The former instructe­d us to think seriously about how the level of analysis we choose to use to understand something greatly shapes what we see and what we do not see.  For instance, I am currently writing a book on what we can learn about Canada from how its political system handled being at war in Afghanistan.  Using Waltz’s three levels of analysis, I would learn completely different lessons: Should I focus on Rick Hillier’s personality?  The challenges of minority government?  Or the place of Canada in the world?  To be clear, in Man, the State and War, Waltz essentially games the debate, favouring the level that had been most ignored – that of the international system.  Instead of focusing on personality or domestic institutions, he would focus more on the structure of the international system and the position of countries within it.  This is a very useful reminder, as much of the Canadian debate – with a few award-winning exceptions – ignores how the imperatives of being a relatively small country critically constrain choices.  After all, Canada, despite the mythology, was not alone in Afghanistan – every country that was similar to it in terms of power and institutions did pretty much the same thing.

The latter book, Theory of International Politics, continues to play a crucial role in how we think about international politics.  Every scholar of IR is either consciously and explicitly or unconsciously and implicitly reacting to it.  While Waltz was leaning on an approach, Realism, that goes back as far as Machiavelli and beyond, he made a tremendous contribution by rooting the logic of Realism in the nature of the international system.  Because there is no central authority in international politics (the World Court can be ignored, the United Nations does not have its own capacity to coerce, and so on), countries have to rely on themselves, and this self-reliance will inevitably lead to suspicion.  Any effort to single-handedly improve one’s own security will threaten the security of other countries, and they will respond in kind.  This security dilemma is not Waltz’s innovation, but the clarity of his arguments and his applications made it so clear to me that I stopped studying the politics of arms races in graduate school.  I felt that Waltz had largely answered my question.    

Although many have long lamented the divide between scholars and policy-makers, Waltz, in addition to influencing policy-makers via being required reading for their classes in undergrad and beyond, always engaged in major policy debates, often by taking controversial stances.  He was outspoken as an early opponent of the Vietnam War, reminding us that Realism is not about the application of force but the judicious deployment of power.  Since 1980, Waltz served as a confounding advocate of the spread of nuclear weapons.  He saw the spread as being inevitable, due to the security dilemma, but also that deterrence could foster peace.  I regularly used the latest version of this argument to challenge my Intro to IR classes.

I only met him once, at a dinner a couple of years ago when he visited Montreal for a talk at Concordia (I think).  All I remember was that he was very kind and very engaged.  The testimonies of his former students indicate that he was very tough but also very fair.  He must have been a great mentor, as the list of his students is a very impressive one, including many who continue to shape the field today.

While Man, the State and War is now more than 50 years old, it is still a mighty good read for not just scholars of IR.  Readers of the International Journal and those who follow our stuff at OpenCanada would benefit from reading this book. It is not only useful for providing distinct lenses to see IR, but also a great shortcut for understanding how the great political theorists of all time have thought about international politics.  Theory of International Politics is a bit more advanced and social science-y, so it is probably not for summer beach reading.  Still, it is far more readable than nearly all contemporary IR scholarship, so I would recommend it.  It is a thin book with powerful implications.  It certainly changed how I viewed international relations.

Ken Waltz will be missed, but the good news is that his books will carry his influence for generations to come.

Twitter is used in a vast number of ways. For some it is a means of following friends; for others it is a source of links to news and articles. It increasingly serves as a collective fact checker for traditional media. Many use Twitter as a newspaper or magazine, providing links to both breaking news, and long-form journalism and reporting. During the Libyan revolution, citizens and revolutionaries used it to communicate with the outside world. The manhunt for the Boston bombers was live-tweeted, and Twitter was used to corroborate the police scanner. During sporting events and awards shows it forms a collective second screen community. It is a place for snarky commentary, gossip, and breaking news. Some people tweet all day, others just watch.

The point is, any list of how Twitter is used, will itself be trite. Users engage with Twitter in diverse ways for diverse reasons, just as they do with newspapers and TV.

For me, Twitter is a way of actively immersing myself in the communities in which I work and engage: international relations, digital technology, politics and journalism.

Using Twitter, I can actively participate in a 24-7 real-time collective conversation in each of these communities. In each, I follow and engage with academics, politicians, journalists, activists, technologists, and a wide range of citizens from all backgrounds and professions interested in the same subjects as me. Herein lies the real power of the form. Twitter is not an extension, or supplement to public discourse, it is a public discourse. And, compared to other media, a remarkably accessible form of it.

When people ask whether Twitter can be democratizing, they usually ask, as Tom Flanagan did, whether it can shape elections. This is an attempt to prove relevance only via instrumentality, which to me is the wrong metric. Twitter has broken down the barriers of entry to public discourse. This, in itself, it it’s democratizing effect. We value free speech and newspapers for more than their instrumental effects, and so we should Twitter.

Twitter has been successful because it has become a part of the public and personal discourse, not because it overthrows dictators. The question driving the debate over what Twitter is and isn’t, therefore, shouldn’t be whether Twitter will change politics, because Twitter is politics. A gossip-mill or an accountability mechanism – just like any other political system, it is a reflection of the people who use it.

The fact that Twitter has become a de-facto public space poses real challenges. But these are not whether people have trouble finding useful information, or are overwhelmed by the pace, or don’t enjoy short videos – the problems depicted by Flanagan and Yakabuski. These are simply projections based on personal tastes, like saying I don’t like newspapers because they leave ink on my fingers, or they take too long to read.

The real challenge of Twitter, and social media more generally, is that we need to think carefully about what it means to devolve the public space to private companies. There are a wide range of challenges that stem from this. Here are four.

First, just as more newspapers go behind paywalls, and cable TV replaces broadcast, more and more of our public debate costs money. So far, Twitter has remained free. But with increasing pressures to commercialize, and the increase of social marketing, we will pay in some form or another. This payment will undoubtedly have an effect on Twitter’s democratizing role.

Second, we need to think as a society about how our individual and collective information (or “Big Data”) is being used by the private and public institutions that collect, sell, and trade it. In particular, who owns the data we leave behind as we engage online, or our “data exhaust”. The EU is grappling with these tough questions head on, and has recently proposed a right to erasure and deletion.

Third, Twitter needs to decide whether it is a publishing platform or a media company. Increasingly, Twitter, like YouTube and Facebook, is making editorial decisions about what content is allowed on their platform. Tweets to the videos of the killing of a child in Syria would be allowed, for example, whereas those to the mass shooting of a group of children in the United States would surely be taken down. Why, and how are these decisions being made? Twitter and Google both now issue transparency reports detailing their editorial decision making, as well as government requests for data. But these only provide a very limited glimpse.

Finally, what is the nature of free speech on privately owned platforms? Over the course of the twentieth century, we developed laws, regulations, and norms around public communication on TV, radio, and in print. Few of these have transferred to the new public squares, which are almost wholly owned by increasingly monopolistic private companies, in varying degrees of contact and partnership with national governments.

Twitter is many things to many people, and its uses present a vast array of opportunities and challenges. Lets seriously debate the changes it represents in the way we communicate and interact, not dismiss it as a trite fad.

The system has succeeded beyond its architects’ wildest imaginations. Whereas tariffs averaged a colossal 44 per cent after the war, choking international trade and balkanizing the world economy, today over half of all exports – from coal to computer chips – face no tariffs, while another third contend with “nuisance tariffs” of just 2 or 3 per cent. Service trade is becoming even freer as e-commerce, e-medicine, and e-learning move “friction free” across the world’s digital networks. Meanwhile, countries like Canada are unilaterally cutting their remaining tariffs, harmonizing standards, and streamlining border red tape in order to link up to global production chains and strengthen export competitiveness.

Then there’s the system’s success in bringing the rule of law to international economic relations. Now when countries clash over aircraft subsidies, food additives, or the protection of sea turtles, they battle it out, not in a destructive trade war, but in the WTO’s “trade court.” Four times as many cases have been handled by the WTO in less than 20 years than by the old GATT in half a century, as countries increasingly use litigation, rather than negotiation, to clarify or strengthen trade rules. And use of dispute settlement is rising fastest among developing countries, underlining the central importance of a rules-based global trade system to their continued export-driven growth.

Meanwhile, the system’s continued expansion – from just 23 members in 1947 to 159 today – means that all of the world’s major trade powers now operate under a single set of rules. The vast negotiation that brought China into the WTO in 2001 easily eclipsed the current Doha Round of global trade talks in terms of its trade and geo-economic impact. Russia’s entry last year will affect its economy and international role just as significantly. The fact that the two giants of 20th century communism made joining the global trading system a cornerstone of their foreign policies underlines just how powerful the WTO’s gravitational pull has become.

The clearest indication of the WTO’s success is the continued growth of world trade. The wave of protectionism that was predicted after the Great Recession has not materialized. On the contrary, world exports have almost doubled since 2000, growing at twice the rate of global output. And developing countries’ exports have grown fastest of all, symbolized by China overtaking Germany as the world’s top exporter. Never has the world been more knit together by trade than it is today.

But success has also created problems. The immediate problem is how to persuade countries to continue liberalizing trade when it’s both less urgent – because so much is already free – and harder to negotiate – because the toughest issues have been left until the end. There’s still work to be done on everything from sky-high agricultural barriers to ruinous fish subsides. But these last redoubts of protectionism are putting up the stiffest resistance, and world has stopped believing (if it ever did) that the sky will fall if another WTO deadline is missed.

A bigger problem is that the WTO faces new challenges – from climate change to exchange rates to resource competition – that are less about making the world economy more open than about managing the open world economy we’ve created. Instead of grand trade bargains and the mercantilist exchange of tariff concessions, these new challenges require patient technical co-operation on transnational regulation, and increasingly involve deep co-operation with other global institutions. But trade officials, like old generals, tend to fight the last war. After eight major trade liberalization rounds spanning a half century of unbroken success, it’s hard to accept that these can’t go on forever, that the free trade battle has largely been won, and that new approaches are needed.

This underscores the biggest problem of all. Having achieved an open and integrated world economy – the “globalization” that wartime planners dreamed of – there’s a danger that we will begin to ignore or even undermine the international system on which it was built. Businesses pay little attention to the WTO, convinced that technology and markets are sufficient to sustain globalization. Politicians have disdain for messy, slow-moving multilateral institutions, believing that bilateralism offers a quicker route to success and glory. The irony is that countries can engage so promiscuously in bilateral and regional deals today precisely because the world economy is already so open, thanks to a secure foundation of multilateral rules.

How long will that last? The protracted global downturn, rising trade and currency frictions, and the seismic shift in economic power from North to South are putting new strains on the global trading system just as the world seems to be losing interest.

Fred Bergsten of the Peterson Institute once suggested that trade liberalization is like riding a bicycle: if you stop moving, you fall off. The era of giant trade liberalizing rounds has effectively ended. Will the WTO also fall over? Or will it find new ways of reinforcing its relevance and advancing trade cooperation? The biggest challenge facing Azevedo is to shake us out of our complacency – and to remind everyone that the global economy is only as strong as the global institutions that underpin it. It would be sad indeed if it took another global catastrophe to bring the world back to multilateralism.

In the discussions of Syria, most of the focus is on whether and how to intervene and break the current stalemate. Today I was reminded that the toughest challenges come after, not before an invasion.

One cannot expect the Hulk approach to work in both invasion and reconstruction modes.

— Gary Owen (@ElSnarkistani) May 8, 2013

At first, I wanted to reply that invasion or destruction is a two or three dimensional problem—how to use your land, sea, and air assets to destroy the forces of the other side—and that reconstruction/peacebuilding/nation-building is a seventeen dimensional problem.  But upon some reflection and twitter-inspiration (thanks mostly to @elSnarkistani), I figured the best way to illustrate how hard it is to rebuild a country and develop a self-sustaining political order would be to continue the Marvel Comics analogy.  This may seem silly, but it will make clear how truly complex and multi-dimensional these “whole of government” efforts are.

To start, the Hulk is probably the wrong superhero you want to deploy if you want to rebuild after the initial combat, as Hulk smashes pretty much everything.  Iron Man would be far more discriminant in the use of force.

Once you defeat the regime (Taliban, Hussein, Qaddafi, whomever), you need to develop rule of law—functional courts, prosecutors, defense attorneys, decent laws, and so on.  Why? Because if people do not trust the government to protect them and deal with their grievances, they will take matters into their own hands.  So, Daredevil, whose alter ego is a genius lawyer, Matt Murdock, would need to be deployed.  Far better than to whom NATO gave the Judicial Reform pillar in Afghanistan. (Italy.)

For reforming the indigenous military, given that counter-insurgency is best done by the locals, you would need someone who is well-respected but also capable of knocking heads judiciously: Captain America.

For developing the economy, Reed Richards of the Fantastic Four might be super-genius enough to turn a wrecked economy into something productive.  I am sure he could come up with inventions that could turn cluster bomb fragments, land mines, and all the other weaponry into the equivalent of ploughshares. 

One cannot underestimate the problems of water shortages and sewage treatment in the aftermath of a conflict.  Thus, Storm of the X-Men would be needed to provide enough rain for freshwater, and to re-direct the sewage away from the populace.

Black Panther is the obvious choice for helping out with governance, since he governs his own nation and is tough enough that we would not have to waste money on a security detail of private military contractors.

This post-conflict stuff is really hard, and just finding the right folks to put into the right positions requires a great deal of luck.  Or magic, which is where Doctor Strange and Scarlet Witch come in (or telepathy, so Professor X might be handy).

To deal with the crimes of the past, truth and reconciliation processes have become an important post-conflict management effort.  For this, Ghost Rider may be the best imagined character to provide incentives for people to admit what parts they played and what crimes they committed in the conflict. 

For public outreach, especially in these places where the population is heavily skewed towards those under eighteen, Spider-man seems to be the obvious choice.  His tragic backstory combined with his cool powers and his sense of humour make him a far more accessible Special Representative of the international community than most superheroes.

This only scratches the surface.  Of course, these superheroes only exist in our imaginations (and on many movie screens this summer).  Which means that it is up to ordinary humans to cooperate, coordinate, and engage in tremendously difficult efforts to re-build in the aftermath of conflict. 

What I am suggesting in this post is that the increased sense of urgency to act in Syria will not be met with a vigorous response.  Why?  Because we lack the superheroes needed to do the heavy-lifting—politically, economically, socially, and so on.  Moreover, most countries are exhausted by the efforts in Iraq, Afghanistan, Sudan, the Democratic Republic of the Congo, and elsewhere AND face steep fiscal challenges at home.  And this leaves us where?  In the Land of Lousy Alternatives.™

Despite the mounting civilian casualties, western powers have proven unwilling to launch a full-scale military intervention. The reluctance to put troops on the ground for fear of ending up mired in another costly Mideast war is understandable, particularly on the part of the United States, just barely out of Afghanistan. Western powers also have understandable concerns about providing rebel forces with more powerful weaponry, such as surface-to-air missiles or SAMs – namely that they could fall into the hands of extremists or their proxies, or be used to target commercial airliners and other civilian targets. These concerns drove the Israeli military’s recent attack on a Syrian airport where SAMs intended for Hizbollah were allegedly being stored. The U.S. appears to be applying the hard-learned lesson of the Afghanistan intervention that arming indigenous fighters can lead to serious blowback. When Taliban fighters inherited many of the SAMs that the West had provided to the Mujahideen a decade earlier, their ability to counter U.S. attacks during the 2001 invasion and subsequent occupation increased significantly.

While it may make long-term strategic sense to deny heavy weaponry to the Syrian rebel forces, without SAMs, they are limited to what they manage to capture from Assad’s army bases, which does not appear to be much, some reporting to the contrary notwithstanding.  Lighter weapons are a poor substitute and regardless, they lack the caches that would be required to take down enough planes and helicopters to make a real dent in the Syrian air force. Hence the standstill in fighting: much of the rural countryside and key border crossings are firmly in rebel hands, but the Syrian government retains control of major city centres and therefore of the country proper. The rebels have not been able to advance beyond the suburbs of Damascus, Aleppo, Hama, and Homs, chiefly because the government strikes back – without discriminating among rebel bases, hospitals, or breadlines – from the sky.

The above situation has provoked calls for a ‘limited’ western air campaign to expedite the fall of the tyrannical Assad regime, or to capture chemical weapons stockpiles, both from outside and within western governments. But we shouldn’t expect one anytime soon, even if Syria’s implosion worsens, because the word ‘limited’ is a misnomer – ground troops and direct military involvement would also be required. Western governments know this, and don’t want any part of it. They are aware that a successful intervention with minimal casualties is hardly guaranteed, and it will be costly, for the following reasons:

Firstly, any ‘limited’ air campaign against the Assad regime will require disabling the Syrian military’s command structure, including targeting its key intelligence and communication headquarters. These command structures are centered in Damascus, and it is unlikely that they have moved because much of Assad’s army remains focused on securing the capital. With a dense population of five million people, the human costs of targeting these centres could be high. After the command centres, even a ‘limited’ air campaign would require crippling the Syrian air force. The Syrian regime has approximately 15 military airports from which planes attacking rebels and civilians take off. One military airport in Taftanaz was recently overrun by the Islamist Al-Nusra Front and elements of the Free Syrian Army, but only after weeks of heavy fighting. The rest of the airports remain in Assad’s hands, and that is where they are likely to stay if no outside support is forthcoming, especially as relative to Taftanaz, they are situated in or near more populated areas, making them more difficult to attack.  

Secondly, even a ‘limited’ air campaign would not be without significant risks to intervening forces and civilians on the ground. Syria has an effective, integrated air defense system that includes strong radar technology, and it is under the control of a centralized intelligence and command structure that could sense and track any air offensive launched by foreign powers. Civilian casualties would be inevitable in the ensuing battle to control Syrian air space, and although no precise numbers are publicly available, the location of critical military and infrastructure targets suggest they would be high.  

Finally, those weighing intervention see an international community that is unlikely to stand behind them or endorse their effort – even a no-fly zone has prove a no go – and the resultant impossibility of replicating the overthrow of Gadhafi in Libya, the success of which was largely contingent on widespread support for the intervening coalition.  Obstructionist behaviour on the part of the Russians at the UN Security Council is another apparently insurmountable obstacle, largely because President Obama has shown little interest in pressuring them to act otherwise. This is hardly surprising, as stalemate in the Security Council on Syria is an ideal political outcome for Obama. The president has no interest in adding another Middle East war to his portfolio, and knows that the U.S. would be hard-pressed to pay for one, given the unraveling domestic fiscal situation.

Syria today is Afghanistan circa 1998. We don’t need a crystal ball to see how it will end up if left to its own fate. If, or rather when this war explodes and threatens the regional balance of power, the West will recalculate its current standing of staying on the sidelines. At this point, the risks and costs of direct military action have tipped the scales to favour a policy of standing idly by. But waiting until all of Syria’s neighours, allies, and enemies are sucked into the vortex will only drive the already high costs of intervention higher, and reduce the chances that any kind of international effort, ‘limited’ or otherwise, will halt the implosion.

There are short and medium term objectives behind the Israeli action. Most immediately, the strikes seek to prevent the Syrian government from transferring Iranian-made missiles to Hezbollah in Lebanon (missiles which have the capacity to hit Israeli population centres). The movement of these weapons to airport warehouses near Damascus constituted, for Israel, the “crossing of a red line” that demanded a response. More broadly, Tel Aviv is sending a strong message to Iran that, despite Assad’s continued survival in power, the alliance between Iran, Syria, and Hezbollah will not succeed in its desire to crush Israel. This is likely why the strikes went beyond the specific consignment of missiles, and also attacked a military research centre.

With such direct interests at stake, maintaining the credibility of its threats is crucially important for Israel. The country’s leaders have been privately grumbling that they wish the United States was equally as concerned about its credibility with respect to both Syria and the wider Middle East.

But the U.S. is haunted by the apparent ‘lessons’ of Iraq, and intervention in Syria has become a spectre it wishes to avoid confronting at all costs. There have been reports that Washington, in collaboration with French and British allies, is secretly planning air strikes and other scenarios involving military force. But for the moment, the Obama administration is dissuaded from those options due to concerns about the strength of Syria’s air defense forces (which recent Israeli actions may have called into question), and about the level of jihadist involvement in the Syrian opposition.

As a result, President Obama has been forced to develop an elaborate rejoinder to questions about why the alleged use of chemical weapons in Syria has not constituted the ‘game changer’ he previously indicated (in August 2012) that it would. Last summer, the President claimed – in comments that apparently were unscripted – that the resort to chemical attacks by the Assad regime would cross a “red line” and change his decision-making calculus. Now, however, Obama officials are insisting that the use of chemical weapons must be “systematic” in order to justify an American counter-response. In addition, they are demanding much stronger proof that it is indeed Syrian government officials who are behind the chemical weapons attacks (the letter sent by the administration to Congress in late April suggested only that it had “varying degrees of confidence”).

It is surely right for the United States to do all it can to gather more definitive evidence – particularly given the incomplete and inaccurate information about weapons of mass destruction that was used to justify war against Iraq. Moreover, the United Nations Independent International Commission of Inquiry on Syria has in the past couple of days indicated that it has heard testimony from victims of the conflict that suggests Syrian rebels have used the nerve agent sarin. (Carla del Ponte, an official with the Commission, claims there is “not yet incontrovertible proof” that would back up these claims.)

However, through its CSI-like efforts to gather soil and human samples for testing, the Obama administration needs to be careful that it doesn’t establish an unrealistic standard for evidence – either for this case, or for future ones. More significantly, it needs to protect its image and the credibility of its threats. Even though the U.S. has not military intervened in Syria, every statement it makes, and every lesser action it takes (such as non-lethal assistance to the Syrian opposition) is an intervention of sorts. It changes the calculus on the ground, for both sides. This is the reality for external parties to a civil war.

The key difference between Israel as an external party, and the U.S. as an external party, is that the latter does not yet see the violence and instability in Syria as a vital threat to its security. Yes, it sees the potential for regional instability that comes with the crumbling of the Syrian state. And yes, it sees the strain being felt by its ally, Jordan (where Syrian refugee camps now constitute more than 10 per cent of the Jordanian population). But these facts alone do not (yet) outweigh the counter-arguments that predict negative repercussions from U.S. military intervention.

And so Washington will continue to pursue other alternatives. This demonstrates that as powerful as the humanitarian rationale for action may be, it is very rarely the determinant for Western action. In fact, it is rarely one incident or event that tips the balance in favour of outside intervention; instead, the evidence shows that decision-makers continually assess costs and benefits – and are heavily persuaded by historical precedents. We have seen very few ‘humanitarian interventions’ over the past three decades where there weren’t additional concerns at play. Humanitarian causes for action have often been present, but for intervention to occur, other ‘stars’ have to be aligned – particularly the belief by a ‘lead’ state that regional or national interests are calling for action, and the perception in that state that the domestic impact will be at least neutral or positive. That alignment occurred in Haiti and East Timor in the 1990s (when the U.S. and Australia respectively saw the benefits of intervention to outweigh the costs), and in Libya in 2011 (when intervention for French president Nicolas Sarkozy was perceived as both an opportunity to get rid of Qaddafi for the Libyan people and a potential boon for his own domestic popularity).

Thus, in the end, what will prompt Western intervention in Syria will not be the rising civilian death toll – as shocking as roughly 70,000 deaths are – but the mounting of ever-more serious threats to regional and international security. The days when the U.S., and its allies, could engage in ‘wars of choice’ are long gone.

Meanwhile, back in Israel, officials are calculating whether Hezbollah will retaliate for the recent air strikes, potentially escalating the conflict, and whether the Syrian President will continue to allow his territory to be used as a transit route for weapons and militants by Hezbollah and Iran. In Damascus, Assad is no doubt assessing the value of Hezbollah support. On the one hand, he knows that if the rebels grow stronger and he is forced to flee the Syrian capital, he would need Hezbollah to help him set up and defend some kind of smaller Alawite enclave on the coast. On the other hand, if Assad and his entourage survive intact in Damascus, they may soon find themselves stuck with a strong Hezbollah whose hostile actions risk transforming the Syrian crisis into a wider regional war.

If ever there were a moment for nimble and skilled diplomacy – to somehow manipulate the dilemmas all sides face – it is now.

It is certainly the case that the influx of money during and after the overthrow of the Taliban fostered a corrupting environment. That’s why one American official quoted in the Times story called the U.S. “the biggest source of corruption in Afghanistan.” Sure. The U.S. bought the support of warlords to help overthrow the Taliban. Yes, they could have chosen to invade the country with far more troops so that they wouldn’t have had to rely on the warlords. Then, they wouldn’t have had to dish out bags of cash to Karzai to keep those warlords on his side. But that’s not what happened.

However, we are kidding ourselves if we ignore the realities of Afghanistan pre 9/11. Whatever the country was before 1979, resisting the Soviets and the civil war afterwards empowered those who could smuggle arms and other resources. This happens in most, if not all, civil wars.¹ These empowered individuals, a.k.a. warlords, became political realities that one can’t easily ignore, as they force individuals and groups to provide kickbacks, “taxes” at checkpoints, and other forms of tribute. One source of initial support for the Taliban was popular frustration with “rents” these warlords were extracting from the populace. And once you get rid of the Taliban, you then have to deal with the “human terrain” as it exists.

On top of that, the challenge of poppies was going to exist whether or not the U.S. dumped big bags of cash in Afghanistan. Illicit drugs will corrupt any political system, especially one as fragile and decentralized as the Afghan one. Eradication was not a good option as it would antagonize farmers. So, there was plenty of money flowing through the country to corrupt the police and the politicians.

And, as the Times article documents quite clearly, the U.S. was not the only game in town. Iran was also trying to buy or rent influence in Afghanistan. Given the rivalry between India and Pakistan for influence in the country, it is a bit surprising that these countries were not mentioned in the article too, but surely they too are providing money to those who are their (temporary) allies.

Still, the classic question is this: you cannot buy allies, but can you rent them? The answer, in the case of Hamid Karzai, is… sort of.  The U.S. got in Karzai what the international community needed – a Pashtun who had influence in the South but was acceptable to the non-Pashtuns in the rest of the country. The bags of cash certainly enhanced Karzai’s appeal to the warlords outside of the South. But you get what you pay for – in this case a tainted individual who relies on bags of cash to gain support rather than developing good governance. Unless the U.S. and its allies had extended great effort to weaken/supplant the warlords back in 2002-2005, whoever presided over the Afghan government was going to have to deal with them.  Karzai and the U.S. certainly could have been more judicious and tried to put some strings on the bags of cash so that the recipients governed better, would appear to be less rapacious, and perhaps concentrate their rent-seeking on those forms of corruption the people minded less.

Indeed, what is truly frustrating about this account is not so much that there were big bags of cash paying people off, but that the inflow of dollars did not satiate the key actors who still sought to extract money from everyone else in the system. Despite the millions and billions of dollars flowing into and out of Kabul, we still saw demands for kickbacks for contracts at the local level, checkpoints on the roads, and pretty much every other way that the corrupt can demand money for their good will. Perhaps the American (and European and Canadian and Iranian and so on) flood of money helped foster a culture of corruption so that everyone expected a cut, but, again, that would be ignoring what preceded 2001.

The reality is that when outsiders intervene, they prefer to rent influence with money rather than to pay for it with blood. Even an American administration that wasn’t distracted by Iraq would have been unwilling to do what was required to change the big realities on the ground. Instead, the CIA and other agencies relied on methods that have worked and failed elsewhere. Which reminds me of one last thing: we tend to notice when the bags of cash do not work but fail to observe the cases where the CIA (or whoever) gets the influence that it seeks to rent.

1. For a discussion of how the United Nations intervention in Bosnia abetted the empowering of corruption and organized crime, see Peter Andreas’s book on Bosnia.

Less appreciated, however, is that the rise of Bangladeshi garment factories is something that Canada has encouraged. Canada made a significant policy change a decade ago, eliminating all tariffs and quotas on imports from the poorest countries. While the average tariff on all goods exported to Canada was less than 1 per cent, roughly 70 per cent of textile and clothing products subject to tariffs had tariffs greater than 15 per cent. The 49 poorest countries were not exempt.

The policy change was unveiled as part of a G8 Africa initiative. But, while most of the world’s poorest countries are indeed in Africa, they export very little. By contrast, poor South Asian nations, such as Bangladesh and Cambodia, as well as the Caribbean nation of Haiti, had some capacity to take advantage of the duty-free access to Canada. Canada’s clothing imports from Bangladesh were $330 million in 2003 and soared to $1.1 billion by 2012. Similarly, Canada imported $83 million in clothing from Cambodia in 2003, and over half a billion by 2012.

As many have noted, conditions in garment factors are abysmal. They are the contemporary equivalent of the dark satanic mills of 19th century England. The mostly women who labour in them endure long hours in poor conditions and earn low wages. Yet, as history has shown, the textile sector serves as the first rung on the ladder to development and economic prosperity. And, according to some commentaries such as this one, it has fueled a social revolution in Bangladesh.

As they did in Europe and North America, garment factories offer workers a chance to enter the better-paying formal sector of the economy. Better wages raise living standards and lower poverty, particularly in cities and towns. Garment production represents a rare chance for many of the women employed in these industries to earn independent income. Their alternatives are usually subsistence farming in the villages they come from.

Textile and clothing exports also contribute to greater overall economic stability. This is because they come from an economic sector that is more stable and has a relatively higher value-added component than the agricultural sector, on which most of these countries depend for their exports. The textile and clothing sector also creates entrepreneurial opportunities and managerial jobs for members of the middle class who might otherwise emigrate.

In other words, Canada’s decision to encourage more imports from these economies encourages exactly the type of activity that promotes development, sexual equality, and poverty reduction in the poorest countries. (Canada’s recent decision to eliminate tariff preferences for more developed economies such as China will now make it even more attractive to import from Bangladesh. The benefits and costs of this more recent policy decision merit another discussion on their own.) Many Canadian clothing imports now come from the poorest countries. In fact, 50 per cent of all Canada’s imports come from outside of the U.S. today (down from 35 per cent a decade ago). These imports come from both developed and developing markets.

In short, Canadian companies are now engaged with markets that are very different from Canada’s. This means that our companies need to ensure that their entire supply chain meets reasonable working conditions and standards, at the very least to protect their reputations which can be easily and quickly destroyed. After the horrific factory collapse in Bangladesh, consumers in Canada and other rich countries will now be able to apply much more pressure on companies to demand better working conditions in poor countries.

For a number of years, we’ve been led to believe that fiscal consolidation or austerity – code for cutting government budgets – is the best way to stimulate economic growth. Supposedly, it triggers a virtuous cycle: by increasing the confidence of the private sector, it spurs investment, which leads to economic growth, which further increases confidence, which in turn fuels more growth. It is this fiscal belt-tightening that eventually improves the health of the entire economy. So we are told by influential economists.

The highly prominent Harvard University’s Rogoff-Reinhart thesis in 2010 which claimed to show that in highly indebted countries, economic growth will cease or retreat once a magic threshold debt level of 90 per cent of GDP is passed, is but one example among many studies that have been used to support this theory of ‘expansionary austerity’. Now it seems that these two economists were omitting important data points and even succumbed to a simple coding error, which casts doubt on their analysis, and on the theory of expansionary austerity itself.

Fiscal consolidation can sometimes lead to economic growth; whether it will depends on a slew of other important variables such as interest rates (when they’ve already reached the zero lower-bound), the type of exchange rate in place (a floating exchange rate can help dampen the effects of fiscal contraction); and how supportive external demand is for an economy’s goods and services. In the case of Canada in the 1990s, the country was fortunate that it undertook fiscal consolidation with the support of these three variables. For some countries this may not be the case, so we should be cautious of blanket arguments in favour of fiscal consolidation.

To be fair, Rogoff-Reinhart never did explicitly claim causation, only correlation. Note that the the Rogoff-Reinhart findings – even if the original results still held – tell us very little if low growth leads to high debt (think Japan) or if high debt leads to low growth (think Greece). This, however, did not stop influential policymakers and politicians like former Republican Vice-Presidential candidate Paul Ryan and European Commissioner Olli Rehn from taking these findings and spinning them to support their own political agendas.

The sole point however is not whether some growth occurs – it is what kind of growth that should concern us; for growth that results from consolidation is more often anemic than vigorous. Moreover, economic growth alone is not a satisfying benchmark to measure the economy’s recovery and future prospects.  We need to ask, ‘How do we get economic growth that is inclusive? And what indicators will tell us we’re on the right track?’ ‘Inclusive’ in this context is code for JOBS, and jobs are what we need to be tracking most closely. What is the point of having overall economic growth if this doesn’t translate into people working and their wages increasing over time? Without job creation, we cannot increase consumption and generate the tax revenues needed to make important investments in education, health, R&D, and infrastructure, which taken together are prerequisites for long-term economic growth. In other words, without jobs, we get stuck on an anemic economic growth path. This is where we are now, and this is what needs the attention of world policymakers.

Indeed if there are any policy ‘heroes’ of the Great Recession, they are the major central banks of the developed world. These institutions have proven remarkably adept at putting a floor under asset values, and a ceiling above credit spreads. But even with recourse to all this ‘unconventional’ monetary policy, policymakers have still failed to put a ceiling above what truly matters: the unemployment rate. I hope that at the next IMF-World Bank meetings, job creation will be at the top of the agenda. And I hope that we will take the Rogoff-Reinhart thesis as a reminder that what’s needed are careful assessments of what each country can do to create jobs, not a one-size-fits-all fiscal fix.

But for me, I don’t know whether to feel more relief or more anxiety that these two guys were able to kill three people and injure more than a hundred people.  They were – ahem – not bright. So does that tell us that folks who do this kind of thing – self-radicalized terrorists – can do some damage, but much less than, say, the damage caused by an unregulated fertilizer distributor?  Or, if these un-geniuses could do this much damage, what would happen if some actually sharp terrorists were at work?

I can easily see both sides of this. I guess the picture is complicated enough that there are elements that should worry us and elements that should provide some solace.

In the worry category:

• That the younger brother was so easily turned from a pretty decent life as a middling student with plenty of friends to an ally of his more messed up brother.
• That it only took two self-radicalized folks to disrupt the life of a city for nearly a week.
• That despite their obvious cognitive limitations, they were able to build a number of bombs that mostly worked.
• That they might not have been caught so soon if they were not such idiots.

In the solace category:

• The Boston medical and first responder community was so competent that all of the patients that reached the hospital alive survived.
• That the terrorists were tracked down and contained within about 100 hours. We tend to be an impatient people, but that is some fast work. 
• That perhaps brighter folks are less likely to do this kind of thing because they are smart enough to sense that they would get caught, that maybe it ain’t worth it, that maybe the U.S. isn’t actually at war with Islam even if it is at war in Muslim countries (Bosnia, Libya are essentially pro-Muslim interventions, right?). Yes, there are plenty of smart folks who are radicalized, but they may still be deterred.
• Hopefully, there are few people so messed up that they would be willing to get their younger brothers involved in something so self-destructive.

Canada is facing similar questions today after two men were arrested in an apparent plot to attack a train. Is this bad news because there were individuals in Canada planning to harm Canadians? Or is it good news because the authorities received a tip from an individual in the Muslim community? It is too early to speculate about this plot, the plotters, or how these individuals were found, but we are again left with mixed feelings.

I really have no clue how to think about this. I am not an expert on terrorism or terrorists or radicalization or anything really related to this. I am just aware that one of the greatest dangers right now is confirmation bias: that we will observe that which confirms our point of view and ignore that which does not.

So, if one is already alarmed by the state of the world and the terrorist threats that might be out there, then this past week will only exacerbate one’s fears. If one is more upbeat about how governments are handling terrorism, then this past week may reinforce that viewpoint, even if it means glossing over or ignoring some of the more disturbing aspects of Boston and the train plot.

And if one is ambivalent? The good news about being ambivalent is that you have fewer biases to confirm and might be more willing to see both sides of the situation. Of course, that is just a recipe for enlightened confusion.