What's Spanish for Quagmire? Reassessing Mexico's War on Drugs

Five myths that caused the failed war next door.

BY JORGE G. CASTAÑEDA | JANUARY/FEBRUARY 2010

Mexico's current government took office on Dec. 1, 2006, but really only assumed power 10 days later, when Felipe Calderón, winner of a close presidential election that his leftist opponent petulantly refused to concede, donned a military jacket, declared an all-out war on organized crime and drug trafficking, and ordered the Mexican army out of its barracks and into the country's streets, highways, and towns. The bold move against odious adversaries (and change of topic) garnered Calderón broad support from the public and the international community, along with raised eyebrows among Mexico's political, business, and intellectual elites.

Three years and 15,000 deaths later, Calderón's war still commands support at home and backing from abroad, mainly from Barack Obama's administration, though skepticism about the Mexican president's strategy is spreading, as Rubén Aguilar and I discovered when we published El Narco: La Guerra Fallida last fall and found ourselves in the middle of a vigorous debate about where our country is headed. It is long overdue.

The Mexican drug war is costly, unwinnable, and predicated on dangerous myths. Calderón has deployed everything from distorted statistics to bad history as weapons to convince the country, and the world, that the war must be joined.

As Americans are painfully aware, wars predicated on false pretenses that pursue ill-defined aims usually turn into regrettable quagmires. Mexico is still far from being a failed state, but it is already entangled in a failed war. Until and unless it abandons the false narrative of the war as the necessary defense of a desperate land besieged by bad guys, it will be in serious danger of becoming one.

1. Mexico's Druggie Explosion

The Mexican government contends it had to deploy tens of thousands of soldiers to take on the drug cartels as never before in part to keep drugs away from Mexico's children. The argument behind this emotionally powerful rallying cry is that Mexico went from being simply a transit point and producer of drugs to being their consumer.

Mexico has been producing marijuana and heroin for export to the United States for decades; it does not produce cocaine but has been the main conduit from Colombia to the United States since the late 1980s. Over the past decade, it became a significant manufacturer of methamphetamines, also for sale in the United States. But now the government claims that Mexicans have started consuming drugs and that this must be stopped before Mexico City ends up like inner-city Baltimore.

The government's case is undermined, however, by its own statistics. Mexico's health ministry has been carrying out national addiction surveys across the country since 1988; the studies constitute a reliable and constant series of data collected by the same specialists in the same places. The most recent survey shows that there has been no significant increase in the number of users in Mexico. The total went from 307,000 to 465,000 addicts between 2002 and 2008 -- an increase of 26,000 addicts per year in a country of 110 million inhabitants. The overall addiction rate amounts to 0.4 percent of the population, far lower than the rate in the United States, Canada, and Western Europe, and lower also than in other Latin American countries such as Bolivia, Brazil, Uruguay, Argentina, and Chile. The number of Mexicans admitting that they had consumed specific drugs at least once in their lives -- the so-called incidence rate -- has also remained stable or even declined for all drugs over the past decade. The prevalence of drug use -- that is, the number of people who confessed to consuming any drug at least once over the previous year -- has remained stable.

These findings are corroborated by other surveys, for example, those carried out by the National Psychiatry Institute, and at the regional level by the Centros de Integración Juvenil. These figures show that in the country's largest urban centers, such as Mexico City, Guadalajara, and Monterrey, as well as in border towns wracked by violence like Tijuana and Ciudad Juárez, there is absolutely no evidence pointing to any meaningful increase in drug use, notwithstanding the considerable expansion of Mexico's middle class in recent years. The figures for Tijuana and Ciudad Juárez are especially noteworthy: From 1998 to 2005, the addiction rate in Tijuana fell from 4.4 percent to 3.3 percent; even in Ciudad Juárez, supposedly the narco capital of the world, it rose from 1.6 percent to just 4 percent.

2. Mexico's Violence Explosion

The second rationale given for Calderón's war was the increase in violence leading up to and throughout 2006, and the notion that organized crime's mayhem was undermining public safety, not to mention the rule of law. Gory cartel-on-cartel violence in the second half of that year, including the appearance of five decapitated heads in a disco in Uruapan, in Calderón's home state of Michoacán, had shocked society, and the new administration made much of campaign polls showing that security and violence ranked highest among the electorate's concerns.

Unfortunately, this rationale is also belied by the facts. Violence in Mexico, measured by murders per 100,000 inhabitants, had been falling in the previous decade -- according to the government's own statistics, which Calderón himself has quoted. According to U.N. data, the murder rate had fallen from 14.9 per 100,000 inhabitants in 1998 to less than 11 in 2006. This was higher than in the United States (5.6), but considerably lower than in much of the rest of Latin America, including El Salvador (58), Venezuela (48), Colombia (37), and Brazil (25).

People in Mexico may have felt more insecure when they elected Calderón, but in fact they were living in a significantly less violent and crime-prone country than a decade earlier.

The confusion separating perception from reality springs from a misreading of public-opinion surveys. Mexicans in 2006 were more concerned about ordinary crime and law and order than anything else, partly because financial worries had diminished in the wake of 11 years of macro-economic stability and modest but persistent growth. But they did not associate that concern with cartels, organized crime, or drug trafficking. In poll after poll, these issues ranked very low among Mexicans' preoccupations. Indeed, violence directly linked to the drug business really exploded only after Calderón took office: In 2006, 2,100 drug-related killings took place; in 2007 the number rose to 2,700; in 2008 to 5,660; and in 2009, through late November, to 5,800.

3. The Besieged State

The third rationale for the declaration of war was the specter of the Mexican government being "captured" -- at local, state, and even national levels -- by all-powerful cartels. This argument appears more credible than Calderón's other claims; a growing number of episodes seemed to prove that the cartels were taking over cities, highways, and ports of entry to the United States, charging for protection, putting entire police forces on their payroll, and so on. The Mexican state, Calderón told the country, was losing control of its territory.

Once again, though, the argument is undercut by the government's own repeated assertions, with the Obama administration's backing, that Mexico was not a "failed state." It wasn't and isn't, but one can hardly make the two cases simultaneously: that is, on the one hand, that Mexico is not a failed state, and, on the other, that it is losing control of its territory.

A dose of historical context also undermines the notion that the cartels all of a sudden threatened to infiltrate and corrupt the Mexican government. Mexico is not Norway, and never was. In the 1980s, the entire Federal Security Directorate was disbanded because it had been completely taken over by the drug cartels. The U.S. ambassador at the time, John Gavin, specifically accused several state governors and cabinet members of drug trafficking in private conversations with President Miguel de la Madrid, a charge de la Madrid considered, in some cases, "excessive."

In 1998, President Ernesto Zedillo's newly appointed drug czar, Jesús Gutiérrez Rebollo, was arrested barely two months after being appointed, when U.S. drug czar Barry McCaffrey, after first applauding Gutiérrez Rebollo, discovered that his Mexican counterpart worked for the cartels.

The Calderón administration's declaration of war against the cartels and its narrative of local governments at risk of being captured by organized crime presupposed that the cartels' penetration of such governments, as well as of the police and army, must have been much greater in 2006 than over the previous 30 years. Unfortunately for Mexico, history makes clear that this is a dubious proposition. Although violence and the capture of certain prerogatives of statehood by the cartels today may be greater than in mid-2006, the issue is what came first: the war or the ascent of the cartels. Calderón argues that the growing threat of the cartels drove him to war; I believe that the failed war has led to the cartels' greater power.

4. The Gun Dealer Next Door

Calderón has argued persistently that Washington shares responsibility for the drug war because of its bad-neighborly ways. The Mexican government accuses the United States of being its enemy's indispensable weapons supplier, ascribing a significant part of today's violence south of the Rio Grande to the Second Amendment of the Constitution in effect north of that river.

A large proportion of the assault weapons used by the cartels do come from the United States, but the figure is far lower than the oft-quoted 90 percent (90 percent of the guns Mexican authorities give to U.S. authorities to trace turn out to be from the United States -- but better estimates suggest 20 to 35 percent of guns in Mexico are American) or the also oft-quoted claim that 2,000 assault rifles cross into Mexico every day. If true, this would mean that more than 2 million weapons have entered Mexico just since Calderón has been in office. To put it into context, Mexico has an average of 15 guns per 100 inhabitants. Finland has 55.

Global statistics suggest that sharing a border with the United States means little in terms of the availability and price of assault weapons, as the favelados of Brazil, the peasants in Colombia, or the armless children in Sierra Leone may tell you. Mexican authorities would be wise to accept this reality, as the cost to legitimate trade and tourism of clamping down and scrutinizing all north-south border flows would be immense, and the effort, if pursued, would be futile. If there is one type of shadowy merchandise that is almost as easy to purchase on the world market as drugs, it is weaponry.

5. The Neighbors Can Break Their Drug Habit

This fifth myth also binds the United States to Calderón's war and reflects the Mexican lament that if only Americans would curb their appetite for illicit drugs, or truly clamp down on their consumption, Mexico's situation would improve. This, too, is a quixotic fantasy.

U.S. drug consumption has not diminished over the past decade, and there is no reason to think it will in the future. What changes over time are the types of drugs consumed, the sectors of society that consume them, and the geographical location of their consumption. But American society will never reduce its overall demand for drugs, because it simply does not wish to; and it does not because, quite rightly, it does not believe that the cost of doing so is worth bearing.

If anything, the United States seems to be moving in the opposite direction; that is, toward decriminalization of marijuana, greater tolerance for safer forms of heroin, an effort to wean people off methamphetamines, and in general, the adoption of a far more relaxed attitude toward drugs. Hence the Obama administration's decision not to enforce federal anti-marijuana laws in states with legalized "medical" marijuana.

It is absurd for hundreds of Mexican soldiers, police officers, and petty drug dealers to be dying over the drug war in Tijuana when, 100 or so miles to the north in Los Angeles, there are, as the New York Times reported recently, more legal and public dispensaries of marijuana than public schools.

If you accept these myths as truths, it would be possible to remain optimistic about Mexico's war. The Calderón administration sporadically publishes statistics on seizures of drugs, chemicals for methamphetamine production, weapons, airplanes, boats, trucks, and even semisubmersible submarines -- the drug war equivalent of body counts -- all at far higher rates than those announced by previous presidents. It also claims that the best proof of the war's success lies in the higher price of several drugs on U.S. streets, like methamphetamines and cocaine.

In this narrative, almost anything can become a metric of "success." The Calderón government even maintains that the dramatic growth in the number of drug-linked killings in Mexico from 2007 to 2009 should be attributed to victories achieved in the war against the cartels; these unfortunate deaths, it claims, mean that the criminal organizations are killing each other in desperation as the army closes in.

The government has continued the two previous administrations' policy of building a national police force, so far without greater success than either Ernesto Zedillo or Vicente Fox, and is said to be pursuing a strategy of sealing off access to Mexico from the south of the country at the Isthmus of Tehuantepec, the 137-mile narrow waist of Mexico that is much easier to patrol than the border with Guatemala and Belize.

But these claims, like the myths that led Mexico to war in the first place, are easily debunked. Colombia offers Mexico painful lessons on the need to crack down on the drug business's collateral damage-violence, corruption, kidnappings, extortion, and so on-as well as the hopelessness of attempting to eradicate the drug trade altogether. After 10 years of Plan Colombia, the U.S. policy dating back to Bill Clinton's administration of generously funding Colombia's counternarcotics and counterinsurgency campaigns, violence in that country has diminished dramatically, the guerrillas are on the run, the paramilitary groups have been largely dismantled, and even corruption has dropped slightly. But as of 2007 Colombian cocaine exports have remained stable, along with the amount of land under coca leaf cultivation, and any future changes in supply would in any case be replaced by increases in the cocaine produced by Peru and Bolivia. The street price of cocaine in the United States today is higher than several years ago but well below its level a decade ago.

Indeed, the success of Mexico's frontal assault on drug production and trafficking is about as unlikely as the prospect that American society will clamp down on demand. A wiser course for Mexico would be to join Americans in lobbying to decriminalize marijuana and heroin, the two drugs easiest to deal with (the first because it is the least harmful and the second because it is the most harmful). Although marijuana legalization may not be imminent, recent polls show that more than 40 percent of Americans favor it and 54 percent of Democrats do.

To continue on the present course will require more and more intrusive U.S. cooperation, both for equipment and training of Mexican law enforcement personnel, as well as for intelligence and other tactical support. It is hard to imagine a scenario requiring U.S. boots on the ground, as has been the case in Colombia, but it is worth pointing out that a poll taken last March shows that 40 percent of Mexicans, a surprising proportion, would favor a U.S. military presence in Mexico in the fight against drugs.

What is clear is that Mexico cannot continue to have its joint and smoke it too: wanting greater and more modern forms of U.S. support but continuing to place traditional limits on it. The United States is funding the Mérida Initiative to boost the Mexican fight, but current levels of aid -- about $450 million per year -- are woefully insufficient, and doing the job properly would cost many billions of dollars a year. The Obama administration has followed in former President George W. Bush's footsteps during his last two years in office and made this war the central and practically the only item on the bilateral agenda. The administration signed off on Calderón's strategy as if its premises were rock-solid; this endorsement has been crucial for the ongoing crusade. But the premises proved misleading, the strategy is not working, and the mobilization of the army has led to mounting human rights abuses.

Mexico jumped into this fray without debate or reflection; it was easily misled by Calderón's myths into believing this was a necessary war. But while few Mexicans were originally critical of the war, more and more have emerged to agree with the title of our book. The Failed War, as we called it, has sold more than 20,000 copies in three months and is part of a broader reassessment, in books, essays, and newspaper columns, of the Mexican tragedy.

I voted for Calderón and called on readers and sympathizers to do the same; I actively backed him during the post-election turmoil in 2006, particularly with foreign skeptics. So it was with some chagrin that in mid-2007 I began formulating many of these criticisms.

But the political culture in Mexico still rewards unthinking loyalty; if you question policy, no matter how substantive your case, people are quick to accuse you of having ulterior political motives. The debate on the whys and hows of Calderón's war we have started seeing in print is still largely absent from television, the country's dominant form of media. That's a shame. Until we in Mexico publicly and collectively confront the tough questions the drug war entails, we will not have a sustainable policy or a viable strategy. And as long as the United States doesn't question our answers, it will also lack a policy for the drug war and, more importantly, for Mexican development. This is a problem: If the war is to continue, it will be as much Obama's as Calderón's, and it will continue to distract from far more important matters, mainly, how to consummate Mexico's remarkable, ongoing transition to a middle-class society.

Why Obama Must Reconcile His Inner Jefferson with His Inner Wilson

Barack Obama might yet revolutionize America's foreign policy. But if he can't reconcile his inner Thomas Jefferson with his inner Woodrow Wilson, the 44th president could end up like No. 39.

BY WALTER RUSSELL MEAD | JANUARY/FEBRUARY 2010

Neither a cold-blooded realist nor a bleeding-heart idealist, Barack Obama has a split personality when it comes to foreign policy. So do most U.S. presidents, of course, and the ideas that inspire this one have a long history at the core of the American political tradition. In the past, such ideas have served the country well. But the conflicting impulses influencing how this young leader thinks about the world threaten to tear his presidency apart -- and, in the worst scenario, turn him into a new Jimmy Carter.

Obama's long deliberation over the war in Afghanistan is a case study in presidential schizophrenia: After 94 days of internal discussion and debate, he ended up splitting the difference -- rushing in more troops as his generals wanted, while calling for their departure to begin in July 2011 as his liberal base demanded. It was a sober compromise that suggests a man struggling to reconcile his worldview with the weight of inherited problems. Like many of his predecessors, Obama is not only buffeted by strong political headwinds, but also pulled in opposing directions by two of the major schools of thought that have guided American foreign-policy debates since colonial times.

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All the Presidents' Men

Politicians and public intellectuals have been influenced by former U.S. presidents, be it Jefferson, Hamilton, Wilson, or Jackson.

In general, U.S. presidents see the world through the eyes of four giants: Alexander Hamilton, Woodrow Wilson, Thomas Jefferson, and Andrew Jackson. Hamiltonians share the first Treasury secretary's belief that a strong national government and a strong military should pursue a realist global policy and that the government can and should promote economic development and the interests of American business at home and abroad. Wilsonians agree with Hamiltonians on the need for a global foreign policy, but see the promotion of democracy and human rights as the core elements of American grand strategy. Jeffersonians dissent from this globalist consensus; they want the United States to minimize its commitments and, as much as possible, dismantle the national-security state. Jacksonians are today's Fox News watchers. They are populists suspicious of Hamiltonian business links, Wilsonian do-gooding, and Jeffersonian weakness.

Moderate Republicans tend to be Hamiltonians. Move right toward the Sarah Palin range of the party and the Jacksonian influence grows. Centrist Democrats tend to be interventionist-minded Wilsonians, while on the left and the dovish side they are increasingly Jeffersonian, more interested in improving American democracy at home than exporting it abroad.

Some presidents build coalitions; others stay close to one favorite school. As the Cold War ended, George H.W. Bush's administration steered a largely Hamiltonian course, and many of those Hamiltonians later dissented from his son's war in Iraq. Bill Clinton's administration in the 1990s mixed Hamiltonian and Wilsonian tendencies. This dichotomy resulted in bitter administration infighting when those ideologies came into conflict -- over humanitarian interventions in the Balkans and Rwanda, for example, and again over the relative weight to be given to human rights and trade in U.S. relations with China.

More recently, George W. Bush's presidency was defined by an effort to bring Jacksonians and Wilsonians into a coalition; the political failure of Bush's ambitious approach created the context that made the Obama presidency possible.

Sept. 11, 2001, was one of those rare and electrifying moments that waken Jacksonian America and focus its attention on the international arena. The U.S. homeland was not only under attack, it was under attack by an international conspiracy of terrorists who engaged in what Jacksonians consider dishonorable warfare: targeting civilians. Jacksonian attitudes toward war were shaped by generations of conflict with Native American peoples across the United States and before that by centuries of border conflict in England, Scotland, and Ireland. Against "honorable" enemies who observe the laws of war, one is obliged to fight fair; those who disregard the rules must be hunted down and killed, regardless of technical niceties.

When the United States is attacked, Jacksonians demand action; they leave strategy to the national leadership. But Bush's tough-minded Jacksonian response to 9/11 -- invading Afghanistan and toppling the Taliban government that gave safe haven to the plotters -- gave way to what appeared to be Wilsonian meddling in Iraq. Originally, Bush's argument for overthrowing Saddam Hussein rested on two charges that resonated powerfully with Jacksonians: Hussein was building weapons of mass destruction, and he had close links with al Qaeda. But the war dragged on, and as Hussein's fabled hoards of WMD failed to appear and the links between Iraq and al Qaeda failed to emerge, Bush shifted to a Wilsonian rationale. This was no longer a war of defense against a pending threat or a war of retaliation; it was a war to establish democracy, first in Iraq and then throughout the region. Nation-building and democracy-spreading became the cornerstones of the administration's Middle East policy.

Bush could not have developed a strategy better calculated to dissolve his political support at home. Jacksonians historically have little sympathy for expensive and risky democracy-promoting ventures abroad. They generally opposed the humanitarian interventions in Somalia, Bosnia, and Haiti during the Clinton years; they did not and do not think American young people should die and American treasure should be scattered to spread democracy or protect human rights overseas. Paradoxically, Jacksonians also opposed "cut and run" options to end the war in Iraq even as they lost faith in both Bush and the Republican Party; they don't like wars for democracy, but they also don't want to see the United States lose once troops and the national honor have been committed. In Bush's last year in office, a standoff ensued: The Democratic congressional majorities were powerless to force change in his Iraq strategy and Bush remained free to increase U.S. troop levels, yet the war itself and Bush's rationale for it remained deeply unpopular.

Enter Obama. An early and consistent opponent of the Iraq war, Obama was able to bring together the elements of the Democratic Party's foreign-policy base who were most profoundly opposed to (and horrified by) Bush's policy. Obama made opposition to the Iraq war a centerpiece of his eloquent campaign, drawing on arguments that echoed U.S. anti-war movements all the way back to Henry David Thoreau's opposition to the Mexican-American War.
Like Carter in the 1970s, Obama comes from the old-fashioned Jeffersonian wing of the Democratic Party, and the strategic goal of his foreign policy is to reduce America's costs and risks overseas by limiting U.S. commitments wherever possible. He's a believer in the notion that the United States can best spread democracy and support peace by becoming an example of democracy at home and moderation abroad. More than this, Jeffersonians such as Obama think oversize commitments abroad undermine American democracy at home. Large military budgets divert resources from pressing domestic needs; close association with corrupt and tyrannical foreign regimes involves the United States in dirty and cynical alliances; the swelling national-security state threatens civil liberties and leads to powerful pro-war, pro-engagement lobbies among corporations nourished on grossly swollen federal defense budgets.

While Bush argued that the only possible response to the 9/11 attacks was to deepen America's military and political commitments in the Middle East, Obama initially sought to enhance America's security by reducing those commitments and toning down aspects of U.S. Middle East policy, such as support for Israel, that foment hostility and suspicion in the region. He seeks to pull U.S. power back from the borderlands of Russia, reducing the risk of conflict with Moscow. In Latin America, he has so far behaved with scrupulous caution and, clearly, is hoping to normalize relations with Cuba while avoiding collisions with the "Bolivarian" states of Venezuela, Ecuador, and Bolivia.

Obama seeks a quiet world in order to focus his efforts on domestic reform -- and to create conditions that would allow him to dismantle some of the national-security state inherited from the Cold War and given new life and vigor after 9/11. Preferring disarmament agreements to military buildups and hoping to substitute regional balance-of-power arrangements for massive unilateral U.S. force commitments all over the globe, the president wishes ultimately for an orderly world in which burdens are shared and the military power of the United States is a less prominent feature on the international scene.

While Wilsonians believe that no lasting stability is possible in a world filled with dictatorships, Jeffersonians like Obama argue that even bad regimes can be orderly international citizens if the incentives are properly aligned. Syria and Iran don't need to become democratic states for the United States to reach long-term, mutually beneficial arrangements with them. And it is North Korea's policies, not the character of its regime, that pose a threat to the Pacific region.

At this strategic level, Obama's foreign policy looks a little bit like that of Richard Nixon and Henry Kissinger. In Afghanistan and Iraq, he hopes to extract U.S. forces from costly wars by the contemporary equivalent of the "Vietnamization" policy of the Nixon years. He looks to achieve an opening with Iran comparable to Nixon's rapprochement with communist China. Just as Nixon established a constructive relationship with China despite the radical "Red Guard" domestic policies Chinese leader Mao Zedong was pursuing at the time, Obama does not see ideological conflict as necessarily leading to poor strategic relations between the United States and the Islamic Republic. Just as Nixon and Kissinger sought to divert international attention from their retreat in Indochina by razzle-dazzle global diplomacy that placed Washington at the center of world politics even as it reduced its force posture, so too the Obama administration hopes to use the president's global popularity to cover a strategic withdrawal from the exposed position in the Middle East that it inherited from the Bush administration.

This is both an ambitious and an attractive vision. Success would reduce the level of international tension even as the United States scales back its commitments. The United States would remain, by far, the dominant military power in the world, but it would sustain this role with significantly fewer demands on its resources and less danger of war.

Yet as Obama is already discovering, any president attempting such a Jeffersonian grand strategy in the 21st century faces many challenges. In the 19th-century heyday of Jeffersonian foreign policy in American politics, it was easier for U.S. presidents to limit the country's commitments. Britain played a global role similar to that of the United States today, providing a stable security environment and promoting international trade and investment. Cruising as a free rider in the British world system allowed Americans to reap the benefits of Britain's world order without paying its costs.

As British power waned in the 20th century, Americans faced starker choices. With the British Empire no longer able to provide political and economic security worldwide, the United States had to choose between replacing Britain as the linchpin of world order with all the headaches that entailed or going about its business in a disorderly world. In the 1920s and 1930s, Americans gave this latter course a try; the rapid-fire series of catastrophes -- the Great Depression, World War II, Stalin's bid for Eurasian hegemony -- convinced virtually all policymakers that the first course, risky and expensive as it proved, was the lesser of the two evils.

Indeed, during Franklin D. Roosevelt's first two terms, the United States pursued essentially Jeffersonian policies in Europe and Asia, avoiding confrontations with Germany and Japan. The result was the bloodiest war in world history, not a stable condominium of satisfied powers. Since that time, Jeffersonians have had to come to terms with the vast set of interlocking political, economic, and military commitments that bind the United States to its role in the postwar era. Jeffersonian instincts call for pruning these commitments back, but it is not always easy to know where to cut.

The other schools are generally skeptical about reducing American commitments. Wilsonians interpret Jeffersonian restraint as moral cowardice. Why, they ask, did Obama refuse to meet the sainted Dalai Lama on his way to kowtow to the dictators in Beijing? Jacksonians think it is cowardice pure and simple. And why not stand up to Iran? Hamiltonians may agree with Jeffersonian restraint in particular cases -- they don't want to occupy Darfur either -- but sooner or later they attack Jeffersonians for failing to develop and project sufficient American power in a dangerous world. Moreover, Hamiltonians generally favor free trade and a strong dollar policy; in current circumstances Hamiltonians are also pushing fiscal restraint. Obama will not willingly move far or fast enough to keep them happy.

The widespread criticism of Obama's extended Afghanistan deliberations is a case in point. To a Jeffersonian president, war is a grave matter and such an undesirable course that it should only be entered into with the greatest deliberation and caution; war is truly a last resort, and the costs of rash commitments are more troubling than the costs of debate and delay. Hamiltonians would be more concerned with executing the decision swiftly and with hiding from other powers any impression of division among American counsels. But Obama found harsh critics on all sides: Wilsonians recoiled from the evident willingness of the president to abandon human rights or political objectives to settle the war. Jacksonians did not understand what, other than cowardice or "dithering," could account for his reluctance to support the professional military recommendation. And the most purist of the Jeffersonians -- neoisolationists on both left and right -- turned on Obama as a sellout. Jeffersonian foreign policy is no bed of roses.

In recent history, Jeffersonian foreign policy has often faced attacks from all the other schools of thought. Kissinger's policy of détente was blasted on the right by conservative Republicans who wanted a stronger stand against communism and on the left by human rights Democrats who hated the cynical regional alliances the Nixon Doctrine involved (with the shah of Iran, for example). Carter faced many of the same problems, and the image of weakness and indecision that helped doom his 1980 run for re-election is a perennial problem for Jeffersonian presidents. Obama will have to leap over these hurdles now, too.

It is not only Americans who will challenge the new American foreign policy. Will Russia and Iran respond to Obama's conciliatory approach with reciprocal concessions -- or, emboldened by what they interpret as American weakness and faltering willpower, will they keep pushing forward? Will the president's outreach to the moderate majority of Muslims around the world open an era of better understanding, or will the violent minority launch new attacks that undercut the president's standing at home? Will the president's inability to deliver all the Israeli concessions Arabs would like erode his credibility and contribute to even deeper levels of cynicism and alienation across the Middle East? Can the president execute an orderly reduction in the U.S. military stake in Iraq and Afghanistan without having hostile forces fill the power vacuum? Will Venezuelan leader Hugo Chávez be so impressed with American restraint under Obama that he moderates his own course and ceases to make anti Yanquismo a pillar of his domestic and international policy? Will other countries heed the president's call to assume more international responsibility as the United States reduces its commitments -- or will they fail to fulfill their obligations as stakeholders in the international system?

A Jeffersonian policy of restraint and withdrawal requires cooperation from many other countries, but the prospect of a lower American profile may make others less, rather than more, willing to help the United States.

There is an additional political problem for this president, one that he shares with Carter. In both cases, their basic Jeffersonian approach was balanced in part by a strong attraction to idealistic Wilsonian values and their position at the head of a Democratic Party with a distinct Wilsonian streak. A pure Jeffersonian wants to conserve the shining exceptionalism of the American democratic experience and believes that American values are rooted in U.S. history and culture and are therefore not easily exportable.

For this president, that is too narrow a view. Like Abraham Lincoln, Woodrow Wilson, and Martin Luther King Jr., Barack Obama doesn't just love the United States for what it is. He loves what it should -- and can -- be. Leadership is not the art of preserving a largely achieved democratic project; governing is the art of pushing the United States farther down the road toward the still-distant goal of fulfilling its mission and destiny.

Obama may well believe what he said in his inaugural speech -- "we reject as false the choice between our safety and our ideals" -- but as any president must he is already making exactly those tradeoffs. Why else refuse to meet the Dalai Lama? Why else pledge support to the corrupt regime of President Hamid Karzai in Afghanistan or aid Pakistan despite the dismal track record of both the civil and military arms of the Pakistani government when it comes to transparent use of U.S. resources? Did the administration not renew its efforts to build a relationship with the regime in Tehran even as peaceful democratic protesters were being tortured and raped in its jails? Is Obama not taking "incentives" to Khartoum, a regime that has for more than a decade pursued a policy in Darfur that the U.S. government has labeled genocidal?

It is hard to reconcile the transcendent Wilsonian vision of America's future with a foreign policy based on dirty compromises with nasty regimes. If the government should use its power and resources to help the poor and the victims of injustice at home, shouldn't it do something when people overseas face extreme injustice and extreme peril? The Obama administration cannot easily abandon a human rights agenda abroad. The contradiction between the sober and limited realism of the Jeffersonian worldview and the expansive, transformative Wilsonian agenda is likely to haunt this administration as it haunted Carter's, most fatefully when he rejected calls to let the shah of Iran launch a brutal crackdown to remain in power. Already the Wilsonians in Obama's camp are muttering darkly about his failure to swiftly close the Guantánamo prison camp, his fondness for government secrecy, his halfhearted support for investigating abuses of the past administration, and his failure to push harder for a cap-and-trade bill before the Copenhagen summit.

Over time, these rumblings of discontent will grow, and history will continue to throw curveballs at him. Can this president live with himself if he fails to prevent a new round of genocide in the Great Lakes region of Africa? Can he wage humanitarian war if all else fails? Can he make these tough decisions quickly and confidently when his closest advisors and his political base are deeply and hopelessly at odds?

The Jeffersonian concern with managing America's foreign policy at the lowest possible level of risk has in the past helped presidents develop effective grand strategies, such as George Kennan's early Cold War idea of containment and the early 19th-century Monroe Doctrine. If successful, Obama's restructuring of American foreign policy would be as influential as these classic strategic designs.

Recent decades, however, have seen diminishing Jeffersonian influence in U.S. foreign policy. Americans today perceive problems all over the world; the Jeffersonian response often strikes people as too passive. Kennan's modest form of containment quickly lost ground to Dean Acheson's more muscular and militarized approach of responding to Soviet pressure by building up U.S. and allied forces in Europe and Asia. The Nixon-Kissinger policy of détente was repudiated by both the Republican and Democratic parties. Carter came into the White House hoping to end the Cold War, but by the end of his tenure he was supporting the resistance to the Soviet occupation of Afghanistan, increasing the defense budget, and laying the groundwork for an expanded U.S. presence in the Middle East.

In the 21st century, American presidents have a new set of questions to consider. The nature of the international system and the place of the United States in it will have to be rethought as new powers rise, old ones continue to fade, and attention shifts from the Atlantic to the Pacific. The rapid technological development that is the hallmark of our era will reshape global society at a pace that challenges the ability of every country in the world to manage cascading, accelerating change.

With great dignity and courage, Obama has embarked on a difficult and uncertain journey. The odds, I fear, are not in his favor, and it is not yet clear that his intuitions and instincts amount to the kind of grand design that statesmen like John Quincy Adams and Henry Kissinger produced in the past. But there can be no doubt that American foreign policy requires major rethinking.

At their best, Jeffersonians provide a necessary element of caution and restraint in U.S. foreign policy, preventing what historian Paul Kennedy calls "imperial overstretch" by ensuring that America's ends are proportionate to its means. We need this vision today more than ever: If Obama's foreign policy collapses -- whether sunk by Afghanistan or conflicts not yet foreseen -- into the incoherence and reversals that ultimately marked Carter's well-meaning but flawed approach, it will be even more difficult for future presidents to chart a prudent and cautious course through the rough seas ahead.

Limbo World: Dispatches from Countries That Do Not Exist

They start by acting like real countries, then hope to become them.

BY GRAEME WOOD | JANUARY/FEBRUARY 2010

KURDISTAN: A shepherd tends to his flock in Iraqi Kurdistan. Few would-be countries have reached a happier state of limbo than this relatively stable Iraqi region.

On my most recent visit to the Republic of Abkhazia, a country that does not exist, I interviewed the deputy foreign minister, Maxim Gundjia, about the foreign trade his country doesn't have with the real countries that surround it on the Black Sea. Near the end of our chat, he paused, looked down at my leg, and asked why I was bleeding on his floor. I told him I had slipped a few hours before and ripped a hole in my shin, down to the bone, about the size of a one-ruble coin. Blood had soaked through the gauze, and I needed stitches. "You can go to our hospital, but you will be shocked by the conditions," Gundjia said. So he pointed me to the building next door, where in about 20 minutes I had my leg propped up on a dark wooden desk and was wincing at the sting of a vigorous alcohol-swabbing by the health minister himself. I was not accustomed to such personalized government service. Fake countries have to try harder, I thought, and wondered whether it would be pressing my luck to ask for the finance minister to personally refund my vat and for the transportation minister to confirm my bus ticket back to Georgia, which is to say, back to reality.

Abkhazia, along with a dozen or so other quasi-countries teetering on the brink of statehood, is in the international community's prenatal ward. If present and past suggest the future, most such embryonic countries will end stillborn, but not for lack of trying. The totems of statehood are everywhere in these wannabe states: offices filled with functionaries in neckties, miniature desk flags, stationery with national logos, and, of course, piles of real bureaucratic paperwork -- all designed to convince foreign visitors like me that international recognition is deserved and inevitable. Nagorno-Karabakh, the Armenian separatist enclave within Azerbaijan, issues visas with fancy holograms and difficult-to-forge printing. Somaliland, the comparatively serene republic split from war-wasted Somalia, prints its own official-looking currency, the Somaliland shilling, whose smallest denomination is so worthless that to bring cash to restock their safes, money-changers need to use draft animals.

These quasi-states -- which range from decades-old international flashpoints like Palestine, Northern Cyprus, and Taiwan to more obscure enclaves like Transnistria, Western Sahara, Puntland, Iraqi Kurdistan, and South Ossetia -- control their own territory and operate at least semifunctional governments, yet lack meaningful recognition. Call them Limbo World. They start by acting like real countries, and then hope to become them.

In years past, such breakaway quasi-states tended to achieve independence fast or be reassimilated within a few years (usually after a gory civil war, as with Biafra in Nigeria). But today's Limbo World countries stay in political purgatory for longer -- the ones in this article have wandered in legal wilderness for an average of 15 years -- representing a dangerous new international phenomenon: the permanent second-class state.

This trend is a mess waiting to happen. The first worry is that these quasi-states' continued existence, and occasional luck, emboldens other secessionists. Imagine a world where every independence movement with a crate of Kalashnikovs thinks it can become the new Kurdistan, if only it hires the right lobbyists in Washington and opens a realistic-looking Ministry of Foreign Affairs in its makeshift capital. The second concern is that these aspirant nations have none of the rights and obligations of full countries, just ambiguous status and guns without laws. The United Nations is, in the end, binary: You are in or you are out, and if you are out, your mass-produced miniature desk flag has no place in Turtle Bay.

My tours of Limbo World over the last few years have taken me around the full spectrum of these enclaves, from the hopeless chatter of virtual Khalistan, a Sikh separatist state that talks a big game and has a president in exile, but not a postage stamp of actual land, to the earnest dysfunction of Somaliland to the slick-running, optimistically almost oil-state of Kurdistan. Each of these would-be countries is, in its own way, an object lesson in the limits of statehood.

PHOTO BY BENJAMIN LOWY/VII

ABKHAZIA: A popular Soviet holiday destination, Abkhazia’s coast is now littered with rusted boats and scrap metal.

They are also ghosts of war-zones future -- most have enemies keen to take back the breakaway territory -- and past. They represent the wars that time forgot, frozen in unresolved crisis because it is either too convenient to keep them that way or too problematic for the Real World countries on their borders to come to a more lasting solution. Limbo, it turns out, is useful because it lets actual countries punish each other by proxy and allows them to exact loyalty and tribute from the quasi-countries dependent on their patronage. If Limbo status didn't exist, someone would invent it.

Unfortunately for these states, winning the full Rand-McNally, General Assembly treatment is more difficult than merely hiring a professional-quality printer to start cranking out the passports. Carving land from other countries is nearly always bloody and in most cases leaves borders that bleed for decades. Somaliland and Abkhazia have existed for almost 20 years, with little indication that widespread recognition is imminent. Indeed, the rare successful cases these days of countries making the leap from troubled enclave to independent nation have pretty much bypassed Limbo entirely. Think East Timor and Kosovo, which jumped from brutal occupation to U.N. administration to independence to become two of the first new countries of the 2000s. The Limbo countries tend to start with violence and then get stuck in the next stage: a path that leads on and on and on, apparently to nowhere.

The Abkhazian case is typical. Abkhazia (pop. 190,000) occupies a stretch of Georgia's Black Sea coast, an area whose beaches, pine forests, mountains, and lakes once attracted Soviet leaders Stalin, Khrushchev, and Brezhnev for holidays. A war in the early 1990s separated Abkhazia from Georgia, killing thousands on each side in the first 13 months and sending 100,000 ethnic Georgians and Mingrelians fleeing from their homes in Abkhazia.

Midwifing Abkhazia's rebellion was Russia, the Abkhazians' ally and guarantor. Georgia was one of the ex-Soviet states most eager to explore alliances with the West, and Abkhazia was Russia's way to make Georgia suffer for its infidelity. Russia sent support to Abkhazia, opened the Abkhazian border for trade, and gradually took steps just short of annexation. In 2006, it granted Russian passports to all Abkhazians, and finally -- once Abkhazia had become entirely reliant on Russia -- it became the first country to recognize Abkhazian independence. According to Abkhazians, Georgia planned to invade in the summer of 2008, and only an influx of Russian troops into Abkhazia at the last minute led Georgia to make a play -- ultimately doomed, due to Russia's surprisingly strong response -- for South Ossetia, another Russian client state inside Georgia, instead. The uneasy standoff meant Russia never formally annexed Abkhazia from Georgia, and in return the Abkhazians made sure the Russians never needed to annex them, because they do Russia's bidding anyway. This guarantee has emboldened the Abkhazians, who taunt the Georgian army just across the line of control. "The first Georgian soldier who crosses the Inguri River will be shot," Gundjia vowed when I visited in the fall.

As the health minister, a lapsed dermatologist named Zurab Marshaniya, rinsed the clotted blood from my leg, he sighed in frustration at his government's predicament. I told him how impressed I was at the pace of Abkhazia's return to its old Soviet status as a tourist resort. When I last came to the Abkhazian capital of Sukhumi in 2006, the one-time jewel of the boardwalk, the Hotel Abkhazia, was bombed out and abandoned to weeds. Now it was half-repaired, and its rival, the Ritsa Hotel, had opened its suites to the richest of Abkhazia's 1 million annual visitors, nearly all of them Russian. (Ritsa's Room 208, from whose balcony a vacationing Leon Trotsky addressed a crowd on the occasion of Lenin's death, goes for about $150 a night.) Abkhazia's hospitals may have been "shocking," but the city as a whole looked no worse from the outside than a down-market cottage town on Lake Superior. Marshaniya was all shrugs and said as long as Georgia still intended to march back into Sukhumi, the gains were fragile.

In the meantime, Abkhazia's foreign policy is based on courting anyone who might recognize its sovereignty. Daniel Ortega's government in Nicaragua obliged in 2008, likely influenced by old Soviet ties, and Venezuelan President Hugo Chávez formally acknowledged Abkhazia in 2009. Except for Russia, though, Abkhazia has no real formal relations, and its diplomats are strictly limited in where they can go. The United States, a close ally of Mikheil Saakashvili's government in Georgia, denies visa requests from Abkhazian government officials, and other states such as India have been persuaded to do the same.

PHOTO BY NARAYAN MAHON

ABKHAZIA: An abandoned apartment block in the town of Dranda.

That leaves Abkhazia represented instead by quirky volunteers like George Hewitt, a professor at the University of London's School of Oriental and African Studies who has made a specialty of Abkhazia's culture and its language, Abkhaz, a linguistic freak show with 67 consonants and only one vowel. Hewitt knows Abkhaz as well as any non-Abkhazian, and he writes impassioned and informed essays on the Abkhazian question. But he is very much a scholar, not a political strategist. I visited Hewitt before my first visit to Abkhazia in 2006 and asked whether he needed anything from Georgia, where he is decidedly non grata. I thought he might like a book, or a postcard. He said there had been calumnies against him in the Mingrelian-language newspapers; could I investigate? Alas, I could not.

Encouraging states like Abkhazia to flourish and proliferate has created precisely the kind of second-class statehood, with uncertain rights and responsibilities in the international system, that diplomacy was designed over the last several centuries to avoid. The Peace of Westphalia established an international order of fixed boundaries in 1648 and made no provisions for the existence of functionally independent enclaves in Brandenburg-Prussia, say, that France could use for leverage. The whole point was to come to conclusions about what was sovereign territory and agree to knock off the warfare and ambiguity. That was in part for the welfare of those enclaves, so they were not trapped in uncertainty and used as proxies -- or worse, neocolonies -- by first-class states. But Limbo World suffers that exact fate today.

Ethiopia, smarting from the loss of its actual colony Eritrea two decades ago, effectively adopted an unofficial second one on the northern edge of Somalia, called Somaliland. Somaliland was among the most noisome and rebellious areas in Somalia under the dictatorship of Muhammad Siad Barre. In the late 1980s, Siad Barre killed hundreds of thousands in bombings of its main city, Hargeisa, and the countryside. When Siad Barre fell, Somaliland rapidly asserted itself as an independent state, and it is now approaching 20 years of relative peace. The coastline that Ethiopia lost in Eritrea it has effectively gained back in Somaliland, with the port of Berbera now a key trade valve into the Gulf of Aden. Ethiopia's support for Somaliland also represents a perpetual outrage to the Somalis of Mogadishu. While continuing to fight among themselves for nearly two decades, most factions agree that Ethiopia is a mortal external threat, especially because it invaded Somalia proper in 2006.

Like the Abkhazians, the Somalilanders are as helpful as they are hapless, as I found from the moment I stepped into their small representation office in the Ethiopian capital, Addis Ababa. At most African embassies, the diplomats regard visa applicants as captive sources of revenue. But rather than a droopy-lidded kleptocrat, the Somaliland office produced a slim, energetic young man with an endearing eagerness to show off his country. He came out to stamp my passport and sat down next to me to sketch a map of the complex land journey between Addis and Hargeisa. "They grow the best khat here," he said, referring to the mildly narcotic chew popular in the region. His index finger traced a proud little circle on an area just on the Ethiopian side of the border. For $20, he pressed into my passport a full-page visa, as official-looking as any in Africa.

On the journey he described, there was an emphatic lack of officialdom, a studied denial by Ethiopia that any border existed at all. At Jijiga, 10 hours from Addis and the last big town before I would cross into the nonexistent country of Somaliland, I had to hunt down a police officer to get him to inscribe my passport with a note confirming I had exited Ethiopia legally. This was a border that existed only by request.

Once on the Somaliland side it took about two hours of off-road driving -- through hills of desert scrub, past herders crouching in huts made of discarded U.N. and usaid flour sacks -- before I met anything resembling a sign of government. At the edge of Hargeisa, a hilly town whose lights were the one glowing dot on the horizon as I drove, two men with machine guns intercepted the car to demand my papers. This, I thought, would be my cue to do what one does at so many other African borders, which is to wink and offer smokes and a small bribe in exchange for safe passage. But before I could phrase my tentative offer, they found the inky blue stamp in my passport and waved me through, asking only that I register with the Ministry of Foreign Affairs the next day.

Unlike Abkhazia, Somaliland did not exactly enchant me as a place beautiful enough to die for. Perhaps it was the heat -- well over 100 degrees Fahrenheit, with nothing to drink, due to strict enforcement of the Ramadan fast -- or perhaps the buggy eyes and green-flecked teeth of the khat-chewers outside my hotel room each night. The standard meal, spaghetti and ground camel meat, eaten with the hands, made clear why I had never been to a Somali restaurant outside Somalia.

PHOTO BY NARAYAN MAHON

SOMALILAND: The port at Berbera, used as a trading center by Ethiopia.

The Somalilanders, of course, had already done quite a bit of dying for their land and for their spaghetti, and they missed no chance to tell me how cynical and cruel the international community had been by not recognizing their state. At the foreign ministry satellite office set up to stamp in the rare tourist, two excitable Somalilanders pointed out that Somaliland had multiparty elections, a free press, and an anti-terrorism policy that the government enforced with zeal. It had done all this without recognition and without help from the World Bank, the International Monetary Fund, or any other agency that requires an international rubber stamp to operate. If this was illegitimacy, other African governments should try it.

And in any case, what was the alternative? A reconstituted Somalia would require reconnecting Somaliland with what may be the world's most spectacularly failed state. Where Somaliland has a fledgling coast guard, Somalia has flourishing pirates, and where Hargeisa has a form of democracy, Mogadishu has howling anarchy punctuated by fits of sharia law.

Yet this is the alternative urged by nearly everyone in the region. Arab states are reluctant to see Somalia, a fellow Arab League member, sliced up and leased to predominantly Christian Ethiopia. The African Union worries that the Somaliland example will persuade separatist movements that if they just fight hard enough, they'll eventually get their own U.N. seats. Somaliland, of course, retorts by pointing out that Somalia is being used by foreign states just as surely as Ethiopia is using Somaliland. Moreover, Somaliland asks whether peaceful and responsible democracy isn't something worth incentivizing, regardless of whether the peaceful and responsible democracy is being practiced by separatists. For now, even Ethiopia, Somaliland's closest regional ally, hasn't bestowed recognition, and there is no sign it intends to.

Critics charge Limbo Worlders with having things backward, even practicing a form of cargo cultism. Just as New Guinean tribes built crude airstrips to lure planes bearing valuable cargo, quasi-countries build crude foreign ministries in the vain hopes of luring ambassadors bearing credentials from London, Paris, and Washington. These critics say Limbo World countries are fatally misled about how independence is supposed to work: Recognition precedes, rather than follows, the creation of an actual state. The list of Limbo World alumni -- countries that gained independence by acting like independent states first, and then getting recognition -- is small, and the few examples of partial success (Kosovo is stuck on 63 recognizing countries, Taiwan on 23) suggest Limbo is a permanent condition when it is not a fatal one.

Indeed, once Limbo World countries have reached a certain level of development, many of them start considering the possibility that independence isn't the brass ring it once appeared. Abkhazia might have entered that phase. After Georgia suffered an embarrassing defeat trying to reclaim South Ossetia (the other quasi-state within its borders) in 2008, Abkhazia became emboldened and developed its trade and infrastructure significantly with Russian backing. It expanded its sea trade, despite a blockade vigorously enforced by the Georgian navy. (Occasional Turkish merchant vessels break the blockade by sailing to the Russian port of Sochi and then skirting the coast until they reach Sukhumi.)

No quasi-state has reached a happier Limbo status than Iraqi Kurdistan. Throughout the 1990s, Iraqi Kurdistan was riven by internal divisions, and at times its senior leaders viewed each other as greater bogeymen than Saddam Hussein. In 1996, the Kurdistan Democratic Party even allied with Hussein against the Patriotic Union of Kurdistan (puk) and invited his forces into Irbil to flush out the puk. The factions reached an icy truce in 2002, with the understanding that they would cooperate to dislodge Hussein and achieve eventual independence.

Nominally, independence remains the goal. Indeed, suspicions that Iraqi Kurdish politicians have discarded that goal have done much to alienate them from their people. But since my first visit there in 2003, the rationale for full independence has become less clear, just as the apparatus of the Kurdish state has become slicker and more sophisticated. On that first visit, the Kurdistan government asserted itself mostly through the indelicate searches by its peshmerga militia, which daily tore apart my luggage and rifled through it with ruthless attention.

PHOTO BY STEFANO DE LUICI/VII

ABKHAZIA: Doctors in Abkhazia’s Gulripsh hospital discuss a new TB case.

Within a few years the peshmerga had become smoother, and the government more comfortable with its fate. Barham Salih, the puk's representative in Washington, led the Kurds' successful push to get the United States to dislodge Hussein. He eventually became a deputy prime minister of post-Hussein Iraq, and puk chief Jalal Talabani, the Iraqi president. In Washington, they retained Barbour Griffith & Rogers, the Republican-affiliated lobbying firm, and their presentation to the outside world became even cannier, with less mention of phrases like "autonomy" that might spook the Turks next door.

I crossed into Kurdistan from Turkey at midnight, on foot, and got a big stamp indicating "Republic of Iraq-Kurdistan Region." On either side of the border, trucks were lined up hundreds deep, loaded with goods and ready to pay a hefty sum in duties -- money destined not for Baghdad but for the Kurdish capital of Irbil. Turkey was a happy partner in this looting of the transport paths, eager to watch Iraq's Kurdish leadership enrich itself as long as it stopped short of asking the world to treat its borders as reality.

When I crossed the southern edge of Kurdistan, where Arab Iraq and its then-horrific carnage began, the only indication of the change in administration was the different color uniform, light blue for the Arab Iraqi police in lieu of the desert camouflage of the peshmerga. In the early days after Hussein's toppling, the border had been a vigorously policed checkpoint that separated Kurdistan unmistakably from its neighbor. Now the Kurds were less zealous in marking the line, as if to say: Feel the fear as you leave the safety of our territory and enter the land of Arabia and of car bombs. We don't need to mark our border on the map because the chill in your spine is marking it for us.

By 2006, the word "independence" was everywhere whispered but nowhere spoken. Instead, Kurdish officials brought me to eat at the buffet of the new hotel they called the Sheraton (not really a Sheraton, but this was not really a country either), to inhale the fresh paint fumes at the clean and orderly international airport, to ogle the tracts of luxury apartments under development by a Turkish construction firm. Pushing the independence issue would have seemed gauche, with Limbo so profitable.

Throughout my travels in Limbo World, the conversation would often swing back to Uruguay, where a 1933 agreement was sealed that is today an article of faith to Limbo Worlders. The Montevideo Convention established a theory of statehood that treated countries like starfish, capable of surviving after having their limbs hacked off and able to sprout new and independent states from those hacked-off limbs.

It has come to be known as the declarative theory of statehood: the idea that a state is any entity with a fixed territory and population, and a government that can enter into relations with other states. Needless to say, if the letter of this convention, to which the United States is a signatory, were followed, nearly every country in Limbo World would immediately convert into full nationhood and every rebel group on the planet would be scrambling to print business cards for its hastily convened diplomatic corps. Like many sweeping declarations of foreign policy, the Montevideo Convention has been the victim of wise neglect nearly ever since its signing. Still, the opposite extreme in international relations -- giving existing countries a veto over every self-determination movement -- hardly recommends itself, and whatever happy medium exists between the two has not yet been reached.

Some in Limbo World are at least temporarily content with this ambiguity. In his Sukhumi office, Maxim Gundjia pointed out that being Russia's pawn is no less embarrassing than being America's pawn, like Saakashvili. And in any case, recognition is overrated, as long as the quasi-state's economy is poor. "What's the use of being recognized like Afghanistan?" he asked. "They have the first flag at the U.N. square, but who wants to live there?"

That evening, as I limped along the Black Sea boardwalk (gingerly, to keep my leg from tearing back open), it was easy to see his point. Indeed, it wasn't obvious why Abkhazia was pursuing recognition so fervently, when even if it achieved legitimacy it would probably have to rely on Russia for most everything, including security. For now, a glance at the shore showed that Abkhazia had more than most real countries: the beauty of a moonlit sea, and the beginnings of prosperity from a flow of tourists glad to disgorge their rubles to buy fancy hotel rooms, cheap wine, and rich Caucasian pastries. The Russian holiday-makers who walked past me were a constant reminder that the desire for true independence, from Georgia and from Russia, was not a realistic one, no matter how hard Abkhazians worked to achieve it. But as I looked out on the scene, the moonbeams caught a ship in the distance, and the uncertainty over whether that ship flew a Georgian flag made me understand, for a second, what keeps them trying.

Why Nuclear Weapons Aren't As Frightening As You Think

President Obama’s pledge to rid the world of atomic bombs is a waste of breath. But not for the reasons you might imagine.

BY JOHN MUELLER | JANUARY/FEBRUARY 2010

""Nuclear Weapons Are the Greatest Threat to Humankind."

No. But you might think so if you listen to world leaders right now. In his first address to the U.N. Security Council, U.S. President Barack Obama warned apocalyptically, "Just one nuclear weapon exploded in a city -- be it New York or Moscow, Tokyo or Beijing, London or Paris -- could kill hundreds of thousands of people. And it would badly destabilize our security, our economies, and our very way of life." Obama has put nuclear disarmament back on the table in a way it hasn't been for decades by vowing to pursue a nuclear-free world, and, with a handful of big treaty negotiations in the works, he seems to think 2010 has become a critical year

But the conversation is based on false assumptions. Nuclear weapons certainly are the most destructive devices ever made, as Obama often reminds us, and everyone from peaceniks to neocons seems to agree. But for more than 60 years now all they've done is gather dust while propagandists and alarmists exaggerate their likelihood of exploding -- it was a certainty one would go off in 10 years, C.P. Snow authoritatively proclaimed in 1960 -- and nuclear metaphysicians spin fancy theories about how they might be deployed and targeted.

Nuclear weapons have had a tremendous influence on the world's agonies and obsessions, inspiring desperate rhetoric, extravagant theorizing, and frenetic diplomatic posturing. However, they have had very limited actual impact, at least since World War II. Even the most ingenious military thinkers have had difficulty coming up with realistic ways nukes could conceivably be applied on the battlefield; moral considerations aside, it is rare to find a target that can't be struck just as well by conventional weapons. Indeed, their chief "use" was to deter the Soviet Union from instituting Hitler-style military aggression, a chimera considering that historical evidence shows the Soviets never had genuine interest in doing anything of the sort. In other words, there was nothing to deter.

Instead, nukes have done nothing in particular, and have done that very well. They have, however, succeeded in being a colossal waste of money -- an authoritative 1998 Brookings Institution study showed the United States had spent $5.5 trillion on nukes since 1940, more than on any program other than Social Security. The expense was even more ludicrous in the cash-starved Soviet Union.

And that does not include the substantial loss entailed in requiring legions of talented nuclear scientists, engineers, and technicians to devote their careers to developing and servicing weapons that have proved to have been significantly unnecessary and essentially irrelevant. In fact, the only useful part of the expenditure has been on devices, protocols, and policies to keep the bombs from going off, expenditures that would, of course, not be necessary if they didn't exist.

"Obama's Plan to Eliminate Nuclear Weapons Is a Good One."

Not necessarily. Obama's plan, unveiled before the world in a speech in Prague last April, represents an ambitious attempt to rid the world of nukes. Under the president's scheme, developing countries would have access to an internationally monitored bank of nuclear fuel but would be barred from producing weapons-grade materials themselves. Existing warheads would be secured, and major powers such as Russia and the United States would pledge to scale back their weapons programs. In September, the U.N. General Assembly passed a resolution in support of Obama's proposal, giving his massive project some institutional backing.

But all of this is scarcely needed. Nuclear weapons are already disappearing, and elaborate international plans like the one Obama is pushing aren't needed to make it happen. During the Cold War, painstakingly negotiated treaties did little to advance the cause of disarmament -- and some efforts, such as the 1972 SALT Agreement, made the situation worse from a military standpoint. With the easing of tensions after the Cold War, a sort of negative arms race has taken place, and the weapons have been going away more or less by themselves as policymakers wake up to the fact that having fewer useless things is cheaper than having more of them. By 2002, the number of deployed warheads in Russian and U.S. arsenals had dropped from 70,000 to around 30,000, and it now stands at less than 10,000. "Real arms control," wistfully reflected former U.S. assistant secretary of state for arms control Avis Bohlen in an essay last May, "became possible only when it was no longer necessary."

Indeed, both sides have long found that arms reductions were made more difficult if they were accomplished through explicit mutual agreements requiring that an exquisitely nuanced arrangement be worked out for every abandoned nut and bolt. In 1991, for example, the Americans announced that they were unilaterally reducing tactical nuclear weapons, and the Soviet Union soon followed, a development hailed by a close observer, Brown University scholar Nina Tannenwald, as "the most radical move to date to reverse the arms race" and a "dramatic move away from 'warfighting' nuclear postures." This "radical" and "dramatic" feat was accomplished entirely without formal agreement. For the most part, the formal arms-control process has been left trying to catch up with reality. When the U.S. Senate in 1992 ratified a nuclear arms reduction treaty, both sides had already moved to reduce their weapons even further than required by that agreement.

France has also unilaterally cut its arsenal very substantially -- though explaining why France needs any nukes is surely a problématique worthy of several impenetrable dissertations. (Perhaps to threaten former colonies that might otherwise abandon French for English?) The British, too, are under domestic political pressure to cut their nuclear arsenal as they wrestle with how many of their aging nuclear subs they need to hang on to (how about: none?), and the Chinese have built far fewer of the weapons than they could have -- they currently stock just 180.

A negative arms race is likely to be as chaotic, halting, ambiguous, self-interested, and potentially reversible as a positive one. However, history suggests that arms reduction will happen best if arms negotiators keep out of the way. Formal disarmament agreements of the kind Obama seeks are likely simply to slow and clutter the process.

But all nukes are not likely to vanish entirely, no matter the method. Humanity invented these weapons, and there will still be nuclear metaphysicians around, spinning dark, improbable, and spooky theoretical scenarios to justify their existence.

"A Nuclear Explosion Would Cripple the U.S. Economy."

Only if Americans let it.Although former CIA chief George Tenet insists in his memoirs that one "mushroom cloud" would "destroy our economy," he never bothers to explain how the instant and tragic destruction of three square miles somewhere in the United States would lead inexorably to national economic annihilation. A nuclear explosion in, say, New York City -- as Obama so darkly invoked -- would obviously be a tremendous calamity that would roil markets and cause great economic hardship, but would it extinguish the rest of the country? Would farmers cease plowing? Would manufacturers close their assembly lines? Would all businesses, governmental structures, and community groups evaporate?

Americans are highly unlikely to react to an atomic explosion, however disastrous, by immolating themselves and their economy. In 1945, Japan weathered not only two nuclear attacks but intense nationwide conventional bombing; the horrific experience did not destroy Japan as a society or even as an economy. Nor has persistent, albeit nonnuclear, terrorism in Israel caused that state to disappear -- or to abandon democracy.

Even the notion that an act of nuclear terrorism would cause the American people to lose confidence in the government is belied by the traumatic experience of Sept. 11, 2001, when expressed confidence in America's leaders paradoxically soared. And it contradicts decades of disaster research that documents how socially responsible behavior increases under such conditions -- seen yet again in the response of those evacuating the World Trade Center on 9/11.

"Terrorists Could Snap Up Russia's Loose Nukes."

That's a myth. It has been soberly, and repeatedly, restated by Harvard University's Graham Allison and others that Osama bin Laden gave a group of Chechens $30 million in cash and two tons of opium in exchange for 20 nuclear warheads. Then there is the "report" about how al Qaeda acquired a Russian-made suitcase nuclear bomb from Central Asian sources that had a serial number of 9999 and could be exploded by mobile phone.

If these attention-grabbing rumors were true, one might think the terrorist group (or its supposed Chechen suppliers) would have tried to set off one of those things by now or that al Qaeda would have left some trace of the weapons behind in Afghanistan after it made its very rushed exit in 2001. Instead, nada. It turns out that getting one's hands on a working nuclear bomb is actually very difficult.

In 1998, a peak year for loose nuke stories, the head of the U.S. Strategic Command made several visits to Russian military bases and pointedly reported, "I want to put to bed this concern that there are loose nukes in Russia. My observations are that the Russians are indeed very serious about security." Physicists Richard Garwin and Georges Charpak have reported, however, that this forceful firsthand testimony failed to persuade the intelligence community "perhaps because it [had] access to varied sources of information." A decade later, with no credible reports of purloined Russian weapons, it rather looks like it was the general, not the spooks, who had it right.

By all reports (including Allison's), Russian nukes have become even more secure in recent years. It is scarcely rocket science to conclude that any nuke stolen in Russia is far more likely to go off in Red Square than in Times Square. The Russians seem to have had no difficulty grasping this fundamental reality.

Setting off a stolen nuke might be nearly impossible anyway, outside of TV's 24 and disaster movies. Finished bombs are routinely outfitted with devices that will trigger a nonnuclear explosion to destroy the bomb if it is tampered with. And, as Stephen Younger, former head of nuclear weapons research and development at Los Alamos National Laboratory, stresses, only a few people in the world know how to cause an unauthorized detonation of a nuclear weapon. Even weapons designers and maintenance personnel do not know the multiple steps necessary. In addition, some countries, including Pakistan, store their weapons disassembled, with the pieces in separate secure vaults.

"Al Qaeda Is Searching for a Nuclear Capability."

Prove it. Al Qaeda may have had some interest in atomic weapons and other weapons of mass destruction (WMD). For instance, a man who defected from al Qaeda after he was caught stealing $110,000 from the organization -- "a lovable rogue," "fixated on money," who "likes to please," as one FBI debriefer described Jamal al-Fadl -- has testified that members tried to purchase uranium in the mid-1990s, though they were scammed and purchased bogus material. There are also reports that bin Laden had "academic" discussions about WMD in 2001 with Pakistani nuclear scientists who did not actually know how to build a bomb.

But the Afghanistan invasion seems to have cut any schemes off at the knees. As analyst Anne Stenersen notes, evidence from an al Qaeda computer left behind in Afghanistan when the group beat a hasty retreat indicates that only some $2,000 to $4,000 was earmarked for WMD research, and that was mainly for very crude work on chemical weapons. For comparison, she points out that the Japanese millennial terrorist group, Aum Shinrikyo, appears to have invested $30 million in its sarin gas manufacturing program. Milton Leitenberg of the Center for International and Security Studies at the University of Maryland-College Park quotes Ayman al-Zawahiri as saying that the project was "wasted time and effort."

Even former International Atomic Energy Agency inspector David Albright, who is more impressed with the evidence found in Afghanistan, concludes that any al Qaeda atomic efforts were "seriously disrupted" -- indeed, "nipped in the bud" -- by the 2001 invasion of Afghanistan and that after the invasion the "chance of al Qaeda detonating a nuclear explosive appears on reflection to be low."

"Fabricating a Bomb Is 'Child's Play.'"

Hardly. An editorialist in Nature, the esteemed scientific journal, did apply that characterization to the manufacture of uranium bombs, as opposed to plutonium bombs, last January, but even that seems an absurd exaggeration. Younger, the former Los Alamos research director, has expressed his amazement at how "self-declared 'nuclear weapons experts,' many of whom have never seen a real nuclear weapon," continue to "hold forth on how easy it is to make a functioning nuclear explosive." Uranium is "exceptionally difficult to machine," he points out, and "plutonium is one of the most complex metals ever discovered, a material whose basic properties are sensitive to exactly how it is processed." Special technology is required, and even the simplest weapons require precise tolerances. Information on the general idea for building a bomb is available online, but none of it, Younger says, is detailed enough to "enable the confident assembly of a real nuclear explosive."

A failure to appreciate the costs and difficulties of a nuclear program has led to massive overestimations of the ability to fabricate nuclear weapons. As the 2005 Silberman-Robb commission, set up to investigate the intelligence failures that led to the Iraq war, pointed out, it is "a fundamental analytical error" to equate "procurement activity with weapons system capability." That is, "simply because a state can buy the parts does not mean it can put them together and make them work."

For example, after three decades of labor and well over $100 million in expenditures, Libya was unable to make any progress whatsoever toward an atomic bomb. Indeed, much of the country's nuclear material, surrendered after it abandoned its program, was still in the original boxes.

"Iranian and North Korean Nukes Are Intolerable."

Not unless we overreact. North Korea has been questing after nuclear capability for decades and has now managed to conduct a couple of nuclear tests that seem to have been mere fizzles. It has also launched a few missiles that have hit their presumed target, the Pacific Ocean, with deadly accuracy. It could do far more damage in the area with its artillery.

If the Iranians do break their solemn pledge not to develop nuclear weapons (perhaps in the event of an Israeli or U.S. airstrike on their facilities), they will surely find, like all other countries in our nuclear era, that the development has been a waste of time (it took Pakistan 28 years) and effort (is Pakistan, with its enduring paranoia about India and a growing jihadi threat, any safer today?).

Moreover, Iran will most likely "use" any nuclear capability in the same way all other nuclear states have: for prestige (or ego-stoking) and deterrence. Indeed, as strategist and Nobel laureate Thomas Schelling suggests, deterrence is about the only value the weapons might have for Iran. Such devices, he points out, "should be too precious to give away or to sell" and "too precious to 'waste' killing people" when they could make other countries "hesitant to consider military action."

If a nuclear Iran brandishes its weapons to intimidate others or get its way, it will likely find that those threatened, rather than capitulating or rushing off to build a compensating arsenal, will ally with others (including conceivably Israel) to stand up to the intimidation. The popular notion that nuclear weapons furnish a country with the ability to "dominate" its area has little or no historical support -- in the main, nuclear threats over the last 60 years have either been ignored or met with countervailing opposition, not with timorous acquiescence. It was conventional military might -- grunts and tanks, not nukes -- that earned the United States and the Soviet Union their respective spheres of influence during the Cold War.

In his 2008 campaign, Obama pointedly pledged that, as president, he would "do everything in my power to prevent Iran from obtaining a nuclear weapon … everything." Let us hope not: The anti-proliferation sanctions imposed on Iraq in the 1990s probably led to more deaths than the bombs dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, and the same can be said for the ongoing war in Iraq, sold as an effort to root out Saddam Hussein's nukes. There is nothing inherently wrong with making nonproliferation a high priority, so long as it is topped with a somewhat higher one: avoiding policies that can lead to the deaths of tens or hundreds of thousands of people under the obsessive sway of worst-case-scenario fantasies.

Obama has achieved much in his first year as president on foreign policy through toning down rhetoric, encouraging openness toward international consultation and cooperation, and helping revise America's image as a threatening and arrogant loose cannon. That's certainly something to build on in year two.

The forging of nuclear arms reduction agreements, particularly with the Russians, could continue the process. Although these are mostly feel-good efforts that might actually hamper the natural pace of nuclear-arms reductions, there is something to be said for feeling good. Reducing weapons that have little or no value may not be terribly substantive, but it is one of those nice gestures that can have positive atmospheric consequences -- and one that can appear to justify certain Nobel awards.

The confrontations with Iran and North Korea over their prospective or actual nukes are more problematic. Obama and Secretary of State Hillary Clinton have already contributed big time to the hysteria that has become common coin within the foreign-policy establishment on this issue. It is fine to apply diplomacy and bribery in an effort to dissuade those countries from pursuing nuclear weapons programs: We'd be doing them a favor, in fact. But, though it may be heresy to say so, the world can live with a nuclear Iran or North Korea, as it has lived now for 45 years with a nuclear China, a country once viewed as the ultimate rogue. If push eventually comes to shove in these areas, the solution will be a familiar one: to establish orderly deterrent and containment strategies and avoid the temptation to lash out mindlessly at phantom threats.

The Islamists Are Not Coming

Religious parties in the Muslim world are hardly the juggernauts they've been made out to be.

BY CHARLES KURZMAN, IJLAL NAQVI | JANUARY/FEBRUARY 2010

Do Muslims automatically vote Islamic? That's the concern conjured up by strongmen from Tunis to Tashkent, and plenty of Western experts agree. They point to the political victories of Islamic parties in Egypt, Palestine, and Turkey in recent years and warn that more elections across the Islamic world could turn power over to anti-democratic fundamentalists.

But these victories turn out to be exceptions, not the political rule. When we examined results from parliamentary elections in all Muslim societies, we found a very different pattern: Given the choice, voters tend to go with secular parties, not religious ones. Over the past 40 years, 86 parliamentary elections in 20 countries have included one or more Islamic parties, according to annual reports from the Inter-Parliamentary Union. Voters in these places have overwhelmingly turned up their noses at such parties. Eighty percent of these Islamic parties earned less than 20 percent of the vote, and a majority got less than 10 percent -- hardly landslide victories. The same is true even over the last few years, with numbers barely changing since 2001.

True, Islamic parties have won a few well-publicized breakthrough victories, such as in Algeria in 1991 and Palestine in 2006. But far more often, Islamic parties tend to do very poorly. What's more, the more free and fair an election is, the worse the Islamic parties do. By our calculations, the average percentage of seats won by Islamic parties in relatively free elections is 10 points lower than in less free ones.

Even if they don't win, Islamic parties often find themselves liberalized by the electoral process. We found that Islamic party platforms are less likely to focus on sharia law or armed jihad in freer elections and more likely to uphold democracy and women's rights. And even in more authoritarian countries, Islamic party platforms have shifted over the course of multiple elections toward more liberal positions: Morocco's Justice and Development Party and Jordan's Islamic Action Front both stripped sharia law from their platforms over the last several years.

These are still culturally conservative parties, by any standard, but their decision to run for office places them at odds with Islamic revolutionaries. In many cases, they're actually risking their lives. Almost two decades ago, even before his alliance with Osama bin Laden, Egyptian jihadist Ayman al-Zawahiri wrote a tract condemning the Muslim Brotherhood's abandonment of revolutionary methods in favor of electoral politics. "Whoever labels himself as a Muslim democrat, or a Muslim who calls for democracy, is like saying he is a Jewish Muslim or a Christian Muslim," he wrote. In Iraq, Sunni Islamic revolutionaries recently renewed their campaign "to start killing all those participating in the political process," according to a warning received by a Sunni politician who was subsequently assassinated in Mosul.

What enrages Zawahiri and his ilk is that Islamists keep ignoring demands to stay out of parliamentary politics. Despite threats from terrorists and a cold shoulder from voters, more and more Islamic parties are entering the electoral process. A quarter-century ago, many of these movements were trying to overthrow the state and create an Islamic society, inspired by the Iranian Revolution. Now, disillusioned with revolution, they are working within the secular system.

But today's problems for Islamic parties may recall an earlier historical moment, the watershed period of the early 20th century when demands for democracy and human rights first gained mass support in Muslim societies from the Russian Empire to the Ottoman Empire. Then as now, violent Islamic movements such as the Ottoman-era Islamic Unity Society objected to electoral politics. But that was not what ultimately undermined democracy in Muslim societies. Instead, secular autocrats, such as Mustafa Kemal Ataturk in Turkey and Reza Shah in Iran, suppressed pro-democratic Islamic movements, driving Islamists underground and helping to radicalize them.

Today, too, dictators and terrorists are conspiring to keep Islamic political parties from competing freely for votes. Government repression has been successful in one sense -- Islamic parties have won few elections. In a broader sense, however, it is failing: According to the World Values Survey, which has polled cultural attitudes around the world, support for sharia is one-third lower in countries with relatively free elections than in other Muslim societies. In other words, suppressing Islamic movements has only made them more popular. Perhaps democratization is not such a gift to Islamists after all.

How India Gives Global Governance the Biggest Headache

The biggest pain in Asia isn't the country you'd think.

BY BARBARA CROSSETTE | JANUARY/FEBRUARY 2010

Think for a moment about which countries cause the most global consternation. Afghanistan. Iran. Venezuela. North Korea. Pakistan. Perhaps rising China. But India? Surely not. In the popular imagination, the world's largest democracy evokes Gandhi, Bollywood, and chicken tikka. In reality, however, it's India that often gives global governance the biggest headache.

Of course, India gets marvelous press. Feature stories from there typically bring to life Internet entrepreneurs, hospitality industry pioneers, and gurus keeping spiritual traditions alive while lovingly bridging Eastern and Western cultures.

But something is left out of the cheery picture. For all its business acumen and the extraordinary creativity unleashed in the service of growth, today's India is an international adolescent, a country of outsize ambition but anemic influence. India's colorful, stubborn loquaciousness, so enchanting on a personal level, turns out to be anything but when it comes to the country's international relations. On crucial matters of global concern, from climate change to multilateral trade, India all too often just says no.

India, first and foremost, believes that the world's rules don't apply to it. Bucking an international trend since the Cold War, successive Indian governments have refused to sign nuclear testing and nonproliferation agreements -- accelerating a nuclear arms race in South Asia. (India's second nuclear tests in 1998 led to Pakistan's decision to detonate its own nuclear weapons.)

Once the pious proponent of a nuclear-free world, New Delhi today maintains an attitude of "not now, not ever" when it comes to the 1968 Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty and the 1996 Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty. As defense analyst Matthew Hoey recently wrote in the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, "India's behavior has been comparable to other defiant nuclear states [and] will undoubtedly contribute to a deteriorating security environment in Asia."

Not only does India reject existing treaties, but it also deep-sixes international efforts to develop new ones. In 2008, India single-handedly foiled the last Doha round of global trade talks, an effort to nail together a global deal that almost nobody loved, but one that would have benefited developing countries most. "I reject everything," declared Kamal Nath, then the Indian commerce and industry minister, after grueling days and sleepless nights of negotiations in Geneva in the summer of 2008.

On climate change, India has been no less intransigent. In July, India's environment minister, Jairam Ramesh, pre-emptively told U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton five months before the U.N. climate summit in Copenhagen that India, a fast-growing producer of greenhouse gases, would flat-out not accept binding carbon emissions targets.

India happily attacks individuals, as well as institutions and treaty talks. As ex-World Bank staffers have revealed in interviews with Indian media, India worked behind the scenes to help push Paul Wolfowitz out of the World Bank presidency, not because his relationship with a female official caused a public furor, but because he had turned his attention to Indian corruption and fraud in the diversion of bank funds.

By the time a broad investigation had ended -- and Robert Zoellick had become the new World Bank president -- a whopping $600 million had been diverted, as the Wall Street Journal reported, from projects that would have served the Indian poor through malaria, tuberculosis, HIV/AIDS, and drug-quality improvement programs. Calling the level of fraud "unacceptable," Zoellick later sent a flock of officials to New Delhi to work with the Indian government in investigating the accounts. In a 2009 interview with the weekly India Abroad, former bank employee Steve Berkman said the level of corruption among Indian officials was "no different than what I've seen in Africa and other places."

India certainly affords its citizens more freedoms than China, but it is hardly a liberal democratic paradise. India limits outside assistance to nongovernmental organizations and most educational institutions. It restricts the work of foreign scholars (and sometimes journalists) and bans books. Last fall, India refused to allow Bangladeshi and Sri Lankan journalists to attend a workshop on environmental journalism.

India also regularly refuses visas for international rights advocates. In 2003, India denied a visa to the head of Amnesty International, Irene Khan. Although no official reason was given, it was likely a punishment for Amnesty's critical stance on the government's handling of Hindu attacks that killed as many as 2,000 Muslims in Gujarat the previous year. Most recently, a delegation from the U.S. Commission on International Religious Freedom, a congressionally mandated body, was denied Indian visas. In the past, the commission had called attention to attacks on both Muslims and Christians in India.

Nor does New Delhi stand up for freedom abroad. In the U.N. General Assembly and the U.N. Human Rights Council, India votes regularly with human rights offenders, international scofflaws, and enemies of democracy. Just last year, after Sri Lanka had pounded civilians held hostage by the Tamil Tigers and then rounded up survivors of the carnage and put them in holding camps that have drawn universal opprobrium, India joined China and Russia in subverting a human rights resolution suggesting a war crimes investigation and instead backed a move that seemed to congratulate the Sri Lankans.

David Malone, Canada's high commissioner in New Delhi from 2006 to 2008 and author of a forthcoming book, Does the Elephant Dance? Contemporary Indian Foreign Policy, says that, when it comes to global negotiations, "There's a certain style of Indian diplomacy that alienates debating partners, allies, and opponents." And looking forward? India craves a permanent seat on the U.N. Security Council, seeking greater authority in shaping the global agenda. But not a small number of other countries wonder what India would do with that power. Its petulant track record is the elephant in the room.

U.S. cellphone users donate $22 million to Haiti earthquake relief via text

Image by Swamibu via Flickr

By Thomas Heath
Tuesday, January 19, 2010; A10

The American Red Cross has received more than $22 million in U.S. text-message donations for Haiti earthquake relief efforts, far outpacing the charity's previous record of $400,000 for emergency relief using similar technology.

"It's truly an unprecedented amount for a text campaign," said American Red Cross spokesman Roger Lowe.

The $22 million is roughly one-fifth of the $112 million total that the American Red Cross has so far raised for Haiti, most of which has come through more conventional sources such as corporate and online donations.

The text-messaging effort involves sending the word "Haiti" in a cellphone text message to the number 90999, which automatically adds a $10 pledge to a person's phone bill.

Image via Wikipedia

Wireless providers have said they are forgoing standard text-messaging fees for the Haiti effort.

"We make no money on this," said Verizon Wireless spokesman Jeffrey Nelson.

To get the money to Haiti faster, Verizon said Monday that it transmitted nearly $3 million in text-message pledges to the American Red Cross. Normally, telecommunications companies wait for the user to pay their phone bill, a process that can take a few months, before passing the donation to the charity.

"I think it's great," said Daniel Borochoff, president of the American Institute of Philanthropy, a watchdog group. "They should expedite the funds as rapidly as possible, and I am glad that they are doing that."

Image via Wikipedia

The American Red Cross is not the only group to see a surge in contributions via text messaging. Hundreds of thousands of people have donated using their cellphones. The technology allows charities to tap into new sources of giving, such as young adults.

"The beauty of it is the young people who don't give will give because it's so easy," Borochoff said. "They hit a few buttons and they can show off, and it's the cooler and hipper way than getting out your credit card or whipping out a check like your parents do."

The mobile donation network was set up through the nonprofit Mobile Giving Foundation and is connected with all four major U.S. cellphone carriers -- Verizon, T-Mobile, Sprint and AT&T.