Brookings Press Blog

Vanda Felbab-Brown Analyzes the President’s Strategy in Afghanistan

What impact will the deployment of 30,000 additional U.S. troops have on Afghanistan? Is military force effective on its own as a means of counterinsurgency? What about alternatives to the announced strategy, such as immediate withdrawal of U.S. troops from Afghanistan or continuing with current troop deployments? Vanda Felbab-Brown, author of the just published book Shooting Up, answers these and other questions about President Obama’s Afghanistan strategy in a piece on the Brookings website.

Commenting on the differences between the strategies pursued by Presidents Bush and Obama, Felbab-Brown observes: “Under President Bush, the strategy remained . . . economy of force. The military effort, as well as the development effort, was never sufficiently resourced to allow for a sustainable momentum to develop on the side of the Afghan government and NATO. President Obama’s commitment of additional multifaceted resources provides an opportunity—though far from a guaranteed outcome—that such a strategic reversal will be achieved. Also, under President Obama’s strategy, there is, for the first time, a clear emphasis on the quality of governance and a sense that Afghan leaders need to be held accountable to the Afghan people and their international partners. There are no more blank checks. Finally, there is now a far stronger emphasis on the regional aspects of the Afghanistan-Pakistan strategy and the need to involve all of the important stakeholders in the region and worldwide.”

"Creating an Opportunity Society" discussed by Ron Brownstein in National Journal and Duncan Currie in National Review

This important new book by Brookings senior fellows Ron Haskins and Isabel Sawhill continues to receive coverage, garner praise, and spur discussion. In the National Journal, Ron Brownstein said that the book “collects decades of pragmatic insights into the challenge of re-creating an economy that works for all.”

In the National Review, Duncan Currie writes that policymakers “will find a veritable armory of intellectual firepower in Creating an Opportunity Society. . . . The authors have thought long and carefully about their subject matter. In many ways, their fair-minded and illuminating discussion is even more valuable than their proposals. Creating an Opportunity Society overflows with keen social and economic insights. It deserves the attention of conservative and liberal policymakers alike.”

- Learn more about author Ron Haskins

- Learn more about author Isabel Sawhill

- Read about Creating an Opportunity Society and view an interview with the authors

Chad Bown Op-Ed in Asian Wall Street Journal: “Free-Trade Greenshoots”

Recessions often bring high tariffs and trade wars, and recent figures from the World Bank show that industry requests for trade barriers are up 30% over the past year. But according to Chad Bown, there is cause for optimism as well. In an op-ed in the Asian edition of the Wall Street Journal, Bown writes that the "global economy may still stay on a pro-trade path." He points to a recent U.S. government decision to deny new trade barriers on imports of aluminum pistons from Argentina and China's use of the World Trade Organization to formally question barriers instead of resorting to retaliatory measures. Bown discusses the WTO's dispute settlement system in his new book Self-Enforcing Trade: Developing Countries and WTO Dispute Settlement.

- Read the op-ed

- Learn more about Self-Enforcing Trade

“Performance Incentives” in Education Week: Article Discusses Authors’ Findings on Using Pay for Educational Change

Education Week takes a look at the research presented in Performance Incentives: Their Growing Impact on American K-12 Education edited by Matthew G. Springer:

While much of the national debate over performance incentives for teachers has centered on bonuses based on student test scores, a new book suggests that such incentives come in all shapes and sizes, and offers some new research on little-studied aspects of those strategies.

The articles goes on to discuss the potential of incentives for weeding out ineffective teachers, retaining good ones, and recruiting hard-to-staff schools.

- Read the full article

- Learn more about Performance Incentives

South Asia expert Bruce Riedel talks with PBS NewsHour on President Obama’s options in region and his book "The Search for al Qaeda"

Bruce Riedel, a former CIA officer and chair of President Obama’s interagency review of policy toward Afghanistan and Pakistan, was recently interviewed on the PBS NewsHour. He spoke with Margaret Warner about the administration’s strategic options in Afghanistan and his book The Search for al Qaeda.

From the interview:

MARGARET WARNER: Now, in the strategy review, and also in your book, you advocated and advocate massive investment in development, in economic security, in governance.

There are again many who say Afghanistan's never had a strong central government, a strong functioning operation like that, and that it's really a fool's errand for us to get mired in that.

BRUCE RIEDEL: Afghanistan shouldn't be measured against the standards of the United States or Western Europe. It should be measured against the standards of the region it works in.

We don't have to build a modern state in Afghanistan to improve it. Simply building roads, so that farmers can get their crops to market, will fundamentally change the dynamics of this country.

- Read the full transcript or watch the video

- Learn more about The Search for al Qaeda

Will Sarah Palin be the 2012 Republican nominee for president? How the GOP’s winner-take-all primaries could boost her chances

The release of former Alaska Governor Sarah Palin’s new book, Going Rogue, is creating a lot of buzz. Many political observers wonder if her book tour is laying the groundwork for a run for president in 2012. Could such a polarizing figure win the Republican nomination?  Walter Shapiro outlines a possible scenario in his Politics Daily column.

Republican Party rules are made-to-order for a well-funded insurgent named Sarah to sweep the primaries before anyone figures out how to stop her. If Palin can maintain, say, 35-percent support in a multi-candidate presidential field, then she is the odds-on favorite for the GOP nomination.

The secret of Palin's presidential potential is the Republican Party's affection for winner-take-all primaries. According to my friend Elaine Kamarck's invaluable new book, Primary Politics, 43 percent of the 2008 Republican delegates were selected in primaries where the winner corralled all the delegates by winning a state or congressional district.

Illustrating how candidates have used the delegate counts to create momentum is one of the topics Kamarck discusses in Primary Politics. The book offers an insider’s view of how the presidential nomination process became the often baffling system we have today.

- Read the full article

- Learn more about Primary Politics

Clive Crook discusses “Creating an Opportunity Society” in Financial Times: “book is full of excellent analysis and proposals”

In his Financial Times column, Clive Crook finds much to like in Creating an Opportunity Society, the new book by Ron Haskins and Isabel Sawhill.

The great virtue of this book—a comprehensive policy manual and the outline of a new social contract—is not just in recognizing that upward mobility in the U.S. is less than it should be, but is in calling for action, and in insisting on fiscal discipline. Its real strength is its distinctively American remedies, with their emphasis on rewarding effort rather than idleness, and insisting on personal responsibility.

Crook applauds the bold centrist and fiscally responsible policies Haskins and Sawhill outline to beef up spending on early education, improve schools, provide incentives to work, and postpone having children until after marriage.

- Read the column

- Learn more about Creating an Opportunity Society

The Cost of Doing Nothing: Not Enacting Health Care Reform Comes with a Hefty Price Tag

An op-ed in the Boston Globe argues that Congress failing to deliver on health care reform carries a significant economic cost. Linda Bilmes, coauthor of The People Factor, and Rosemarie Day, deputy director of the Commonwealth Health Insurance Connector Authority of Massachusetts, write:

Less health insurance equates to more premature deaths, and shorter life expectancy. It also impairs the quality of life—and hence the productivity—of those who are living. This is evident in comparing the health of Americans who live in states with high levels of insurance with those who do not.

Bilmes and Day argue that the current debate over whether the country can afford the estimated $850 billion price tag of health care reform misses the point. Doing nothing comes with a hefty cost, as well, because the uninsured impose big financial and economic costs on the United States.

- Read the op-ed

- Learn more about The People Factor

Vanda Felbab-Brown Blogs on the Karzai Brothers for The New York Times

Brookings fellow Vanda Felbab-Brown, author of the forthcoming Shooting Up: Counterinsurgency and the War on Drugs, joins Robert D. Kaplan (Center for a New American Security), Frederick W. Kagan (American Enterprise Institute), Stephen Biddle (Council on Foreign Relations), and Andrew J. Bacevich (Boston University) on the New York Times blog, Room for Debate, to discuss the Karzai brothers and the challenges they create for U.S. policy in Afghanistan. Numerous reports have linked Ahmed Wali Karzai, the leading power broker in Kandahar and brother of President Hamid Karzai, to drug trafficking. But as Felbab-Brown points out, the Karzais are only the tip of the iceberg: “Indeed, many power brokers in Afghanistan—including some of today’s staunchest eradicators of the poppy crop and members of the Ministry of Interior’s counternarcotics section—have been involved in the drug trade. Because opium constitutes between a third and a half of the country’s gross domestic product (and has been for 20 years), it is deeply embedded in the society’s socio-economic fabric, political arrangements and power relations.”

- Follow the discussion at Room for Debate.

- Learn more about Shooting Up.

Is America truly the “Land of Opportunity”? Isabel Sawhill and Ron Haskins dispel 5 myths

Hard work + talent = financial success

For generations, Americans have believed that this formula will allow them to get ahead in our land of opportunity. But do Americans really enjoy more economic opportunity than people in other countries? Is each generation better off than the previous one? Ron Haskins and Isabel Sawhill provide somewhat surprising answers to such questions in a myth-busting piece in Sunday’s Washington Post (October 31).

- Read “5 myths about our land of opportunity”

- Learn more about Haskins and Sawhill’s new book Creating an Opportunity Society