This morning’s Politico was all over the political map, at least when it comes to the issue of bipartisanship in Washington.  As several colleagues on Capitol Hill have pointed out to me, an “Analysis” piece by Jim VandeHei and Mike Allen appears on the front page under the title: “The Great Myth: Bipartisanship,” which pretty much says it all.  Yet on the very same front page, leading off a “Special Section” on transportation policy, is a piece all about how indispensable Secretary of Commerce and former Rep. Ray LaHood (R-IL) is to Team Obama, because he “lends credibility,” “can provide invaluable insight” into the Republican side, and can tap into his network of Republican friends and former colleagues to win backing for the President’s agenda.

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To succeed, a state should specialize in products in which it has a comparative advantage, according to economist David Ricardo. Ricardo focused on tangible goods traded in the international market. However, states also possess another, by no means less marketable characteristic – reputation. A cause of many conflicts and wars, international standing is a commodity by itself because it can be turned into commercial advantage. The importance of reputation goes beyond attracting potential investors and trade partners. Studies show that concerns over reputation can ensure a state’s compliance with treaties and international norms, including the nuclear nonproliferation regime.

No state can thrive on international standing alone. However, reputation can reinforce or undermine the value of other marketable commodities and even influence the state’s export decisions. While comparative advantage in manufacturing arms offers a great source of export income, selling wrong arms into wrong hands can tarnish a state’s international reputation and offset its profits with resulting sanctions and embargos.

What can North Korea export, given its lack in valuable resources and technological expertise? North Korea’s highest-valued commodities include armaments as well as minerals, metallurgical products, and textiles. Its main customers are South Korea and China. (more…)

What is most striking about the eighth anniversary of the September 11 attacks may be its ordinariness. Certainly, memorials and moments of silence will be observed across the nation, as they should be, but life—and politics—goes on. Here inside the beltway, we are focused on the roiling healthcare debate, the looming risk of a swine flu pandemic, and ongoing economic malaise. On the national security front, we are gradually bringing the War in Iraq to a close, while we gear up for a sustained conflict in Afghanistan and draw near a deadline for Iran to return to the nuclear negotiating table.

The 9/11 Anniversary stirs a mixture of feelings. On the one hand, the shock and horror of that day are beginning to fade into historical memory. Millions of pages and pixels of retrospective on the attacks, their causes and aftermath, have been published; the Pentagon is fully repaired; even the World Trade Center site is once more under construction. So in that sense, life in America has gone back to normal.

On the other hand, the trauma of 9/11 brought about a permanent shift in our national priorities. No longer can intelligence officials or policymakers afford to dismiss out of hand security threats that may at first seem incredible—after all, who would imagine that terrorists could hijack a commercial airliner using box cutters, and then transform it into a guided missile powerful enough to bring down a skyscraper? And no longer can we wait to connect the dots between terrorist cells, crackpot dictators, and black market traffickers. It may be that 9/11 forced an end to the era of American uncertainty about globalization. If nothing else, today, we can be sure that what happens in Pakistan’s Swat Valley, in a refugee camp on the Horn of Africa, or at a crumbling research lab in Eastern Siberia, deserve our attention.

On this anniversary, our first duty is to remember and honor the victims of 9/11. But as the emotional immediacy of the tragedy inevitably fades, our resolve, our constant vigilance, and our heightened awareness of interconnected threats in a globalized world must endure.

As Chris Preble mentioned in his post last week, there is are two different bipartisan responses to the war in Afghanistan.  On one side, a collection of those on the left and the right are advocating for pulling back from this conflict, and another group of unlikely bedfellows is pushing for further engagement.

This is a sharp contrast to other foreign policy issues such as Iraq that broke cleanly along partisan lines, particularly in Bush’s second term.  The fact that this issue doesn’t, in my view, is actually a welcome change.  Too often when a foreign policy dilemma is considered, a knee jerk reaction is to follow the partisan path laid out by party leaders.  Too frequently many tow the party line.  The fact that this seems to not be happening here, perhaps is an indication that further analysis and consideration is taking place- at least that’s my hope.

I’ll examine one of the approaches – disengagement – that has been supported by conservative columnist George Will and Democrat Senator Russ Feingold.  Although the arguments raised by this unlikely pairing are thoughtful and worthy of consideration, they both fall short when presenting their alternative to the current path.

Senator Russ Feingold (D-MN) wrote in the Wall Street Journal,

“Ending al Qaeda’s safe haven in Pakistan is a top national security priority. Yet our operations in Afghanistan will not do so, and they could actually contribute to further destabilization of Pakistan…. We need to start discussing a flexible timetable to bring our brave troops out of Afghanistan.”

Feingold seems to believe that one of the major obstacles to the completion of the mission in Afghanistan is the actual presence of US troops.  He point to a perception of US troops as an occupying force.  He also refers to 2009 polling that showed that a “plurality” of Afghans wanted a reduction in US troops.  I looked at that same BBC poll.  It found that indeed support for US troops in the country has decreased over the past several years.  In the 2009 poll, although 44 percent said that US and NATO/ISAF forces should decrease, 47 percent said that they should either stay the same or increase.  It is true that if one of goals of the US/NATO presence is to win over the local population, then these numbers really do matter.  There may be some time in the future when overwhelming disapproval by the Afghan population necessitates a drawdown of foreign forces.  The numbers, however, don’t yet show that. (more…)

In keeping with the PSA’s charter, we’re seeing bipartisan consensus emerging around U.S. policy in Afghanistan. The bad news? There are actually two bipartisan consensuses.

Technically, that is impossible. Consensus means “general agreement” or “a view reached by a group as a whole” so there can’t really be more than one.

And that is the problem. So long as the right is fighting the right, and others on the left are fighting the left, policymakers will be inclined to focus on other policy issues, content to let Afghan policy drift, and hope for a miraculous turnaround (e.g. Karzai becomes less corrupt and more competent; the Afghan economy begins to produce something other than opium; the Pashtuns decide to make common cause with the Tajiks, Turkmen and Hazara; Afghan men decide that Afghan women should have rights, etc). Our men and women in uniform, engaged increasingly in armed social work are caught in the middle while the pointy-heads pull on their respective chins.

Certain leading voices on the right agree with others on the left that we must redefine our ends in Afghanistan, and begin exploring ways to draw down the military presence there. My colleagues Malou Innocent and Ted Galen Carpenter have just completed a comprehensive study making this case (you can get a preview here), and will present it for the first time at Cato on Monday, September 14th.

A familiar group of hawks and neocons dismiss such sentiments as defeatist bordering on treasonous. Others suggest that talk of withdrawal is simply premature.

The debate got a jolt this week when George Will’s Tuesday column in the Washington Post declared that it was “Time to Get Out of Afghanistan.”

News of the Will column broke late Monday night. Bill Kristol — tipped off, no doubt, by the Post‘s editors who agree with him — had his response ready by 9 am.

The salient question: Would the GOP follow Will or Bill? By 4 pm, we had our answer when Michael Steele and the RNC weighed in…on Kristol’s side.

There is a debate on the left as well. George Will’s position echoes a stance adopted by Sen. Russ Feingold last month, and repeated this morning on NPR (with Rep. Jim McGovern). But scholars at the left-leaning Center for New American Security and the Brookings Institution have joined forces with those from AEI and CSIS in recent weeks to make the case for increasing the commitment to Afghanistan, and explicitly discouraging any talk of withdrawal any time soon. (See, for example, this account by The Nation‘s Bob Dreyfuss.)

The public favors withdrawal. A CBS News poll found that 41 percent of Americans want “troops to start coming home, up from 33 percent in April and just 24 percent in February. Support for increasing the number of troops dropped from 39 percent in April to just 25 percent now.” A Washington Post/ABC News poll taken last month found that for the first time since they began asking the question, a majority of Americans no longer think the war in Afghanistan has been worth the costs.

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With General Stanley McChrystal finishing his 60-day Afghanistan military policy review, the main headline has been speculation that he will request more troops. The BBC speculates , “This report does not mention increasing troop numbers – that is for another report later in the year – but the hints are all there.”

While Washington and Brussels brace for a troop request above and beyond the more than 100,000 U.S. and NATO troops already there, the underlying question is the one that really matters: What is success in Afghanistan, and what is it worth in blood and treasure?

Afghanistan was once viewed as the good war. Iraq symbolized the imperial extension of American power, while Afghanistan symbolized the necessary use of American power in the national defense. Richard Haass famously called Iraq the “war of choice” and Afghanistan the “war of necessity,” but in a recent New York Times op-ed , Haass signaled a potentially significant shift in establishment foreign policy thinking by labeling the Afghan war now a war of choice.

In declaring this, Haass defined success in Afghanistan as “bringing into existence an Afghan government strong enough to control most of its territory” and wrote that there are “alternatives to current American policy” to achieve this goal. He is quick to point out that labeling Afghanistan a war of choice doesn’t make it “good” or “bad,” but rather begs the question of “whether military involvement would probably accomplish more than it would cost and whether employing force is more promising than the alternatives.” (more…)

Mental health may not be the first thing you think of when pundits and bloviators blather on about high foreign policy and international security issues, but it’s there.

If policymakers think they have it tough with their late nights at the White House and Congress try being at the point of spear. If all soldiers and marines had to worry about were lack of sleep and newspaper columnists or think tank experts voicing criticisms they would be rolling on the floor laughing.

You probably know where I’m going with this but let me get specific. After six years of being ground down in Iraq U.S. forces in Afghanistan, currently over sixty thousand of them, are in the thick of it, getting wounded and killed far too freely.

Thus far, 2009 is turning out to be the most tragic for Americans in the Afghan War, with 176 dead, far more than the 155 casualties in all of 2008. A very high number indeed, considering the United States has suffered a total of 806 military deaths since the 2001 invasion.

The only other coalition members with triple-digit casualties since the war began are the United Kingdom, which has 207 deaths, and Canada, which has 127. The impact in those countries is even higher since, as they have far less forces there their casualties are proportionally far higher.

Yet the psychic casualties are also staggering.

As the Cleveland Plain Dealer reported this past Saturday the Army, with 128 suicides last year, already has 79 so far this year. The Navy had 41 last year and 28 this year. The Marines have 34, seven shy of last year, and the Air Force has recorded half its 40 suicides of 2008.

And 2008 itself was a record year for military suicides. That year 140 soldiers on active duty took their own lives, continuing a trend in which the number of suicides has increased more than 60 percent since 2003, surpassing the rate for the general U.S. population.

The government says around 5,000 veterans a year commit suicide. To counter that, a VA suicide hot line launched in 2007, (800) 273-TALK, fielded close to 100,000 calls in just its first eight months. (more…)