Think Tanked

CFR's Steve Cook: 5 Things to Know About Egypt's Army

When I first met Steve Cook of the Council on Foreign Relations nearly 10 years ago, he was already one of the most knowledgeable people of Egyptian military affairs one could find. And now he knows all of the major (and many not-so-major) players inside and out.

For those who are wondering why the military isn't cracking down on the protesters in an authoritarian setting (or for those with any other questions about the Egyptian military), Cook has put a little primer together over at his CFR blog.

For starters:

1. The senior officers are the direct descendants of Gamal Abdel Nasser and the Free Officers who built the Egyptian regime.  The military has been a primary beneficiary of this political order and have not had to intervene overtly in politics until now because the system worked relatively well under a brother officer.  The armed forces, especially the commanders, are deeply enmeshed in the Egyptian economy.

Check out the other four.

And if you want to learn even more, read his Ruling But Not Governing.

CFR's Max Boot on the Reduction of Troops

In a piece at the Weekly Standard,  Council on Foreign Relations senior fellow Max Boot argues that the 32% decline in troops in the 10 years following the end of the Cold War in 1991 weakened us for a proper military response to 9/11. 

The stress on the troops over the last 10 years is apparent despite building the numbers back up (albeit not to Cold War levels). And because of that stress and our experience of unpreparedness at 9/11, Boot makes it clear that it is unconscionable that Gates would propose cutting troop numbers by 50,000.

Some hard questions:

We wish that President Obama, who forced these cuts on Gates and the Defense Department, would explain what in the international situation gives him confidence that we can meet all of our security commitments with so many fewer grunts. The president thinks that most of our troops will be gone from Afghanistan by 2015, but how certain is he that the drawdown will occur as envisioned? How certain is he that Pakistan, Yemen, or Somalia won’t be the staging ground for another 9/11, thereby requiring another massive commitment of U.S. troops? How certain is he that we won’t face a war on the Korean Peninsula or in Iran or in some other land where we cannot currently envision sending American forces—any more than anyone could have envisioned on September 10, 2001, that America would eventually have 100,000 troops in Afghanistan?

UPDATE: The article is causing quite a bit of controversy. Matt Duss at the Center for American Progress offers a pretty strong reaction.

CFR's Richard Haass Talking Afghanistan on Morning Joe

Personnel Files: CFR's Peter Orszag Named as Citi's Vice-Chair of Global Banking Business

Earlier this summer, Peter Orszag stepped down from the OMB and took on a position at the Council on Foreign relations. Now, Bloomberg Business Week is reporting that Orszag is taking on a new role with Citi. It's not immediately clear whether he will hold both positions simultaneously or will be departing CFR.

From Bloomberg:

Citi says it naming former budget director Peter Orszag as a vice chairman of its global banking business.

[...]

To keep in line with ethics rules, Citi says Orszag's role at the banking giant will not involve contact with officials from the federal government.

Citi says Orszag will be a member of its senior strategic advisory group.

CFR's Robert Danin & Brookings' Shibley Telhami Talk Israeli-Palestinian Negotiations on PBS NewsHour

CFR's Peter Orszag Kicks Off NYT Column

Peter Orszag, Office of Management and Budget director-turned think tanker, began his newly-announced New York Times column this week. Earlier in the summer, Orszag announced he would depart OMB and rumors floated that he would head back to the think tank world--most likely Brookings, where he had previously been a senior fellow. Instead, in early July, the Council on Foreign Relations announced Orszag would be joining them as a distinguished visiting fellow.

From the release:

Peter Orszag, economist and former director of the Office of Management and Budget, will become a contributing columnist for The New York Times Op-Ed page. Beginning Tuesday, Sept. 7, his columns will appear one to two times a month in The Times and online at NYTimes.com/opinion and will cover a broad range of economic and domestic issues, including national fiscal policy, education and health care. In addition to his columns, he will examine these and other relevant issues on The Times's Opinionator blog.

"We welcome Peter Orszag's expertise and insight to our Op-Ed lineup," said Andrew Rosenthal, editorial page editor of The New York Times. "As a Washington insider and one of the most recognizable names in economics, his writing will provide a unique perspective on the national landscape."

Mr. Orszag is a distinguished visiting fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations. As President Barack Obama's first budget director, he worked on the 2009 stimulus package and helped craft the health care legislation passed in 2010. He was an outspoken proponent of the idea that reducing health care costs would be key to maintaining the federal budget and preparing for the country's economic future.

Washington Post's Ezra Klein likes the move, saying it's a step in the right direction over the other former administration officials who typically get columnist spots.

...the fact that speechwriters made the most natural columnists doesn't mean they're the ones with the most interesting insights: The policy people, the people building the bills and running the negotiations and navigating the legislature -- that's more interesting stuff, actually. But how did you know if they could write? Well, with Orszag, it was his blogging. Same goes for Keith Hennessey, who ran George W. Bush's National Economics Council and now writes a very good blog. Academics like Tyler Cowen and Brad DeLong also belong on this list. Paul Krugman, as it happens, got his big break at Slate, which isn't that far off. Now that there are forums for people who aren't professional writers to do public writing, we're finding that some of those people are perfectly good writers, and then we get the benefits of their writing and their life spent doing something other than writing. It's an encouraging trend.

And what did Orszag write about for his first column?

Our dueling deficits: jobs and the budget.

In the face of the dueling deficits, the best approach is a compromise: extend the tax cuts for two years and then end them altogether. Ideally only the middle-class tax cuts would be continued for now. Getting a deal in Congress, though, may require keeping the high-income tax cuts, too. And that would still be worth it.

Why does this combination make sense? The answer is that over the medium term, the tax cuts are simply not affordable. Yet no one wants to make an already stagnating jobs market worse over the next year or two, which is exactly what would happen if the cuts expire as planned.

Higher taxes now would crimp consumer spending, further depressing the already inadequate demand for what firms are capable of producing at full tilt. And since financial markets don’t seem at the moment to view the budget deficit as a problem — take a look at the remarkably low 10-year Treasury bond yield — there is little reason not to extend the tax cuts temporarily.

CFR's Richard Haass on This Week

CFR's Stephen Biddle on Success in Afghanistan

Last week, Foreign Affairs editor Gideon Rose interviewed Council on Foreign Relations senior fellow Stephen Biddle on all things Afghanistan. 

Here's part of the exchange on how the U.S. would know if it's successful, which takes at least "a whole fighting season and a winter," according to Biddle.

ROSE: So what I hear you saying is that you have a Potter Stewart definition of success, but not a Potter Stewart definition of failure. In other words, if it is working you'll see the levels of violence come down at some point. You'll see things start to stabilize and then you'll know things are going well. But if that hasn't happened yet, it is hard to distinguish between "It may happen down the road" and "It's not going to happen."

BIDDLE: Yeah. And eventually, there's a statute of limitations on this. I mean, you can't reasonably expect after five or six years to keep saying, "Well, it'll happen eventually." Again, I think about a year to 18 months is a reasonable time frame. You have to live through a whole fighting cycle.

ROSE: So, in effect, you are saying we should have some kind of mental clock ticking but we should have set it for when the new set of policies -- the Afghan surge -- essentially began?

BIDDLE: I think that's right. I also think we have to look at the details of the sequence of things that are happening, rather than just the aggregate casualty statistics -- especially at the national level.

If the model is working, if COIN is doing what it's supposed to do, a series of things should happen, more or less in this order: first you clear the bad guys out, then the bad guys are going to try and counterattack. You have to expect that and resist it. The counterattacks eventually tail off and then you have to build up governance. So there's a series of things that happen.

What I'm advocating in assessing the situation in Afghanistan is that we do it in a much more disaggregated way. We don't look at whether July is the largest casualty month in the history of the war at that national level. That doesn't tell us much. You've got to look at particular places in terms of their own natural history. When did the operation start there? At what part of the process should you reasonable expect a place like Nawa, as opposed to a place like Marjah, to be? And is what you're seeing consistent with what you would expect for this moment in the natural history of that place?

In Marjah, I think you could reasonably expect that we're right smack in the middle of the first major fighting season since the United States showed up. And this is counterattack time. I think that's basically what we're seeing. It is a really bad sign if we're still seeing the same thing next July in Marjah.

Read the full transcript here.

CFR's Elliott Abrams: Time to Shut Down the PLO Office

Last week, to much confusion and some protest, the State Department upgraded the Palestinian diplomatic mission to the United States. The mission now has the permission to call itself the "General Delegation of the Palestine Liberation Organization."

But Elliott Abrams, senior fellow for Middle Eastern studies at the Council on Foreign Relations says that some of the initial reporting has been misleading and that it's time to shut down the PLO office and open a Palestinian Authority office.

Abrams told Think Tanked:

The news stories reporting that the United States has upgraded the Palestinian Authority office in Washington are in error, for there is no PA office. There is a PLO office, one which requires a waiver twice each year to exist because of the PLO's past links to terrorism. The PLO is, according to the United Nations, the "sole legitimate voice of the Palestinian people," but (even just considering the support for Hamas) it is clear that that is untrue. Instead, the PLO represents the ghost of Yasser Arafat plus the salaries of a whole bunch of his cronies. It would be better to close the PLO office than to upgrade it, and substitute a PA office, for any current and future Palestinian political development--the newly trained police, the elections, the improved finances--will take place through the PA.

At the same time, the Obama administration appears to be downplaying the move in anticipation of criticism from Israel or any of the pro-Israel organizations in the U.S.

At the State Department briefing on Friday, spokesman P.J. Crowley said "there has been no change in the status of the Palestinian mission" and was either unaware or unwilling to discuss the Israeli position.

QUESTION: ...The U.S. apparently this week upgraded the Palestinian delegation here in Washington to the level of general delegation. What are the reasons for that move? What does it mean? Haaretz, the Israeli newspaper, was saying that that would mean that say Palestinian diplomats here would have diplomatic immunity. They would be able to have other diplomatic privileges.

MR. CROWLEY: I mean, just to clarify, there has been no change in the status of the Palestinian mission here in Washington. We – it operates under guidance provided by the State Department. It does not have any diplomatic privileges or immunities. At the request of the PLO representative, which we have granted given the improvement in the relations between the United States and Palestinians, they have requested permission to fly the Palestinian flag. And they have requested permission to call themselves the General Delegation of the PLO, which is a name that conforms to how they describe their missions in Europe, Canada, and several Latin American countries. But these steps have symbolic value, they reflect improved relations between the United States and Palestinians, but they have no meaning under the Vienna Convention on Diplomatic Relations.

QUESTION: What was the reason for approving it now? Were requests made in the past under previous administrations?

MR. CROWLEY: That’s a fair question. I don’t know. They requested it, we evaluated it, and we recognized its importance to them, and we granted it.

QUESTION: And why weren’t they allowed to fly the flag previously?

MR. CROWLEY: I think under the guidelines that were established when a PLO office was established here in Washington, these were the set guidelines at the time. Over time, in this particular case, we’ve adapted them. But their status as a mission has not changed.

QUESTION: Was there communication with the Israelis on this? And do they have any sensitivities about it?

MR. CROWLEY: I don’t know. I can’t say.

CFR: Four Religious Views on Immigration Reform

The Council on Foreign Relations recently held a faith and immigration conference with the goal of reconciling religion and immigration law. Four religious leaders shared their thoughts on Arizona, religion, amnesty and immigration.

The Institute on Religion and Democracy's Mark Tooley argues religious leaders have been too quick to side with illegal immigrants, and that there are strong "faith-based arguments" for enforcing the law while still treating people compassionately.  But the National Association of Evangelicals' Galen Carey contends if "we reform our laws that will make it much easier for our laws to be enforced and respected." Arturo Chávez of the Mexican American Catholic College says programs that will allow people to come to the country legally "on some kind of temporary workers' program" will help put a stop to cartels' human trafficking, which he says is currently being treated as simply another illegal immigration issue.  Episcopal Bishop Katharine Jefferts Schori says that treating people in a "less than fully humane way," such as jailing undocumented children, violates their basic human dignity and the insistence of most religions "to treat the image of God in the person before you."

Read what Tooley, Carey, Chavez and Schori have to say here.