At about 13.10 GOP poll-leader Herman Cain reveals the shocking news that the People's Republic of China is seeking nuclear-weapons capability.
I've been a very bad (lame) duck of late, but for good reason. On top of many other duties, I am teaching a new graduate seminar this semester on Global Economic Governance with some very smart and fun students at the LBJ School of Public Affairs at the University of Texas. Each week we start the class by digging into the current news, which lately has been a veritable feast for IPE junkies. We've had particular fun with the Occupy Wall Street (OWS) coverage, and more recently the "Occupy Occupy Wall Street" (OOWS) retort from the very proud and indignant 1%.
Last week, I asked my students to react to claims that the OWS movement needed to articulate some clear demands in order to capture the rhetorical advantage and be taken seriously. My students took to this task with gusto on their own internal class blogsite, while pushing back a bit with intelligent arguments for why the OWS movement should NOT have a clear message. Nonetheless, they did come up with a clever blurb for OWS and I promised to blog on this in hopes of attracting some smart (and undoubtedly snarky) feedback from Duck readers.
Here's the message my students crafted:
Last week, at University of Bristol, I gave a talk called "The Future of World Order" to the student International Affairs Society. It was a speculative lecture, based on my 17 years directing the Grawemeyer Award (for Ideas Improving World Order) more than my scholarship per se. I warned the audience from the start of two personal biases: (1) I am an optimist; and (2) I don't really put much stock in specific predictions. I tried to stick to big ideas more than particular policies.
In the presentation, I argued that any order built on coercion and force would inevitably face a legitimacy crisis -- and would ultimately collapse. The implications are twofold, I think. Domestically, people will demand greater control of their own lives. This means the world will see many more emancipatory movements to topple autocrats and unaccountable sources of power -- as illustrated just this year by events in Egypt, Syria, Libya, Bahrain, the city of London, Wall Street, etc.
Internationally, it means order built on deterrence, brute force, or even the balance of power will give way to something that is more consensual, such as a security community. In support of this position, I talked a bit about John Mueller's thesis that major power war is becoming obsolete -- an outmoded institution, abandoned like slavery and dueling previously were. Could this thinking become even more pervasive, so that virtually any talk of war -- internal or external -- becomes outmoded? Eventually.
In the talk, I did not explicitly argue against the traditional state-centrism of international relations, nor call for the end of the states-system. However, I strongly implied that the future of world order will be more cooperative, focused on low rather than high politics (elevating the human security agenda), and much less violent.
This week, recovering from jet lag, I've been following the efforts to save the euro and Eurozone. One interesting aspect is that conservative leaders in Europe have certainly made some bold claims to sell their preferred outcomes. For instance, while traveling in Australia, British Prime Minister David Cameron used some classic statist language to highlight his concerns about the implications of ongoing negotiations:
"This is our key national interest, that Britain, a historic trading nation, has its biggest markets open and continues to have those markets fairly open and fairly governed."Note the words and phrases Cameron used: "key national interest," "attack" and "defend."
He later told the BBC's political editor Nick Robinson: "In business often it's selling more to your existing customers that's the best strategy.
What his comments reveal is that when - if - the eurozone crisis ends, big political questions will replace the big economic problems”
"We're big sellers into Europe, we can do better in those markets if we liberalise further."
Mr Cameron has vowed to protect the UK's position and said on Friday that the City of London was one "area of concern... a key national interest that we need to defend".
"London - the centre of financial services in Europe - is under constant attack through Brussels directives," he said.
"Nobody should take for granted another 50 years of peace and prosperity in Europe. They are not for granted. That's why I say: If the euro fails, Europe fails," Merkel said, followed by a long applause from all political groups.Gulp.
"We have a historical obligation: To protect by all means Europe's unification process begun by our forefathers after centuries of hatred and blood spill. None of us can foresee what the consequences would be if we were to fail."
Found this baby while prepping slides for my "Battlestar Galactica and Civil-Military Relations" panel presentation at ISA-Northeast conference next week. Happy Friday.
Over on the other side of the methods divide, Andrew Gelman shares a tip: Caffeine, a lightweight and free app for Macs that keeps them awake even when you haven't clicked on them for a while. But let me double down on Gelman with a tip that, if used improperly, could destroy your computer: Insomniax, which doesn't just keep your Mac awake but actually disables its sleep function. In other words, if you have to move from one place to another while you're running calculations, or if you just want iTunes to keep playing when you close the lid on your MacBook, then Insomniax is the solution. Seriously, though: If you forget to turn Insomniax off, it could result in essentially melting your computer. So, you know. Handle with care.
Are student-athletes better prepared to complete a college degree in a reasonable amount of time than the general student body? Given the stereotypes many people share about "jocks," this may seem like a startling question. Yet, the NCAA released evidence this week that claims to demonstrate that student-athletes graduate at a very high rate, often at much higher rates than other students at the same institutions. My local newspaper, the Louisville Courier Journal revealed this news today on the second page of the sports section. The front page of the same section featured local athletes modeling new uniforms. Seriously.
In any case, here are the NCAA numbers and claims:
Others are more concerned
. Nawal Mustafa worries that the ducks might be….dead ducks. Scientists are worried that the sudden decline in the blogger population might be related to the mysterious die-off of hundreds of birds in Arkansas at the beginning of the year, for which there is as of yet no known cause. Unlike that incident, though, no carcasses have been found.
Nevertheless experts take comfort that co-founder Patrick T. Jackson is alive and kicking, cantankerous as ever. Jackson is more goose than duck though, with a fierce bite, and it might be that whatever malady has struck is particular to ducks.
The site has hired a lot of new talent lately, getting in ducks in a row. New bloggers like Joshua Busby have taken to their new roles like ducks to water, offering trenchant analyses of pressing global issues like conflict and famine in the Horn of Africa and global warming. Megan MacKenzie waddles through wonderful posts about gender. Catherine Weaver pecks at the innards of international financial institutions. It might be that the old ducks are just lame ducks, resting on their laurels while the little chicks handle the site, relaxing and spending time with their families. Maybe even working.
Others, however, have not had the same success, with readers, especially those who admired Steve Jobs, directing particular ire towards the smart-aleck posts of Brian Rathbun. Rathbun has frequently had to duck and cover. Contacted by the paper, Rathbun wimpered, “The internet makes you a sitting duck. Anyone can just lambaste your posts, saying ‘you aren’t funny. FAIL.’ It is very hurtful.”
*This statement does not yet apply to the Haqqani Network in Pakistan; even though its founder and senior leadership have all been individually designated as terrorists.
[ Oh, come on Vikash, the USnegotiated with"reached out" to that group before Admiral Mullen's testimony to Congress. Until that testimony we had no idea that a group founded and led by people we call terrorists could actually be considered a terrorist "group." Sure the Haqqanis are vicious individually, but as a group they're like the Cub Scouts. Seriously, though it's not like the Haqqani Network is the same as Al Qaeda. Anyway, if you designate the Haqqani Network as a terrorist organization that might mean that Pakistan would be declared a state sponsor of terror and that would be bad because ... umm ... our ally might stop cooperating with us in the War on Terror. ]
^This statement also does not apply to individual Al Qaeda linked militants who might be of some use to the US in overthrowing the government of Libya.
The US has a Responsibility to Protect unarmed civilians from brutal repression by armed aircraft or ground units.* ** ^[ Look, my friend, if he is willing to work with NATO, we should overlook all the indiscretions of his youth, and hopefully he will also overlook the fact that we tortured him and his wife and then handed him over to the Libyan regime for even more torture. We all know that Qaddafi was the brutal one, right? ]
*This offer does not apply to pro-democracy demonstrators who happen to live within shouting distance of a major US military base.
It’s great to be here with all of you and to have the opportunity to participate in another Next Generation gathering. I remember distinctly the first of these that was held right here in Dallas back on this date five years ago in 2006. We then went on to do meetings in San Diego, Denver, Chicago, and DC. I participated as part of the leadership team on those events, and know this is a great opportunity to meet people from different fields and perspectives and to talk about issues in ways that get beyond the partisan rancor that we often see in the public arena.
I've been in the throes of finishing a book and other matters so I haven't had a chance to blog much lately.
A couple of quick observations on the death of Qaddafi (assuming the reports are confirmed). First, he died with almost all of the country opposed to his rule and celebrating his death. Second, he was killed and his forces were defeated by indigenous forces with the support of NATO. While we have seen a good deal of criticism of NATO, US Libya policy, and of R2P (as a neo-imperialist enterprise) in the past several months, that criticism has tended to dismiss or diminish the fact that the effort to overthrow Qaddafi was fought by a broad coalition of Libyans with widespread Libyan public support --not just a handful of NATO states.
So let's be clear, we would not be witnessing a celebration in Tripoli, Benghazi, Misratah and elsewhere today without the combined efforts of the Libyans themselves and the international community -- motivated by the concept of R2P and the norms embedded in it. Qaddafi clearly had lost domestic as well as international legitimacy. As his forces converged on Benghazi in March a global coalition concluded that a mass atrocity event was imminent. That coalition included the Arab League, leading human rights and humanitarian organizations, as well as much of the rest of the world, and they backed the United Nations Security Council Resolution 1973. That coalition demanded and endorsed a robust NATO-led intervention to protect civilians and their collective efforts empowered local forces to resist and ultimately to prevail.
It is true that NATO angered many by moving beyond the mandate of UNSC Res 1973 and declaring regime change as one of its key objectives in the pursuit of protecting civilians. But, regime change was not only the objective of NATO, it was also the objective of what appears to be an overwhelming majority of Libyans. Many of whom believed that if Qaddafi had been able to stay in (or later return to) power he would have slaughtered his opponents, including those civilians sympathetic to the revolution.
Critics of the Libyan intervention == or any intervention tend to dismissively proclaim that its important to "Let the Libyans decide it for themselves." That's a cop out. What exactly does that mean? In the absence of NATO's air campaign we would not be witnessing the celebrations today. The Libyans wanted to, but probably could not have, settled it by themselves.
Joshua Goldstein and I have a piece on humanitarian intervention that will be out in the next issue of Foreign Affairs -- due out in the next day or two -- in which we argue that there is a broader aspect to Libya and to humanitarian intervention. Intervention along with R2P, peacekeeping, and a broad range of civilian protection mechanisms and norms have contributed to a dramatic decline of violence around the globe. Joshua presents this more explicitly in his new book, Winning the War on War and Steve Pinker pads that discussion in his excellent book. In short, there is a reason global violence is down -- and the ideas and norms embedded in R2P, peacekeeping, and transitional justice are working.
For what its worth, R2P at its core is a concept that articulates a redefinition of sovereignty. It entails responsibility as well as rights. When a leader commits crimes against humanity, war crimes, ethnic cleansing, or genocide, the rights and protections of sovereignty are lost.
This is a revolutionary idea. It is also remarkably young. Most of us who teach IR Theory begin with Realism and teach Thucydides and the Melian Dialogue. Realists like to use Thucydides to emphasize the enduring dimensions of Realist logic across a range of international orders and 2,500 years of history. I use it to demonstrate the remarkable youth of civilian protection mechanisms in global society.
I'm not so pollyanish to believe that the death of Qaddafi will lead to full compliance with R2P or that R2P will be able to end genocide or all atrocities. But it will and has stopped many. Critics point out that we still see Assad and Bashir acting today with impunity. Yes, but most of the world recognizes that their conduct is abhorrent. And, we no longer see Charles Taylor, Milosevic, Karadzic, Mladic, or Arkan. And after today, we no longer see Qaddafi. This has all happened in a remarkably short period of time. History may not have turned, but it may well be changing.
Qaddafi has lost his contest with Hussein and Bin Laden for hiding the
longest from US/Allied/Local searches. Lots of folks will make much of
this event, as they should. I have already seen a great tweet/blogpost by Spencer Ackerman predicting everyone's responses.
What would my readers predict of me? Woohoo? Well, sure. That NATO
made a difference despite being hamstrung by the dynamics of coalitional
bargaining within and between countries? Indeed. That much of the
effort and all of the sacrifices (except for tax $$) were paid by
Libyans? Yes.
What does Libya teach us about NATO that we didn't know before? Given
that I have spent a few years on NATO at war in Afghanistan, the Libyan
experience more confirms my beliefs (confirmation bias alert!) than teaches me anything new. And experts on Kosovo might say that Afghanistan just made things clearer.
We did see how xenophobia
can cause even a fragile coalition government to become more
enthusiastic about a military mission--Italy's increased assertiveness
as 2011 went on. We also saw that an absence of government (Belgium on
day 4xx of caretaker government) means that no veto points means
assertive efforts, at least here.
Once again, the fear that NATO might fail re-energized efforts and
commitment so that NATO would not fail (with lots of help from the
Libyan rebels). I ended up making a claim yesterday in class that none
of the places NATO has spent heaps of dollars, lives and time really
matter that much intrinsically. Bosnia became a NATO mission not
because the US cared about Bosnia but that it cared about NATO. Folks
kept on the Kosovo mission for fear of NATO failure. Every NATO member
showed up to some degree in Afghanistan not because they cared about
Afghanistan but because they cared about NATO. Libya shows that NATO
matters in that countries needed NATO legitimacy to participate. And
the US wavering efforts from beginning to end really hinged on how much
the US cared about the alliance more so than the lives of folks in
Libya. Which does distinguish Libya, where NATO became relevant, from
Syria and Yemen. Once NATO countries got involved in Libya, the stakes
for the US and lots of other countries changed. France and the UK
forced others to get involved via NATO.
And, yes, NATO also matters because the doing of seven or eight months
of patrols and strikes and refueling and intel sharing and all the rest
requires heaps of military interoperability. Political interoperability
may vary across the alliance, but the practice of coalition warfare
requires, well, heaps of practice. NATO for sixty years has meant that
the militaries are more or less in tune with each other. As we have
seen yet again with no stories of mid-air refueling mishaps, for
example.
Qaddafi is gone, raising questions about Libya's future. I am actually
pretty confident that NATO's future will be ... more of the same.
Political scientists hate, hate, hate faculty meetings. They are yet another drain on the time they need to do their Original Research. Before political scientists assemble for a faculty meeting, they will chit chat with one another about how pointless the agenda is for that day. Surely we could do this all by email, they say to one another. Is it really necessary to come all the way to campus to approve a courtesy appointment for the newest overpaid member of the law school faculty?
Yet all political science faculty meetings, even if the only item on the docket is to name the graduate student lounge in honor of the most recently deceased member of the department, last at least two hours. The discussion is endless. Every possible angle is considered. Every faculty member has his or her turn.
Political science faculty meetings last so long because all political scientists love the sound of their own voice. No matter the topic, they must weigh in. They suffer from a kind of non-profane Tourette’s syndrome, an audio narcissism.
As a consequence even though all are clearly better served simply voting yes and concluding the meeting in two minutes, no one can refrain from talking. Once someone starts, the dam breaks. While each feels individually satisfied to have said his/her piece, they are collectively worse off by losing two hours they will never get back. Political scientists call this a “collective action problem.” They have used this very concept to explain the origins of WWI and the escalation of ethnic conflict into mass genocide. It is equally applicable to faculty meetings. Indeed sitting through faculty meetings was likely the homicidal inspiration.
Perhaps political scientists secretly like faculty meetings. They love the give and take of deciding on the graduate student curriculum, the consideration of the strategic plan that the dean will never read, the formation of the undergraduate honors award committee. They are all so giddy that they just cannot stop. Faculty meetings make them feel…..ALIVE.
Yet this hypothesis cannot explain the look on the faces of department members after a faculty meeting. They are pale and malnourished. Cutbacks have forced the university to cancel any expenditures on lunch, and every faculty meeting is scheduled between the hours of 12-2.
You, as someone who is not a political scientist, are asking yourself why political scientists could not agree in advance to keep discussion to a minimum, to only deal with the most pertinent of issues, to not digress onto tangents. Political scientists are laughing at you right now. They know that faculty members are not able to, in political science lingo, make a “credible commitment to shut the f&%k up.”
Political scientists have developed two solutions to the collective action problem, neither of which apply to political science faculty meetings unfortunately. First they can appoint a strong, dictator-like chair with agenda-setting power who can control the meeting. This, however, removes whatever shame the normal political scientist feels to his colleagues about blathering on too long and gives unchecked dithering ability to one person. No one political scientist can resist that kind of temptation. Political scientists call this a “principal/agent problem.”
Second, they can limit the size of the group. This allows monitoring and more credible commitments. The problem is that political scientists cannot be fired. This is because of tenure, another thing that (senior) political scientists like. This is doubly problematic because senior faculty are the worst violators of credible commitments in faculty meetings. Junior faculty just want to go back to their office and work on their original dataset, which is necessary for tenure.
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| Photo: Protester at Zucotti Park, 9/28/11; Credit: David Shankbone/Wikimedia Commons |
The Economist reports on advances in non-lethal weaponry, emphasizing the latest line of research into electro-magnetic weapons:
BULLETS and bombs are so 20th-century. The wars of the 21st will be dominated by ray guns. That, at least, is the vision of a band of military technologists who are building weapons that work by zapping the enemy’s electronics, rather than blowing him to bits. The result could be conflict that is less bloody, yet more effective, than what is now seen as conventional battle...This rosy view assumes weapons would only affect (or be directed at) "the enemy" - the author is grievously blind to the civilian costs of messing with power grids. While it doesn't "blow people to bits" (and is certainly a step up from demolishing concrete buildings in urban areas), sudden loss of electrical power can be deadly to civilians: depriving them of life-sustaining medical care, causing vehicular accidents, deaths from exposure to heat or cold and disease from the collapse of water and sewage systems.
The logical conclusion of all this is a so-called “human-safe” missile, which carries an electromagnetic gun instead of an explosive warhead. This gentle way of handling the enemy - stopping his speedboats, stalling his tanks—has surprising advantages. For example, it expands the range of targets that can be attacked. Some favourite tricks of modern warfare, such as building communications centres in hospitals, or protecting sites with civilian “human shields”, cease to be effective if it is simply the electronics of the equipment being attacked that are destroyed. Though disabling an aircraft’s avionics will obviously cause it to crash, in many other cases, no direct harm is done to people at all.
My second option for a title was: 'How to teach masculinities by looking at pictures of handsome men.' (Note: this photo was sent to me as a humor-gift from one of my students...I didn't do it myself!)
Although the majority of the offerings in the European Consortium on Political Research's inaugural Winter School in Methods and Techniques (to be held in Cyprus in February 2012) are pretty firmly neopositivist, at the risk of sound like a shameless self-promoter I'd like to call your attention to course A6, "Knowing and the Known: Philosophy and Methodology of Social Science," which I am teaching. The short description of this course is:
"The social sciences have long been concerned with the epistemic status of their empirical claims. Unlike in the natural sciences, where an evident record of practical success tends to make the exploration of such philosophical issues a narrowly specialized endeavour, in the social sciences, differences between the philosophies of science underpinning the empirical work of varied researchers produces important and evident differences in the kind of social-scientific work that they do. Philosophy of science issues are, in this way, closer to the surface of social-scientific research, and part of being a competent social scientist involves coming to terms with and developing a position on those issues. This course will provide a survey of important authors and themes in the philosophy of the social sciences, concentrating in particular on the relationship of the mind to the social world and on the relationship between knowledge and experience; students will have ample opportunities to draw out the implications of different stances on these issues for their concrete empirical research."
Further details, including the long course description, below the fold.
Supporters of action on climate change are under siege in Washington. House Republicans are attempting to cut appropriations on all things related to climate change. Even Democrats appear to want to downplay talk of the issue. The "green jobs" agenda, in light of Solyndra solar's woes, is now mired in controversy. Despite Al Gore's recent effort to refocus attention on the problem with his new Climate Reality campaign, an economy wide legislative effort like cap-and-trade appears dead in the United States for the foreseeable future (That didn't stop Australia's House of Representatives from bravely passing a carbon tax last week).
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| Perhaps with gallows humor? Source: Artist as Citizen via Realclimate.org |
And this week, in problematic-representations-of-indigenous-populations-on-children's-television, Lucasfilm brings you Nomad Droids:
Well I guess some foreign policy subtext in TV for eight-year-olds is a step up from 99.7% of what's on American prime-time. Thanks to Clone Wars, my kid is quickly becoming fluent in such concepts as strategic depth, diversionary warfare and humanitarian mission creep. Last week he learned, for example, that real soldiers treat disaster relief as an annoying distraction from their actual job; that, though not bothering to understand what the locals need might backfire, it will mostly backfire on the locals; and crucially, that what appears to be an ecological problem might just be chalkable-uppable to mis-communications between political actors. Everything can be fixed through diplomacy.
I used to watch all of the presidential debates when I was in my late twenties and early thirties. Even though my party allegiance was never in doubt, I wanted to know the contours of the debate even for the other side, what there substantive differences were, where the daylight between the candidates was, etc.
I don't do this any more. Obviously one reason is that they are just not informative. None of the candidates truly embrace policy ideas, and even if they did, that isn't what is rewarded. So during their primaries, in particular, they draw largely semantic contrasts between other nominees in an obviously disingenous way. They make stupid, canned jokes that generally fall flat. I hate bad jokes.
Well, he could.
But when they do get substantive, it is even more pointless. This is because they always talk about their Plan. Plan for Energy Independence, Plan for Tax Reform, Plan for Health Care. Apparently they are on their campaign website. Even assuming that anyone ever reads them, why do they bother?
Every four years we have this bout of collective amnesia in which we forget that we are not electing a dictator for four years, but rather the head of a particular branch of government who has to contend with 535 idiots down the street. Even if Obama wanted to be Hitler, he couldn't.
Now it might be better if the President is also not an idiot as well, and I suppose his Plans tell us something about whether that is the case. But nothing anything like any of these Plans will ever get passed by Congress, so what is the point of pointing out the tiny differences with other nominees, particularly in the same party?
An illustrative example: Obama went hard at Hillary in 2008 on her mandate for individuals to get insurance as unnecessary and perhaps draconian. "My plan wouldn't require individuals to get insurance," he said, or something like that. First, it was a dumb idea. You need the revenue from healthy people to pay for sick people. Any third grader gets that. Second, who the f*ck cares about Your Plan? Congress is just going to mangle it into something unrecognizable anyways. And they did. Obama didn't even take his plan and make it his opening bid.
Really, all we need to know is whether you support universal health care or not? Do you believe that we should drill for oil right offshore? Should we tax the rich at a higher rate than currently? A simple yes or no will do. This is all we really need; everything else is extraneous and ultimately inconsequential. And we don't need 18 months to get this down. Save your $200 million dollars. Fill out a questionnaire, shut up, and we'll let you know in November.
With the rugby world cup semi-final only a few days away, it would take something like a broken ship dumping tons of oil and chemicals onto the country's beaches to get the country to talk anything besides the All Blacks... Wait... New Zealand is all about environmental protection, green energy, clean air (and funny guys like Jemaine Clement from Flight of the Concords) isn't it? I mean, what is a ship with oil even doing near this environmental mecca?
One of the few items recently that has caused me to emerge from my nothing-but-Friday-nerd-blogging temporary hiatus was this article on civilian war deaths by Michael Spagat and his collaborators. I wrote a post with some praise and some questions, and recently received a thoughtful response by email from Michael and his crew in which they further detail the coding methods used in the project. Since the original thread generated some interest, I've decided to post their response here.
Civilian Targeting Index Clarification
by Madelyn Hicks, Uih Ran Lee, Ralph Sundberg and Michael Spagat
Since publishing our paper in PLoS ONE on the Civilian Targeting Index we have received some interesting feedback both in emails and on the “Duck of Minerva” blog concerning the nature of the one-sided violence data we use from the Uppsala Conflict Data Program (UCDP). In particular, some readers wonder how solid the underlying evidence of intentionality can really be for incidents coded as one-sided violence (i.e. ’civilian targeting’). We would like to take this opportunity to clarify this important coding issue in some detail.
Colonel Gian Gentle, a confirmed counterinsurgency [COIN] skeptic, raises questions for Col. Paul Yingling about the role of generals as COIN seems to be falling short in Afghanistan. Yingling made much noise in 2007 by attacking American generals for poor leadership in 2007,
as the US was losing in Iraq at the time. Gentle is essentially
pushing Yingling either to call Petraeus a bad general now (since
Afghanistan is not such a happy place) or retract his earlier
criticisms.
While this is an argument between two Colonels, I am stepping in because
I received a similar question last week at a presentation in Los
Angeles (at USC) on the current book project: did our work on caveats
and other means by which countries influence how their troops are used
in alliance operations explain mission failure on Afghanistan?
The answer to my question is also partly an answer to Gentle's
question. That is, (a) not so clear the mission has failed; (b) failure
is over-determined. First, there are lots of indicators that seem to
suggest that the Taliban momentum of 2008-09 has been broken, even as
violence continues. NATO and the US may not be clearly winning
(whatever that means, see below) but we are not so clearly losing as we
were a few years ago.
Second, COIN and good generalship can only do so much. Likewise,
caveats and other overly blunt means to control troops in a multilateral
damage can have an impact, but other stuff matters as well. What
matters? I have long talked about the three Ps of Afghanistan: poppies,
Pakistan, President Karzai. Each one makes COIN very, very hard.
Poppies give the insurgents access to cash and facilitates corruption of
police, courts, army, etc, which need to be the backbone of the COIN
effort. Pakistan serves as a sanctuary (although not from drones),
making "defeat" of the Taliban very hard since they can rest, recover
and re-arm there. Plus Pakistan may just be doing more than providing
space for these guys. Karzai presents the third challenge to the
NATO/US effort, as the military side of COIN is aimed at providing a
safer environment so that the government can provide services and gain
the confidence of the people. Karzai has been focused on maintaining
his grip on power, at the expense of building institutions and putting
competent people into power. Generals McChrystal, Petraeus, and Allen
had/have finite ability to get Afghanistan to do what is necessary to
make progress.
The key difference between these generals running the Afghanistan war
and the ones who ran the Iraq war before 2007 is that the current folks
have proven adaptable to the circumstances. While the newer folks may
have tried to apply an Iraq template to Afghanistan and that may not be
the best fit, they at least have a better grasp of the
multi-dimensionality of the conflict. The American generals in the
first four years of the Iraq war had very little clue about how to
prepare for the conflict, where to focus the efforts, and how to move
from conventional war to counter-insurgency. Franks was one of the
worst generals in recent memory, Abizaid recognized the realities (I
think) but could not get those under him to adjust, and Casey was mostly
focused on preserving the Army rather than adapting to the realities on
the ground.
Military experts can draw greater distinctions between the past and
present crews (Yingling, I am sure, could roast Gentile's assertions
pretty quickly). But the conditions in Iraq with the AQ types
overplaying their hands, the Sunnis realizing that the US was their best
protection against Shiites and Sunni extremists, and somewhat more
compliant local leadership enabled COIN. In Afghanistan, these
conditions have not really existed. So, there is more going on here
than generals. Clearly so, as Gentile is really attacking
counter-insurgency doctrine more than individual generals. War is
politics by other means, and COIN especially so. Winning a COIN battle
means getting the politics right, and that is largely although not
entirely out of the hands of the military. All the COIN stuff can do is
enable the politicians, not work miracles despite the hype surrounding
Petraeus.
Gentile's attack is actually a different war, one for the soul of the
military. What will be the future of the American army? A smaller one
for sure, hopefully avoiding these kinds of conflicts. The reality is
that politicians will continue to use force in ways that are
inconvenient to conventional thinkers in the military. There will be
few conventional wars to fight as long as the opponents realize that the
US can beat them at that game. That is not going change even as these
Colonels fight over the lessons to draw from the wars of the Aughts.
Indeed, this whole discussion reminds me of the most basic lesson of
Vietnam--people will learn the lessons they want to learn, as these
conflicts are complicated. There is never one single set of lessons to
learn, and so the fight afterwards is over which lessons do people want
to learn.
Long-time Bosnia watchers Vlado Azinovic, Kurt Bassuener, and Bodo Weber from the Democrtization Policy Council in Sarajevo issue a warning to the EU and NATO to restore a deterrence capability in the country:
The deterioration of the prevailing political dynamic is not only continuing, but accelerating one year after the general elections of October 2010. The mix of variables makes political miscalculation all the more likely. The costs of such miscalculation by local political actors are likely to be far greater than they were prior to 2005 because of the perceived potential to realize long-held – but previously forbidden – goals. Social pressures, particularly on issues of employment and transfer payments, may also compel political actors to move more precipitously to redirect popular anger that might otherwise be directed at them. There are numerous potential ingredients that could come into play to produce significant violence. Given the reduction of countervailing external deterrence, this creates – as one interviewee put it – “a very dangerous cocktail.”
I remember well the first time I ever encountered the concept of "fair trade": it was on a poster in the cafeteria of the Friedrich-Ebert-Stiftung in Bonn, where I spent time during the summer of 2002 doing research in the "Archives of Social Democracy" for my first book. The poster proudly proclaimed that the coffee served in the cafeteria was fair trade coffee, and explained the basic principle -- growers were paid a decent wage for their product -- along with urging people to purchase fair trade coffee elsewhere. Before too long I started to see the same symbol for fair trade certification popping up in the United States, and nowadays I can walk into my local Giant Foods and purchase fair trade coffee for home use quite easily.
During our recent discussion about Steve Jobs and his legacy, Nawal suggested that we should have "fair trade computers." This strikes me as a very good idea, and no crazier than fair trade coffee. I can anticipate the basic objection -- consumer electronics are too price-sensitive, and people won't pay more for a fair trade certified computer -- but to my mind this is flawed because a) the Apple business model shows that people will pay a premium for quality and elegance, so why not for social justice; and b) at least nowadays, there isn't a price differential between fair trade certified coffee and other coffee of comparable quality, at least not in my local food stores (sure, Folgers and Maxwell House make cheaper coffee, but that's a different issue; if one is buying Peet's or Newman's Own or a comparable brand, the price of the fair trade stuff is the same as the price of the non-fair trade stuff).
So this leads me to wonder: why aren't there fair trade computers? Is there something about the coffee industry that makes it uniquely susceptible to the notion of fair trade, and something about the consumer electronics industry that prevents it from adopting fair trade practices? Are those parameters fixed, or could they be reshaped? The Internet lets me down on this occasion, since googling "fair trade computers" doesn't seem to turn up much insightful commentary on this issue. So I turn to the readers of the Duck to tell me either why fair trade computers are an unworkable idea, or -- and perhaps better -- to help me envision what a viable fair trade computer looks like. One thing I know is that it can't be a sub-standard machine; I can't imagine that fair trade coffee would succeed if all the fair trade product was horrible swill while the other coffee was uniformly better-tasting. So why not a fair trade iPad? I know I'd pay a premium for such a thing if it existed, and I'd bet that others would as well.
My daughter loves the Game of Thrones story as told to her orally by my brother on a boat in Bali this summer. Yet she remains curiously unwilling to read the books or watch the HBO version with me. Apparently she might find it too hard on her stomach - puzzling, given her affinity for the eminently stomachable Hunger Games trilogy... perhaps to capture the teen sci-fi market George R. R. Martin should consider a final installment: 
A few of us in the Politics/IR Department at Reading were asked to summarise the major results and effects of the war in Afghanistan for its tenth anniversary today. I should have talked more about the overall economic crisis that the war on terror has accelerated, but anyway:
Today is the 10th anniversary of the US-led invasion of Afghanistan. But it is not the anniversary of the start of the war between the United States, the Al Qaeda network, and the Taliban. The armed struggle can be dated earlier to Osama Bin Laden’s fatwa and unilateral declaration of war on the US in August 1996. After Bin Laden was evicted from Sudan, he found sanctuary in Afghanistan by buying the Taliban regime that became host.
In an effort to change the conversation from the Duck's current all-Jobs all the time format, let me simply commend Jorge Cham, the creator of Ph.D. Comics, and the rest of his crew for the Ph.D. Comics movie, which manages to be everything that a satisfying break from writing code should be: Funny, heartwarming, and short. Graduate students, see it soon. Faculty members can see it too, but not at the same screening as your grad students; after all, do you really want to know how hard they laugh at the jokes about clueless professors?
This is a really, really pretty chair. It was designed by Adolf Loos, a turn-of-the-century architect and interior designer. There is a famous building in Vienna once known as the "house with no eyebrows" that is also his. Did you know that? Probably not. Only aficionados of fin-de-siecle modernism really pay much attention. Very few designers are remembered. The same will be true of Steve Jobs in fifty years, maybe twenty. What?! Too soon?
Patrick and PM's posts are hardly unique today. There has been an incredible outpouring of adulation about Steve Jobs as a visionary. I don't get it. It is not so much that I oppose his foreign outsourcing. I never really knew much about that until today, but it seems that every major corporation does it, and I wouldn't single him out for blame even if the practice is kind of despicable. I just don't get what he really leaves behind except some very pretty things.
I don't see what Steve Jobs did that others wouldn't have done, or weren't already doing, except put them in a prettier box. That puts me in the strange position of denying the importance of agency, which is really my driving interest in international relations. But it seems that all of these things -- the ipod, the ipad, the iphone-- were inevitable. Jobs just made them more functional. Just like the Loos chair (well technically this was 20 years before functionalism, but you get my drift). Don't get me wrong, I love my ipod. But I liked my knock-off, too, before it died. I like having my music on my person, but spinning the little ipod wheel does not get me all hot and bothered. Plus, those iconic white headphones suck, no matter how many Feist songs you hear to try and convince you otherwise.
And I really don't understand the Ipad fetish. It seems to me it is a really light laptop with no keyboard. Does it come with a life supply of Windex? I would prefer a really light laptop with a keyboard and save myself the $400 to buy some music to listen to on I-Tunes, although I am relying more on Spotify these days. That makes my point again.
I am ready to be convinced otherwise, but someone please explain this to me. These Apple fetishists were all over the radio gushing about how their products were an extension of them. Isn't that just plain creepy?
If I were to make a prediction, and you know I don't like to, Apple will inevitably falter because other people are (always have been) working on similar technologies. No one stays on top forever. And the media will construct a narrative about how this never would have happened under Steve Jobs. But it probably would have. He was Adolf Loos, not Louis Pasteur or Florence Nightingale. Can we put down our ipads long enough to get a hold of ourselves?
Steve Jobs occupied a unique place in American business and culture; no other billionaire in my life has commanded genuine affection from the general public, and nobody deserved it more. The Financial Times reports that Jobs's passing has elicited similar responses in P.R. China. One Chinese academic wrote of Jobs:
It is said Chinese people hate the rich. But all the Chinese are mourning for Jobs after he died. They don’t hate the rich. They respect the rich who accumulate their fortune via talents and innovation as well. What Chinese people hate are those get rich by monopoly, corruption and cheating.Despite the many imperfections in Jobs's life and character, nevertheless it is clear that not a few people find his example to be one worth admiring--and using as a symbol of what genuine freedom and competition might look like.
Forget protest movements and populist politics, to say nothing of academic blogging and scholarship -- if you want to change the world in your lifetime, this is the guy you ought to emulate. RIP Steve Jobs, one of the greatest practical visionaries of our time.
As the Occupy Wall Street New York movement enters its second week of activity and the movement spreads to LA, Boston, Chicago, Denver and other cities across the country, the silence on the part of the Obama administration becomes more and more noticeable (we can't count Biden's weird and incoherent references to the movement in an interview yesterday). Few expected Obama to come out with any statement last week, when the media was still painting the movement largely as a band of hippies who don't know enough to shower, let alone drive a political movement. Dan Gainor at Fox news pointed out that these individuals did not represent the 99%, that they may not even be real Americans, and they certainly didn't have a movement with traction.
Earlier today, I tweeted and blogged and even (dare I say it) facebooked to get some help. The challenge: to come up with a good analogy to capture the incredibly strange idea that cutting foreign aid might be a way to address the US fiscal crisis.
My starting point: Cutting foreign aid to address the budget crisis is like an alcoholic cutting back on apertifs.
The responses thus far:
The American Political Science Association is abuzz with talk about a breakout book by an up and coming star in international relations theory, Patrick T. Jackson. While Jackson had previously had strong indie credentials established through gritty work on the strategic construction of the notion of Western civilization by the United States after WWII, The Conduct of Inquiry in International Relations looks to give Jackson the broader notoriety in the field that many have long thought he deserved. The book blurb proposes that it “pops a cap in the ass of the bitch-ass notion of a single unified scientific method, and proposes a framework that clarifies the variety of ways that IR scholars establish whether their empirical claims are correctamundo.” Sales of his book were brisk at the Routledge booth where the bold cover was also a hit. It is the one that says “bad mother*@er” on it.
Jackson's book has elicited a firestorm of criticism from game theorists, stats jocks and other meth-heads in the discipline. Jackson's response? "If my answers frighten you, then you should cease asking scary questions."*
In one of its 
most quotable passages, Jackson writes: "The path of the social scientist is beset on all sides by the inequities of the pseudo-positivists and the tyranny of the APSR. More scientific is he who, in the name of charity and good will, shepherds the grad students through the dark valley of political science, for he is truly his brother's keeper and the finder of lost insights in international relations. And I will strike down upon thee with great vengeance and furious anger those who attempt to poison and destroy my pluralist brothers. And you will know I am the Director of General Education at American University when I lay my vengeance upon you."
Jackson’s new book comes at an increasingly self-reflective time in international relations. Most recently prominent scholars David Lake and Peter Katzenstein have offered their ideas about what ails the discipline. When asked to comment
"Get these motherfu*cking positivists out of my motherf*cking discipline!"
Jackson’s academic style is brusque and confrontational. After a spirited give and take at an APSA panel with colleague Dan Nexon on the use of Lakatos in assessing paradigmatic progress in international relations, Jackson bristled sarcastically, “Check out the big brain on Dan! Oh, you were finished!? Well, allow me to retort.” When Nexon pushed Jackson on his belief of the inapplicability of Popperian falsification methods to the social subject matter of political science, Jackson rejoinded: “English, motherf*@ker! Do you speak it?” He then asked rhetorically, somewhat incongruously, “Do you know what they call hermeneutics in France? L'herméneutique.” His hotel room was later found trashed.
While Jackson has never formally acknowledged it, it is open knowledge in the field that his middle initial stands for “Thaddeus.” Fearing for their lives, however, the paper could not get anyone to speak to that on the record. Jackson carries a briefcase with him at all times. Its contents are unknown, but there is a rumor that it contains Bruce Bueno de Mesquita's soul.
*I borrowed this from techne. See below. It was just too good to pass up.
That's right, coming soon to a campus near you. (Or if not, click here to arrange your own screening.)
PHD Movie Trailer from PHD Comics on Vimeo.
