National accounting ... costs overseas
Thursday, January 28, 2010
FOR A SELF PROCLAIMED agent of change, Barack Obama sure handles the media in a same old, same old fashion.
The tried-and-tested formula, employed 48 hours ahead of time, of spoonfeeding journalists with the main budgetary elements of a State of the Union speech has pretty well ensured that deficit-trimming initiatives (for all their likely minimal effect) unassailably comprise - along with jobs-creation - the major drum-beat message across all media, after this ceremonial account-giving by the President one year in to his first term.
So much so that many journalists seem to have forgotten it was way back when Obama was in office only one month that they were already reporting deficit-trimming as a priority then too. Remember the February 2009 “Fiscal Responsibility Summit” that the new President convened? When the first speaker he called on – in a gesture of victor’s graciousness – was his beaten opponent John McCain, who instantly aimed his sights on military spending? (Unlike Obama himself last night, of course.)
The arguably strong real-politique necessity for a big domestic emphasis right now has obscured news of the vital international questions currently being hammered out in high-level forums scattered around the globe. It’s not been easy for the Administration’s senior internationalists, plus the reporters and analysts who shadow them, to decide which city to travel to on any given day this week. (Last night Secretary of State Hillary Clinton was absent from the Chamber and its cameras ... Secretary of Defense Robert Gates was not – which is the cannier politico?)
Montreal had claimed Mrs Clinton’s attendance early in the week, for a major donor countries’ thrashing-out of mid- and longer-term help for Haiti. But she and her governmental and journalistic retinues were then rapidly hopping onto transatlantic planes.
London had long been designated for a conference on mid- and longer-term decision-making policies for Afghanistan. The meeting was not designed, of course, to reflect on this week’s freshly-calculated US federal deficit of $1.35 trillion having been brought to this point largely by our vast expenditure on Iraq and Afghanistan, which recently topped $1 trillion spent since 2001, with another $33 billion going to fund America’s increased Afghan presence this year.
The jet-setters’ itineraries got even busier when a new subject-area, and a somewhat different gang of participants -brining Arab countries to the fore - were crammed into the diplo-schedule for yesterday. The Arab family’s poorest relative, Yemen, had grabbed some global limelight (in London, too, for mercy’s and convenience’s sake) only after Christmas Day’s foiled airliner bombing over Detroit, which reputedly originated in that newly-appreciated “failing state” bordering the Red Sea. The one-day special that was duly organized at speed, had by last night endorsed some new anti-Qaeda effort and some shoring-up for the beleagured Yemeni government, hard-pressed as it is by both secessionists and rebels.
With London’s focus shifting back to Afghanistan today, the re-installed President Hamid Karzai (though hardly re-mandated, in view of the country's mangled and much-disputed elections process) will come under, yet again, firm international pressure to purge his adminsitration's rampant corruption. Few observers can realistically expect a convincing outcome - only more empty promises.
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ON THE MATTER OF SECURITY, without which no government, corrupt or otherwise, can expect its writ to run, the London discussions will boil down to one simple way forward that the Nato-based international force is relying on now. It’s summed up well if bluntly by a media source with some direct credibility on the issue – the US military’s own newspaper, the Stars and Stripes. The paper this week tackles the subject from a telling choice of listening-post.
For The Stripes datelines its report as coming from “RAF Mildenhall”. That’s ostensibly a base for the UK’s Royal Air Force, just sixty miles from the Afghan conference-site (Secretary Clinton is pictured passing through the base, above right) but it's primarily home to a tightly orchestrated set of US Air Force units, including the 95th Reconnaissance and the 488th Intelligence Squadrons, whose eyes are trained on all points east.
In its brisk summary The Stripes says the main conference business will be two-fold: “Buying off insurgents, and setting a tentative timetable for handing over security to Afghan forces”. (Backing up the second point journalistically, Reuters news agency got sight of a draft communiqué naming an actual deadline for this handover of “security primacy” to the Afghans, given the not entirely precise date of “early 2011”.)
The actual mechanism for dealing (literally) with insurgents is outlined to The Stripes by Colonel Bjarne Iverson, who commanded a “reconstruction operations” center in Iraq in 2006, served more recently as General David Petraeus’ executive officer, and is now the US Army's Senior Fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations. Reminding the soldiers' paper of the “Sons of Iraq” program whereby one-time enemies were co-opted with American cash, Iverson defined “reconcilable” elements of the Afghan jihadist movement as “the economic Taliban [my emphasis] who are strictly in it for the paycheck, money to feed their families.” He asked and answered himself rhetorically “Can they be siphoned off? … They probably can.” And he makes it clear he means siphoned off by money.
But where will the pay-off moolah come from? Not, it turns out, from the US Treasury. The Commander-in-Chief, with his attention back in Washington now sharply trained anew on his national budget, was (London sources are saying) delighted to hear Britain's and Japan's leaders confirm to him, ahead of today’s talks, that they will jointly provide a special fund of $500 million.
Economics commentators are rarely called into media analyses of the Afghan security situation … but undoubtedly the price tag to be placed on long-term peace there, and - we can hope - a diminished Al-Qaeda threat from that region as a whole, will be hefty. The Anglo-Japanese fund is only a start.
But unless (as is always posible) the media find themselves have to reporting on a lot of things going very badly wrong in Afghanistan, they will be auditing the pay-out from a deal that's very cheap compared with all that's been spent already.
NOT TO VEER BACK INTO GLOOMINESS, but readers of previous editions of THE MEDIA BEAT will know I'm impatient to learn if the State Department and media foreign desks will be booking tickets anytime soon to a conference somewhere on Somalia.
Is that failing state going to get serious attention as a developing security threat - with Al Shabaab taking up the Al Qaeda mantle. Or will we have to wait for some horrific terrorist attack, originating from there, to land on the front pages?
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