Context For The Latest Episode Of The Cambodia-Thailand Conflict

Not so long ago, international wars were viewed as a thing of the past, after a long lull at the end of the 20th century (with the brief, but notable exception of the Gulf War in 1992, which was prompted by Iraq's invasion of Kuwait), leaving only insurgencies and cross-border fights with military forces not sponsored by recognized sovereign countries. 

But, the 21st century has proved that this lull was only temporary. We've seen the Russia-Ukraine War (in 2014 and 2022 to the present), there have been military clashes as recently as this year between India and Pakistan, Israel and the U.S. have attacked Iran (which has also struck Israel), the U.S. and Saudi Arabia have recently engage the Houthi regime that is the de facto ruler of Southern Yemen after it attacked merchant ships off its coast, and there have been low intensity naval clashes between China and the Philippines in the past couple of years. A six day war between Cambodia and Thailand this month has added to that roster.

The latest round in a 118 year old border dispute related to a historic Hindu temple built by the Khmer Empire during what were the Middle Ages in Europe, near the current border between Cambodia and Thailand, led to a six day military conflict between the two countries that left at least 38 people dead and displaced at least 310,000 people, until a cease fire took hold yesterday. The two nations have had military clashes for hundreds of years, even before the ambiguous 1907 map that is at the root of this particular border dispute took hold. 

Shots were heard early on Thursday morning near Prasat Ta Muen Thom, an ancient temple on the disputed border between the two countries. Senior commanders from the Thai and Cambodian militaries agreed to de-escalate one of the bloodiest border conflicts between their nations in decades on Tuesday.The deal seemed to end, at least for now, [six] days of fighting that killed at least 38 people. More than 180,000 people in Thailand have evacuated from areas along the border, while in Cambodia, more than 130,000 people have fled their homes.

Each nation accused the other of firing first.

The Thai Army said on July 24 that Cambodia had fired rockets into civilian areas in four Thai provinces, prompting Thailand to send F-16 fighter jets to strike targets in Cambodia.

Cambodian officials said that Thai soldiers had opened fire on Cambodian troops first, at a temple claimed by both nations, called Prasat Ta Moan Thom by the Cambodians and Prasat Ta Muen Thom by the Thais. They said Cambodian forces returned fire some 15 minutes later.

The ownership of Prasat Ta Muen Thom / Prasat Ta Moan Thom is disputed by the two countries. Cambodia’s de facto leader, Hun Sen, claimed in a social media post that a Thai military commander had “started this war” by ordering the closure of the temple on Wednesday, and opening fire on Cambodian troops the next day. Thailand has accused Cambodia of starting the conflict.

The temple is in disputed territory, and people there speak Khmer, the official language of Cambodia, as well as Thai — highlighting the cultural overlap. The area is known for ruins from the Khmer Empire, which lasted from the ninth to the 15th century.

Arguments about where the border should be, and who owns the temples in the region, have led to decades of disputes. In 1962, the International Court of Justice awarded Cambodia sovereignty over the Preah Vihear Temple (known as Phra Viharn in Thailand), another temple about 95 miles away. In 2013, the court, the top judicial body of the United Nations, tried to clarify the 1962 decision. It said that Cambodia had sovereignty over the immediate area around that temple, but it left unresolved who controlled a larger disputed area. The border disputes can be traced to a 1907 map created during French colonial rule in Cambodia. The two countries interpret the map differently. Military fighting has broken out intermittently since 2008, but the last time that a major clash turned deadly was in 2011.

The two countries have had occasional military clashes and nationalist rivalries for hundreds of years.

The quoted material above (and below) is all from today's New York Times, but I have reordered the quoted material to be more readable, in this particularly poorly structured and edited article (which also includes duplicated sentences), and as a result, have not specifically noted where I omitted parts of the story. 

The cease fire was negotiated by Malaysian diplomats, with input from the U.S. and China.

The U.S. does not have particularly strong ties to either party in the conflict and wasn't directly involved in it, even though it claims to have participated in the peace negotiations, so news coverage of the conflict was relatively modest. But, the U.S. has historically favored Thailand, a constitutional monarchy which was one of the few countries never to fall to colonial powers, since it generally speaking sided with the West in the Cold War, over Cambodia, with its history of one of the most violent communist revolutions in history, which China has tended to favor.

An equally interesting aspect of the latest conflict is that Thailand's prime minister was suspended from office by a Thai court for controversial statements made not long before the shooting broke out, which is a political tactic that would be unavailable in most countries (but might be desirable if the grounds for it were suitably defined), in which the status of the prime minister would be primarily an issue for the parliament. Also, relatively few countries recognize the intermediate sanction of suspending a head of government without actually removing the head of government from office.

The border tensions have already contributed to a political crisis in Thailand: On July 1, a Thai court suspended the prime minister, Paetongtarn Shinawatra, because of comments she made about the dispute.

In June, Ms. Paetongtarn spoke by phone to Hun Sen, who is . . . Mr. Hun Manet’s father [Hun Manet has been the prime minister of Cambodia since 2023], to discuss the escalating border tensions. Mr. Hun Sen has had close ties to [Ms. Paetongtarn's] father, Thaksin Shinawatra, a former prime minister of Thailand and the leader of a powerful political dynasty, as well as one of the country’s richest men.

Mr. Hun Sen posted a recording of their call, in which Ms. Paetongtarn seemed to disparage Thailand’s powerful military and take a deferential tone. She called Mr. Hun Sen “uncle” and told him that she would “arrange” anything he wanted.

In response, thousands of protesters took to the streets of Bangkok to express their outrage. Although Ms. Paetongtarn apologized, she has faced pressure to resign.

Stray Thoughts

Domestic affairs: 

* Back to the issue of the definition of "manhood". This is an intense crisis on the right and not so much on the left. This is because there is a definition of manhood out there, albeit a vague one, and most men on the left can come close to it or aspire to get there. Men on the right are distressed and want a new definition of manhood because they can't even realistically hope to live up to the prevailing definitions of it. They are educational and economic failures. They resort to violence or threats of violence. They are sympathetic to rapists because they can't cause women to have sex with them voluntarily without heavy pressure. They aren't emotionally stable. They can't sustain positive relationships with women. They are either not fathers at all, or are divorce absentee fathers who don't even pay the child support that they owe.

* Maybe someday, we will adapt to warm American summer climes with a world where professionals wear shorts and short sleeves without a necktie in the summer, and maybe even stop their days for siestas, while keeping their offices a bit warmer.

* The GOP base doesn't seem to care that Trump is facing two felony prosecutions and is likely to be indicted on felonies in two other cases with pending grand jury investigations in Atlanta and the District of Columbia respectively. Realistically, Biden's announcement that he will run again will keep viable Democrats out of the race for the 2024 Presidential election. So, we seem likely to have another Trump v. Biden race in 2024, unless Republicans change their mind following one or more felony convictions of Trump (which seem likely). If that does happen, the race is likely to be less close as liberal Gen Z replaces older more conservative voters in the electorate and turns out to vote more than younger voters in the past, and as Trump's legal problems sway swing voters to avoid him and discourage more moderate Republican voters from voting at all.

* The U.S. has seen far more population growth in Southern latitudes, both in the Southwest and the Southeast, than other places. Some of this is chasing jobs, but a lot of it seems to be driving by older people retiring somewhere that they no longer have to deal with snow and cold. As summer temperatures in the Southern U.S. relentlessly rise, water shortages strike some places, and warm temperature bugs and beasts move north, will this trend eventually reverse itself? Insurance companies withdrawing from or limiting their exposure to Florida and California seems to presage these trends.

* The trend towards Florida, Texas, and other Southern states doubling down on their backwardness ought to be had for them in the long run. Will that happen? Will it discourage smarter and more sane people from moving there? Will it at least lead to more political polarization? Is this a strategy to keep liberal migrants out in order to prevent old school conservatives from being diluted away to political irrelevance?

* The coal industry is collapsing. This has to bode ill for the economic futures of Wyoming and West Virginia, the two states most dependent upon coal economically. Oil is used predominantly for transportation, which is transitioning steadily towards electric vehicles. Will that make a dent in the economies of states like Alaska and Texas that are stereotypically dependent upon the oil industry?

* Rural America is depopulating. There have been few decades when Americans haven't been migrating from rural areas to cities to make our nation more urban since the founding. Rural school districts have undergone multiple rounds of consolidation. Rural areas have half the per capita income of urban areas, despite subsidies of rural America. Robots and drones threaten to push the trend further by allowing for the greater automation of farming. When automation facilitates farms with more acres per farmer and more acres per farm, that inevitably depopulates farming communities, but also makes the farmers who remain more affluent.

* Eugenics is an almost taboo word in modern political discourse. But on the soft side of eugenics, it would seem better for our society if college educated couples had more kids and if economic struggling people and felons had fewer kids. It seems like the demographic trends at the bottom are trending that way. But educated people are marrying later and are less likely to have kids at all.

* Another paradigm challenging data point is that homelessness is higher, predictably, in places with higher home prices, but unforeseen, in places with low poverty rates:

A study from the real estate website Home Bay suggests what metro Denver and other regions with high home prices really face is an affordable housing crisis, of which homelessness is the most visible sign.

“Since 1985, housing prices have risen four times faster than incomes, even after adjusting for inflation,” said Matt Brannon, a data analyst with Home Bay’s parent company, Clever Real Estate. “The relationship between homelessness and housing affordability needs to be talked about more.”

The U.S. may be the wealthiest nation on the planet, but last year about 582,000 of its residents were homeless. . . . One of the most vexing problems is that economic prosperity does not improve housing outcomes, but more often than not, worsens them.

An analysis of the 50 largest U.S. metro areas that Brannon conducted found that those with home values above the national average have homeless rates 2.5 times higher than metro areas with below average home values.

Take San Jose, in the heart of California’s Silicon Valley, which epitomizes the nation’s high-tech prowess and ability to create high-paying jobs. It boasts the lowest poverty rate among the 50 metros studied at 6.9%. Yet it also has the country’s highest typical home values at $1.39 million, and the nation’s highest homeless rate of 637 per 100,000 residents — 3.6 times the U.S. rate. . . .

Right behind San Jose are San Francisco and Los Angeles, where the high rank on home values lines right up with the rank on the homeless rate — second and third. Seattle, Sacramento, Las Vegas, New York, Portland, Ore., and Denver all made the top 10.

Metro Denver had the seventh highest typical home value in the nation at $559,309, and the fourth-lowest poverty rate at 8.4%. It also had the 10th highest rate of homelessness at 231.6 per 100,000, based on 2022 counts from the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development.

. . .

Dallas ranks 38th for its homeless rate and Houston 47th. Even Austin, which like metro Denver has faced rapid home price gains due to strong in-migration, ranked 17th.

Although high home prices typically align with higher rents, renters are more likely to become homeless than homeowners. The Home Bay study also looked at that relationship.

Cities with higher rates of homeless have an average rent of $2,274 a month, while those with below-average homelessness have average rents of $1,596, based on the Zillow Observed Rent Index, which covers a broad range of rental properties. . . . Western states hosted 10 of the 12 metros with above-average homeless rates. New York and Hartford, Conn., were the exceptions.

Atlanta, Pittsburgh, Chicago, Houston, and Cincinnati had the lowest homeless rates among U.S. major metros, all below 50 per 100,000 or under a third of the U.S. average of 175.5 per 100,000.

And Brannon points out five metro areas that have done better at bucking the correlation between higher housing costs and more homelessness — Atlanta, Miami, Boston, Charlotte, N.C., and Dallas. 

Of those, Boston is the most comparable to Denver when it comes to home values — $577,160 vs. $559,309. Despite Denver having a slightly lower home value than Boston, its homeless rate is 2.5 times higher. In 2015, Boston’s mayor at the time issued a comprehensive plan to reduce chronic homelessness called “Boston’s Way Home.” The program counts more than 15,000 people without shelter who have been housed. Only one in 50 homeless people in Boston sleep outside on any given night, the lowest rate of any major city and a fraction of the nearly four in 10 estimated nationally, according to the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development. . . . 

Despite criticisms that outgoing Mayor Michael Hancock didn’t do enough, Denver boosted spending on homelessness from $8 million when he took office to $190 million authorized last year and another $254 million this year, including $77.7 million in federal dollars from the American Rescue Plan Act. . . . 

The Home Bay study is based on 2022 numbers from the U.S. Census Bureau. A point-in-time count conducted on Jan. 30 across metro Denver and released on July 24 found a 31.7% increase in the number of people living in temporary shelters or on the streets across the metro area. That number went up from 6,884 to 9,065 people.

My go to solutions for homeless are to reduce the shortage of affordable housing with market based housing facilitated by zoning deregulation and to focus on "housing first" solutions. Fully funding (or even more heavily funding) Section 8 HUD spending would do a lot as well.

* Air taxi service, an economic development I incorporated into fictional scribblings in the early aughts, is just about ready for prime time and is getting FAA regulations to go with it. I think it would be a great industry to organize primarily with mutual companies (i.e. consumer co-operatives).

International affairs:

* I still haven't seen a good clear narrative explanation of the riots that swept France a few weeks ago. I'd like to understand it better.

* Islamic terrorism is alive and well in Pakistan, with ISIS allied extremists targeting comparative "moderate" Islamist political and religious movements. The Sahel war is also ongoing. Islamic terrorism seems to have greatly diminished in North America and Europe, however.

* Israel is presenting itself as an example of what happens in a parliamentary political system with proportional representation producing quite pure majority rule, with few institutional checks and balances, and also with a fragmented political culture that can't rely on widely held political and legal norms to prevent abuses. In addition to disturbing reforms to its legal system, it is also continuing mistreatment of people in Palestinian territories unabated. I'm ambivalent. There is a lot of good about Israel which has provided a haven for the Jewish people worldwide, and the U.S. with the other largest group of Jewish people in the world has a unique obligation to protect Israel from genocide at the hands of hostile neighbors. But, Israel, feeling the existential threats it faces keenly, isn't exactly behaving well either.

* Ecuador had record murder rates, among the highest in the world, and rampant gang violence and extortion. It imposed draconian violations of civil rights and massive deployments of law enforcement. This worked. Murders have plummeted, and organized crime seems to have collapsed as well. One would think that it could eventually return to a more normal state. But massive organized crime and murders are a problem that is very rarely broken and they seem to have managed it. It is certainly an instance that calls for "reevaluating of priors." It doesn't disturb, however, the intuition that perceived likelihood of being caught is far more important that perceived punishment severity.

* The Ukraine War continues. The Ukrainian counteroffensive is making only slow gains, but has intruded into Russian territory a few times. Russia is still acting with disregard for basic standards of humanity, calling off its fragile grain shipment deal and attacking civilian centers with no military importance out of spite. The quality of Russia's military force continues to decline, however. Russia narrowly survived an abortive coup by its mercenaries who had been hung out to dry by the ordinary military. Russia has lost so many experienced and often high ranking soldiers and so much equipment that its conventional military capabilities in Europe have been vastly diminished and its neighbors are ramping up their own military might and expanding NATO. This engagement has greatly downgraded Russia's international standing as a military power. Without the economic base of the full Soviet Union and the Warsaw Pact countries of Eastern Europe, it can't maintain a Soviet scale military force as it has tried to.

* The U.S. is inherently in its origin story, a nation of immigrants. Most countries are nation-states. Does that change the legitimacy of anti-immigrant xenophobia in those countries in ways that it does not in the U.S.?

Bangladesh growing economically, Pakistan stagnant.

The split of West Pakistan and East Pakistan after their split from India was entirely foreseeable, because culturally the two regions had little in common except Islam. This continues to play out today as the two countries follow very different paths. 

– Bangladesh to clock highest growth in Asia this year. 

– Pakistan’s growth to be lowest in South Asia in current fiscal. 

8% vs. 3%.

via Brown Pundits. These are GDP growth figures, not population growth figures. Pakistan has 2% per year population growth. Bangladesh has 1% per year population growth.

Irony Strikes

Official NSA and CIA gift shop sweatshirts are made in Pakistan.

Juan Cole on the Pakistani Taliban's School Massacre

Juan Cole provides useful background and context in understanding an incident yesterday in which six or seven Pakistani Taliban militants killed about 145 people mostly older school children and injured more than a hundred more, while burning several teachers alive at a school run by the Army in the Tribal Areas of Pakistan.

In a nutshell, he explains that the Pakistani Taliban are mostly part of a single linguistic and ethic group in the tribal areas of uneducated people allied with the "seminary student" movement in Afghanistan.  They were allied with the Pakistani Intelligence Services for years, but after U.S. encouraged pressure from the top, the Pakistani military has declared war on them in the past few months and killed about 2,000.

Cole describes the school massacre as a futile effort to exact revenge for their losses, that look to them like a betrayal, during this campaign which is taking a great toll on their movement.

Good News Reminders

Between 1991 and 2010, the homicide rate in the United States fell 51 percent, from 9.8 per 100,000 residents to 4.8 per 100,000. Property crimes such as burglary also fell sharply during that period; auto theft . . . dropped an astonishing 64 percent. . . the trends continued in the first half of 2011. . . . the United States could soon equal its lowest homicide rate of the modern era: 4.0 per 100,000, recorded in 1957. . . . the United States is still more violent than Europe or Canada. . . But . . . is far, far safer than it was as recently as the late 1980s. . . .

Crime’s continued decline during the Great Recession undercuts the . . . myth that hard times force people into illegal activity. . . . Yet recent history also refutes . . . [those] who predicted in the early 1990s that minority teenage “superpredators” would unleash a new crime wave. Government, through targeted social interventions and smarter policing, has helped bring down crime rates. . . . Yet solutions bubbled up from the states and municipalities. . . . [I]ncarcerating more criminals for longer periods probably helped reduce crime. . . . [But,] crime rates fell while Miranda warnings and other legal protections for defendants remained in place. . . . what’s most striking about the crime decline is how little we know about its precise causes. . . . state incarceration, which peaked at a national total of 1.4 million on Dec. 31, 2008. This phenomenon is probably a source of success in the war on crime — and its most troubling byproduct. But increased imprisonment cannot explain all, or most, of the decline: Crime rates kept going down the past two years, even as the prison population started to shrink.

From here.

Incarceration rates in the U.S. are still unrivaled in the world, despite falling slightly, but the U.S. has reduced its use of the death penalty by every measure: new death penalty convictions, executions carried out, and circumstances when its imposition is permitted. The single largest source of executions in the world, China, has greatly reduced its use of the death penalty in the last few years.

Disproportionate federal criminal sentences for crack cocaine use have been materially moderated. DNA testing has produced the exoneration of many wrongfully convicted individuals while producing convictions for suspects who could have been shown to be guilty of rapes in no other way. The use of DNA in burglary cases has produced convictions of individuals guilty of hundreds of burglaries each.

Teen consumption of hard drugs has fallen. Cocaine and meth are a lot less popular than they used to be. Criminal gangs are less powerful. The decriminalization of medical marijuana in a variety of states has turned would be criminals into tax paying small business owners filling a gap in the economy during hard economic times. More teens who need prescription drugs for mental health problems are getting them.

The decline in crime is not the only good news.

Accidental deaths have declined dramatically on an age and population adjusted basis (increasing population increases accidental deaths and some accidental death causes like falls have always been heavily geriatric), in every category except accidental deaths from prescription drugs (mostly a small subset of prescription painkillers often fraudulently obtained). It is now almost as safe to work in a factory as it is to work in an office or retail store, and for most kinds of workers, ordinary automobile accidents and homicides that happen to occur on the job are the most common causes of work related deaths (farming remains the least reformed in terms of worker safety). Drunken driving deaths, in particular, are way down, and traffic deaths generally are now less frequent than accidental deaths from prescription drugs.

Suicides are also down, although some of that can be attributed to deaths that might otherwise have been treated as suicides being classified as accidental prescription drug overdoses.

Dramatic reductions in smoking, early detection of cancers, and improved cancer therapies have reduced deaths from cancer dramatically. Improved treatment regimes like cholesterol control drugs, asprin therapy and moderate alcohol consumption, as well as reductions in smoking, have reduced deaths from cardiovascular diseases. The life expectency of people with HIV and AIDS has expanded greatly as treatment options have improved, and new infection rates are not increasing, although they aren't really falling either. Progress has been made in finding treatments for spinal injuries and in the way that trauma can be treated in specialized emergency room settings.

Births to pre-teens and teenagers are at record lows, and this is due to fewer teen pregnancies, not rising abortion rates, as abortion rates are also at record post-Roe v. Wade lows (for all ages). Births to poor women have fallen to rates similar to those of more affluent women, limiting excacerbation of their poverty. Infant mortality and pre-term births have also become less common. Emergency contraception has become more widely available, preventing unwanted pregnancies, and drugs like RU-486 have made early term abortions more widely available and less traumatic to obtain.

Divorce rates have fallen significantly for college educated couples.

Air pollution has declined somewhat, motor vehicle fuel efficiency has increased significiantly, lighting energy efficiency has made dramatic strides, renewable power production has surged, and exposures to lead and mercury are greatly reduced. Hybrid cars, plug in electric cars, and fuel efficient microcars have entered the mass market.

The percentage of people who are graduating from high school, and who are obtaining further education after high school, is rising.

Housing is more affordable than it has been for decades. Consumer debt is falling signficantly. Inflation is negligable. Federal tax rates are at near record lows. Customs duties, quotas and other barriers to international trade are far less common than they were several decades ago. Illegal immigrant populations have fallen, and the government facilitated part of that decline has disproportionately focused on convicted criminals. Government leaders in every political party at every level of government take seriously the need to facilitate a positive economic environment for business, even though they disagree about how to make that happen.

Streaming high quality video has become widespread and affordable. The cost of long distance calling within the United States has greatly declined. Mobile phones and mobile internet access are available to the masses. Electronic books have become feasible and widespread. While it once cost a considerable sum of money to buy an encyclopedia for home use, now, access to information sources just as vast, including full text scholarly journal articles in many disciplines, are now freely available. You can get a good summary of your genome for a couple of hundred dollars and a whole genome which was impossible to get at any cost a couple of decades ago can now be sequenced for a few thousand dollars.

Fast, relatively painless, modest risk surgical correction of nearsightedness is now possible for about the cost of ten pairs of glasses, and contact lens are now cheap, disposable and better in quality than they used to be.

Gay rights have made significant advances: several states permit gay marriage, more permit civil unions, gays can now serve openly in the military, and the U.S. Justice Department has decided to stop defending the constitutionality of the Defense of Marriage Act's decision to not recognize same sex marriages that are valid under state law. Many states, including Colorado, have adopted laws prohibiting discrimination on the basis of sexual orientation.

The percentage of people who identify as non-religious has grown dramatically, and with it so has the social acceptability of that religious self-identification. Fundamentalist evangelical sects have seen their growth plateau in favor of less politically minded non-denominational megachurches. We are seeing patterns of secularization in the United States similar to those seen in Europe a generation or two earlier.

The war in Iraq is over and no more U.S. troops remain stationed there. The practice of disregarding the legal rights of U.S. citizens and legal aliens suspected of terrorism in the United States, while remaining a threat, is no longer a matter of administration policy, the adminstration has ceased to rely on torture and widespread extraordinary rendition of prisoners aimed at facilitating human rights abuses, and the terrorism souced paranoia in the nation's airports has ebbed a bit. Osama bin Laden and a very large share of other senior al-Queda leaders have been killed or captured, including almsot everyone with direct involvement in the 9-11 attacks. The Taliban went from being on the very of ruling all of Afghanistan to being routed in Afghanistan where they have been replaced with a fragile new civilian regime, although a low level Taliban insurgency continues there and across the border in Northwest Pakistan.

Two decades after the end of Soviet style communism, many of the former Soviet and Warsaw Pact nations have significantly reformed themselves in a Western democratic capitalist model, and few are more totalitarian than they were in the Soviet era. China's path towards market based economic reforms has continued and its totalitarian limitations on personal freedom and political express have loosened somewhat. China and Taiwan are on a path towards more detente. Dictatorships have been ousted in Yemen, Egypt and Tunisia. The South Sudanese have secured independence from an oppressive regime in the North. Burma is taken steps towards restoring civilan rule and Nigeria has the most democratic civilian leadership it has had in decades. Kim Jong Il is death and there is some reason to think his son who has become his successor will be at least no worse and probably somewhat better in governing his nation than his father.

Less recently, but also notably, dictatorships in Indonesia and Iraq have been replaced with fragile emerging democracies, and democracy has made progress in Pakistan. East Timor has held onto its political independence and democratic government. Kosovo has been established as a functional independent nation. Most of the most prominent Serbian war criminals are dead or have been brought before international human rights tribunals. The humanitarian fallout from natural disasters in Haiti have begun to resolve itself without resulting in the ouster of a democratically elected civilian government that followed decades of totalitarian rule. Long civil wars in Sri Lanka and Mozambique and Ethiopia ended (giving birth to the sovereign nation of Eritrea in the last case). Long years of seemingly never ending suicide bombings in Israel have declined to a trickle, and the Palestinian Authority has more authority and is more democratic than it has been in many decades past. Civil wars in Bosnia, Ivory Coast and Liberia are over. Cuba is easing up slightly on its restrictions on private ownership of property and private enterprise. The struggle with near sovereign narcotics cartels in much of Columbia has grown far less intense. A campaign of genocide in Darfur, Sudan has been tamed, even though that regimes abuses of not ended. Violence related to disputed sovereignty in Kashmir has ebbed. Kate Middleton's marriage to Prince William has given the world a delightfully perfect new princess of the countries of the British Commonwealth to gossip over. Absolute monachs in Jordan and Morocco have adopted democratic reforms.

Democracy, freedom, peace and economic prosperity aren't universally making gains in the world. Mexico continues to be immersed in an orgy of drug related violence and political turmoil (in Veracruz it was so bad that the city recently fired every single employee of the police force and Navy sailors stepped in to patrol the city while it the civilian police force was rebuilt from the ground up). Unemployment in the U.S., much of it long term, remains high, and declining consumer debt is often rooted in foreclosures and bankruptcies. Europe faces a sovereign debt crisis that threaten the E.U. economies and eurozone as a whole. Iran is still sword rattling in the Persian Gulf. Syria is violently cracking down on dissent from its dictatorial regime. Sudan is indiscriminately dropping bombs on the communities of the Nuba Mountain area and bullying newly independent South Sudan over oil pipeline charges. Depots still reign in many of the "stans" of the former Soviet Union, an active and violent insurgency continues in Chechnyia, and Islamic terrorist violence in Northern Nigeria is surging. Belarus, Venezula and Hungary are at serious risk of becoming fully non-democratic regimes. But, on balance, there is actually more good news than bad out there.

Pakistani Politics Still Violent

"A Pakistani government minister who had said he was getting death threats because of his opposition to a controversial blasphemy law was shot to death Wednesday.

Shahbaz Bhatti was the only Christian member of the Cabinet in Pakistan, where 95 percent of people are Muslim. He served as the government’s minister of minority affairs....

The Taliban claimed responsibility. “(The) assassination of Bhatti is a message to all of those who are against Pakistan’s blasphemy laws,” said Ihsanullah Ihsan, a Taliban spokesman."

Two months ago, a governor of a Pakistan state — Salman Taseer — was murdered for the same reason.

From here.

How do you run a democratic civilian government when senior government officials who take positions on issues (never mind waiting around to see how the political and legal process resolved the dispute), that somebody else in the system doesn't like, are routinely murdered or executed?

It has been this way for a long time. Pakistan's first Prime Minister, Liaquat Ali Khan, was assassinated in 1951, after which the first President, Iskander Mirza declared martial law and discarded the constitution, which lead to his removal from office in a coup by General Ayub Khan, the same day, October 7, 1958.

Zulifikar Ali Bhutto, leader of the Pakistan's People's Party became President after a democratic election on December 20, 1971, was replaced in a coup in July 1977, and was executed for complicity in a 1974 political murder on April 4, 1979.

President Mohammad Zia ul-Haq was killed when his plane exploded in August 1988. Suffice it to say that it certainly sounds like suspicious circumstance.

Benazir Bhutto (the late Zulifikar Ali Bhutto's daughter) became Prime Minister in 1988, was removed by the President based on corruption charges August 1990, returned to power October 1990, and was removed for more corruption charges November 1996.

A coup removed the civilian regime entirely over dissatisfaction with the decisions on military matter being made by Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif on October 12, 1999, and the leading General Pevez Musharraf declared himself to be President on June 20, 2001. Between then and 2007, he survived four assassination attempts.

More than 140 people died in a suicide bomber's unsuccessful attempt to kill Benazir Bhutto as she campaigned for President after eight years in exile on October 18, 2007, and she was successfully assassinated December 27, 2007 after a political rally, in which the leaders of the regime of Pakistan in power at the time is accused of being complicit.

Bhutto's widower, Asif Ali Zardari lead the Pakistan Peoples Party to an electoral victory Febraury 18, 2008, and after street protests and a threatened impeachment, General Musharraf stepped down in August, and Zardari was sworn in as President.

This, of course, just includes the highlights, without mentioning assassinations and assassination attempts on lower level figures, and a constant low level parade of other political killings and suicide bombings. For example, seven more famous political assassinations in Pakistan can be found here (many of which are discussed with more narration here.) I've also omitted multiple wars, some still in progress today. The separation of Pakistan from India was not bloodless. One bloody civil war split Bangladesh and Pakistan into separate countries in the 1970s. There have been wars with India over the Kashmir and out of general mutual antipathy. There have been subnational insurgencies and violent counterinsurgencies in the country's "frontier provinces" since 1958, and one of them is in progress right now.

Xe Services, which is currently embroiled in revelations related to the arrest of a U.S. CIA contractor who used to work for them, was accused in 2009 of having conducted political assassinations of its own without Presidential approval. This is in addition to the many Presidentially authorized CIA assassinations of people believed to be involved with the Taliban, mostly with drone deployed missiles, pursuant to the 2001 Authorization for Use of Military Force by Congress following 9/11.

Pakistan is not Yemen. It is a developing country with a viable middle class and more than a hundred million people, with one of the oldest histories of civilization in the world, and a substantial GDP, that has nuclear weapons, not a sparsely populated poor nation in the middle of a desert. In theory, it is a nation of Muslims who have a lot in common with each other in a "nation-state" sense.

Even without any new provocations, it would take a lifetime just to settle the scores for all the political killings that have occurred so far. A simple change of President pursuant to election results in the ordinary manner, without assassinations, impeachments or coups, that takes place in the United States every four to eight years, most of the time, is almost unprecedented in Pakistan.

As much as we can become concerned with minor happenings in Pakistan, the very basics of orderly, peaceful civilian government of any kind seem elusive.

Afghanistan As A Basket Case

Afghanistan is by almost any measure imaginable (with the exception of AIDS and parasitic disease infection rates) the most impoverished, unhealthy, undeveloped country in the world outside of sub-Saharan Africa, often by a large margin, and on some measures, like the percentage of people with access to clean water, or calories of food per day per capita, is worse off than any other country in the entire world.

Literarcy is low, especially for women. Sanitary toilet facilities are rare. Maternal and infant mortality are extremely high. Girls marry young and often involuntarily. Debts are sometimes settled by bartering children. Per capita income is low. Telephones and televisions are rare. Many places outside major cities don't have fixed power plants and electrical lines (although there are generators). Few people outside major cities and military bases has internet connections. Life expectancies are short. The average age is close to the youngest in the world, and middle aged or older adults are rare compared to any country in Eurasia or the Americas. Drug abuse is common. Many communities don't have schools. Central heating is the rare exception in a place with high desert winters. The roads are in poor repair and scarce. Unemployment is rampant, which is particularly dire in a nation with no real welfare state, particularly if you have seven hungry children. It is one of the few places in the world with violent death rates higher than drug war torn Northern Mexico. A large share of the population is engaged in marginal subsistence agriculture. A business with ten employees engaged in non-automated craft work or automobile repairs pretty much qualifies as "big business" there. Most of the country has no banks. Most of the country lacks the extravagant mosques of the Saudi Arabia, Iraq, Iran, Pakistan and India. The educated middle class, such as it was, largely left all but a few of the biggest cities in the late 1970s and early 1980s. The country has been embroiled in civil wars for decades when U.S. forces joined that conflict in 2001. This basket case of a country is also deeply divided on ethic and linguistic lines, more a collection of leftovers from other countries than a nation-state in its own right. It is a world that Thomas Malthus and Thomas Hobbes would have understood well.

Afghanistan makes stereotypical examples of Third World deprivation like Bangladesh look like lands of plenty. Ethiopia has more food. The Reconstruction era American South had better bathrooms, better stocked stores and fewer disabled veterans of past wars. For that matter, the classical Greeks, classical Romans, classical Egyptians, classical Sumerians and the Harappans of ancient Pakistan had better municipal infrastructure. The Bronze Age Hittites has a more developed mining and metallurgy sector of its own. Afghanistan makes a tough ghetto in a Rust Belt American city look like a wealthy, technologically advanced, safe, well governed heaven. (Although unlike Port Angeles, Washington, they apparently lack killer mountain goats.) The only remotely successful industry in the country is opium poppy growing, and that business isn't looking good in a country where the Taliban remain on the defensive, the borders are patrolled again, and the foreign troops and aid workers in the country make it harder to do business. Poor people in Southern Africa and Chile toil in unsafe mines for peanuts. Poor people in Afghanistan walk over vast mineral wealth every day without knowing that it even exists.

The Taliban, who are the main U.S. military opponent there, the terrorist groups they failed to rout after 9-11 having long since departed for greener pastures, are likewise a pretty pathetic military force. They have no tanks, no armored personnel carriers, no airplanes, no drones, no artillery too heavy to be carried by infanty, no documented anti-air missiles, no helicopters, no fortified bases, no modern hospitals, no non-line of sight missiles, no navy (not that a navy would be very helpful in the landlocked country), very few if any night vision goggles, little body armor, few experienced officers, low kill v. be killed ratios, a poor track record of success in suicide bombings, lots of soldiers detained, and low pay. They can't afford mercenaries, only foreign volunteers. They have no nuclear weapons or chemical weapons or biological weapons and no allies who will threaten to use them on their behalf. They have civilian vehicles, tents, borrowed civilian buildings, rifles, mortars, rocket propelled grenades, and improvised explosive devices (their most effective weapon). But, they aren't as good at improvising explosive devices for want of skills and materials as the Iraqis or the Palestinians. Their riflemen are grossly inaccurate and their ammunition supplies are limited. They don't have the luxury of months long basic training regimes. Many of their soldiers can barely read and are barely more than boys. The Taliban are an order of magnitude less well trained and equipped and organized than the remnant Iraqi military forces and foreign fighters the U.S. fought in Iraq, most of whom had serves in one of the Middle East's more professional and effective military forces before the U.S. troops arrived, most of whom were literate, most of whom remembered what a functioning government looked like. Most of the Afghan Taliban who do have a little education were trained in theology, not engineering or management or politics.

Their cell phones and radios are open books to the armies that are trying to kill them. Their movements can be tracked with satellites and drones. They are moving on foot and by donkey. Bribes and plunder are a big part of the Taliban military compensation plan. A large portion of the Afgan population are children, and a fairly large number of adult men have been disabled at some point in war or work. Many adults have the failings associated with growing up malnourished. The minority of women in Afghanistan who aren't little girls, pregnant, nursing or elderly have largely not been co-opted to fight this war. Their supporters in Northwest Pakistan have been undermined by the biggest flood in a generation and distracted by the Pakistani military's attacks on them, as well as U.S. drone attacks.

The Taliban are certainly making a concerted effort, and they have bounced back from their initial defeats at the hands of U.S. forces and Afghan warlords. They are fighting on their home turf, have nothing to lose, are ruthless, have the recent memory of having run almost the entire country, have the courage of their convictions, speak the language, and understand the people better. But, they are themselves a foreign sponsored missionary organization at heart. Their roots in the country are a few decades old in a place where people trace their tribal roots back thousands of years to Vedic warriors and lost Biblical tribes, accurately or not.

Unlike the Viet Cong, for example, they aren't a sovereign proxy force for a powerful nation with money and advanced weapontry. The Vietnam War, for example, featured many dog fights with an opponent who had military aircraft. Supporting them is the hobby of disaffected wealthy elites in the Middle East (especially Saudi Arabia) and to a lesser extent a political and religious minority faction in Pakistan, and to a lesser extent, corrupt local servants of foreign powers there now. The former Soviet Republics to their North are not their friends. Yes, Vietnam and Afghanistan and Iraq were all counterinsurgency campaigns. But, both Vietnam and Iraq were far healthier by comparison. Afghanistan is more like Somolia or Darfur than it is like Vietnam.

The Taliban's efforts are helped by the fact that the civilian government in Afghanistan is weak, corrupt and is losing its democratic mandate with flawed elections. But, the Afghan government's civilian constitution is far more workable than the one that was adopted in Iraq and developed more democratically. It has fewer legal traps that can deadlock government officials for months trying to form governments or pass budgets, it is simpler, it doesn't have the same seccessionist issues to deal with as Iraq (where the Southeast and Kurdistan would like to leave the country), it provides for greater local autonomy, and it doesn't have competing civilian and religious power bases the way Iran does. Its express commitment to Islamic law as the law of the land gives the Taliban less to rally around the insurgents against the pre-Soviet Western oriented monarchy and Soviet regime had. The civilian government's military forces may not be particularly impressive, but they are better trained, better equipped, more able to train in the open, more likely to be paid consistently, and have a bigger organization framework than the Taliban does. In Iraq, insurgents rallied around a vision of a new Sultanate. In Afghanistan, the memories of monarchy and Soviet style communism still leave a sour taste, and the theocratic Talibann regime looked good only in comparison to the anarchy that preceded it. There aren't a lot of other compelling political visions in Afghanistan to compete with the current regime.

The cost of the military effort of the U.S. and its allies in Afghanistan is several times the nation's entire GDP, particularly after the recent U.S. surge in troop levels. And, while bloody conflicts rage in some provinces, a minority of Afghan provinces have produced the vast majority of U.S. and allied force casualties. This is a regional conflict within Afghanistan, not a nationwide active battlefield.

We broke Iraq which is still worse off than we found it, has millions of refugees abroad as a result of a war we brought to it, and has undergone a massive ethnic cleansing campaign that has left the country far more segregated regionally than it was before we arrived.

Afghanistan was broken when we arrived, is arguably marginally less of a hell hole than it was when we got there, has been united under some semblence of a democratic civilian government for the first time in a generation, has substantial swaths of territory that are reasonably secure militarily, has not undergone major demographic shifts as a result of our presence, and has not produced millions of refugees as a result of our arrival (which is not to say that the world is not awash with Afghan refugees, they just left before we arrived), despite being similar in geographic size and population to Iraq. Afghanistan is much worse off than Iraq would be even if all of Iraq's oil wealth disappeared tomorrow.

We learned the hard way on 9-11 that the price of leaving even one little obscure hinterland anywhere in the world, even thousands of miles away, in a place we've never ruled, to fester in a pit of utter poverty, war, anarchy and religious extremism leads to horrible consequences. Letting the Taliban return to control outside the framework of an Afghan civilian government that can keep it in line in a democratic (or at least non-theocratic) system would be an act of deferred self-mutilation.

But, we also need to avoid falling into the trap of thinking that weakness is strength. Asymmetric warfare gives the weaker party some advantages, but weakness is still weak. Superior military forces with superior economic resources have been defeating weaker military forces for thousands of years, and there is no reason to believe that the laws of war have been rewritten in this little corner of the world at this point in history. There is a reason that the Taliban have decided to send emissaries to civilian government of Afghanistan to negotiate some sort of political settlement. Their capacity to wage war is limited and once again, winter is coming.

Our goal in Iraq was to replace a regime that we mistakenly thought was a threat to its neighbors. Our goal in Afghanistan is to allow for a regime to take hold that can prevent non-governmental actors there from posing a threat to us; their neighbors are well equipped to protect themselves from this militarily feeble opponent. Our end game goal for Afghanistan is less ambitious, but since it started off so much worse off, getting it to a point where it can function well enough to suppress non-governmental military and terrorist threats is more of a chore. It is harder to create than to destroy. It takes more time. I'm not at all sure that the current strategy of our forces there is the right one. But, if the U.S. military in concert with the other resources of the United States government and our military allies can't defeat a foe this pathetic, it may as well give up, send all of our soldiers back to their homes, and shutter its doors.

In By A Coup, Out By A Coup

Pakistani dictator Pervez Musharraf has resigned in the face of impending impeachment proceedings and his loss of support from the military. Musharraf took power in a military coup. A brief recap of the relevant history is here.

Notably, the act which undermined his credibility in the end was the arbitrary removal of a national supreme court justice.

Don't Pay Attention, Miss A Coup

Pakistan (one of the world's largest countries which also happens to have nuclear weapons and is home to Osama bin Laden) is under martial law after a coup a couple of days ago. Take one weekend off from the news to celebrate your birthday and you miss stories like this one.

UPDATE (also from here):

[November 5]: Hundreds of opposition figures have been arrested, and Pakistan's satellite and local television and radio stations are firmly under military control, as are the newspapers. . . . Musharraf may postpone parliamentary elections, scheduled for January, for "a year." (Past military dictators in Pakistan have "postponed" the elections "for a year" many years in a row). . . . Musharraf has been invoking the need to fight Muslim extremism as a pretext for his coup. But in fact, he made the (further) coup because the Pakistani Supreme Court had unanimously decided that he was ineligible to run for president, and he hasn't cracked down on the radio station of Fazlur Rahman in the north (one of the Pakistani clerics who trained the Taliban and who denies that al-Qaeda exists). He has cracked down on civilian Supreme Court justices, on lawyers, and other distinctly secular, middle class forces in Pakistani society (along with officials of the Jama'at-i Islami, the Pakistani equivalent of the Muslim Brotherhood, which has not for the most part been violent).

In fact, the Muslim extremists are in the tribal areas, and in the Northwest Frontier Province (NWFP) and the hardscrabble towns and villages of northern Punjab. If you were worried about the extremists, you'd declare martial law in the NWFP and the tribal areas. Instead, Musharraf is said to be planning to give in to the demand in these northern areas that sharia or Islamic canon law be implemented! This is a defender of secularism?

Down in Lahore and Faisalabad, no one could get more than a few hundred people even to protest Musharraf's frontal assault on the Red Mosque last summer. But Musharraf didn't make his coup in the NWFP, he arrested hundreds in Lahore and elsewhere in the deep Punjab, which is mostly traditional, conservative, Sufi, Shiite, or mildly reformist. There are extremists from the eastern and southern Pakistani Punjab, but they are a small fringe. That is why it is significant that Qazi Hussain of the Jama'at-i Islami could rally 20,000 persons near Lahore. When the Punjabis get excited about something in Pakistan, there is sometimes a political earthquake.

[November 4] Pakistani dictator Pervez Musharraf has made a second coup. Over his eight years of military dictatorship, he had dressed his government up in the outward trappings of 'democracy.' He allowed (stage-managed) parliamentary elections in 2002. The same year, he ran for president in a referendum with no opponent, such that he could not lose.

The Supreme Court ruled against him in his attempt to dismiss the uncooperative chief justice, and the same court had been set to rule on whether he could remain as president (he was just reelected to the post by the stage-managed parliament he had helped install).

Musharraf appears to have concluded that the Supreme Court would rule against him, thus his coup-within-a-coup, which at last throws off the tattered facade of democratic institutions and reveals the naked military tyranny underneath. Pitifully, Musharraf explained that he had to make the coup in order to ensure the transition to democracy he says he began 8 years ago. Apparently the "transition" (i.e. Musharraf's dictatorship) will last for the rest of his life.