U.S. Consular Official Killed Returning from Mexico

IT BEGINS?

I'd worried in print three weeks ago about Mexican traffickers retaliating against U.S. targets, now that the U.S. is becoming more involved in Mexican efforts to target the gangs. Now it appears that a U.S. consular official, Lesley Enriquez, and husband Arthur Redelfs were intercepted by an armed gang and shot dead on Saturday afternoon.

The couple were returning home to El Paso from a child's birthday party across the border in Ciudad Juarez; the attackers spared the couple's own infant.

Random violence? Could be, except that a Mexican man driving a similar car--the husband of a Mexican national who also works at the consulate in CJ--left the same party that afternoon and he, too, was shot dead. His two kids are wounded.

The FBI is investigating. President Calderon will come by to show the flag on Tuesday, brimming with American support. The consulate will be closed the same day for a period of mourning. Meanwhile, folks at U.S. consulates in Mexico would be advised to stop driving white SUVs for the duration.

Philip Seib Critiques State's New PD Plan

SO I DON'T HAVE TO.

USC CPD head Philip Seib describes State's new PD roadmap as "so lacking in imagination, so narrow in its scope, and so insufficient in its appraisal of the tasks facing U.S. public diplomats that it is impossible to understand why its preparation took so many months."

And he's just getting warmed up. Ouch.

Urgent Evoke

Alternate-reality game designer Jane McGonigal has a new one: Urgent Evoke, a World Bank-sponsored ARG that attempts to port the addictive qualities of games such as Mafia Wars and Farmville to the social-innovation realm. Planning to give it a look and take it for a spin, given that what I've read so far makes players feel that they're a sort of Mission Impossible super-agent, but without the international killings and kidnappings. Stay tuned.

U.S. Goes COIN in Mexico?

NOT QUITE YET.

The U.S. and allies have moved to a counterinsurgency (COIN) focus in Afghanistan, which could be encapsulated as "protect the people from the insurgents." The same cannot yet be said for U.S. activities down Mexico way, judging from this morning's "U.S. to Place Agents Within Mexican Units to Aid Drug Fight" in the Post:

CIUDAD JUAREZ, MEXICO -- For the first time, U.S. officials plan to embed American intelligence agents in Mexican law enforcement units to help pursue drug cartel leaders and their hit men operating in the most violent city in Mexico, according to U.S. and Mexican officials.

The new mission is apparently a logical extension of the DEA's old-school decapitation strategy, a.k.a. counterterrorism a.k.a. CT, which could be encapsulated as "kill or capture top bad guys."

In the U.S. drug-war context, CT has failed utterly to affect U.S. drug consumption and its collateral effects, never mind the burgeoning business in domestic pot and imported narcotics; insert your own metaphor about the narcotics business as Hydra-headed monster. I don't know why a strategy that hasn't worked in the U.S. is projected to work in Mexico.

Now, in my last post in this space, I came out heavily for a CT mission and against a COIN focus in Afghanistan--but differences between the Mexican and Afghan contexts abound:

• By more directly involving U.S. agents in Mexican operations, the U.S. may inspire notoriously thin-skinned Mexican cartels to strike across a porous U.S.-Mexico border on a scale that the Taliban et al. simply cannot. (Actually, this has already happened.) Mexico absolutely will not tolerate the deployment of U.S. troops into Mexico to counterattack following any such cartel action.
• Unlike Afghanistan, Mexico has a relatively effective and increasingly democratic central government that can run a COIN operation on its own, or perhaps with U.S. cash such as promised in the story above.
• Mexican stability is a vital U.S. national-security interest and deserving of more than half-measures such as a CT mission.

Taking these factors into account, I figure it would be cheaper for now for the U.S. to fund Mexican COIN efforts and simply continue its current cop-training and border-interdiction missions. The alternative is to venture down a slippery slope in which DEA and other intelligence advisors become military advisors become SEAL teams become ... what?

Against COIN, for CT in Afghanistan and Elsewhere

A COROLLARY TO THE OLD "NO LAND WAR IN ASIA" MAXIM: DON'T INVADE SICILY, EITHER.

While I mostly use this blog to comment on soft power, sometimes I venture into hard power—and this is one of those times.

Over the winter break I had an epiphany about the interrelation of U.S. hard and soft power: I now oppose a counterinsurgency (COIN) strategy in Afghanistan and advocate a purely counterterror (CT) strategy (PDF link) there instead.

Blame history—or histories—that I've read recently, starting with Livy's works on early Rome (books I-V) last spring and Donald Kagan's The Peloponnesian War at the end of 2009. I've taken occasional dips back into Robert Kaplan's Warrior Politics and his source materials (Churchill, the Federalists, Machiavelli, Sun Tzu, and several others).

What I've taken from that reading is that the U.S. must pull back from its current efforts to remake Iraq and Afghanistan in the image of a Western democracy, or risk long-term political and economic exhaustion.

What follows is not an argument about morality, and readers may find much of it amoral. It is about making cold-blooded political and economic calculations about where U.S. national interests will lie in the next decade. They do not lie in an open-ended COIN mission.

The history of the Peloponnesian War is particularly relevant here. Athens began fighting Sparta with the resources of an empire and thousands of talents of silver in the bank—enough to fight expensive, far-flung naval and land campaigns for three years without lasting financial consequences.

Athens was rich, and if peace with Sparta had come by the end of the third year, Athens would have continued to prosper and rule over much of the Mediterranean. (Athens had a "hard"—conquered or cowed—empire as opposed to the "soft" empire of alliances and treaties the U.S. currently has.)

But the war with Sparta dragged on for decades, despite occasional peace overtures by both sides. By war's end—despite the spoils of battle and increased taxes and tribute extracted from its shrinking dominion—Athens was broke, depopulated by fighting and plague, bereft of its empire, and could no longer project power into the Mediterranean. Where its former interests ranged from Black Sea Turkey to southern Italy, it spent decades as a small-bore power and never regained its former strength or influence.

I worry that the U.S. is similarly locked into an open-ended commitment to democratize a nation that is of regional rather than global importance—a parallel to Athens convincing itself that it had to conquer distant, militarily insignificant Sicily.

"Winning" in Afghanistan
The U.S. could "win" in Afghanistan where victory is defined as a stable, legitimate central government that can project power within its own borders. I don't doubt that the U.S. and its allies could accomplish this given enough time and resources. But I think—as many COIN experts also do—that it will take at least another decade or more of blood and treasure to produce such a result, if ever.

Of course I'd like to see the results of a successful COIN campaign: a stable democracy, women's rights, and general prosperity for Afghans, who among all Asia's peoples surely deserve those things. I certainly want to end al-Qa'ida's ability to operate freely in South Asia and elsewhere.

The U.S. is the only country that would both conceive of these missions and attempt to carry them out. But goals beyond keeping al-Qa'ida on the run don't serve the long-term interests of the U.S., and I am more interested in regaining and preserving U.S. hard power than I am in the rewards that would come from "winning" a lengthy COIN war.

I fear the U.S. people and government becoming exhausted from the costs of a lengthy COIN effort, just as they are already exhausted from (and have largely forgotten about) the Iraq war. I worry that if this fatigue sits in, the U.S. will abandon foreign-policy leadership as it has done periodically throughout history.

This outcome would be worse than a resurgent Taliban, worse than Afghan women and men being further oppressed, and worse than al-Qa'ida having plentiful additional caves to plot in.

Here are some signs of an exhaustion of U.S. power: The U.S. is already overextended, with commitments in Iraq (shrinking for now), Afghanistan (expanding), Yemen (pending) and Iran (TBD). At home, the U.S. economy remains feeble and in the long term is increasingly hostage to other nations for goods and services it no longer produces (and increasingly, no longer can produce).

Even more worrisome is the U.S. credit situation. The wars, and much other U.S. government spending, are now heavily underwritten by other countries' purchases of debt the U.S. issues. It has borrowed trillions from foreign countries and especially China, which continues its steady, highly rational policy of promoting exports while freeriding under the American security umbrella (just as the U.S. once rode for free beneath Britain's).

Over time, those countries accrue enough debt to have a say in U.S. policies that may threaten the dollar's value, which is why you now see high U.S. officials flying to Beijing to soothe PRC nerves and explain why America keeps borrowing money.

At home, there are few resources to apply following a major disaster, such as a Katrina-style hurricane or a major earthquake.

The U.S. needs to start rebuilding its reserves—of capital, of credit, of political goodwill abroad, of military force—to be ready for these and more serious crises, for which we currently have few resources to spare. Such challenges may involve humanitarian crises (think Darfur, a Rwanda-style genocide, Indian Ocean tsunamis); Latin American instability (Mexico, Venezuela, post-Castro Cuba); rogue-state nuclear development (Iran, North Korea); or complex challenges from a rising power (China, a reinvigorated Russia).

What a CT Focus Means
Focusing on a counterterror-only mission means admitting that Afghanistan and Iraq—and Yemen and Iran—are not, and will not likely become, threats to the U.S. that require tens of thousands of troops. Individuals from those countries (as well as their alleged British, Nigerian or Virginian lackeys) may be threats, but threats that can mostly be handled by a CT strategy, intensified border protection, and other measures. The countries themselves will remain militarily negligible outside their own neighborhood.

A CT strategy would mean keeping a few heavily fortified bases in Afghanistan and Iraq to maintain the "B-52 effect" of being able to suppress large-scale fighting via airpower, while pulling all our other troops out. We would then keep up Predator decapitation strikes and occasional bombing of insurgent hideouts, while providing air support for the Afghan National Army and police.

We would also do what we could—and no more—to strengthen the Kabul and Islamabad governments. Sooner or later that will mean standing back while an unsavory strongman takes charge in one or both countries—someone who can maintain stability if not a Western-style democracy, although we can certainly pressure them to try.

Benefits of a CT Focus
Pulling the bulk of U.S. troops from the two active wars means military spending drops sharply, freeing up greatly needed funds for other uses: to stimulate the domestic economy, to aid in healthcare reform, or simply to reduce the need to issue more debt and thus begin paying down our current tab. (As an added benefit, China and others who want to extract wealth from a less-secure Afghanistan must then foot their own security bill.)

Perhaps we become less hated in Afghanistan and Iraq, perhaps not, but we get out of the nation-building business that President Bush used to deride and can use our political, economic and military assets elsewhere. At that point we begin to rebuild those all-important reserves without which a great nation cannot aid allies, warn off adversaries, and sway those in the middle.

Costs of a CT Focus
A pure CT focus has substantial drawbacks, particularly for those who favor a foreign policy oriented toward human rights.

The U.S. will move from the current twin focus on winning civilian hearts and minds while killing insurgent leaders toward a pure assassination model—not a morally pleasing choice.

Lots of Afghans who have worked with the U.S. will flee or else die when their areas revert to warlord or Taliban control. Women's rights will vanish almost completely, almost overnight. Afghan opium will continue to utterly dominate world markets. Only the B-52 Effect will prevent a resumption of frank civil war along ethnic lines, but myriad "incidents" will occur at the cost of thousands of lives. Brain drain will resume and quickly accelerate.

And the U.S. will still spend billions per year to maintain bases in and supply lines to Afghanistan, and to prop up the Islamabad government and underwrite its occasional punitive expeditions along the Afghan border. (These costs will still be far less than the expense of a full-bore COIN mission, however.)

I believe enduring these stomach-churning tradeoffs is worthwhile because making them enables the U.S. to rebuild its reserves in every area: political, financial, and yes, moral, since it can then use its clout to be a broader guarantor of human rights worldwide than it can by continuing to bleed itself in Afghanistan and Mesopotamia.

To paraphrase the line from Kaplan's Warrior Politics that changed my mind: At the end of the day, America's power to do good is strongest when American hard power is both abundant and largely held in reserve.

I believe the U.S. is of greatest benefit to the world's oppressed overall when it serves as a beacon to the idealists and a threat to dictators and criminals—qualities that the U.S. will not possess as long as it is tied down by one or more land wars in Asia.

Holbrooke: "It's Complicated."

PRESIDENT OBAMA'S MAN-ABOUT-AFPAK CHECKS IN AT BROOKINGS.

Richard Holbrooke spoke at Brookings this afternoon on the topic of the Obama administration's challenges in Afghanistan and Pakistan.

He gave some fairly standard answers to some fairly standard questions; when asked how the U.S. deals with the winner of a clearly fraudulent election, Holbrooke doggedly insisted that Hamid Karzai was the legitimately elected president of Afghanistan and that the U.S. would deal with him on that basis--a pragmatic statement if not one that will endear him to fans of transparency and the rule of law.

A few other notes follow.

On why the U.S. is in Afghanistan: During the Obama administration's review of AfPak policy, the conclusion was that "basic national security interests were at stake in these countries," an attitude Holbrooke says was confirmed during subsequent visits to everyone he could name, including the UAE, Russia, Afghanistan's neighbors and Egypt, among others.

On the new day at USAID: With a new administrator finally in place, USAID can start to get more serious work done, although Holbrooke notes that the agency is badly depleted with (for example) "just four engineers [of its own] left in the water area." Contractors handle the rest, something Holbrooke and Secretary Clinton seem determined to change. Look out, AED, DAI, JAA, et al!

On earthquake relief in Pakistan, 2005: "This is what a great nation does for a country that is under so much pressure." Again, Holbrooke is being pragmatic and in this case, excessively modest about what the U.S. hoped to gain from throwing "hundreds of millions" in aid at Pakistan's quake-stricken hinterland.

Holbrooke also noted that Georgia is currently training a battalion in Tbilisi that, when deployed, will make Georgia the most numerous per-capita donor of troops to the Afghan mission until the new U.S. deployments are complete. Again, Holbrooke insists there is no quid pro quo here--implying that the Georgians are doing this out of the goodness of their collective heart--but anyone familiar with Georgian-Russian relations knows that Georgia is creating a chit to be cashed in later if Moscow comes knocking.

Liebenthal Gets It

Public diplomacy is primarily about exuding prowess or emanating skill or demonstrating compassion. It's about others observing your virtues without you having to trumpet them, and at some point in the future this turns into a usable reputational asset.

And Brookings' Kenneth Liebenthal clearly gets this in his comment to the Times on President Obama's China trip:

“The United States actually has enormous influence on popular thinking in China, but it is primarily by example,” [Liebenthal] said. “If you go to the next step and say, ‘You guys ought to be like us,’ you lose the impact of who you are.”

Diem TKOs Abdullah After First Round!

CRINGING AT REPEATING THE SAME MISTAKES.

On Monday the Afghan Independent Election Commission certified that Afghan President Ngo Dinh Diem had won reelection against rival Abdullah Abdullah, removing the need to conduct a second round of voting at the onset of winter in an increasingly insecure country.

Oh, sorry—Diem didn't win reelection; he's been dead for decades!

It was Hamid Karzai who was (ahem) reelected.

You can't blame me for making an analogy to the one-time leader of South Vietnam. Vietnam War comparisons are a dime a dozen in the pundit business lately.

Unfortunately, they're usually the wrong Vietnam analogies.

These wrong analogies focus on the Afghan war based on how it impacts the U.S. They focus on U.S. forces, on the war's cost, on its impact on domestic politics, on how it affects presidential legacies. They focus on the problems of exiting a Vietnam-like quagmire, on sustaining Vietnam-like casualties, on how each new insurgent offensive is a potential Tet, on how our men and women train and strain to be capable soldiers, diplomats, medics and engineers, and how some of them die.

All this echoes how the U.S. focused on itself (or on the Cold War contest) during the Vietnam War, rather than on South and North Vietnam themselves.

The Vietnam analogy I rarely hear relates to how the U.S. is making precisely the same mistake with President Karzai as it did with President Diem of the Republic of South Vietnam.

As in the case of Diem, the U.S. wants an Afghan leader who can be effective on behalf of U.S. policy. And certainly, like the former South Vietnamese strongman, Karzai cleans up well (he wears recognizable clothing and speaks excellent English). His corruption, or that of his family and friends, is tolerable (if it's not overly publicized). There are few other Afghan leaders in Karzai's league (who aren't warlords).

Also like Diem, Karzai's writ stops a few kilometers outside the national capital. His military is undisciplined and untrustworthy (although not yet as treacherous as the ARVN, which shot Diem in 1963). Both Diem and Karzai rely/relied on U.S. aid and military force for their positions, and both made themselves appear indispensable to keep these resources flowing.

There are differences. Tribe was relatively unimportant in South Vietnam, although Diem belonged to the Catholic elite that helped the French rule a Buddhist nation; Karzai belongs to Afghanistan's majority tribe and Islamic denomination. Thanks to both royal and French rule, South Vietnam had a functioning civil service that Afghanistan lacks. Vietnam did not suffer through decades of civil war before U.S. intervention, as Afghanistan has.

Importantly, I don't see the Taliban as a primarily nationalist movement in the way the Vietminh and Vietcong are now considered (or at least nationalists first, Communists second). I see the Taliban as Arab-influenced provincials who manipulate Pashtun affiliations to their own ends.

The fact remains, though, that the U.S. is again propping up an ineffective leader and his light-fingered cronies in a nation that rates domino-like deference from U.S. policymakers. It is maddening to watch the U.S. support an election-stealing figurehead who alienates Afghans from the Kabul government as much as the Diem (and Nhu) families did the South Vietnamese.

Petraeus and Nagl's Counterinsurgency Manual (download the PDF from this link) advises that protecting and providing services to the host-country population are the counterinsurgent's primary concerns, and that the host government should be enabled to provide these services. It follows that counterinsurgents should do everything possible to help Afghans create an honest, effective central government—and then stand back.

Senator Kerry and others have inspired President Karzai to at least genuflect toward clean government. Following his election 'victory,' Karzai held a press conference where he vowed to clean the government of corruption:

"My government will be for all Afghans and all those who want to work with me are most welcome," Karzai said in a nationally televised victory speech.

"There will be crucial changes in our future government. Now we are determined to use all our forces, by any means, to remove this stain (of corruption) from our soil," he said.

But while Karzai said he was committed to reform, some analysts felt he did not spell out his plans in sufficient detail, indicating no major changes were planned.

The Communists won in 1940s China because they were seen as incorruptible, as well as competent administrators of the territory they occupied before 1949. The North Vietnamese copied this formula in the 1960s and won over Vietnamese peasants while the U.S. fretted over who ruled Saigon.

The Taliban national government of the 1990s was seen as incorruptible—at first—and provided security to Afghans, but few other services. Similarly, their insurgent heirs are trying to repeat this pattern by hand-picking a parallel government in areas they control, arguing that Kabul is corrupt and home to only a puppet government.

What will it take for the U.S. to stop supporting its 21st-century Diem and recognize that the first requirement for an Afghan leader is that he be honest and serve all of Afghanistan's citizens?

It almost doesn't matter at this point; the window on voting out the Karzai administration closed with a thump when Abdullah dropped out of the runoff. The next opportunity to get a competent, effective leader in office in Kabul won't be until 2013 or 2014.

Until then, I'm going to keep making the only Vietnam analogy that matters, the one that should flow off the lips of every U.S. officer and diplomat when they go to work in Afghanistan each day:

We saw what happened when we backed crooked leaders in Vietnam. What step am I going to take today, next week and next year—no matter how small—to make sure a clean, competent leader for all Afghans has a chance in 2013?

A Tout France

Sometime correspondent (and blogger on all things culinary near Puget Sound) Ronald Holden is in New York for French Affairs, a conference put on by the French Government Tourist Office.

Although Ron rightly complains about this agency's overly busy Web site (although I love that it leads to a vlog called Lost in Francelation), he finds much to admire about France's unified national program for attracting tourist dollars:

France was the first country to target a wide variety of niche travel markets: gay & lesbian, Jewish, religious, Hispanic, luxury, first-timers, retirees, French expats. Theme travel, too: culinary, wine, ski, spa, and so on. There's no comparable agency promoting the entire USA; individual companies (airlines, hotel chains, Disneyland destinations) and individual states and cities are expected to do their own marketing campaigns. The Sarkozy government pitched in to help France's embattled hospitality sector by cutting the VAT on restaurant meals by 75 percent, but hotel revenues, in the world's most visited country (77 million foreign tourists a year) are still down 13 percent.

So: Not only does France go out of its way to welcome everyone and tempt them with everything, it's also applying good old-fashioned tax policy to make eating out cheaper across the entire country.

That can only encourage longer stays and accomplishing something I was unable to do last year: tear myself away from Paris proper and see the countryside.

It makes me wonder who could possibly take the reins and promote Brand America with one voice, 'round the world. I mean, besides Disney.

Cupping Rwanda

COFFEE MAY HELP REBRAND A NATION BETTER KNOWN FOR GENOCIDE.



A few years ago I helped a client edit a paper on improving African value chains. The paper looked at out how, say, Ugandan growers who made just a nickel on each pineapple could capture more of the five euros the same pineapple fetched by the time it wound up at a Paris grocery store.

There are lots of ways to pull this off. Growers can band together to demand better prices from middlemen, or form their own middleman organization. Or they can pool funds for a processing plant that creates value-added foods like pineapple chunks or slices. Or get a reputable group to certify the pineapples as organic. Or create a brand around the supposed uniqueness of pineapples from a specific Ugandan region, much like the DOC system does for Italian wines. Even simply building cool-storage facilities that keep a surplus fresh for sale at a more favorable time can improve returns.

If you're Rwanda and you have excellent coffee beans but a slight image problem thanks to the 1994 genocide, rebranding seems to be the way to go. In this morning's Post, "A pick-me-up for Rwanda" details how some entrepreneurs are promoting Rwandan coffee here in D.C., a town that I assure you is in desperate need of better espresso:

Emblazoned on the windows of Bourbon Coffee is the phrase "Murakaza neza," which in the Rwandan language of Kinyarwanda means "We welcome you with blessings."

Rwanda is better known for the 1994 genocide that left more than 800,000 people dead than for its cappuccino. But that doesn't stop Arthur Karuletwa, founder of Bourbon Coffee, from dreaming big.

"If done right, it could be the platform to re-brand the country," says Karuletwa, former chief executive and now a shareholder in the company. Coffee can "create awareness that there's recovery, there's trade, there's investment opportunities, there's tourism. There's life after death."

Rwandan coffee growers experience some typical developing-world problems, including poor infrastructure for getting coffee to market, large numbers of small growers, and corrupt officials. But they've also got a product that raises eyebrows among coffee professionals:

"Rwanda is a very wanted origin," says Susie Spindler, executive director of the Alliance for Coffee Excellence, which runs the Cup of Excellence competition [the Oscars of coffee]. She says coffee traders and roasters visiting Rwanda are discovering unusual flavor profiles they never knew existed.

"It mixes a lot of regular characteristics that you usually only find in one area," agrees Stacey Manley, Bourbon's barista. "Latin American coffees tend to be lighter-bodied and kind of nutty with cocoa. But you almost never find an earthy, really heavy-bodied Latin American coffee. Those are typically Indonesian characteristics. And in Indonesia, coffee is very rarely bright. So the weird thing about Rwandan coffee is it'll have all these different characteristics in one coffee."

In the tradition of European wines, Rwanda has succeeded in establishing five distinct coffee appellations. Altitudes and soils vary among the appellations, creating unique flavors: spicy with hints of tea and cocoa in one, nutty with berry and floral notes in another.

So I'm going to go and try Bourbon Coffee, which is at 2101 L St. NW. Watch for stores in Boston and New York. Socioeconomic competitor: the three Juan Valdez Coffee outlets in D.C., which I tried once. While the decor was beautiful, I could barely gak down the espresso; Juan must have been having an off day because everyone else seems to love the joint.