• There was no state-building or pop-centric coin in Anbar Province where the Sunni Awakening began.
• The Sunnis came to the US for help; the US military did nothing to win their hearts and minds.
• “If NATO so alienates the population by accidentally killing civilians that many more join the Taliban, then why do the Taliban deliberately kill three times as many ordinary Afghans without causing three times the backlash, leading to their defeat?”

See Captain’s Journal for an excellent and detailed analysis, as opposed to my mediocre and short one.

Since then [April 2009] – in addition to the two wars, economic crises, and global flu pandemic — it’s been hard to keep up the pressing and immediate challenges on the Obama administration’s to-do list. We’ve seen natural disasters (Haiti’s earthquake, Nashville’s flooding, Oklahoma’s tornadoes), man-made disasters (the BP oil spill), default crises (Dubai, Greece, Ireland, Spain, Portugal), foreign policy crises (North Korea, Israel), and attempted terrorist attacks (Abdulmutallab on Christmas, Shahzad in Times Square).

I can only assume that it’s fairly common for President Obama to wake up, receive his morning briefings, and say, “You’ve got to be kidding me.”

Well, nobody made him run for president.

Washington has so far endorsed Afghan plans for reconciliation with some Taliban…the plans echo the Awakening movement in Iraq, where tribal leaders from the country’s Sunni minority rebelled against Al Qaeda in Mesopotamia and joined forces with the Americans.

I may be the dense one here, but I don’t get this analogy. The Sunni awakening was about Sunni leaders in Iraq deciding to join forces with US troops to fight Al Qaeda. How is the US agreeing to negotiate with the Taliban like the awakening at all? I don’t get it.

The best news is the headline figure: total D&G funding is up 25% from FY 2010, rising from $2.6 billion to $3.3 billion. The troubling aspect of this is that programs in Afghanistan account for just a bit over 100% of the increase. Thus, excluding Afghanistan (which accounts for 42% of the total D&G budget), there is a small decrease in total D&G funding. Given the skepticism I have shown about US policy towards Afghanistan, I do not believe this is a good use of scarce D&G funds.

Outside of Afghanistan, however, I am reasonably pleased with the allocation of D&G funds. The bad news continues to be that D&G funding remains concentrated in a very small number of countries. Five countries account for 60% of D&G funds in the FY 2011 request: Afghanistan, Mexico, Pakistan, Iraq, and Sudan. The good news is that, excluding Afghanistan, these are countries where D&G funding could do some good. While I was skeptical about funds for Iraq, Pakistan, and Sudan last year, in retrospect this was a good use of D&G funds as each of these countries has made major progress towards improved governance in the past year. Iraq and Sudan held elections. Even if the results of the former are still disputed and the latter were highly flawed, they represent progress compared to the status quo ante. Moreover, in Iraq, the key figures are using its existing electoral institutions to resolve the election dispute, not going around them. In addition, Pakistan seems to finally be taking the threat the Taliban poses seriously. I also think the funds for Mexico make sense. Most of the money is going towards human security and rule of law programs, designed primarily to defeat the influence of drug gangs. Mexico is a democracy, wants to solve this problem, and is our neighbor. Helping Mexico get a handle on fighting drug cartels thus seems like a good use of D&G money.

I have also changed my opinion on what the overall picture of US D&G funding suggests about how the US Government views these programs. In the past I have talked a lot about the militarization of aid. I don’t think that’s quite accurate, however. Rather, what the budget demonstrates is that the US Government is increasingly prioritizing governance and rule of law programs (especially human security) over democracy ones, such as working with civil society and political parties. This is no surprise as the Obama Administration has made clear that improved governance in weak states is central to current US foreign policy (although I have my doubts about whether the administration can achieve this ambitious objective). It’s also not a bad idea because without security, nothing is sustainable. In addition, while I do not like the idea of US D&G funding going increasingly to security, aligning with the Defense Department’s priorities is probably a good idea from a budgetary point of view because the military tends to get what it wants much more than other parts of the US Government. While this probably will result in a loss of autonomy for USAID and the State Department in D&G programs, budget protection from the Defense Department is a reasonable trade-off, from a bureaucratic politics point of view.

Overall, as I said, I am pleased. My main concern remains Afghanistan. The US will spend $1.3 billion in FY 2011 in D&G programs in Afghanistan, like the massively wasteful RAMP-UP. My fear is that one day Congress will ask the administration to account for these flawed, corruption-inducing programs as part of the broader “who lost Afghanistan” debate and that the blowback will be severe.

In the decades to come, the most lethal threats to the United States’ safety and security…are likely to emanate from states that cannot adequately govern themselves or secure their own territory. Dealing with such fractured or failing states is, in many ways, the main security challenge of our time…

The United States now recognizes that the security sectors of at-risk countries are really systems of systems tying together the military, the police, the justice system, and other governance and oversight mechanisms. As such, building a partner’s overall governance and security capacity is a shared responsibility across multiple agencies and departments of the U.S. national security apparatus

Why so few people see how ambitious (unrealistic?) this foreign policy is remains a true mystery to me.

Freedom House…in its latest annual assessment that liberty and human rights had retreated globally for the fourth consecutive year. It said this marked the longest period of decline in freedom since the organisation began its reports nearly 40 years ago.

The author (I have no idea who because The Economist does not carry bylines), goes on to discuss the various causes of the latest democratic recession:

…the worrying thing is that the cause of liberal democracy is not merely suffering political reverses, it is also in intellectual retreat…

there are some obvious reasons why Western governments’ zeal to promote democracy, and the willingness of other countries to listen, have ebbed. In many quarters (including Western ones), the assault on Saddam Hussein’s Iraq, and its bloody aftermath, seemed to confirm people’s suspicion that promoting democracy as an American foreign-policy aim was ill-conceived or plain cynical.

In Afghanistan, the other country where an American-led coalition has been waging war in democracy’s name, the corruption and deviousness of the local political elite, and the flaws of last year’s election, have been an embarrassment. In the Middle East, America’s enthusiasm for promoting democracy took a dip after the Palestinian elections of 2006, which brought Hamas to office…

But perhaps the biggest reason why democracy’s magnetic power has waned is the rise of China – and the belief of its would-be imitators that they too can create a dynamic economy without easing their grip on political power.

The article then makes one of the most concise, clear, and convincing arguments the importance of supporting democracy I have read in a long time. It methodically addresses all of the criticisms leveled against democracy and shows why they are wrong.

So how does the case in defence of democracy stand up these days?…Democracy may not yield perfect policies, but it ought to guard against all manner of ills, ranging from outright tyranny (towards which a “mild” authoritarian can always slide) to larceny at the public expense.

… all but two of the 30 least corrupt countries in the world are democracies… Autocracies tend to occupy much higher rankings on the corruption scale…

What about the argument that economic development, at least in its early stages, is best pursued under a benign despot?…For every economically successful East Asian (former) autocracy like Taiwan or South Korea, there is an Egypt or a Cameroon (or indeed a North Korea or a Myanmar) which is both harsh and sluggish…

Believers in democracy as an engine of progress often make the point that a climate of freedom is most needed in a knowledge-based economy..It is surely no accident that every economy in the top 25 of the Global Innovation Index is a democracy, except semi-democratic Singapore and Hong Kong.

China, which comes 27th in this table, is often cited as a vast exception to this rule…The determination of China’s authorities to impose their own terms on the information revolution was highlighted this week when Google, the search engine, said it might pull out of China after a cyber-attack that targeted human-rights activists…

Admirers of China’s iron hand may conclude that it can manage well without the likes of Google…But in the medium term, the mentality that insists on hobbling search engines will surely act as a break on creative endeavour…

What about the argument that autocracy creates a modicum of stability without which growth is impossible?…On the State Fragility Index…democracies tend to do much better than autocracies…

At the very least, a culture of compromise – coupled with greater accountability and limits on state power – means that democracies are better able to avoid catastrophic mistakes, or criminal cruelty. Bloody nightmares that cost tens of millions of lives, like China’s Great Leap Forward or the Soviet Union’s forced collectivisation programme, were made possible by the concentration of power in a small group of people who faced no restraint.

Liberal democratic governments can make all manner of blunders, but they are less likely to commit mass murder autocracies may be faster and bolder. They are also more accident-prone.

For all its frustrations, open and accountable government tends in the long run to produce better policies…Above all, elections make the transfer of power legitimate and smooth. Tyrannies may look stable under one strongman; but they can slide into instability, even bloody chaos, if a transition goes awry. Free elections also mean that policy mistakes, even bad ones, are more quickly corrected…

I often describe democracy assistance as a harm reduction strategy. This is a crucially important point that the development first crowd does not seem to understand.

Sudan is sliding towards violent breakup…Both parties want elections for the wrong reasons. The National Congress Party (NCP) wants votes in April 2010 that would allow it to regain the political legitimacy it needs both to protect President Bashir against the International Criminal Court (ICC) arrest warrant and to be in a stronger position to declare a state of emergency if needed, including in the event of a new war. The Sudan People’s Liberation Movement (SPLM) is concerned that derailed elections might jeopardize its overriding goal of holding the referendum [on independence for southern Sudan] on schedule. It threatens to declare unilateral independence if pushed to accept a referendum postponement…

It is essential to move rapidly on a number of fronts, including to negotiate a Darfur peace agreement that allows all Darfuris to vote in national elections; to implement legal reforms necessary for a free and fair national election process; and to agree on the commissions for the South’s self-determination referendum…Time is also required to negotiate a framework for the negotiations over how two highly interdependent states will relate to each other…These processes require strong, united international facilitation, as well as support from other major political forces in Sudan…

If implementation again lags badly, it will be necessary to concentrate on achieving the minimum essential to prevent return to deadly chaos: namely ensuring that the South’s referendum is held on schedule, with a day-after arrangement is in place.

It is quite ridiculous to believe that international negotiators can solve all of these issues in four months.  Thus, we need “to concentrate on achieving the minimum essential to prevent return to deadly chaos.” I had a long talk with someone who works on Sudan, and asked whether the US government was rethinking its strategy and calling to postpone the election.  The answer, sadly but predictably, was no.  I guess we have learned nothing from Afghanistan and Iraq, so let me make this clear: holding an election when we think it will cause a civil war is not a good idea.