States of stupidity (guest post by Peter T.)

In mid-2014, Obama defined the core of his foreign policy as “don't do stupid shit.”  Obama followed up by normalising relations with Cuba, negotiating a detente on nuclear matters with Iran that deprived the U.S. neo-cons of a potential casus belli, and refusing to be drawn into the ground war in Syria and Iraq.  Not doing stupid shit is a low threshold, and critics have charged that even so, it has not always been met.  Doubtless so, but it was a welcome contrast to the previous administration that made stupid routine.  Here, I want to look at one part of U.S. policy in the Middle East, a part that surely merits the label “stupid,” a part that just looks as if it went from being merely stupid to being moronic.

This Huffington Post piece by Jeffrey Sachs more or less covers the background.[*]  In focusing on Secretary Clinton's role, however, it misses an interesting point.  As Sachs notes, the CIA has done stupid stuff with disastrous consequences at least once a decade since its inception.  Further, as the CIA's effort in Syria has gone from muddle to failure post-Clinton, it has not therefore slackened.  Even as Kerry was negotiating a limited cease-fire (labeled a "cessation of hostilies"), the CIA stepped up arms deliveries and its foreign government partners were threatening armed intervention.

So this is not just Hillary Clinton, or Obama.  One explanation is to see this sort of thing as the real face of U.S. policy.  Another is to see it as the play of bureaucratic and other interests allowed some degree of play.  A third possibility, though, is to see it as an example of a state which has no single locus of decision – a state with multiple independent centres of power.

This challenges our ordinary conception of the state.  But examples are not hard to find. One thinks of the British and French frontier officers who often drove imperial expansion in the nineteenth century, sporadically checked by some areas of home government and encouraged by others.  Or the American settlers whose actions negated treaties with native tribes even as they were signed.  Or the way the German General Staff formulated military plans without regard for the Foreign Office, or how the French Foreign Ministry neglected to formally communicate a key diplomatic agreement to their general staff.  A final example is Japan in the 1930s.  Who was in charge: Tokyo or the young officers of the Kwantung Army?  The answer surely is both.

The possibility is that the CIA is so embedded in Washington and foreign networks of influence that it is effectively beyond the control of the formal mechanisms of the U.S. state. Certain versions of international-relations theory view states as single, "unitary" actors.  More realistic theories take into account the play of internal forces that shape decisions. Both approaches assume that, however arrived at and however discordant or contradictory, policy is at least the expression of a unified process.  The examples above suggest this is not always the case.

-- Peter T.

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[*] I have certain disagreements with the Sachs piece that I plan to address at some later point.  I will add that guest posts at this blog obviously represent the views of the guest author and do not necessarily represent, down to every detail, the views of the blog's proprietor. -- LFC

Roots and implications of the Iran nuclear deal

Peter T., who has guest-posted and commented insightfully at this blog, sent me an analysis (link) of the Iran deal by Sharmine Narwani.  She argues, essentially, that the changed strategic situation in the region represented by the rise of ISIS and its gains in Syria and Iraq (and continued strength of other extremist Sunni groups, e.g. the Nusra Front) drove the U.S. to make an opening to Iran in 2012 in order to take "the old American-Iranian 'baggage' off the table..., allowing [the U.S. administration] the freedom to pursue more pressing shared political objectives with Iran."  Iran stood up to 'the Empire' and its allies, Narwani maintains, rode out UN sanctions, and emerged with an agreement that, in exchange for sanctions relief, blocks it from doing something it never wanted to do in the first place: namely, acquire an operational nuclear weapons capability.

While Narwani's assessment has its strong points, it perhaps goes too far in painting a rosy prospect of Iranian-U.S. strategic cooperation in the region.  The two countries do not have formal diplomatic relations; unilateral U.S. sanctions on Iran that are unrelated to its nuclear program but relate to its support for groups such as Hezbollah are, afaik, unaffected by the nuclear deal; and 36 years of 'baggage' cannot be entirely taken off the table, istm, in one fell swoop. The past several decades must have left a substantial residue of psychological scar tissue between Iran and the U.S. that no agreement, no matter how 'win-win' in its basic structure, can remove overnight.

Narwani's piece looks behind certain statements of the principals to get at what she thinks are the real motivations behind the deal.  This mode of proceeding is not without merit, but it risks overlooking some points.  The main U.S. ally in the region, for better or worse, is Israel, to the maintenance of whose military superiority -- its 'qualitative military edge', in the ghastly-sounding bureaucratic phrase -- the U.S. is committed to the tune of several billion dollars a year (a commitment that may go up).  This fact standing alone imposes certain limits on the degree to which Iran and the U.S. can jointly pursue their "shared political objectives".  Iran's human rights record and the fact that it still has several American citizens, one of whom is an American-Iranian reporter for The Washington Post, in custody also tells against an immediate warming of U.S.-Iran relations in the wake of the deal (assuming the deal survives congressional scrutiny and Obama retains enough congressional support to sustain a veto of a disapproval resolution, which I think he will).

Finally, it might be worth scrutinizing the "shared political objectives" of the U.S. and Iran a bit more closely.  Iran is of course a major backer of Assad.  And the fact that the Pentagon, as detailed for example in a front-page NYT article of July 31, is trying (with very limited success to date) to train 'moderate' Syrian fighters primarily to attack ISIS, rather than Assad, might suggest, as some other developments (including arguably the deal itself) do,  a convergence of interests between Iran and the U.S.: ISIS is the main perceived threat by both.  And yet the very same NYT article of July 31 pointed out that the CIA still has a covert program in place to train Syrian fighters to battle Assad, noting that the CIA and Pentagon programs are working somewhat at cross-purposes.

Narwani may be right that the nuclear deal represents a quasi-epochal shift in strategic alignments in the region.  I would be inclined however to a more muted judgment.  The Obama administration was not motivated to reach, along with its allies, a deal with Iran mainly because of the rise of ISIS, contrary to what Narwani suggests. The Obama admin was also facing a situation in which the pressure for a military "solution" to the perceived Iranian nuclear "problem" was rising, both domestically and also from Israel.  What the nuclear deal most obviously and immediately does is remove much of the pressure for a military "solution," pressure to which the Obama admin was unlikely to have succumbed but which might have grown increasingly irksome and irritating. This, it seems to me, is perhaps the deal's most significant implication.

Note: Minor edit after initial posting.

Added later: For another perspective, see this article in Counterpunch (7/15/15), which views the nuclear deal as a move toward U.S./Iran détente and examines the forces impelling it as well as the motives behind the opposition.  

The abstract and the passive voice

Here (via) is an interesting abstract from an article in the American Economic Review of last April:

We provide evidence that increased political influence, arising from CIA interventions during the Cold War, was used to create a larger foreign market for American products. Following CIA interventions, imports from the US increased dramatically, while total exports to the US were unaffected. The surge in imports was concentrated in industries in which the US had a comparative disadvantage, not a comparative advantage. Our analysis is able to rule out decreased trade costs, changing political ideology, and an increase in US loans and grants as alternative explanations. We provide evidence that the increased imports arose through direct purchases of American products by foreign governments.

An abstract can't do everything, but this one seems especially designed to frustrate a reader (or tempt him/her to read the article). First, what exactly is "increased political influence" via a "CIA intervention"? Presumably something like the overthrow of Mossadegh, Arbenz or Allende, but the wording also suggests something short of that. Second, although the abstract strongly suggests that the outcome (increased purchases from U.S. companies) was intended, its use of the passive voice drains the scenario of agency (yes, an overworked word): "increased political influence...was used to create a larger...market...."  Why not say: "We provide evidence that during the Cold War, the U.S. used CIA covert actions to benefit American companies by creating political conditions that led to more purchases of American products by foreign governments"? Maybe that doesn't say exactly the same thing and it's a bit long-winded, but it does indicate that someone was actively doing something, as opposed to "increased political influence, arising from CIA interventions...was used...."

Note on Argo

I saw the movie Argo recently. It was good (apart from a couple of fairly minor things). In a nice symmetry, the movie is as smart as the fake movie-within-the-movie is silly. Argo is suspenseful and never boring, the prologue properly sets the historical context (noting the CIA-engineered coup against Mossadegh), and it's also hard to complain about a screenplay that includes, toward the end, a reference to the opening of Marx's Eighteenth Brumaire. And the cast, led by Ben Affleck (who also directed), is excellent.

CIA seeks expanded drone authority in Yemen

A detailed, well-reported WaPo piece on this here. Not a good idea, ISTM.
Update (4/26): The CIA's request has been approved.

Clichés 101: "a tense time in the region"

The opening graph of an AP story in WaPo headlined "Hezbollah unravels CIA spy network in Lebanon as agency contains damage":

Hezbollah has partially unraveled the CIA’s spy network in Lebanon, severely damaging the intelligence agency’s ability to gather vital information on the terrorist organization at a tense time in the region, former and current U.S. officials said.

Two questions:
(1) When is it not "a tense time" in that region?
(2) What "vital information"? Well, of course we don't know because the article's sources, "former and current U.S. officials," no doubt wouldn't say. The result is an article about a putative intelligence disaster that never really explains why it's a disaster -- except insofar as some people working with the CIA may have gotten killed. But the article doesn't even confirm that since, as someone quoted toward the end mentions, Hezbollah treats different captured spies differently: some it "disappears," some it apparently doesn't.

Head of Kashmiri American Foundation charged

Note (added 7/20): NYT and WaPo today refer to the group as the Kashmiri American Council, not Foundation.

Intuition and a glance at Wikipedia suggest that the Foreign Agents Registration Act is perhaps not one of the more consistently applied and enforced of U.S. laws. At any rate, quite hard on the heels of talks in Washington, which were said to have gone well, between the acting director of the CIA and the director-general of the ISI, Pakistan's intelligence agency, comes news that the FBI has arrested the executive director of the Kashmiri American Foundation on charges of being an unregistered agent of the Pakistan government. Not to get too speculative (what is this, a blog?) but it looks like maybe the CIA and the FBI and the Justice Dept. aren't communicating as well as they might, in view of the timing. Pure speculation on my part. (Some may see this as retaliation for the Pakistanis having detained several people involved in the vaccination campaign in Abbottabad [see previous post on that] or for the earlier arrest of CIA contractor Raymond Davis. Who knows?)

The CIA and (alleged) fake vaccinations

Via DPTrombly:

In the latest incident in the rapid deterioration of the US-Pakistani relationship, the ISI have picked up a Pakistani doctor that it claims, and the Guardian reports, was involved in a horrifying breach of medical ethics. According to the Guardian’s sources, the CIA recruited this doctor to conduct a fake vaccination drive in Abbottabad, hoping to corroborate bin Laden’s sister’s DNA with residents of the mysterious compound where US operators would later terminate the al Qaeda head. Chris Albon is dead on about the disastrous medical and public health implications of this story, which will seriously endanger health workers even if the story was a complete fabrication.

Trombly says he agrees with Albon but, on the other hand, also says this is what one should expect when a clandestine agency is tasked with eliminating a most-wanted enemy. However, I suspect Albon's point is that there are some lines that even a clandestine agency carrying out an important mission should not cross. Clearly the CIA wanted to be as sure as it could be that OBL was living in that compound. The question -- or a question -- thus is whether the fake vaccination campaign, assuming it occurred, was essential or whether the required near-certainty was obtainable by other, less ethically troubling means (e.g., surveillance, tracking the courier who left and returned to the compound periodically, etc.). The CIA is licensed to do a lot of dubious things, but a good baseline rule is that torture shouldn't be one of them and neither should this.

Pakistan update: blustering about the border regions

Lead graph of Karin Brulliard's piece today in WaPo:

Karachi, Pakistan — Pakistan’s defense minister has said that the country might withdraw thousands of troops from its volatile border areas in response to a suspension of U.S. military aid, a move that would undermine Washington’s interests in a region that is home to al-Qaeda and a stew of other Islamist militant groups.

A bit of editorializing here, no? Whether the threatened move would "undermine Washington's interests" depends on exactly what the thousands of Pakistani soldiers are currently doing there. Recently it was reported that there have been cross-border clashes involving unspecified Afghan insurgents attacking into Pakistan and the Pakistan army responding with artillery fire that has allegedly killed Afghan civilians. A reduction of the Pakistani military presence in the border regions might not necessarily be an entirely bad thing if it leads to some reduction in Pakistan-Afghanistan tension. OTOH there might be a downside if the Pakistani military is actually carrying out effective counterinsurgency operations in the border regions. They are not in any case in N. Waziristan, where several militant groups continue to be based.

The WaPo article goes on to note that drone strikes in the border regions have been continuing, another source of some U.S.-Pakistan tension. Peter Bergen and Katherine Tiedemann, writing in the current Foreign Affairs, contend that control of the drone program in these areas should be switched from the CIA to the U.S. military, a proposal which may have something to recommend it. However, the very non-transparency of the drone program which Bergen and Tiedemann criticize may be one reason the Pakistan government has tacitly supported it. On balance, though, they are probably right that more transparency would mean more support for the drones among the civilian population in these areas and a corresponding reduction of anti-U.S. sentiment.

Update on the attack in Khost

The murkiness of the situation on both sides of the Afghanistan-Pakistan border has only been underscored by the claims of responsibility and involvement by both the Pakistani and Afghan Taliban in the recent attack on the CIA base. The attack, as Christine Fair said on the NewsHour tonight, appears to have been aimed at decreasing the CIA's ability to carry out drone strikes in North Waziristan, the home of the Haqqani network. Thomas Johnson, on the same NewsHour segment, suggested that the Haqqani network might have "outsourced" the attack to (elements of) the Pakistani Taliban. Johnson also said that the degree of insurgent infiltration of the Afghan police and army, and of interpreters, has been underestimated. Fair had interesting things to say about Hakimullah Mehsud, current head of the Pakistani Taliban. They were both speaking rather quickly and my TV was misbehaving, so I later went to the NewsHour website and listened to the segment again. (Easier to follow that way.)
Further update: See the front-page articles in Wash Post of Jan.10.