This week, US Forces withdrew from Afghanistan's Korengal Valley -- known more commonly to those who served there as "the valley of death". It is a story that has landed relatively quietly in the US media, and deserves much more attention.

US troops arrived in the Korengal in 2005 -- they moved in, claiming the high ground of the tiny, isolated valley, and prepared for an impossible mission. The strategy was for those soldiers to draw the fire and attention from Taliban and foreign fighters who sought to enter into Afghanistan from the Pakistani theater via the .8km-wide valley.

The goal was not to secure the valley, nor to block the valley's entrance. The goal was to tie up insurgents in a battle away from more populated regions of Afghanistan.

The goal was put quite frankly by the Washington Post:

"The troops were, in essence, bullet magnets. "

Since 2005, over 40 US soldiers have been killed, hundreds wounded. The soldiers were met by daily small arms fire, ambushes, IED attacks, and mortar fire from the surrounding hills. Some of the fire came from Taliban, more from local insurgencies who sought to oppose the central government's expanded control over the remote valley -- filled with 5,000 fiercely independent Korengalis -- who speak their own language, and follow many of their own customs.

This year, a new command structure in Afghanistan has come to the conclusion that ISAF operations in Korengal run higher risks than rewards. The conclusion was that Capt. Mark Moretti's troops in the valley had not stumbled not into a hive of Taliban insurgency, but an internecine blood feud between Korengalis, who sought, above all, to be left to their own devices.

(more after the jump)

Renewed warnings about the US Federal Government's budget deficit hit the front page of the New York Times today.

The Federal Reserve chairman said Wednesday that the government must begin to make “difficult choices” to address its gaping deficits and warned that “postponing them will only make them more difficult.”

Bernanke continued:

"Although sizable deficits are unavoidable in the near term, maintaining the confidence of the public and financial markets requires that policy makers move decisively to set the federal budget on a trajectory toward sustainable fiscal balance."

The United States needs to spend less money. Period. But that is the easy part. The hard part comes when specific cuts must be made.

(I should add that this post is written under the assumption that no further tax increases are politically feasible/possible/desirable in the short- or medium-term)

The American reaction to potentially cutting Social Security benefits is representative of the difficulty of cutting domestic social benefits - Americans react with visceral disdain to any suggestion that their Social Security benefits might be cut and politicians are wary of running on benefit-cutting platforms. Social Security is rightly called the "third rail of American politics."

If social benefits can't feasibly be cut, where to next? Foreign aid is a favorite target of budget-cutters (71% of Americans would cut it), but it accounts for less than 1% of the total federal budget.

One idea, until recently thought to be tantamount to political suicide, is to make cuts in the US Defense Budget, which represents the largest single piece of the discretionary budget. Why is it not political suicide now? Matthew Yglesias has some interesting analysis that examines the political feasibility of defense cuts.


(Graph courtesy of Anne Lowrey of the Washington Independent - In blue, the number of people who say something should be cut with. In red, the percent of the budget that these programs account for)

Yglesias calls defense spending "the least-unpopular cut" of "the major budget items," but correctly identifies that "it’s very politically difficult for a president to do anything that provokes the ire of the defense establishment whether or not it polls well in the abstract."

By: Anonymous

For over eight years, the U.S. has been embattled in a war on terror. Since then, almost 800 detainees have passed through the gates at Guantánamo Bay. On his third day in office, President Obama signed an Executive Order that established a responsible date for closing the detention facilities at the Guantánamo Bay Naval Base. Three months ago that date passed; but the urgency of closing the facility remains.

Closing Guantánamo would immediately increase the United States’ long-term prospects for safety and security. Our enemies could no longer exploit the camp as a recruiting tool to inspire hatred and violence against our troops and citizens. Some doubt the link between the symbolism of U.S. prisons like Guantánamo and Abu Ghraib and terrorism, however, reports from troops in the field suggest otherwise. Major Matthew Alexander, whose team of interrogators obtained the information necessary to locate and capture the head of al Qaeda-in-Iraq, believes that “the reason why foreign fighters joined al-Qa’ida in Iraq was overwhelmingly because of abuses at Guantánamo and Abu Ghraib, and not Islamic ideology.”

Furthermore, closing Guantánamo will enhance our credibility with our allies throughout the developed world.

Well this TIME piece is just about the most depressing thing I've read all week.

How can southern Sudan become an independent nation when it possesses so little of what defines one? Many aid workers and development experts in Juba doubt it can. They have coined a new term to describe its unique status: pre-failed state.

I'm no expert on development, but it seems overly teleological to call it a "pre-failed" state.  Clearly a newly independent South Sudan would be impoverished, but it's impoverished now as a part of Sudan!  Moreover, poverty does not inevitably cause state collapse.  Good governance, coupled with international aid, could presumably keep the nation afloat until a real economy develops.

I'm not saying it will be easy, but isn't it too pessimistic to assume a new state would inherently fail?
     

An unheard of story out of Helmand this weekend. On April 10, Afghani police and intelligence agents stormed a hospital run by the Italian NGO Emergency in Lashkar Gah -- the capital of Helmand. The charges are startling. IRIN News reports that three Italians and six Afghans from the aid organization of "terrorism and assassination". The charges come from the top -- Provincial Governor Golab Mangal.

Mangal accused the head of Emergency in Afghanistan, Marco Garatti, of taking a US$500,000 bribe from Taliban insurgents and involvement in a plot to kill him during a visit to the hospital. He also accused Garatti of the “deliberate killings” of patients and wounded people in the hospital at the behest of the Taliban.

To be specific: the charges are that Garatti was accepting Taliban money for organizing a suicide bombing. Mangal held his press conference with props -- two suicide vests, guns, and ammunition he claims were seized inside of the Emergency hospital.

Mangal is alleging that an Italian NGO was in the pocket of the Pakistani Taliban, targetedly killing their patients, and accepting money in a cash for suicide deal. The charges are shocking, surprising even the Afghan Ministry of Public Health.
(more after the jump)

I finally read James Traub's excellent piece on emerging drug trade routes, "Africa's Drug Problem."  Traub highlights the case of Guinea-Bissau, a small West African state that has become a regional hub for narcotics smuggled from South America into Europe.  The sheer volume being transported is staggering:

The U.N. Office on Drugs and Crime estimated that 40 tons of cocaine, with a street value of $1.8 billion, crossed West Africa on the way to Europe in 2006. The number has now dropped significantly, but many law-enforcement officials view this as a pause before further adaptation. 

Three key issues emerge from this piece.

This first is the maladaptive role governments play in this trade.  In Guinea-Bissau, the state, depending on your level of cynicism, is either impotent to stop drug traffickers or is entirely complicit and enmeshed in illegal activities.  Traub presents strong, although anecdotal, evidence of the latter:

Then, Djata says: “We got a call from the prime minister’s office saying that we must yield up the drugs to the civil authorities. They said the drugs would not be secure in police headquarters, and they must be taken to the public treasury.” A squad of heavily armed Interior Ministry police surrounded the building. Djata said his boss replied, “We will bring the drugs ourselves, and then we will burn them.” Government officials refused. Djata and his men relented, and the drugs were taken to the public treasury. And soon, of course, they disappeared — as did the Colombians. 

In either case, the mismanagement of resources by governments has either created additional incentive for public officials to illegal enrich themselves or has deprived the state of the necessary capabilities to intercept well-financed drug traffickers.  The heart of the matter is the prevalence, and acceptance, of corruption.

Secondly, the insatiable global demand for illegal narcotics provides a powerful financial incentive to criminal gangs. 

Although it seems much longer, it has only been less than a month since some pundits were declaring the death of the Obama Presidency. The failure, or success, of health insurance reform would "devastate" the Administration and Democrats in the 2010 mid-term elections. Words like "doomed" and "failure" were tossed around like inevitabilities by respected news sources.

But in politics, like in many things, success begets success. More importantly, narratives of success beget narratives of success. Today, a mere 20 days after the House of Representatives passed health insurance reform by a 219-212 margin , Obama's presidency is now "emboldened". The president's "sensible" Nuclear Posture Review was announced last week, immediately garnering both international, bureaucratic and domestic support. A few days later, President Obama signed a new Strategic Arms Reduction Treaty (START) with Russia. As new job numbers for March were announced, coverage focused on President Obama's argument that the U.S. economy was "turning the corner." And finally, just yesterday President Obama was given the opportunity to name a new Associate Justice to the Supreme Court with the retirement of Justice John Paul Stephens, which the media is reporting as putting the GOP "on the defensive."

Our northern neighbors in Canada described the dynamic well:

His presidential voice carries more weight than just a few weeks ago. It's an odd political world where the difference of a few congressional votes on a subject such as health care can be said to define a presidency's success.

The CBC adds that President Obama's "influence abroad is clearly greater if he is seen to be a winner at home."

The Administration won't be able to wave a magic wand and create world peace and stability now. But the Administration's hand has clearly been strengthened, and the White House is once again in control of the political narrative in the United States, critically important as it faces financial regulation, the upcoming nuclear summit, and more tough decisions in Afghanistan.

What a difference a couple of weeks make.