no national interest there and the current structure of government (a centralized state which is the opposite of what a decentralized tribal society needs) is fundamentally flawed.
The Arab Spring is already shaping up to be more momentous and less favorable to the West than we would like. The Egyptian Army is delaying elections, probably in an attempt to replace Mubarak with another dictator instead of a real election. The State Department has been begging Libya’s neighbors, apparently without much success, to police their borders to reduce the flood of arms that our “allies” in the war against Qaddafi are sending to Al Qaeda. Someone is launching sophisticated missiles at Israel from Egyptian territory. And this is just the beginning.
The Middle East will develop without much influence from us, but given our track record over the last fifty years, perhaps it is best that the Europeans take the lead on nation building. We used to be great at it. The Philippines today is a proud democracy and the US turned the warrior dictatorships of Japan and German into peace loving democracies. The brilliant reconstruction of Germany and Japan tend to be disregarded these days as critics claim that nation building there was easy, because they had been industrial economies, but those critics tend to forget that Japan thought its Emperor was God and was willing to commit mass suicide to protect him. Compared to that attitude, even the most fanatical Muslim country looks like a nascent democracy.
It is the US which has changed, not the rest of the human race. We took a curious collective shift in our mentality in the late 1950’s and one of the unexpected side effects was that we lost the knack for nation building. The splendid ability to make the rest of the world want to be more like us has disappeared. This may be because the world has developed alternative visions which we have been lax in countering. It may be because we have lost faith in our myths, always a sign of a declining culture. It may just be because we have reordered the way we do things to our detriment.
Whatever the underlying cause, one of the other symptoms of that sea change in America’s attitude can be found in the public’s attitude toward the U.S. Army. Not the other services, but the Army in particular. In my experience, even the most strident leftists usually have a soft spot for the Navy and the Air Force, as well as for the Marines and the elite units like the Navy SEALS and the Special Forces. It is the line Army, the average Americans converted into effective soldiers, that bears the brunt of the anti-military feelings. Even today, now that the Ivy League has lost their excuse to ban ROTC, they are falling all over themselves to create Navy ROTC units, not Army ROTC.
This is odd, because the Army has always been the most democratic of all of the services. It has always been easier in the Army than in the other services for an enlisted man to be promoted into the officer ranks. After the Civil War, the African American treated the Army as one of the best jobs available to their community and to this day, African Americans still speak proudly of their children “in the service.” The integration of the Army went a lot more smoothly than the integration of the Navy.
The Army’s democratic values were reflected in national politics. Until 1960 every President with a military record came from the Army. Since 1960, eleven candidates for President from the two major parties had Navy experience, six had an Air Force (or Air Corps) record, seven had no military service and only two had Army experience. Among those elected, JFK, LBJ, Nixon, Ford, Carter and the first George Bush were Navy veterans and Reagan and the second Bush had an Air Force record (Air Corps in the case of Reagan). Clinton and Obama have no military experience.
Why is this important? Because the basic fighting unit of the U.S. Army is the individual. In the Navy and the Air Force, it is a machine. There is a difference in attitude and in an organization’s approach to education, and structure if your most important unit is a ship or an airplane than if it is a human being. All of the elite units, of course, are based on highly trained individuals, but they are very small and very specialized individuals and their organizational structure is not a model for organizing a large number of people.
It is this democratic attitude – of individuals making up the fundamental building block of society – which we have lost. Politics today is a matter of constructing a coalition of power blocs – the Black community, the Unions, the evangelical Christians – big enough to get elected and assuming that everyone in those power blocs lack the individuality to think outside that bloc. National politics is more like the old fashioned urban machines of the late 19th Century than of the politics that won World War II. Not coincidently, nation building has been taken from the Army and given to a professional group of humanitarians, with dismal results.
Another reason this is important is because the Army has always borne the brunt of warfare. It is easy to be for war when you fly over foxholes rather than live in one and easier to be against war when you haven’t liberated any death camps. The loss of the Army as the primary service among the national political and business elites has meant that our decision making process has lost touch with reality.
One of the things that struck me most in my year in Afghanistan was the degree to which 24 year old infantry sergeants with high school educations were more sensitive to the local culture than Ivy League educated diplomats. It reminded me of Mark Twain’s dictum that the problem with schooling is that it interferes with your education.
And we as a country can only be the loser.
Thomas F. Berner
www.WeThePeopleBlog.net
comments@wethepeopleblog.net
One result of soft power is that we have no idea who will take over Libya. Oh, The New York Times is gah gah over the quality of the front men for the transitional party, but given the track record of The New York Times, that is more a cause of concern than comfort. There are reports that the CIA had a team with some of the rebels in Benghazi, but the CIA has shown itself all too often to be vulnerable to a peculiar form of xenophilia which makes them fall prey to the con jobs of fast talking foreigners.
One thing is clear: the current unity of the anti-Qaddafi crowd is already falling apart and that we have no influence over who will come out on top of the internecine battles to come. With no troops on the ground and with no visible role in liberating Libya, we will have to “lead from behind” again as the Europeans, who are practitioners of hard power even as they have gutted their own armies. They will get Libya’s oil and we will get the bill.
In truth, we have not practiced real “hard power” since the Spanish American War, when we took over Spain’s colonies as one of the fortunes of war. Since then we have only had versions of soft power, no matter how much blood and treasure we committed to a war. Hard power was the Soviet Union, dismantling East Germany’s industrial plant brick by brick and moving it to the USSR. Soft power was our building up West Germany, creating a formidable competitor to our own industry.
Today, as we scramble to abandon Iraq, a fragile but real democracy in the heart of the Middle East, we are committing to staying in Afghanistan until 2024 even though – or perhaps I should say precisely because – the United States has no national interest there and the current structure of government (a centralized state which is the opposite of what a decentralized tribal society needs) is fundamentally flawed.
The Arab Spring is already shaping up to be more momentous and less favorable to the West than we would like. The Egyptian Army is delaying elections, probably in an attempt to replace Mubarak with another dictator instead of a real election. The State Department has been begging Libya’s neighbors, apparently without much success, to police their borders to reduce the flood of arms that our “allies” in the war against Qaddafi are sending to Al Qaeda. Someone is launching sophisticated missiles at Israel from Egyptian territory. And this is just the beginning.
The Middle East will develop without much influence from us, but given our track record over the last fifty years, perhaps it is best that the Europeans take the lead on nation building. We used to be great at it. The Philippines today is a proud democracy and the US turned the warrior dictatorships of Japan and German into peace loving democracies. The brilliant reconstruction of Germany and Japan tend to be disregarded these days as critics claim that nation building there was easy, because they had been industrial economies, but those critics tend to forget that Japan thought its Emperor was God and was willing to commit mass suicide to protect him. Compared to that attitude, even the most fanatical Muslim country looks like a nascent democracy.
It is the US which has changed, not the rest of the human race. We took a curious collective shift in our mentality in the late 1950’s and one of the unexpected side effects was that we lost the knack for nation building. The splendid ability to make the rest of the world want to be more like us has disappeared. This may be because the world has developed alternative visions which we have been lax in countering. It may be because we have lost faith in our myths, always a sign of a declining culture. It may just be because we have reordered the way we do things to our detriment.
Whatever the underlying cause, one of the other symptoms of that sea change in America’s attitude can be found in the public’s attitude toward the U.S. Army. Not the other services, but the Army in particular. In my experience, even the most strident leftists usually have a soft spot for the Navy and the Air Force, as well as for the Marines and the elite units like the Navy SEALS and the Special Forces. It is the line Army, the average Americans converted into effective soldiers, that bears the brunt of the anti-military feelings. Even today, now that the Ivy League has lost their excuse to ban ROTC, they are falling all over themselves to create Navy ROTC units, not Army ROTC.
This is odd, because the Army has always been the most democratic of all of the services. It has always been easier in the Army than in the other services for an enlisted man to be promoted into the officer ranks. After the Civil War, the African American treated the Army as one of the best jobs available to their community and to this day, African Americans still speak proudly of their children “in the service.” The integration of the Army went a lot more smoothly than the integration of the Navy.
The Army’s democratic values were reflected in national politics. Until 1960 every President with a military record came from the Army. Since 1960, eleven candidates for President from the two major parties had Navy experience, six had an Air Force (or Air Corps) record, seven had no military service and only two had Army experience. Among those elected, JFK, LBJ, Nixon, Ford, Carter and the first George Bush were Navy veterans and Reagan and the second Bush had an Air Force record (Air Corps in the case of Reagan). Clinton and Obama have no military experience.
Why is this important? Because the basic fighting unit of the U.S. Army is the individual. In the Navy and the Air Force, it is a machine. There is a difference in attitude and in an organization’s approach to education, and structure if your most important unit is a ship or an airplane than if it is a human being. All of the elite units, of course, are based on highly trained individuals, but they are very small and very specialized individuals and their organizational structure is not a model for organizing a large number of people.
It is this democratic attitude – of individuals making up the fundamental building block of society – which we have lost. Politics today is a matter of constructing a coalition of power blocs – the Black community, the Unions, the evangelical Christians – big enough to get elected and assuming that everyone in those power blocs lack the individuality to think outside that bloc. National politics is more like the old fashioned urban machines of the late 19th Century than of the politics that won World War II. Not coincidently, nation building has been taken from the Army and given to a professional group of humanitarians, with dismal results.
Another reason this is important is because the Army has always borne the brunt of warfare. It is easy to be for war when you fly over foxholes rather than live in one and easier to be against war when you haven’t liberated any death camps. The loss of the Army as the primary service among the national political and business elites has meant that our decision making process has lost touch with reality.
One of the things that struck me most in my year in Afghanistan was the degree to which 24 year old infantry sergeants with high school educations were more sensitive to the local culture than Ivy League educated diplomats. It reminded me of Mark Twain’s dictum that the problem with schooling is that it interferes with your education.
And we as a country can only be the loser.
Thomas F. Berner
www.WeThePeopleBlog.net
comments@wethepeopleblog.net
Saturday, August 13, 2011
Eastern Europe Votes “Republican” ….. By Dick Shriver
The responsibility of the US president is to keep its citizens safe and free. President Barack Obama is doing neither. No one recognizes more how badly our president has failed on these two basic measures than citizens of Eastern Europe. Many of them came/fled/weaseled their way to the US to escape the absence of freedom and safety in their home countries up until the Berlin Wall fell and the Soviet Union collapsed. In recent years, many young people have come to the US from Eastern Europe, armed with impeccable English (plus fluency in 3-4 other languages) and college degrees, and are outpacing their American counterparts in business schools throughout the US. Ask any of them who they would vote for as president of the US today and they would likely answer, “Any republican”, or “anyone other than Barack Obama”.
The reason is simple: Eastern Europeans know tyranny, and in the US, they recognize the signs of creeping socialism and, in their minds (and mine), the inevitable and revanchist end result of government excess and its consequence, communism and tyranny. They are incredulous at what we are doing to ourselves. They know that socialism (and worse) in the US may lead to the end of their own new-born freedom and safety.
After posting a recent blog decrying the failed Obama presidency, within hours I received messages from former students from Estonia to Romania saying how much they agreed with me; and these were students who have never studied or lived in the United States.
Conservatives amongst the coming generations in Eastern Europe may represent a majority, especially among young, college-educated professionals or business persons. Already the “republican party of Europe”, called the European People’s Party (EPP), is represented in the offices of 17 heads of state out of 27 countries in the European Union. Importantly, much of the conservative political campaign energy in Eastern Europe is derived from the firepower of educated, dedicated, patriotic, hard-working, ambitious young people.
Inside the US, it is almost not possible to find a recent emigre from Eastern Europe who voted for Obama, or who would vote for him in 2012. While these intelligent people hardly represent enough votes to make a difference in the US, what is it that they know that our own indigenous, home-grown smart people don’t know?
The answer is they remember, if not directly, then indirectly through their parents and, especially, their grandparents, what tyranny was like … and they prefer freedom and will work hard to protect it ... as hard as Americans worked for freedom during WWII. The stakes to them are more or less the same.
Newt Gingrich, former Speaker of the House of Representatives and now a candidate for the US presidency in 2012 recently lost most of his campaign staff; Newt, have you thought of retaining some of Eastern Europe’s conservative campaign talent?
Thursday, June 30, 2011
Honor and Afghanistan
Afghanistan is a difficult subject for me to find a position. I spent a year there from 2004 to 2005 (thanks to my fellow blogger, Russ Deane). I love the Afghan people, the culture and the country, so my heart tells me that we should stay until the country is stabilized and well on its way to becoming a developing country.
My head tells me something else, however, that this is another example of the current crop of foreign and national security advisors (and their cheerleaders at The New York Times and The Washington Post) failing their President and their country. In a War on Terror, you don’t fight to hold real estate. You fight the terrorists – and for the most part, they have decamped to other climes – and you fight their bankers, trainers and suppliers.
Iraq had the money and Saddam had the inclination to bankroll terrorism on a grand scale. The war in Iraq, therefore, (the war that our foreign policy elite called an unnecessary war, the war that everyone hates Bush for, the war that was the successful war) was a far more important battle in the War on Terror than Afghanistan can ever be. The Taliban were just Al Qaeda’s landlord, charging Osama rent to stay in the country, but Iraq was something different.
Terrorism has dropped off because Saddam, not the Taliban, is gone. A 600 page translation of Iraqi secret police correspondence, released by the Pentagon in 2008, shows just how heavily involved in world terrorism Saddam was. Without a magnifying glass, you would have missed this story in The New York Times, of course – it covered the story in all of two paragraphs back among the truss ads – but then the importance of a news story is often inversely related to the space The Times devotes to it. What is important is that Saddam was a key player in world terrorism, as important in his way as Osama bin Laden was in his.
If the Taliban were to take power in Afghanistan tomorrow, they would resume oppressing their people, but it is a pretty good bet that they would not invite Al Qaeda back. The rent Osama paid them was not worth the ten years they’ve spent in the wilderness. There may be reasons for the West to stay in Afghanistan – reducing the probability of its resuming its status as a narco-state and keeping a lid on Pakistan are two that come to mind – but we should no longer be there to fight terrorism.
The war in Afghanistan is not being fought the way you need to fight terrorism. One of the most successful battles against terrorism is being conducted in the southern Philippine Islands with zero publicity (except, of course, from Robert Kaplan of The Atlantic, the greatest war correspondent since Marguerite Higgins fifty years ago). There are only a handful of Green Berets assisting Philippine forces and together, they have trounced Al Qaeda. When the time comes for us to leave, we will do so with a decisive victory and no lingering commitments. We have kept the costs low and our options open.
The swelled heads who are advising the President have learned nothing from Vietnam. They are suffering from the Talleyrand Syndrome (i.e., they forget nothing and they learn nothing). They haven’t read (or, at least, haven’t understood) John Nagl, Hyman Rothstein, Mike Moyar or any of a number of thoughtful military intellectuals who have a better grasp of counterinsurgency than they do. The war is being treated just like Vietnam. Clear and hold, body counts, a corrupt local government aided and abetted by the international community’s own form of corruption; it’s not as if the thinking hasn’t progressed on counterinsurgency since 1960, it’s just that those in authority don’t seem to know that (or at least care).
What makes these advisors truly blinkered, though, is their willingness to telegraph their moves, and to slap a smiley face on stupid decisions. If you announce withdrawals a year in advance, subject, not to progress in the battlefield, but on the election cycle, you are not fighting to win, you are not even fighting to a draw; rather, you are fighting to lose and expending American lives while you are doing so. If the Taliban believes that we are leaving, why shouldn’t they lie low and wait to take over once we’re gone? There will be some fireworks before then, of course, to encourage us to leave and to create the illusion that there is still a war going on, but there is no reason for them to have an all-out Tet Offensive until we’re gone and they have a clear field.
But however inadequate the President’s civilian advisors have been, they don’t know any better. Admiral Mullen and Generals Petraeus and Allen, on the other hand, do know better and they, too, have behaved irresponsibly by letting it be known that they opposed the President’s plan. They have not resigned, which is the only honorable way for a member of the military to distance himself from a strategic decision made by the Commander-in-Chief. By their staying in office, the President’s decision has become their decision and they no longer have the right to dissent.
These are great American heroes and honorable public servants, which makes it all the more distressing that they behaved as they did. Obviously, these distinguished military men believe that the President’s decision will not lead to a disaster or they would be more outspoken than they are, so it is incumbent on them not to distance themselves from the final decision. It has become a team decision and they have made it their decision since they are staying as part of the team. Dissent only makes things worse. If Congress forced them to go on the record, shame on Congress.
As the James Bowman, the great historian of the concept of honor, has noted, we as a nation are fast losing all sense of what honor requires of us. Honor required that Admiral Mullen and Generals Petraeus and Allen refuse to let critics goad them into expressing of their opposition publicly and that they simply acknowledge that the plan was jointly conceived and that they stood behind the final version of the plan. It is ominous that three of the greatest military minds in the country don’t understand that it is wrong to stay in office to implement an order you don’t believe in, or, alternatively, to let the word go out that you disagreed with a plan that you’re implementing so that if things don’t work out, you can save face and point a finger somewhere else.
Ignorance of what honor demands is a far more serious matter to the United States than the outcome of the war in Afghanistan.
Thomas F. Berner
www.WeThePeopleBlog.net
comments@wethepeopleblog.net
My head tells me something else, however, that this is another example of the current crop of foreign and national security advisors (and their cheerleaders at The New York Times and The Washington Post) failing their President and their country. In a War on Terror, you don’t fight to hold real estate. You fight the terrorists – and for the most part, they have decamped to other climes – and you fight their bankers, trainers and suppliers.
Iraq had the money and Saddam had the inclination to bankroll terrorism on a grand scale. The war in Iraq, therefore, (the war that our foreign policy elite called an unnecessary war, the war that everyone hates Bush for, the war that was the successful war) was a far more important battle in the War on Terror than Afghanistan can ever be. The Taliban were just Al Qaeda’s landlord, charging Osama rent to stay in the country, but Iraq was something different.
Terrorism has dropped off because Saddam, not the Taliban, is gone. A 600 page translation of Iraqi secret police correspondence, released by the Pentagon in 2008, shows just how heavily involved in world terrorism Saddam was. Without a magnifying glass, you would have missed this story in The New York Times, of course – it covered the story in all of two paragraphs back among the truss ads – but then the importance of a news story is often inversely related to the space The Times devotes to it. What is important is that Saddam was a key player in world terrorism, as important in his way as Osama bin Laden was in his.
If the Taliban were to take power in Afghanistan tomorrow, they would resume oppressing their people, but it is a pretty good bet that they would not invite Al Qaeda back. The rent Osama paid them was not worth the ten years they’ve spent in the wilderness. There may be reasons for the West to stay in Afghanistan – reducing the probability of its resuming its status as a narco-state and keeping a lid on Pakistan are two that come to mind – but we should no longer be there to fight terrorism.
The war in Afghanistan is not being fought the way you need to fight terrorism. One of the most successful battles against terrorism is being conducted in the southern Philippine Islands with zero publicity (except, of course, from Robert Kaplan of The Atlantic, the greatest war correspondent since Marguerite Higgins fifty years ago). There are only a handful of Green Berets assisting Philippine forces and together, they have trounced Al Qaeda. When the time comes for us to leave, we will do so with a decisive victory and no lingering commitments. We have kept the costs low and our options open.
The swelled heads who are advising the President have learned nothing from Vietnam. They are suffering from the Talleyrand Syndrome (i.e., they forget nothing and they learn nothing). They haven’t read (or, at least, haven’t understood) John Nagl, Hyman Rothstein, Mike Moyar or any of a number of thoughtful military intellectuals who have a better grasp of counterinsurgency than they do. The war is being treated just like Vietnam. Clear and hold, body counts, a corrupt local government aided and abetted by the international community’s own form of corruption; it’s not as if the thinking hasn’t progressed on counterinsurgency since 1960, it’s just that those in authority don’t seem to know that (or at least care).
What makes these advisors truly blinkered, though, is their willingness to telegraph their moves, and to slap a smiley face on stupid decisions. If you announce withdrawals a year in advance, subject, not to progress in the battlefield, but on the election cycle, you are not fighting to win, you are not even fighting to a draw; rather, you are fighting to lose and expending American lives while you are doing so. If the Taliban believes that we are leaving, why shouldn’t they lie low and wait to take over once we’re gone? There will be some fireworks before then, of course, to encourage us to leave and to create the illusion that there is still a war going on, but there is no reason for them to have an all-out Tet Offensive until we’re gone and they have a clear field.
But however inadequate the President’s civilian advisors have been, they don’t know any better. Admiral Mullen and Generals Petraeus and Allen, on the other hand, do know better and they, too, have behaved irresponsibly by letting it be known that they opposed the President’s plan. They have not resigned, which is the only honorable way for a member of the military to distance himself from a strategic decision made by the Commander-in-Chief. By their staying in office, the President’s decision has become their decision and they no longer have the right to dissent.
These are great American heroes and honorable public servants, which makes it all the more distressing that they behaved as they did. Obviously, these distinguished military men believe that the President’s decision will not lead to a disaster or they would be more outspoken than they are, so it is incumbent on them not to distance themselves from the final decision. It has become a team decision and they have made it their decision since they are staying as part of the team. Dissent only makes things worse. If Congress forced them to go on the record, shame on Congress.
As the James Bowman, the great historian of the concept of honor, has noted, we as a nation are fast losing all sense of what honor requires of us. Honor required that Admiral Mullen and Generals Petraeus and Allen refuse to let critics goad them into expressing of their opposition publicly and that they simply acknowledge that the plan was jointly conceived and that they stood behind the final version of the plan. It is ominous that three of the greatest military minds in the country don’t understand that it is wrong to stay in office to implement an order you don’t believe in, or, alternatively, to let the word go out that you disagreed with a plan that you’re implementing so that if things don’t work out, you can save face and point a finger somewhere else.
Ignorance of what honor demands is a far more serious matter to the United States than the outcome of the war in Afghanistan.
Thomas F. Berner
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Friday, June 3, 2011
HOW THE US PAYS CHINA TO HELP AFRICA ….. By Dick Shriver
Before heading out to the village of Chambasho in Tanzania where I would be working for the following ten days as part of a US assistance program, we had to check in at the county HQ in Kongwa. After doing some necessary paperwork there, we headed back to our SUV. As this was the county seat of a fairly large piece of Tanzania, all foreign business was handled through this office. Along one side of the parking lot, I spotted about twenty brand new walk-behind garden tractors, each with several attachments, and even a cart for hauling.
My father had once owned a tractor of that type, and I recognized it as a Gravely, and thought “that’s exactly what we American’s should be doing for Tanzania”. When I came closer, however, they turned out to be Gravely knock-offs from China. The next day in the village where I would be working, there was one Chinese tractor being shared by the villagers and two sunflower seed oil presses, also from China. In other words, the main technology supporting the economy of the village was from China … Nowhere was there any sign of US machinery or technology.
Here’s the way I think it works.
The US Agency for International Development, USAID, has allocated $464 million, or roughly a half billion dollars for Tanzania for FY 2010. These funds are distributed among 24 different categories or line items of assistance. One of those line items was HIV/AIDS which totaled $336 million, or 72% of the total (This was a legacy of President G. W. Bush, by the way, who was the first US President who set out to eliminate HIV/AIDS in Africa, and greatly increased US support in this area).
The category in which I worked was agriculture which, even though it was the second largest item after HIV/AIDS by a good margin, US assistance for agriculture, the basis for Tanzania’s economy, amounted to a paltry $63 million.
From here on is mainly speculation, speculation based on experience, however.
At least 10% of US assistance is siphoned off in the form of bribes, kickbacks and other forms of corruption (a popular scheme in Russia, for example, was for Russian officials to charge the Russian farms or companies a “fee” for the otherwise “free” services of American volunteers provided by the US government … nothing kick-starts black market economic activity like a valuable “gift”). In the case of Tanzania, the $ 500 million in US aid might therefore produce $50 million in bribes, kickbacks etc..
Half of the $50 million, say, remains in the pockets of local Tanzanians. The other half is put to legitimate use by, say, buying tractors from China. The Chengdu is a Gravely look-a-like for which no royalty is paid to Gravely, so all that is necessary is labor, materials and transportation costs in order for the Chengdus to make it to Tanzania. Domestic labor in China is paid for in the tongue-and-lip twisting Chinese currency, the Rimnimbi, a phony currency in terms of international trade that gives the workers a subsistence wage and a hard currency profit to the Chinese government. This tractor probably needed no imported materials or parts; as we know, under communism, all domestic raw materials and even energy are essentially free, being allocated on the basis of government’s estimated “need” (in this case, a need for hard currency plus political sway in Africa)
So the cost for the Chinese to make the Chengdu tractor is close to zero. Transportation is another expense, but then again, it is via Chinese ships for which the cost to build and staff is also close to zero for the same reasons as above, though fuel must increasingly be imported at world prices. Still, transportation costs would be a minor cost of a market-priced Gravely tractor, so the Chinese will have a huge cost/price advantage for a long time.
The bottom line is that the US provides “soft” aid in the form of volunteers for large sums of US taxpayer funds that pay for travel and local and US-based staff, and about 30% in overhead. US assistance (of all kinds, not just technical assistance) is then “monetized” by any number of possible shenanigans, which money is used to line some pockets and pay for a multitude of Chinese tractors and sunflower seed presses and the like … things the Tanzanians really need, thus giving the false impression that the “generous” Chinese are assisting the Tanzanians more than the US.
Technical assistance or consulting is basically invisible to the beneficiary country, at least that is the case the minute the advisor or consultant leaves. Therefore the US receives essentially no positive visibility compared to echelons of shiny new Chengdu tractors. China looks good, gets free advertising from the new equipment, earns real US pre-laundered dollars, makes a dollar profit, pays off its workers and manufacturers in Chinese checkers, and Tanzania is forever grateful.
Meanwhile, the US presence is best seen in the form of used American-provided condoms hanging in the trees along the roadside.
Tuesday, April 12, 2011
Bye Bye Burqa, The Gendarmes Have You Now, By Dick Shriver
If anyone thinks the women of Islam will lead the charge away from the more sinister interpretations of the Koran and from Islamic fundamentalism, with the exception of literally a handful of exceptional and brave Muslim women, they may have another thought coming. France, the second country after Belgium to ban the burqa (actually, it’s the naqiba, the veil across the face, that has been banned … the burqa being the entire garment that goes from covered head to nearly-hidden toe, including the naqiba), is the first to enforce (sort of) the law, as two women were arrested because they wore the naqiba; they were charged with illegal protest so as not to cause too much of a stir amongst France’s 5-10 million under-assimilating Muslims (France’s total population: 65 million)..
Young Muslim women, those under the age of twenty, seem to want a different life, though … Many want schooling, to learn a trade, to become educated, to become liberated. Many, if not the vast majority of, young women in Iran were especially hopeful for these outcomes when they protested the elections in Tehran in 2009 -2010; while the actual differentiation may not be as stark as this, the choice is somewhere between being free to choose the kind of life you lead on the one hand or, at the other extreme, being told who your spouse will be, then being pummeled by your spouse at will, or even stoned to death by spouse and family with no jury other than a twisted interpretation of the Koran.
The US Agency for International Development (USAID) has programs throughout much of the Muslim world, some of which target education of girls and women directly. The Peace Corps is also active in Muslim (or significantly Muslim) countries. So we might get an A for effort, but in terms of real results, we seem to be closer to an “F”. Some countries are sufficiently enlightened to allow a token number of women and girls to obtain a US-style education, or even a full education in the US.
Where have we (the reasonably well-off non-Muslim world) gone wrong? Here’s a theory:
Women and girls in Muslim countries can only apply for foreign educational opportunities when the families of these would-be students concur (I know this to be a fact in specific instances; I just don’t know how widespread parental dissent is). The stumbling block, therefore, is how to help those young women who would like to participate in educational programs and are intellectually capable of doing so, but can’t apply because father doesn’t approve. Obtaining such information may be delicate, but without it, it’s hard to make a case for reform. We should be smart enough to obtain a decent estimate. Certainly, as Muslim autocrats in Africa and the Middle East fall like tenpins, the US should be there promoting women’s rights as part of any democratic reform movement. Secretary of State, Hillary Clinton, has been one of the earliest and most steadfast American leaders to stand up for women on the world stage.
Meanwhile, too many female Muslims will grow up without a decent education … though many will be educated in the 5,000 or so madrassa’s throughout the Muslim world, too many of which endorse and teach terrorism, anti-semitism and anti-Americanism…. Muslim countries are beginning to realize they are throwing away half their talent while their leaders ask, “why are our people so poor?”
The burqa ban in France is a symbol of this struggle. On a positive note, Muslims in burqa’s will not soon displace the Gaite Parisienne’s can-can dancers.
DickShriver@WeThePeopleBlog.net
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