Amitai Etzioni Notes

Biden for Afghanistan

Senator Biden has been repeatedly criticized by Senator McCain for calling for the dismemberment of Iraq. McCain charged Biden with saying that "that Iraq had to be broken up into three different countries," and called the plan "one of the more cockamamie ideas that I've heard in a long, long time."

Actually, the most sensible policy that follows from Biden's position is to recognize that Iraq is much more a tribal amalgam than a solid nation. Hence, the more each ethnic and confessional group is able and encouraged to govern itself, the closer we are to a stable Iraq. A federation with a high level of devolution to the various regions is the best model.

True, such an approach will leave some issues standing, especially those concerning the borders among the Kurdish, Shia, and Sunni parts of the country and maintaining law and order in the few remaining mixed parts. However, managing these problems would be much less taxing than imposing American ideas about nation building up and down the large country.

The same approach ought now to be applied in Afghanistan--and in the areas of Pakistan that border on Afghanistan. The United States and its allies best work with the tribes and their natural leaders, rather than try to subject them to an American composed and directed, very ineffectual, and increasingly corrupt national government. After all, the United States did not overthrow the Taliban or free Afghanistan; it merely helped a coalition of tribes called the Northern Alliance to achieve these goals. Since, the United States has tried to replace the tribal militias with a national army and police force, and substitute elected officials for tribal leaders. However, these attempts at nation building have met with very limited success. Here again the lessons of Iraq are relevant. The situation turned around in Iraq once the United States started working with the Sunnis--in the areas they controlled--rather than trying to suppress them, and when the US started working with their Sheiks rather than with Sunni hand-picked "representatives" in Baghdad. (For addition support on this topic, see the Washington Post article, "A New Breed Grabs Reins in Anbar: U.S.-Backed Sheiks Reshaping Own Areas and, Potentially, the Future of Iraq.")

Finally, the same is true about the tribal parts of Pakistan. The United States can bomb them until the mules come home, and it can pray that the Pakistani army will take them on. However, the bombing kills women, children and other innocent civilians, which fuels the already strong anti-Americanism. And the Pakistani army, even more rigidly geared for conventional warfare than the US army, has a very hard time fighting in the tribal areas. The rough terrain only adds to the difficulties.

When I asked the CIA chief from the area whether all seven tribes that make Waziristan their home are of one kind and one mind, he allowed that they are not. Asked whether it might be possible for the United States and its allies to work with some of the tribes to hold at bay the others, he suggested that this is the only way the US may be able to stop the area from serving as a haven for Al Qaeda and the Taliban.

There is no way on earth to turn Afghanistan into a stable democracy in the foreseeable future. However, it can be helped to develop a stable regime, based on tribal forces and coalitions. These, in turn, could gradually evolve, as other tribal societies did, into national societies--and, over time, into some kind of democracy. Even so, the prevention of terrorism need not wait until all these complex and slow processes mature, as long as the United States works with the tribes, instead of against them in the name of a waning national government. Biden was right about the best ways to approach the reconstruction of Iraq, and his ideas can be made to work in other parts, too.

Amitai Etzioni is Professor of International Relations at The George Washington University. For more discussion, see his book: Security First (Yale, 2007) or www.securityfirstbook.com email: comnet@gwu.edu

Social conservatives, I wonder...

Are social conservatives failing the most elementary test of ethics: to not discriminate? They seem to hand out boatloads of free passes to McCain and his political partner, while withholding the high marks due to Obama and kin.

For decades, social conservatives have extolled the value of marriage. However, we do not hear them cheering for Barack and Michelle, who are clearly honoring their marital vows, and they have precious little to say about John McCain's extra-martial affair or the fact that he has been divorced. (They need not be concerned about engaging in gossip or rumor mongering; McCain openly acknowledges both the divorce and the affair.)

Maybe social conservatives are saying to each other that not all moral transgressions or sins are created equal. Indeed, Catholicism, Judaism, and the secular legal codes of all major nations grade transgressions. One can hold that abortion is a much more serious offense than divorce and extra-marital affairs put together. Hence, one may try to argue that McCain's failings can be much more quickly overlooked than those of Obama. However, such a claim does not stand for a minute, as it disregards that all the Obamas have done is to talk about the right of women to choose; McCain committed adultery and got a divorce. I am hard put to find a religious or secular ethic, legal system, or set of values that does not draw a sharp line between talking and doing.

Then there is a matter which is difficult to approach but should not be shoved under the rug. For decades, social conservatives from Pat Moynihan to Charles Murray had a special beef with African Americans, especially the men. They were depicted as promiscuous, quick to move on, unwilling to marry, and neglectful of the children they spawned. Social conservatives promoted various plans to encourage marriage -- including denying welfare to single mothers, many whom were African American -- and they looked for positive role models for African Americans who did marry, stayed married and attended to their offspring. They could call them--the Obamas. I am not insisting on confetti, but how about some coast to coast acknowledgment that here is the couple we have being praying for, role models by any standard? And how about one more heartfelt round of applause for Obama for being willing to take the heat for supporting responsible fatherhood, especially among African Americans?

I do not blame Sarah Palin for the pregnancy of her unmarried daughter, although Palin's advocacy of abstinence-only sex education may well have contributed to the pregnancy of some girls. But it seems curious to hear from those who have weighed in for decades against pre-marital sex and teen pregnancy that the news from Palin's family is welcome because it shows that theirs is a "normal American family, with its share of travails." It is not hard to imagine what social conservatives would have shouted from the rooftops if the shoe had been on the other foot, if Obama had a 17-year-old, unmarried daughter who became pregnant. Would they not have argued that it showed a profound character flaw in the parents?

Then there is a point best made by a leading social conservative, the former dean of the Catholic University Law School and an official in several past Republican administrations, Douglas W. Kmiec. (A man who, by the way, was subject to a tirade from the pulpit and denied communion for his support of Obama.) Kmiec says he expects that Obama and Biden will fulfill the call by Pope John Paul II to "ensure proper support for families and motherhood."

I take it for granted that social conservatives share the precept that "whatever you do for the least of my brothers, you do for me." Better yet, these days they not care only about poverty and social justice, but also about the environment and climate control, about preserving God's gifts to mankind. I assume we can agree that the argument over who scores better on these points is going to be a short one.

I am not opposed to devout people who draw on their values to judge political candidates. I am merely concerned when they play it the other way around: shade, shave and tailor their moral judgments to fit their political preferences. Such bias surely is not the greatest moral failing, but it ranks somewhere far from the bottom of the scale of what is right vs. wrong.

Race in the Obama Age

The following conversation between a white sociologist, an African American mother, and her 15 year-old-daughter was recorded a few years back. However, it still seems to provide a rather personal exchange about how the meaning of race in America is changing, long overdue and too slowly, but for the better.

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“From then on, Enola frequently spoke for the communitarian movement, participated in our meetings, and participated as a key member of our task force on the family. In the process we became friends; not the kind who call each other regularly with “you know what happened today?!” and share intimate details of their personal lives, but of the kind who work together well and enjoy each others’ company.

I was hence taken aback when one day over lunch Enola mentioned that she was ever so pleased that the summer was approaching; soon she and her family would retreat from the Yale community to Oak Bluff. “Oak Bluff?” I inquired. (I knew it to be the home of a middle-class African American community in Martha’s Vineyard.) “Yes,” Enola explained, “to be with my own kind.” As my face must have registered some astonishment, Enola elaborated, “You know, to be able to let our hair down, to tell our kinds of jokes.”

These brief comments evoked many deliberations. It does not take a PhD in sociology to realize that it is essential that community members be “comfortable” with one another and that this is much more readily achieved among people who are “of the same kind.” But, at the same time, this means that communities exclude people who are different, which goes against the grain. There may be no way to expunge this tension inherent in the nature of community. There is just no way around the fact that communities draw a line between members and non-members --they aren’t a railroad station. That is, by definition they exclude some people, typically many more than they include.

It saddened me, nevertheless, that the base for de facto exclusion so often is race. What would it take before a very successful, much respected, African American family would feel fully at home in the white part of Bethesda where I used to live (and for me to feel comfortable in Enola’s parts of Oak Bluff)? Maybe communities of the future could build their affinity on some other social base, such as working for the same college or a shared interest in the arts. One cannot help but long for a day when communities will be made on the basis of what people chose rather than with what they inherited at birth.

While I was drafting my memoir I checked with Enola about our conversation on Oak Bluff, which took place several years earlier. This led to a number of candid exchanges by email about the relations between blacks and whites, culminating in a lunch to which Enola brought her 15-year-old daughter Leah. Enola explained that she and her family are members of many “affinity” groups that are either largely white or racially mixed and feel “comfortable” in them, but it was also true that they had special bonds with African Americans, in black-only groups. It was especially important, Enola elaborated, for her to be a member of the Jack and Jill society. Here, it was not even clear whether racially mixed couples should be admitted. A key purpose of this society is to encourage young African Americans to marry within their race. Enola pointed to the many successful African American men who marry white women, which sends a message to African Americans that they are not as worthy as whites are, feeding their inferiority complex. Hence, the need to allow, even encourage, some measure of separate social relations by race. Here is a verbatim transcript of the dialogue that ensued.

Amitai: We are talking about social life. We obviously are integrated in the classroom and at work. We can go from here in two directions. We can either segregate the social fabric and say there’s nothing wrong with it. Both sides do it. Or we can see we need a mixture. We need some occasions where we can meet in our groups but we need also some situations where we meet socially across those lines. Because otherwise we’re going to be a very divided society.

Enola: First of all, I don’t think we have a problem. Maybe because I’m so alarmed about the rate of interracial relationships and marriage and the implications for black women, but I don’t think we have a problem when it comes to people meeting socially across racial lines. . . .

Amitai: If you had a magic lever you would increase the separate tables (in campus and school cafeterias in which students tend to self-segregate by race) and decrease the social interaction?

Enola: I think, to be perfectly honest with you, I think that I’m a dying breed. I would. . .

Amitai: You said you are alarmed about the interaction?

Enola: I am because of my children. Because I have become more and more convinced through my research and my work that there’s a lot of unfinished emotional business in the black community that needs to be taken care of. Particularly around issues of self-worth and relationships that we’ve just not attended to. As Orlando Patterson has argued in “Rituals of Blood,” slavery was devastating in its effects on relationships between black men and black women and those effects are still with us today. And I think that has an effect on this whole issue.

Amitai: May I ask Leah about the same thing?

Enola: Sure.

Leah: I think that it’s partially just a function of the way that I’ve grown up that I’m basically pretty much in favor of really integrating. The school I’m at is mostly white and a lot of my friends are white. And, they’re just my friends. And I wouldn’t give them up. I wouldn’t give them up just because they’re not my same race. And about the issue of intermarriage. I don’t know it sounds like, I guess, hard to know that it might be hard for me to find someone to marry me because I’m black. But I think if people are really in love with other people they shouldn’t really have much regard for their race.

Amitai: I don’t think it’s going to be hard for you to find people to marry you. Mark my words. Leah, one more question please. My older African American friends, present company not included, often tell me they feel discriminated against every day. When they try to get a cab, it won’t stop for them; when they go to a shop, the shopkeeper keeps an eye on them thinking they’re going to steal and such. Do you feel that way?

Leah: I have to admit that I don’t really do a lot, mostly I just go to school. And I don’t really feel that way. There was one incident when there was a lady in a store, I was there with my brother and a friend of ours and she was following us around. I mean it might have been because we were teenagers and it might have been because we were black, I don’t know. But I don’t feel that generally happens to me a lot, but I do believe that it does happen to some people.

There was much more of a three way conversation along the same lines, but the high points for me were Leah comments. She was clearly able to put whatever feelings of inadequacy and need to self-segregate her parents had behind her. In that sense her parents succeeded. They aspired to nurture young African Americans that could leave behind the psychologically damaging effects of the past. In Leah, they fully achieved their purpose. This was good news for all of us. I believe there is a growing sense, on both sides of the divide, not only to do right, but also to bring the matter to closure. There is a desire to bring an end to the charges and countercharges, the guilt and shame, the sense of racial “apartness,” and to move toward a world in which people are judged by their personal journeys rather than by the past of the group of which they are members--by birth and pigmentation. Leah told me that this was not an idle dream.”

                    

Excerpted from My Brother’s Keeper  (Rowman & Littlefield 2003) by Amitai Etzioni.

Victory in Iraq and Afghanistan?

Senator McCain claims that the U.S. is “winning” in Iraq and that a surge will lead to victory in Afghanistan.  This, despite the fact the General Petraeus keeps stressing that the U.S. gains are “fragile,” and that Brigadier Carleton-Smith, former commander of the British forces in Afghanistan, recently observed that a military victory in Afghanistan is impossible and the U.S. and its allies must find a way to negotiate some kind of a mutually beneficial deal with the Taliban. Meanwhile, the Taliban are gaining ground while the corrupt government propped up by the U.S. is becoming more deeply involved in the opiate trade.

McCain never comes clean and explains that he has vastly watered down what he considers a victory. Senator Daniel Patrick Moynahan is widely credited with the phrase “defining deviancy down.” He showed that when major American cities were awash in violent crime, the police were able to make great strides by ceasing to consider various crimes to be, well, crimes, and then dropping those numbers from their statistics. McCain is now trying to pull the same trick.

Once upon a time, victory was defined by the Bush Administration—and by Senator McCain-- as the establishment of a democratic state in Iraq and in Afghanistan, not merely because we were out to help the people of these nations gain liberty and the blessings of our kind of political system, but also because neocons maintained that only democracies make reliable partners in peace. The U.S., we were told, needs these nations to become democracies for our security. Onward and forward with regime change.

Now, victory is defined as two stable countries, able to defend themselves and to prevent their land from being used a base for terrorists. I am not belittling this goal. But, even after any notion of genuine democratization has been dropped like so much extra baggage, this goal is still a rather tall one, likely to be defined down further. It reminds me of one of my students, who came to class wearing a medal he won for coming in second in a race that had only two paticipants.

One may say, wait a moment; did not these nations have elections? Sadly, elections are by themselves not democracy makers. Egypt, Syria, Russia, and China all conduct regular elections. Democracies require a free press; viable competing political parties; and a civil society in which future leaders can gain political experience, rather than be hand picked by the established government or the occupying power.  Very few of the elementary components of democracy are available in Afghanistan, and Iraq is not fairing much better. Indeed, there is a little doubt that if these nations developed strong authoritarian leaders-- local Putins-- the populations would embrace them in a jiffy, especially if they could put an end to the sectarian violence and the waves of crime, and provide basic services, starting with electricity in their homes.

In short, anyway you look at it, the claims of victory in Iraq and Afghanistan are shallow and hollow, if not outright deceptive.

More Nukes to Pakistan?

The list of the overwhelming challenges President Bush is leaving for the next president was long enough before he added, with the acquiescence of the U.S. Senate, providing India with nuclear material and knowhow. There are so many ways this is a dangerous policy that it is hard to know where to start. The “winner” is the fact that Pakistan’s military responded by deciding that it must keep up with India, and hence will seek to expand its nuclear program, one way or another. This is a truly alarming development, in a world in which alarms abound, because Pakistan is by far the country in which terrorists are the most likely to get their hands on nuclear arms, either by capturing them, having them slipped to them by cooperative elements in the military or intelligence services, or by overthrowing the failing government.
   
One may say, wait a moment; the US is not giving India nuclear arms. Hence, why would Pakistan seek to countervail them? The fact is that India’s access to highly enriched uranium is limited. As a result of the U.S. providing Indian civilian reactors with such materials, India can and will use its own uranium in its military nuclear facilities to make more bombs.

The U.S. has a vital security interest in curbing the proliferation of nuclear weapons. It has been pressing Iran and North Korea for years to stop such developments, and it has rallied its allies to help it in implementing such nonproliferation policies. However, if the U.S. helps another nation expand its nuclear program, it will end up undermining the already weak norm against nuclear weapons, making it even more difficult to demand that other nations give up their military nuclear ambitions. In the words of Senator Byron Dorgan, “[The] message is you can misuse American nuclear technology and secretly develop nuclear weapons, you can test those weapons, you can build a nuclear arsenal in defiance of U.N. resolution and you will be welcomed as someone showing good behavior with an agreement with the United States of America.” He added that the agreement is a “green light to say ‘You may produce additional nuclear weapons.’”

The notion that it is ok for “good” governments to have nuclear bombs, that we need only worry about rogue and failed ones, is a risky supposition. Governments come and go. The government of Iran—when the U.S. helped the Shah to start a nuclear program—was a close ally which overnight became a dire enemy. I am not suggesting that India will follow the same course, but the notion that it can be relied upon to be a close U.S. ally has little to support it. For decades, India was much closer to Russia than to the U.S., and there are large and growing segments of the populations who, let’s put it gently, do not love us.

In short, the Bush “legacy” has just been extended by adding one more mess to the pile, and the next administration is being saddled with one more problem that it will need to fix—only this one is more troubling than many of the others.

Amitai Etzioni is a professor of international relations at The George Washington University.  For more discussion, see Security First (Yale 2007).  To contact him, write comnet@gwu.edu. www.securityfirstbook.com

Even capitalists may find this one…foul.

According to a recent NPR story (Morning Edition, September 9, 2008) the Bush administration has announced plans to overhaul the GI Bill, a federal program that has paid for 22 million American veterans and family members to attend college since the end of WWII.  In an attempt to streamline the application process, the VA wants to turn part of the GI bill over to private industry to design a computer system to review and process applications, replacing the 850 government workers currently responsible for this work. Doing so, VA officials claim, would save tax-payer money and dramatically reduce the time veterans have to wait to have their applications reviewed.

Keith Pedigo, Associate Deputy Undersecretary for Policy and Program Management and the Department of Veterans Affairs, is a strong advocate of the proposed changes: “Presently, it takes us about 20 days to process an original claim from a veteran…But if you ask them if they would rather have it processed in one minute, my guess is most of them would opt for the one minute approach.”

But, as some veterans’ advocates have pointed out, the privatization of government programs is not without its own risks.  In 2003, the department hired a private contractor to design and install a computer program to monitor the use of supplies in VA hospitals.  $300 million later, not only was the program still not operational, it had actually made things worse by causing numerous supply shortages: surgeries were postponed because necessary supplies were unavailable and some doctors were forced to buy their own latex gloves.  Although the program was ultimately abandoned, the company responsible for the failure went unpenalized, and went on to become a major contractor in Iraq.

If VA officials don’t seem to remember this scandal, veterans’ advocates certainly do. Advocates like Rick Weidman, director of Vietnam Veterans of America, worry about what will happen to veterans if something goes wrong again this time, and about who can be held accountable when the government privatizes its programs:  “Anything goes wrong. I’ll tell you what will happen, and it’s what always happens in these instances, is they’ll say, well, it was not our job, it’ s the VA’s. And the VA will say, we can’t do anything, it’s contracted out. It’s the contractor’s job. And that is baloney. The problem isn’t the troops, the problem is the leadership.”

The VA has, thus far, been quite secretive about the details of this proposal.  Reports indicate that they’ve handpicked a small number of private companies to compete for the contract, but no indication has been made about the identity of these companies.

Some news reports need no editorializing. They just make you sick.