Richard Holbrooke, the new US envoy to Afghanistan and Pakistan described the US and NATO attempts to arrest Afghan poppy production as “wasteful and ineffective.” The BBC reported on Saturday, that Holbrooke reported that despite US expenditures of $800 million/year in poppy eradication efforts the US is getting no return for their investment. Holbrooke recommends that the US should redirect money spent on eradication to assistance to farmers.
About a month ago, I wrote here about the damage US poppy eradication policy was doing on the overall effort to stabilize Afghanistan and defeat the resurgent Taliban. Holbrooke’s comments are a hopeful indicator that US policy will shift over the coming months, away from destroying the livelihood of farmers (which ultimately encourages their support of the Taliban) to providing alternative means of wage earning. As I wrote a month ago, if this means purchasing crops from these farmers t several times the market price, it will be money well spent. Aggressive eradication methods not only do not work to stem the tide of poppy farming but actively undermine the US mission in Afghanistan.
Monday, March 23, 2009
US Unemployment County-by-County
The New York Times published this map of the United States illustrating the unemployment rate county-by-county. It is instructive to remember that the traditional unemployment measure undercounts the unemployed. Unsurprisingly, the heavily agrarian plain states seem to be doing better (that is, less poorly) than the rest. Oddly enough you’re better off living on the East Coast rather than the West Coast, and if you live in Alaska, well, Federal Subsidies notwithstanding, you should consider moving.
Sunday, February 22, 2009
Indivisible Insurgencies
Joe Klein, after reading this article by Fred Kaplan, posts this on Swampland:
Without sealing the border, increasing pressure on Taliban and Pashtun anti-government forces in Afghanistan while allowing them safe haven in Pakistan affords those forces strategic depth. Likewise, attacking those forces in Pakistan without maintaining pressure in Afghanistan allows them an avenue of escape. Thus, while there are anti-government forces in Pakistan who have focused their attacks on Pakistan and may separable, both the restiveness and its underlying causes, in both Pakistan and Afghanistan, must be addressed for NATO to achieve any discernible success in Afghanistan.
In fact, I haven't heard a coherent strategy yet from anyone about Pakistan. (And from what I hear, the accumulated U.S. diplomatic, military and intelligence knowledge of that benighted, and ridiculously complicated, country is surprisingly minimal.) As Richard Holbrooke said last night on Lehrer, there is a notable level of disagreement among U.S. experts about the intent of the Pakistani Army and ISI (inter-services intelligence agency).But Klein and Kaplan are wrong – Pakistan should not take precedence over Afghanistan. Neither should Afghanistan take precedence over Pakistan, though, at least in so far as the US is concerned with the Pashtun tribal belt that straddles the two countries and is fomenting unrest in each. The challenge posed by the ongoing insurgency in Afghanistan cannot be addressed without addressing it corollary in Pakistan at least not without sealing the border between the two countries – a task that has proved impossible thus far and, in its impossibility, has lead or contributed to the destabilization of Pakistan.
Last summer, I first reported that the U.S. intelligence community now considered Pakistan the centrol [sic] front in the war on terror. Well, we're not talking about wars on terror any more, but the situation in Pakistan is, without question, the most sever [sic] foreign policy problem that we're facing right now. Kaplan's right: it needs to take precedence over Afghanistan.
Without sealing the border, increasing pressure on Taliban and Pashtun anti-government forces in Afghanistan while allowing them safe haven in Pakistan affords those forces strategic depth. Likewise, attacking those forces in Pakistan without maintaining pressure in Afghanistan allows them an avenue of escape. Thus, while there are anti-government forces in Pakistan who have focused their attacks on Pakistan and may separable, both the restiveness and its underlying causes, in both Pakistan and Afghanistan, must be addressed for NATO to achieve any discernible success in Afghanistan.
Wednesday, February 18, 2009
Where Empires go to Die
It has become a truism that Afghanistan is proving to be as intractable a problem for the United States as it was for the Soviet Union, Great Britain, and many empires before. McClatchy reports that the majority of the additional 17,000 troops to be dispatched to Afghanistan will be slated for deployment to Helmand province and will be tasked with taking on poppy growers. While I do not echo Juan Cole’s strident assessment that the current Afghan insurgency is due to ISAF efforts to eradicate poppies, it is a terrible mistake to believe that poppy eradication will substantially improve security efforts in Afghanistan.
Indeed, poppy eradication will likely exacerbate the current insurgency and work to further destabilize Afghanistan. While there is little doubt that the sale of poppies and their conversion into opiates funds the insurgency, their growth and their harvest form the livelihood of many rural Afghan farmers. It is the most profitable crop those farmers can raise. The only effect of forcibly eradicating the poppies will be the destruction of those farmers’ livelihoods which will inevitably lead to their alienation from the United States, NATO and the Afghan government, and their embracing the Taliban.
Rather than forcibly eradicating the poppy crop, NATO should approach this problem with a mixture of carrots and sticks. First, NATO must position itself to act as competitor-buyer to the Taliban for the coming year’s poppy crop. NATO should out-bid the Taliban and offer to provide seed and subsidies or inflated purchase prices to farmers to produce alternative crops next year – prices should be inflated with a view towards making alternative crops substantially more profitable per acre than poppies. Simply disrupting production is foolish and works cross-purposes with our ultimate goals in Afghanistan. This commitment to incentivizing the production of alternative crops or livelihoods must be long-term and systemic; while we must be wary of having an entire nation on the dole that risk is substantially less threatening than either aggravating the insurgency or allowing the Taliban access to funds while dumping heroin on the world market.
Second, if the purchasing of this year’s poppy crop is successful the Taliban will not sit idly by. There will be serious attempts to intimidate and compel farmers to continue growing poppies. The likely Taliban reaction will require a heavy, protective NATO presence in poppy producing regions like Helmand.
Afghanistan poses a difficult challenge to the United States and, as the situation in Pakistan continues to devolve, Afghanistan is becoming ever more intractable. The imperative to act, and to act quickly, is a good one, however to act – even in a localized way – without considering the obvious ramification is to needlessly exacerbate an already dreadful situation.
Indeed, poppy eradication will likely exacerbate the current insurgency and work to further destabilize Afghanistan. While there is little doubt that the sale of poppies and their conversion into opiates funds the insurgency, their growth and their harvest form the livelihood of many rural Afghan farmers. It is the most profitable crop those farmers can raise. The only effect of forcibly eradicating the poppies will be the destruction of those farmers’ livelihoods which will inevitably lead to their alienation from the United States, NATO and the Afghan government, and their embracing the Taliban.
Rather than forcibly eradicating the poppy crop, NATO should approach this problem with a mixture of carrots and sticks. First, NATO must position itself to act as competitor-buyer to the Taliban for the coming year’s poppy crop. NATO should out-bid the Taliban and offer to provide seed and subsidies or inflated purchase prices to farmers to produce alternative crops next year – prices should be inflated with a view towards making alternative crops substantially more profitable per acre than poppies. Simply disrupting production is foolish and works cross-purposes with our ultimate goals in Afghanistan. This commitment to incentivizing the production of alternative crops or livelihoods must be long-term and systemic; while we must be wary of having an entire nation on the dole that risk is substantially less threatening than either aggravating the insurgency or allowing the Taliban access to funds while dumping heroin on the world market.
Second, if the purchasing of this year’s poppy crop is successful the Taliban will not sit idly by. There will be serious attempts to intimidate and compel farmers to continue growing poppies. The likely Taliban reaction will require a heavy, protective NATO presence in poppy producing regions like Helmand.
Afghanistan poses a difficult challenge to the United States and, as the situation in Pakistan continues to devolve, Afghanistan is becoming ever more intractable. The imperative to act, and to act quickly, is a good one, however to act – even in a localized way – without considering the obvious ramification is to needlessly exacerbate an already dreadful situation.
Wednesday, January 7, 2009
A Response to Art Hobson
On December 6, 2008, Art Hobson, a columnist for the Northwest Arkansas Times, penned this piece decrying Islam. Below is a reproduction of my response, submitted to the Northwest Arkansas Times on December 24, 2008, and left unpublished.
I was saddened to read Prof. Hobson’s piece which appeared in these pages on December 6. He is a man of some regard whose views are afforded much respect in this community. Unfortunately, his December 6 piece was rife with errors, poorly researched, and revealed disdain for Muslims, persons of religions, and even the members of this community that look to Prof. Hobson’s insights on matters of all stripes.
Prof. Hobson errantly conflates suicide terrorism with Islam. He does this obliquely, seemingly discussing the two as separate matters but leaving no doubt in any reader’s mind that Prof. Hobson believes that Islam manufactures suicide bombers. He comes to this by first discussing the recent attacks in Mumbai–an attack that, interestingly, did not involve suicide bombers.
While Hobson, like many of us, relies on his impression that “nearly every recent terrorist attack comes from Muslims,” the group singularly responsible for the most acts of suicide terrorism over the last 30 years is the Marxists Tamil Tigers–a predominately Hindu group! In fact, Prof. Robert Pape, a political scientist from the University of Chicago, demonstrated in 2005 that suicide terrorism is motivated not by religion but by politics.
Hobson is correct that in combating the groups that employ terrorism we should ask: What are their aims and why have they attacked? It is unfortunate for Prof. Hobson – and potentially disastrous for us as a nation – to lump disparate groups with varied goals together and wrongly attribute their actions solely to their religion. Muslims, like Christians, Jews, Hindus and Buddhists, come in many varieties and for as many that believe “Paradise is in the shadow of swords” there are those that heed the Koran 2:62: “Surely those who believe, and those who are Jews, and the Christians, and the Sabians, whoever believes in Allah and the Last day and does good, they shall have their reward from their Lord, and there is no fear for them, nor shall they grieve.”
I was saddened to read Prof. Hobson’s piece which appeared in these pages on December 6. He is a man of some regard whose views are afforded much respect in this community. Unfortunately, his December 6 piece was rife with errors, poorly researched, and revealed disdain for Muslims, persons of religions, and even the members of this community that look to Prof. Hobson’s insights on matters of all stripes.
Prof. Hobson errantly conflates suicide terrorism with Islam. He does this obliquely, seemingly discussing the two as separate matters but leaving no doubt in any reader’s mind that Prof. Hobson believes that Islam manufactures suicide bombers. He comes to this by first discussing the recent attacks in Mumbai–an attack that, interestingly, did not involve suicide bombers.
While Hobson, like many of us, relies on his impression that “nearly every recent terrorist attack comes from Muslims,” the group singularly responsible for the most acts of suicide terrorism over the last 30 years is the Marxists Tamil Tigers–a predominately Hindu group! In fact, Prof. Robert Pape, a political scientist from the University of Chicago, demonstrated in 2005 that suicide terrorism is motivated not by religion but by politics.
Hobson is correct that in combating the groups that employ terrorism we should ask: What are their aims and why have they attacked? It is unfortunate for Prof. Hobson – and potentially disastrous for us as a nation – to lump disparate groups with varied goals together and wrongly attribute their actions solely to their religion. Muslims, like Christians, Jews, Hindus and Buddhists, come in many varieties and for as many that believe “Paradise is in the shadow of swords” there are those that heed the Koran 2:62: “Surely those who believe, and those who are Jews, and the Christians, and the Sabians, whoever believes in Allah and the Last day and does good, they shall have their reward from their Lord, and there is no fear for them, nor shall they grieve.”
Sunday, December 21, 2008
The Terrible Journalism of Alessandra Stanley
Alessandra Stanley should go back to writing about television. I gather she wasn’t very good at that, either, but her pieces – and I shudder to call them pieces – on politics and the economy that have appeared over the last month in the New York Time have been wretched. The first piece she wrote that caught my attention covered President-elect Obama’s press conference unveiling Sen. Clinton as Secretary of State-designate. It was a horrible, hack-job of a piece, widely reviled for Ms. Stanley projecting – and projecting enough to generate a thousand almost wholly fictional words. Now, she’s written a piece bemoaning the loss of the sex scandal due to the recession.
Most of us spent the last decade or more wishing that the news would begin covering, you know, news again. The endless drumbeat of non-stories and scandals pushed people away from politics and the political process. They also served as cover for perhaps the most disastrous Presidency this country has ever seen. Rather than covering the many, many sins of this administration, the media was, until late in 2006, mostly cowed by the administration. It seemed that no sin-not the bungling of an unnecessary war, not a war of choice, not the bungling of an arguable necessary war, not violating the principles that gave us our nation, not torture, not abuses of power, not intimidation, not politization of every facet of government-was sufficient to shine real scrutiny on this administration because at least there was no sex.
What a farce. Go away, Ms. Stanley. And take your nonsense journalism with you.
Most of us spent the last decade or more wishing that the news would begin covering, you know, news again. The endless drumbeat of non-stories and scandals pushed people away from politics and the political process. They also served as cover for perhaps the most disastrous Presidency this country has ever seen. Rather than covering the many, many sins of this administration, the media was, until late in 2006, mostly cowed by the administration. It seemed that no sin-not the bungling of an unnecessary war, not a war of choice, not the bungling of an arguable necessary war, not violating the principles that gave us our nation, not torture, not abuses of power, not intimidation, not politization of every facet of government-was sufficient to shine real scrutiny on this administration because at least there was no sex.
What a farce. Go away, Ms. Stanley. And take your nonsense journalism with you.
Wednesday, December 17, 2008
Can We Call It a Depression yet?
As the resident economist (a title my qualifications are dubious for at best) on this and other blogs Ben and I have been a part of I thought I’d answer a question Ben has posed to me and is being bandied about by the pundit class. Are we in a depression now or just another recession?
My short answer is we won’t know until we’re on the other side of this. Truth be told there isn’t a commonly accepted definition of what a depression is. This stands in marked contrast to the commonly accepted definition of a recession used by economists. The “textbook” definition of a recession is at least two consecutive quarters of negative economic growth, which is to say from a strictly definitional standpoint we weren’t in a recession until after the Commerce Dept revamped numbers for the past few quarters.
This is in no way intended to imply people out there aren’t hurting, just that the until such time as we string together two quarters of negative growth (an oxymoron, but stay with me) we weren’t technically in a recession. We are now and evidently have been for a little while now, but does that mean we’re in a depression?
Again, my answer revolves around the definitions of economic phenomena and in that regard we won’t know. Back in 1929 everyone knew something bad was coming and in 1933, the statistical height of what is now known as The Great Depression, there wasn’t a household in America unaffected but the dismal economic conditions. My reading of history is to sparse to know if people referred to the period from 1929 to approximately 1935 as a depression at the time, but if they had it would have probably been towards the back end of the period when the full extent of the economic wreckage was coming into focus. Also, that was six years of economic contraction or stagnation with the rate of unemployed reaching over 30%, if memory serves. From where we sit it seems far to soon to think that after 12 months or even 18 months of an economic downturn we could justifiably declare our current economic state a depression. Our unemployment rate is on November 6th sat at 6.5% and analysts at that time expected it to increase to 8% by the middle of next year. As awful as that is, it not even in the double digits yet. We could get there, but that would seem to be a long ways off. Also so far during our current recession the economic contraction rate has not exceed 1%,which puts us in comparatively better shape then those that lived through The Great Depression.
The bottom line is that we could find ourselves in a depression in a couple years, but we’re not there yet and we’ve for a long way to fall before we get there. I don’t think we’ll look back at this time and ever consider it a depression. I do think there will be a revolution in economic and business cycle thought because of our current experience and I’ll explain why.
The U.S. economy by and large no longer “makes” things. The percentage of GDP that is comprised of manufactures has continued to decline over the past decade. We are a service economy propelled forward by financial vehicles and the multiplier effect those profits send into the marketplace. Now this is unsupported by any one source and more my summation of the economy as I perceive it today, so slam me for being wrong if you can prove I am.
Because we don’t make things anymore the old Keynesian remedies will have a limited affect. There are droves of disaffected workers out there, but how many of them are blue collar? We should absolutely invest in infrastructure improvements, but how many people will there be to fill these jobs? And perhaps the most perplexing problem is what to do with all those laid off white collar workers? There are 30,000 people that used to work for Lehman Brothers and I would venture to say few would be inclined, or even qualified to lay brick or pave a road. This creates the real challenge for President-elect Obama. You can’t send them all back to school, and if you did what profession would they learn? No doubt a number of the folks who used to work in the financial sector are far better positioned to deal with a period of unemployment then many blue collar workers, but where will they find work?
I haven’t heard any good answers to this problem and I don’t have any to share.
So what does it all mean? Quite honestly the nature of our current recession is something wholly new to our economic experience and some time back the complexity of the finance involved transcended my ability to understand. That said there are two things I am fairly certain of:
1) It’s going to get worse before it gets better
2) It will get better
Obviously not comforting thoughts, but we are in uncharted waters here. The bottom could be a long way off or could be today. Time will tell if we are living in a severe recession or in a depression. What’s clear in the present is that we can’t call this a depression yet. Someday in a distant future (or near future) and call me an idiot, but for my thoughts on this day I’m unprepared to accept we are in a depression.
My short answer is we won’t know until we’re on the other side of this. Truth be told there isn’t a commonly accepted definition of what a depression is. This stands in marked contrast to the commonly accepted definition of a recession used by economists. The “textbook” definition of a recession is at least two consecutive quarters of negative economic growth, which is to say from a strictly definitional standpoint we weren’t in a recession until after the Commerce Dept revamped numbers for the past few quarters.
This is in no way intended to imply people out there aren’t hurting, just that the until such time as we string together two quarters of negative growth (an oxymoron, but stay with me) we weren’t technically in a recession. We are now and evidently have been for a little while now, but does that mean we’re in a depression?
Again, my answer revolves around the definitions of economic phenomena and in that regard we won’t know. Back in 1929 everyone knew something bad was coming and in 1933, the statistical height of what is now known as The Great Depression, there wasn’t a household in America unaffected but the dismal economic conditions. My reading of history is to sparse to know if people referred to the period from 1929 to approximately 1935 as a depression at the time, but if they had it would have probably been towards the back end of the period when the full extent of the economic wreckage was coming into focus. Also, that was six years of economic contraction or stagnation with the rate of unemployed reaching over 30%, if memory serves. From where we sit it seems far to soon to think that after 12 months or even 18 months of an economic downturn we could justifiably declare our current economic state a depression. Our unemployment rate is on November 6th sat at 6.5% and analysts at that time expected it to increase to 8% by the middle of next year. As awful as that is, it not even in the double digits yet. We could get there, but that would seem to be a long ways off. Also so far during our current recession the economic contraction rate has not exceed 1%,which puts us in comparatively better shape then those that lived through The Great Depression.
The bottom line is that we could find ourselves in a depression in a couple years, but we’re not there yet and we’ve for a long way to fall before we get there. I don’t think we’ll look back at this time and ever consider it a depression. I do think there will be a revolution in economic and business cycle thought because of our current experience and I’ll explain why.
The U.S. economy by and large no longer “makes” things. The percentage of GDP that is comprised of manufactures has continued to decline over the past decade. We are a service economy propelled forward by financial vehicles and the multiplier effect those profits send into the marketplace. Now this is unsupported by any one source and more my summation of the economy as I perceive it today, so slam me for being wrong if you can prove I am.
Because we don’t make things anymore the old Keynesian remedies will have a limited affect. There are droves of disaffected workers out there, but how many of them are blue collar? We should absolutely invest in infrastructure improvements, but how many people will there be to fill these jobs? And perhaps the most perplexing problem is what to do with all those laid off white collar workers? There are 30,000 people that used to work for Lehman Brothers and I would venture to say few would be inclined, or even qualified to lay brick or pave a road. This creates the real challenge for President-elect Obama. You can’t send them all back to school, and if you did what profession would they learn? No doubt a number of the folks who used to work in the financial sector are far better positioned to deal with a period of unemployment then many blue collar workers, but where will they find work?
I haven’t heard any good answers to this problem and I don’t have any to share.
So what does it all mean? Quite honestly the nature of our current recession is something wholly new to our economic experience and some time back the complexity of the finance involved transcended my ability to understand. That said there are two things I am fairly certain of:
1) It’s going to get worse before it gets better
2) It will get better
Obviously not comforting thoughts, but we are in uncharted waters here. The bottom could be a long way off or could be today. Time will tell if we are living in a severe recession or in a depression. What’s clear in the present is that we can’t call this a depression yet. Someday in a distant future (or near future) and call me an idiot, but for my thoughts on this day I’m unprepared to accept we are in a depression.
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