The 17 wage slips showed laborers taking home an average of $1.54 daily after debt repayments, salary advances, and fees.
Critical question completely unanswered: how much for each one? Because if I'm taking most of my wages in salary advances, then, yes, my apparent weekly wage is going to be very small. But my actual weekly wage is going to be much bigger. These things shouldn't be lumped together!
1: It is a poor piece. I wouldn't have sent it if it wasn't consistent with the solid-looking second link.
If workers are deliberately kept in debt by manipulations of the work available and the cost of necessities (e.g. the company store), then it's all the same.
3: that is another good point that is not addressed.
One of you should read the underlying report to figure that out. The point I was trying to make, anyway, was that the existing labor certification schemes apparently aren't working at all.
I didn't read the article yet, but the OP put the Merle Travis song in my head.
Probably sixteen tons of tea is not a thing a person loads in a day.
Not even if you include the weight of the little bags.
I think the Guardian link is true but also bullshit.
But postwar nation building has been devoid of justice for victims, minority protection and genuine reconciliation. The state security apparatus has allowed perpetrators to go unpunished.That's true, but so far as we can tell it has nothing at all to do with these attacks. The targets weren't Sinhalese or Buddhist nationalists, they were Christians and Westerners who did nothing to Tamil Muslims during the war or after. The terrorists seemingly were radicalized outside the country and based on the targeting their ideology was global jihadism, which cares not at all about anything anyone has done in Sri Lanka. AFAICT at this point this was really a global event, not specifically Sri Lankan.
Also unmentioned the fact that the Buddhist Sinhala nationalists guilty of the mob attacks and shit lost elections four years ago, and couldn't even rally enough support in parliament to make Sirisena's coup stick when he made their guy PM.
I don't know from Buddhism, but I do know that if you want to make sure there's a really big clash of civilizations, mass murder at religious services seems like a pretty good strategy.
"AFAICT at this point this was really a global event, not specifically Sri Lankan. "
There's a history of attacks by Buddhist gangs on minority Muslim communities -- so as I assume that there could well have been locally contingent reasons for why these global causes were able to recruit locally.
12: Sure. Though apparently not exactly recruit locally as recruit among overseas Sri Lankans. Sketchy information says these were middle-class, educated, studying overseas: your classic international jihadi, not at all local communal street fighters.
I'd say the article is a clear attempt to change the subject, which is not wildly successful ("hot takes"); but mostly I was amazed that after reading the line I quoted, I thought, "well, we can assume the opposite of this is going to happen, so are there any new and different liberal pieties anyone has to offer? No?"
It seems we should not put the Rainforest Alliance in charge of counterterrorism, if that was anyone's Plan B.
I managed not to read the piece, which is as you say a clear attempt to change the subject. There is a horrible irony to this atrocity in that the first terrorist group to make widespread use of suicide bombing were Tamils, I believe more in India than in Sri Lanka. But when one considers the brutality with which the Tamil Tiger uprising was ended -- more or less as if the Israelis had just shelled Gaza until everyone in it was dead or wounded -- it's astonishing to me that the country functions at all.
as to 13: there is quite a lot of research showing that jihadi cells tend to have a mix of classes and personality typoes: you need local muscle as well as deracinated cosmopolitan intellectual types even if those are often the ones with the bombs.
The Islamic State (or whatever remains of it these days) is claiming the bombings are retaliation for the New Zealand mosque attacks. Its a fucked up world we live in.
personality typoes
Such breathtaking elegance. Do you usually have a different pseud?
Also, my day has not been great, but reading that labor exploitation study contributed significantly [Moby can give the appropriate p-value range] to its bleakness. Man, just fuck everything. Certified Sustainable Green Paving of the Many Roads to Hell
You can't just invent a p-value, unless you're Cyril Burt.
Oh I know, but we can estimate. The confounding factors are: work in the crawlspace by several contractors over several days has stirred up a wrathful army of reeking mold spores; it's hot; Trump is still president; garbage disposal in the new house is broken to shit but I can't take it out by myself because it's wired through the cabinet into the wall and I'd probably have to hack the cabinet up with an axe and I don't have an axe; I DON'T HAVE AN AXE. How pissed off can I get about well-meaning liberals completely failing to do good in the world on top of all that? Well, you'd be surprised.
That's a lot. I think the main thing is be sure to turn off the power at the breaker before using an axe near wiring.
Also, if it's wired through the cabinet wall, it's probably a hard-wired disposal. You need to disconnect the wiring at the disposal end. But first turn off the power.
the brutality with which the Tamil Tiger uprising was ended -- more or less as if the Israelis had just shelled Gaza until everyone in it was dead or wounded
AFAIK this is a massive exaggeration. The final Tiger pocket at Mullaitivu contained only a small fraction of the civilian Tamil population. The state did indeed shell that very dense pocket, committing war crimes in the process. They did that though not to kill the civilians but to drive them out until there was enough space for a final assault; the same army doing the shelling also went out of its way to assist the civilians escaping across the lagoon.
we can assume the opposite of this is going to happen
I don't think we can, actually. Pace Moby, these attacks weren't optimized for escalation in Sri Lanka: if they had been, they would have targeted Buddhists. Instead, they were optimized for global media attention. As has been pointed out above, Sri Lanka has been through vastly worse than this, and somehow remains a constitutional democracy. I repeat, they voted out the proto-fascists who won the war, and thus far have kept them out; parliament and the courts stood against a palace coup, and won bloodlessly and lawfully.
are there any new and different liberal pieties anyone has to offer?
Neither new nor different. First (and believe you me, I am surprised to be writing this), procedural liberalism. Sri Lanka appears to be meandering in the direction of justice and freedom all on its own. Second, technocracy works. Services in India, Sri Lanka, and IIRC the US all had advanced warning of this attack, apparently with a lot of actionable detail. The Sri Lankan bureaucracy was unable to act because of higher-level politicization; unimpeded international and interagency cooperation would have prevented this attack. Counterterrorism is boring, in short.
Procedural liberalism is really a nice thing, considering the options.
I wasn't imagining that these attacks would make the tinderbox of Sri Lanka explode or anything so drastic, although I'd bet on significant repercussions for the Muslim community (that won't rise to the level of international news, but will still suck to live through). I meant only that the world really seems to be moving in the direction of more nationalism and more sectarianism, not less -- therefore rhetoric about putting aside those antiquated passions to come together in fellowship seems a little hollow to me -- and I would be impressed if Sri Lanka kept up a contrary trend. I certainly hope you're right that the political system is robust, but I think "technocracy works, except when it doesn't" is as far as I can go. But I'm sorry if it seemed like I was wringing my hands over how easily all those savages get set off because war is all they understand, you know. I just don't have time to write at length, which probably means I shouldn't bother, since I seem to have a binary choice between long and wrong.
16 I don't believe that, the New Zealand mosque massacre was only 5 weeks before the Sri Lanka bombings. You don't get up an operation as sophisticated as that in 5 weeks.
I'm inclined to agree with 26- opportunistically claiming an outrage perpetrated by other bastards was SOP for AQ and I don't see why ISIS should be any different; but on the other hand I can't think of any other outfit which would be a good fit for this, nor can I think of a reason to do it without owning it.
I don't think it really matters since if somebody did it and says they are IS, it's not like you can disprove them by looking at their terrorism license.
Haven't there been photos of (some/all of) the alleged perpetrators standing in front of an ISIS flag? The narrative I've heard is that ISIS expressed support for them but didn't actually help them in any substantive way. ISIS has definitely claimed they were responsible for a lot of things they probably had little if anything to do with.
The narrative I've heard is that ISIS expressed support for them but didn't actually help them in any substantive way.
That seems pretty consistent with ISIS behavior over the years. Outside of what was their own little empire, they've acted as more of a brand name that gets let out to various franchisees, rather than a coordinating body.
26: agreed; it was IS, but not as a revenge attack. If the New Zealand killings hadn't happened they'd have picked something else.
25: You have nothing to apologize for, and I for one would prefer you keep writing, right or wrong.
And anyway you weren't wrong at all. On rereading your OP you were clearly talking about the world at large rather than SL specifically.
As to the world at large, yes, it's looking grim. But the Sri Lankan response points a way forward: total shutdown of FB and Whatsapp, and a curfew. There are plenty of Buddhist assholes who who would want to get their mobs out burning Muslims (and in future as you say some of them will) but their best window was closed by the state. Social media catalyzed awfulness isn't inevitable, it can be managed, even by a state as poor as SL (and AFAIK poor countries are actually ahead on this, of necessity). When we see a protracted shutdown in a major democracy like India or Indonesia or France (which I think will happen quite soon) FB&C will realize they need to deliver meaningful moderation or get shut down.
Also from SL, that peace and harmony and those good things aren't always necessary for progress. SL has had 10 years of peace, and didn't get there by negotiations, which achieved nothing in decades*, but through the state mobilizing and winning the war. As it happens it was a very nasty government that got that done, but that didn't have to be the case; if liberal internationalists had picked a side instead trying to talk it out that war might have ended a lot sooner.
More widely, all kinds of weird things are happening in Myanmar, most of which I don't comprehend at all. But the endgame seemingly is some kind of confederation with the many non-Bamar ethnic armies getting their own autonomous areas. If and when that shakes out, you'll see some kind of peace, with a whole bunch of variously atrocious governments, all of them making most of their revenue from drugs and resource stripping. It may well nonetheless be the most piously liberal thing to look the other way on lots of war crimes and help make that happen.
Speaking of war crimes, also interesting things with the Rohingyas in Bangladesh. They (reasonably) are refusing to return without assurances they aren't going to get, and the Bangladeshis (IMO also reasonably) are refusing to let them settle or work outside the camps, or to be educated in Bangla. If that's just left to rot you'll likely end up with another Gaza Strip; but if everyone at least tacitly accepts that reconciliation isn't happening and those people aren't going home, what you might end up with instead is a super dense city of a couple of million people with educations in English, Nansen passports, and a political economy shaped by liberal NGOs. Another Singapore would be too much too hope for, but maybe, IDK, another Macao? I have no idea how to get there, but there are smarter liberals than me.
*Dim memory, stand to be corrected.
I don't know about Sri Lanka, but in a lot of countries, post-emergency coordination is happening over WhatsApp, where representatives of a bunch of responding agencies can hang out on a single channel and make sure everyone is in the loop. Closing WhatsApp could throw a spanner into that process.
It could be argued that reliance on WhatsApp is not such a great idea for this purpose, but in practice it seems be be the best tool out there, because everyone has it.
Yes, I couldn't imagine life here without WhatsApp. If something happened it would be my primary communication channel.
Is that just the same as Facebook Messenger? If not, should I worry that I don't have it?
SL has had 10 years of peace, and didn't get there by negotiations, which achieved nothing in decades*, but through the state mobilizing and winning the war. As it happens it was a very nasty government that got that done, but that didn't have to be the case; if liberal internationalists had picked a side instead trying to talk it out that war might have ended a lot sooner.
This.
You know what the best peace process by far is? The one that, historically, has the highest chance of actually producing a lasting peace? Victory.
If you try to compromise and partition and satisfy each group you end up with a frozen conflict that goes on for decades, that ill-intentioned actors can use any time they want to stir some shit up. Look at Ireland. Look at India. Look at Cyprus and Palestine and Bosnia and all those other places where well intentioned outsiders have thought "look, there are very fine people on both sides, let's try and make everyone happy". What success stories are there on the other side? Canada?
35: no, it's different - you don't need to be on FB to use it, you just need a mobile phone.
Threema's better because it's more secure, but of course it only has any value if you have lots of equally paranoid friends.
It's worth remembering that something somebody called a victory preceding all of the frozen conflicts in 36.
40: I don't think anyone regarded Ireland or India or Cyprus or Bosnia as a victory. Maybe Palestine, I suppose.
Of course they regarded Ireland and India as victories. That's what calling yourself king or empress of something means.
I am trying to respond to 36, but my brain keeps bleeding. C... c... comity! But let me ask you in good faith, ajay: how useful do you think this insight is in guiding policy, especially policy by world powers? E.g. the scenario Mossy mentions, where "if liberal internationalists had picked a side instead [of] trying to talk it out that war might have ended a lot sooner"? Doesn't it rather depend on the war?
36 is the Benny Morris argument which I find troublingly difficult either to refute or to accept: that the ethnic cleansing of '47-8 was necessary for the state of Israel and would have worked better if it had been more thorough. Ireland worked fairly well until 1967-8, I think. No one would call partition in India a success, but I'm not sure what would have constituted victory in that conflict, and for whom?
Mossy, you may well be right about the scale of the end of the Sri Lankan war. I had a friend in Colombo at the time (a diplomat) who was shocked by it but even relatively small scale atrocities can be shocking enough.
42: I meant the partitions - attempts at compromise that ended up producing an enduring conflict.
43: I don't know. It's not my research...
42: I meant the partitions - attempts at compromise that ended up producing an enduring conflict.
43: I don't know. It's not my research...
"that the ethnic cleansing of '47-8 was necessary for the state of Israel and would have worked better if it had been more thorough"
Wait, that's a different argument and not one that I espouse at all.
45/46: Fair enough. Take it through the counterfactual if you like, though: what's the victory -> lasting peace scenario for each/any of the cases you brought up (Ireland, India, Cyprus, Palestine, Bosnia)? Who wins the war?
36: Not sure if the EU is a counterexample or further evidence for your theory.
Partition as a result of a colonial power leaving (India, Palestine, Ireland at one point) seems like a very different thing from de facto partition as a negotiated solution to a long-running conflict (Cyprus, Bosnia, Ireland at a different point).
47: I was going to say that you, Trump and Netanyahu are all agreed on a Middle East peace plan, but apparently you don't. I'd be interested if you want to elaborate on that.
48: Note that in the Ajay Peace Plan, defeat works as well as victory. So while ajay may have additional thoughts on the preferred winner, his plan, as articulated, is indifferent.
I guess ajay is arguing that Israel should have decisively won the 1948 war and conquered the entirety of Mandatory Palestine, but that this would not necessarily have resulted in the Arab population of the West Bank and Gaza either fleeing or getting kicked out? I suppose it's possible.
A bit that works in favor 36 is that many cultures encourage magnanimity in victory. So once you've won, you can show that you're good people by not destroying the people you've defeated, by being more reasonable than people expect, etc. That's a lot harder to do in a current or frozen struggle -- you don't want to create precedents that favor your opposition, or concede points that they can leverage against you.
Ok. Sorry if I misunderstood you about Palestine/Israel. But how does the result of the 67 war fit the idea that peace follows victory?
This is not to say you haven't got a good general rule. It's just that there are some obvious exceptions. Perhaps the destabilising factor is outside allies. Both Arabs and Israelis were dependent on foreign arms. But is the anything conflict nowadays where that isn't true?
54 Benny Morris argues that kicking the Arabs out was always part of the Jewish plan in that war. (It goes without saying that kicking the Jews it was the entirety of the Arab plan).
Three of the suicide bombers were from the same family, a local family with money. That seems unexpected.
43: Of course it depends on the war. I think liberals might have a tendency to cognitive dissonance in cases like this because a number of higher principles -- renunciation of war as policy (negotiate solutions); rule of law (treat like situations alike); egalitarianism (treat people alike) -- can conflict with its most basic principle, empiricism, which tells us every war is different, and often there are only choices between greater and lesser evils.
36 et seq: I was thinking mostly of civil wars, not international. I'd say though the EU (and Japan) is strong evidence for ajay. I don't know anything about Partition, but I think the contrast between 1971 (India wins, installs friendly Bangladeshi government, lasting peace) and all the other wars is telling.
In other cases we can contrast Biafra (state wins, though the war is prolonged by gun smuggling on aid flights), with the Ivory Coast (war frozen by international action in 2002, remains unresolved; bonus points for the ICC botching its trial of Gbagbo). In the Congo we can contrast the Simba and Shaba rebellions (state won with Western help, peace restored*) with the 1990s (nobody won, West never took a hand, resolved to the extent it has been by MONUC defeating militias in the Kivus). We also have Sierra Leone (peace plans failed, resolved by Britain defeating RUF) and Rwanda (peace plans failed, resolved by RPF winning the war).
*Peace under Mobutu, yes. Still better than the 1990s.
For the Turks of Cyprus, are they not better off living as a half-sovereign republic than as an oppressed minority in a Greek state?
Victory for the Bosniaks is that they continue to exist at all and mostly live in Bosnia. That's compared to the Serb plan which was to kill 'em all and let God sort 'em out.
The Armenians won in Nagorno-Karabakh, but it hasn't been all that great (although better for the Karabakh Armenians than for the Azeris who lived in and around Karabakh, or for the Armenians who lived elsewhere in Azerbaijan, although I don't think that Azeri independence was ever going to go particularly well for them absent a very different kind of Soviet Union), and you can't really call it a peace. The Abkhaz won themselves a very poor shadow state and Russian passports. Victory? More or less ditto for the South Ossetians. They could be opening up to the wider world along with other Georgian regions; instead they can go to and fro via the Roki tunnel and cheer as Russian soldiers niggle away a meter or two from Georgia here and there by moving the fence in the dead of night. Winning.
Which is just to repeat the comments above that every war is different and the details matter.
60: you could also add the Falklands where the US was pushing for a peace plan involving partition before the actual land campaign started.
Yes, there are some cases where the rule maybe doesn't work. But remember that the original idea for Israel was for a state with a massive non-Jewish population which would have had equal rights to the Jewish population - not for Palestine to be partitioned into a Jewish state and an Arab state. That would have been better, I think. Probably not achievable, at least not by the 1930s once both sides really get going on the murder.
Could someone expand in 52 because it seems to be saying Ireland was partitioned twice? Also Cyprus is very much a post colonial partition, I would say (as is Korea of course).
48: sure. Ireland: entire island granted home rule as Irish Free State in 1922. No partition of Ulster. No Troubles. Ireland probably better off as a result from 1922 onwards because it has the (at the time) rich industrial North.
64: Partition at independence then whatever you would call the agreement that ended the Troubles. It doesn't seem much like a partition to me, though I don't know the details, but it does seem like the kind of negotiated compromise settlement to a long-running civil conflict that you're objecting to in general.
I admit that it's not really clear to me how you're defining the type of conflict to which your theory applies.
cheer as Russian soldiers niggle away a meter or two from Georgia here and there by moving the fence in the dead of night.
This is so pathetic it could only be Russian. Imperialism reduced to a small angry child putting his feet on the other child's side of the car seat.
66: I wouldn't describe the GFA as a negotiated compromise settlement; both sides had clear territorial ambitions, one side achieved them completely, the other didn't at all. The GFA was a victory.
68: This report has it as more than a few, I was relyingon memory in my previous comment. Maybe in some places it's a few meters, maybe in others it's more. Salami tactics, in the Leninist way.
On the other hand, they clearly don't want Tbilisi, or they would have taken it in 2008. (I was there at the time, and probably would have made it to Armenia safely. The official Americans, and their families, who waited another three days to leave would have been well trapped in the capital.)
60: Biafra is pretty much the paradigm case against this argument. The world powers essentially took Ajay's argument and ran with it (the "quick kill" strategy) hoping the Nigerian federal army would triumph decisively and there would be an end of the matter. And...well it took three years and about 2.5 million casualties.
they clearly don't want Tbilisi, or they would have taken it in 2008
Or they were worried about what happens to countries who try to annexe smaller countries. There were a lot of aggressive noises coming from US Republicans in summer 2008. McCain especially.
71: major powers, notably the UK and the USSR, with at least the USA's benign neglect, chose to support the Nigerian federal government against Biafra in the hope this would lead to a rapid, decisive victory - the so-called quick kill - and then an enduring peace. It, er, didn't turn out like that and about two and a half million people died over three years. As for the enduring peace, it's true that the South didn't rise again, but Nigeria remained a military dictatorship until the 1990s and it has never been without varying levels of violent insurgency.
73: Nicolas Sarkozy claims that he told Putin that if he did that, he'd end up looking like George W. Bush.
74: On skimming wiki I'll concede Biafra wasn't a case of rapid victory* by international aid, but equally it isn't the counterexample you say it is. Per wiki, Biafra did have substantial external support: "De Gaulle made the decision to begin regular French arms shipments to Biafra on 17 or 18 October 1967" [right about the time the federal forces were beginning to make major advances] (source); "Clapham notes that France's military aid to Biafra prolonged the war for about eighteen months." (source); aid ferried via Gabon and Ivory Coast, which recognized Biafra.
And that's just state policies; but lurid's question was about pious liberals, and those aren't limited to states. If anything in fact I'd guess the thrust of her question was toward non-state liberals, and on that front we have the Biafran airlift:
By 1968 most of JCA's funding originated from the United States government [external support again, however incoherent] and was funneled through JCA.[27] At its peak in 1969, the airlift delivered an average of 250 metric tons of food each night to the estimated 1.5 to 2 million people dependent on food relief supplies, most of which was brought in by the airliftThat's more than 1/10 of the besieged population fed by aid, very significant support.
76. Perhaps the difference between Biafra and various other cases mentioned is that Biafra was swimming in oil. That makes the "frozen conflict" result much less likely.
77: Save Rwanda and Bangladesh, every case in 60 involved substantial external economic interests. Less so than Nigerian oil, but still there. In any case, the question isn't about what the considerations of policy are, but what they ought to be.
I am probably going to regret wading into this at all, but this whole discussion is surreal from a U.S. perspective, where my thoughts go first to Vietnam (victory -> stability, but as pf says in 53.2, there are two sides to the victory coin) and then to the wars in Afghanistan* and Iraq**, and beyond that to the end of open warfare between the U.S. and indigenous nations, all of which it is absolutely possible to shoehorn into a glib lesson like "You know what the best peace process by far is? The one that, historically, has the highest chance of actually producing a lasting peace? Victory." But it is a little hard for me to see the benefit of that lesson for current actors, and it's an extremely live issue in this still-nominally-democratic country, which is why I asked the question in 43 in the way that I did. I want explicit norms.
* 3000-comment discussion easy there
** I am absolutely not claiming Iraq as a counterexample, but it's such a fetid stew of both diplomatic and military mismanagement going on for decades that I'm not sure how to give the best account of it.
I owe you a substantial reply, Mossy, thank you. Punishing workday of compounding mistakes; I can barely write a sentence.
Also, though I called them bullshit in context, the platitudes in the Guardian piece are still worth repeating, if only to cancel out the bullshit from the fascists:
"They did not give priority to national security, there was a mix-up. They were talking about ethnic reconciliation, then they were talking about human rights issues, they were talking about individual freedoms," [Gotabaya Rajapaksa] said.
President Sirisena's government sought to forge reconciliation with minority Tamils and close the wounds of the war and launched investigations into allegations of rights abuse and torture against military officers.
Officials said many of these secret intelligence cells were disbanded because they faced allegations of abuse, including torture and extra judicial killings.
jihadi cells tend to have a mix of classes and personality typoes
Indeed.
especially policy by world powers
Me fail reading.
this whole discussion is surreal from a U.S. perspective,
Fair. What I had in mind was the cottage industry of negotiators and activists and transitional justice experts centered on the UN, and the failed peace plans associated with it (and in which of course the US is often heavily involved, though that will seldom reach public consciousness).
how useful do you think this insight is in guiding policy, especially policy by world powers? E.g. the scenario Mossy mentions, where "if liberal internationalists had picked a side instead [of] trying to talk it out that war might have ended a lot sooner"?
it is a little hard for me to see the benefit of that lesson for current actors, and it's an extremely live issue in this still-nominally-democratic country, which is why I asked the question in 43 in the way that I did. I want explicit norms.
Would you like a pony with that? I really don't think a systematic rigorous answer to that is possible. Scattered thoughts:
Norms of competence: empiricism.
In particular, any state before embarking on any policy of interfering in another's affairs must have filled an office with experts and linguists, and kept that office funded for decades, and listened to its counsel. In general, a state must know how wars are won and lost*. Beyond local specialist knowledge that means also study of military and diplomatic history, history from above, which the Anglophone academy at least has systematically ignored for decades. Practical policy formation will involve also cooperation among military, civilian, and academic personnel (I'm thinking of the Google employees refusing to work with DoD here).
Norms of practice:
Basically are intractable in the abstract, requiring weighting of incommensurable values with incomplete information (probable body count this year versus probability of rule of law in 10 years' time, for instance).
In practice though, given empirical competence, a state may go through a decision procedure for peace or war (or nothing)**; I'll take my dim memories of SL as a case. Is there a reasonable prospect of durable settlement? No, the LTTE negotiate in bad faith, think they can win, and don't trust third-party guarantees. Will Tamil Eelam and its people be better off independent? No. Will rump SL be better off without Tamil Eelam? No. Does LTTE have the ability to win and maintain a durable peace? No. Does rump SL? Yes.
All I can say in general is that supporting a side gives one leverage over that side, and thus an opportunity to mitigate harms and promote liberal goals. In reality, the SL offensive against LTTE was backed by the PRC, not the West or India, and the PRC got its various BRI concessions in return. If instead liberals had backed SL, different conditions might have been imposed: a magnanimous peace, a schedule for renormalizing politics, an FTA tied to verifiable labor protections on tea plantations, whatever.
*The US in particular (though it's by no means unique) has a really disastrous lack of this; the civilian leadership has no idea how to pick or pursue objectives at the political level, the military leadership no idea how to win wars at the military level (however proficient they may be at the tactical and operational levels).
**There's a huge literature on conflict termination, of which I've read none.
Though not a major power, you may find this paper on Denmark in Afghanistan interesting (I can't remember if I read the whole thing).
Hey, quit running up my response debt!
Bombing churches was last week. It's gone back to shooting in synagogues.
It's ok lk, if you default I'll be happy with a 99-year lease on your deepwater ports and oilfields.
Okay, okay, I will take time out from my urgent bean-counting this morning to ward off the resource curse. (Note that it turns out Sri Lanka's websites are .lk, but I am speaking only for myself.)
I can't quite explain why 36 raised my hackles so much, but in effectively asking for a probability range for past performance guaranteeing future results, I was trying to push ajay to strip out the hindsight bias a bit. Obviously he wasn't claiming that "military solutions or bust" is a universal formula for success, but I still wanted more context. I think it's fair to restrict the data set to "the cottage industry of negotiators and activists and transitional justice experts centered on the UN, and the failed peace plans associated with it," which at least gives you a context in which multilateral agreements and multilateral wars are viable alternatives. In the case of India/Pakistan and Partition I am also genuinely interested to know how much ajay/anyone thinks the outcomes could have been improved by military intervention -- for that one I really do want a counterfactual account -- because it's not easy for me to imagine. It also seems not unrelated to the successful "victory" outcome of WW2 that there was not a "victory" option on offer to oil the India-Pakistan transition in 1948. But argue it out!
In general, a state must know how wars are won and lost... The US in particular (though it's by no means unique) has a really disastrous lack of this; the civilian leadership has no idea how to pick or pursue objectives at the political level, the military leadership no idea how to win wars at the military level (however proficient they may be at the tactical and operational levels).
I agree with this wholeheartedly but I'm not an expert, and would be open to counterarguments. (It's endlessly fascinating to me how much effort and education and research goes into the U.S. cock-ups. I remember parts of No End in Sight vividly: e.g. not the exact quote, but Barbara Bodine saying something like "There was one way to get this right and forty ways to get it wrong, but I didn't realize at the time that we were going to go through all forty of those ways one after the other." I'd say there's about a 10% chance that I will get around to writing some long thing about Petraeus and doctrine formation, higher if someone gives me an arbitrary deadline after June 1.) In terms of "pick[ing] and pursu[ing] objectives at the political level," in the current government there is also a tug-of-war between ideological correctness and cronyism in terms of who gets influence, which makes the results very hard to predict, except that you can predict that they'll be pessimized. That might also be "endlessly fascinating" to observe if it weren't sickening and terrible. On the other hand the fact that we backed the losing side in Syria doesn't seem to have registered in the national consciousness at all, so maybe if the U.S. half-assedly backs losers for the foreseeable future, that will improve the odds of world peace? Wait, no, that's definitely not right...
So anyway: yeah, I'm basically satisfied with your response to my question under your "scattered thoughts" header and elsewhere, I think that's the right angle and the right level of skepticism/pessimism. Anything else I can think of to say will probably broaden the discussion to be uselessly unwieldy... but as I say, I take this stuff seriously even if Californians have limited political influence.
Oh wait one last thing:
study of military and diplomatic history, history from above, which the Anglophone academy at least has systematically ignored for decades
Is this really true? I never studied history formally (exception: one "Eastern Europe in Transition" class in college in 2000, which OMFG it looked so bad then and it looks so good now), but that seems amazing and dismaying.
P.S. IN HINDSIGHT
In the case of India/Pakistan and Partition I am also genuinely interested to know how much ajay/anyone thinks the outcomes could have been improved by military intervention
...is me being pissed off and venting, so discount accordingly.
I am truly impressed that my casual and low-powered grenade, dropped into such an unpromising stretch of water, has brought to the surface such a rich crop of intellectual fish. I ban myself.
I think that the counterfactual for Partition is not an externally imposed military solution but an independent and unified India. This is fairly widely accepted as a better alternative to what actually happened - certainly Partition is conventionally seen as a disaster which implies that not-partition would have been better. The Indian government and its armed forces would obviously in this case have been able to prevent mass intercommunal violence in the scale that occurred in 1947, as they had been doing so perfectly well since the last outbreak of intercommunal violence in 1857.
the fact that we backed the losing side in Syria
Isn't straightforwardly true. The FSA was of course an utter failure; but the US from 2014 (?) on was essentially fighting against IS and not for anything else in particular, and I think the counter-ISIL coalition can at this point be called a notable success. In the process the US has backed the SDF (meaning largely YPG) which has resulted in the Syrian Kurds holding a lot of ground and last I noticed heading for some kind of federal status under Damascus, which may (in theory) turn out to be a net gain for them (in terms of political status, without trying to weigh the costs of the war).
Is this really true?
For instance, here and here. ISTR a piece saying there is only one dedicated military history major left in the US, at (the) Ohio State University, but can't find it now. At my own ex-department, there were only two (out of maybe 12) historians-from-above, both now retired. Everyone left today is a social historian, most of them specialized on just one city. They do good work, but still. One city. And if you're a grad student who wants to do something else, good luck. One of the retired guys specialized in the British and French navies, their modernization and arms race in the 19th century, and on Allied sigint in WWII. All that knowledge is spectacularly relevant today, but don't know if he has anything like an inheritor anywhere in the world.
It's in Columbus, Ohio. Between Lane Avenue and the Death Kroger.
It only sounds funny if you aren't used to it.
Military history is definitely still a thing in the US. There's a whole society for it, with a list of graduate programs.
Sorry to have missed the peace through victory subthread. I was on my way home from California. The conquest of which, MAGA idiots notwithstanding, seems to be holding.
In the runup to Iraq, and I guess immediately post-invasion, a different set of morons pointed to postwar Germany and Japan as the models. See, you can reinvent a society. I would ask if they really thought we were going to visit the same scale of destruction on the Iraqis, and more importantly, if they thought we were really going to be able to convince a broad swath of Iraqi society that they'd been in the wrong and the whole disaster was their fault. The justice of our cause was apparently thought to be that self-evident.
97: Sure. But what fraction of the US political class will have studied, even at undergrad? That list is notably short on big names.
we were really going to be able to convince a broad swath of Iraqi society that they'd been in the wrong
Heck, it took 15 years after VE Day to convince a majority of German society that they'd been in the wrong, and I'm not even sure whether it's been achieved with Japan now.
Such assholes. That the welfare of actual Muslims is the last thing any self-appointed defender of the faith ever cares about.
Frozen Cyprus still causing very concrete problems today.
Seems I'm ridiculously optimistic. And weaksauce prescient.
A Muslim Sri Lankan cow-orker will not be going home on leave this summer. The initial terrorist incidents and riots were far from where his family lives but the other day when I asked him if his family was ok he looked worried.
Way too optimistic. How bad this would be if they'd targeted Buddhists instead, how low the Rajapaksas are. I'll keep hoping the voters call bullshit.