Alex Massie points me to this little piece in the Guardian. It’s about how Croatians in Zagreb have overcome their government’s ban on smoking in bars and cafes by simply continuing smoking. The piece’s author, Euan Ferguson, is commendably enthusiastic about this development, but his traditional British contempt for the region shines through nonetheless:

What have the Balkans ever done for us? Until I saw this picture, I would have said pretty bloody little. Anger, wars, vampires, evil food, poisoned rivers, dictators, distrust, revenge and fear and it still features the only part of the world – mad northern Albania – where I’ve been offered a handgun for protection in a hotel because they’d lost the bedroom key.

Right back atcha, pal—what have you ever done for us? British policy in the Balkans has always been wrong-headed, hatched by the dimmest bulbs in the foreign office, whose understanding of the region seems to have come from a reading of Rebecca West’s disastrous Black Lamb and Grey Falcon and not much else. Stuff your sanctimony, pal, and ponder your own country’s turd-filled legacy to the world (Pakistan, Afghanistan, the modern Middle East come to mind) as you drift into cultural senescence and irrelevance, the distended state teat lolling about your wrinkled lips.

I usually give neoconservatives the benefit of the doubt and assume that they don’t actually believe the strong form of democratic peace theory—namely that armed conflict between democracies is somehow impossible.

But sometimes I’m proved wrong. Case in point, Jackson Diehl is disappointed in the Iranian Greens:

Ataollah Mohajerani, who has been a spokesman in Europe for presidential candidate-turned-dissident Mehdi Karroubi, came to Washington to address the annual conference of the Washington Institute for Near East Policy. The mostly pro-Israel crowd was primed to cheer what they expected would be a harsh condemnation of Ahmadinejad and his bellicose rhetoric, and a promise of change by the green coalition.

What they heard, instead, was a speech that started with a rehashing of U.S. involvement in the 1953 coup in Tehran and went on to echo much of Ahmadinejad’s rhetoric about the United States and the nuclear program.

Neoconservatives do recognize that even if the Palestinians had a perfectly representative government, they’d continue fighting against Israel, right? They recognize that there are certain wars, like wars over territory, which are not affected by the political systems of the warring parties, right? Right…?

I continue to believe they’re not complete ideologues, despite frequent evidence to the contrary.

An amazing show at the Rock ‘n Roll Hotel tonight—Future of the Left are certainly one of the finest working bands today. They’re funny, they’re kinetic, they’re worth your time.

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The finale involved the bass player giving me his bass to make noise on:

Ridiculous. Good times.

Via Spencer Ackerman, I just read John Nagl and Richard Fontaine’s op-ed from two weeks ago:

As the Obama administration debates whether to stick with the counterinsurgency strategy for Afghanistan, opponents point to that nation’s flawed presidential election as a reason why this approach cannot work… This argument is badly flawed. Electoral fraud will render our task in Afghanistan more difficult, but it does not make counterinsurgency impossible. On the contrary, a counterinsurgency approach — and not a narrowly tailored mission focused solely on killing or capturing enemies — remains the best path to success in Afghanistan.

Ackerman’s worried by their proposal to effectively bypass the central government. I’m less so. They are being a bit too optimistic about the benefits this will be bringing to the Afghan people, and they’re certainly prettying up what the surge actually achieved in Iraq. Nevertheless, it’s one step closer to accepting that the best we can probably hope to accomplish is a loose confederation of warlord fiefdoms that more-or-less has control over its territory. Setting realistic goals is the first step to some kind of positive outcome to this whole mess.

For a quick survey of the thinking that’s already been done in the field of development studies, as well as several tidy frameworks for thinking about the daunting challenges ahead of us in Afghanistan, you couldn’t do much better than reading Francis Fukuyama’s concise tome State-Building: Governance and World Order in the 21st Century.

Being written in 2004, the book seems to be primarily geared towards understanding our options in Iraq. Nevertheless, in the final chapter, Fukuyama broadly outlines the problem of Afghanistan, and it’s none too rosy a picture.

It is not clear, given the low to nonexistent level of stateness in many failed states, whether there is any real alternative to a quasi-permanent, quasi-colonial relationship between the “beneficiary” country and the international community. In a sense, the latter has recreated the earlier mandatory system of the League of Nations period in which certain colonial powers were given explicit charter to govern a given territory on its behalf. The problem with our current system is that contemporary norms do not accept the legitimacy of anything other than self-government, which makes us then insist that whatever governance we do provide be temporary and rule transitional. Since we do not in fact know how to transfer institutional capacity in a hurry, we are setting ourselves and our supposed beneficiaries up for large disappointments. [p. 104]

I suppose it should be stressed here that Fukuyama isn’t taking the activist Max Boot neocolonial stance—that even though we Americans don’t like the term ‘empire’, we should just get on with paternalistic administration of the rest of the world. Rather he’s saying that though the colonial worldview is of a bygone era and is unthinkable today, we shouldn’t fool ourselves into believing that there has been any kind of record of spectacular success in state-building in the post-colonial era.

Pope Benedict’s recent kindly invitation to disaffected Anglicans came across to many as a blitz from the blue, but it really shouldn’t have. Whether on the individual or congregational level, various and sundry Protestant groups of a persistently Roman hue, especially Lutherans and Episcopalians, have made the pilgrimage to Rome on their own, without any special prompting from the Vatican. The thing that surprises in this case, I suppose, is that Rome had never spelled out the process quite so systematically, making so many concessions to Anglo-Catholic liturgy along the way.

The real question people seem to want to know about this move is why? What is Benedict up to? Ross Douthat tackled the question the other day in his Times column and gave a pretty good accounting of the matter—but only “up to a point”, as Mr. Salter would say.

Douthat is right that Benedict certainly has in mind the exodus from the Protestant mainline in favor of seemingly more vibrant faiths like Pentecostalism, Evangelicalism, and Mormonism, on the one hand, or secular agnosticism and religious apathy, on the other. (Some have suggested that the Anglicans’ liberal remnant should invite disaffected Catholics, but the flow doesn’t go that way, by and large. Rather than join other, more progressive congregations devoted to halting global warming through joint parish initiatives, lapsed Catholics just drop out of organized religion altogether.)

But Douthat was being way too clever (or too post-9/11) in suggesting that Benedict’s ulterior motive in attempting to unite the traditionalist elements of Christianity was to bolster Christendom’s flanks against a resurgent Islam. I don’t think this sort of “Nixon Goes to China” strategy goes very far in explaining Benedict’s invitation to the Anglicans. He has been very plain, since even before the beginning of his papacy, that he wants to help the West shake off the “dictatorship of relativism” and establish a society that is founded on a mutual ordering of faith and reason.

This traditionalist consolidation isn’t so much aimed at confronting an Islamicized Europe as it is confronting, as he sees it, the twin ills of relativism and fundamentalism. Fundamentalism, I’m sure we can all acknowledge, can come in Christian varieties as well as Islamic ones.

The struggle against relativism and fundamentalism was at the heart of Benedict’s controversial Regensburg lecture, before it was driven deep into the background by the ensuing fury over his quotation of a 14^th-century Byzantine ruler’s perception of Islam. This struggle is also what Benedict seems to have been referring to in his recent speech in which he described Africa as the world’s “spiritual lung”:

… [T]his ‘lung’ can take ill as well. And, at the moment, at least two dangerous pathologies are attacking it: firstly, an illness that is already widespread in the West, that is, practical materialism, combined with relativist and nihilist thinking… . There is absolutely no doubt that the so-called First World has exported and continues to export its spiritual toxic waste that contaminates the peoples of other continents, in particular those of Africa… .

To continue his metaphor, these spiritual toxins are weakening Africa (and, one would presume, the societies that gave rise to them in the first place), causing it to be susceptible to a secondary infection, namely:

religious fundamentalism, mixed with political and economic interests. Groups who follow various religious creeds are spreading throughout the continent of Africa: they do so in God’s name, but following a logic that is opposed to divine logic, that is, teaching and practicing not love and respect for freedom, but intolerance and violence.

It’s not wholly wrong to suggest that Benedict had the West’s confrontation with Islam in mind (not to mention Archbishop Rowan’s rhetorical excesses in this regard). But you have to put the issue in its overall context: The real problem for Benedict isn’t Christendom v. Islam, or some kind of vague cultural Clash of Civilizations; it’s the ideological maladies that arise when one fails to maintain a society founded on a mutual ordering of faith and reason.

Alex Massie draws my attention to a Jason Zengerle profile of Rory Stewart at TNR. It’s a good piece, worth reading in full¹. Of course, as is customary in these sorts of articles, Zengerle seeks out a dissenting opinion from COIN booster Andrew Exum.

Matt Yglesias explains the crux of their disagreement:

…it seems to me that the real disagreement here is probably driven by different views about the U.S. military than by different views about Afghanistan as such. Exum believes that the Pentagon has developed powerful new operational doctrines about counterinsurgency that make it possible to achieve things via U.S. military intervention that U.S. military intervention hasn’t traditionally achieved. I read Stewart as being skeptical about that idea…

A couple of random questions/points expanding on this:

1) Do COIN supporters think that the army is well-suited to doing development work? This is redolent of a sort of universalist bias in American thinking, which assumes that the only thing keeping an individual from flourishing is oppressive circumstance. In Iraq, we had the strong form of this thesis, wherein the removal of Saddam would lead to the rise of a functional, semi-modern democracy in the heart of the middle east. After Iraq, our aspirations for Afghanistan are lower, but the belief in the mechanism remains: if only we can limit violence, good things will happen. Limiting violence is a good thing in itself, to be sure, but it doesn’t causally lead to a stable state emerging. And a stable state in control of its territory is the minimum of what we’re after.

2) Do COIN supporters even know what development is capable of? I don’t claim to know either, definitively, not being a specialist in the field. But my father worked at the UNDP his whole career, and I did a stint at an NGO after college, so I have at least some kind of appreciation of both the ambition of development practitioners as well as the crushing difficulty of actually achieving these goals. Reading the McChrystal recommendations, the following bullet point struck me:

Facilitating Afghan governance and mitigating the effects of malign actors. Success requires a stronger Afghan government that is seen by the Afghan people as working in their interests. Success does not require perfection—an improvement in governance that addresses the worst of today’s high level abuse of power, low-level corruption and bureaucratic incapacity will suffice.

This sounds like the kind of development boilerplate one might see on funding proposals and grant requests. It blithely suggests that even achieving a percentage of perfection is within our reach. I doubt that it is even in the long term. I’m virtually certain it’s impossible in the 12-18 month horizon that General McChyrstal’s report is talking about.

3) We’re not thinking about time horizons correctly at all. Development, as a formalized field, has only existed since after World War II—that’s a bit north of 60 years. During that time, the great successes have been in eradicating diseases like river blindness and polio, and in fighting famines through the introduction of improved farming techniques. Creating good governance in post-colonial tribal societies in Africa, on the other hand, has been depressingly less successful. Surely we’ve all heard that the Afghanistan project will take as much as 50 years to get right. I’d say 50 years is the lowball estimate, even if we as a country were 100% committed to the project and suffered no setbacks in the interim.

Rory Stewart’s Tory conservatism is based on experience of not just Afghanistan, but of development work in general. The COIN proponents’ optimism seems to be based on a can-do American ethos typical of its excellent armed services. While I’m an enthusiastic supporter of the type of thinking that the COIN crowd is doing, I fear that as their star has risen in Washington, their vision has become more maximalist. All problems appear to be nails for their hammer, and all previous failures have been failures of not doing it the right way. But many of these problems, especially but not exclusively in Afghanistan, are fundamentally problems of political (not economic) development, and are devilishly hard to solve by outsiders. It’s folly to assume that a fresh pair of eyes and new determination will succeed where decades of effort have already failed.

A while ago, Matt Yglesias linked to this band, Future of the Left—presumably because the first song, Arming Eritrea, tickled him. He’d been writing on U.S. policy in Ethiopia for a while, and bands with any kind of even remote awareness of current affairs are fairly rare.¹

My friend Hank has since been telling me to give the band more of a listen. I’ve owned the album for a few months now, but I never really found it too compelling. It might be that my judgment was being clouded by the band’s heritage. Two of the members of FotL are from Mclusky, a band that no shortage of friends had told me, as a Jesus Lizard fan, I absolutely must get into.

Well, I tried, and I couldn’t really understand the comparison. Mclusky was brutish and heavy, math rock for the sake of math rock, with unpleasant metal influences throughout. The Jesus Lizard, for all their cacophony, are only incidentally mathy and complicated—inventive musicians making aggressive, somewhat demented music with a subtle sense of humor permeating their whole oeuvre. Mclusky is like a pile driver to Jesus Lizard’s scalpel.

It turns out Future of the Left is a different kettle of fish. Though not beyond delivering a knuckledragger every so often, they’ve set out to to fuse the best of 90s noise rock with a melodic new wave sensibility. And largely they’ve succeed swimmingly. Look no further for the epitome of their project than I Am Civil Service:

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Shellac meets Franz Ferdinand. Or better put, pure Shellac with a melodic Franz Ferdinand bridge, except it’s a bridge to nowhere. Civil Service is a punishing one-part song with several subtle, excellent permutations. The trick starting at 1:36, where the bass switches from the guitar’s syncopated rhythm to a repeated note, switching the note with every repetition, is a classic Bob Weston technique. The finale could end A Minute.

Consider me converted.

EDIT: What timing!

Andrew Sullivan attempts to ding Daniel Larison for an overly dogmatic realist critique of democratization.

Larison first:

Egypt and Jordan can remain at peace with Israel despite the profound unpopularity of this arrangement because the governments are unaccountable and authoritarian. Surely the elections in Gaza should tell us that democratization allows people with deep grievances to vent them by empowering the most extreme and radical elements. This has proved to be ruinous for people in Gaza and far from what Israel wants. Democratization and regional stability are incompatible. If you desire one, you cannot have the other.

Sullivan writes, “I don’t buy the argument that in the long run, autocracies are more stable than democracies, even in the Middle East,” and goes on to cite Iran as proof of the instability of the autocratic model when it comes to succession.

He’s missing the point, though. I’m not sure even steely Larison would go so far as to argue that autocratic succession is any kind of ideal. Autocracies by their very nature change leaders amidst a tension that can at any time spill over into war. Indeed, the greatest achievement of democracy has been that power transfers have been institutionalized to the point of violence being a nearly unthinkable outcome.

What Daniel is correctly railing against, however, is the by far most questionable aspect of Democratic Peace theory: namely that democracies do not go to war against each other. Democratic Peace theorists like the claim, with some sleights of hand, that history bears out this claim. But Daniel’s counter-example is a powerful one. Is there much doubt that the Arab Street, if given access to the reins of power, would demand anything but the annihilation of Israel?

Apple’s ad firm, Chiat\Day, does its job admirably well: the featured song in the above ad, by Swedish popstress Miss Li, is firmly stuck in my brain, as are the color-coordinated dancers and their camera-equipped iPods. Mission accomplished. If I were in the market for an MP3 player, I don’t doubt my final decision would have been influenced by this spot.

The ad gets even better when you go listen to the original song:

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It’s a fairly standard take on alienation from suburban materialism, an irresistible sugary blast of angst and frustration with our consumerist lives.

Talking shit about the neighbor wife
But when she comes, you put on a big smile
I’d like to throw up in her Gucci bag
She’s coming here to brag
…
A house, and a boat, and a gray shiny car
Things just to prove you’ve gone far
Soda streamer, watching tv, cute little dog
Perfect in your shallow bourgeois
Shangri-La

Chiat\Day’s edits to the song deftly avoid any of these inconvenient sentiments, making it sound like the soundtrack for an ad for a travel agency (“I gotta get away”) for disaffected hipsters (“I’ve got a feeling that I don’t belong”). Mention of “bourgeois Shangri-La” does make it in towards the end of the edit, but by that point it sounds like a great place to be, maybe even the place these colorful hipsters are trying to get away to. Apple’s iPod nano, which should by all measures be the emblem of the senseless consumerism Miss Li is singing about, is presented by the ad as the very passport to some sort of glorious paradise where we’re free to be ourselves.

Brilliant.