From:
Pietro Calogero, doctoral student in City and Regional Planning, UC Berkeley
Program in comparative urban policy, focus on Afghanistan

To:
Congresswoman Barbara Lee
1301 Clay St Suite 1000 North
Oakland CA 94612

Senator Barbara Boxer
1700 Montgomery St, Suite 240
San Francisco CA 94111

Date: 10 November 2006

Policy ideas to consolidate Democratic gains over the next two years

Dear Congresswoman Lee and Senator Boxer,

First, profound congratulations on retaking both the House and the Senate!

Second, I am sure you are well aware of the following issues. So please just use this as a letter from one of your constituents if it has some helpful quotes for you.

For many Americans this midterm election was a protest-vote against the Iraq War policy. The good news is that this has handed control of both houses of Congress to the Democrats. The challenge now is to consolidate this gain by articulating strong policies which present constructive alternatives to the Administration’s current quagmire.

Dealing with Iraq

The president’s invitation for suggestions on Iraq is an interesting two-sided maneuver. The disaster there is largely his fault and entirely his responsibility. But if the Democrats can articulate a distinctive policy which is effective—even if the president ignores it or adopts it without crediting Democrats—it is still a promising path for consolidating Democratic power in Congress and having a strong shot at the presidency in 2008.

First we need to evaluate whether any group or faction within Iraq can maintain a stable national government there. If not, the United States should prepare to break the country apart and withdraw piecemeal: first from an independent north, and then from an independent middle. Neighboring countries will object strongly; hopefully that will encourage regional cooperation to stabilize Iraq as either one or three states. Turkey will be upset with an independent Kurdistan. Perhaps this move will inspire them towards constructive engagement. Saudi Arabia will be upset at the further harm to Sunni Arab interests by dismembering the country. Maybe then they will stop allowing private funding of insurgents by private Saudi citizens (same applies to Afghanistan).

The US should remain in the south for awhile, to make sure the situation there does not deteriorate and to monitor the situation in the middle and north. We should look to make close, long-term alliances with the Shi’ites in the south. If that means taking an accommodationist stance toward Iran—at least regarding Iraq—that is necessary. Regardless of the particular dysfunctional relationship between Ahmedinejad and Bush, Iran will remain a significant regional player and will remain deeply involved in the Shi’ite-majority region south of Baghdad. 

If the Shi’ites want to maintain Iraq as a unified country, we should assist them in that effort. But given our current reputation there as invaders, we must shift our stance so that the various groups in Iraq cannot simply mobilize by seeking to ‘oppose the infidel.’ At this point our very presence in central Iraq invites violence. Once insurgents realize that they have to deal with other Iraqis and a longer-term, post-US era, they will face local pressure to begin bargaining or lose credibility. But again, this is inextricable from the regional context. Once the neighboring countries realize we are willing to abide by the collective (or fragmented) will of the Iraqis and allow this colonially-defined geography to be radically altered, they may be more willing to act proactively to produce a stable, peaceful outcome on their own borders.

Thus far I have not mentioned oil once. If we want to send a message that we are concerned with the long-term welfare of Iraqis, we need to resolve the best political solution for the people. And we need to communicate that their welfare is most important to us, not their oil. If anything, oil is a dangerous threat to stability. It may finance reconstruction, but it could also lead to a corrupt rentier state like Nigeria. Above all we need to encourage Iraqis to develop a scheme for broad-based investment and redistributive economic growth, whether in one state or three.

Note that this and the following policy recommendations are premised on a shift in the relationship between the Legislative and Executive branches of the federal government. In a post-Soviet world of increasing complexity and strong American dominance, the Executive should no longer have sole responsibility for foreign policy. Both the Senate and the House should have a much more active and direct role in foreign relations.

Fighting terrorism through justice, not war

Terrorism as a long-term, continuous threat that must be fought in a very different way than warfare between states. It is a continuous threat, and like crime, it must constantly be policed. It cannot be treated as War in the strict constitutional sense, partly because it does not fit the definition of conflict between states and, since there can be no bright-line distinction of the moment when that threat is gone, we run the risk of a permanent suspension of Constitutional rights if we define this as a state of War. We must not give in to the terrorists in the first place by living in fear and suspending our Constitutional rights. Restricting our freedoms is exactly what they want, and fear-based policies which suspend due process in this country hand them an immediate victory. To combat this, the Senate must affirm that we are not at War with a country called Terror, and therefore the full powers of the Constitution in peacetime must be restored. The Executive must request any future Declaration of War and the exact terms by which it will be concluded. Returning to a state of rule-of-law is the most effective way to restore our nation’s credibility, and it will be our most effective long-term defense, here and abroad.

We need to close down Guantanamó, and the detention facility at Bagram north of Kabul. We need to give suspected terrorists due process. We need to fully ban torture, and begin repairing our reputation to the point where we can advocate human rights once again. There are other issues which Americans deeply care about, like the prevention of human trafficking, the elimination of child exploitation and slavery. But our current behavior has destroyed our credibility and potential leverage in these related arenas as well. Banning torture merely requires forcing the president to respect the 8th Amendment of the US Constitution, or face immediate impeachment. No new laws are necessary here. Enforcement of existing, 217-year-old law should suffice.

Fighting terrorism by following the money

Fighting terrorism also means improving many forms of intelligence in this country and beyond. As with narcotics-trafficking and other forms of organized crime, terrorists use transnational financial networks to finance their operations. In many cases these networks overlap. We must pursue these financial networks aggressively. Why, for instance, are Taliban units in Southern Afghanistan equipped with new trucks and equipment? Do our allies Pakistan, the Emirates, and Saudi Arabia allow their citizens to finance terrorist networks? What pressure can we apply to these states to shut this down?

In the fall of 2001 we pursued terrorist networks aggressively, but this effort seems to have faltered. It needs to be renewed, even as we allow freedom of expression and freedom of travel. An open society does not mean permitting unregulated criminal and terrorist financial networks to thrive, here or internationally.

Fighting terrorism through intelligence

Another form of intelligence is to educate as many Americans as possible about these regions, their cultures, and languages. Right now we have a severe shortage of Americans who are willing and able to translate from Arabic, Farsi, Pashto, Tajik, Uzbek, Chechen, Sudanese dialects, Somali dialects, Igbo, and other Nigerian languages. Rather than thinking of this as a secret-intelligence need, this should be aggressively funded through universities, just as it was in the 1950s and 1960s. I received the FLAS for Farsi in 2005-2006, but I was surprised at how little funding there is available for this.

Furthermore, we need to get more Americans, of all ages, to travel abroad as civilians and understand this world a little better. That means promoting high school and college semester-abroad programs, dissertation and book research, expanding Peace Corps (and making damned sure the CIA is not involved in it), mid-career executive-exchange programs like the IREX professionals program, and designing new seniors peer-to-peer programs.

Note that rarely, if ever, does a secretive intelligence-gathering system work effectively. September 11th was an astounding example of the self-defeating failure of agency secrecy. The 9/11 report confirms what the RAND Corporation has been advocating for a decade: sharing, networking, and collaborating on soft forms of intelligence-gathering is best. Only through active critique and response can we learn and adapt continuously to new intelligence needs. In some ways, the open-source community which is developing Linux and BSD is the best model. It is worth contemplating why and how the most secure operating system can be developed through public collaboration. The hardest system to crack is NetBSD; and the only people who have gotten close are the developers themselves who keep trying to hack their own system. And they can’t.

Our secretive federal intelligence-services were conceived in a state-versus-state framework in the 1930s and 1940s. What we need today is an adaptive, open framework which is not spending a big chunk of its own budget protecting itself and hiding itself. The federal government would spend its money far better by funding public-broadcasting journalists and Anthropologists doing fieldwork all over the world, and then simply paying attention to what they publish. 

Of course, we should also pay attention to what the CIA and NSA are actually finding rather than waste those resources by forcing them only to reveal what politicians want to hear. But that has been a problem ever since Johnson ignored the CIA assessment that Ho Chi Minh was going to prevail in South Vietnam. It may not be solvable if politicians can always blackmail the secretive services with the threat of revealing their operatives. Since the current Administration has gotten away with the Plame affair, the message to the CIA and NSA is that they must state what politicians want to hear, not what has actually been learned.

Not letting terrorism define diplomacy

Latin American and African dictators used to gain favor with the US by claiming that their opponents were Soviet-allied communists. In exactly the same way, repressive regimes today seek our support by branding their enemies as “terrorists”. It does not serve our long-term strategic interests to allow ourselves to be used in this way.

We should align ourselves with democracies, with governments that promote transparency, human rights, and human development. In South Asia, our natural allies are India, Afghanistan, and Bangladesh. Sri Lanka should be pressured into resolving its civil war humanely and justly, with equal treatment of Tamils, not just on paper but in real social practice. In Pakistan we must resume strong diplomatic pressure on Pervez Musharraf to schedule democratic elections, and to work for peaceful internal stabilization as well as stabilization of Pakistan’s relationship with its neighbors. And if Pakistan refuses to govern the Tribal Areas along the border with Afghanistan, then maybe Pakistan should let Afghanistan govern those areas.

In Africa, as well, we should strengthen ties with democracies or with democratic movements within the governments and societies of countries. Many states in Africa have struggled through long, bloody conflicts and emerged as democracies only to face the disaster of AIDS in epidemic proportions, as well as diplomatic and economic isolation and neglect from the rest of the world.

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Rebuilding international credibility by honoring treaties

The second set of policies should be to rebuild our international credibility by honoring our treaty commitments and rejoining the effort to make the world more secure and just through treaties: for instance the Ottawa Treaty on Landmines, a Small Arms Treaty, and of course the Geneva Conventions. We should also join the International Criminal Court, and perhaps reinstate the Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty.

Rebuilding international credibility by recognizing democracy

We may not be comfortable with it, but the Palestinians voted for Hamas. If we are to show that we support the spread of democracy in the Middle East, we must recognize and honor the democratic will of the Palestinian people. We must recognize and honor the Hamas electoral victory.

We should also make it clear that our previous special relationship with Israel no longer serves our long-term geopolitical interests. We should remain their close allies, as we are with the Netherlands (for example). We should recognize a Palestinian state, without committing to a particular set of boundaries, and begin to develop diplomatic relations now. Such a reality on the ground will force the Israeli people and their leadership to begin taking substantial steps toward actually seeking peace with Palestinians. Through constructive engagement we can also develop an entirely new form of political leverage among Palestinians to discourage terrorist attacks against Israel. Gaza and the West Bank are quite a small area. The United States could provide significant development to this area quite inexpensively, compared to the price we pay for not helping Palestinians at the moment. We should do this without Israeli involvement, but perhaps with Saudi and Emirati funding assistance. Meanwhile, we should require the IDF to clean up the bomblets they dropped in southern Lebanon in the last few days of their bombing campaign.

Rebuilding international credibility by separating aid, diplomacy, force

In the past ten years three forms of overseas US policy have been collapsed together: diplomacy, military force, and humanitarian aid. This blending hurts all three efforts. Military “Provincial Reconstruction Teams” expose themselves to attack by trying to do goodwill projects in Afghanistan. They do what they do best, which is build school buildings and other physical infrastructure, but this is exactly the sort of assistance which is vulnerable to attack. But they cannot run actual education, such as literacy and numeracy education for boys, girls, and women. And those are precisely the programs that would leave a valuable legacy in the minds and hearts of Afghans.

Meanwhile, the militarization of humanitarian aid makes humanitarian organizations into military targets. Provincial Reconstruction Teams may be able to cope with this, but no other organization is likely to respond with heavy weapons-fire to an attack: it is a contradiction of the principles and mission of organizations like the Red Cross, Doctors Without Borders, and Oxfam. So wherever militarized aid occurs, these organizations cannot go.

Thirdly, militarization of diplomacy prevents the State Department from doing its job as well.

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Domestic policies: Stop coasting and start reinvesting in America

We should not forget that every country in the world has developed through a sustained process of internal investment. In the United States, the great moment of development was under Roosevelt with the New Deal, and in many ways this was continued under Truman, Eisenhower, Kennedy and Johnson. But development is not some fixed condition. It is always a sustained effort—to educate our children, maintain our physical infrastructure, and maintain the health of our people. With education, there is no cheap trick, there is no easy solution. It is labor-intensive, and in that sense, it is also jobs for Americans that cannot be outsourced overseas. We cannot let our infrastructure creak along without aggressive maintenance. Consider recent problems with our electricity-grid and certain levees that failed.

As for American health, the current system is failing. Here we don’t just mean the health care system. Our lifestyles are killing us, with an epidemic of obesity which involves both our food system and daily physical activity. When we drive too much, not only do we send a lot of money to the Middle East, burn a precious resource, and pollute the air; but we also hurt our own health. We must pursue development policies that build in health-maintenance. There are many ways to do this, and it is time to begin on many fronts.

But we do also mean the health care system. Doctors wish that doctors could administer our health care system. That is a noble ideal, but it has never been the case and is unlikely to ever occur: doctors like being doctors, not administrators. What we have ended up with is health-care administered by private-insurance adjustors, which no-one likes except the insurance industry. If the free market is supposed to deliver goods at the least cost, why is American health-care the most expensive in the world? We must figure out a better way now that our population is getting older and needing more care. Otherwise the legacy that this generation will pass on to its children and grandchildren is an impoverished country.

Democrats for fiscal responsibility

How do we fund all this? When it comes to health care, any number of options are more efficient and less expensive than the current setup. In health care, a better system will lead to lower costs. And healthy cities can be transformed and adapted over time through smart policy. Urban policy requires thinking ahead taking the long view of our lifestyles, our relationship to our environment, and the design of our lifestyles.

As for education and infrastructure, these are issues of giving back and passing on investment. Our generation has enjoyed unprecedented wealth founded on the investments made by our mothers and fathers. We owe this to our children, as we owe all American children real opportunity by funding all schools and giving them the resources they need to succeed—not by punishing them with unfunded mandates like the No Child Left Behind program. And fiscal responsibility means spending only the revenue you take in. It means balancing the federal budget as Bill Clinton did. We are accused of being the party of “tax-and-spend”, but the alternative seems to be spending without taxing, which is like having an irresponsible child who uses their credit-card without earning the money to pay it off.

Three pillars of government accountability

It is time to also recognize that government accountability to the people stands on three pillars. One is democracy, as we know well. Another is taxation; when the people see taxation as part of their investment in the future of their children and their society, they will make sure that the investment is being well-spent. If you want to see what happens to a country where the people don’t need to pay tax and the government is not responsible to them, go to Nigeria. Or Equitorial Guinea. Oil revenues mean those countries do not need to tax their citizens, and therefore are not beholden to those citizens. Go see what rights those citizens have.

But there is a third pillar to government accountability as well, and our forefathers understood this when they guaranteed free speech and a free press as the first Amendment in the Bill of Rights. Transparency is the third pillar of accountability. Transparency is how government is held accountable on a continuous basis to the people it serves. The secretive behavior of the Bush Administration is an object lesson in avoiding accountability. It is increasingly clear that, in addition to a free press, the United States needs stronger legislation to maintain transparency in all branches of government. The government must share its records and not sneer at the people when they want to know, for instance, why we are invading one country when we are busy grappling with terrorism and insecurity in other countries nearby. But more generally, it means not presuming that deliberations and documents should be classified unless the Administration decides it wants to inform the American people. We cannot run a democracy on a need-to-know basis. Transparency is the pillar of accountable government that has been most weakened by our president, and it is time to consider both removing legislation which allows secrecy and enacting legislation which brings government practices more in line with the Constitution of the United States of America. 

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Hope you both find some of this useful. Sorry it is long.

May God bless you and speed you on with the work ahead.

Sincerely,

Pietro Calogero

PhD student in City and Regional Planning
University of California, Berkeley
Board member, Afghan Friends Network