He's not alone, of course, but scholar Gilles Dorronsoro is quite pessimistic about the Afghan surge and ongoing counterinsurgency campaign:The current counterinsurgency campaign shows little signs of accomplishing its mission. The surge is not enough to reverse the Taliban’s gains, or the quick decline of the Karzai government. Pakistan’s lack of support makes the Taliban sanctuary there a major strategic problem.More troops and the latest...
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The Calculus of Counter-narcotics
$250 million = the amount spent just by the US in FY2010 to counter narcotics in Afghanistan$100 million = the amount earned annually by the Taliban from narcotics trafficking304,000 acres = the number of acres devoted to opium in 2009304,000 acres = the number of acres devoted to opium in 2010$64 per Kg = the price of opium in 2009$169 per Kg = the price of opium in 2010Total production of opium did decline, but mainly because of a disease...
Flashback: Afghanistan “Mission Accomplished”
I've been teaching Af-Pak in my security class these past few weeks. The war has been going on for so long that many "highlights" now seem like distant history.For instance, everyone remembers the farce that was George W. Bush's May 1, 2003, celebration of the end of major combat operations in Iraq. The image of the "Mission Accomplished" banner is engrained in our brains, as is the picture of Bush in flightsuit strutting to deliver his...
Austerity, unicorns, and political economy
Mark Blyth waxing enthusiastic about why "austerity" is not commonsensical economic policy at all. Food for thought.WatsonMedia presents Mark Blyth on Austerity from The Global Conversation on Vimeo.
You can’t create national security policy in a vacuum
Stephen Biddle has a spot-on piece over at Foreign Policy on how Presidents, and Obama in particular, must take into account domestic politics when setting national security strategy. With the release of Bob Woodward's latest book, Obama's Wars, many have jumped on the President's alleged quote that he can't lose the entire Democratic Party to justify the need to set a troop draw-down date for Afghanistan as evidence that he's putting politics...
Applied Signaling: Pajamas and 3-year olds
Every night, about 15 minutes or so after we've put my 3-year old daughter to bed, we inevitably hear a knock at the door. She's typically knocking because she needs to go the bathroom. She's also knocking because she wants to scope out what we are doing, find out if she is missing anything. One thing that bothers her is if me or my wife leaves the house after she goes to bed. In order to go to sleep she needs some kind of guarantee that we...
Prisoners of America’s Wars (A shameless self-promotion kinda morning…)
My (first) book, Prisoners of America’s Wars: From the Early Republic to Guantanamo is now shipping on Amazon.com (or Amazon.co.uk, Amazon.ca, etc.). Considering that this would be the closest thing to offspring that I have ever produced, I thought that I would post it in the hope that it may be of some interest to some Duck readers. I've pasted the abstract below for that very reason:Prisoners of war have been a significant feature of...
Metrics for Winning Hearts and Minds
I often find myself in disagreement with Amitai Etzioni, but he does makes some sense in his recent Politico op-ed on Petraeus' "metrics" for progress in Afghanistan: The newest way General Petraeus plans to measure success in the war in Afghanistan reminded me of what the government did when its campaign to persuade the public to stop smoking did not make much headway. It stopped counting how many people had had their last cigarette - and...
Another war on terror outrage: asylum denied
Did anyone else know about this additional outrageous consequence of the "war on terror"? You may have to be a subscriber to see this note from The Nation, September 20? Deborah Amos's Eclipse of the Sunnis: Power, Exile, and Upheaval in the Middle East (PublicAffairs; $25.95) is a harrowing account of the pain and anguish suffered by the Iraqi Sunni diaspora in the Middle East. Especially perverse is a legal hurdle faced by exiles seeking...
Marty Peretz, Harvard, and the First Amendment
I attended the Harvard Social Studies concentration’s 50th anniversary celebration on September 25, well aware of the controversy over the University's naming an undergraduate research scholarship in honor of New Republic editor-in-chief, Martin Peretz. Generating the conflict were Peretz’s long history of contemptuous writings about Muslims and other groups and especially his recent, disgraceful statement: “I wonder whether I need . . ....
Miliband of Brothers (Stolen from Channel 4, but too good not to reuse)
For my first Duck post to be so parochial is a shame, but I can’t resist commenting on the result of Labour’s leadership election, declared a couple of hours ago. For someone such as myself who was once, briefly, one of Ralph Miliband’s students at LSE in the 1960s, the idea that the son of the author of Parliamentary Socialism should now be the leader of the British Labour Party is weird. That he should have obtained that post by beating his...
Revolving Doors, Lobbyist Edition
Via Marginal Revolution, an interesting new paper that explores what happens to an ex-staffer's lobbying revenue when the politician they worked for leaves office.Our main finding is that lobbyists connected to US Senators suff er an average 24% drop in generated revenue when their previous employer leaves the Senate. The decrease in revenue is out of line with pre-existing trends, it is discontinuous around the period in which the connected...