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Time to put Greece out of its misery

By BJ Bjornson

I swear that watching the ongoing Greek debt debacle is like watching some guy with broken legs in a wheelchair getting “helped out” by a bunch of thugs who proceed to break his arms and then demand he get rid of the “luxury” wheelchair to pay for his medical treatment. Every so-called bailout package, thanks to their ever-more-onerous austerity measures that will crash a weak economy even further, seem designed to make the situation worse rather than better.

And as bad as this latest deal is, it is merely another stopgap measure, since the numbers simply don’t add up.

The problem, of course, is that all the observers and “segregated accounts” in the world can’t turn Greece’s economy around when it’s burdened with an overvalued currency and has no ability to implement any kind of stimulus. Quite the opposite: in order to get this deal done, Greece had to find yet another €325 million in “structural expenditure reductions”, and promise a huge amount of front-loaded austerity to boot.

The effect of all this fiscal tightening? Magic growth! A huge amount of heavy lifting, in terms of making the numbers work, is done by the debt sustainability analysis, and specifically the assumptions it makes. Greece is five years into a gruesome recession with the worst effects of austerity yet to hit. But somehow the Eurozone expects that Greece will bounce back to zero real GDP growth in 2013, and positive real GDP growth from 2014 onwards. Here’s the chart:




Note that the downside, here, still looks astonishingly optimistic: where’s all this economic growth meant to be coming from, in a country suffering from massive wage deflation? And under this pretty upbeat downside scenario, Greece gets nowhere near the required 120% debt-to-GDP level by 2020: instead, it only gets to 159%. And to make things worse for the Eurozone, the report explicitly says that under the terms of this deal, “any new debt will be junior to all existing debt” — in other words, there’s no way at all that Greece is going to be able to borrow on the private markets for the foreseeable future, so long as this plan is in place.

Magic growth is about right, given Greece is being forced to find 325 billion euros in savings with a GDP that is only 220 billion euros and falling. And yet look at that chart! The cripple, being forced to even further cripple himself, is expected to make a miraculous recovery almost immediately! The wishful thinking of this scenario is simply mind-boggling.

This is what happens when you replace empirical evidence and critical thought with ideology, stupidity parading as sense. Unfortunately for the Greeks, the real world consequences of such are going to be quite painful indeed.

A little history on U.S.-Iran relations

By BJ Bjornson

Nothing new or even surprising here, and all pretty much just a basic overview, but it is still nice to be reminded of the history every now and again, particularly given the increased drumbeat towards military action these days.

"You Ain't Seen Nothing Yet"

Commentary By Ron Beasley

There is a lot not to like about MEP Nigel Farage but when he is right he's right:

For the actual people of Greece there is only one solution - default and leaving the Eurozone.  The attempts at "bailout" are designed to bail out the big banks and give Germany an economic occupation of Greece.  The austerity being forced on the Greeks only guarantees that the country will officially slip into depression followed by civil war and the debts will never be re-payed.  Make no mistake - this is war.  Unlike WWII it's economic rather than military.  But the goal is the same - German domination.

This is not meant to be an excuse for the Greek economic  irresponsibilty, this is what happens when you spend money but don't collect taxes, but it's not the Greek people who should suffer.

Via Zero Hedge

Real Men Go To Tehran Via Damascus

By Steve Hynd

The CSMonitor's Nicholas Blanford today writes that "diplomats and analysts say Western and Arab officials are mulling an option of military support for the rebel Free Syrian Army," the Sunni main opposition to Assad's Shiite regime. Despite the continued shelling of the Sunni stronghold city of Homs by Syrian government forces, now into its fifth day, the UNSC vetoes of China and Russia as well as military appreciation that Syria is not like Libya seems to have taken a "colaition of the willing" direct intervention off the table. Blanford quotes Andrew Exum of the CNAS think-tank in Washington, a group acknowledged as a primary driver of the Obama administration's foreign and military thinking.

“The Syrians will almost certainly resist any intrusion into their sovereignty, so to execute either a NFZ [no-fly zone] or safe haven would mean a fairly extensive air war to reduce Syrian air defenses,” Exum says. “We should also note that any such air operations would take place in some of the most militarily and politically sensitive air space on Earth.”

Syria has an aging but extensive air defense network provided by Russia, along with the bulk of its other weaponry. It's military is five times larger than Libya's. Both Hillary Clinton and the UK's William Hague have explicitly ruled out direct military action for now.

It may be that the West is already funneling both weapons and trainers to the FSA's rebels. Two days ago Borzou Daragahi, the Middle East and North Africa correspondent for the Financial Times, tweeted: "Wow - Misurata revolutionaries announce combat deaths of three #Libyan fighters in #Syria". That would seem to at least partially substantiate Philip Giraldi's report back in December (well in advance of any UNSC vote) that:

Unmarked NATO warplanes are arriving at Turkish military bases close to Iskenderum on the Syrian border, delivering weapons from the late Muammar Gaddafi’s arsenals as well as volunteers from the Libyan Transitional National Council who are experienced in pitting local volunteers against trained soldiers, a skill they acquired confronting Gaddafi’s army. Iskenderum is also the seat of the Free Syrian Army, the armed wing of the Syrian National Council. French and British special forces trainers are on the ground, assisting the Syrian rebels while the CIA and U.S. Spec Ops are providing communications equipment and intelligence to assist the rebel cause, enabling the fighters to avoid concentrations of Syrian soldiers.

However, Assad has friends that Libya did not have, namely Russian and China, who have interests in Syria that they can exercise, whereas they did not have the ability to project force in Libya nor supply the regime at reasonable costs. Russian foreign minister Sergey Lavrov has said that Assad is ready to negotiate with the rebels but few believe Assad really means it - especially since the shelling of Homs continues - and in any case the rebels are standing firm on their call for regime change. Thus the stage is set for a protracted proxy war between the West and Russia, which has a major naval base in Syria it will not want to give up.

It also sets up a direct confrontation between Shiites and Sunnis in the region, with the neo-whatever eternal bugbear Iran sitting in the background as a clear target. The neocon Washington Institute for Near East Policy (WINEP) think tank in particular is being especailly vocal on Syria right now, hoping to drive Western policy towards a showdown with Tehran. They are talking up the FSA:

“I believe the FSA is now one of the drivers of the situation. It is going to shape the outcome,” says Jeffrey White, a military analyst with the Washington Institute for Near East Policy (WINEP) and author of a new briefing paper on the FSA. “It has changed the nature of the conflict with the regime, is becoming increasingly identified with the popular opposition within Syria, has shown resilience on the battlefield, and is growing in capabilities and numbers.”

And talking up the notion of proxy intervention.

turning the FSA into a coherent military force will require “coordinated action by the intelligence services of a coalition of the willing,” says Jeffrey White, a military analyst with the Washington Institute for Near East Policy.

The FSA, he says, would need an assured supply of arms and ammunition, especially anti-tank missiles, secured means of communication, advice on how to coordinate operations across different regions of Syria, intelligence on Syrian Army operations and vulnerable military infrastructure.

“The intelligence services of the US, the UK, France, Turkey, Jordan, and other states in the region have the know-how and capabilities to do these kinds of things,” Mr. White says. “It would be important to have cooperation from one or more of the states bordering Syria, especially Turkey, in order to establish base facilities, training camps, supply routes and infiltration routes.”

It's a dangerous route to take.

“Syria is already an arena for proxy competition between Saudi Arabia and its allies and [rival] Iran and its allies,” says Aram Nerguizian, a military analyst with the Center for Strategic and International Studies in Washington and author of a report published in December on the risks of military intervention in Syria. “Anything that would involve direct Western intervention would be deeply destabilizing at the regional level.”

Of course, destabilizing the region has long been the neocon answer to the Middle East - as long as it doesn't include Israel. Their stated theory is that a shake-up will mean the emergence of democratic states more friendly to the U.S. Thus WINEP and others advocating covert arming of the rebels have both regime change and crippling Iran in mind when they do so.

"In Syria [sectarian identity] is there. All you have to do is scratch the surface," says Andrew Tabler, a Syria specialist with the Washington Institute for Near East Policy and author of a book on Syria under the presidency of Mr. Assad. "Until now, I don't think you have seen a tremendous amount of organizing along sectarian lines.... But it is natural that the main divide is going to be between Alawites and other Shiite off-shoots versus Sunnis."

The Guardian's Seumas Milne is spot on when he writes:

Already US, British and French leaders are busy setting up a new coalition of the willing with their autocratic Saudi and Gulf allies, satirically named "friends of democratic Syria", to build up the opposition and drive Assad from power.

Intervention is in fact already taking place. The Saudis and Qataris are reported to be funding and arming the opposition. The Free Syrian Army has a safe haven in Turkey. Western special forces are said to be giving military support on the ground. And if that fails, the UN can be bypassed by invoking the "responsibility to protect" civilians, along Libyan lines.

But none of that will stop the killing. It will escalate it. That is the clear lesson of last year's Nato intervention in Libya.

...The overthrow of the Syrian regime would be a serious blow to Iran's influence in the Middle East. And as the conflict in Syria has escalated, so has the western-Israeli confrontation with Iran. Even as US defence secretary Leon Panetta and national intelligence director James Clapper acknowledged that Iran isn't after all "trying to build a nuclear weapon", Panetta has let it be known there is a "strong likelihood" Israel will attack Iran as early as April, while Iran faces crippling EU oil sanctions over its nuclear programme.

Western intervention in Syria – and Russia and China's opposition to it – can only be understood in that context: as part of a proxy war against Iran, which disastrously threatens to become a direct one.

To WINEP and many others calling for intervention by proxy in Syria, greater sectarian conflict and a possible confrontation with Iran are features, not bugs. The former head of Mossad took to the NY Times yesterday to proclaim that "Getting Iran booted out of Syria is essential for Israel’s security" and "The current standoff in Syria presents a rare chance to rid the world of the Iranian menace".

There are without doubt some serious and genuine advocates of the "Responsibility to Protect" doctrine who are allying themselves with the regime-changers over Syria, but they are few and far between.

This Is The War That Never Ends

By Steve Hynd

It just goes on and on my friends.

The United States’ plan to wind down its combat role in Afghanistan a year earlier than expected relies on shifting responsibility to Special Operations forces that hunt insurgent leaders and train local troops, according to senior Pentagon officials and military officers. These forces could remain in the country well after the NATO mission ends in late 2014.

...Under the emerging plan, American conventional forces, focused on policing large parts of Afghanistan, will be the first to leave, while thousands of American Special Operations forces remain, making up an increasing percentage of the troops on the ground; their number may even grow.

Three things.

1) You just knew this whole new "combat mission ends in 2013, troops out by 2014" was election-year spin, didn't you?

2) This is yet another example of how special forces are becoming the mover-and-shaker of the military, with consequently rising budgetary and bureaucratic clout (as well as ever closer ties to the CIA, now run by SOF-fan General Petraeus.)

3) The Green Beret's real mission, no matter what is being said now, is going to turn into refereeing the next Afghan civil war.

With Afghanistan's three major political blocs and three major insurgent groups moving in opposite directions, the country is facing the prospect of total fragmentation. Here's the worst-case scenario: The U.S. military reaches a settlement with the Afghan Taliban that does not address the country's political future, Karzai holds on to power illegitimately while pressing for his own peace deal with the Taliban, non-Pashtuns rise in opposition to both Karzai and the Taliban, and the national security forces fracture along ethnic lines. At the same time, the three insurgent factions turn against one another as the Haqqani network exploits the chaos and maintains a rear defensive position in Pakistani safe havens. Meanwhile, Pakistan's own domestic Taliban resurges and Islamabad faces yet another wave of terrorism and Afghan refugees.

Arif Rafiq's plan to avoid this catastrophic scenario for Afghanistan involves "improving the quality, not the quantity, of the Afghan national army and police" and "the army professionalized to serve as a bulwark against fragmentation". He doesn't explicitly say so in his piece, but it's pretty obvious from there who could form the most stable government. Rafiq's course for Afghanistan most likely leads to a military junta running a U.S.-friendly dictatorship. We've plenty of experience at dealing with those.

Russia, China Veto Syria Resolution

By Steve Hynd

As expected by many, Russia and China have refused to back even a watered-down UNSC resolution on Syria, the only two of 15 member states on the council to vote against the resolution.

Susan E. Rice, the U.S. ambassador to the United Nations, said after the vote that the United States was “disgusted” by the Russian and Chinese vetoes. The council has “been held hostage by a couple of members,” she said, adding that “these members stand behind empty arguments and individual interests while seeking to strip” any resolution of meaningful terms.

“A couple of members of this council remain steadfast in their willingness to sell out the Syrian people and shield a craven tyrant,” Rice said. She said Saturday’s action was even “more shameful” given Russia’s role in selling arms to Assad’s government.

[...]

[Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov] said that the resolution was impractical and unfair and voiced concern about adopting what he called “an absolutely unrealistic provision expecting that the government of Syria would withdraw from the cities and towns exactly at the time when the armed groups are taking over the quarters of those cities and towns.”

“We are not friends or allies of President Assad,” said Lavrov, who plans to visit Damascus on Tuesday. “We try to stick to our responsibilities as a permanent members of the Security Council, and the Security Council by definition does not engage in domestic affairs of member states.”

It seems to me there are two main reasons for the vetoes. The first is that of Of $8.2Billion in total arms sales to Syria since 2003, 98% came from Russia or China. The second is not unconnected with that venal motive: the initial wave of the Arab Spring provoked regime change in pro-US nations and both China and Russia were just fine with that, but the second upsurge of revolutionary fervor has been in nations that favored Russia and China, e.g. Yemen, Libya, Syria. Given the way in which Western nations twisted the UNSC resolution on Libya, which talked about separating fighting sides and an arms embargo, into bombing on behalf of the rebels and arming them, neither nation wants to set another precedent where regime change can masquerade as an R2P mission. This resolution was clearly a big step down that road and so it had to be vetoed.

So what next? Susan Rice was unusually blunt for a UN ambassador after the vote, saying that "the United States is disgusted that a couple of members of this Council continue to prevent us from fulfilling our sole purpose here-addressing an ever-deepening crisis in Syria and a growing threat to regional peace and security."

Were this 2002, we might expect some "coalition of the willing" would now be put together by the U.S. to take further steps up to and including military intervention, even without a UNSC imprimatur. But it isn't and Libya further increased international suspicion of R2P militarism. Thus Hillary Clinton is describing the Syrian best case scenario as "similar to what we see now in Yemen."

Hasten the Day

By Steve Hynd

Romney charges that the Obama administration's announcement of a 2013 end to combat missions in Afghanistan and 2014 pull-out date "makes absolutely no sense."

One of the few moderate, sane Republicans left, James Joyner, responds:

Critics who worry that this announcement of a withdrawal severely undercuts our negotiating position with the Taliban are surely correct. They can easily bide their time now that they have a date certain.

So how can a decision that undermines our allies and our own negotiating power nonetheless be the right one? Because the alternative is to continue getting people killed -- not to mention inadvertently killing innocents -- in a fight we can't win.

...As with many other Obama foreign policy decisions, one might have wished for a better rollout. Consultation with our NATO allies and partners on the matter would have been good form. And, after a more than a decade of fighting, a presidential speech rather than a casual announcement by the defense secretary would have been more fitting.

Ultimately, though, hastening the day Americans stop dying for a lost cause is the right call.

The Taliban always could "bide their time" in Afghanistan. They live there. Announce the timetable or not, it's meaningless.

I'm highly skeptical that this announced transition will actually mean the end to Americans fighting and dying in Afghanistan, and even more so that 2014 will see the end to a US military presence there, but I cannot help but concur with James' sentiments about "dying for a lost cause".

Alas, I'm fairly sure that Simon Jenkins is right when he writes that nothing has been learned from Afghanistan.

More alarming about the Afghan war has been its psychology. It has generated some two dozen books on my shelf, and every one of them warns, cautions, criticises, condemns. The Pashtun Taliban should not be underestimated. Defeating them by main force flew in the face of all experience. Pakistani intelligence would offer them sanctuary and support. Nato should not drive al-Qaida, a tiny Arabist cell in 2001, into alliance with the Taliban. The idea that force of western arms could turn a corrupt Muslim statelet into a sanitised, pro-western democracy was arrogant and unreal.

Every warning was disregarded in a classic of "cognitive dissonance".

...Unlike most European countries, sucked into the Afghan vortex by Nato blackmail, Britain and the US were willing warriors, with belligerence in their cultural genes. Discussing "what must be done" to order the rest of the world is second nature to their political class...Which is why this is not the endgame. Britain is even now rattling sabres and dicing with disaster alongside the US against Iran. Such a war would be as catastrophic as could be imagined, and against a country that poses no conceivable threat to western security. The sole reason for going to war against Iran is to go to war against Iran. That is how we went to war against Afghanistan and Iraq. Clearly, nothing has been learned.

If not Iran, then Syria. If not Syria, then somewhere else. It certainly seems correct to say that the US and Britain share some subtextual notion of "manifest destiny" that means they can keep on blithely assuming they have the right and wherewithall to "order the rest of the world" at gunpoint. To truly "hasten the day Americans stop dying for a lost cause" we're going to have to deal with that notion. I confess, I've no blessed clue how.

India's Technology Windfall And U.S. Myopia

By Steve Hynd

Yesterday brought news that India has selected France's Dassault as the preferred bidder for a hundred or more advanced fighter aircraft, the Rafale, in a deal worth up to $30 billion over ten years. Russia, the US and the Eurofighter consortium had also bid on the deal and the deal was so coveted that President Obama personally pushed the US bids on his last visit to India. The U.S. amabassador to India resigned the day after the U.S. bid was rejected.

But while the public talk from India is of a better airframe, more able to withstand the Indian climate, I strongly suspect that the real reason the Rafale won the bidding war is that French President Nicholas Sarkozy had last year promised an unprecedented technology transfer, including machine tools and military secrets, if the French plane won - a promise he has now said France will keep to. Only the Russian bid offered anything similiar, and india is well aware Russian tech does not meet Euro heights.

So, in ten years time India will have the plants and the know-how to make advanced military aircraft - and the technology will have rapidly filtered into other areas of Indian manufacturing, giving India a massive leg up in its bid for superpowerdom. The deal was too sweet not to take, and the U.S. government was foolish and prideful not to offer something similiar. Indeed, U.S. policy towards India has been extrordinarily myopic for years, perhaps because the major military and foreign policy apparatchiks have been befuddled by General Kayani of Pakistan's Jedi mind tricks and false promises of more complete Pakistani co-operation. Pakistan's primary economic and military ally is and will remain China, not America, and it's about time U.S. administrations recognised this.

India, the natural counter-balance to China, is feeling ignored and unloved by the U.S. after the false spring of Bush's nuclear giveaway and the bipartisan rush to sell India lots of expensive but obsolescent weaponry. And it's trying to create a new strategy that accepts the reality of America and the West's continuing bamboozlement by Pakistan - including through outreach to nations like Iran. India is well aware that war between the regional superpowers is not at all unlikely in the future but like China would prefer economic battles. Technology transfers like the Rafale deal give India a leg up either way, and if America wants a powerful democratic ally in the region it should be offering such transfers at every opportunity rather than leaving it to Europe to become India's preferred future trading partner.

Who could have expected...?

By Steve Hynd

This is breaking news, apparently:

The Taliban in Afghanistan are being directly assisted by Pakistani security services, according to a secret Nato report seen by the BBC.

The leaked report, derived from thousands of interrogations, claims the Taliban remain defiant and have wide support among the Afghan people.

It alleges that Pakistan knows the locations of senior Taliban leaders.

Seriously, this hasn't been "breaking" news since about 2005. More interesting would be a breaking confession from some D.C. insider as to why U.S. foreign policy makers has bi-partisanly looked the other way for so many years.

But let's talk Saint-General and DCI David Petraeus' favorite subject: momentum.

In a damning conclusion, the document says that in the last year there has been unprecedented interest, even from members of the Afghan government, in joining the Taliban cause.

It adds: "Afghan civilians frequently prefer Taliban governance over the Afghan government, usually as a result of government corruption."

The report has evidence that the Taliban are purposely hastening Nato's withdrawal by deliberately reducing their attacks in some areas and then initiating a comprehensive hearts-and-minds campaign.

It says that in areas where Isaf has withdrawn, Taliban influence has increased, often with little or no resistance from government security forces. And in many cases, with the active help of the Afghan police and army.

Time's John Wendle doesn't believe that "The Taliban's momentum has been broken" either, even if Obama takes Petraues' word for it.

Still, two more years until the combat troops get relabelled as non-combat advisors and the war officially ends.

Making Afghanistan Safe For China

Commentary By Ron Beasley

Is US blood and treasure making Afghanistan safe for Chinese exploitation?  It certainly looks like it.

In December, 2007, China's state-owned China Metallurgical Group Corp. (MCC) signed a $2.9 billion agreement with the Kabul government to extract copper from the Aynak deposit, one of the world's largest unexploited copper deposits with an estimated 240 million tons of ore.

And now we have this:

KABUL, Afghanistan (AP) - Afghanistan's government signed a deal Wednesday with China's state-owned National Petroleum Corporation, allowing it to become the first foreign company to exploit the country's oil and natural gas reserves.

The contract, which covers the northeastern provinces of Sari Pul and Faryab, is the first of several such blocks to be put on the market in coming months, Afghan Minister of Mines Wahidullah Shahrani said during the signing ceremony.

Bring the troops home now.  Start rebuilding the US not Afghanistan.  Let the Chinese make the country safe for exploitation.