McChrystal: the flawed flogging the clueless

Since I'm on a leave of absence I don't have access to the Rolling stone article about Afghan campaign top general Stanley McChrystal, but here's a link to a piece with some key excerpts. His comments look to fit the classic Washington definition of a gaffe: an inadvertent or inconvenient dollop of truth, the eternal enemy of all things governmental.

I'm convinced, for example, that McChrystal's characterization of Obama as ill-informed and somewhat disengaged about Afghanistan is almost certainly true. Obama had no background in or interest in foreign affairs before being elected, and his decision to call Afghanistan the "right" war was strictly political, to countermand the impression that he is a war wimp. He seems to have no clue just how complicated Afghanistan is -- or how unnecessary it is for the U.S. to fight there, given that the Taliban is an indigenous Afghan movement and al-Qaida, which does have international ambitions (though little operational capacity) has no real foothold in Afghanistan. The fact the al-Qaida and the Taliban are different outfits that don't have identical agendas seems to have escaped him.

While McChrystal's slams at the administration (except for Hillary) ring true, however, his own plan is deeply flawed and rife with wishful thinking. Classic counterinsurgency doctrine depends on a stable government with a reasonable amount of popular support and effective security forces to succeed. This is hardly the case in Afghanistan, where Karzai's rule doesn't extend beyond Kabul and the government (and Karzai's brother) are profoundly corrupt and unpopular. Not only is it unnecessary for the U.S. to dictate the political outcome in Afghanistan, it is most unlikely to succeed in a country with deepseated suspicion of outside powers and no desire to have an effective central government. So there are no good guys in this flap.

Government, the technological late-adopter

The one thing I didn't get before doing this editorial on the Obama administration's efforts to give every single American access to broadband service, was an informed estimate of how long it has taken for broadband to spread to whatever percentage of Americans now have it, compared to the time it took for other technologies to spread. Since the computer age began, the fedgov has been scrambling to make this or that technology (Internet in schools, wireless service in cities) to more Americans, especially the "underserved," more quickly. In almost every case the government has been playing catch-up rather than hustling technology along. Every new computer technology has spread to the vast majority of Americans much faster than previous new technologies like the telephone or television -- almost entirely through private-sector efforts. By the time government decides this or that new technology is just the thing it ought to subsidize or hustle along, often enough a new technology has emerged, leaving government to subsidize something approaching obsolescence.

The swiftness of promulgation of new technologies might slow down if the recession lasts longer than most experts expect it will. Even if that happens, I suspect government will be congenitally behind. Government has wasted billions trying to get current on computer technology in its own operations and agencies, but its procurement processes almost assure that it is buying yesterday's technology, and not all that intelligently. It's probably beneficial that government doesn't understand IT very well. If it did, it would 0probably be surveilling all of us much more comprehensively and efficiently than it is now.

Health care? Expect more taxes

As Matt Bai's article in the NYT Magazine explains in perhaps too much detail, the Obama administration has moved shrewdly in pursuit of getting something that can be called health care reform through Congress, nurturing relationships in Congress to an extent Bush and Clinton never approached. But the sticking point just might be new taxes. As this Register editorial points out, Obama is actively flirting with two notions: making health benefits taxable to employees and putting a cap in deductions the "wealthy" can claim, to raise at least some of the money that will be needed.

The notion that deepening government involvement will lead to saving money, as the administration and its lackeys keep trying to make us believe (and maybe to convince themselves) is chimerical. But they seem determined and savvy, and resistanbce is less at this point than in 1993. I think Mike Cannon at Cato is doing some of the best work being done on health care issues, including this paper just released delineating the failures of the Massachusettsmodel, and a steady rain of articles and blog posts. If reasoned argument cold do it more nationalized health care would be dead in the water. I suspect if the administration falters, however, it will be due to divisions in the Democratic party rather than reasoned argument.

Reaching for more arbitrary power

The Obama administration has announced, with TreasSec little Timmy Geithner confirming it on Capitol Hill that they're reaching seriously, that it wants to give the government the same authority to seize and run all kinds of financial institutions the same way the FDIC now has the power to seize banks, try to work off the bad paper and either close them or sell them. The FDIC does this ona fairly regular basis now, though it's almost always small banks that it seizes. When there was a widespread problem with S&Ls in the 1980s (a problem set up by the government when it increased the amount of deposits the FDIC insured, thereby putting all the risk on the taxpayers and inviting S&Ls to behave more riskily than they otherwise would have), the government set up a special temporary agency. the Resolution Trust Corp., to handle the problem and then go out of business. But the keepers of Obama Nation want this power to be permanent.

As this Register editorial argues, not only would the move expand the power of the Federal Reserve, which was the main cause of the financial crisis in the first place (but in government nothing succeeds like failure), it would keep any number of businesses that would do better to go bankrupt or out of business sputtering along on the taxpayers' dime, diverting cap[ital and other resources from more productive uses. Expect stagnation if this stinker passes.

Talking with Jagdish Bhagwati

I suppose I get my kicks in strange and mysterious ways.Talking to somebody I haven't had a chance to talk with before, learning new things from him (or her) and feeling at least a modicum or rapport with somebody I respect highly probably doesn't strike too many people as all that exciting. But I get a jolt from it.

I've been working on a piece for next Sunday's Register on the prospects for international trade during an Obama administration and during a time of international economic downturn that I'm afraid will last longer than most anyone would prefer, since the governments who claim to be trying to fix it are throwing gasoline on the fire instead. So I decided to call Jagdish Bhagwati, economist at Columbia for many years and perhaps the foremost expert on international trade on the planet. I had read and admired his book, "In Defense of Globalization," which corrects a lot of yahoos left and right. We had a nice long talk, and it sounded as if he enjoyed it too. He's very concerned about the possibility of what he calls a WTO-consistent trade war and thinks Obama to date has been extremely disappointing, that the economists around him may be generally pro-trade but don't really know much about the subject. It's an opinion he's expressed here, and here as well as to me.

I'll link to my piece when it's published.

Real problems developing

A few weeks ago I suggested that a potentially major crisis involving India, Pakistan and Afghanistan might face the incoming Obama administration, but that otherwise the Imperium’s potential conflict spots seemed to be in a state of relative quiescence. So much for my predictive powers! The Israeli-Palestinian conflict does not really affect the core interests of the U.S., but if it stays in the headlines much longer there will be increasing pressure for the U.S. to get involved one way or another — although it’s hard for me to imagine just what the U.S. could do that would be more stabilizing than destabilizing. When the Bush administration took power, as I remember, it decided not to jump in to the Israeli-Palestinian situation, contenting itself with expressing complete support for Israel but, with the final Clinton effort fresh in memory, simply issuing statements and expending verbiage on a “path to peace.” I wouldn’t be surprised if the Obama admin. does much the same — but my record as a prophet is not exactly pristine.