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Defense and Foreign Policy
Great New Blog in English by Cubans in Cuba
During the past several years, the growth of the Cuban dissident blogger movement has become a major irritant to the Cuban regime. Some bloggers, such as Yoani Sanchez, are becoming well known around the world. Her blog has even been available in English for a few years. I’ve written about her here and Cato published a recent paper by her.
The Cuban blogosphere is vibrant and diverse, but has been available almost exclusively in Spanish. Now, a new English blog site, Translating Cuba, is posting the thoughts of leading Cuban bloggers in Cuba, including Sanchez and recent hunger striker Guillermo Fariñas. Contributors to the site don’t share identical points of view, but they hope that “the voices on this site will mirror the free, open and plural society we all know that Cuba is ultimately destined to be.”
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‘Border Enforcement’ Bill Driven by Election-Year Politics
A $600-million bill to enhance border enforcement has hit a temporary snag in the Senate, but it is almost inevitable, with an election only a few months away, that Congress and the president will spend yet more money trying to enforce our unworkable immigration laws.
“Getting control of the border” is the buzz phrase of the day for politicians in both parties, from Sen. John McCain, R‑Ariz., to Sen. Chuck Schumer, D‑N.Y. Never mind that apprehensions are down sharply along our Southwest border with Mexico, mostly I suspect because of the lack of robust job creation in the unstimulated Obama economy.
Meanwhile, since the early 1990s, spending on border enforcement has increased more than 700 percent, and the number of agents along the border has increased five-fold, from 3,500 to more than 17.000. (See pages 3–4 of a January 2010 report from the Center for American Progress and the Immigration Policy Center.) Yet the population of illegal immigrants in America tripled during that period. If this were a federal education program, conservatives would rightly accuse the big spenders of merely throwing more money at a problem without result.
To pay for this politically driven expenditure, Congress plans to nearly double fees charged for H1‑B and L visas used by foreign high-tech firms to staff their operations in the United States. The increased visa tax will fall especially hard on companies such as the Indian high-tech leaders Wipro, Infosys, and Tata.
This all has the ring of election-year populism. Congress pretends to move us closer to solving the problem of illegal immigrants entering from Latin America by raising barriers to skilled professionals coming to the United States from India and elsewhere to help us maintain our edge in competitive global technology markets.
More Stephen Biddle on Afghanistan
In June I pointed to what I thought was an interesting article co-authored by CFR’s Stephen Biddle that took a rather dim view of the prospects of fighting a counterinsurgency war on Hamid Karzai’s behalf in Afghanistan.
CFR has posted a transcript of a media call from earlier today with Biddle, who’s just returned from Afghanistan, hosted by Gideon Rose, the new editor of Foreign Affairs. There are some interesting tidbits in there. Try this, where Biddle has been working to try to push out well into the future any prospective date by which we can judge progress or a lack thereof in the fight:
ROSE: So what I hear you saying is that you have a Potter-Stewart version of a definition of success, but not a Potter-Stewart definition of failure.
In other words, at some point if it’s working, you’ll see the levels of violence come down; you’ll see things start to stabilize and then you’ll know things are going well. But if that hasn’t happened yet, it’s hard to distinguish between “It may happen down the road”; and “It’s not going to happen.”
BIDDLE: Yeah. And eventually, there’s kind of a statute of limitations on this. I mean, you can’t reasonable expect after five or six years to keep saying, well, it’ll happen eventually.
So five or six more years would be too long. (I should note that Biddle also suggests later in the interview that we need somehow to extend the U.S. presence in Iraq beyond the 2011 deadline in the existing Status of Forces Agreement in that country to prevent a meltdown from happening there.) Next Biddle restates his argument that al Qaeda “safe havens” isn’t a particularly good argument for continuing the war, but the prospect, which he admits is very unlikely, of a Pakistani collapse and al Qaeda somehow acquiring a deliverable nuclear weapon is. Rose pushes back:
ROSE: See, that actually scares me more than if you had given the reverse answer, because however sort of relatively minor the Afghan danger would seem to be, the idea of fighting a nasty, ongoing, unsatisfying war simply for a domino theory aspect of what might happen in a neighboring state if the war doesn’t go well, strikes me as so tenuous a connection that it really is going to be hard to justify. And I think over time, you might get into a political dynamic in which the — if the war doesn’t get — the prospects don’t seem to get any better, that the public might not find that convincing. Do you worry about that?
BIDDLE: Well, I mean, people use domino theory as pejorative wording when they oppose a war. The idea that states worry about the stability of their neighbors because they worry about the stability of their own country is ubiquitous in international politics. One of the central reasons why the United States got involved in the Balkans back in the 1990s was the fear that chaos in the Balkans could spread to our NATO neighbors and trading partners. You know, the United — the Soviet Union was continuously worried about instability on its borders. This is a normal concern in international affairs. It’s not like an imaginary ghost dreamed up by people who want to do Vietnam War revisionism.
ROSE: Understood entirely, although —
BIDDLE: I don’t think that this is an absolute transcendent be-all and end-all threat to U.S. national security that we should be willing to pay any price and bear any burden in order to deal with. I’ve argued in the past — and I continue to believe — that Afghanistan is close call on the merits because the stakes, while important, are indirect and are not unlimited. And obviously the cost of waging this war is, you know, clearly high.
So what it boils down to, I think, is neither a slam dunk in favor of waging the war in which any reasonable person must surely think this is worth it, nor a slam dunk in which this war is obviously crazy and any reasonable person should think that we should get out tomorrow morning. I think what you end up with is a situation where the costs and the benefits are pretty close on the analytics and it boils down to a value judgment that reasonable people will make differently about how much cost should you be willing to bear to reduce how much of a threat.
Now, the threat here if the worst case scenario unfolds, is pretty serious. I mean, you may or may not have worried about nuclear weapons in Soviet hands during the Cold War. Bin Laden would probably use the things if he got them. And an American decision by a presidential administration that could reasonably have waged this war with some respectable prospect of success, but decided instead to withdraw — if that scenario played itself out and Pakistan collapsed, bin Laden got a nuclear weapon and used it in the United States — that would be regarded by generations of historians as the single biggest foreign policy blunder in the history of the nation.
Now, a variety of bad things have to happen in sequence for that worst case to play itself out. That’s why I think this is a close call, rather than an obvious “do it” or an obvious “don’t”. But I think especially with respect to the guy in the Oval Office who has to bear the responsibility for this that I suspect that worst case looms fairly large, but I think all indications are that the president is pretty ambivalent about this, in part because I suspect he sees the costs and benefits as being closer on the margin than one would in some ways like.
But what really struck me about the interview was the fog-machine answer Biddle gave to a question from James Kitfield involving Karzai. See if you do better with it than I did:
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Bob Gates Against the World
Defense Secretary Robert Gates has again made headlines with a proposal to slow the growth of the Pentagon’s budget — already higher than at any point since World War II — by cutting overhead, waste and a top-heavy command structure.
The proposed shuttering of Joint Forces Command (Jif-Com) has elicited most of the press attention today, and prompted an impassioned plea from Virginia politicians, including Gov. Bob McDonnell, that the command remain open. Unhelpfully for Gov. McDonnell, outgoing Jif-Com head James Mattis (who will assume the title of CENTCOM), reportedly supports Gates’s decision.
But this isn’t the first time that opportunistic politicians have latched onto defense spending as a way to sprinkle economic benefits to their constituents, and at the expense of the rest of us. (In the same vein, Gates reportedly repeated his pledge to kill the entire DoD appropriation if it includes the unwanted C‑17 and the alternate engine for the Joint Strike Fighter that some members of Congress continue to push.)
Leaving aside the predictable political wailings, the reforms that Gates proposed are neither revolutionary, nor particularly controversial to most objective observers. Politico’s Gordon Lubold and Jen DiMascio in their ever-helpful Morning Defense newsletter point out that “The cuts seemed to take several pages out of the Defense Business Board task force led by [Arnold] Punaro that recently recommended many of the same trims.” (For more on that report, see here.)
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Strip-Search Images Stored
The Transportation Security Administration will be sure to point out that it was not them—it was the U.S. Marshals Service—that kept “tens of thousands of images recorded with a millimeter wave system at the security checkpoint of a single Florida courthouse,” according to Declan McCullagh of C|Net news.
The TSA has taken pains to make sure that their use of strip-search machines does not produce compromising images of the traveling public, but rules are made to be broken. How do you protect privacy in the use of a technology that is fundamentally designed to invade privacy?
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Collateral Murder, Indeed
I finally found the time to go through the WikiLeaks’ Afghan War Diary entries containing accounts of my 2004 tour in Afghanistan (my third tour; appropriate bio and disclaimer can be found here).
I am underwhelmed. I am not sure what Julian Assange thought the release of these documents would tell people about the war in Afghanistan, beyond the fact that people are shooting at each other and that, generally speaking, war is Hell. If I identified the entries associated with my service in Afghanistan, you would read summaries of the firefights and rocket attacks that my unit faced, with metrics of rounds fired and received and associated casualties.
Parallel to Noah Schachtman’s excellent write-up contrasting his experiences while embedded with Marines in Helmand Province versus what WikiLeaks provides, you would have little visibility on the actual maneuver of troops, the relationship that they have with the populace, and the effectiveness of Afghan forces. Reading WikiLeaks alone would give you a picture of the Afghan War that falls short of what you can get from normal press outlets.
This skewed portrait of our policy comes at no small price. The identification of our intelligence contacts and sources is sure to put their lives in danger, as Steve Coll and (more importantly) Taliban spokesmen point out.
Unfortunately, Assange has taken Afghan War policy as an acceptable loss as well, no matter how you define it. Whether you support a COIN-centric approach, a reduced footprint in Afghanistan, a counterterrorism model, or even letting the CIA run the war, this is a disaster. This release of information is actually more damaging to downsizing strategies, since we will end up leaning on tribal alliances and intelligence assets more, not less.
Assange is facilitating the deaths of our intelligence contacts because he believes that the benefits outweigh the cost of their lives. That’s mighty rich, coming from a guy who labeled a 2007 case of mistaken identity in Iraq that resulted in the death of civilians as “collateral murder.” In that case, helicopter pilots misidentified a reporter’s zoom lens as the tail end of an RPG launcher, but armed men were in the reporters’ entourage that may have independently met the criteria for using force under the rules of engagement.
That’s (possibly) a mistake in the distinction of combatants, not an intentional approval of the loss of innocent life that is deemed acceptable in proportion to the direct military advantage anticipated. The latter is the definition of collateral damage, and Assange seems to have no problem with asserting his moral judgment in this realm.
Collateral murder, indeed.