U.S. peacebuilding in Afghanistan: not setting ourselves up for long-term success

A few months ago, I was asked, through a friend who couldn't do it but was originally asked, to write and present a paper on U.S. peacebuilding in Afghanistan. It was one case study for an Institute for Foreign Policy Analysis workshop (in conjunction with the Osaka School of International Public Policy) on examining the current U.S.-Japan relationship when it comes to peacebuilding. Papers were presented on the U.S. and Japanese governments in the larger sense, Afghanistan, and Sudan, with a paper written from each perspective by academics and practitioners from both the U.S. and Japan. The idea was to look at what both nations have done and hope to determine the possibility and mechanics for a whole-of-alliance (in the bilateral sense) approach to peacebuilding. All in all, it was a very interesting workshop.

I looked at three aspects of U.S. efforts in Afghanistan: ANP development, ANA development, and DDR. Our readers are probably familiar with most of the challenges involved with these programs, but if you're not I laid out the very basics of them. The bottom line to all three of these programs, though, is that we're focusing on short-term gains in a counterinsurgency context at the cost of long-term stability and peace building. And all of this in spite of a growing set of knowledge of best practices in similar situations. One of the reasons I suggest this is the case is that the U.S. military is the biggest foreign player in the country (in personnel and money) and without other guidance is attempting what it is trained to do: win wars. Of course, without setting the conditions for a lasting peace, it will be hard to "win" the war. And this paper doesn't even get into other things like economics or politics.

I recommend reading through all of the papers - all of them are informative. Professor Yuji Uesugi, from the Hiroshima Peacebuilders Center, wrote about Afghanistan from a Japanese perspective and came to similar conclusions as I did (huzzah for validation!), but from a different and very interesting angle. I know virtually nothing about Sudan, but those papers are pretty interesting as well. The first paper by Weston Konishi and Charlie McClean is a winner, too. And thanks to these two guys - they did a great job putting this workshop together.

Apropos of absolutely nothing, some notes about the atomic bomb

I'm just finishing up an excellent book that asserts a direct continuity between the secrecy and lack of accountability fostered during the Manhattan Project and the roughly six-decade accumulation of unprecedented (and arguably unconstitutional) executive power, which continues essentially unabated to this day. It's a brief volume called Bomb Power by Pulitzer Prize-winner Garry Wills, published last year, and you should read it.* While some of the author's more strident claims may strike you as a bit... aggressive (q.v.: "Our anxiety over nations 'going Communist' was in large part prompted by a fear that this would shrink the area" of the globe in which we could stage nuclear missiles or port our nuclear submarines, p. 44), I'll agree with Walter Isaacson that the book is "persuasive [and] elegantly argued." If you're interested in the creeping militarization (or what I prefer to call the "securitization") of America's engagement with the world in the decades since the Second World War -- that is, the subordination of U.S. foreign policy priorities to the presumed prerogatives of defense and "security" -- then you shouldn't miss this important contribution to the literature.

One of the early chapters provides a few details of the Manhattan Project with which I was either previously unfamiliar or poorly acquainted, and because it's 0427, I'll reproduce recount [EDIT: it occurs to me that this word, plus the use of page numbers, may have given the impression that I'm quoting passages verbatim, which -- unless it's in quotation marks -- I'm not] them here for your comment or general edification.

• Among the leading physicists in the German atomic weapons program was Werner Heisenberg, one of the pioneers of quantum mechanics and original exponent of the "uncertainty principle." BG Leslie Groves, the director of the Manhattan Project, allegedly dispatched former major league catcher and OSS operative Moe Berg to investigate killing Heisenberg if he perceived that Germany was close to the production of a bomb. (It wasn't.) (p. 24)
• When the war with Germany ended prior to the successful fielding of the atom bomb, President Truman set up what was called the "Interim Committee" to advise him on whether or not the weapon should be used against Japan. The members of the committee (among them the presidents of Harvard and MIT) unanimously recommended on 01 June 1945 "that the bomb should be used against Japan as soon as possible; that it be used on a war plant surrounded by workers' homes; and that it be used without prior warning." (p. 25) I'll be honest: I'm more than a little surprised that there was unanimous consent on the stipulation "without prior warning," but Oppenheimer and his colleagues were apparently concerned that a failed detonation after announcement of the bomb's existence would set back the war effort dramatically.
• The committee that drew up a possible target list for the bomb expressly avoided those cities that had been previously subjected to American firebombing, as the effects of prior raids would make it difficult to evaluate the destructive impact of the atom bomb. (p. 25)
• The second bomb was initially intended not for Nagasaki but for a city called Kokura. Flak and cloud cover forced the aircrew to divert to a secondary target. Similarly poor weather over Nagasaki meant that the bomb landed off-target, which accounts in part for the more powerful second weapon's comparatively smaller casualty count (40,000 killed and 40,000 injured in Nagasaki versus 70,000 and 50,000 at Hiroshima). (p. 27)
• Manhattan Project officials had little reason for confidence that the Hiroshima and Nagasaki bombs would be even this effective, as the successful prior test detonation had taken place under controlled conditions and with a stationary warhead. The risk of failure was highlighted in the first post-war test at Bikini Island in 1946: only five ships were sunk when an air-dropped bomb missed its target -- a 90-vessel floating boneyard -- by half a mile.
• While Secretary of War Stimson speculated an invasion that could cost 1 million American lives would be required to assure Japanese surrender without use of the bomb, other senior U.S. leaders thought continued firebombing and blockade could be effective. This latter viewpoint was supported by the results of the U.S. Strategic Bombing Survey, conducted in 1946, in which "sixty-four percent of the [Japanese] population stated that they had reached a point prior to surrender where they felt personally unable to go on with the war." The Survey's Summary Report asserted that "certainly prior to 31 December 1945, and in all probability prior to 1 November 1945, Japan would have surrendered even if the atomic bombs had not been dropped, even if Russia had not entered the war, and even if no invasion had been planned or contemplated." The emphasis here is mine. (p. 28)
• Between 1953 and 1955, the U.S. doubled its weapon count from just under 900 to almost 1800, increasing the overall yield of those weapons from around 5,000 Hiroshimas to almost 200,000. By the middle of the decade, the nuclear production complex consumed a staggering SIX POINT TWO PERCENT of total U.S. electrical power. (p. 42)
• As of 2007, nuclear warheads cost the U.S. only about a quarter of a million dollars each. The vast majority of spending on strategic arms goes to delivery systems and the massive security apparatus that protects the nuclear weapons program. (p. 42)

Maybe you already knew all of this and I'm the only dummy who didn't, but I find the subject fascinating. As much as I admire Wills's work, I find myself making excuses for the various Doctors Frankenstein who brought to life the monstrosity of "Bomb Power." It is, for me, basically impossible to imagine the pervasive and overwhelming fear that must have driven senior leaders in the Project to set up what the author calls "the vast and secret apparatus of the National Security State" (53). One can easily see in the era of the "Global War on Terror" just exactly how simple it is to mobilize public support for questionable policies by cultivating (or more charitably, indulging) a sense of national fear. Imagine if you can how Groves, Oppenheimer, and the rest must've dreaded finishing a close second in the race to beat the Germans to the bomb, and it's easy to see how every bit of extra-legal corner-cutting could have seemed not just excusable, but absolutely essential.

Wills is eager to assign base motives to power-grabbing presidents and their self-satisfied aides, but I'm more of a structuralist on this one. It's sometimes tough to see how things could've turned out any other way considering the politico-historical and geographic realities of the post-war period, which, I suppose, is precisely the sort of resigned inattention against which the author is militating. One thing is for sure: it's very, very difficult to imagine an alternate history in which the U.S. could have played a similarly assertive global role without the centralization of authority over military action and accumulation of responsibility for foreign affairs in the office of the presidency. Whether this is a good or bad thing is for you to decide.

* If you're interested in learning more about the book, read this review-slash-interview with Wills by Rick Perlstein, who, by the way, has two written excellent books about the post-Goldwater evolution of American conservatism and the Nixon presidency.

Japanese community festivals, national reconciliation, and Iraq

There are two people whose writing ability I would trade body parts for: Christopher Hitchens and David Foster Wallace. Two completely different styles, obviously, and it's hard to imagine content more varied. But both guys are just such an absolute pleasure to read that I really don't care much what the subject is. I've read everything DFW ever wrote (from tennis to cruise ships to lobster festivals and more), and I try to keep up with Hitchens as best I can (though he's so prolific that it's difficult).

In this week's Fighting Words -- Hitchens' weekly column for Slate -- we're met with a sort of sappy sentimentalism you don't normally see from the world's crankiest public intellectual. The spark for all this: a festival in California. Hitchens elaborates:

This time every summer I begin to suspect myself of going soft and becoming optimistic and sentimental. The mood passes, I need hardly add, but while it is upon me, it amounts to a real thing. On the first weekend of every August, in Palo Alto, Calif., the Japanese community opens the doors of its temple and school in order to invite guests and outsiders to celebrate the Obon Festival.

Ancestor-oriented celebrations are not exactly my thing, but there is a very calm and charming way in which the Japanese use this particular moment in the lunar calendar to remember those who have preceded them and to make the occasion a general fiesta. (I suppose the nearest regional equivalent would be the Mexican Day of the Dead.) The clement weather allows the wearing of the lighter yukata, or summer kimono, and the staging of the Bon Odori dance, in which all can join, to the soft rhythm of taiko drums. For the rest of the time, the yagura, or wooden scaffold, is the center of a sort of fairground, in which stalls and raffles compete for custom with the sellers of sake and Japanese beer and with an amazing teriyaki buffet.

There's a large turnout of non-Japanese for these attractions, getting larger every year it seems to me, but it doesn't succeed in swamping the main event or in making it into a mere tourist attraction. You come across a group of grave and serious Japanese gardeners, engaged in the judging of a bonsai competition, and you suddenly appreciate that nothing can turn this consideration into a hucksterish sideshow. (One day, perhaps, someone will write something serious about the Japanese genius for small things and for miniaturization, which extends from carvings to plants to the idea of painting on grains of rice and which seemed at one point to lead the world in the concept of the microchip.)

If you've read his stuff before, you'll be a little surprised to see Christopher Hitchens singing the praises of a pseudo-religious, ethnic-identity based celebration -- this is, after all, the author of God is Not Great, among other forceful explications of secular humanism. So why all the gushing? Well, perhaps because it's easy to see how it all could have gone so much differently.

In the United States, and especially in California, the war against Japanese imperialism was also accompanied by collective punishment of Japanese-Americans and the sequestration of their persons and property. When I first came to the Bay Area in 1970, I was introduced by Carey MacWilliams, a great historian of the state, to Lou Goldblatt of the longshoremen's union, one of the very few public figures to have opposed the indiscriminate internment. It was a crime committed largely by liberals like Earl Warren, as many people prefer to forget, and was even supported at the time by the Communist Party. (Actually, why do I say even? Communists by then were getting pretty used to supporting mass roundups and deportations.)

Hatred and fear and bigotry were probably never more general or more strongly felt than against Japanese people in America in the period between Pearl Harbor and Hiroshima/Nagasaki, and Hollywood and the comic book industry kept the feeling alive for some years afterward. Speaker Sam Rayburn of Texas drew howls of laughter when he said a kind word to young Rep. Daniel Inouye, who had lost a limb fighting for America in Europe, and—thanked for taking the trouble to notice the newcomer—roared: "Ain't no trick to it! How many one-armed Japs we got around here?"* (Actually, I think that was pretty funny.)

It may be that this narrative resonates more with me than most: my twin brother's wife is a fourth-generation Japanese-American from California. Her grandparents met and married behind a fence at the Manzanar internment camp. Lest we forget, this was a mere six decades ago, and in perhaps the freest and most open society man has ever known.

And so, the point?

Well, my point is that under the azure blue skies that prevailed all of last weekend, you would not have known that any of the bitterness and misery had ever taken place. There were old people present, Japanese and non-Japanese, who had a real memory of it. And there were young people to whom, if it occurs at all, it must seem prehistoric. But there was no awkwardness; no "making nice," no pretense of a false coexistence. All could meet under the great roof of a secular multiethnic democracy, and all did, sharing the food and the music and admiring one another's children. And if this of all reconciliations can occur, without it even having to call itself a reconciliation, then perhaps we are not all heading for hell on a sled as fast as we sometimes think. Ernest Renan said that to form a common nation, people had to agree to remember a few things but also to forget a few things. Without undue amnesia, and without being mandated or enforced or policed, this maxim seems to have been followed naturally in this case.

So why is this meaningful? Well, if for nothing else, then simply because it reminds us how recently our world was riven with violence on a scale nearly unimaginable to those of us born in the latter part of the 20th century. In living memory, as they say. No matter what you think about the necessity or morality of the whole deal, it's a matter of record that hundreds of thousands of Japanese civilians were immolated by American bombs. Those people were the mothers and fathers, uncles, brothers, cousins and so on of people who lived and live in this country. And yet by and large their descendants don't rage against this historic iniquity, don't seek reparations, don't consider blowing themselves up in shopping malls or airplanes to right the wrongs visited on their ancestors.

And so what? Well, it sort of gives you hope for a place like Iraq, doesn't it? Ok, if not hope, then at least some vague precedent. I know there are a host of differences in these scenarios. I know that there are massive, meaningful dissimilarities in culture, religion, economics, government, level of development, national character, and so on that inform and control the ways that different populations respond to conflict and injustice. Japan wasn't gripped with insurgency or civil war after the 1945 surrender. The two scenarios have almost nothing in common, except for this: in both places, awful things happened to people, many of whom were innocent.

Somehow Japan has emerged from that experience as a strong and vibrant democracy, the Japanese people are free of anti-American grudge, and our country hosts a large and incredibly well-integrated ethnically Japanese population. How did all this happen? Why did it happen to the Japanese, and how do we help other populations recover from conflict with similar resiliency? I can't answer those questions and I'm not sure anyone can nail it down, though I'm sure there are people who can speak to them in some kind of meaningful way.

So when I see people saying that there's no chance that Iraq will become an integrated, peaceful, multi-ethnic and multi-confessional modern state, I consider what our grandfathers must've thought in 1945: did the Germans -- hell, Nazis! -- seem amenable to reconciliation, to integration into the European political and economic framework? Did the Japanese -- those very same Japanese who showed such wanton disregard for their own lives as to fly suicide missions in airplanes or run as waves into enemy guns?

Maybe I, like Hitchens, am feeling a little loopy, intoxicated with optimism. (Just not about Afghanistan, I guess.) But it's worth keeping in mind sometimes that there was a time when the world was more hateful, more dangerous, more fractured, more violent, and all around shittier than it is today, and some of those things in some of those places have changed for the better. So don't cross your fingers or anything, but maybe consider the fact that a century and a half ago, Americans were shooting one another up, too.