Bret wrote a good post discussing the impact - or lack thereof - of the President's healthcare speech before he delivered it last week. While it is too early to tell what if any impact that speech has in fact had on the healthcare reform debate in Congress, several polls since the speech have measured a notable bump in the President's approval rating, both generally and for healthcare reform specifically. You can find the most recent poll, conducted by CNN/Opinion Research, here.
UPDATE: Shorter Nate Silver: the American people are confused. (h/t Bret)
Monday, September 14, 2009
Wednesday, September 9, 2009
Meet Joe Wilson
Representative Joe Wilson (R-S.C.) hails from the 2nd District of South Carolina. Wilson has served the good people of the 2nd District since winning a special election in 2001 following the death of Congressman Floyd Spence.
Rep. Wilson is also the gentleman who interrupted Pres. Obama during his address to a joint session of Congress on September 9, 2009. Mr. Obama, while attempting to dispell the myriad lies - yes, lies - propogated by the likes of Chuck Hagel, Sarah Palin, and the Wall Street Journal, noted that his plan would not provide health insurance to illegal immigrants. Rep. Wilson responded by shouting through the gallery, interrupting the President, "You lie!"
Rep. Wilson's outburst is indefensible. Wilson breached protocol by interrupting the President, shouting in the gallery, and labeling the President a liar. Sen. McCain has already called for Rep. Wilson to apologize. But apology is not sufficient. Even the Republican party, which continues to coddle partisans who adhere to such absurdities as denying President Obama's citizenship, must recognize there is no place for such behavior. The President and the Presidency are deserving of respect, at least as much respect as is shown for their colleagues in the House and the Senate, and in those august chambers.
Rep. Wilson should apologize. He should be shunned by his colleagues. He should be censured by the House.
UPDATE: Bret notes in comments that Wilson's outburst has been described as unprecedented -- I certainly have no living memory of anything like this happening. Former Congressman, now Chief of Staff, Emanuel claims it is unprecedented. Sen. Leahy notes that nothing like Wilson's shouts has occurred in his 35 years in the Senate.
Wilson has released a rather weak and, in my view, insufficient apology. As Scherer says, Rep. Wilson has apologized for the tone rather than the substance, and not at all for the incredible disrespect he showed the Presidency.
Rep. Wilson's website has crashed.
Wilson's Democratic opponent for 2010's website has crashed: RobMillerforCongress.com
Why the President's Health Care Speech Doesn't Matter
Ed Homick at CNN tackles the question of whether Obama's speech later today will change the game on the health care debate. John Sides at GW provides a survey of the ample historical evidence that presidential speeches matter very little.
A couple of additional thoughts on why Obama's address is unlikely to affect the healthcare debate:
1) The health care plans in circulation are already incredibly moderate. These are not single-payer, comprehensive national health insurance proposals, and yet the opposition has succeeding as painting them as a radical, slippery slope to government run healthcare. That strategy will continue even if the proposals become even more moderate by including the public option just as a trigger. No matter how Obama frames the proposals, the opposition will continue to insist he is just lying. There is no amount of effective communication when the opposition is this successful at generating mistrust.
2) Relatedly, oppositions don't care about specifics. Their job is to win electoral support by opposing. They will oppose for the sake of opposing, regardless of the content of the proposals or the President's framing of those contents.
3) Individual leaders and strategies don't matter.
Tuesday, September 8, 2009
Assessing Options in Afghanistan
Eric Schmitt and Scott Shane survey US policy options in Afghanistan in the New York Times today. Framing the debate as whether “the United States needs a large and growing ground force in Afghanistan to prevent another major terrorist attack,” Schmitt and Shane hear from Bruce Hoffman that
the argument that terrorism can be prevented essentially by remote control wasHoffman continues:
“immensely seductive” — and completely wrong. “We tried to contain the
terrorism problem in Afghanistan from a distance before 9/11,” [Hoffman] said.
“Look how well that worked.”
UPDATE: Peter Bergen weighs in on Afghanistan, noting that[T]he success of strikes from Predators in killing Qaeda suspects in Pakistan
depended on accurate information on terrorists’ whereabouts from Pakistani
intelligence. In Afghanistan, without such sources, “we’d be flying blind,” he
said.
- More than five million refugees have returned home since the fall of the Taliban. This is one of the most substantial refugee repatriations in history, yet it is little remarked upon because it has largely gone so smoothly.
- One in six Afghans now has a cell phone. Under the Taliban there was no phone system.
Millions of kids are now in school, including many girls. Under the Taliban girls were not allowed to be educated. - In 2008, Afghanistan's real GDP growth was 7.5 percent. Under the Taliban the economy was in free fall.
- You were more likely to be murdered in the United States in 1991 than an Afghan civilian is to be killed in the war today.
Sunday, September 6, 2009
More on Stability (A Methodological Detour)
Last month, Foreign Policy released the latest edition of its Failed States Index. Given recent events in Pakistan and Iran, and the renewed discussion of the US national interest in a stable Afghanistan, it is worth doing some thinking about how we measure and explain state failure, using the FSI as a starting point. Despite its grounding in extensive empirical observation and its attempt at methodological sophistication, the FSI is a potentially misleading measure of propensity for failure.
A casual survey of the 2009 index reveals some potential empirical inconsistencies. Do we really believe that North Korea is at roughly the same risk of failure as states like Haiti and Ethiopia? Are China’s communist party and Israel’s democracy really as vulnerable as the regimes in places like Kyrgyzstan, Belarus, or even Russia for that matter? Regional comparisons are also problematic. For example, Uzbekistan, under the control of Islam Karimov’s authoritarian regime since independence, is rated at greater risk of failure than both Tajikstan, which is less than ten years removed from civil war, and Kyrgyzstan, which less than five years removed from the Tulip Revolution, and is arguably characterized by organized crime groups competing for power.
Part of the reason for these discrepancies is that Failed States Index is a bit of a misnomer. I suspect many casual analysts, including myself at times, have used the FSI as an indicator of state strength or weakness. In fact, Foreign Policy argues that the index is a measure of a state’s risk of failure (loosely defined as vulnerability to collapse or conflict). The index is composed of the aggregation of 1-10 rankings on 12 indicators of social, economic, and political cohesion and performance. As such, the FSI is an implied explanation for why states fail, and a poor one at that.
If your aim is to produce an explanation (or prediction) for state failure, social and economic indicators should be analytically separated from the political. Strong political institutions may be able to absorb the demands arising from the economic and social pressures the FSI incorporates. Furthermore, state strength must not be defined in terms of its ability to incorporate these demands. A better way to explain state failure would be to establish independent measures of state capacity or efficacy (say an index including degree of monopoly on force, degree of autonomy/meritocracy of the bureaucracy, quality of public goods provisions, degree of “stateness” problems, etc). The FSI political indicators actually provide a rough approximation of what this measure should look like (arranging the rankings according to these indicators results in some interesting reorderings. Then, having established variation on this index, the degree to which social and economic factors explain this variation is an empirical question. Regressing the political indicators on the social and economic indicators would provide a better idea of the significance and relative weights of these factors’ effects on state failure. An alternate approach would be a survival model using these 12 indicators as independent variables. I’m sure there is no shortage of academic analyses of this type (the State Failure Project/Political Instability Task Force comes to mind), but the inability of social science to make their work accessible to the policy community is another matter.
The way that you conceptualize and explain failed states has real and important implications for policy. For example, the argument that al Qaeda was nourished in an environment of relative state capacity strikes me as revisionism. Going forward, this debate requires the explicit identification of what constitutes a strong state capacity, and the careful identifications of the most important factors that cause variation in capacity. In short, the FSI succeeds in its goal of providing a “starting point for the discussion of why states fail.” However, the uncritical use of these types of indices in policy analysis and decision making is likely to lead to the misallocation of scarce resources to either A) prop up states that don’t need it, or B) correct problems that really have no effect on state failure.
On Stability
Colin has repeatedly suggested that the United States should abandon Afghanistan. He believes that the costs of occupying Afghanistan are greater than the potential benefits. He does not, however, identify potential costs and he seems to suggest that stability is not a worthy goal. Indeed, he has questioned whether instability is a bona fide threat to US national security.
Let me begin by noting that I do not agree with every aspect of the United States strategy in Afghanistan. As I have noted in previous posts, there are facets of US strategy that need great reform, particularly the US approach to poppy growth and opium production. I am also in agreement with Colin in so far as I question whether that is an achievable goal. Colin and I – so far as I can tell – diverge on the question of what US goals ought to be and whether those goals are achievable. As I have written previously, I do not believe that western style democracy is in the offing in Afghanistan but I do believe that stability there is achievable and that it is worthwhile goal for the United States from a national security perspective.
States are best able to deal with other states. It is unsurprising that after several hundred years of a state-centric international (or at least, western international order), states are predisposed to develop and effectuate policies with a view towards other states. The international system is likewise designed to account for interactions between and among states. This system provides a convenient hierarchy for decision making – it is a heuristic that allows decision makers to contextualize events and place them in appropriate bins: international organization, state or individual; interstate or intrastate.
Stability within and among states is thus convenient and, to some extent, necessary for states to craft responses. But stability for its own sake is not a sufficient reason for the United States to be involved in Afghanistan. Indeed, creating instability has, at times, been a useful tool for the United States and an appropriate goal for the United States. For example, the United States fueled the anti-Soviet insurgency in Afghanistan because creating a quagmire in Afghanistan for the Soviet army allowed the United States to inflict non-trivial damage on the Soviet Union for little cost. Instability there, and at that time, was an appropriate goal.
However, persistent instability, once a policy goal has been achieved – in the case of Afghanistan, depleting Soviet resources, driving the Red Army out of Afghanistan, and contributing to the collapse of the U.S.S.R – serves no positive foreign policy objective and can become a source of insecurity.
Afghanistan is frequently depicted as having been chaos under the Taliban. That was not in fact the case. While the Taliban were a backwards and despicable regime, they did provide some semblance of order. There writ was weak and the extent of their control territorial speaking was limited. Within this limited control, Al Qaeda was able to carve out what amounted to a fiefdom in Afghanistan – an area of the country, nominally under Taliban control, run by Al Qaeda. Within that space, Al Qaeda was able to conduct its operations, culminating with the September 11, 2001 attacks.
So, non-state threats to the United States are not necessarily born from chaos. But a weak state allows non-state threats to operate with impunity. When those non-state threats are given access to infrastructure that facilitates a global reach – airports, say – through porous borders, then the ability of that non-state organization to act with impunity within a putative state is a threat to the national security of the United States.
Additionally, a weak state affording the non-state actor safe haven (potentially unknowingly or unwillingly) presents the United States with a policy dilemma. How does the United States address the non-state threat? Traditionally, the United States could demand the state to turn over member of the non-state organization, or demand that the state cease facilitating the non-state organization under threat of some sort of state-driven reprisal. But this presumes that the state is sufficiently cohesive to comply with US wishes, or sufficiently cohesive for the United States’ state-driven reprisals to have effect. The United States might pressure the non-state actor directly and by-pass the putative state. Or, the United States might attack both the sheltering state and the non-state actor simultaneously – as it did in Afghanistan in 2001.
This is not to say, however, that instability does not present a threat to the United States as well. First, it would be hard to imagine a state that is sufficiently chaotic in which a cohesive non-state actor would not be able to setup a fiefdom like Al Qaeda managed to do in Afghanistan before 2001. Even in Somalia, the preeminent example of a collapsed state in chaos, features areas of either incredible stability (Somalialand) or areas that have been pacified by a non-state actor to facilitate the non-state actor’s goal (see Islamic Courts Union). Second, the net effect of one state’s instability on US national security must be examined on a case-by-case basis: Has there been spillover? If so, what are the consequences of the spill-over? How do those consequences impact US national security? This is not a linear system and its effects may not be immediately nor readily identifiable.
In Afghanistan, spill-over has been obvious. The Pashtu-based insurgency that rose up in the wake of the US invasion in 2001 has traditional cross-border links. The porous nature of the Afghan-Pakistan border and the relatively weak control Pakistan exerts over its border areas provided the Pashtu insurgency with safe haven – another, though slightly removed, example of instability threatening US national security. This, in turn, has fueled a Pashtu-based insurgency in Pakistan, attacking the state. Disruption of Pakistan is a threat to the national security of the United States – that is self-evident.
At this point, while the Afghan and Pakistani insurgencies have separate goals, they clearly contribute to each other. It is highly unlikely that in leaving Afghanistan, the insurgency in Pakistan will burn-out. Leaving Afghanistan, however, will remove whatever ability the United States has had to prevent the Pakistani Pashtu insurgency from using Afghanistan as a safe haven in its war against the Pakistani state. That the Afghan state is currently too weak to provide a similar role is apparent, and the likelihood that an abandoned Afghanistan would give the Pakistani Pashtu insurgency strategic depth militates against the United States leaving. Further, there is little reason to believe that, should the United States abandon Afghanistan, that Al Qaeda or some other non-state actor would not be able to carve out yet another fiefdom where it could enjoy operational freedom, engendering an additional threat to the United States.
Building a stable Afghan state with a government able to exercise its writ sufficiently to prevent the development of a new non-state fiefdom is no easy trick. That said, abandoning the Afghan project is the only way to guarantee failure with regard to that strategic objective. Yes, leaving would stem American expense of blood and treasure in the short-term. It is likely that in the medium and long term, however, quitting Afghanistan at this stage, will only cost the United States greater expenditures of both. Failure of long-term policy thinking and engagement during and following the last Afghan war contributed directly to the attacks of September 11, 2001. These failures are hallmarks of US foreign policy making in the post-War era. But making the same mistake, in the same place, twice is not just bad policy, it’s criminal. Simply abandoning Afghanistan would be just that.
UPDATE: Ahmed Rashid writes in today's Washington Post:
Many dissenters in Washington, such as columnist George Will, insist that the Afghans are incapable of learning and unwilling to build a modern state. Others, including former British diplomat Rory Stewart, argue that Afghan society should be left alone. But the dissenters do not sufficiently acknowledge the past failures of the Bush administration that led us to this impasse. What's worse, they offer no solutions.
Let me begin by noting that I do not agree with every aspect of the United States strategy in Afghanistan. As I have noted in previous posts, there are facets of US strategy that need great reform, particularly the US approach to poppy growth and opium production. I am also in agreement with Colin in so far as I question whether that is an achievable goal. Colin and I – so far as I can tell – diverge on the question of what US goals ought to be and whether those goals are achievable. As I have written previously, I do not believe that western style democracy is in the offing in Afghanistan but I do believe that stability there is achievable and that it is worthwhile goal for the United States from a national security perspective.
States are best able to deal with other states. It is unsurprising that after several hundred years of a state-centric international (or at least, western international order), states are predisposed to develop and effectuate policies with a view towards other states. The international system is likewise designed to account for interactions between and among states. This system provides a convenient hierarchy for decision making – it is a heuristic that allows decision makers to contextualize events and place them in appropriate bins: international organization, state or individual; interstate or intrastate.
Stability within and among states is thus convenient and, to some extent, necessary for states to craft responses. But stability for its own sake is not a sufficient reason for the United States to be involved in Afghanistan. Indeed, creating instability has, at times, been a useful tool for the United States and an appropriate goal for the United States. For example, the United States fueled the anti-Soviet insurgency in Afghanistan because creating a quagmire in Afghanistan for the Soviet army allowed the United States to inflict non-trivial damage on the Soviet Union for little cost. Instability there, and at that time, was an appropriate goal.
However, persistent instability, once a policy goal has been achieved – in the case of Afghanistan, depleting Soviet resources, driving the Red Army out of Afghanistan, and contributing to the collapse of the U.S.S.R – serves no positive foreign policy objective and can become a source of insecurity.
Afghanistan is frequently depicted as having been chaos under the Taliban. That was not in fact the case. While the Taliban were a backwards and despicable regime, they did provide some semblance of order. There writ was weak and the extent of their control territorial speaking was limited. Within this limited control, Al Qaeda was able to carve out what amounted to a fiefdom in Afghanistan – an area of the country, nominally under Taliban control, run by Al Qaeda. Within that space, Al Qaeda was able to conduct its operations, culminating with the September 11, 2001 attacks.
So, non-state threats to the United States are not necessarily born from chaos. But a weak state allows non-state threats to operate with impunity. When those non-state threats are given access to infrastructure that facilitates a global reach – airports, say – through porous borders, then the ability of that non-state organization to act with impunity within a putative state is a threat to the national security of the United States.
Additionally, a weak state affording the non-state actor safe haven (potentially unknowingly or unwillingly) presents the United States with a policy dilemma. How does the United States address the non-state threat? Traditionally, the United States could demand the state to turn over member of the non-state organization, or demand that the state cease facilitating the non-state organization under threat of some sort of state-driven reprisal. But this presumes that the state is sufficiently cohesive to comply with US wishes, or sufficiently cohesive for the United States’ state-driven reprisals to have effect. The United States might pressure the non-state actor directly and by-pass the putative state. Or, the United States might attack both the sheltering state and the non-state actor simultaneously – as it did in Afghanistan in 2001.
This is not to say, however, that instability does not present a threat to the United States as well. First, it would be hard to imagine a state that is sufficiently chaotic in which a cohesive non-state actor would not be able to setup a fiefdom like Al Qaeda managed to do in Afghanistan before 2001. Even in Somalia, the preeminent example of a collapsed state in chaos, features areas of either incredible stability (Somalialand) or areas that have been pacified by a non-state actor to facilitate the non-state actor’s goal (see Islamic Courts Union). Second, the net effect of one state’s instability on US national security must be examined on a case-by-case basis: Has there been spillover? If so, what are the consequences of the spill-over? How do those consequences impact US national security? This is not a linear system and its effects may not be immediately nor readily identifiable.
In Afghanistan, spill-over has been obvious. The Pashtu-based insurgency that rose up in the wake of the US invasion in 2001 has traditional cross-border links. The porous nature of the Afghan-Pakistan border and the relatively weak control Pakistan exerts over its border areas provided the Pashtu insurgency with safe haven – another, though slightly removed, example of instability threatening US national security. This, in turn, has fueled a Pashtu-based insurgency in Pakistan, attacking the state. Disruption of Pakistan is a threat to the national security of the United States – that is self-evident.
At this point, while the Afghan and Pakistani insurgencies have separate goals, they clearly contribute to each other. It is highly unlikely that in leaving Afghanistan, the insurgency in Pakistan will burn-out. Leaving Afghanistan, however, will remove whatever ability the United States has had to prevent the Pakistani Pashtu insurgency from using Afghanistan as a safe haven in its war against the Pakistani state. That the Afghan state is currently too weak to provide a similar role is apparent, and the likelihood that an abandoned Afghanistan would give the Pakistani Pashtu insurgency strategic depth militates against the United States leaving. Further, there is little reason to believe that, should the United States abandon Afghanistan, that Al Qaeda or some other non-state actor would not be able to carve out yet another fiefdom where it could enjoy operational freedom, engendering an additional threat to the United States.
Building a stable Afghan state with a government able to exercise its writ sufficiently to prevent the development of a new non-state fiefdom is no easy trick. That said, abandoning the Afghan project is the only way to guarantee failure with regard to that strategic objective. Yes, leaving would stem American expense of blood and treasure in the short-term. It is likely that in the medium and long term, however, quitting Afghanistan at this stage, will only cost the United States greater expenditures of both. Failure of long-term policy thinking and engagement during and following the last Afghan war contributed directly to the attacks of September 11, 2001. These failures are hallmarks of US foreign policy making in the post-War era. But making the same mistake, in the same place, twice is not just bad policy, it’s criminal. Simply abandoning Afghanistan would be just that.
UPDATE: Ahmed Rashid writes in today's Washington Post:
Many dissenters in Washington, such as columnist George Will, insist that the Afghans are incapable of learning and unwilling to build a modern state. Others, including former British diplomat Rory Stewart, argue that Afghan society should be left alone. But the dissenters do not sufficiently acknowledge the past failures of the Bush administration that led us to this impasse. What's worse, they offer no solutions.
Friday, September 4, 2009
On Media, Deliberation, and General Silliness in the Healthcare debate
In a blog entry for Newsweek, Jenny Hontz discusses the influence of Facebook on healthcare reform, and spuriously concludes that it has some. In contrast to some other shameless glorifications of technology in the media, Hontz at least provides some evidence for her inference: one advertising cliche, one B-list celebrity, and 7 or 8 anecdotes/off the cuff comments from "experts." The reality is that there is no evidence to support the idea that Facebook status updates have ever affected major policy decisions, and no reason to believe they ever will.
Hontz's reference to social networks as "the real town halls" leads to me to believe the root of this general silliness in the media lies in a popular, and fundamental, misunderstanding of the nature of democratic politics. Much animosity and general frustration generated by the healthcare debate would be ameliorated if we just dispensed with the myth that American democracy is somehow deliberative. Over 50 years ago, Joseph Schumpeter conceived of democracy as a marketplace in which political entrepreneurs compete for customers in the form of voters in elections. Democracy is not a process by which reasonable people come together to discuss differences and arrive at a common good, which becomes policy. Politicians make policy, or don't, because of their calculations about what will win them elections, not by getting together in the Senate chamber and changing each others' minds about what serves the best interests of society.
Viewed in this sense, the healthcare debate looks less passionate and more rational. The idea that town halls are deliberative is silly. Elected representatives in opposition are in the privileged position of not having to make policy. Instead the opposition just does what it does best- oppose. Not with specific alternatives or reasoned debate, but with misinformation, name calling, and general populist rhetoric. Of course they have no incentive to reign in this type of rhetoric at town halls, because town halls are primarily a mechanism for the transmission of voters' intentions, not for deliberation.
Analogously, there are two mechanisms by which online social networks might affect policy. The first is that they facilitate deliberation, which Hontz argues is occurring on healthcare, a proposition for which there is absolutely no evidence. Second, networks may facilitate the transmission voter intentions. This mechanism is certainly more plausible, but the evidence that representatives respond to these intentions is thus far scant. As Hontz rightfully notes, updating your Facebook status is cheap talk, and may not be a credible signal of your intention to support. In any case, a more careful consideration of the democratic process, and more accumulation of serious evidence is necessary before we start declaring that "Facebook Revolts" are shaping policy making.
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