P-A and Star Wars

I ended up jumping into the Duck conversation of understanding the failures of the Empire during Star Wars.  My take relies on P-A theory, as my latest book project has definitely pushed me deep into the dark side.

Dark Side Nostalgia

Wired went from a fun post about the Battle of Hoth to a great conversation among people I follow on twitter.  Behold, the power of a fully armed and operational community of IR scholar-geeks.  My own attempt at this stuff earlier this week pales in comparison to the sharpness of these posts.

In grad school, we often joked that principal-agency theory was the real dark side.  My friends who specialized in American politics (or even took American as their second subfield) found themselves inevitably drawn into the dark side, using, deploying, applying P-A theory.  By focusing on IR and Comparative, I avoided the dark side during my time there.

But alas, my fall was inevitable.  As soon as I began to co-author with one of the disciples (David Auerswald), I was tainted.  As a result, the new book on NATO and Afghanistan, with the final draft to be sent to Princeton University Press tomorrow for processing, contains delegation, discretion, oversight.  These are of the dark side.  I have become so infected that I pondered at length the P-A dynamics of the Avengers.  As a result of the betrayal of my former self, I cannot help but think of P-A relations when it comes to Darth Vader, the Emperor, Luke and all the rest.  The series of pieces in the uber-geek symposium reek of the dark side.  They ponder who was monitoring whom, they implicitly indicate that there was agency slack, hidden information and hidden action aplenty.

It is true as say, that once you step into the dark, forever it will dominate your destiny.  If only I could figure out that force lightning....

Irrational Service, Rational Shirking

Phil Arena posted a series tweets this morning pointing out some contradictions between people's theories and their behavior:

A fun exercise: watching academics who hate "rational choice" b/c "ppl r not rational"shirk service, contribute nothing to public (1/2)
— Phil Arena (@filarena) February 13, 2013

goods, vote narrow self-interest in committee meetings, and advocate for hires who will take their side in all important dept disagreements
— Phil Arena (@filarena) February 13, 2013

Phil goes on to suggest that most academics are rational shirkers/voters regardless of their theoretical dispositions.  I do not find this surprising.  In the great battles of the 1990s when Phil was just a wee lad, dreaming of formal models, there was a fun (from the standpoint of an outside observer) conflict between the rational choice crowd focused on utility maximization and an unholy alliance of Realists, feminists, post-modernists and others who only shared one interest--maximizing utility (gaining control of the APSR and other publications).  And the rat choicers felt guilty enough to give in a bit.   This old listserv post put it best:

The proponents of value-free social science are compelled by their sense of 
justice and fair play to hand over significant power to those who reject 
value-free social science.  At the same time, those who argue for a more 
straightforwardly normative approach to the discipline make common cause 
with their mortal ideological enemies in order for both sides to pursue 
the blatantly self-interested goals of tenure, promotion, wealth, and fame.

So, just as Stephen Krasner found that hypocrisy is not new to IR/sovereignty, political scientists often behave in ways that contradict their models.  This perestroika debate was at the level of the profession, but Phil's observation is more at the departmental level--that most folks tend to shirk, vote strategically and so on.  Actually, yes on the former, no on the latter.  We suck as political animals, so most of us do not count votes ahead of time, most of us do not lobby all that effectively, and most of us suck as administrators.

On the shirking thing, well, every department has folks who are reliable and those who are not.  Those that are reliable end up doing far more than their share of service.  Those who are unreliable find themselves doing less service since they are .... unreliable.  They may not show up at meetings, they may not do the paperwork, they may not read what they are supposed to read, they may not be appropriate advisors for about half of the human population, whatever.  And this may be a rational strategy to avoid work or it may just be that being unreliable is in their nature.  The challenge for any academic leader--chair, director, dean, whatever--is to find ways to reward the reliable so that shirking is less attractive.

I tried to be unreliable, but I sucked at it.  During the dark days before the move, I tried to avoid doing anything that would help out those that did me wrong.  Yet, I still ended up serving on more dissertation committees and I still met the service obligations of the profession.  Now that I am in a new place, I have re-set, saying yes to nearly everything.  Perhaps by over-doing it, I will miss deadlines and under-perform, leading to a reputation for unreliability--if only I was so strategic.

Immature Parties, continued

I have been ranting here and elsewhere about the crappy oversight that exists in Canada (but the US, with its farcical confirmation hearings, is making oversight a joke as well).  Well, this piece drove me up a twitter wall this morning. In the defence committee report on the F-35, the majority party removed heaps of interesting stuff to protect the government from embarrassment, and thus caused the government some embarrassment. When the Auditor General and the Parliamentary Budget Office say you messed up, and then the committee writes a report omitting such stuff, well, folks notice.  Indeed, folks leak.

The Conservatives are a majority party with no real threat in sight, yet they continue to deny, deny, deny that they did anything wrong ever.  So, they word-smith this report to make it appear as if any mistakes were solely done by folks at the Ministry of National Defence.  Given Harper's micro-management of stuff, this is pretty funny.

What drives me crazy is that committees in legislatures are supposed to do something other than be the lapdogs of the government.  The opposition must, of course, oppose in Westminster systems, but, again, the automatic gainsaying just leads to less credibility.  When the NDP actually had good reasons to criticize the F-35 and showed that its reps knew their stuff, well, their party's cred went up.  When the Liberal opposed a war that it had started (Kandahar), it made them look foolish. To criticize and to oppose are not identical.  A constructive opposition can figure out how to criticize a policy without having to mindlessly oppose to score points.  And a government and its party in the legislature needs to be able to respond to criticism intelligently rather than censoring documents and engaging in denials.  When you deny reality, you lose credibility. 

Am I naive to expect the parties to act maturely?  Only sort of. The parties have some incentives to attack the other party thoughtlessly, but they also have some reason to develop reputations for being transparent and constructive.  Voters might actually vote for the party they respect.  Sure, that seems naive, but we shall see.  Message control may or may not lead to the Conservatives as the natural governing party of Canada, but developing a reputation for denial, censoring reality and the like might not be that helpful in that ambition.

Belated Super-Nerd Analysis

I love this post for thinking about the Battle of Hoth, where the Empire fails in all of its objectives.  For me, the really confusing part of this battle is at the start, when Vader kills the Admiral for appearing out of hyperspace too close to the planet, losing the element of surprise.  It would seem to me that appearing further out would be helpful perhaps for surrounding the planet, but would also be detected sooner since the fleet would then be crossing through the star system for a bit of time.  This would give the Rebels more time to react, not less.  Unless one assumes that the Rebels cannot detect a fleet in the neighborhood.  I find that hard to believe, given the rest of the state of technology existing in that galaxy at that time. 

So, anyone care to make sense of that for me?

Out-Pandering the NDP

I have often criticized the NDP for pandering to the Quebec nationalists by taking weenie positions on a possible Quebec referendum.  Well, the Immigration Minister of Canada, Jason Kenney, has out-pandered the NDP.

In a press conference with Tamil-Canadian media last month, Citizenship and Immigration Minister Jason Kenney said Canada acted against its own interests by listing the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam (LTTE) as a terrorist group in 2006.

Acted against the interests perhaps of Canadian politicians seeking the Tamil-Canadian vote, but Canada had stood out as one of the few advanced democracies not recognizing the reality that the LTTE were a terrorist group.  Of course, perhaps we should have given the LTTE a pass because it only perfected the art of suicide bombing including the use of apparently pregnant women.  Perhaps we should give the LTTE a pass because it was more equal opportunity for women than many other terrorist groups?

Of course, this was a session only for Tamil-Canadian media so it took a month to get out.  If this was not pandering, Kenney should have said it widely and loudly.  So, the media here really is the message--talk to an ethnic lobby in a way that you cannot say publicly.  Good times.

Yes, the Sinhalese majority of Sri Lanka have abused the Tamils in many ways--providing the textbook case of ethnic outbidding--where two parties compete for a majority's vote at the expense of a minority.  But in 2006, the LTTE were still alive and kicking and causing much in the way of civilian casualties.

To be clear, the Tamil-Canadians are not the only community that has supported those using violence in the homeland and where local politicians have pandered to them (Irish-Americans are a famous case).  I expect (in books 1 and 2) for people to seek policies that aid their kin back home.  I also expect politicians who need their votes to support their positions.  But I don't have to approve of it. So, excuse me if I call a pander a pander, but Kenney is the new pander bear of Canada.*

* As this picture suggests, I am not the only person to think of the phrase "pander bear"

Is Mali Afghanistan?

Last night, I was asked once again is Mali Africa's Afghanistan?  Hell if I know.  Well, I didn't say that, but it really depends on what you mean by "Afghanistan."  Mali experts will say no, because all experts hate when their place is considered to be very comparable to another, especially one of the objectively worst places on earth (not just violence, but corruption, economic situation, etc., Afghanistan always ranks at the top or bottom of those lists).  I am an expert on neither country, but have followed Afghanistan for much longer since the books in progress focus on outsiders mucking around in Afghanistan.  Plus ten days there in 2007 make me an expert, right?

So, when I think is Mali like Afghanistan, I tend to say no because:

• Who is the Pakistan in this analogy?  Maybe Libya played the role of outsider feeding/fostering unrest, but not anymore.
• Indeed, the neighbors seem to be constructive.  Imagine a world in which India and Pakistan and Iran were working together to support the government of Afghanistan and the NATO effort?  Yeah, unrealistic, but Mali, as far as I can tell, is getting help from multiple countries in the region to regain control of the north.
• Does Mali have poppies or the equivalent?  Afghanistan has been greatly complicated by the reality that poppies are one of the very few profitable exports with efforts to substitute/eradicate/minimize raising all kinds of problems.  
• While the various groups that seized the north share some identities with the people who reside there (Tuareg, Muslim), they apparently wore out their stay quite quickly and don't have the reservoir of support that the Taliban has had among certain tribes within the Pashtuns. 

What makes Afghanistan and Mali similar?

• Limited trust/capacity at the center.  Afghanistan has Karzai, and Mali has a new military regime promising to have elections soon.
• A crappy "security sector."  Afghanistan's police systematically abuse the populace.  Mali's military seems to be killing folks who have little to do with the various separatist groups.

So, yes, there are a few similarities, but violence, state collapse, and intervention do make Mali Afghanistan.  Mali's road will be tough and bumpy, and it may not head where people hope it is heading.  But it ain't Afghanistan.  When we apply analogies, we really need to think not just about the apparent similarities but the core properties and see how many of them apply.  In this case, a few but not that much.

Limited Expertise, Always Pushed Beyond

The danger in doing live TV/radio is that the interviewer almost always goes beyond the pre-interview.  So even when I make it clear that I am no expert on Mali politics, they ask about it anyway.  This time, I pretty much said: "Your guess is as good as mine." 

I do this stuff because I feel obligated--by the university that hired me in part to help raise the visibility of the institution, by the grant agencies that want public engagement, by my profession's anguishing about relevance, and by my deep desire to poop on myths that keep getting spread, like Mali is like Afghanistan.  Also, I am a self-admitted narcissist.

Anyhow, check out it and tell me what I should do better or if I should just shut up.

Five Rules of Dodgeball and Regime Change

To continue this morning's musings about Libya and such, I realized that the rules of dodgeball can make sense of US strategies in the aftermath of regime change:

• Dodge: Once you break the opposition, try to get an international organization to do the very minimum (Afghanistan with non-NATO ISAF at first)
• Dip: Once you break a country, hand over the reins to emigres and run out of the country (Iraq, plan A)
• Duck: Once your effort to dip has failed, create a half-assed agency that is only slightly connected to the inter-agency back home, let it make bad decisions but then avoid responsibility (Iraq, Bremer and his Can't Produce Anything authority).
• Dive: Break a government without any commitment of troops, and then wait for others to manage the place (Libya)
• Dodge: Once an ally breaks the opposition, try to get regional/international organizations to run the place (Mali).

Did I miss any rules?

Non-Buyer's Remorse

There has been a lot of gnashing lately about the failure of the US/NATO to stop the flow of arms from Libya.  Well, given the "no boots on the ground" components of the UN resolutions and of the policies of the NATO countries, how could the outsiders have done anything to stop the flow of arms.  NATO has been trying to stop the flow of arms into Afghanistan for the past decade (plus or minus) without too much success, and it has had a heap of troops in the neighborhood plus much in the way of intel and air assets nearby. 

My basic point here is a simple one: the flow of arms beyond Libya is not a surprise, but very few folks were advocating a serious NATO deployment two years ago.  So, we now have some remorse that more was not done, but it was quite unrealistic to expect outsiders to do much/enough to make a dent the past few years.  It is not that we forget about Libya, it is that we didn't care enough about Libya to invest sufficient resources to affect the flow of arms.  After two American wars in the Mideast, the US was not up to another war (again, my concept of a war cap seems to apply).  NATO, exhausted by Afghanistan, was not going to send enough troops to make up for the missing Americans. Who was left?  Exactly. 

Of course, the funny thing is that when the US did focus its effort on a country, it still messed up on containing the weapons, but I blame that on Rumsfeld.

Anyhow, I am waiting for someone to figure out how one can stop the flow of weapons without putting troops on the ground.  Anyone?

Fear Not

I am not fearful.  Fear leads to anger, anger lead to hate, and hate leads to suffering

Grad Students Watch Just Enough TV

Check out this rant by William Spaniel


The context is in his blog.  Just heaps of fun thinking about how to play a game and where it goes awry.  I want William to watch a few weeks of Price is Right so that he can rant about bidding strategies in the opening game and then on the showcase showdown.

Known Knowns and All That

I saw this tweet today.

And I have so many reactions to it.  First, Rumsfeld would probably say that it was true from a certain point of view.  That the war, in terms of a conventional land campaign, was indeed over in weeks.  The US toppled the Iraqi government later than the impatient would have expected but still pretty quickly given how few forces were deployed to Iraq.  But, of course, the problem is that Rummy and his pals thought that they could easily handover Iraq to Chalabi and other emigre pals and then the US forces could run back home.

Which gets to the known knowns as Rummy would say: we knew in 2002 that the Office of the Secretary of Defense was broken.  That is the military term for a dysfunctional organization, and OSD was quite dysfunctional.  The people there lived in fear of Rummy--I saw it on a regular basis during my year on the Joint Staff.  And these folks were given the job of running the "post-war" phase.  I knew they would screw it up, which is one reason why I argued at the time that this was the wrong war at the wrong time by the wrong people.  But little did I know that they would use the list of things that they should not do and use it as a checklist instead.  Disband the army and free up 400,000 or so men who were trained in fighting and knew where all of the guns and explosives where?  Check!

So, the first moves by the US as the Iraqi government fell was to insure that "war" would last for years rather than months. Not providing enough troops meant that the infrastructure needed to run Iraq was decimated by looting.  Disbanding the army and extreme de-ba'athification gave a weak insurgency heaps of oxygen to burn brighter.  I could go on.

The biggest known known of 2003--that Rumsfeld was incredibly arrogant.  What was unknown at the time that he was so arrogant that he was willing to use his war strategy as a tool for domestic political purposes: using only a small number of troops and having the Marines go further inland than in their entire history was designed less with victory in Iraq in mind and more about fighting a bureaucratic battle against an Army he disliked (that would be the US Army).  While Rumsfeld was not the only one responsible for the debacles of 2003-2006, he certainly bore a heap of responsibility that he continues to deny.

Worst SecDef ever?  Almost certainly.  McNamara made poor decisions due to his arrogance, but had a learning curve.  His mistakes were not nearly as profoundly ... stupid as Rumsfeld's.  I guess the question is whether failing in Vietnam did more or less damage to American interests than the Iraq war.  Both wars raised concerns about American decline, caused loss of political capital around the world, did heaps of damage to the American military, and significant harm to the US economy (and world economy as a result).  It would be a toss-up, I guess, if not for the fact that Rumsfeld's focus on Iraq meant that the US did not reinforce victory in Afghanistan, wasting a huge amount of time that gave the Taliban a chance to recover.  Afghanistan may not have been winnable anyway, but the turn to Iraq made failure in Afghanistan far more likely. 

Or is there a SecDef that did a better job of undermining US national security?

Cool Map

This here is a cool map.  I am too busy to think about it now, but perhaps my learned readers can offer a few thoughts to prime ye olde Spewe pumpe.

Army Training, Suh!

I got a comment on my post about Germany's drones that referred to the problems resulting from Germany given responsibility for police training.  NATO not only divvied up the country into different areas of operation with the Germans getting the north, Italians getting the west, the Canadians/Brits/Dutch sharing the south and the Americans leading in the East, but they also had functional division of responsibilities as well.  The Germans got policing, the British got counter-narcotics, and the Italians got judicial reform.  Yeah, incredibly problematic and more than just a bit funny, that last one.

Anyway, the Germans were poorly suited to do police training for several reasons, but particularly because of two key restrictions: their army and police were not allowed to cooperate much due to historical stuff, and German troops faced geographic restrictions as well.  So, other than training in Kabul, the training could otherwise only take place on German bases in RC-North (I could be slightly wrong on this, but I am basing this on interviews with Germany Interior Ministry folks as well as others who experienced/observed some of this). 

Eventually, the US took over and poured a heap of resources into this.  But it led to a set of perceptions that I don't think were accurate.  That police training was just a few years behind training the Afghan National Army, illustrated thusly:*

* I hereby demonstrate why I did not major in graphic arts

The green line on the left is ANA training, the blue line on the right is ANP.  The basic idea is that both training efforts have the same trajectory.  The problem with this is that training police may be fundamentally and inherently more difficult than army training.  Police need to do a wide variety of tasks, they need to be deeply engaged with local populations, they face constant temptation to exploit those that they should be protecting and serving, and so on.  While being a member of an army unit also has its own challenges, most enlisted troops have fewer skills to master, local knowledge and engagement is less important (again, for the enlisted folks), and so on.  So, I would expect the comparison to look more like this:

The basic point here is that we cannot simply blame the Germans for delaying the police training.  Nor should we expect police training to be progressing at the same rate (if a few years behind) as the army training.  And of course, this all assumes that army training has been swell.  Army training can only be done overnight in the movies:

Oversight Overboard

Check out my latest at CIC--where I call both CA and US legislators a bunch of babies.

Silly Sunday is Late

But this is just silly enough to merit a quick post:

Musical Chairs, Military Style

The Canadian Forces/Ministry of National Defence just announced the changes in command.  I am bummed because some of the folks I have met are retiring.  LTG Peter Devlin will be retiring from his post as head of the Land Staff (commander of the Canadian Army).  I met him a few years ago to interview him about his time as commander of NATO forces in Kabul in 2004.  It was a fascinating interview and most helpful in my research.  I bumped into him last week when I was at conference co-hosted by the Combat Training Centre.  It was nice to catch up, and he had some really interesting things to say in our conversation.  Let's just say that he would be on my side with the bet withPhil Lagassé.


The downside of researching the military in any modern democracy is that the people you meet move up and out so quickly.  There are only one or two officers I worked with in the Pentagon that are still around in the military, but most are gone.  The same is increasingly true here--most of the colonels and generals interviewed for the project are out of the CF.  A few remain and in interesting spots.  So perhaps hanging out last week with the Captains and Majors might have been a good idea.

The Educational Political Peter Principle

Germany is about to lose yet another minister to plagiarism.  This time it is the ..... what for it..... Minister of Education.  Before, it was the Minister of Defense.  For some reason, politicians in Germany think that a PhD is a requisite for higher office, so they end up cheating along the way to get there.  I think the Germans would do themselves a huge favor by changing expectations--that an MA in a policy-oriented program, perhaps just with classwork and no thesis, might be sufficient for high political office.

Am I posting this due to schadenfreude?  No.  I am posting this because it gives me an excuse to post my favorite video: the retirement ceremony of former Minister of Defense Von Guttenberg

There are Priorities and then There are Priorities

I got in a twitter conversation with Robert Caruso yesterday about Kerry's prioritization of diplomatic security.  Kerry has been pushed by the events of Benghazi and Congressional pressure to say that diplomatic security:

[E]verything I do will be focused on the security and safety of our people."youtu.be/cdFMJcXB9w8

My basic point is that this should not be the focus of the Secretary of State.  Yes, he (or she as it has been the past decade and a half) should care about the people he puts in harm's way, but put in harm's way they must be.  We need to do a better job of providing insurance and other personal benefits for non-military but at risk folks*, and security needs to be a consideration.

* One of the key revelations of "whole of government" efforts in Iraq and Afghanistan is that the military often had a hard time working with the civilians since the latter were far more exposed to the risks without adequate benefits programs.

But it cannot be THE consideration or the most important focus of the Secretary of State, whose primary focus must be on the national interest, on maximizing what is best for the US in the world.  That is the job description.  Just as Generals ought to develop battle plans that manage risk so that the soldiers' lives and limbs are not wasted, the State Department needs to develop engagement strategies that manage but do not eliminate risk.  Otherwise, the State Department can continue the trend of building fortresses and minimizing access.  This is great for those who want twitter to be how the US engages the publics of other countries, but it will risk losing key sources of information and of influence.

So, I do not mean to be flippant here but stress that the safety of diplomats is significant but ought not to be the focus of Secretary of State Kerry nor of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee.