Category Archives: United States

European Union, Sweden, United States

Can Sweden save the European Union from the NSA spooks?

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facebook goes arctic

Even as the media continues to debate leaks revealing the secret surveillance program of the U.S. National Security Agency, code-named ‘PRISM,’ one of the chief private-sector actors in the PRISM scandal opened its first non-U.S. site on Wednesday, giving one European nation a key jurisdictional hook to regulate future data privacy.USflagEuropean_UnionSweden

According to news reports from The Guardian, Facebook, has been cooperating voluntarily with the NSA’s PRISM program since summer 2009, thereby exposing the private data of both U.S. and non-U.S. citizens alike to the purview of the NSA under the authority of the U.S. PATRIOT Act passed in the aftermath of the 2001 al Qaeda terrorist attacks on New York and Washington.

But Facebook also opened a new facility to host its servers in far northern Sweden on Wednesday (in part to use the chilly Arctic weather to more efficiently cool its European servers).  Despite the awkward timing, it is Facebook’s first server hall outside of the United States, and its opening comes when European Union leaders are pushing for answers on the extent to which NSA has been permitted access to private, personal data by Facebook, Google, YouTube, Apple, AOL and other service providers and while the European Parliament is considering a new data protection directive that would enhance protection of the personal data of EU citizens.  Assuming that the European Union cannot stop U.S. government agencies, it means that European regulators could target U.S. technology companies in greater measure — after all, the EU already places restrictions on Google’s StreetView program and has already banned the European use of Facebook’s face recognition software.

So does that give Sweden a unique opportunity to ensure that the private data of EU citizens is not caught up in the NSA snare?

After all, Sweden is virtually synonymous with good government, right?

According to Transparency International, it’s among the least corrupt countries is the world.  In the middle of the 18th century, Sweden essentially invented the concept of freedom of information with the Freedom of the Press Act of 1766, and its leaders over the past two decades championed a EU-wide freedom of information regime.

But a reputation for transparency doesn’t necessarily connote a reputation for protecting privacy.  Wikileaks founder Julian Assange was so worried that Swedish authorities would extradite him to the United States that he chose to hunker down in Ecuador’s London embassy instead of allowing British authorities to transfer him to Sweden for a trial on a sexual harassment charge.  Swedes have also raised concerns with EU policymakers that the push for more robust data protection could actually harm government transparency by limiting the Swedish government’s ability to provide open access to documents.

Moreover, the current center-right coalition headed by prime minister Fredrik Reinfeldt of the Moderata samlingspartiet (Moderate Party) has introduced greater levels of Swedish surveillance.  In 2009, it narrowly passed legislation that would allow the government’s Försvarets radioanstalt (the National Defence Radio Establishment) to wiretap and access all international telephone and internet traffic, even if all  ultimate parties in the traffic are Swedish.  Though the legislation, know as the ‘FRA law’ passed only narrowly by Sweden’s parliament, the law had its genesis in the prior center-left government of the Sveriges socialdemokratiska arbetareparti (Swedish Social Democratic Workers Party).  It essentially codified into Swedish national law much of what PRISM has been purported to do within the United States.

The law caused some amount of concern, especially in neighboring Finland because all of its Internet and phone traffic at the time routed through Sweden.

Sweden’s foreign minister Karl Bildt earlier this week protested that Swedish activities under the FRA law are not similar to what’s been reported PRISM, in part on the basis that the FRA law was debated publicly and enacted by a duly elected parliament.  In that regard, Bildt’s right — it was clear just what was at stake when the Swedish parliament adopted the FRA law; in contrast, Facebook wasn’t even developed until three years after the U.S. PATRIOT Act.  In addition, Bildt expressed a healthy hint of suspicion about other ‘certain states,’ presumably including the United States:

 

Continue reading Can Sweden save the European Union from the NSA spooks? →

United States

Reframing the issue of Edward Snowden’s whistle-blowing: public vs. private

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Edward_Snowden

Eleven years ago, in the wake of the Enron debacle, Congress passed protection for whistleblowers as part of a wide-ranging set of public company reforms within the Sarbanes-Oxley Act.USflag

Now consider that, instead of a former National Security Agency Central Intelligence Agency employee and, until very recently, a Booz Allen Hamilton employee, Edward Snowden (pictured above) were instead a disgruntled Facebook or Google employee, he knew about the voluntary cooperation with PRISM, and he honestly believed that Facebook and/or Google were enabling the NSA’s illegal activity.

If he (1) reasonably believed that his employer was breaking the law by cooperating with the NSA and (2) engaged in whistle-blowing activity as defined by Sarbanes-Oxley, would he have a claim under Sarbanes-Oxley for adverse employment action if Facebook or Google had fired him instead of Booz Allen?

Though the definition of whistle-blowing is relatively circumspect under Sarbanes-Oxley, let’s assume that for purposes of our example, Snowden ’caused information to be provided’ to a ‘government body conducting inquiries’ related to a ‘rule or regulation of the Securities and Exchange Commission.’  It’s a stretch, but certainly the participation of Facebook or Google in PRISM and the PRISM activities are material information to any potential investor and certainly affect shareholder value.

Would he have a Sarbanes-Oxley case against his employer for retaliating against him?*

More importantly, would John Boehner or Eric Holder or the American public generally be more sympathetic to him if the whistle-blowing came from within Facebook or Google and not from within the public sector?  Would the 1984 tropes be replaced by Atlas Shrugged tropes?

For the record, I think Snowden neither hero nor traitor, but I do immediately suspect the agenda of anyone who is certain of either.

I also think that the answer tells us much about how incredibly different U.S. politics is from world politics — that this is a relevant question is only possible in a highly individualistic culture like that of the United States, where distrust of government runs so high that one political party’s essential worldview for three decades has been ‘government is the problem.’

I don’t think re-framing the issue in these terms would make much difference in France or Brazil, let alone China, but I think it does in the United States.

* Theoretically, because Booz Allen is publicly traded, he might still have a case for retaliation, but I wanted my example here to be from the ‘private sector’ and not from the ‘public sector,’ though it’s obviously clear how blurred the line has become, even in a place like the United States, which we don’t think of the government as a large Venezuela-style actor in the private sector, and we like to talk about the ‘private sector’ and the ‘government’ as if there are bright lines between the two. (UPDATE: A commenter notes that when Snowden was revealed to have leaked the PRISM documents, the U.S. government would have revoked his clearance, which may have made him simply unable to carry out his duties under Booz Allen’s contract with the NSA, casting more doubt on why Snowden’s Sarbanes-Oxley case as a Booz Allen employee would be more farfetched.)

United States

Remembering Medgar Evers and the fight for civil rights

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Exactly 50 years ago today — on June 12, 1963 — a young 37-year-old civil rights activist was brutally shot in the back in the driveway of his home in Jackson, Mississippi.USflag

That young activist, Medgar Evers, had spent his tragically truncated life as the field secretary for the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP), a role in which he helped James Meredith break the segregation barrier in order to become the first black male to enroll in the University of Mississippi in 1962.

Evers today has entered the pantheon of American heroes.  His remains lie in Arlington National Cemetery near Washington, D.C.  If you fly into Jackson today, you’ll fly into Mississippi’s largest airport, which is now named in honor of Evers.  But at the time, his murderer was twice freed after a jury, comprised solely of white men, refused to convict him — he was convicted only in 1994 on the basis of new evidence.

In the 50 years since Evers death, the United States has become a much more equal place — after all, it elected its first non-white president five years ago, and it’s had two black secretaries of state.  The world of white privilege and segregation that Evers — and Rosa Parks, Martin Luther King, Jr. and other civil rights leaders of the 1960s — fought to tear down is unrecognizable today.

But that doesn’t mean the cause for civil rights is over.  Within the United States alone, black Americans remain far behind, as a group, on terms of socioeconomic gains.  Immigrants to the United States, many of whom came to this country as young children, remain in painful legal limbo.  Gay and lesbian Americans struggle not just for the right to same-sex marriage, but the right to live, work and exist without prejudice.  A U.S. prison population in excess of seven million people (though that number is starting to decline), many of who are in prison for non-violent offenses, faces innumerable challenges to even their basic safety behind bars.  The revelations of the NSA and PRISM programs show that the U.S. government continues to push forward with new surveillance tools that, though they may enhance homeland security, innumerably reduce global privacy rights.

That highlights the fact that the lines between greater civil rights in the United States and greater civil rights globally has blurred.  In many ways, the work of Medgar Evers is now a broader, globalized struggle.  U.S. activists work alongside European, Asia, Arab and African activists to challenge inequality worldwide.

  • In Mauritania and elsewhere in the Sahel, the fight continues against the continued practice of human slavery.
  • In Turkey, the crackdown this week of protesters at Taksim Square by prime minister Recep Tayyip Erdoğan have highlighted the fact that the biggest threat isn’t creeping Islamism, but the more garden-variety illiberal disregard for basic civil rights like freedom of speech and freedom of expression, and deeper abuses of power that have hollowed out Turkey’s democracy.
  • Even as western Europe enters a world of same-sex marriage equality, many pockets of the world feature significant hurdles for gay and lesbian individuals — sub-Saharan Africa continues to treat gay activists with brutality and just yesterday, Russia passed a troublingly broad anti-gay law.
  • In Iran, moderate presidential candidate Hassan Rowhani has pushed for the loosening of political and cultural censorship and greater political freedoms within the framework of Iran’s existing Islamic republic.
  • In the People’s Republic of China, residents of Hong Kong marched last week on the occasion of the anniversary of the government crackdown on Tiananmen Square in 1989.
  • The Arab Spring protests of 2011 — from Bahrain to Tunisia to Egypt — have made political participation unavoidable throughout the Arab world, even if new majoritarian Islamist governments now face new civil rights challenges in finding a way to make Islamic democracy work without introducing new elements of religious, political and gender-based inequality.
  • A few hundred miles from the coast of Florida, Haitians continue to suffer from some of the worst poverty in the world, exacerbated by the tolls taken by the 2010 earthquake.

So as today’s more globalized fight for civil rights continues, it’s worth reflecting today to remember Evers and an entire generation of Americans who defined much of the content of what we think of as ‘civil rights’ in their fight for racial equality in the United States half a century ago.

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Bottom photo credit to Kevin Lees — Arlington National Cemetery, Virginia, May 2012. 

United States

Rice and Power bring liberal interventionism back to the heart of U.S. foreign policy

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samanthapower

U.S. president Barack Obama will shake up his national security team today with the announcement that national security adviser Tom Donilon will be stepping down.  In his place will come Susan Rice, the current U.S. ambassador to the United Nations, and in Rice’s place will come Samantha Power as the new UN ambassador (so long as Power is confirmed by the U.S. Senate). USflag

That will place Rice and Power at the vanguard of the administration’s foreign policy for the next three and a half years, and it will anoint both of them as potential U.S. secretaries of state in future Democratic presidential administrations — Rice was considered a frontrunner to succeed Hillary Clinton as secretary of state earlier this year, though she ultimately lost out to former U.S. senator John Kerry after Senate Republicans made clear that they would hold up Rice’s nomination over her role in the administration’s handling of the attack on U.S. diplomats in Benghazi.

Both women share a perspective that the United States has a role to play to boost human rights around the world, including through the use of military force.  Rice, who served in the administration of U.S. president Bill Clinton, ultimately as assistant secretary for African affairs, has often said that U.S. failure to intervene in Rwanda during the 1994 genocide and the Hutu massacre of 800,000 Tutsis was a defining moment.  Power (pictured above), a former journalist who covered the fighting in the Balkans and the ‘ethnic cleansing’ of Bosnia-Herzegovina in the early 1990s, has been even more outspoken on the role of U.S. policymaking and its impact on human rights.  Before joining the Obama administration as the senior director for multilateral affairs and human rights, Power won a Pulitzer Prize for her 2002 book, ‘A Problem from Hell’: America and the Age of Genocide, which takes the U.S. government and others to task for standing by as genocide occurred in Armenia, Cambodia and Rwanda.

As such, Libya plays a central role in the careers of both officials who, along with Hillary Clinton, were among the proponents arguing for the Obama administration to take an active role in Libya to assist rebels trying to overthrow longtime strongman Muammar Gaddafi.  That placed them at contretemps with more traditional foreign policy realists like Donilon and Bob Gates, the U.S. defense secretary at the time.  Their success led to a NATO-backed no-fly-zone in Libya and, later, the arming of anti-Gaddafi rebels by NATO allies.  The NATO efforts accomplished the goal, and Gaddafi lost control of Libya in August 2011 and he was executed by rebels in October 2011.

In the tradition of U.S. foreign policy, party labels like Democrat and Republican often matter less than where officials fall on the line between liberals and realists (as the terms are commonly understood in international relations theory).  So as Donilon leaves the White House and Rice and Power ascend, the big story today is less about any one individual than the shift of the Obama administration much further toward the liberal IR perspective.

Though Senate Republicans will not have the opportunity to question Rice because her role doesn’t require Senate confirmation, they will have an opportunity to question Power and will almost certainly bring the discussion back to Benghazi.  But Benghazi’s relevance as a ‘scandal’ is somewhat dubious, especially when there are at least two more important fundamental issues about the administration’s approach to Libya.

The first has to do with U.S. constitutionality and the separation of powers.  Whereas the Bush administration sought a vote in the U.S. Congress authorizing its military action in Iraq back in 2002, the Obama administration controversially argued that its military engagement in Libya, at a cost of over $1 billion, never reached the level required to notify the U.S. legislature and seek congressional approval under the Vietnam-era War Powers Resolution.  Critics claim that the law required the Obama administration to obtain authorization to continue the Libya operation within 60 days of its inception.

More significantly for world politics, however, are the adverse, unintended consequences of arming the anti-Gaddafi rebels.  Some of those arms ended up in the hands of Libyan jihadists, and many more ended up in the hands of all sorts of rebels in northern Mail, including jihadists, Islamists and Tuareg separatists, triggering a crisis that toppled Mali’s government and required French military intervention to stabilize the country.  There’s a strong argument that U.S. military intervention in Libya in 2011 prioritized the short-term political rights of anti-Gaddafi rebels at the expense of the human rights of northern Malians and, potentially, the human rights of everyone within the African Sahel, which remains a precarious new security challenge.

These questions are especially relevant in light of the ongoing two-year civil war in Syria.   Continue reading Rice and Power bring liberal interventionism back to the heart of U.S. foreign policy →

Pakistan, United States

How the U.S. drone strike on the Pakistani Taliban undermines Sharif’s government

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No one will cry for the death of Waliur Rehman.USflagPakistan Flag Icon

As the second-in-command of the Tehrik-i-Taliban Pakistan (i.e., what’s commonly referred to as the Pakistani Taliban), he’s responsible for many of the destabilizing attacks that the TTP effected in the lead-up to the May 11 parliamentary election.  In selectively targeting the Pakistan People’s Party (PPP, پاکستان پیپلز پارٹی‎) and its allies, it effectively prevented the leaders of the PPP from openly and publicly campaigning, and they actually forced the son of the late prime minister Benazir Bhutto, Bilawal Bhutto Zardari, out of the country during the last days of the campaign.

Rehman, in particular, is also responsible for attacks in Afghanistan as well, including perhaps seven CIA employees in a strike on Afghanistan, according to the U.S. government, and it added him to its list of specially designated global terrorists in September 2010.

So, in a vacuum, the U.S. drone strike that has killed him (and five other individuals) Wednesday morning is good news, right?

Probably not, especially if you’re cheering for a more secure Pakistan. Continue reading How the U.S. drone strike on the Pakistani Taliban undermines Sharif’s government →

United States

Questions on the U.S. war on terror, Obama’s big speech and its effect on world politics

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dronetanamo

There’s a lot to unpack from the wide-ranging speech that U.S. president Barack Obama gave this afternoon on the United States and its ongoing military action to combat terror organizations.USflag

I got the sense that Obama’s been anxious to make this speech for some time and to make the terms of debate over targeted attacks from unmanned aircraft — ‘drones’ — public.  The speech itself came after U.S. attorney general Eric Holder admitted in a letter for the first time that U.S. drones killed Anwar al-Awlaki in Yemen, as well as three other U.S. citizens accidentally.  It’s important to recall, furthermore, that Obama only first publicly acknowledged the drone strikes in Pakistan last year during an online chat.

It’s far beyond my blog’s realm to delve far into the speech in specificity — Benjamin Wittes has already done that in a series of blog posts (here and here) at Lawfare that are more articulate than anything I could produce in such a short time frame.  But when the president of the United States delivers a wide-ranging address on the U.S. war on terror, it has so many effects on world politics that it’s impossible not to think about how policy may change in the remaining years of the Obama administration.

Those policy decisions are incredibly relevant to international law and politics, but also in the domestic politics of two dozen countries — Pakistan, Yemen, Iraq, Afghanistan, Somalia, and so on.

What I do have, however, are a lot of questions that remain following the speech — perhaps even more than I had before I watched the speech.

  • Associated forces.  Obama mentioned al-Qaeda’s ‘associated forces’ four times, but what exactly is an associated force?  The lack of any meaningful definition lingered awkwardly with every mention.  In many ways, this goes to the heart of the legal issue with the drone strikes in places like Yemen and Somalia, and whether they’re even authorized under the Authorization to Use Military Force (AUMF).  Al-Qaeda in the Arab Peninsula (AQAP) and al-Qaeda in the Islamic Maghreb (AQIM) share a name, and key links, but it’s really difficult for me to believe that impoverished radical Yemenis or Tuaregs are really so associated with the original iteration of al-Qaeda that Osama bin Laden led in 2001. Somalia’s al-Shabab is often described as a home-grown al-Qaeda, but is it an associated person? It’s even more doubtful than AQAP and AQIM.  Hamas and al-Qaeda are certainly mutually sympathetic and may well have mutual ties over the past two decades, but does that make Hamas an associated force?  In the same way, the Taliban in Afghanistan is not affiliated with the Tehrek-e-Taliban Pakistan (i.e., the Pakistani Taliban), but they’ve been a particular target of the Obama administration’s drone strikes in Pakistan — so much so that drone strikes were a top issue in Pakistan’s recent national elections.  So there’s a real question as to whether those actions legal — if those targets aren’t associated forces, the targets aren’t subject to the use of military force under the AUMF.
  • The precision of future drone strikes.  Obama has committed to more judicial use of drone strikes that have, as Obama admitted, killed civilians in the past, and though he didn’t exactly outline it in his speech, it’s reported that the U.S. military will take over some of the role that the Central Intelligence Agency has played in the drone strikes in recent years.  Nonetheless, the CIA has been reported to have used so-called ‘signature strikes,’ which target young men who live in areas known to be dominated by radical terrorist groups, though the strikes aren’t based on specific identification or intelligence that ties the targets to clear engagement against the United States.  Obama didn’t mention ‘signature strikes’ today.  But he argued that the use of drones is ‘heavily constrained’ and further bound ‘by consultations with partners’ and ‘respect for state sovereignty,’ and that drone strikes are only waged against terrorists ‘who pose a continuing and imminent threat’ when there are not other governments ‘capable of addressing’ that threat,’ and only when there’s a ‘near-certainty that no civilians will be killed or injured.’  That’s a much higher standard than what’s been reported in the past.  So was Obama describing past policy on drone strikes or future policy? What do assurances of more precision in the future mean when we don’t know the level of care with which the drone strikes have been effected in the past?
  • The oversight of future drone strikes.  It’s also unclear how the Obama administration believes oversight should be handled.  Obama, in his speech, noted that he’s asked his administration to review proposals for extending oversight on drone strikes, and he outlined several options, including something similar to the FISA courts that authorize electronic surveillance of U.S. citizens in the fight against terrorism.  But he’s in year five of his administration — shouldn’t this be something that his administration has already considered?  Will his administration be able to enact a system in time for Obama’s successor?  Will it even be based in statute so that it’s binding on future administrations?  All of this is unclear. Continue reading Questions on the U.S. war on terror, Obama’s big speech and its effect on world politics →

Sweden, United States

Photo of the day: Meeting Swedish royalty in Delaware

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WILMINGTON, Del. — A quick shot of the king of Sweden, Carl XVI Gustaf, and the queen of Sweden, Silvia, who ‘landed’ in Wilmington via a recreation of the Kalmar Nyckel on Saturday to commemorate the 375th anniversary of the formation of New Sweden, the colony that from 1638 to 1655 was the Swedish entry into the New World colonial sweepstakes.USflagSweden

Swedes gave the United States, among other things, the log cabin.

The quite interesting backstory here is that of Peter Minuit, the Dutchman who once purchased the island of Manhattan from native Americans for goods worth around 60 Dutch guilders.  But Minuit, who remained the director of New Netherland from 1626 to 1633 was eventually expelled from the Dutch West India Company.  In response, he took up shop with the Swedes and helped them found their only colony which, despite his best efforts, ultimately came under the control of New Netherland.  After Minuit helped build Fort Christina (named after the Swedish queen of the time) in New Sweden, he set off for Stockholm for more colonists, stopping along the way in the Caribbean for a tobacco transaction, but got caught in a hurricane near the island of St. Christopher and died.

Though the Swedish foothold in colonial America wasn’t incredibly large, Carl Gustaf has made several trips to Delaware during his reign, which began in 1973.  Sweden’s monarch is even less powerful than the British monarch — Carl Gustaf doesn’t even appoint Sweden’s prime minister, not even as a matter of formality, nor does he have the kind of coalition-building role that the Dutch monarch had until only very recently.

In 1980, the Swedish monarchy became the first in European history to establish absolute primogeniture, meaning that the first-born child of the king, whether male or female, will become first in line to the throne, in the present case, crown princess Victoria.

The next Swedish election is set to be held only in September 2014.

Photo credit to Kevin Lees — Wilimington, Delaware, May 2012. 

United States

Photo of the day: Five presidents (or six?)

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It’s not everyday that the gang of all of the living current and former (and possibly future) presidents of the United States gather in one place.USflag

But it happened today on the occasion of the opening of the presidential library of former president George W. Bush in Dallas, Texas — see above the ‘most exclusive club in the world,’ from left to right:

  • Jimmy Carter, Democratic president from 1977 to 1981;
  • Bill Clinton, Democratic president from 1993 to 2001;
  • George H.W. Bush, Republican president from 1989 to 1993;
  • George W. Bush, Republican president from 2001 to 2009; and
  • Barack Obama, the Democratic incumbent since 2009.

It’s essentially every president elected since 1976, with the single exception of Republican president Ronald Reagan, who died in 2004.  Carter’s predecessor, Republican president Gerald Ford, died in December 2006.

It’s notable that all of their spouses were well enough to attend as well, including Hillary Clinton, the former New York senator and until very recently, the U.S. secretary of state, who could well become the next president of the United States after the 2016 election:

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Russia, United States

Boston bombing suspects could cause uptick in anti-Chechen feeling in the US

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Russia map

UPDATE:  Ramzan Kadyrov, Chechnya’s president, has come out with a statement disclaiming Chechen culpability, but in a way that blames American ‘attitudes and beliefs,’ and I doubt it will do much to lift American hearts and minds in favor of Chechnya:

Tragic events have taken place in Boston. A terrorist attack killed people. We have already expressed our condolences to the people of the city and to the American people. Today, the media reports, one Tsarnaev was killed as [police] tried to arrest him. It would be appropriate if he was detained and investigated, and the circumstances and the extent of his guilt determined. Apparently, the security services needed to calm down the society by any means necessary.

Any attempt to draw a connection between Chechnya and Tsarnaevs — if they are guilty — is futile. They were raised in the United States, and their attitudes and beliefs were formed there. It is necessary to seek the roots of this evil in America. The whole world must struggle against terrorism — that we know better than anyone else. We hope for the recovery of all the victims, and we mourn with the Americans.

 * * * * *

It’s a small Caucasian republic in Russia with barely over one million people, but Chechnya attracted attention worldwide in the 1990s when it fought two wars against Russia to become a separate republic.

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Now, with word that the two bombing suspects are/were Chechen (or perhaps from neighboring Dagestan, it’s unclear to me), Chechnya is likely to come to the forefront as a topic of U.S. foreign relations, even as one of the suspects has been killed overnight and a wide manhunt continues for the second suspect, 19-year-old Dzhokhar Tsarnaev.

We still have more questions than answers at this point, and there’s no evidence, as far as I can tell, that this is some concerted plot concocted in Grozny or Makhachkala, so I’m wary to make any sweeping statements.

But Tyler Cowen at Marginal Revolution worries that it will destroy the chances of the U.S. Congress passing a comprehensive immigration bill later this year, and while I think that’s a valid concern, I worry more that this will cause  huge anti-Chechen sentiment in the United States, emboldening Russian president Vladimir Putin to effect a crackdown on the North Caucasus, which still features some amount of insurgent activity since Russian troops asserted control over Chechnya in 2000.

Predominantly Islamic, Chechnya largely held off the assertion of Russian political and military control following the First Chechen War from 1994 to 1996, and the Russian military’s failure was one of the reasons (aside from Russia’s economy) that former Russian president Boris Yeltsin became very unpopular in early 1996 months ahead of his reelection.  Yeltsin, and Putin thereafter, from 1999 to 2000 in the Second Chechen War, definitively brought Chechnya under federal control.  Ramzan Kadyrov, the current Chechen leader since 2007, is the son of a former-rebel-turned-Kremlin-ally, and his iron rule has restored some amount of political and economic stability to Grozny, though his tenure’s been marked by a number of accusations of human rights violations.

If anything, neighboring Dagestan has become the more recent problem as a seat of instability and violence, and the struggle in the two regions has transformed from a largely post-Soviet nationalist struggle into one that’s much more religious in nature over the past decade.

The former U.S. ambassador to the United Nations under the Bush administration, John Bolton, is already claiming they are hired killers in a grander conspiracy.

As Politico notes, U.S. presidents haven’t exactly been profiles in courage on the Chechen issue in the past:

For years before the Boston Marathon suspects were identified, American presidents have avoided talking about Chechnya — it’s been a prerequisite demanded by Russia’s leaders for maintaining strong relationships.

President Barack Obama and his administration have been quiet on the continued tensions between Vladmir Putin’s government and the area that is its federal subject. That follows the pattern of his predecessors: Bill Clinton pushed Boris Yeltsin to find a peaceful settlement to what began in 1994 as a war to gain independence from Russia, as did George W. Bush.

Since taking office, Obama hasn’t said the word “Chechnya” publicly. The Treasury and State Departments have, though, taken action.

Reports of Russian military abuses abound from its Chechen campaigns from the 1990s and 2000s, many documented by the late Russian journalist Anna Politkovskaya.  Pro-Chechen groups have conducted a number of terrorist activities against citizens in Russia, many of them harrowing — the 2002 Moscow theater hostage crisis, the 2003 Stavropol train bombing, the 2004 Moscow metro bombing, the 2004 Beslan school siege — but never outside Russia.

I’m not going to pretend to be an expert on current Chechen rebel activity, but I fear that Putin could use the Boston bombing — if indeed the link to Chechnya is confirmed — as a pretense for another campaign against Chechen and Dagestani rebels.

Photo credit to BBC News. 

United States, Venezuela

A conversation with Ambassador Patrick Duddy

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CARACAS, Venezuela — For what it’s worth, here’s some more of the conversation from last Friday with Patrick Duddy, who served as the U.S. ambassador to Venezuela from 2007 until 2010 and who kindly gave me nearly a half-hour of time to discuss current U.S.-Venezuelan relations.

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The late president Hugo Chávez ejected Duddy from the country on September 11, 2008, though Duddy returned a few months later, and I was curious as to his view of U.S.-Venezuelan relations especially because he served under both U.S. presidents George W. Bush and Barack Obama.

Obama’s appointee to succeed Duddy, Larry Palmer, was rejected out of hand by Chávez in 2011, and the post continues to remain vacant.  Palmer now serves as ambassador to Barbados and the Eastern Caribbean.

Duddy, a veteran U.S. diplomat, has served throughout Latin America, including Brazil, Paraguay, Chile and Bolivia.

* * * * *

On the policy differences between the administrations of George W. Bush and Barack Obama on Venezuela:

It would be easier to underscore the commonalities between the Bush and Obama administrations. I served as ambassador from 2007 to September of 2008 for President Bush, and then as you know, I was expelled on Sept. 11, 2008, spent some months out of the country, [and] returned the next summer as President Obama’s ambassador…

Both administrations, while I was ambassador had a pretty clear message which was we thought… both sides would benefit from a more productive relationship.

On Maduro and potential U.S. relations in a Maduro administration: Continue reading A conversation with Ambassador Patrick Duddy →

United States, Venezuela

Growing U.S.-Venezuelan commercial ties won’t lead to diplomatic thaw if Maduro wins

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CARACAS, Venezuela — I reported earlier today in Deutsche Welle on the state of U.S.-Venezuelan bilateral relations, which aren’t exactly gangbusters, if you’ve been paying attention for the past 14 years.

Venezuela Flag IconUSflag

The bottom line is: don’t expect acting president Nicolás Maduro, if he wins, to transform the chilly relationship between the United States and Venezuela.

To me, however, the more interesting factor is the commercial ties between the two countries, already strong throughout the reign of the late president Hugo Chávez, but now growing ever faster as Venezuela’s economy sputters and becomes increasingly import-dependent:

Venezuela’s obvious top export is oil – and the United States is its top customer, and that’s been true during both the Bush and Obama administrations, even when relations were at their worst. The United States purchases up to 900,000 barrels of oil a day from Venezuela – it officially funds around 40 percent of Venezuela’s export receipts. Given the complex financial arrangements between China and Venezuela and Venezuela’s subsidies to Cuba and to the rest of Central America and the Caribbean, US demand for oil has directly funded Chávez’s government, despite the rhetoric against the supposedly evil, imperialist gringo empire.

But precisely because of Venezuela’s dependence on the oil industry, the other sectors of its economy have atrophied, especially under the business climate during the Chávez era, when domestic and foreign businesses alike were subjected to ad hoc expropriation. That’s made Venezuela increasingly reliant on imports of staples, such as food and even fresh produce. Venezuela is even starting to import refined oil products, in part due to a gasoline subsidy that keeps gas prices at the lowest level worldwide.

Obviously, U.S. policymakers would prefer that Henrique Capriles, the opposition candidate, wins the election. But given the incumbent advantages of the Maduro campaign, who has inherited the political infrastructure of his predecessor, Maduro’s election seems much likelier. If the Venezuelan economy does continue its downward spiral in the months and years to come, Maduro could well use anti-American rhetoric to deflect criticism from the failures of economic policy.

That means bilateral relations might get worse before they get better.

It’s uncertain whether that growing dependence would improve ties with the US – it’s easy to envision a fall in gas prices or a financial crisis result in even more brinksmanship in a Maduro administration as a distraction from harder budget choices.

Photo credit to Kevin Lees — Caracas, Venezuela, April 2013.

European Union, United States

A comparison of US and EU freedom of information regimes

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For what it’s worth, I’ve been reviewing a law review article that I wrote in 2006 comparing, on the one hand, the U.S. Freedom of Information Act and, on the other hand, E.U. Regulation 1049/2001.European_UnionUSflag

The paper,  Ever Closer Transparency: Comparing the European Regulation on Public Access to Documents with the U.S. Freedom of Information Act, tries to accomplish three tasks: (i) establishing the theoretical context for freedom of information and the policy rationales underlying it, (ii) explicates the text of FOIA (5 U.S.C. §552), as adopted in 1966 and amended in 1974 in the United States, and Regulation 1049/2001, as adopted in the European Union in 2001, elucidating their similarities and differences, and (iii) providing five recommendations to strengthen the freedom-of-information regimes in each country.

Given that I spent the next part of the year taking the New York bar exam and jumping into a fund formation legal practice at Latham & Watkins, I never followed up with actually publishing the article, so I’m considering revising the paper and submitting it.

Any comments or recommendations on the original text (see in Scribd below — the link is here) are very much welcomed!

Iraq, United States

Remembering the 10th anniversary of the U.S.-led Iraq invasion

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iraq cartoon

Retired U.S. colonel Ted Spain lists 10 mistakes that the United States made in its Iraq invasion in March 2003 in a succinct and insightful piece in Foreign Policy today.USflagiraq flag icon

Virtually all of them — from the intelligence failures to the inability or incapacity to provide for post-invasion law and order to the flippant attitude of the U.S. to building diplomatic ties in advance of the invasion — have to do with inadequate pre-war planning.

It reminded me of a cartoon that a friend rediscovered from The New Yorker over the weekend (pictured above), a poignant commentary on just how much hubris American policymakers, chief among them the Pentagon strategists under the leadership of U.S. Donald Rumsfeld, displayed in March 2003 before the Iraqi invasion.

It’s unclear today that the United States or the Middle East is more secure for having removed Saddam Hussein from power.  Lawrence B. Lindsey, at the time head of U.S. president George W. Bush’s national economic counsel, was essentially sacked for suggesting that the war might cost up to $200 billion.  It ended up costing $800 billion, nearly 4,500 U.S. troop deaths, 32,000 wounded and today, the U.S. military doesn’t even have so much as a small outpost in Baghdad since the absolute withdrawal of U.S. forces in December 2011.

Furthermore, the horrific prisoner abuse scandal at Abu Ghraib cost the United States whatever moral legitimacy it still had left a year after the invasion, which morphed from a quest to rid the country of phantom weapons of mass destruction into an aimless occupation to develop a democratic Iraq into a darker, counterinsurgency effort to stop a painful sectarian civil war.

And that’s even if you believe that the faulty intelligence that led U.S. political leaders to believe that Iraq was harboring weapons of mass destruction (it wasn’t — Saddam was posturing in large part to posture vis-a-vis Iran) was merely gross negligence and not outright manipulation and fraud.

Saddam was certainly no angel — and with the civil war in neighboring Syria reaching nearly a two-year anniversary under strongman Bashar al-Assad, the two countries provide quite a damning indictment for the Ba’ath Party (حزب البعث العربي الاشتراكي) in the two countries where it has been the dominant party in the last half of the 20th century.

But it’s certainly clear that Iraq is no better off for having suffered through the invasion and its aftermath.  Iraq today is, mercifully, a long way from the sectarian violence that marred in the civil war from 2005 to 2008 but today, clear strains exist among the Sunni, Shi’a and Kurdish Iraqis.

Millions of Iraqi citizens were either displaced in the sectarian violence or fled the country entirely, and an estimated 120,000 Iraqi citizens were killed in the fighting. 

maliki

Iraqi prime minister Nuri al-Maliki (نوري المالكي) (pictured above), who leads a Shi’ite coalition in the Iraqi parliament, is hardly a secular democratic leader, and protests have increasingly opposed his government in recent months — despite a 50% increase in Iraqi oil production since taking power in 2006, Sunnis in Baghdad now stridently oppose the al-Maliki government.  The Iraqi parliament passed a law earlier this year limiting the speaker of the Iraqi parliament and Iraq’s prime minister and president to just two terms in office — that means al-Maliki will not govern Iraq after expected parliamentary elections in March 2014.

Those elections, by the way, will occur just months before another war-torn country in which the United States still has troops, Afghanistan, is set to select a successor to the term-limited president Hamid Karzai (حامد کرزی) after 12 years in office.

Iraq ranked in 2012 as the ninth-worst failed state in The Fund for Peace’s failed state index.  It’s perceived as the world’s 18th most corrupt country in 2012 according to Transparency International.  Though it’s made many gains in the past five years, it still ranks as just 131 out of 186 in the United Nations Human Development Report for 2013.

Above all, it bears repeating:

An estimated 120,000 Iraqi citizens died. 

You can’t place the blame for all of those deaths directly on the U.S. military or the Bush administration or Donald Rumsfeld.  But it’s indisputable that the invasion that the United States launched 10 years ago this week led to the unraveling of Iraqi civil society that unleashed the violence that led to those deaths.

If there’s one overweening lesson that the next generation of American security experts take away from the Iraqi war, whatever strides or obstacles that Iraq faces in the decades ahead, it’s that inadequate planning can doom even the most flawless initial invasion into a decade of painful, costly and terror-filled destabilization.

Thanks to Timothy Stewart-Winter for the cartoon by Robert Mankoff, which ran in The New Yorker in 2003.

Afghanistan, United States

Will Hamid Karzai really step down as Afghanistan’s president in August 2014?

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karzaiobama

Four panelists discussed whether the United States military should leave Afghanistan at the end of 2014, as currently planned by the administration of U.S. president Barack Obama Thursday evening at a debate sponsored by the McCain Institute (founded in 2012 in cooperation with Arizona State University and, yes, U.S. senator John McCain was in attendance). USflagafghanistan flag

The panel included a wide range of voices, including the American Enterprise Institute’s Fred Kagan, The Atlantic‘s Steve Clemons, Ken Roth of the Human Rights Watch, and the RAND Corporation’s Seth Jones, whose 2010 book on the Afghan war, In the Graveyard of Empires: America’s War in Afghanistan, remains a must-read touchstone for understanding the U.S. effort in Afghanistan even today.

Whither Karzai?

The underreported issue is what exactly Afghanistan’s government will look like at the end of 2014 when U.S. troops are supposed to leave — and that, to paraphrase Robert Frost, will make all the difference.

It’s one of the most crucial puzzle pieces for Afghanistan’s future, both in relation to deeper U.S. political engagement with Afghanistan, as well as the U.S. decision on its military footprint in the country after 2014.  After all, it’s going to be much easier for the U.S. to disengage militarily if it’s doing so in the context of an Afghan government that’s committed to the rule of law and nation-building and that can also stand on its own in the absence of U.S. forces.

As such, the presidential election currently scheduled for April 3, 2014 should determine the regime with which the U.S. government will be negotiating the transformation of its current military-heavy relationship with Afghanistan.

But for now, incumbent Afghan president Hamid Karzai is stepping down after two consecutive terms in office — he is constitutionally barred from seeking a third term in office.

That means, as U.S. troops draw down in permanent numbers, the U.S. government will not only be dealing with a new civilian government in Afghanistan, but a government without Karzai, the only Afghan leader that U.S. policymakers have ever really known since the U.S. military removed the Taliban government in autumn 2001.  Karzai was quickly selected as interim president and, thereafter, won reelection in the (somewhat imperfect) October 2004 and August 2009 presidential elections.

So while the official timetable suggests an election around 13 months from now that will lead to Afghanistan’s first peaceful transfer of national power set to take place weeks before U.S. troops permanently withdraw, color me skeptical.

It seems to me that the United States can either secure the integrity of the current withdrawal timetable or the current Afghan electoral timetable, but certainly not both.

That the McCain Institute is even hosting a panel to discuss the option of a significant U.S. military force in Afghanistan beyond 2014 is a testament to the fact that the 2014 drawdown date is written in pencil, not ink.  And if the mayor of New York City can find a way to evade term limits to seek a third consecutive term, I’m sure the U.S.-backed president of Afghanistan can do the same.

Consensus for greater U.S. political engagement

One thing upon which all of the panelists more or less agreed was the need for more political engagement from the United States in Afghanistan.

As Roth drolly noted, ‘you can’t kill your way to good governance.’

Roth expressed caution that Afghanistan has only been viewed as a military matter, which he argued has been counterproductive for U.S. objectives in the region, especially with respect to promoting good governance and deepening the rights of women in Afghanistan; he remained hopeful, however, that the troop drawdown would open space in the U.S. agenda for further political engagement.

Even Kagan, who strenuously cautioned against an end to the U.S. drawdown in 2014 (which, after all, is two ‘fighting seasons‘ away), noted that the United States needs a political strategy — and he was quick to caution that negotiating with the Taliban is an exit strategy, not a political strategy, and not a particularly smart one at that.

Clemons, who opposes a significant military role in Afghanistan beyond 2014, thoughtfully added, ‘It’s odd we’ve adopted a country that we don’t seem to want to be very close to,’ questioning why U.S. officials haven’t developed closer ties to develop economic opportunities or reduce trade barriers.  He noted, too, that the amount the United States spends annually on its military action in Afghanistan (around $198 billion in fiscal years 2012 and 2013, according to this source) dwarfs in multiples the country’s GDP — around $20 billion or so in 2011.

Looking ahead to December 2014

But none of that answers the fundamental question of what we’ll mean in, say, December 2014, when we talk about the ‘Afghan government’ — and that’s a pretty important question. Continue reading Will Hamid Karzai really step down as Afghanistan’s president in August 2014? →

United States

What game theory tells us about the sequester showdown

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obamaboehner

Here in the United States, we’ve reached the final day before $85 billion in spending cuts take effect from sequestration (Ezra Klein really does provide ‘everything you need to know‘ in background, so I won’t waste your time with my own explanation). USflag

For non-U.S. readers (or lazy Americans), here’s the issue in a nutshell: Back in 2011, the United States was nearing its debt limit ceiling — a totally idiosyncratic limit on the U.S. treasury incurring additional debt, regardless of whether the U.S. Congress has enacted spending necessitating the issuance of further debt.  It’s so idiosyncratic that only Denmark has a similar mechanism.

Because the Republican Party won control of the U.S. House of Representatives in the 2010 midterm elections, negotiations between U.S. president Barack Obama and the U.S. Congress in summer 2011 were more fraught than usual over the debt ceiling.  Partly, that’s because of the influence of the ‘tea party’ movement that boosted the ranks of House Republicans with anti-deficit legislators and that threatened the remaining House Republicans who cooperated too readily with the Democratic administration with primary challenges in future congressional elections (i.e., if you’re not conservative enough, we’ll put up someone who is: see, e.g., U.S. senator Bob Bennett, U.S. senator Dick Lugar).

So the solution was a last-minute agreement, which provided for a ‘supercommittee’ to recommend legislation to reduce the U.S. budget deficit by $1.2 trillion in the next decade.  If that failed to result in a compromise (and of course it failed, and it failed way back in November 2011), lawmakers would be subject to around $85 billion in automatic across-the-board cuts (the ‘sequestration’), half of which would affect U.S. defense spending and half of which would affect U.S. domestic spending (though the cuts to domestic spending are, well, pretty much dumb from any point of view, economic or otherwise; that was the point, however — they were designed to be a negative incentive, even though Jeffrey Sachs today argues that the discretionary spending cuts are part of some grand Faustian Obama bargain).

No one really thought at the time the agreement was incredibly robust, and Standard and Poor’s responded by actually downgrading the United States’s credit rating from ‘AAA’ to ‘AA+.’

A short-term deal on New Year’s Eve 2012 — when lawmakers considered the so-called ‘fiscal cliff’ of both the scheduled increase of U.S. income taxes from Bush-era rates back to Clinton-era rates in addition to the sequestration cuts (among other austerity measures, such as the end of a holiday on the payroll tax) — achieved a compromise on tax rates, but pushed the sequestration issue until March 1.

That brings us up through today.  Congressional Republicans and the Obama administration have reached no deal and, within the next 24 hours, $85 billion in cuts are supposed to go into effect through the U.S. federal government.

Predictably, the sequester has become an increasingly loud issues in the past week (Andrew Sullivan thinks the United States should just push forward with the sequester, U.S. Federal Reserve chairman Ben Bernanke thinks otherwise).

The problem as I see it, is that House Republicans realize both that they are the beneficiaries of:

  1. a classic hold-up situation*, insofar as a dysfunctional government hurts U.S. president Barack Obama more than it hurts 535 disparate members of Congress — that becomes more true as the executive branch has gained more power (no matter how many times the Obama administration sends poor U.S. transportation secretary Ray LaHood out in front of the cameras to protest there’s simply not enough money for the U.S. government to process airport security in a timely manner), and
  2. a game of chicken** where the Republicans start off with a steering wheel that’s already four-fifths ripped off the car, due to the increased polarization of Congress (in no small part because of ideological purity tests that threaten incumbents with primary contests) and the increased insularity of Congressional districts (in no small part because of the decennial gerrymandering of those districts).

What’s fascinating about this situation — and what makes it so interesting to me in the world of non-U.S. politics as well — is that there are plenty of hold-up situations in international politics (e.g., basically everything that’s happened in the Doha round of negotiations in the World Trade Organization since 2001) and plenty of games of chicken (e.g., basically, take your pick of every dodgy election and subsequently contested result in the past decade from Kenya to Georgia), but it’s rare to see them combined in the same policymaking frankenstorm. Continue reading What game theory tells us about the sequester showdown →