Latin America

I'm clearing off my desk today and working on the opening lecture for my graduate IR theory course, so I'm not going to try to write a detailed commentary. Instead, let me take this opportunity to pass on a few pieces that caught my eye, on a wide array of subjects.

1. From the S Rajaratnam School in Singapore comes an optimistic assessment on the status of the Pakistani Taliban. According to Khuram Iqbal, the Pakistani Taliban have failed to gain popular support, and show no signs of becoming an effective mass movement (akin to Hezbollah in Lebanon). Instead, they are increasingly seen as a narrower terrorist group, reinforced their unpopularity. While they remain a problem to be dealt with, fears that the Pakistani state was on the verge of collapse or that the entire country might be "Talibanized" seem to have been greatly overblown. (Juan Cole: take a bow).

2. There is a fascinating article by Richard Oliver Collin in the latest issue of International Studies Perspectives, entitled "Words of War: Iraq's Tower of Babel." It is a careful analysis of the extraordinary degree of linguistic diversity and fragmentation in Iraq, and it underscores how ill-prepared the United States was to try to occupy and govern the place. Money quote from Collin's conclusion:

It cannot be argued that enhanced language proficiency in Arabic and Kurdish would assure military victory for the United States in its conflict with the various Iraqi insurgent groups.  Language capability is a necessary but not sufficient condition for triumph in war and diplomacy. The evidence does strongly suggest, however, that American inability to create a basic communications capability has contributed importantly to the failure of the United States thus far to resolve its Middle Eastern problems at some minimally acceptable level ... Can this historical trend be changed? There is no reason to believe that the present spate of Middle Eastern difficulties is going to be the last chapter in America's involvement in the Middle East ....

The United States historically has attempted to pursue a policy of intense involvement in Middle Eastern affairs, sometimes diplomatic and sometimes military, but without a concomitant commitment to understanding the region's culture, religion, and particularly its languages. Since American foreign policy in the Middle East policy has never been more than sporadically successful, an argument can be made that Washington needs to match its military investment with a serious commitment to language and area studies. Language lessons are cheaper than tanks, and if America's linguists were good enough, the United States might not need quite so many tanks."

Note: he says linguistic competence is "necessary but not sufficient," so please don't assume that training some more linguists would suddenly give us a magical capability to reorder other countries at low cost.

3. If you're just now trying to catch up on the situation in Afghanistan (and why haven't you been reading the AfPak Channel here at FP?), a good short introduction is Thomas Billetteri, "Afghanistan Dilemma," CQ Researcher, available here. (Full disclosure: I'm quoted a couple of times, but so are lots of other people with varying views.) Billetteri takes no position on the policy choices facing us, but the piece is an excellent introduction to the issues.

4. I've also just finished a fascinating paper by two economists from the Universidad de los Andes, analyzing the effect of Plan Colombia on the production and distribution of drugs (e.g., cocaine). The analysis is fairly technical and some of the math is beyond me, but it's clearly a serious attempt to determine the impact of different policies and how the different actors involved (the U.S. and Colombian governments, the drug growers, the drug smugglers, etc.) interact in a strategic fashion. Among other things, the authors (Daniel Mejia and Pascual Restrepo) show that although Plan Colombia's drug eradication efforts have reduced the amount of acreage under cultivation by nearly 50 percent, actual cocaine production has decreased by only 11 percent and the prices of coca leaf, coca paste, and actual cocaine have remained fairly stable. Why? Because growers responded to eradication efforts by adopting more productive cultivation techniques, thereby producing nearly the same amount of cocaine from smaller amounts of land. 

They also demonstrate that the Colombian and U.S. governments have conflicting interests in pursuing the "war on drugs." Specifically, the Colombian government benefits far more from every dollar spent on eradication efforts (i.e., against drug production) because that takes money away from the growers (and thus the insurgency). By contrast, the United States gets a larger "bang from the buck" from drug interdiction (i.e., against drug trafficking) because the main U.S. interest is in trying to keep cocaine out of the United States. Here's a summary of their main findings:

We find, among many other things, that a three-fold increase in the U.S. budget allocated to Plan Colombia would decrease the amount of cocaine reaching consumer countries by about 19.5% (about 60,000 kg). We also estimate that the elasticity of the cocaine reaching consumer countries with respect to changes in the amount of resources invested in the war against illegal drug production is about 0.007%, whereas the elasticity with respect to changes in the amount of resources invested in the war against illegal drug trafficking is about 0.296%. In other words, if the main objective is to reduce the amount of drugs reaching consumer countries, targeting illegal drug trafficking is much more cost effective than targeting illegal drug production activities.  However, if the objective is to reduce the cost of conflict in Colombia, targeting drug production activities is more cost effective .... Furthermore, we find that the optimal allocation of resources from the point of view of the U.S., whose objective is to minimize the amount of cocaine reaching its borders, implies that all the U.S. assistance to Plan Colombia should be for the war against drug trafficking.  From the point of view of Colombia, whose objective is to minimize the total cost of internal conflict, the optimal allocation would imply that all the U.S. assistance for Plan Colombia should go to finance the war against drug production."

I'm sure one can raise questions about their analysis, but this is the sort of work that really ought to be informing the debate over whether Plan Colombia is working and how U.S. assistance should be allocated. 

Happy reading!

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Debates about many foreign policy issues persist because it is hard to know what the right course of action is and reasonable people can reach different conclusions about them. But there is a special category of foreign policy where almost everyone agrees the existing policy is wrong-headed yet almost everyone also believes the policy is impossible to change.

I'm sure FP readers have their own favorites in this category, but I thought I'd start the conversation with three nominees of my own.  

1.) Farm Subsidies and Agricultural Trade Barriers.

Like other industrial countries, the United States subsidizes a host of agricultural products and erects various trade barriers against foreign imports. This happens because the farm lobby is defending the narrow interests of the farm sector and many democratic systems give small groups (in this case farmers or agribusiness) disproportionate influence. (It's the usual story: A small group reaps the benefits of this policy while the costs are dispersed across the whole population). This policy makes food more expensive, encourages farmers to grow the wrong crops, squanders energy, and hinders economic development in poorer countries, thereby contributing to political instability. These policies also make it much harder to negotiate multilateral trade deals that would raise prosperity world-wide. So although nearly every detached observer thinks the policy is wrong, they also know that the political power of farm interests (both here and abroad) makes it excruciatingly difficult to change course.

2.) The Cuba Embargo.

We all know the old line that insanity consists of doing something over and over again but expecting different results. By that standard the U.S. embargo on Cuba is demented. If an embargo was going to topple Castro's regime, it would be long gone. The current embargo has been in place for nearly five decades, persisting even after the Soviet Union had collapsed and when it is clear that an old and feeble Fidel poses no threat. Hardly anyone thinks it is the right policy anymore (if it ever was), but it remains in place because a small number of well-organized and politically active Cuban-Americans care about the issue and the rest of the country doesn't care enough to override their preferences. Because Florida is a swing state and its politicians remain sensitive to the Cuban-American lobby, a policy that has probably helped Castro stay in power remains in effect. Maybe this policy will finally change under Obama (or when Fidel dies), but don't bet on it.

3.) The "War on Drugs."

This one is a bit more controversial, in the sense that there is still a genuine debate on some of these issues.  But there seems to be a growing consensus that the "war on drugs" (which we've been waging far longer than the "war on terrorism") is both ill-conceived and poorly executed. In the United States, as in many other countries, our anti-drug policies focus primarily on the supply-side: we go after growers, traffickers, dealers and users. And the United States is especially quick to incarcerate anyone who possesses narcotics, even for relatively minor offenses. The results are almost certainly worse than the problem itself: our policy helps enrich drug lords and make it possible for them to destabilize whole governments, as they are now doing in Mexico and Afghanistan. Criminalizing narcotics possession has created a burgeoning prison population that is expensive to maintain and whose long-term incarceration produces a host of other social ills. (For a depressing analysis of some of them, see sociologist Bruce Western's Punishment and Equality in America). As The Economist recently argued, "the war on drugs has been a disaster, creating failed states in the developing world even as addiction has flourished in the rich world. By any sensible measure, this 100-year struggle has been illiberal, murderous and pointless." Reasonable people still disagree on what a better approach might be, but decriminalizing narcotics possession and focusing on education and treatment programs would cost less and probably leave us no worse off in terms of addiction and its consequences. But a politician who seriously proposed such a course of action would almost certainly face a firestorm of criticism, so the current failed policy is likely to continue more-or-less unchanged.

There are some other enduring policy initiatives I think are equally misguided (such as missile defense) but the consensus against them is not as clear-cut. On these three, however, I think most well-informed individuals know the policy is wrong yet unlikely to change.

So three questions for readers.   

First, am I right to say that most experts agree that these three policies are both wrong and resistant to revision?

Second, are there any other prominent examples of similar follies: misguided foreign policies that almost everyone thinks should be changed but won’t be?  

And third, if a lot of stupid policies persist even when it is obvious they make little sense, what does that say about the capacity of democratic systems to learn from their mistakes?

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In today's New York Times, Thomas Friedman offers a quasi-defense of Israel's assault on Gaza, expressing that hope that Israel is trying to "teach Hamas a lesson" similar to the lesson it supposedly taught Hezbollah during its 2006 war in Lebanon. If Hamas learns not to use violence and accepts Israel's existence, he writes, then maybe diplomacy can produce the two-state solution that Israel badly needs and supposedly wants.

A few comments: To begin with, Friedman's depiction of the Lebanon War is at odds with the more sober conclusions reached by the Winograd Commission, the official Israeli commission of inquiry convened to examine its conduct of that war. And if it was such a resounding victory, why do Israelis now claim that the war in Gaza is necessary to re-establish their deterrent? Moreover, Friedman concedes that Israel is likely to face a renewed challenge from Hezbollah in the future. With meaningless "victories" like that, who needs setbacks?

Second, Friedman portrays Israeli society as divided between those who believe that ending the occupation is essential for Israel's long-term security and those who believe that continuing the occupation is the key to Israel's long-term security. He omits the hard-core settlers who believe that Israel has a god-given right to all of Mandate Palestine (a group that comprises some 20 percent of Israeli society) and claims -- incorrectly -- that it is the opponents of the occupation who have been driving Israeli policy in recent years.

In fact, it is increasingly clear that it is the opponents of the two-state solution that have been in charge. Friedman refers to Israel's "withdrawals" from Lebanon and Gaza as evidence that Israelis support a negotiated settlement. This is dubious at best. Israel withdrew from Lebanon in 2000 because the cost had become too great (i.e., they were in effect driven out by Hezbollah). Under Ariel Sharon, Israel withdrew unilaterally from Gaza as part of a larger plan to consolidate Israeli control over most of the West Bank, and put off the prospect of a Palestinian state indefinitely. As his chief advisor, Dov Weisglas, admitted in an interview, the withdrawal from Gaza "supplies the amount of formaldehyde that's necessary so that there will not be a political process with the Palestinians...when you freeze the process you prevent the establishment of a Palestinian state...this whole package that is called the Palestinian state has been removed from our agenda indefinitely."

With respect to the West Bank, the number of Israeli settlers more than doubled during the Oslo period, and Israel consolidated its control via an elaborate array of checkpoints, roads, and the meandering "security fence." According to the Foundation for Middle East Peace, since 2001 the number of Israeli settlers on the West Bank has grown by roughly 70,000 people, some 18,000 of them outside Israel's "security fence." The vast majority of the settlers aren't independent extremists operating on their own: they are subsidized by the Israeli government, rely on government utilities for water and electricity, and depend on the IDF for protection.

Prime Minister Ehud Olmert has warned on several occasions that failure to get a two-state solution places Israel's future at risk, but he has done nothing to halt the settlement project or to empower those Palestinian leaders (such as President Mahmoud Abbas and Prime Minister Salam Fayyad) who genuinely seek a two-state solution.

It is often said that Israel lacks a "partner for peace," but so do the Palestinians. So if the Obama administration is serious about settling this conflict, it will have to exert real pressure on both sides.

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