I’ve been a deficit hawk for a long time.  I spent the whole Bush Administration railing about the consequences of deficit spending, and though I am a strong Obama supporter, I’ve been pretty brutal on him from the beginning.  In 2009, I wrote:

BernardFinel.com » The Fiscal Abyss

Look… I understand the reality of this. Republicans run up massive deficits in order to constrain Democratic administrations. It is fundamentally undemocratic behavior. And sooner or later, a Democratic president was going to come along and say, “screw it, I am not going to allow my agenda to be dictated by the dead hand of past Republican idiocy.” But, the fact is that this is a disaster looming:

White House Adds $2 Trillion to Deficit Forecasts – washingtonpost.com

The nation would be forced to borrow more than $9 trillion over the next decade under President Obama’s policies, the White House acknowledged late Friday, bringing their long-term budget forecast in line with independent estimates.

We’re going to add $9 trillion to our national debt… IF WE’RE LUCKY. This assumes no double-dip recession. It assumes no major terrorist attacks. It assumes no other wars. It assumes no more financial meltdowns. It assumes no disruption in oil supply. $9 trillion in new debt is the BEST CASE.

I’ve continued in this vein since, writing this in 2010:

BernardFinel.com » Debating Obama’s Present and Palin’s Future

The issue for me was not “inflation.” It was we were going down a path where interest rates were going to spike, blowing a hole out of business investment and the country’s fiscal posture. And I believed (and continue to believe) that unconstrained deficit spending will lead to a double-dip recession due to the disastrous consequences of a massive increase in our debt, ballooning interest payments (particularly to foreign investors), and a fiscal crunch that will make our current problems look like child’s play. We’ve been funding our new debt with short-term t-bills, and so we could see massive interest rate moves very rapidly, leading to a rapidly deteriorating fiscal picture. So, interest, not inflation was — and is — my concern.

The reality is that the consequences are going to be more severe than just passing along debt to our children. Our current fiscal insanity is very likely to severely affect our global position. 

Over at his site, Fabius Maximus lays out some of the potential consequences of a significant economic downturn, though he seems to see the main danger as one of insufficient stimulus, and hence avoidable, whereas I see the fundamental problem as a structural fragility in the economy introduced by Bush’s deficits. His policies put us in a position where there are simply no effective counter-cyclical instruments because we’re already near the zero bound on monetary options and additional fiscal stimulus is likely to lead to a crisis of confidence in the American government causing interest payments to spike and sucking money out of the economy as a result.

Anyway, regardless of how we get there, FM and I share a similarly pessimistic assessment about the near to mid-term outlook for the U.S. economy.  His view of the geopolitical consequences are the following:

Some thoughts on the political effects of a long recession « Fabius Maximus

We can say little about the new order. Here are some guesses.

* China will become a great power, again The Middle Kingdom.
* The US will no longer be sending our troops into other nations at the drop of a hat, as we have since the Spanish-American War — and doubly so since WWII. We can no longer afford the necessary military machinery (which we run today only by loans from China, Japan, and OPEC).
* More countries will get nukes, which will dampen down regional conflicts (as it did in the Middle East and China-India).
* Violent conflict will take new forms, probably intense economic war and 4GW.
* Technological change will continue, bringing humanity kicking and screaming into a better world.

All of those consequences strike me as plausible.  I also think this will raise a fundamental challenge to the United States, not as a matter of national security, but as a matter of self-perception.  Consider the China case.  The notion that China could become a co-equal player to the United States scares a lot of  Very Serious People in Washington.  It is considered wholly self-evident that a world in which China is more assertive and the United States more constrained would be bad.  But would it?

We make a mistake to thinking of China as a challenger in the mode of Germany (1914-45) or the Soviet Union (1917-89). I am going to channel my old professor from SAIS, George Liska, an old-school European geopolitical theorist.  Liska noted that a fundamental ordering pattern in international politics was the competition between land powers and sea powers.  The difference, though, is not about the source of military might — navies vs. armies; the difference is a function of international orientation and commercial interests.  Land powers, traditionally, less reliant on trade and overseas communication tend toward autarky, and are tempted to use threats to the open international order as a way to pursue state interests.  They, thus, seek to foment instability as a way to dissipate the capabilities of their sea power rivals, and they also are willing to directly threat communication links.  As a result, their power position is inherently a threat to the livelihood and way of life of sea powers.

But China is, as a matter of international orientation, much more of a sea power than a land power, even though its military capabilities are focused on ground forces rather than naval forces.  China is tremendously reliant on international trade, commerce, and finance.  People sometimes tell me that the growth of Chinese military capabilities creates a latent threat that they might choose to use it to deny us access to trade… but how would that serve their geopolitical interests?

The point is the rise of China, as a structural matter, resembles the challenge posed by the United States to Britain in the late 19th Century moreso than it does the rise of Germany in the early 20th Century or the Soviet Union after World War II.  The main challenge for the United States is not facing down China, it is figuring out how to best accommodate and co-opt China to play a stabilizing role in the emerging world order.  The main threat is not that they will work against our interests, the main threat is that we will try to maintain American hegemony and thus spurn a potential strategic partner.

The same is true on several other points FM makes.  Some Americans will bemoan our diminished capacity for foreign interventions, when as a matter of national strategy these interventions are — and have almost always been — counter-productive.  I am less sanguine than he about the impact of the spread of nuclear weapons, but while that may prove to be a regional problem, it need not pose a fundamental threat to U.S. interests.

We could, in short, with sufficient wisdom and leadership manage a transition to a new “new world order” in such a way that neither American prosperity nor political independence are jeopardized.  But that will require a thoughtful and careful pruning of responsibilities and a cultivation of successors and partners in global management.

Unfortunately, we won’t do that.  Just as simply continuing Clinton-era fiscal policies would have left us in better shape, we’re likely to shoot ourselves in the foot in terms of managing international transition.  We’re going to hold on too hard and too long to our current dominance, and as a result we’ll likely miss the opportunity to establish a new set of global institutions.

The Long Recession is going to affect international politics.  The United States is going to have to accept a diminished role in the world.  The only question is whether we do it with wisdom and embrace emerging opportunities, or whether we do it kicking and screaming wasting resources and destroying relationships in the process.

I think Yglesias is right on this point:

Matthew Yglesias » Home Page

But anyone who is holding out on reform out of fear of empowering future Republican majorities should consider that for all the reasons Democrats will have the chance to change the rules in January 2011, Republicans will be able to change the rules in 2013 or 2015 or whenever else. The only reason filibustering has been allowed for as long as it has has been because of strong norms against its over-use. But those norms have been eroding for decades. The idea that Senate majorities are going to allow this trend to continue indefinitely is silly. The way this movie goes is that the downward spiral of obstruction continues until some majority gets sick of it and changes the rules. The question is when will the rules change not will they be changed.

And though he doesn’t say it, I think I understand why he is sanguine about this change, and why I would support it as well.  The problem we have right now is essentially zero accountability because the public can’t figure out who is responsible for what comes out of Washington.  People are pissed out that our government seems unable to do anything in a timely fashion and then proceeds to blame the party in power. 

But the issue is not an abstract one of accountability.  See here is what I suspect Matt is thinking.  I think he thinks that the best thing for progressive politics would be for the Republicans to be able to actually implement their policy preferences.  More wars, tax cuts for the rich, gutting of entitlements, outlawing abortion, expelling illegals, the whole she-bang.  In the short-run, of course, the result would be disastrous.  In the long-run, it would put an end, once and for all, to much of right-wing agenda.

But similarly, conservatives should support this argument.  You think Obama and Pelosi and Reid are socialists and that the country is actually center-right?  Well, put your money where your mouth is.  Let them govern along majority-rules principles and see whether the country embraces or rejects the results.  My guess is that more progressive taxation, better regulation of financial entities, greater access to medical care, a heavier reliance on clean energy produced in the United States through some sort of cap-and-trade scheme, campaign finance reform that ensures transparency of funding, and well, the rest of the Democratic/progressive/liberal agenda would actually be pretty damn popular once people saw that it did not actually move us in the direction of the serfdom.

The reality is, the theory of conservative politics — small government, low taxes, more religion — is more popular than the real consequences — crumbling infrastructure, cycles of booms and busts, massive concentrations of wealth, and censorship and harassment in the name of “family values.”  Whereas, Democratic preferences tend to be more popular in practice than in the abstract.  I think, as a practical matter, conservatives like the filibuster, in part, because it allows them to pander to their base by promoting policies that they know would be disastrous if implemented.  Just one example…. imagine where the GOP would be if Bush had managed to privatize social security right before the stock market lost 40%.

Yesterday, wrote a post where I argued, in full:

For the record, I don’t condone leaking secrets. But nor do I condone a policy that can only work in secret.

Yes, there are some narrow tactical initiatives that make sense as covert action. But, even then, secrecy is a wasting asset, and any strategy that requires secrecy in the long-term is likely doomed to failure.

This provoked a surprisingly animated response from Aaron Ellis, where he writes:

The strangest comment to come out of it so far, at least as far as this blog is concerned, comes from Bernard Finel.

….

Finel is a very intelligent guy, but I don’t have a clue what this actually means. In an exchange on Twitter, he seemed to be saying that our informants in Afghanistan shouldn’t be kept secret because, er, secrecy in the long-run is doomed to failure, er, yeah. And if they’re killed because Wikileaks published all their names and details, then the US strategy is also to blame for their death because those informants shouldn’t have been kept secret because, er, secrecy, you know, in the long-run, er, is doomed to failure. What the what?!

Let’s break this down, shall we?

Our strategy in Afghanistan is posited on our ability to defeat the insurgency by building up Afghan institutional capable of providing security and good governance.  In order to do so, we must work with Afghans all across the country on a myriad initiates and activities.  We have to build infrastructure.  We have to train security forces.  We have to work with local political leaders to ensure projects and activities are responsive to local needs and concerns. We need to gather information on insurgent activities.

Much of what the Wikileaks documents reveal is precisely that, the thousands of meetings, connections, and initiatives that form the basis of a population-centric counter-insurgency campaign.

But, according to some concerned observers making these sorts of banal contacts public threatens the Afghan participants. Joshua Foust describes the concern:

This is a much more serious issue than most people realize. Abaceen Nasimi, an Afghan who’s traveling around the country and tweeting about it, worries this morning, “The Wiki leaks is going to get lots of people into the hit list of Taleban, even if the names are not real.”

“What a mess,” he adds.

Adam Serwer, a staff writer for the American Prospect, tweeted this morning, “Former Military Intelligence Officer sez of wikileaks, ‘Its an AQ/Taliban execution team’s treasure trove.’”

We have, in short, a strategy that requires deep, constant, and br0ad-based cooperation between Americans and Afghans, but that also — if all the people worked up about Wikileaks are to be believed — one that requires somehow keeping all of these thousands upon thousands of contacts secret for a period of several years at least.

As a practical matter, I think the concerns for the lives of Afghan partners is probably largely accurate.  They are at greater risk due to the the leaks.  But similarly, I think it was always unrealistic to assume such secrecy count be maintained.  Two follow-on points:

(1) The scale of the leak is massive, and certainly this gives the insurgency an ability to make make effective intelligence assessment of our intentions.  The size of the leak and the ability to search and cross-reference incidence and contacts gives the insurgents a dramatically enhanced ability to connect the dots.  This is a bad.  That said, many of the individual data points — whether they are infrastructure projects, civilian casualties incidents, or even contacts between individual Afghans and coalition forces — were probably already known to elements of the insurgency.  Why?  Because the sheer scope of the interactions is so large that the insurgents would have to be wholly inept to not notice it. And they are not inept.

(2) To the extent that we are promising protection to people who work with us, we’re writing a check we can’t cash.  Possibly the United States has the capacity to ultimately suppress insurgent activity so that it is no longer a threat to political stability. But it is impossible to prevent reprisals against individuals.  In short, if we can’t keep it secret, we can’t protect them.

Because we can’t provide individualized security, we have to keep individual contacts with American force secret, but we can’t keep them secret because the sheer scale of interactions is so large that even in the absence of a data dump, local intelligence and rumors will give them away.  We’re not the only ones with informants. But if we can’t keep it secret and as a consequence can’t keep “collaborators” safe, then either Afghans will shy away from working with us, or will play a double-game and hedge their bets with the insurgents.  Indeed, I am slightly less alarmed about the human consequences than some because I suspect the latter is already taking place.  Many of the Afghans who are being “outed” in these reports, likely had already “outed” themselves by going to the insurgents and sharing information with them as a hedge… which is part of the reason why our COIN campaign is not working as well as some had hoped.  Lots of hedging and playing both sides going on.

In short, we have a strategy of deep engagement that requires keeping this engagement secret in order to avoid the murder of those who are genuinely cooperating with us and in order to avoid people playing both sides.

From the specific to the general: Secrecy is always a wasting asset.  In warfare deception and operational security is an important element of operational planning, but it only needs to be temporary, until the blow is struck.  You need to keep the date and location of D-Day secret, but only until D-Day.  But what we require in Afghanistan is not just a temporary secrecy in order to launch a military attack, what we require is a wholesale cover-up of banal and mundane contacts for a period of multiple years.

Our need for secrecy in Afghanistan is a direct consequence of a poorly conceived approach to counter-insurgency that wholly fails to address the challenges of being a third party, external actor in the conflict.  The United States is a major source of illegitimacy in Afghan.  The reality is this causes problems even when contact is relatively limited — we cause problems for the Saudi and Egyptian regimes, for instance, even though we don’t meddle in their domestic politics at all.

The problem is that we have a fundamental failure of strategy in Afghanistan related to the dynamics of third party interventions in civil conflicts, but instead of addressing that directly, we’re trying to disguise it by hiding the level of contact with individual Afghans.  Secrecy in this case is an effort to rescue our Afghan policy from the strategic incoherence imposed by trying to apply a flawed and limited doctrine to the case.

So, it isn’t that the informants shouldn’t be kept secret, it is that the strategy of having Afghans provide intelligence (and cooperate) directly with a foreign occupying power is fundamentally flawed.  We shouldn’t put them in that position.  And when the edifice comes crumbling down — as it inevitably would, either piecemeal of altogether due to a catastrophic leak — it is simply a mistake to blame the consequences on Wikileaks.  We doused the house in gasoline, and it seems to me peculiar to insist that blame for the conflagration ought to only be assigned to the person who happens to strike the match.

There is another element of the secrecy problem, and that is the reality that public support for the war in the United States requires keeping the American public in the dark about key facts — including the role of Pakistan, the corruption and ineffectiveness of our allies, the likelihood that in the end reconciliation will allow “terrorists” to join the Afghan government, the large number of Afghan civilians killed, etc.  This is another place where strategy and secrecy come in conflict, but I think this point is sufficiently self-explanatory that I see no reason to expand on it.

James Joyner writes:

Balancing Secrecy and Democracy

There are legitimate operational secrets to be kept while we’re at war. Additionally, the fact that information shared with the American people is also shared with our enemies and the publics of situational allies makes transparency and full candor difficult. But our leaders owe it to us to present a realistic account of where we are in this thing rather than engaging in feel good propaganda.

The problem — and I don’t know whether Bernard and I are in agreement here — is how to balance these competing interests.

I agree 100% and it is difficult.  And I also agree with James’ other concerns — about junior operatives making decisions on their own assessment of “whistle blowing,” about the likely response of the IC which will be to tighten access, and about the likely response of foreign governments not to trust us.

But that said, this issue is raising two fundamental challenges of COIN/state-building:

(1) These long, drawn-out conflicts breed cynicism and disillusionment.  Just as a decade at war created a kind of arrogant disdain for civilian control in McChrystal’s staff, it also created in some IC and military analysts a corrosive cynicism about authority and rules.  These are the flip sides of the same coin, and both are the result of fighting drawn-out, grinding conflicts.

(2) A fundamental challenge of COIN by third parties is that the outside party is a fundamental source of illegitimacy.  Everything we touch instantly acquires the patina of imperialism. So, in order to be “successful” we need to camouflage our role.  But as a practical matter, we can’t do it. We are the ones training and equipping (and partnering with) Afghan security forces.  We’re the ones financing infrastructure projects.  We’re the ones trying to mediate local disputes.  And every time we do any of those things, we’re putting our partners and collaborators at risk.  But you can’t hope to keep the level of contact and cooperative envisaged by our COIN operational guidance secret.  Most of Afghanistan’s GDP can be traced back to U.S. sources today.  I just don’t see how this level of involvement can ever been effectively hidden.

So, yes, we need to balance operational secrecy with the transparency required for democratic accountability, but we also need to avoid strategic choices that exacerbate these tensions.  Our approach to COIN seems designed to expose every imaginable weaknesses in our capabilities. Given our capabilities and our system of government, we are currently pursuing the worst possible strategic option and most misusing our national strengths.

Joshua Foust writes:

The Wiki-leak is more and less important than you think | Need to Know | PBS

And you know an Afghan was speaking to a U.S. soldier or intelligence agent. If you have times, locations, and half the participants, you don’t need names to identify who was involved in a conversation — with some very basic detective work, you can find out (and it’s much easier to do in Afghanistan, which loves gossip).
….
If I was a Taliban operative with access to a computer — and lots of them have access to computers—I’d start searching the Wikileaks data for incident reports near my area of operation to see if I recognized anyone. And then I’d kill whomever I could identify. Those deaths would be directly attributable to Wikileaks.

I would be more likely to attribute the deaths to the Taliban.  I’d also say that some of the responsibility would be shared by American authorities who requested the meetings without being able to provide security to the participants. Frankly, on the list of people to whom I would attribute the death of the Afghan in question, Wikileaks would be pretty low on my list.

The reality is that this is a long-standing problem of collaborators in conflicts.  Usually they come at risk because they are denounced by enemies and rivals, but it is also common for files to be stolen or abandoned.  When East Germany fell, of course, Germans raided the HQ of the Stasi to find names of collaborators.  When the Iranians “students” seized the U.S. Embassy in 1979, the laboriously reconstructed shredded documents to find CIA contacts in country.

The point is, the idea that the United States could embark on a large-scale state building initiative in Afghanistan and somehow keep secret years worth of meetings with locals working on construction contracts and even providing tactical intelligence is hard to fathom.  Any such strategy must begin with the assumption that local collaborators will ultimately be made public, with the logical implications for security and cooperation that flow out of that realization. 

Foust also says:

The Wiki-leak is more and less important than you think | Need to Know | PBS

Radical transparency sounds like a really great idea until you ponder the real consequences. We keep secrets all the time, for very good reasons, whether personal or professional. In the IC, those secrets are kept secret for a very good reason: releasing them to the public will cause irreparable harm to our country’s security.

I am always fascinated by this sort of claim. Maybe it is true. But it is surprisingly difficult to document. The number of security breaches that have caused “irreparable harm to our country’s security” is vanishingly small. Yes, they do sometimes cause human suffering, as the release of the Wikileaks documents likely will.  But “irreparable harm”? That seems like a high standard, does it not?

For the record, I don’t condone leaking secrets. But nor do I condone a policy that can only work in secret.

Yes, there are some narrow tactical initiatives that make sense as covert action. But, even then, secrecy is a wasting asset, and any strategy that requires secrecy in the long-term is likely doomed to failure.

This is the piece of the wikileaks documents that has gotten the most coverage, I think:

Pakistan Aids Insurgency in Afghanistan, Reports Assert – NYTimes.com

Americans fighting the war in Afghanistan have long harbored strong suspicions that Pakistan’s military spy service has guided the Afghan insurgency with a hidden hand, even as Pakistan receives more than $1 billion a year from Washington for its help combating the militants, according to a trove of secret military field reports made public Sunday.
….
The records also contain firsthand accounts of American anger at Pakistan’s unwillingness to confront insurgents who launched attacks near Pakistani border posts, moved openly by the truckload across the frontier, and retreated to Pakistani territory for safety.
….
The reports suggest, however, that the Pakistani military has acted as both ally and enemy, as its spy agency runs what American officials have long suspected is a double game — appeasing certain American demands for cooperation while angling to exert influence in Afghanistan through many of the same insurgent networks that the Americans are fighting to eliminate.

A few points:

(1) What is new is not the suspicion that Pakistan may be aiding the insurgency.  What is new is that this assessment is not just held by anti-war critics, but also by people inside the U.S. military. I have no way of confirming this assessment, nor judging how widely held this assessment is.  But if this is a broadly held consensus, it is significant for at least two reasons.
(A) It shows that various outside analysts were quite close to the mark in terms of the problem posed by Pakistan’s search for “strategic depth” in Afghanistan.  This goes beyond the insurgent sanctuary problem, but also confirms its existence. There has been a lot of wishful thinking about our ability to essentially isolate Afghanistan as a battlefield, and insufficient consideration of the consequences for the conflict, if, in the final analysis, it is impossible to eliminate the insurgent sanctuary in Pakistan.  That said, some of these documents are old, and it is unclear how much has changed on this issue in the meantime.
(B) Again, if these documents paint an accurate picture, it reveals a troubling disconnect between public pronouncements and private assessments.  Ultimately, democratic governance and accountability requires giving the public sufficient information to make informed decisions. Keep doubts and concerns private may serve legitimate strategic objectives, but we need to acknowledge that our strategic objectives in Afghanistan may be at odds with the requirements of democratic governance at home.  In short, is it ever worth fighting a war that requires your to compromise and weaken accountability at home?

(2) The United States clearly needs to make some tough choices with regard Pakistani interests in Afghanistan.  My assessment has long been that Pakistan perceives that it has compelling national interests at stake in Afghanistan.  Though my assessment is that many of these “interests” are in fact illusory — notably the “strategic depth” concept — my assessment is wholly irrelevant.  Unfortunately, it is my impression that American policy has been too heavily reliant on the notion that we might ultimately be able to talk Pakistan around to a more “reasonable” assessment of their interests on the ground.  Again, it is possible that circumstances have already changed, but on the whole it strikes me as more likely that Pakistan perceptions represent a durable assessment of strategic interests, and that as a consequence American policy needs to be pursued based on a clear-eyed view of how the Pakistanis seek Afghanistan rather than how we would wish to see it.  The consequence of this assessment is to push American thinking toward the achievement of minimalist goals, since at least some of our maximalist agenda in Afghanistan is likely to be in conflict with Pakistani preferences.

(3) I think it remains unclear whether Pakistan is ultimately a source of encouragement or of restraint vis-a-vis the Afghan insurgency.  It is likely elements of both.  But I think it is a mistake to assume that Pakistani involvement with the insurgent — if an accurate judgment — is necessarily fundamentally at odds with American interests — even if it at odds with American strategy.  In short, I think it is reasonable to ask whether Pakistani involvement with the insurgency might not prove to be a source of leverage were we the reconceptualize our approach around seeking to managing Afghanistan rather than “win.”

(4) The political consequences of these leaks are likely to be massive.  U.S.-Pakistani relations are going to hit a very rocky patch.  Key now is to think about the long-run.  But there will be a lot of demands for ratcheting up pressure on Pakistan, which is likely, I think, to be counter-productive.

I’ll be writing more about these documents today and tomorrow.

What an interesting weekend! I’ll have some things to say about the Wikileaks documents, but my comments will be perhaps a bit more circumspect than usual and I want to address that issue now.

After three and a half years, I am leaving the American Security Project at the end of this week to return to a faculty position at the National War College. Both because of this transition and because I’ll be on the DoD payroll starting next week and am as yet unsure about the specific guidance and constraints now given to NWC faculty, I’ll try to be a little careful in how I word my comments. Point is, my tone is likely going to change a little from here on out, so I felt an acknowledgment of this was appropriate.