While No One’s Looking, the Palestinians Are Building a State
But in Bethlehem, far away from the television cameras and breathless news reports, 2,000 Palestinian financiers also gathered recently at the second Palestine Investment Conference to quietly go about the business of building the economy of a viable Palestinian state. They discussed almost $1 billion in new projects targeting high-growth sectors, including information and communications technology, housing, and tourism. The politics of the conference represent a paradigm shift quietly taking place in the West Bank under the leadership of Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas and Prime Minister Salam Fayyad, in which Palestinians are increasingly turning to the mundane, workaday tools of governance and development as their principal strategy for ending the occupation.
War and child growth: Iraq & WWII Germany
At the population level, childhood growth is often seen as a marker of health and the quality of the environment. When populations get taller in a few generations, this is likely due to some improvement in local conditions (better nutrition, less infection, cleaner water supply, etc.). Conversely, when linear growth declines, it is usually because local conditions (ecological, economic, political) have deteriorated. Two recent working papers illustrate how this pattern applies to war conditions.
Afghanistan’s Civic War
The war Colonel Jones is fighting is, of course, the counterinsurgency war that Gen. Stanley A. McChrystal, commander of NATO forces in Afghanistan, and Gen. David H. Petraeus, regional commander of the U.S. military, urged President Obama to adopt during the fierce and protracted policy debate over Afghan strategy last year. Some of the president’s closest advisers, including Vice President Joe Biden, argued that after seven years of American neglect and the Afghans’ corrupt and incompetent governance, it was simply too late to fight for hearts and minds. But Obama accepted most of his generals’ advice, agreeing to dispatch 30,000 more soldiers as well as hundreds more civilians to the battle. Senior military and civilian officials in Kandahar use the same language Jones does in describing the impending effort there (no one calls it a “battle”): no kinetic operations, civilians out front, Afghans leading the way. NATO officials acknowledge that the plan is driven as much by the near impossibility of defeating the Taliban in a region where they are deeply rooted as it is by counterinsurgency doctrine. This is, for reasons of necessity as well as of philosophy, the new face of war in Afghanistan. Obama also said that, by mid-2011, he would begin to draw down troops — which means that Jones and his fellow commanders may have just another year to carry out a task that many policy makers and experts, not to mention many American voters, aren’t convinced can be done at all.
Christopher R. Albon is a Ph.D. candidate specializing in armed conflict, public health, human security, and health diplomacy.
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