Jan Egeland, former UN humanitarian relief chief, offers a thoughtful report card for where we are as a community of developed nations in dealing with those most in need around us. Egeland notes the decline (there has been a decline) in conflicts and suffering since the end of the cold war. He now puts the number of lives in the balance at only a billion.

He recounts interactions he has had with Senators McCain and Obama, and with President Clinton in his role as a freelance promoter of international relief, and he sees in these experiences hope -- and a hope for investment -- for the humanitarian agenda in a new U.S. administration. He also notes that such an investment is long overdue:

Every year since the invasion in 2003 America has spent six times more in Iraq alone than the United Nations system has had to invest on all peace, human rights, relief, development and environmental efforts around the globe. The annual 120 billion dollars spent in Iraq is nearly twenty times more than the cost of all the successful UN humanitarian and peace-making operations in Angola, the Congo, Liberia, Sierra Leone, South Sudan, Burundi, Ivory Coast, Northern Uganda, the Middle East and East Timor combined. The cost of unilateralism and effectiveness of multilateralism is not known to the American tax-payer, or to UN member states.

The next US administration may change this. As a UN official I had good meetings with Senators McCain and Obama and worked closely with President Bill Clinton on tsunami relief. I believe the benefits of global partnerships will be very clear to the next administration.

Posted by Tarek Rizk at 3:16 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

I've been paying close attention to the uneasy back and forth between NATO member states and US Secretary of Defense Robert Gates lately. Gates, facing reports of looming state failure in Afghanistan, Gates, who is a much less high-strung SecDef than his predecessor Don Rumsfeld, has pointed to the openly-waffling members of the NATO alliance and said, "Where you at?"

The problem is, Gates is paying for the mistakes of the past, both by Rumsfeld and by the Bush White House writ large since routing the Taliban in Afghanistan years ago.

Roger Cohen, writing today in the New York Times (and probably the International Herald Tribune, too) doesn't see it this way, for some reason. To me, his blindspot seems willful.

Cohen runs through the current situation facing Afghanistan, building to the payoff. He frames Afghanistan as "Europe's Iraq" but unconsciously amends that later, calling the war in Afghanistan as "the better war." And Cohen glides right by the impact of that possibly improving situation on the one in Afghanistan with a single sentence. Talking about Gates, Cohen writes, "He's had the honesty to say Iraq dampened European zeal to fight in Afghanistan."

Then be takes a lightning volley of cheap-ish shots:

I see Europeans yawning. Can Waziristan really be a threat to the West? O.K., the frontier regions are where Ayman al-Zawahiri and other Al Qaeda leaders are said to be hiding, but they're isolated. As for the Madrid and London bombings, bad stuff happens. Always did, always will.

Such insouciance is an alliance failure. NATO has failed to prove its relevance to a post-modern European generation. NATO needs re-branding. It needs to be more hip in getting across where a precious peace came from.

Now, the reformed Taliban, the bumper poppy crop, and the instability next door in Pakistan -- another successful product of US foreign policy -- are combining for a dangerous 2008 in the region. The fact is, a lot of work remains in Afghanistan, and the multinational NATO-flagged forces, poppy eradication teams, the Afghan army and local police forces must find a way to work together to save the country from sliding into failure. But as low-key as he is, Robert Gates isn't going to transform NATO countries with a legitimate beef about the state of play in the Middle East into happy campers by poor-mouthing them. His supporters like Roger Cohen will come up gooseggs too if they think the secret to more war-fighting zeal in Afghanistan is a re-branding of NATO as the key to peace. Instead, some humility about how we got here and what we've handed them would go a long way.
Image used courtesy of Flickr User lafrancevi.

Posted by Tarek Rizk at 2:29 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

Is President Bush's news conference today going to tell us that American drones bagged a big target in this Pakistan blast?

Posted by Tarek Rizk at 9:37 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

Today, it seems, we will talk about the things that President Bush is haphazardly jamming (or trying to avoid jamming) into his final year in office. I turn now to the follow-up from President Bush's late-to-the-party trip to Africa earlier this month.

First, I came across this Brookings analysis a few days back. In it, Homi Kharas offers a reality check, taking quite a few of our nation's proudest African achievements down a peg. Perhaps the most damning is the unfortunate reiteration of the old trope that Africa takes when we give, and we don't give what Africa wants. In this case, it's health-related assistance, rather than investment in infrastructure, jobs, business development, etc:

But surely one can at least be proud of the focus of the U.S. aid effort in combating priority health needs? Even here, the verdict is mixed. Health is a major concern of Americans, and hence it is easy to get domestic support for health-related aid. But it is much less of a priority for Africans themselves. Afrobarometer, the leading source of data on public attitudes in Africa, has conducted polls in 7 of the top 10 African countries which are major recipients of U.S. aid, asking thousands of Africans their views on the most important development issues. Respondents in these countries--Zambia, Mozambique, Kenya, Nigeria, South Africa, Tanzania and Uganda--systematically said that their priorities for development were for more jobs, better incomes, support for agriculture, and improvements in basic infrastructure like roads, power, water and other infrastructure. Improving health, and more specifically dealing with AIDS, came low on the list, with only 7% mentioning health, disease or AIDS as the top development priority and less than one-third putting it in the top three priorities. Health--broadly defined--only cracked the top three priority list in Uganda and Tanzania, and even there the main priority--either infrastructure or the economy--received more than twice the responses as health. Unfortunately, U.S. assistance in these other, priority categories has declined.

Then today, Center for Global Development's Sara Jane Hise writes eloquently of the ambivalence she felt after seeing President Bush deliver a speech -- which she says "felt like looking over vacation photos with the president" -- about his Africa trip. She notes that Bush painted a picture with "broad brushstrokes" but offered little new information and definitely left out what she was hoping for: "a coherent vision of the reasons for U.S.engagement with Africa and the development process more broadly, and a clear sense of what should be done next."

Well, maybe better luck next president, Sara Jane. At least that's what the One Campaign is hoping for. Today, One told its members about the culmination of its petition drive to ask all the presidential candidates to pledge to visit Africa during his or her first term. After just two weeks, 100,000 names were gathered, and Senators Clinton, McCain, and Obama, as well as Governor Huckabee have all agreed to the request. (No comment from Ron Paul, and no comment from me, despite how easy it is to make fun of Paul.) So at least I won't be writing in 8 years that we're watching President whomever jam all kinds of long-ignored Africa business into his or her packed schedule now that lame-duck-ness has really taken hold. Hopefully.

Posted by Tarek Rizk at 2:32 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

I withheld comment on the Andrew Natsios Darfur piece in Sunday's Post because I read that crusading force for good (and good hair) John Prendergast would be responding forthwith. The dialogue is worth checking out.

The underlying theme, which Prendergast deals with directly, is the legacy of George W. Bush as a president who sat through the 21st century's first genocide. In the prism of Prendergast's analysis, Natsios comes across as trying to lower the bar so it can seem like things beyond the control of the United States were the reason stronger action wasn't possible by President Bush.

Prendergast notes a bunch of these details, calling out some of Natsios's mitigating factors as bogus. Perhaps most telling is that faux evenhandedness that Prendergast detects in what Natsios wrote and what the State Department has argued. He argues that treating rebel groups rising up against a genocide and the perpetrators of that genocide as equal plays directly into Khartoum's hands. Think about it. If there is no punishment for these actions, why would they stop? Prendergast notes that this is how Sudan waged its war in the south for two decades.

Unfortunately, the scourge of the Darfur movement is that the ask is weak, niche, or complicated. I'll let Prendergast explain what he wants President Bush to do:

There are two main areas he could emphasize, beyond existing efforts to get a U.N.-led protection force deployed to Darfur. First, Bush should give Ambassador Richard Williamson, the new envoy to Sudan, whatever he needs to help breathe new life into Sudan's peace efforts, including a full-time team based in the region and renewed efforts to engage the influential Chinese in advance of the Olympics.

Second, Bush should lead international efforts to impose a cost for perpetrating genocide and obstructing help. The United States should press in the U.N. Security Council for targeted economic sanctions against responsible Sudanese officials, engage the European Union to ban euro-based Sudanese oil transactions, and share intelligence with the International Criminal Court to accelerate indictments of Sudanese officials most responsible for continuing violence.

Prendergast says Bush has 11 months. Good luck with that.
Photo of John Prendergast courtesy of Flickr user eschipul.

Posted by Tarek Rizk at 9:57 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

I really wanted to read and enjoy the New York Times' smart idea of asking five experts what questions hadn't yet been put to the Democratic candidates in advance of tonight's (what may be final) debate, in Ohio.

Unfortunately, their questions weren't that good.

Charlie Savage's first batch were actually okay, though I think it's a little bit of a lazy approximation to imply that because the White House "won court rulings upholding the indefinite detention of two Americans as enemy combatants," such a policy had been ratified by a court. The only court that matters never got a chance to fully rule on the indefinite detention of Jose Padilla; the Bush White House, smelling defeat in the court it had carefully stacked in its favor, transferred Padilla to the civilian legal system and tried him on new, previously unheard-of charges, all to avoid a Supreme Court determination on whether it could indefinitely hold a citizen without due process of law. Some lower courts had given the White House wins in this area, true, but our system isn't like a game show. The White House can't just take its winnings and go home.

Further down, questioners seem ill-informed, or just sort of phoning it in. Roger Lowenstein's NAFTA question is about 24 hours behind the Obama-NAFTA news cycle (and I think it's safe to say the candidates will get NAFTA questions tonight). I can think of exactly no learning gathered from full answers to Christine Rosen's questions about BlackBerrys and the impact of the "unruly mob" Internet on daily life.

I like Atul Gawande's question about health care, but it's clear he's being willfully naive. He knows exactly what the challenges are to implementing a non-single-payer health care system such as the ones advocated by both Senators Clinton and Obama. The truth is, these plans will be starting points for a lot of negotiation that will yield something less than is promised. No surprises here.

Meanwhile, the only truly foreign policy questions are a bunch of right-wing talking points. I scrolled to the bottom expecting to read BIll Kristol's smirking name, but found a useful surrogate, onetime Guiliani campaign adviser Ruth Wedgwood. Wedgwood's questions run the gamut from the blindly hyperpatriotic (do you still think it was a waste of Senate time to debate and vote on a resolution condemning Moveon.org?) to the revisionist (didn't we go to war to end Saddam Hussein's decades-old genocides which had ended a long time ago?).

A far better selection of un-asked questions can be found in a related piece, an anthology of suggested queries culled from NYTimes.com commenters. The smart, succinct questions cover a wide variety of topics better than the media-dulled batch from the newer piece. Commenters ask about nuclear weapons policy, noting a difference in the stances of Clinton and Obama, as well as a carbon tax, the potential of a long term agreement with Iraq about a future security arrangement being subject to Senate ratification like any other treaty, even changing findings about the "clean-ness" of ethanol and who might serve as their top advisers.

Good thinking.

Photo courtesy Flickr user silent (e).

Posted by Tarek Rizk at 9:41 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

Michael Signer, who worked as a foreign policy adviser to John Edwards' presidential campaign, offers an alarming assessment of how poorly the media has covered the foreign policy aspects of this presidential campaign. He described the response from major media outlets to John Edwards' foreign policy speeches as a "big yawn" and highlighted the fact that candidate speeches are sometimes good indicators of what's to come:

This is troubling, because what a candidate says on foreign policy matters. Often, major policy proposals are road maps to what the candidates actually do once elected. George W. Bush's famous national security speech on Sept. 23, 1999, at the Citadel in South Carolina accurately portended his most provocative policies as president, from "transforming" our armed forces through technology and lighter brigades, to disengaging from the Clinton administration's many diplomatic commitments.

But 2004 was supposed to be the "foreign policy election." We had very different paths laid out before the nation. We had very different implementers of each vision. We were going as a nation to decide what direction to take.

We never reached that question, I feel. America scrapped a little bit about our war and the terrorism, but we didn't really go to the polls thinking about foreign policy. Exit polls show that the number one issue on minds of voters was something called "moral values", followed by the economy and jobs.

And so we're back where we were in 2000 and 1996 and 1992, and probably election before then. We're at a point where we can finally make a decision about the foreign policy roadmap our nation takes. So far, nobody has stopped to ask the candidates for directions.
Image courtesy of Flickr user Brain Farts

Posted by Tarek Rizk at 1:30 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

Nation Of Andorra Not In Africa, Shocked U.S. State Dept. Reports

width="500">

Posted by Tarek Rizk at 2:54 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

Joe Klein recounts in Time a fascinating trip he took to Doha this past weekend, where he moderated a panel at the U.S.-Islamic World Forum. Klein expected his panelists to sound off angrily on the topic: what the Islamic world should expect from the next President of the United States. Instead, the response from panelists was mostly exhaustion.

The first panelist, a member of the Palestinian parliament from Gaza, began with a shrug. "We've made all these arguments before," he said, speaking mournfully. He didn't expect much different from the next President than what Palestinians had gotten from Bill Clinton or George W. Bush--a belated fling at trying to "solve" the Middle East. "Why do they always wait till their last year in office?" he asked, seeming too weary for fury. The next speaker, from Indonesia, wasn't very angry either. He hoped the next President would emphasize soft power rather than military force. The final speaker, a charismatic religious leader from Egypt, didn't want to talk about the next President at all. He wanted to talk about the problems of Islamic youth. But, I pressed, what do you want from the next President? "Change," he said, innocently, "and hope ... for the future."

The Americans in the audience smiled at that: clearly an Obama voter. The notion that the U.S. might elect someone named Barack Obama seemed almost surreal to most of the Islamic delegation. But what was most striking was the overall sense of subdued despair after all the battles and outrages of the Bush years. "The past few years, the Muslims were throwing tables at us," a U.S. Middle East policy expert told me. "Maybe they're just worn out."

The sense of shell-shock is palpable in Klein's account. Reformers, reeling from the United States support for -- and subsequent backpedaling on -- a freer democratic process in Palestine, Egypt and Lebanon, don't know what to hope for. Neither do the Iraqis, some of whom call loudly for U.S. withdrawal while others question Klein worriedly in the hallway, fearing the Democrats' professed plan to withdraw. It's not clear that Obama has the answers, but he has clearly articulated the sense of frustration. Recounts Klein, "As a Libyan said to me, employing an Obamism, 'I think everyone is ready to turn the page.'"

Posted by Josh Weissburg at 2:41 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

It seems from the comments Foreign Policy collects here that the Department of State miscalculated the outcome of the elections in Pakistan. They certainly weren't in a position to extract reliable information from the wet-behind-the-ears election monitoring team that parachuted in the week of the vote.

But the conclusion from the two elections discussed here would seem to be that the folks in charge of figuring out what's going to happen -- and dare I say preparing for that outcome -- either don't do that first job very well or have some obstacle standing in their way of doing the second one.

Going further, if you look at the fact that the security situation forced out the established election monitors forcing a late-day substitution by a team which was no-doubt qualified but surely poorly prepared, and you combine that with the fact that State is sounding pretty surprised that Musharraf's party lost so badly, it makes you wonder if maybe State was sort of accepting -- or maybe relying on -- the fact that the Musharraf government was going to fix the count.

Or maybe it's like the situation in Palestine, where the State Department oddly sort of stepped out of its body and looked on dispassionately as the election they pushed for blew up in their faces with the selection of Hamas as the new government. Maybe we just saw Musharraf, the repository of hopes and millions since 9/12, as an unstoppable ally, even though his service in this role had been spotty at best.

I have a guess that it is something between these. There is an expression, "cockeyed optimist" that signals a person who sees the cloud's silver lining even as that cloud is producing enough rain to drown him. Meanwhile, we've all talked a lot about the lack of realism in this administration's aspirational policies about democracy promotion and other "wishing into being" policies. I'm generally a supporter of idealism when it serves as the fuel in a vision, driving to new heights and putting strength behind each step up the ladder. This doesn't feel like that. In both these cases, a bad (for the State Department) outcome seemed assured. In Pakistan, either Musharraf would cheat and win and our ally would have no credibility left, or he would play fair and lose, and the basket with all our eggs would be gone. (A third possibility was also bad, which was that catastrophic violence would mar the election.) How didn't we prepare for this? Who's minding the store?

Posted by Tarek Rizk at 10:27 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

The people in this NPR story -- immigrants to America from Iraq, Costa Rica, et al -- renew my pride in our country. They see what we have and take for granted, and they know it's not perfect, but they instantly know the value of this democracy, this dialogue, this trust between the governed and the governing.

Listening to the Iraqi couple discuss whether they could even have candidates civilly debate the future of their country without "hitting each other with shoes" almost makes you view with relish the next eight and a half months of non-stop presidential politics. Almost.

Posted by Tarek Rizk at 12:25 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

Here is the irony: for years after 9/11, Democrats (and occasionally, Republicans) aspiring to high office wondered whether they would ever be able to win an election without devoting most of their rhetoric to sounding tough on terror. Entire organizations were born of the need to make Democrats electable by "reclaiming" security. Advocates for global development twisted themselves into knots (us too) wondering how closely to link the threat of terrorism to a straightforward moral entreaty to help the poor and the sick. Would anyone really buy such fluffy platforms in our new, hard power-hungry political climate?

And now comes Barack Obama, who not only refuses to link his hopeful rhetoric to the hard realities of a struggle against terrorism, he takes flak from Democrats and Republicans alike for his relentlessly ebullient message. Granted, Obama has not been tested in a general election; he may yet be forced to delve beneath inspiration and big ideas to compete on the grounds of real policy proposals. But so far Obama's big ideas -- America is a "can-do" place ("Yes we can!"); listeners should be empowered ("You are the change America has been waiting for!") -- the same ones US in the World has been emphasizing for years as gateways to engage the public on global issues, are clearly winning the day.

I admire the way Obama has run his campaign. I admire the fact that he does not accept the conventional wisdom that a long, hard struggle against terrorism will and must define the 21st century (read E.J. Dionne ably challenging John McCain on this). I admire the way he reaches out to Independents and Republicans, during the primary season, who are tired of this old trope. And I resonate with the big ideas he loves to invoke in order to bring Americans together; I've been part of the GII's effort to get global issues advocates to employ these ideas as a way to draw people to our issues for a long time. But while I admire all this, I sure wish he would walk us through the "gateway" ideas he so ably invokes to get our attention and show us what's on the other side. If you needed convincing that the big ideas strategy works, look to further. It's a testament to the power of such ideas (and to Obama himself) that this simple strategy has gotten him so far. But there's got to be something on the other side of the gateway.

If there is something real in there, David Brooks' tongue-in-cheek profile of those of us suffering from "Obama Comedown Syndrome" (OCS) will stay tongue-in-cheek. But the clock is ticking, and OCS may be contagious.

Posted by Josh Weissburg at 11:09 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

The findings from the Center for New American Security and Foreign Policy Magazine survey of "3,400 active and retired officers at the highest levels of command about the state of the U.S. military" are a treasure trove of interesting, disturbing, unsettling and compelling data. Lots of folks are chewing on different pieces of the results.

I was stuck on one piece of information:

For many, it is the most convincing argument against the use of controversial interrogation techniques in the war on terror: If the United States tortures the suspects it captures, it's all the more likely that U.S. soldiers will be tortured by America's enemies. Similar logic underpinned the signing of the Geneva Conventions after World War II. But the index's officers suggest the situation today may be more complex.

When the officers were asked if they agree or disagree with the statement "Torture is never acceptable," opinions were split. Fifty-three percent agreed, and 44 percent disagree. Nineteen percent, nearly 1 in 5 officers, say they "strongly disagree" with the notion that torture is never acceptable. Asked if they believe waterboarding is torture, opinions were similarly divided. About 46 percent of the officers say they agree with the statement "Waterboarding is torture," and about 43 percent say they disagree.

These results suggest that the military itself may be of two minds about the use of torture and what constitutes it. It also suggests that, in the fog of war, even the most emotional and controversial arguments are never cut and dried.

There is a lot in the survey, as I said, worth digging in to. But the torture findings I cite above feel again like a strong signal being sent to civilian leadership and the media. It feels like the torture debate America is having, where we're parsing the meaning of "severe pain or suffering," instead of sharpening our understanding of the importance of the issue, is blunting its impact. We've talked torture to death. It has no meaning.

What's worse, torture has become a partisan brickbat. Whether they want to or not, the GOP has become the party that, by staking out a tough on bad guys stance, is open to torture. Torture victim and presumptive GOP presidential nominee Senator John McCain managed to avoid casting a vote characterizing water boarding as torture. He may be the only person most of us can point to and say, "that guy was tortured."

And the military -- especially retired as well as active duty -- is aware of its position as a part of the partisan infrastructure in Washington. They are a reliably conservative allegedly non-partisan voice, commanding respect and deference, quietly setting the agenda, while allegedly being "led" by civilians and elected officials. The politicization of torture, I believe, is a factor in this steadily rising pro-torture response from members of the military. (Last May, a smaller number said torture was okay.) This very serious issue, which should know no politics, is shrunk down to another talking point, another way to score on your ideological opponent.

My colleague attended the briefing this morning about these findings, and the discussants were able to look more closely at some of the differences in the responses between the wider set of the subset of respondents who had seen combat action in Iraq and Afghanistan. Although the subset who had seen recent action was statistically too small to draw conclusions from, the indication was that they were less warm to torture than the wider group which included retirees and the like. To me this makes sense under my thesis that these results reflect the politicization of this issue. To retirees and career reservists beyond combat age, the politics of this issue play out in the safety of living rooms and op-ed pages. This isn't the case for soldiers who every day face a situation where moral high ground is our only defense against becoming a victim of torture. And that's cold comfort.

Posted by Tarek Rizk at 9:05 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

NFL donates Pats swag to impoverished children in Nicaragua:

MANAGUA, Nicaragua -- The New England Patriots won the Super Bowl and ended the season with a perfect 19-0 record -- at least it looks that way in Nicaragua.

The NFL donated 290 Patriots hats and an equal number of team jerseys trumpeting the slogans "Super Bowl Champions, 19-0" to impoverished children from two small communities in southern Nicaragua.

Thursday's gifts could not change history -- the Patriots lost the Feb. 3 game to the New York Giants 17-14 -- but they made a lot of youngsters in the communities of San Gregorio and Buena Vista very happy, said Miriam Diaz, spokeswoman for the humanitarian organization World Vision, which arranged the donation with the NFL.

"They [Patriots] lost, but the children won," Diaz said.

The only "football" most of the children know is soccer, but they were very enthusiastic about the U.S. version of the game once the rules were explained to them, she said.

"They were very happy to receive the hats and jerseys," Diaz said. "They said they did not expect such a surprise."

Neither did the Patriots.

Posted by Tarek Rizk at 3:06 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

You'll forgive me if I'm distracted this morning. I've discovered a tremendously fun little resource called PolFeeds.com. These folks have tracked down feeds from pretty much every entity around inside and aiming at government and have thrown them all together on this site. You can browse them freely on the site, but the real gold is putting together customized feeds and putting them into your favorite reader.

It's alarming and rewarding, like getting a peek inside Washington's huge, foaming, collective brain.

You can dive headlong into the ongoing debate over renewing the so-called "Protect America Act," and listen to members of Congress foam and fulminate on both sides. You can check the Jedi-Mind-Trick by Oklahoma Republican Senator Jim Inhofe as he subtly offers "corrections" to the Clean Air Act's Renewable Fuels Standards. You can browse past NJ Democratic Senator Bob Menendez as he takes credit for predicting a "tsunami of foreclosures" last year. You can even read about Representative Diane Watson's enshrinement on a Promenade of Prominence Walk of Fame in Ted Watkins Park in the Watts section of Los Angeles.

I am normally a partisan of unfiltered information, and this is certainly not that, at least not in the individual entry. But the aggregate result of seeing all of this information flowing from members of congress, senators, presidential candidates, leadership offices, etc is that you can get a sense -- like drinking from a firehose -- of the output, the multiplicity of threads, the staggering quantity of information, issues, and causes our leaders are managing (or not managing) at any given time. These are all little skirmishes in a battle to control the message, push the trends forward and win the day, the week, the month on their issue.

It's a great way for ordinary people to take a snapshot of what we mean by "inside the Beltway" when we throw that phrase off so carelessly. Take a look.

Posted by Tarek Rizk at 11:03 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

Calls for -- and promises of -- a Civilian Response Corps spring eternal, but the reality seems to hover just beyond the horizon of realistic expectation. Today The Washington Post reported movement toward that horizon, noting that "President Bush's fiscal 2009 budget proposal allocates funds to expand what until now has been little more than a pilot project... The 2009 budget calls for $248 million for the program, up from $7.2 million in the 2007." That is indeed an exponential increase and reason to believe that the U.S. may begin recruiting civilian capacity to deal with the manifold challenges of our stability and reconstruction operations in a serious way.

The Post mentions another reason to believe this civilian capacity will become a reality at last: as we noted in November, Defense Secretary Robert Gates resisted the temptation to leave it all to the military. Instead, he recognized and specifically called for more civilian response capacity. Reports the Post:

"We must focus our energies beyond the guns and steel of the military," Gates said in a November speech. "Based on my experience serving seven presidents, as a former director of CIA and now as secretary of defense, I am here to make the case for strengthening our capacity to use 'soft power' and for better integrating it with 'hard power.' "

Gates acknowledged that arguing for more funds for another agency is considered "blasphemy" at the Pentagon. "It is certainly not an easy sell politically," he said.

The U.S. is fortunate to have a seasoned leader at the Pentagon, someone willing to learn from the failures of the CPA in Iraq. But let's not be shy to point out the research and advocacy that pushed the necessity and refined the structure of the proposed Civilian Response Corps to begin with.

At the risk of creating an Oscar speech, which inevitably run too long but still leave important people out, there are key some key players who deserve honorable mention. Tory Holt at the Stimson Center, Tammy Schultz and others at the Center for New American Security, Stewart Patrick at the Center for Global Development, Lorelei Kelly at The White House Project, Lisa Schirch at the 3D Security Initiative, collaborative efforts like the Alliance for Peacebuilding and the Partnership for Effective Peacekeeping, and the U.S. Global Leadership Campaign each played a critical role in pushing this idea forward to its present, near-realized state.

Our own David Devlin-Foltz had occasion to speak to the Conflict Prevention and Resolution Forum earlier this week, urging others to learn more about the emerging, and increasingly sophisticated, effort to advance peacebuilding as part of comprehensive, smart power approaches to U.S. foreign policy.

Posted by Josh Weissburg at 9:49 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

I spoke yesterday at the National Summit on Citizen Diplomacy and I have the button to prove it!

My own role as a citizen diplomat got off to a shaky start during my junior year in France in 1975. I arrived at breakfast in the student rooming house in Paris where I would be living for the next seven months and identified myself as an American. My new acquaintances in the student rooming house seemed surprised. "Vraiment?," one asked," You don’t seem like one."

I was pleased. Just a few hours into my time in Paris and I had shaken off the stereotypes about ugly Americans -- despite my polyester wardrobe and instinctive patriotism. I beamed and stumbled on in my atrociously limited French: I’m glad that you don’t hate me because of the war in Vietnam. I thought all the French hated us. My new friend grew more puzzled. Wait, he said: where did you say you are from? I’m American, I repeated. “Oh,” he said, “I thought you said you were Moroccan. Now I understand. In fact, you do seem very American. And the Vietnam War was stupid. Also, your pants are ridiculous.”

But with time, a lot of work on my pronunciation, a lot of listening -- and some new clothes -- I formed friendships that continue today. I’d like to think that I helped influence, for the better, the attitudes of my friends, students and colleagues. It was a great experience for me. But what was my net impact?

Organizers of high quality, high touch citizen exchange argue that the number of people influenced goes well beyond the traveler. “High road” citizen exchange, as our friends at World Learning call it, benefits the family the visitor stays with, the surrounding community, the schools or workplaces or organizations she is in contact with. And then the same concentric circles ripple out from the traveler on her return home. That, of course, is central to the value of the Peace Corps beyond its development impact, as we discussed here. It's what makes the Fulbright programs so much more than an academic exercise.

There will be impacts that the traveler herself cannot imagine. But that's why the impact of citizen exchange is so maddeningly difficult to quantify. The National Council for International Visitors, a co-sponsor of the Summit, is meeting this weekend in DC and will be hearing about some new research findings about the long-term value of citizen exchange.

I say this hopefully, as a partisan of citizen diplomacy and someone who makes my living in part from helping NGOs evaluate the impact of their work. Building a cadre of citizen diplomats is a generational challenge. But even the most patient foundation funders tend to think in terms of 3-5 year grant cycles. They want to see impact, but rarely invest heavily in evaluation.

We were heartened to hear from Geoffrey Lamb, the managing director of public policy at the Gates Foundation, that the Foundation believes that it should provide "patient capital" and make truly long-term commitments to solving big problems. Speaking at a forum organized by Johns Hopkins University, Lamb noted as well that Gates will spend up to 25% of a grant on measurement and evaluation to ensure that it is investing well.

We're happy as well that many foundations and think tanks are supporting citizen exchange as one aspect of "smart power." We can do our best to assess the impact of citizen diplomacy, and we must, if citizen diplomacy is to take its rightful place as a well-funded contributor to rebuilding the world's esteem for the United States.

But when and how will we really know how much Franco-American relations were harmed by my plaid double-knit pants in 1975 – or helped by my conversations later that year with guys who are now senior French government officials and business leaders. I’d like to think the balance is positive. But I can’t guarantee it; I mean, those pants really were ridiculous.

Posted by David Devlin-Foltz at 4:38 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

I still get a little sick and sad when I read things about the darkest hollows of America's foreign policy, like Nick Kristof's column on America's torture and illegal detention of al-Jazeera news cameraman Sami al-Hajj, which my colleague just wrote about. Or Lawrence Wright's profile of National Security Director Mike McConnell. Or Jane Mayer's depressing account of the black sites that the CIA uses for torturing our enemies without any legal ramifications.

But I've read these all around the same time, while helping my colleagues think and talk about some events on public diplomacy for one of our clients. (It doesn't help that I'm watching President Bush and his surrogates along with compliant senators of both parties demagogue a breathtaking expansion of US surveillance powers under the simple wink-and-nod promise that you can trust the government not to abuse its power.) And now I'm sitting here feeling like someone punched me in the stomach.

What kind of forward progress would we expect to make on this issue? How are we going to help people confront the challenge of America's banged up image in the world when here, this week, today, our government is force-feeding indefinitely detained members of the media in Guantanamo Bay and coordinating sham trials and legally dubious executions for our enemies?

But I digress. Kristof has spent the last few months reforming his column in some ways, writing still what he feels will jolt people out of their seats but not always slamming the door on hope and choosing misery over solutions. But his New York Times blog -- mainly via the work of his aid worker, school teacher, and public health specialist contributors -- is a whole different animal. It was clicking this link that threw me a lifeline.

Kristof notes that, it may be a meaningless gesture, but perhaps you can write Sami al-Hajj a note of apology. Then his Rwanda-based Columbia University public health expert Josh Ruxin writes about an innovative approach to tackle preventable diseases that end so many lives in Africa. Next I read his response to reader comments about a column praising (mostly conservative) evangelical Christians for being leaders on humanitarian aid abroad.

Kristof's blog is an antidote to his column. It's something that sits me down and makes me think it's not all that bad, that the slow, grinding work of some glacial change -- say changing America's image abroad -- is still progress.

Over years of life in Washington as an advocate, activist and communicator, I've learned over years to work hard to strike a balance this way. It's hard to resist the urge to fulminate and spit (and I spit around here a lot, in my off time) but there's no value in digging too deeply, living too closely to these agonizing contradictions. We can't expect to take short term gains, for instance, in improving the way America is viewed around the world. Not today or tomorrow. But Dr. King said the arc of the moral universe is long but it bends toward justice. There will be a time when our nation isn't bearing forth such shameful acts in all our names. And then we can begin, with each simple, human interaction, rebuilding all that we've lost.

Posted by Tarek Rizk at 4:28 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

With at least one client that is heavily invested in the the subject, we at the GII spend a fair amount of time thinking about the challenge of public diplomacy. We've noted many a time on this blog the challenge of making gains in this area when policy choices undercut the United States' "common interests and values" outreach.

Nicholas Kristof argues that legitimate policy differences (think: should we maintain military bases in Saudi Arabia?) are one thing, but Guantanamo represents something else entirely:

If the Bush administration appointed an Under Secretary of State for Antagonizing the Islamic World, with advice from a Blue Ribbon Commission for Sullying America’s Image, it couldn’t have done a more systematic job of discrediting our reputation around the globe. Instead of using American political capital to push for peace in the Middle East or Darfur, it is using it to force-feed Sami al-Hajj, an Al Jazeera cameraman who is on a hunger strike to protest abuse during more than six years in a Kafkaesque prison system...

Defense Secretary Robert Gates and Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice pushed last year to close Guantánamo because of its wretched impact on American foreign policy. But they lost the argument to Alberto Gonzales and Dick Cheney. So America spends millions of dollars bolstering public diplomacy and sponsoring chipper radio and television broadcasts to the Islamic world — and then undoes it all with Guantánamo.

Like Kristof, I "originally gave President Bush the benefit of the doubt and assumed that the inmates truly were 'the worst of the worst.' But evidence has grown that many are simply the unluckiest of the unluckiest."

Guantanamo has been a rallying cry for civil libertarians (and simply for ashamed Americans) for years. But if you do public diplomacy advocacy (or if you work for a presidential candidate), think about Kristof's reminder as a strategy tip too: the quickest way toward recouping America's sullied image in the Arab world likely has a lot more to do with Guantanamo that it does with skillful media relations or a revamped USIA.

Posted by Josh Weissburg at 3:46 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

(Image courtesy of Lael Brainard's “Security by Other Means: Foreign Assistance, Global Poverty and American Leadership.”)

A new report from the Carnegie Endowment assesses the reforms to U.S. development assistance overseen by Randall Tobias under Secretary Rice. Carnegie finds, much as others have, that "Reforms aimed at making foreign assistance an instrument of the administration’s “transformational diplomacy,” and ensuring greater transparency and oversight instead created an overly centralized and complex system that was rushed into practice."

Among the key conclusions from Carnegie's report on the State/USAID overhaul:

• The new system confuses strategic decisions, which should be made in Washington, with tactical ones better suited to context-knowledgeable field officers. Reforms also require that any change made to a foreign assistance project receive approval from the newly created Director of Foreign Assistance (DFA) position, creating huge potential for gridlock.
• In the quest for greater strategic control, the reorganization actually diminishes Washington’s ability to evaluate the objectives and successes of foreign assistance projects. Detailed narratives which provided rationale for programs under the old system have been replaced by a complex, numbered grid system that lacks critical information, making a serious assessment of projects in Washington difficult.
• The reorganization was led by “core country teams,” the members of which, in many instances, had only a passing knowledge of the country they were to plan for. The implementation process also failed to involve many key stakeholders, including ambassadors, USAID missions, and congressional leaders.
• The reorganization was instituted due in large part to the Secretary’s inability to answer congressional inquiries regarding U.S. spending on democracy promotion. The new system places an exaggerated emphasis on the ultimately futile attempt to instantly report on U.S. foreign assistance expenditures and detail the outcomes of an $11 billion program.

What sort of reform might actually work? I'm partial to the HELP Commission's recommendations.

Posted by Josh Weissburg at 3:04 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

I'm always impressed when an organization that has a vested interest in keeping the foreign aid business chugging makes a real effort to push aid reform forward. It's easy for such organizations to affirm that relief and development assistance needs a makeover when asked but concentrate the bulk of the organization's energies on getting more aid, rather than better.

Oxfam America has avoided the temptation to help the bottom line while letting the reform process languish; they're devoting resources to a Reform Aid campaign with its own website (www.reformaid.org) and talking points. This isn't a back room policy detail -- it's a real priority. Bravo Oxfam America.

Posted by Josh Weissburg at 4:50 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

Just a few things we're reading this week, as we run hither and yon supporting our great nation's right to vote...

• Check out a thoughtful look at the world of online philanthropy as part of Slate.com's Slate 60 philanthropy special this week.
• Michael Cohen at Democracy Arsenal questions whether the missing ingredient of a successful foreign policy was the ability of a president to "scare the snot out of our enemies," as Max Boot avers.
• Via kottke.org, I came across this awesome item about Southern Hospitality, in which a writer with a video camera, $20, and a mandate to not reveal he's working for ESPN talks his way into a NASCAR race, two meals and a bed for the night from some nice folks in Virginia.
• Finally, 3 Quarks Daily found this interesting piece in the Chicago Tribune about the charged nature of archaeology in Israel.

Posted by Tarek Rizk at 4:36 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

From a political perspective, the Democrats have it together this time around. Clinton and Obama agree on the big stuff: get out of Iraq, improve education and economic prospects for struggling American families, reform health care. The Republicans are divided and struggling to come to terms with President Bush's legacy.

While this works wonders on the campaign trail (and makes for two very compelling Democratic candidates -- "Yes We Can!"), David Brooks argues that these common Democratic platforms will not survive the weight of office. The big issues -- when to draw down in Iraq and how much, which domestic programs to spend on in the midst of an economic downturn -- will force some very difficult choices for Democrats.

That is not to say that our next president will find it impossible to make smart decisions that require careful evaluation and painful tradeoffs. Only Democrats should view the promises of this campaign in the light of the real choices their candidate would face in the years to come.

Posted by Josh Weissburg at 3:25 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

We're not professional prognosticators here at the GII. And I, for one, famously have a love-hate relationship with my own ability to screw things up for one side in any contest by supporting that side (known informally as the "touch of poo"). So I try to stay away from advocacy in the early going outside of the odd yard sign or ring tone.

Not so President Bush who this weekend continued his national barnstorming campaign in support of presumptive GOP nominee John McCain. McCain and Bush are currently enjoying a more harmonious time in their relationship than in the past.

Outside of President Bush, conservatives seem to be spending more of their time talking about the Democratic contest. Bill Kristol may have trained his own touch of poo on the campaign of Senator Barack Obama in his New York Times column this morning. And buried in this LA Times piece (via MSNBC's First Read), Colin Powell (who passed an inauspicious anniversary last week with nary a mention outside of liberal blogs) said he was open to voting for a Democrat for president and went on to praise Senator Obama.

Doesn't matter to me who you vote for tomorrow. Just vote.

Posted by Tarek Rizk at 12:20 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

The Army has had to grapple with what it means to "win the peace" in Iraq and Afghanistan for years. It's no stranger to the idea that the real battle is for hearts and minds. That comes out in nearly every interview and piece of Congressional testimony I've heard from senior Army officers. It stands to reason, then, that the Army has at last updated its operations manual to put these lessons into Army doctrine.

Military officials described the new document, the first new edition of the Army’s comprehensive doctrine since 2001, as a major development that draws on the hard-learned lessons of Iraq and Afghanistan, where initial military successes gave way to long, grueling struggles to establish control.

It is also an illustration of how far the Pentagon has moved beyond the Bush administration’s initial reluctance to use the military to support “nation-building” efforts when it came into office.

But some influential officers are already arguing that the Army still needs to put actions behind its new words, and they have raised searching questions about whether the Army’s military structure, personnel policies and weapons programs are consistent with its doctrine.

Now to the hard part: budgets and priorities will have to change to reflect the new doctrine. "Structure, personnel policies and weapons programs" will not evolve as easily.

Posted by Josh Weissburg at 3:24 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)