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Somehow, I feel like one crosses a personal and professional Rubicon by putting "Extensive experience with Blogspot" on one's resume. This 21st century of ours is quite strange.

Flashpoint

(Introducing a new and probably uninteresting series of blog posts where I mention political science paper ideas)

Does anyone have any data on avoiding the death penalty as a useful incentive in hostage negotiations? After all, it seems like if there _IS_ any deterrent effect to the death penalty, it would appear in long, iterated negotiations, right?

What Sort of Afghan Insurgency?

 I just got back from a press conference with Afghan Minister of Defense General Abdul Rahim Wardak hosted by The Center for a New American Security.  

Though the room, and the Q&A period, was more-or-less-choked by reporters fishing (poorly!) for process stories, some really interesting things got said.

Most notable was that General Wardak specifically indicated that he thought that the insurgency was "primarily urban, [though] supplemented  by a modified Maoist rural insurgency." (emphasis added) This departs from the emerging conventional wisdom on Afghanistan-Pakistan, which is that it is a primarily rural insurgency. There are three ways to spin this:

1. He just doesn't know what he's talking about. - Unlikely. He's very widely respected in Afghanistan.

2. He considers the real challenge ("Center of gravity" to military folks) to be urban centers in southern Afghanistan, or even in the FATA region of Pakistan, with the rural areas a symptom of the problem. - More likely, but still out of congruence with analyses by Kilcullen, etc, much less academic literature like Libby Wood's Insurgent Collective Action and Civil War in El Salvador*

3. He was specifically signaling the possibility of reconciliation with individuals who don't threaten the urban core, i.e. by implying that they are not really "the enemy," and can be negotiated with. If true, then the idea of "defining down" war aims -which, to be fair, he did disagree with in his speech- may become the implicit consequence of our strategy there.

Why do I think it's the 3rd option? Well, as Spencer Ackerman alludes to -man, is he a posting machine or what- the new Afghan local militia program is going to be used to secure Highway 1 from Kabul to Herat. While, yes, controlling the cities and the roads are key for any military plan, this is starting to look a lot like the 1970s-style tribal autonomy for rural areas, combined with strong control over urban areas and the key roads.

Oh, one more thing, which probably fully descends into crazy speculation: better security on the road from Kabul to Herat would allow for resupply through Herat if logistics through Pakistan continues to fall apart. Herat, of course, is just over the border from Iran...

* Full disclosure - she advised my senior essay

How to Deter Russia, Part 1

Allegedly*, this is a real ad for the Ukrainian army...

Join the Ukranian Army on a contract, and you'll get to serve during the day and club during the night! Well, at least it develops night operations skills that can deter Russia, I guess...

* I mean, come on, this has to be from Ukranian SNL or something...

Opening An Aristocratic Can of Worms

So tonight I was talking over Victorianism and the 1950s with one of my friends tonight (among my crew,  this is our version of sports). And something came up that I know too little to meaningfully comment about, but I find interesting.

The following is the skeleton of an idea I'm having trouble expressing, so bear with me:

Despite advances in cultural and social history, let's be frank, we know far more about the upper classes of the past than we do the lower classes. This can lead to either Marxist repressimism, or a pollyannish love of Gone With the Wind.  Let's take it as granted that we are not landholding aristocrats who love rural communities and hate the city. 

The classical historiographic/sociological move is to say that peasants with money and cities are bourgeoisie, in part since we live on the other side of a change in social structures and economic efficiencies (to wit, the Enlightenment and the Industrial revolutions) that profoundly wipes away rural landholding. But is that really right? What makes a society take on populist values en masse, rather than everyone taking on aristocratic values and being able to fulfill them? How would we tell the difference?

My strong belief is that we're the former, rather than the latter. But what does a shift between them mean, and how would we know? This is the sort of thing that's going to bother me for a while. 

I Will Not Use That Pen/Sword Cliche

One of my favorite professors always recommended the Times Literary Supplement as the best periodical published in the English-speaking world. He and I shared a love of illustrative, unusual anecdotes that could be used to demonstrate the sheer weirdness of a place or a time.

So, via the Times Literary Supplement, a great review of a book   on publishing in England during WWII

These are anecdotes I guarantee you do not know, such as:

When Germany and Britain agreed in 1941 to allow prisoners of war to sit examinations, an international inter-library loan system was organized from the Bodleian Library, using Basil Blackwell’s book-dump in Geneva. Two Oxford dons, C. S. Lewis and J. R. R. Tolkien, devised – and marked – an English Honours degree for “kriegies” behind the wire. In 1945, the Inter-Allied Book Centre, occupying the old Daily Chronicle offices, distributed 1.5 million books to liberated countries and assisted GER, German Educational Reconstruction.

You Know You've Studied Too Much Political Science

....when your first thought on seeing this video is "If this had happened, it would teach us a lot about changing gender norms in post-conflict reconstruction"...



Molly and Dara are gonna love this...

Official Canadian Army Science Fiction

So apparently SF author Karl Schroeder was retained by the Canadian Forces to write a speculative scenario of peacekeeping ops in 2025. It falls roughly in the same SF angle as Vernor Vinge's  Rainbows End (about which much more later) - the "we have lots of P.W. Singer's warbots, but humans are the ultimate self-organizing swarm." 

Most of it will never happen even inside a DARPA lab, much less deployably, but you should read it. It will get you outside the set of counterfactuals you currently possess.

I'll Have What They're Having

Earlier this evening, I was lucky enough to go to a CNAS launch event for Tom Ricks' new book, The Gamble.  While the centerpiece of the evening was undoubtedly the banter between Nagl and Ricks (the Wallace and Davis of COIN?), and getting to meet some really interesting people, there's one important fact to report:

The bar served Cabernet Sauvignon.* I guess we know what side CNAS is taking in the great Counterinsurgency Drink Wars... 

*Okay, and Chardonnay, and a couple beer selections too.

The First Serious Investigative Journalism Challenge of the Obama Administration

That Phrase Does Not Mean What You Think It Means

H/T to Dara:

ETA: Also, the Levant (and I'm given to understand the rest of the Muslim world as well) has absolutely amazing fruit juices, many of which are not available easily in America. This is probably the single most ignored aspect of Middle Eastern cuisine in America, by the way.

For All Your Notebook Needs

If you're in this blog's target demo, you probably own a Moleskine notebook or something like it. This website will help you.

Some Thoughts on Yale and Military Recruitment

From Abu Muqawama, a discussion of whether/how to restore ROTC to Ivy League campuses, triggered by a WSJ article that cites a YPU debate(!). 

To summarize the discussion in the (read them all, seriously) comments, a bunch of Abu M's commentators essentially argue that Army OCS/ROTC doesn't draw upon tropes of service, excellence, and challenge to the same degree that the Marines do. Speaking as a former Yale undergrad, I think those commentators (see e.g. Chris as well as Anon at 10:17) are on to something, but there's an interesting way around the problem.

I can say from experience that several of my friends who have considered/pursued/actually received a commission in the Marine Corps did so precisely because of the image of the Marines as being the toughest and the bravest. The Army was actually doing really decently in both perceptions and recruitment for OCS (much less so for ROTC, which had to drive 30 minutes away to Sacred Heart) but the Navy and Air Force ROTC struggled to pick up any recruits.  

There are some anti-military forces on campus, but they're frankly a sad parody of the '60s student radicals at best. They self-segregate, and almost all of their rhetoric is about Don't Ask, Don't Tell. Unlike in the era of the draft, almost all of the opposition to the Iraq War treats soldiers as victims (a condescending and insulting position to be sure, but one that isn't based on hatred, which is at least a starting point...), and there's very little real anti-military sentiment on campus.

Yet here's the interesting thing; Teach for America, State Department, and other similar jobs that invoke imagery of service are pursued by LOTS of people on campus. And, yes, while the Marines have a great image, they also aren't afraid to engage and recruit on campus. They (in)famously were thrown out of the Commons Rotunda for advertising to students, a privilege allegedly only reserved for students but not outside recruiters. The irony? Commons Rotunda is a wall of memorial names that directly inspired Maya Lin's design for the Vietnam Memorial...*

Those sorts of active appeals frankly are only made by the Marines, never by CT-area ROTC or OCS programs, who expect Yalies to find them, rather than vice versa. The Marines email large fractions of the Yale class, and specifically target people who are leaders of campus organizations - in fact, that marketing outreach is almost precisely the same as used by TFA, come to think of it...

The other, more-interesting fact is that Yale already does have decent numbers of veterans participating in upper level IR (M.A.), history, and poli sci seminars, since the Army uses Yale's history and IR MAs as prep programs for officers to teach at West Point, and there's substantial course registration overlap between the grad school and the undergrad school. Since Yale arguably has one of the best poli sci programs for studying intra-state war and transnational terrorism, this is undoubtedly awesome, and builds an environment within the poli sci department that frankly is hungry for more exchange and outreach.

I've been in classes with a few of them, and the interesting thing is that no one seemed to have trouble with military officers or discharged servicemen in their classes, as stereotype from the outside might suggest. Rather, they were perceived almost as knowing EVERYTHING about the War in Iraq, and were treated as having an unimpeachable claim to authenticity that they definitely didn't want, for both professional* and personal reasons. The source of that bending-over-backwards respect? Probably that the military seemed so remote from campus life, in so many ways; many of my classmates had never even really known a military officer before... 

At the same time, they were ideal recruiters simply by their presence and example. There definitely were students who considered joining up as a result of seeing thoughtful and principled military leaders up close. More soldiers getting graduate degrees at Yale? Rarely have forces combined to be so beneficial "For God, For Country, and For Yale," and for COIN.

*Allegedly, she received a C for her design for the memorial in her architectural design class since it was "too derivative" of the Rotunda. This is almost certainly untrue but indicates something about how much the memorial aspect of Commons Dining Hall is accepted as part of everyday life but not really thought about.

** Specifically, my peers seemed to have a lot of problem with the idea that military men don't like being treated as military authorities on political questions, and have legal constraints on what they can say. Which either demonstrates the freedom of academia or its utter distance from reality, and I'm not sure which.

One last note: these are purely my opinions and impressions, and definitely should not be taken as speaking for any current or former Yale student. I have no doubt that my best guesses at how my military and non-military classmates perceived each other are somewhat incorrect in aspects.

Wherein The True Glory of Parliamentary Procedure is Revealed

From a vintage Time article detailing the 1975 fight to move the filibuster down from 67 votes to just 60 (H/T Yglesias - seriously, Helen, Molly, and Dara, you need to start writing things soon so I seem more original here)

Although he lost under the sheer weight of his opponents' voting power, Alabama's Democratic Senator James Allen, 62, played the most adroit role in the three weeks of parliamentary maneuvering. Tall and paunchy, his langorous drawl camouflaging his Mach 4 mind, Allen used every trick, rule, ruse and gambit in the book to bedazzle his foes. At one point it seemed as if Allen had the Senate voting on the following snarled procedure: a motion to table a motion to reconsider a vote to table an appeal of a ruling that a point of order was not in order against a motion to table another point of order against a motion to bring to a vote the motion to call up the resolution that would institute the rules change.

That is, by my count, eleven stacked resolutions. And at least two of them, I'm pretty sure, aren't acceptable under the latest Robert's Rules of Order Newly Revised (RONR), thus further proving that Jefferson's Manual is a truly, truly bizarre document.*

*Among other things, it lacks any motion to take a motion off the table, thus requiring a two-thirds vote to suspend the rules merely to consider a previously-tabled question, meaning that any tabling motion is essentially a motion objecting to the consideration of the question.

Path Dependence in Russian Political Economy

Any blogger hesitates before writing a post about something on BoingBoing - after all, it's the fifth most popular blog in the English-speaking world, and its posts are replicated on dozens of other blogs you, my hypothetical reader, probably read. 

Nonetheless, this post on the resurgence of barter in Russia strikes me as exceptional. Cory Doctorow writes:

Russia's liquidity crisis is so bad that giant factories and regional governments are conducting commerce using barter -- trading underwear for cars, food for construction work, etc. The ruble's in short supply, first because the government's bought up a ton of money to keep it from collapsing, and second, because there is so little confidence in banks that many people keep their savings in safe-deposit boxes or mattresses, rather than savings accounts.

He goes on to quote reporting in the NYT:

 Advertisements are beginning to appear in newspapers and online, like one that offered “2,500,000 rubles’ worth of premium underwear for any automobile,” and another promising “lumber in Krasnoyarsk for food or medicine.” A crane manufacturer in Yekaterinburg is paying its debtors with excavators...

The Hyundai factory in Taganrog, the southern seaport where Chekhov was born, rolled out a barter promotion on its Web site, offering to trade vehicles for “raw materials,” “high-tech equipment” or “other liquid goods, including finished products of various branches of industry.” Gleb Korotkov, a spokesman for the factory, said he could not be specific about what goods were meant, saying it was a “commercial secret.”

Barter deals seem to be spreading fastest in construction industries. Dmitri Smorodin, who runs a large St. Petersburg building firm, said he thought for two months before announcing in late January that he was willing to accept barter items — including food products — as payment for construction work...All this evokes a bit of déjà vu. In the mid-1990s, barter transactions in Russia accounted for an astonishing 50 percent of sales for midsize enterprises and 75 percent for large ones.

The practice kept businesses afloat for years but also allowed them to defer some fundamental changes needed to make them more competitive, like layoffs and price reductions. It also hurt tax revenues.

The comeback is on a small scale so far. The most recent statistics available, from November, showed that barter deals made up about 3 to 4 percent of total sales, according to the Russian Economic Barometer, an independent bulletin. Nevertheless, economists are taking note.

While sometimes it seems that on social or economic issues that the NYT really does think that the plural of anecdote is "data," there's probably something to this. After all, the Soviet economy had a sclerotic system of internal cash accounting, where balance-sheet transactions had values tremendously inflated by comparison to hard-cash transactions, resulting in barter as a means of getting around the system. David Hoffman's The Oligarchs: Wealth And Power In The New Russia, the  best treatment of the collapse of the Soviet economy, is at its most compelling when talking about the incredible barter maneuvers entrepreneurs -and ordinary citizens - would go to in order to demonstrate the truth of the "use" theory of value.  

While I have no doubt that Craigslist, etc, will facilitate equivalent things happening in America, it seems likely that there's path-dependence at work here; Russian entrepreneurs have knowledge of who to go to to barter things in a crisis, more so than other options. It worked for decades under unbelievably more scarce conditions, after all, so shouldn't it work now? If that's the case, then we should expect to see the e-bartering platforms mentioned later in the article taking off in a way that they wouldn't in the United States (unless, of course, businesses try to keep barters off the record, since as I recall barter is now taxable in Russia, as it wasn't during much of the '90s). If these trends continue, it'll be an interesting demonstration of how financial institutions develop, or fail to do so, in post-authoritarian states.

Wherein This Blog Establishes An Official Preference

Tom Ricks (Hat tip to Abu Muqawama) has the real story behind the Surge; it all was decided over a bottle of wine:

On the long flight home to Washington in a C-17 military cargo jet, Gates, who declined to be interviewed for this article, disappeared into his mobile home in the plane's belly with Pace and a bottle of California cabernet sauvignon. A few days later, Odierno got the word: Gates wants you to have all five brigades.

While there's certainly nothing wrong with drinking California Cabs (at my former wine bar, I used to serve this vintage, which is really quite good), there are clearly superior options for the Official Drink of Counterinsurgents. And don't buy this whole nonsense that leading COIN blogs try to pass off about arrack; one whiff of my former Sri Lankan roommate's favorite bottle has convinced me that this must be either a dastardly in-joke, or an extended Tim Powers reference.*

No, the proper drink of the counterinsurgent is clearly gin. What more could hearken back to counterinsurgency's dusty and slightly disreputable British history** than the favored liquor of Churchill? And this legacy is still alive in the Middle East; the Jordanians to this day make amazing gin that compares to Hendrick's in quality, and Gordon's in price!*** Clearly, there was a knowledge diffusion effect.

* According to Tim Powers' detailed historigraphic backstory notes for Declare, T.E. Lawrence, Gertrude Bell, and others used to take a shot of one half measure kerosene, one half measure arrack mixed together. I leave it to the reader to decide whether this was as a sort of initiation, or simply to cut the arrack's taste...

** About which more later, when I get around to cleaning up my senior essay enough to put it up on this blog.

*** Contrary to popular conception, working as a bartender tends to have the same effect as working in a chocolate factory; spending all day with the product tends to make it rather less appealing on one's off hours.

Obligatory Charles reference

Tom Ricks is reading Stathis Kalyvas' The Logic of Violence in Civil War (Cambridge Studies in Comparative Politics)
, and reports that 

"It is such heavy academic going that I'm taking a break from it to read another book about civil war, Antonia Fraser's massive warts-and-all biography of Oliver Cromwell...As she tells it, Cromwell has gotten a bad rap. As a commander, he cared more about military effectiveness than ideological purity. Generally, while he was no party animal, he seems somewhat less rigid that the Cromwell I learned about in school."

More on my thoughts on The Logic soon, but for the moment I can only come to one conclusion - my friends still in the Yale Political Union have no choice but to to invite Tom Ricks to speak next year at the Charles Motion debate. 

Iraqi refugees and withdrawal

In what I think is a well-intentioned but misleading post, Brian Beutler (guestblogging for Yglesias, and referencing a Spencer Ackerman post) argues that fast withdrawal from Iraq is the only way to decrease the total number of Iraqis that die as a result of working with* American forces.  He writes:

This isn’t my issue, but I don’t see an easy answer here that doesn’t involve a swift draw down of U.S. forces from Iraq. As our commitment there decreases, the number of these sorts of entanglements will go with it, and fewer peoples’ lives will be at risk.

I'm not sure I understand what this means. It's not as if letting some of our current translators go is going to prevent them from being at risk for reprisal; there are hundreds, if not thousands, of former translators for MNF-Iraq who quit their jobs, and still had to flee Iraq out of fear for their lives.

The problem isn't the people we'll employ in the future, or even the people we employ now; it's the people we used to employ, who lack protection even if they return. I really wish the discussion about withdrawal was more about offering visas and asylum, and less about how many months and how many troops.

*If you don't get why this is so terrifying for translators, remember how the term "collaborator," is used as an epithet in movies about World War II...