The shooting of four Israeli settlers on the West Bank was a brutal crime, and I condemn it as strongly as I condemned Israel's attacks on the civilian population of Gaza or its assault on the Mavi Marmara. Whatever one thinks about the Israeli occupation, shooting civilians in this fashion is never justified.  

I can't say I'm surprised by the event, however, having written earlier this week that we ought to expect spoilers to try to disrupt this latest round of talks. There is no shortage of spoilers on the Israel side either-such as Rabbi Ovedia Yosef, spiritual advisor to the Shas party, who offered his pious hope that "Abu Mazen and all these evil people should perish from this world ... God should strike them with a plague." But to be fair, at least the rabbi didn't actually shoot anybody.  

When I heard the news, my first thought was that the shooting was both a crime and a blunder, because it would only reaffirm Hamas's pariah status and keep them outside the peace process even longer. But then I reconsidered. I think the more important lesson here is that Hamas has already assumed that this latest round of talks will fail, and that this failure will pound the final nail in the coffin of the two-state solution.

As I've said before, that outcome will be a tragedy for all concerned, as well as a serious problem for the United States.  But it also makes me wonder if Hamas is being a lot more far-sighted than the various parties who are sitting down to talks in Washington this week.

Why?  Because if the parties fail to reach a genuine and reasonable two-state solution, we are going to end up with one-state apartheid on the West Bank. That's hardly headline news, of course, insofar as people like Jimmy Carter, Ehud Olmert, and Ehud Barak have warned about this possibility for years. At that point, the conflict will evolve into a Palestinian campaign for political rights within that single state, based on well-established norms of justice and democracy, and it will put Israel and its American patron in a very awkward situation.  

If that happens, Hamas will be in a strong position. Mahmoud Abbas and Salam Fayyad will have failed, and Hamas' rejectionism will have been vindicated. Its reputation for probity and superior grass-roots organizing ability will be a powerful asset in the struggle for Palestinian hearts and minds, and those same capacities will also help them resist the inevitable Israeli attempts to suppress them. Their star will be ascending, and the secular and more moderate Fatah will be even less legitimate than it is today.

The best (only?) hope of averting that outcome lies in making the current negotiations a success and ending the occupation once and for all. If Abbas, Obama, and especially Netanyahu realize this, maybe they'll surprise us all and get the job done. No matter how many brutal crimes are committed or hateful speeches are uttered by those who oppose "two states for two peoples."

When great powers intervene in minor countries, sometimes they win quick and fairly decisive victories. (Think U.S. in Grenada). When this happens, the only short-term problem is where to hold the victory parade and how many medals to give out. But when a war of choice goes badly, then national leaders have to decide either to cut their losses and get out or to "stay the course." If the opponent is an insatiable great power like the Third Reich, there may be little choice in the matter. But if the enemy is an insurgency in a relatively weak and unimportant state, and the challenge is nation-building in a society that you don't understand very well, it's a much trickier decision.

As we've seen in Iraq and are seeing again in Afghanistan, getting out of a quagmire is a whole lot harder than getting into one. Indeed, I'd argue that this is a general tendency in most wars of choice: they usually last longer than the people who launch them expect, and they usually cost a lot more. I'm hardly the first person to notice this phenomenon, which does make you wonder why it keeps happening.

In any case, now that we are (supposedly) leaving Iraq, here are my Top Ten Reasons why wars of choice last too long, and why it's so hard for politicians to wake up, smell the coffee, and just get out.

1. Political leaders get trapped by their own beliefs. All human beings tend to interpret new information in light of their pre-existing beliefs, and therefore tend to revise strongly-held views more slowly than they should. Having made the difficult decision to go to war (or to escalate a war that is already under way) it will be hard for any leader to rethink the merits of that decision, even if lots of information piles up suggesting that it was a blunder.

2. Information in war is often ambiguous. Another reason wars of choice last too long is that the case for cutting one's losses is rarely crystal-clear. Even if there is lots of evidence that the war is going badly, there are bound to be some positive signs too. Remember all those "benchmarks" the Bush administration developed for measuring progress in Iraq? If you have enough of them, you can always find a few items on the list where things are looking better. When the evidence is mixed (as it usually is), leaders are even less likely to rethink their beliefs that the war is worth fighting.

Read on

On the eve of President Obama's speech to the nation on Iraq, some of the people who dreamed up this foolish war or helped persuade the nation that it was a good idea are getting out their paintbrushes and whitewash. I refer, of course, to the twin op-eds in today's New York Times by former Deputy Secretary of Defense Paul Wolfowitz and neoconservative columnist David Brooks.

Wolfowitz, you will recall, was one of the main architects of the war, having pushed the invasion during the 1990s and as soon as he became Deputy Secretary of Defense in the Bush adminstration. He was the guy who recommended invading Iraq four days after 9/11, even though Osama bin Laden was nowhere near Iraq and there was no evidence that Saddam Hussein had anything to do with it. For his part, Brooks was an enthusiastic cheerleader for the war in the months prior to the invasion, and he continued to defend it long after the original rationale had been exposed as a sham.

The main thrust of Wolfowitz's column is that the United States should remain in Iraq for as long as it takes to yield a "stable country." His analogy is to Korea, where the United States has stationed troops for nearly sixty years. Of course, Wolfowitz ignores the fact that our role in Korea was defensive: we entered the Korean War after North Korea invaded the South (with Soviet help), and we did so with the full authorization of the U.N. Security Council. In Iraq, by contrast, the United States went to war on the basis of bogus evidence, as part of a grand scheme to "transform" the entire Middle East. 

Staying in Korea was also part of the broader strategy of containment, which made good sense in that historical epoch. The Soviet Union was a serious great power adversary and North Korea was a close Soviet ally, and there was every reason to think the North might try again if South Korea were left on its own. By contrast, maintaining a semi-permanent military presence in Iraq isn't going to contain anyone, and it is precisely that sort of on-the-ground interference that fuels jihadi narratives about nefarious Western plans to dominate Muslim lands. It is perhaps also worth remembering that our prolonged military presence in South Korea isn't very popular there anymore, and that most Iraqis want us out of their country too.

Notice also that Wolfowitz says very little about the costs of this adventure in the past, or how much more blood and treasure the United States should be expected to spend in the future. There are boilerplate references to the "brave men and women" of the U.S. military, and to Iraq's people "who have borne a heavy burden." All true, but he doesn't offer any numbers (either dollars spent or lives lost), because he might have to take his share of responsibility for the hundreds of thousands of people who would be alive today if the United States had not followed his advice. It would also remind us that he once predicted that the war would cost less than $100 billion and that Iraq's oil revenues would pay for reconstruction and so it wouldn't cost the American taxpayer a dime. Given that track record, in fact, one wonders why the Times editors thought he was a reliable source of useful advice on Iraq today.

As for Brooks, his column is a transparent attempt to retroactively justify an unnecessary war. He marshals an array of statistics showing how much things have improved in Iraq, but all his various numbers show is that after you've flattened a country and dismantled its entire political order, you can generate some positive growth rates if you pour billions of dollars back in. He claims this "nation-building" effort cost only $53 billion (hardly a trivial sum), but that figure omits all the other costs of the war (which economist Joseph Stiglitz and budget expert Linda Bilmes estimate to be in excess of $3 trillion). And like Wolfowitz, Brooks is mostly silent about the hundreds of thousands of dead Iraqis and thousands of dead and wounded Americans who paid the price for their naïve experiment in social engineering.

Of course, what Wolfowitz and Brooks are up to is not hard to discern. They want Americans to keep pouring resources into Iraq for as long as it takes to make their ill-fated scheme look like a success. Equally important, they want to portray Iraq in a somewhat positive light now, so that Obama and the Democrats get blamed when things go south.

All countries make mistakes, because leaders are fallible and no political system is immune from folly. But countries compound their errors when they cannot learn from them, and when they don't hold the people responsible for them accountable. Sadly, these two pieces suggest that the campaign to lobotomize our collective memory is now underway. If it succeeds, we can look forward to more "success stories" like this in the future.

President Obama is hosting a dinner for Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas on Sept. 1, in order to kick off the new round of direct talks between Israeli and Palestinian negotiators. As regular readers know, I don't think this effort will go anywhere, because the two sides are too far apart and because the Obama administration won't have the political will to push them towards the necessary compromises.

Furthermore, there are now a few hints that the Obama administration is about to repeat the same mistakes that doomed the Clinton administration's own Middle East peacemaking efforts and the Bush administration's even more half-hearted attempts (i.e., the "Road Map" and the stillborn Annapolis summit). Last week, the Israeli newspaper Yediot Ahronoth provided a summary of a conference call between Obama Middle East advisors Dennis Ross, Dan Shapiro, and David Hale and the leaders of a number of influential American Jewish organizations. According to the article (whose accuracy I cannot vouch for), the goal of the direct talks will be a "framework agreement" between the two sides that would then be implemented over a period of up to ten years.

Excuse me, but haven't we seen this movie before, and isn't the last reel a bummer? This idea sounds a lot like the Oslo Accords, which also laid out a "framework" for peace, but deferred the hard issues to the end and repeatedly missed key deadlines. Or maybe it's another version of the Road Map/Annapolis summit, which offered deadlines and bold talk  and led precisely nowhere. Or perhaps what they have in mind is a "shelf agreement" -- a piece of paper that sits "on the shelf" until conditions are right (i.e., forever). It is this sort of charade that has led veteran observers like Henry Siegman to denounce the long-running peace process as a "scam," and Siegman is hardly alone in that view.

Here's the basic problem: Unless the new "framework" is very detailed and specific about the core issues -- borders, the status of East Jerusalem, the refugee issue, etc., -- we will once again have a situation where spoilers on both sides have both an incentive and the opportunity to do whatever they can to disrupt the process. And even if it were close to a detailed final-status agreement, a ten-year implementation schedule provides those same spoilers (or malevolent third parties) with all the time they will need to try to derail the deal. I can easily imagine Netanyahu and other hardliners being happy with this arrangement, as they would be able to keep expanding settlements (either openly or covertly) while the talks drag on, which is what has happened ever since Oslo (and under both Likud and Labor governments). Ironically, some members of Hamas might secretly welcome this outcome too, because it would further discredit moderates like Abbas and Fayyad. And there is little reason to think the United States would do a better job of managing the process than it did in 1990s.

The great paradox of the negotiations is that United States is clearly willing and able to put great pressure on both Fatah and Hamas (albeit in different ways), even though that is like squeezing a dry lemon by now. Fatah has already recognized Israel's existence and has surrendered any claims to 78 percent of original Mandate Palestine; all they are bargaining over now is the share they will get of the remaining 22 percent. Moreover, that 22 percent is already dotted with Israeli settlements (containing about 500,000 people), and carved up by settler-only bypass roads, checkpoints, fences, and walls. And even if they were to get an independent state on all of that remaining 22 percent (which isn't likely) they will probably have to agree to some significant constraints on Palestinian sovereignty and they are going to have to compromise in some fashion on the issue of the "right of return." The obvious point is that when you've got next to nothing, you've got very little left to give up, no matter how hard Uncle Sam twists your arm.

At this point, the main concessions have to come from Israel, simply because it is the occupying power whose presence in the West Bank and whose physical control over Gaza makes a Palestinian state impossible. Some readers may think this characterization is unfair, but the issue isn't so much one of "fairness" as one of simple practicality. How do you possibly create "two states for two peoples" if Israel doesn't withdraw from virtually all of the West Bank? 

Read on

It's a glorious day in New England, and I hope President Obama's vacation improves now that it's stopped pouring. Now that he's got a little down-time, I hope he's thinking hard about his economic and foreign policy team. He's been in office for more than a year and a half, and he's had to wrestle with more than the usual number of alligators. He inherited an American economy in free fall, a lost war in Iraq and a losing war in Afghanistan, a declining U.S. image abroad, a comatose peace process in the Middle East, and assorted challenges in places like Sudan, Somalia, and Colombia. 

Given that array of troubles, one would hardly expect him to achieve a perfect record of success after a little more than nineteen months. But having said that, does Obama have any private concerns about the people upon whose advice he's been relying? As the economic recovery effort slows, does he still have the same confidence in people like Tim Geithner, Larry Summers, and Ben Bernanke? With the GOP poised to make big gains in November, does he still think advisors like Rahm Emanuel and David Axelrod have the fingers on the pulse of the people? As his own approval ratings slip (despite a slight bump up this month), does he think his media team is doing a good job of managing public perceptions?

Then there's foreign and defense policy. With Secretary of Defense Robert Gates contemplating retirement sometime next year, who is waiting in the wings to give him balanced and sage advice on national security matters? After the roller-coaster ride Obama experienced on Middle East issues (the initial demand for a settlement freeze, the Cairo speech, the humiliating climb-down, and now direct talks that hardly anyone thinks will succeed), does he still have faith in his Middle East team? What about Richard Holbrooke and Stephen Bosworth, the high-profile special envoys who were supposed to work their magic in AfPak and North Korea? And has the seemingly endless parade of bad news and the dearth of tangible progress in Afghanistan and Pakistan raised any doubts in his mind about the wisdom of those who encouraged him to escalate there?

I don't expect President Obama to voice any of these concerns (if he has them), and for all I know he still believes that he's got the best and the brightest on his team. But no president makes all the right appointments, and one sign of effective leadership is the ability to reshuffle your team over time. Back when he took office, I wrote that one sign of his effectiveness would his willingness to replace people who weren't performing well, but the only high-profile departures I can think of so far are the resignation of DNI Dennis Blair and Obama's decision for relieve Afghan commander Stanley McChrystal. And Obama took the latter step because McChrystal made some ill-advised remarks to a journalist, not because he had lost confidence in McChrystal's handling of the war itself.

But I'm still wondering if we're on the cusp of a significant reshuffle. It's pretty common for some people to depart after a couple of years anyway, because these jobs are killers and because academics serving in government normally get no more than two years of leave. The midterms are going to be seen as a referendum on Obama's performance to date, and it's not going to be pretty. The Right hates him, the progressive left has lost faith, and the middle is muddled. Obama will have to start looking forward to 2012, and he will want to inject some new blood and new energy into the Executive Branch. And lord knows he needs a prominent win somewhere. But where? And which of his current team can deliver it?

From the New York Times story revealing that Mohammed Zia Salehi, an aide that Afghan President Hamid Karzai intervened to free from charges of corruption, has been on the CIA payroll:

Anonymous American official: "If we decide as a country that we'll never deal with anyone in Afghanistan who might down the road ... put his hand in the till, we can all come home right now."

Sounds like a plan to me. I don't mean to be flip (well, maybe I do), but how much more evidence of the fundamental contradictions bedeviling our war effort do we need? We say corruption is endemic and is making the Karzai government unpopular, yet our own CIA is busily buying off Afghan politicians. We say our real goal is to defeat or destroy al Qaeda, yet we are spending billions on anti-corruption efforts and "nation-building." We pour millions of dollars into a very poor country, which then flows into the pockets of Afghan politicians and back out into private bank accounts in Dubai and elsewhere. We add more troops in order to quell violence, but that makes us look like foreign occupiers and leads to additional civilians casualties, no matter how careful we try to be. And we never seem to have a serious discussion of the actual stakes in Afghanistan, the costs of an open-ended effort, the definition of "success," or the likelihood that we will achieve it. 

Earlier this summer I mentioned that I was reading Jared Diamond's Collapse: How Societies Choose to Fail or Succeed, and I promised to sum up the insights that I had gleaned from it. The book is well-worth reading -- if not quite on a par with his earlier Guns, Germs, and Steel -- and you'll learn an enormous amount about a diverse set of past societies and the range of scientific knowledge (geology, botany, forensic archaeology, etc.) that is enabling us to understand why they prospered and/or declined.  

The core of the book is a series of detailed case studies of societies that collapsed and disappeared because they were unable to adapt to demanding and/or deteriorating environmental, economic, or political conditions. He examines the fate of the Easter Islanders, the Mayans, the Anasazi of the Pacific Southwest, the Norse colonies in Western Greenland (among others), and contrasts them with other societies (e.g., the New Guinea highlanders) who managed to develop enduring modes of life in demanding circumstances.  He also considers modern phenomenon such as the Rwandan genocide and China and Australia's environmental problems in light of these earlier examples.

I read the book because I am working on a project exploring why states (and groups and individuals) often find it difficult to "cut their losses" and abandon policies that are clearly not working. This topic is a subset of the larger (and to me, endlessly fascinating) question of why smart and well-educated people can nonetheless make disastrous (and with hindsight, obviously boneheaded) decisions. Diamond's work is also potentially relevant to the perennial debate on American decline: Is it occurring, is it inevitable, and how should we respond?

So what lessons does Diamond draw from his case studies, and what insights might we glean for the conduct of foreign policy? Here are a few thoughts that occurred to me as I finished the book.

First, he argues that sometimes societies fail to anticipate an emerging problem because they lack adequate knowledge or prior experience with the phenomenon at hand. Primitive societies may not have recognized the danger of soil depletion, for example, because they lacked an adequate understanding of basic soil chemistry. A society may also fail to spot trouble if the main problem it is facing recurs only infrequently, because the knowledge of how to detect or deal with the problem may have been forgotten. As he emphasizes, this is especially problematic for primitive societies that lack written records, but historical amnesia can also occur even in highly literate societies like our own. 

By analogy, one could argue that some recent failures in U.S. foreign policy were of this sort. Hardly anybody anticipated that U.S. support for the anti-Soviet mujaheddin in Afghanistan would eventually lead to the formation of virulent anti-American terrorist groups, in part because the U.S. leaders didn't know very much about that part of the world and because public discourse about U.S. policy in the Middle East is filled with gaping holes. Similarly, the people who led us into Iraq in 2003 were remarkably ignorant about the history and basic character of Iraqi society (as well as the actual nature of Saddam's regime). To make matters worse, the U.S. military had forgotten many of the lessons of Vietnam and had to try to relearn them all over again, with only partial success.

Second, societies may fail to detect a growing problem if their leaders are too far removed from the source of the trouble. Diamond refers to this as the problem of "distant managers," and it may explain why U.S. policymakers often make decisions that seem foolish in hindsight. As I've noted here before, one problem facing U.S. foreign policymakers is the sheer number and scope of the problems they are trying to address, which inevitably forces them to rely on reports from distant subordinates and to address issues that they cannot be expected to understand very well. Barack Obama doesn't get to spend the next few years learning Pashto and immersing himself in the details of Afghan history and culture; instead, he has to make decisions based on what he is being told by people on the ground (who may or may not know more than he does). Unfortunately, the latter have obvious reasons to tell an upbeat story, if only to make their own efforts look good. If things are going badly, therefore, the people at the top back in Washington may be the last to know. 

Read on

If you're looking for another realistic counter to the official optimism about Afghanistan, check out Christopher Layne's op-ed from two days ago in the Chicago Tribune.  In a handful of sharp, short paragraphs, Layne reminds us that 1) the "surge" in Iraq (the approach now being adapted to Afghanistan) didn't work, 2) the current emphasis on counterinsurgency (COIN) warfare misdiagnoses the origins of our troubles in the Middle East and Central Asia, and 3) our current fascination with COIN "sets exactly the wrong strategic priorities for the United States." 

Smart piece. It will take some time before this view become the conventional wisdom, but I'm still betting that it will.  Unfortunately, it will be many billions of dollars and thousands of lives too late.