When All Is Said And Done

Steve Coll outlines the actual choice Obama is confronting:

Look, there's no chance that the Obama administration or the international community is just going to pull the plug on Afghanistan and walk away. There is a commitment to do the hard work, to prevent the Taliban from taking control of the Afghan government, from destabilizing all of South Asia, from destabilizing Pakistan. So the question is not stay or go. The question is, are more American troops part of the solution, or are more American troops part of the problem?

But shouldn't we try to avoid starting arguments by ruling out one obvious, if clearly perilous answer (among several)? Steve actually has a response to that:

I wonder if there is enough clarity, even inside the Obama administration, about exactly what security interests we're really fighting for here.

I think that there are two.

One the president articulates all the time, and I think he's correct about it: It's a vital national security issue for the United States to defeat or disable or reduce Al Qaeda to the point where it can no longer carry out disruptive attacks against the United States or important allies of the United States.

But Al Qaeda isn't in Afghanistan. Al Qaeda is on the border. You can argue that an American presence in Afghanistan is vital to continue to prosecute that important campaign. But that's only one of the two reasons that this war matters.

The other is that the United States has a vital national security interest in a stable, modernizing South Asia. Pakistan, India, all of South Asia — a billion and a half people are on the cusp of joining modern Asia in a march to prosperity, political normalcy and stability.

If Pakistan blows up, if the Taliban succeed in radicalizing local populations, then this region will be chronically unstable for years to come.

And why does that matter to the United States? Not least because there are more than 100 nuclear weapons already finished and extant in this region. But this is a region that, like Southeast Asia and Latin America, has the opportunity to stabilize, gel, integrate economically and march toward modernity.

The Taliban are essentially all that stands in the way of that project. It's more complicated than that, because the Taliban are a creature of dysfunctional Pakistani security services and lots of other unsolved problems. But the United States has a vital national interest in making sure that the Taliban do not destabilize South Asia.

And Afghanistan is not the only place where that contest is going to be carried out. And it is not a contest that is only military. It's a complicated transnational contest. But it is of vital interest I think to this country, and it does require substantial patience and investments.

My worry is simply that, however lovely this would be, it could be undoable. Undoable for cultural, political, religious, regional reasons. And that there is always the potential for continued enmeshment to deepen and spread the friction between the West and Islam. I fear we are defining a vital national interest on a battlefield we can never control or even fully understand.

Maybe I'm being too pessimistic (I was about the military potential of the Iraq surge to quell the population). Sam Roggeveen rightly argues that the devil is in the details, and that each decision should be empirically based and that the record of Western intervention in the developing world is not as bad as it might seem. He's right that to stick to pure pessimism as some kind of doctrine is not conservative at all. I just get queasy at the vastness and complexity of the neo-imperial task, the potential for even more blowback, and the knowledge that the power trying to accomplish this is … well, bankrupt. Its major global rival, China, can sit back, enjoy the benefits if America wins, and enjoy America's accelerated decline if America loses.

Isn't there a point at which you have to conclude: not worth it?

(Hat tip: AtlanticWire)

From The Dept. Of Careful What You Wish For

Some Democrats want to repeal the insurance anti-trust exemption. Austin Frakt and Ian Crosby caution:

[I]nsurance companies are partially exempt from federal antitrust law for an important reason: so they can share rate-making data. This function actually benefits small insurers who would not otherwise have sufficient data to properly adjust premiums. Paradoxically, removing the legal cover for data sharing would harm small insurers more than large ones.

The Halo Effect

The Economist studies the phenomenon:

The existence of the so-called halo effect has long been recognised. It is the phenomenon whereby we assume that because people are good at doing A they will be good at doing B, C and D (or the reverse—because they are bad at doing A they will be bad at doing B, C and D). The phrase was first coined by Edward Thorndike, a psychologist who used it in a study published in 1920 to describe the way that commanding officers rated their soldiers. He found that officers usually judged their men as being either good right across the board or bad. There was little mixing of traits; few people were said to be good in one respect but bad in another.

Later work on the halo effect suggested that it was highly influenced by first impressions. If we see a person first in a good light, it is difficult subsequently to darken that light. The old adage that “first impressions count” seems to be true. This is used by advertisers who pay heroic actors and beautiful actresses to promote products about which they have absolutely no expertise. We think positively about the actor because he played a hero, or the actress because she was made up to look incredibly beautiful, and assume that they therefore have deep knowledge about car engines or anti-wrinkle cream.

How Do You See Your Life?

Robert Moran passes along an unusual poll question

StrategyOne polled Americans (n=1,000 telephone survey) October 9-12, 2009 with the following question:

"People often use metaphors to describe their life… Which ONE of the following do you think best describes your life?"

A Journey: 51%
A Battle: 11%
The Seasons: 10%
A Novel: 8%
A Race: 6%
A Live Performance, Like a Play: 5%
A Carousel: 4%
Other: 2%
Unsure: 2%

The responses above were provided to participants and are well-known life metaphors from Western culture. For example, life as a journey is from Homer's Odyssey (and the Epic of Gilgamesh should also be credited as well). Life as a battle is Homer's Iliad. Life as the seasons is from Ecclesiastes and ascribed to King Solomon. Life as a race is from St. Paul. And life as a performance or play is from The Bard – Shakespeare.

The interesting thing about the data in this instance is that (a) journey is the dominant metaphor for life among Americans and (b) there are minimal differences by age, gender and region. The only real difference is by income where those making less than $35,000 are three times as likely to describe their lives as a battle (20% vs. 6% average for the other income groups).

Karzai: America’s Favored Weakman

DiA downgrades the Afghan leader:

In late 2001 there were two powerful forces facing each other in Afghanistan: the mainly Pashtun Taliban, and the mainly Tajik and Uzbek Northern Alliance. But America wanted to unite the country, so, as usual, we went looking for a "third force". Hamid Karzai fit the bill because he was ethnically Pashtun but anti-Taliban (and foreign-educated and urbane). But for the same reasons that he didn't fall into either of the two main camps, Mr Karzai was weak. He wasn't Taliban, but he wasn't really Northern Alliance. He was "untainted" only because he didn't have his own army. And this is always the problem with third forces. If they were strong, they wouldn't be the third force; they'd be one of the first two forces…

It would be entirely possible for America to mount a COIN campaign in support of our favourite Afghan strongman. But in Hamid Karzai, we didn't pick our favourite strongman. We picked our favourite weakman. That's why we're in trouble.