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Since the conflicts over Abkhazia and South Ossetia in the early 1990s, violence has erupted several times in Georgia, most notably in August 2008. Large-scale human rights violations characterized the August 2008 war, including the displacement of almost 150,000 people. By the time the fighting ended, Georgia had lost the last areas it controlled in South Ossetia and Abkhazia, and Russia subsequently recognized the independence of both. While most of those displaced in the August 2008 war have returned, over 200,000 people from earlier conflicts remain displaced.

On November 19, the Brookings-Bern Project on Internal Displacement will host a discussion of current issues around human rights, democracy and displacement in Georgia. The event will feature a presentation by Tinatin Khidasheli, international secretary of the Republican Party of Georgia, and Giorgi Chkheidze, executive director of the Georgian Young Lawyers’ Association. Following their remarks, Sam Patten, senior program manager for Eurasia at Freedom House, and Nadine Walicki, country analyst for the Internal Displacement Monitoring Centre, will join the discussion.

Senior Fellow Elizabeth Ferris, co-director of the Brookings-Bern Project, will provide introductory remarks and moderate the discussion. After the program, panelists will take audience questions.

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• Human Rights, Democracy and Displacement in Georgia

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Editor's Note: This is the second part of a two piece series on internal displacement that originally appeared online in TerraNullius. The first part is available here.
 
This post continues our discussion of the study entitled "From Responsibility to Response: Assessing National Response to Internal Displacement" recently released by the Brookings-LSE Project on Internal Displacement.

Addressing housing, land, and property (HLP) issues is a key component of national responsibility. Principle 29 of the non-binding but widely accepted Guiding Principles on Internal Displacement emphasizes that competent authorities have a duty to assist IDPs to recover their property and possessions or, when recovery is not possible, to obtain appropriate compensation or another form of just reparation.

The 2005 Framework for National Responsibility – which set the benchmarks we applied in our current study – reaffirms this responsibility (in Benchmark 10, “support durable solutions”) and flags a number of the challenges that often arise, such as IDPs’ lack of formal title or other documentary evidence of land and property ownership; the destruction of any such records due to conflict or natural disaster; and discrimination against women in laws and customs regulating property ownership and inheritance. The Framework for National Responsibility stresses that, “Government authorities should anticipate these problems and address them in line with international human rights standards and in an equitable and non-discriminatory manner.”

The extent to which a government has safeguarded HLP rights, including by assisting IDPs to recover their housing, land, and property thus was among the indicators by which we evaluated the efforts of each of the 15 governments examined in our study. Our findings emphasized the importance of both an adequate legal and policy framework for addressing displacement related HLP issues and the role that bodies charged with adjudication and monitoring can play in ensuring implementation.

HLP Law and Policy Frameworks

One of the most encouraging signs of governments taking seriously their responsibility to address internal displacement has been the development, adoption and implementation in all regions of the world of specific laws and policies that respect the rights of IDPs. Some of the countries surveyed have developed laws, decrees, orders, and policies that protect IDPs’ HLP rights, but these measures are also not without their limits and challenges. A few examples are presented below.

In Colombia, while Law 387 on Internal Displacement (1997) stipulates the right of IDPs to compensation and restitution (Article 10), the government has been hard-pressed to establish measures enabling them to realize that right (see further, below). In Colombia, the constitutional complaint process – the acción de tutela petition procedure – has made the government accountable to IDPs and has influenced government policy toward IDPs, including the policy of allocation of government assistance such as housing subsidies.

In Georgia, the legal framework for IDP protection includes a property restitution law for IDPs from South Ossetia, adopted in 2007, which provided for the establishment of a Commission on Restitution and Compensation; however, this body never became operational and the status of the law is unclear following the August 2008 conflict. The State Strategy on IDPs, also adopted in 2007, protects IDPs against “arbitrary/illegitimate eviction” and sets out a large-scale program for improving the living conditions of IDPs in their place of displacement, all the while reaffirming their right to property restitution.[1]

Displaced families whose homes were destroyed or damaged during the August 2008 received $15,000 from the government to rebuild their homes, although many IDPs have held off reconstruction efforts due to concerns about insecurity. The RSG on IDPs recommended in 2009 the established of a comprehensive mechanism for resolving HLP claims for both the South Ossetia and Abkhazia conflicts. In addition, in 2010, Georgia adopted procedures for vacating and reallocating IDP housing, which, among other things, addresses those cases in which removal of IDPs from a collective center is ordered by the government and may require an eviction, and spells out safeguards for guaranteeing the right of IDPs.[2]

Iraq’s 2005 Constitution protects Iraqis against forced displacement (Article 44(2)). Through its Property Claims Commission, formerly the Commission on the Resolution of Real Property Disputes established by Order No. 2 (2006), Iraq has sought to recover property seized between 1968 and 2003, although significant gaps and challenges remain. For those internally displaced between 2006 and 2008, Prime Ministerial Order 101 (2008) sets out a framework for providing property restitution for registered IDPs with a view to encouraging and facilitating their return to Baghdad governorate, the origin of the majority of post-2006 IDPs and the location of the majority of post-2006 returnees. However, there have been few claims; many IDPs lack the necessary documentation, do not trust government institutions, fear retribution or cannot afford the requisite costs.[3]

In Afghanistan, where national authorities have not yet defined “internally displaced persons,” property and land rights of IDPs are either specifically addressed or generally implicated in substantive and procedural provisions found in a series of executive acts that have been issued since 2001, including the most IDP-specific of them, Presidential Decree No. 104 on Land Distribution for Settlement to Eligible Returnees and Internally Displaced Persons (2005). This decree sets forth a basic framework for distributing government land to both IDPs and returnees as a means of addressing their housing needs. However, IDPs seeking access to land are required to provide their national identity cards (tazkera) and documentation proving their internal displacement status—documentation which they may have lost. Moreover, the decree does not recognize other fundamental rights or needs of the internally displaced; it is valid only in areas of origin; and its implementation has been marred by inefficiency and corruption within the very weak ministry that is tasked with its implementation.

Although the 2006 peace agreement in Nepal  included a commitment to return occupied land and property and to allow for the return of displaced persons, four years after the peace agreement (and three years after the adoption of a national policy), between 50,000 and 70,000 people remained displaced.  Nearly half of the returnees interviewed by the Nepal IDP Working Group reported serious land, housing and property problems.  Of the more than 10,000 claims for compensation for property filed in 2007 only 2,000 families had received support to reconstruct or repair their houses by 2009.  It is widely reported that IDPs with non-Maoist political affiliations have been the least likely to recover land and property.

In Turkey, the government has yet to take full responsibility for displacement caused by its security forces against a largely Kurdish population. In its Law 5233 on Compensation of Damages That Occurred Due to Terror and the Fight against Terror (27 July 2004) and its Return to Village and Rehabilitation Program, displacement is defined in terms of “terrorism” or the “fight” against it. This law does not specifically focus on internal displacement, but it does benefit IDPs among other affected populations. Law 5233 and its related amendments and regulations compensate for “material damages suffered by persons due to terrorist acts or activities undertaken during the fight against terror” between 1987 and 2004. Compensation is provided for three types of damage: loss of property; physical injuries, disabilities, medical treatment, death and funerals; and inability to access property due to measures taken during “the fight against terrorism.”

According to the law, compensation is to be determined by damage assessment commissions (DACs) at the provincial level, with funding provided by the Ministry of the Interior. From 2004 to August 2009, the commissions received just over 360,000 applications. Of those, over 190,000 claims were decided: 120,000 were approved and the claimants awarded compensation; the remaining 70,000 were denied. Around $1.4 billion in compensation was awarded, of which close to $1.1 billion has been paid.[4] The existing legal and policy framework do not adequately address the obstacles to return, including the village guard system, insecurity and the presence of landmines and unexploded ordnance.

In Kenya, the government’s promotion of return included a National Humanitarian Emergency Fund for Mitigation and Resettlement of Victims of 2007 Post-Election Violence which was to meet the full costs of resettlement of IDPs, including reconstruction of basic housing, replacement of household effects and rehabilitation of infrastructure. But in practice, the government has been criticized for promoting return before conditions were safe. The government has also tended to focus on IDPs who own land and to attach durable solutions to land; there is no clear strategy for dealing with landless IDPs, such as squatters and non-farmers.

Awareness among IDPs as to their housing, land, and property rights under existing law – where there is law addressing those rights – is inadequate in many instances. For example, in Turkey, about half of IDPs surveyed in 2006 were not aware of their entitlements under the Return to Village and Rehabilitation Program or the Law on Compensation. [5]

National Human Rights Institutions and Constitutional Courts

In some cases, national human rights institutions (NHRIs) and constitutional courts have a critically important role to play in supporting as well as in holding governments accountable to guarantee the rights of IDPs. In a number of the countries our study examined, the work of NHRIs on internal displacement has included a focus on HLP issues.

In Georgia, for example, the Public Defender has been actively monitoring and reporting on the country-wide housing program begun in 2009 and has raised concerns about evictions of IDPs and the quality of housing in relocation sites. The Public Defender’s office also has undertaken a study on the conditions of the hidden majority of IDPs living in private accommodation rather than in collective centers.

The Afghanistan Independent Human Rights Commission has reported on and raised concerns about the large number of IDPs living in urban slums and informal settlements and about the fact that many IDPs were unable to return to their homes due to disputes over land and property.

Constitutional courts have in some instances played a role in strengthening the national legal framework for protecting the property rights of IDPs. Notably, Colombia’s activist Constitutional Court, in its Decision T-821 in October 2007, ordered the government to ensure respect for IDPs’ right to reparation and property restitution. In January 2009, the Constitutional Court ordered the government to comprehensively address land rights issues and to establish mechanisms to prevent future violations.

Subsequently, the government has sought to ensure these rights by adopting in 2011 the historic and ambitious Law 1448, known as the Victims and Land Restitution Law. In this law, government acknowledges for the first time ever the existence of an internal armed conflict in Colombia, and recognizes as “victims” those individuals or communities whose rights were violated under international humanitarian law or international human rights law. The law regulates reparations for all victims of the armed conflict since 1985 – numbering over 5 million – including through land restitution or compensation for IDPs which is to occur over the next decade.

However, restitution of land does not guarantee returnees’ security and may even endanger people given that land disputes and seizures remain a driving force of displacement. Aiming to prevent further victimization of returnees as a result of insecurity and violence, the government established a new security body, the Integrated Center of Intelligence for Land Restitution (Centro Integrado de Inteligencia para la Restitución de Tierras, also known as CI2-RT) within the Ministry of Defense. Additional participants include the Office of the Vice President, the Ministry of Justice and Interior, the Department of Administrative Security (DAS), Social Action (Acción Social), Incoder, and organizations representing victims of violence. Time will tell how successful the implementation of this ambitious law will be.

In Georgia, the Constitutional Court has also played an important role by recognizing the rights of IDPs to purchase property without losing their IDP status or in any way jeopardizing their right to return.

Conclusion

Securing HLP rights for IDPs is, of course, a key component of finding durable solutions to displacement. The study found that land and property disputes are almost always sources or manifestations of lingering conflict and often an obstacle to IDPs’ free exercise of their right to return.  While some governments have made efforts to provide mechanisms for property restitution or compensation, those mechanisms have rarely been adequate to deal—at least in a timely manner—with the scale and complexity of the problem. National human rights institutions and constitutional courts can play a key role in holding governments accountable for HLP and other rights and freedoms of IDPs.

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[1] Government of Georgia, State Strategy for Internally Displaced Persons–Persecuted Persons, Chapter V.

[2] The Standard Operating Procedures for Vacation and Reallocation of IDPs for Durable Housing Solutions (2010) (www.mra.gov.ge)

[3] IDMC, Iraq: Little New Displacement but around 2.8 Million Iraqis Remain Internally Displaced: A Profile of the Internal Displacement Situation, 4 March, 2010, p. 240 (www.internal-displacement.org)

[4] IDMC, Turkey: Need for Continued Improvement in Response to Protracted Displacement: A Profile of the Internal Displacement Situation, 26 October 2009, p. 12, citing correspondence with the government of Turkey, 17 September 2009 (www.internal-displacement.org)

[5] Hacettepe University, Institute of Population Studies, "Findings of the Turkey Migration and Internally Displaced Population Survey," press release, 6 December 2006, cited in IDMC, Turkey: Need for Continued Improvement in Response to Protracted Displacement: A Profile of the Internal Displacement Situation, 26 October 2009, p. 11 (www.internal-displacement.org)

       

As the Obama administration copes with Russia’s annexation of Crimea and continuing pressure on Ukraine, its actions invariably invite comparison to the Bush administration’s response to the 2008 Georgian-Russian war. But as the Obama White House readies potentially more potent economic sanctions against Russia, former Bush administration officials are bandying a revisionist history of the Georgia conflict that suggests a far more robust American response than there actually was.

Neither White House had good options for influencing Russian President Vladimir Putin. And this time, the fast-moving developments on the ground in Ukraine confront the United States with tough choices. Because the West will not go to war over Crimea, U.S. and European officials must rely on political, diplomatic and financial measures to punish Moscow, while seeking to launch negotiations involving Russia in order to de-escalate and ultimately stabilize the Ukraine situation. They are not having an easy time of it.

Neither did the Bush administration during the 2008 Georgia-Russia war. In a brief, five-day conflict, the Russian army routed its outnumbered and outgunned Georgian opponent and advanced to within a short drive of the Georgian capital, Tbilisi. Bush officials ruled out military options and found that, given the deterioration in U.S.-Russian relations over the previous five years, they had few good levers to influence the Kremlin. The sanctions Washington applied at the time had little resonance in Moscow.

In recent days, however, former Bush administration officials have described a forceful and effective U.S. response in Georgia. On “Fox News Sunday” on March 16, former senior White House adviser Karl Rove told Chris Wallace, “What the United States did was it sent warships to, to the Black Sea, it took the combat troops that Georgia had in Afghanistan, and airlifted them back, sending a very strong message to Putin that ‘you’re going to be facing combat-trained, combat-experienced Georgian forces.’ And not only that, but the United States government is willing to give logistical support to get them there, and this stopped them.”

Rove was echoing what former Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice wrote in a March 7 op-ed in The Washington Post: “After Russia invaded Georgia in 2008, the United States sent ships into the Black Sea, airlifted Georgian military forces from Iraq back to their home bases and sent humanitarian aid. Russia was denied its ultimate goal of overthrowing the democratically elected government.” Really? These statements do not match well with the history of the conflict.

War broke out the night of Aug. 7, when Georgian President Mikhail Saakashvili ordered his troops into the breakaway region of South Ossetia, after Russian forces shelled Georgian villages just outside South Ossetia. The Russians — by appearances, spoiling for a fight — responded swiftly with massive force. They turned the Georgian army back and overran much of Georgia.

As has been widelyreported, when the conflict began, one of Georgia’s five army brigades was serving as part of the coalition force in Iraq (not Afghanistan, as Rove claimed). On Aug. 10, U.S. C-17s began returning the brigade to Tbilisi, and it promptly went into combat.

The brigade was well-trained and experienced — but in counterinsurgency operations for Iraq, not combined arms operations. Facing a larger and far better-armed opponent, the brigade added little to the failing Georgian effort to halt the Russian advance. On Aug. 12, Moscow announced a cease-fire. French President Nicolas Sarkozy traveled to the Russian and Georgian capitals to formalize an end to the hostilities.

Did the U.S. airlift of the Georgian troops to Tbilisi change the tide of battle or Moscow’s political calculations? No. The Russian army handily drove them back.

What about the deployment of U.S. Navy ships to the Black Sea? The guided missile destroyer USS McFaul did enter the Black Sea to deliver humanitarian supplies to Georgia, passing through the Bosporus on Aug. 22 — 10 days after the cease-fire.

No evidence suggests these actions had much, if any, impact on Putin’s decision making. The Russians halted their offensive short of Tbilisi, figuring that occupying the capital was unnecessary. They thought — as did many in Georgia and the West — that the political shock of the rout would suffice to bring down Saakashvili’s government (though, in the end, it did not).

U.S. C-17s did fly humanitarian supplies to Tbilisi, but President Bush ruled out military action. His administration imposed modest penalties on Russia, ratcheting down bilateral relations, freezing a U.S.-Russia civil nuclear cooperation agreement and ending support for Moscow’s bid to join the World Trade Organization. U.S. officials found that they had little leverage to affect Moscow’s behavior.

The Obama administration has applied similar measures as it seeks to sway Putin again, but it has added a new penalty: visa and financial sanctions targeted at individual Russians, including some close to Putin. On March 20, the president also announced a new executive order to enable U.S. sanctions against key sectors of the Russian economy, including finance, energy and defense — the kinds of tough penalties that the United States has not previously applied against Moscow.

Despite the bluster of former Bush administration officials today, Washington in fact has a stronger hand in the current crisis in Ukraine in one other regard. In 2008, many European states held Saakashvili partially responsible for triggering the war with the Georgian advance into South Ossetia. Ukraine, by contrast, has acted with great restraint. This time, nearly all of Europe agrees that Russia’s actions are out of bounds. Sure enough, European states also appear more ready to sanction Russia than in 2008. Along with the various sanctions the U.S. alone has announced, European Union officials last week also announced visa and financial sanctions on individual Russians.

These moves might not end up shaking Putin from his course, but applying the new executive order could inflict real pain on the Russian economy — something Washington did not accomplish in 2008. Those who faced the challenge of punishing Russia over Georgia should understand the complexities of dealing with Putin and, at a minimum, cut the current administration a little slack.

Read the original article at POLITICO Magazine»

       

       

       

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On April 30, 2007, the Brookings Center on the United States and Europe held its fourth annual conference. As in previous years, the annual conference brought together scholars, officials, and policymakers from both sides of the Atlantic to examine the evolving roles of the United States and Europe in the global arena. Panel discussions covered some critical issues about Europe and the U.S.-Europe relationship: "The French Elections", "NATO and Afghanistan" and "Islam in Europe". Panelists included, among others, Lt. General Karl Eikenberry, Deputy Chairman of the NATO Military Committee; Ashraf Ghani, former Finance Minister of Afghanistan; Tufyal Choudhury of Durham University; Philip Gordon of the Brookings Institution; and Corine Lesnes from Le Monde.

8:30 a.m.		Continental breakfast available
8:50 a.m.		Welcome and Introduction Strobe Talbott, President, The Brookings Institution
9:00 - 10:30 a.m.		"The French Elections" Chair: Jim Hoagland, The Washington Post Panelists: Laurent Cohen-Tanugi, Skadden Arps; Notre Europe Corine Lesnes, Le Monde Philip Gordon, The Brookings Institution
10:30 - 10:45 p.m.		Break
10:45 a.m. - 12:15 p.m.		"NATO in Afghanistan" Chair: Carlos Pascual, The Brookings Institution Panelists: Lt. General Karl Eikenberry, Deputy Chairman of the NATO Military Committee Ashraf Ghani, former Finance Minister of Afghanistan Marvin Weinbaum, Middle East Institute
12:15 - 1:30 p.m.		Buffet Lunch (Saul/Zilkha)
1:30 - 3:00 p.m.		"Islam in Europe" Chair: Jeremy Shapiro, The Brookings Institution Panelists: Daniel Benjamin, The Brookings Institution Tufyal Choudhury, Durham University Jonathan Laurence, Boston College

The Center on the United States and Europe Annual Conference is made possible by the generous support of the German Marshall Fund of the United States

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• Transcript (.pdf)

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Low-Income Boys in Higher Inequality Areas Drop Out of School More Often than Low-Income Boys in Lower Inequality Areas, Limiting Social Mobility, New Brookings Paper Finds
“Economic despair” may contribute if those at the bottom do not believe they have the ability to achieve middle class status

Greater income gaps between those at the bottom and middle of the income distribution lead low-income boys to drop out of high school more often than their counterparts in lower inequality areas, suggesting that there is an important link between income inequality and reduced rates of upward mobility, according to a new paper presented today at the Brookings Panel on Activity. The finding has implications for social policy, implying a need for interventions that focus on bolstering low-income adolescents' perceptions of what they could achieve in life.

In “Income Inequality, Social Mobility, and the Decision to Drop Out Of High School,” Brookings Nonresident Senior Fellow and University of Maryland economics professor Melissa S. Kearney and Wellesley economics professor Phillip B. Levine propose a channel through which income inequality might lead to less upward mobility—often assumed to be the case but not yet fully proven. The conventional thinking among economists is that income inequality provides incentives for individuals to invest more in order to achieve the higher income position in society, but Kearney and Levine observe that if low-income youth view middle-class life as out of reach, they might decide to invest less in their own economic future.

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See an interactive map of inequality by state, plus more findings »

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The authors focus on income inequality in the lower half of the income distribution, as measured by income gaps between the 10th and 50th percentiles of the income distribution rather than income gaps between the the top and bottom of the income distribution, which has been more of a focus in popular culture. They show this "lower-tail" inequality is more relevant to the lives of poor youth because the middle is a more realistic ambition. Furthermore, their research could reconcile a puzzle: social mobility does not appear to be falling, despite the rise in income inequality. But, as Kearney and Levine point out, U.S. income inequality has been rising because the top of the distribution has been pulling away from the middle, not because the bottom is falling farther behind the middle.

The authors look specifically at high school drop-out rates through a geographic lens, noting the link between highly variable rates of high school completion and income inequality across the country. One-quarter or more of those who start high school in the higher inequality states of Louisiana, Mississippi, Georgia, and the District Columbia fail to graduate in a four-year period, as compared to only around 10 percent in Vermont, Wisconsin, North Dakota, and Nebraska—lower inequality states. Their econometric analysis goes on to show that low-income youth—boys in particular—are 4.1 percentage points more likely to drop out of high school by age 20 if they live in a high-inequality location relative to those who live in a low-inequality location.

Kearney and Levine examine a number of potential explanations for this link, including differences in educational inputs, poverty rates, demographic composition, and other factors. Ultimately, the evidence suggests that there is something specific about areas with greater income gaps that lead low-income boys there to drop out of school at higher rates than low-income boys elsewhere. The authors' research suggests that adolescents make educational decisions based on their perceived returns to investing in their educational development: a greater distance to climb to get to the middle of the income distribution could lead to a sense that economic success is unlikely—what they term “economic despair.”

"Income inequality can negatively affect the perceived returns to investment in education from the perspective of an economically disadvantaged adolescent,” they write. “Perceptions beget perceptions."

Digging into reasons students themselves give for dropping out, they find that low-income students from more unequal places are more likely to give up on their educational pursuits. Surprisingly, survey evidence shows that academic performance does not have as large an impact on low-income students in high inequality states: 51 percent of dropouts in the least unequal states reported that they dropped out because they were performing poorly, as compared to only 21 percent of students who dropped out in the most unequal states.

The finding suggests that economic despair could play an important role: if a student perceives a lower benefit to remaining in school, then he or she will choose to drop out at a lower threshold of academic difficulty. They also note that while the wage premium of completing high school should reduce the dropout rate, household income inequality has an offsetting negative effect.

The choice between staying in school and dropping out may reflect actual or perceived differences from the benefits of graduating. For instance, the authors note their past research showing that youth from low-income households who grow up in high lower-tail inequality states face lifetime incomes that are over 30 percent lower than similar children in lower inequality states. They also highlight other research showing that the overwhelming majority of 9th graders aspire to go to college, but by 11th grade, low-SES students are substantially less likely to expect they will enroll in college, even among those students with high test scores.

"There are important policy implications for what types of programs are needed to improve the economic trajectory of children from low-SES backgrounds," they write. "Successful interventions would focus on giving low income youth reasons to believe they have the opportunity to succeed. Such interventions could focus on expanded opportunities that would improve the actual return to staying in school, but they could also focus on improving perceptions by giving low-income students a reason to believe they can be the "college-going type." For example, interventions might take the form of mentoring programs that connect youth with successful adult mentors and school and community programs that focus on establishing high expectations and providing pathways to graduation. They could also take the form of early-childhood parenting programs that work with parents to create more nurturing home environments to build self-esteem and engender positive behaviors."

Read the full paper from Kearney and Levine here »

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• How “economic despair” affects high school graduation rates for America’s poorest students

       

       

I was honored today to speak at the kick off meeting of the new ReFormers Caucus. This group of over 100 former members of the U.S. Senate, the House, and governors of both parties, has come together to fight for meaningful campaign finance reform. In the bipartisan spirit of the caucus, I shared speaking duties with Professor Richard Painter, who was the Bush administration ethics czar and my predecessor before I had a similar role in the Obama White House. 

As I told the distinguished audience of ReFormers (get the pun?) gathered over lunch on Capitol Hill, I wish they had existed when in my Obama administration role I was working for the passage of the Disclose Act. That bill would have brought true transparency to the post-Citizens United campaign finance system, yet it failed by just one vote in Congress.  But it is not too late for Americans, working together, to secure enhanced transparency and other campaign finance changes that are desperately needed.  Momentum is building, with increasing levels of public outrage, as reflected in state and local referenda passing in Maine, Seattle and San Francisco just this week, and much more to come at the federal, state and local level.

       

       

       

       

       

Executive Summary

At the invitation of President George W. Bush, the G20 leaders met on November 15, 2008, in Washington, DC, in response to the worldwide financial and economic crisis. With this summit meeting the reality of global governance shifted surprisingly quickly. Previously, major global economic, social and environmental issues were debated in the small, increasingly unrepresentative and often times ineffectual circle of G8 leaders. Now, there is a larger, much more legitimate summit group which can speak for over two-thirds of the world’s population and controls 90% of the world’s economy.

The successful first G20 Summit provides a platform on which President-elect Obama can build in forging an inclusive and cooperative approach for resolving the current financial and economic crisis. Rather than get embroiled in a debate about which country is in and which country is out of the summit, the new U.S. administration should take a lead in accepting the new summit framework for now and focus on the substantive issues. Aside from tackling the current crisis, future G20 summits should also drive the reform of the international financial institutions and address other major global concerns—climate change, poverty and health, and energy among others. With its diverse and representative membership of key countries and with a well-managed process of summit preparation and follow-up the new G20 governance structure would allow for a more inclusive deliberation and more effective response to today’s complex global challenges and opportunities.

Policy Brief #168

A Successful G20 Summit—A Giant Step Forward

Once announced, there was speculation that the G20 Summit would be at best a distraction and at worst a costly failure, with a lame duck U.S. president hobbled by a crisis-wracked economy and a president-elect impotently waiting at the sidelines, with European leaders bickering over seemingly arcane matters, and with the leaders of the emerging economies sitting on the fence, unwilling or unprepared to take responsibility for fixing problems not of their making.

As it turned out, the first G20 Summit was by most standards a success. It served as a platform for heads of state to address the current financial turmoil and the threats of the emerging economic crisis facing not only the U.S. and Europeans, but increasingly also the rest of the world. The communiqué unmistakably attributes blame for the crisis where it belongs—to the advanced countries. It lays out a set of principles and priorities for crisis management and an action plan for the next four months and beyond, and it promises to address the longer-term agenda of reform of the global financial system. Very importantly, it also commits the leaders to meet again in April 2009 under the G20 umbrella. This assures that the November G20 Summit was not a one-off event, but signified the beginning of a new way of managing the world economy. The U.S. Treasury, which apparently drove the decision to hold the G20 rather than a G8 summit and which led the brief preparation process, deserves credit for this outcome.

A Long Debate over Global Governance Reform Short-circuited

With this successful summit a number of unresolved issues in global governance were pushed aside virtually overnight:

• The embarrassing efforts of past G8 summits to reach out to the leaders of emerging market economies with ad hoc invitations to join as part-time guests or through the well-meaning expedient of the “Heiligendamm Process”—under which a G8+5 process was to be institutionalized—were overtaken by the fact of the G20 summit.
• A seemingly endless debate among experts about what is the optimal size and composition for an expanded summit—G13, G14, G16, G20, etc. —was pragmatically resolved by accepting the format of the already existing G20 of finance ministers and central bank presidents, which has functioned well since 1999. With this, the Pandora’s Box of country selection remained mercifully closed. This is a major accomplishment, which is vitally important to preserve at this time.
• The idea of a “League of Democracies” as an alternative to the G8 and G20 summits, which had been debated in the U.S. election, was pushed aside by the hard reality of a financial crisis that made it clear that all the key economic players had to sit at the table, irrespective of political regime.
• Finally, the debate about whether the leaders of the industrial world would ever be willing to sit down with their peers from the emerging market economies as equals was short circuited by the picture of the U.S. president at lunch during the G20 Summit, flanked by the presidents of two of the major emerging economies, Brazil and China. This photograph perhaps best defines the new reality of global governance in the 21st Century.

Is the G20 Summit Here to Stay?

The communiqué of the November 15, 2008 Summit locked in the next G20 summit and hence ordained a sequel that appears to have enshrined the G20 as the new format to address the current global financial and economic crisis over the coming months and perhaps years. Much, of course, depends on the views of the new U.S. administration, but the November 2008 Summit has paved the way for President Obama and his team to move swiftly beyond the traditional G8 and to continue the G20 format.

In principle there is nothing wrong with exploring options for further change. However at this juncture, we strongly believe that it is best for the new U.S. administration to focus its attention on making the G20 summit format work, in terms of its ability to address the immediate crisis, and in terms of subsequently dealing with other pressing problems, such as global warming and global poverty. There may be a need to fine-tune size and composition, but more fundamental changes, in our view, can and should wait for later since arguments about composition and size—who is in and who is out—could quickly overwhelm a serious discussion of pressing substantive issues. Instead, the next G20 Summit in the United Kingdom on April 2, 2009 should stay with the standard G20 membership and get on with the important business of solving the world’s huge financial and economic problems.

One change, however, would be desirable: At the Washington Summit in November 2008 two representatives for each country were seated at the table, usually the country’s leader and finance minister. There may have been good reasons for this practice under the current circumstances, since leaders may have felt more comfortable with having the experts at their side during intense discussions of how to respond to the financial and economic crisis. In general, however, a table of 40 chairs undoubtedly is less conducive to an open and informal discussion than a table half that size. From our experience, a table of 20 can support a solid debate as long as the format is one of open give and take, rather than a delivery of scripted speeches. This is not the case for a table with 40 participants. The G8 format of leaders only at the table, with prior preparation by ministers who do not then participate in the leaders level summits, should definitely be preserved. To do otherwise would dilute the opportunity for informal discussion among leaders, which is the vital core of summit dynamics.

What Will Happen to the G8 Summit and to the G7 and G20 Meetings of Finance Ministers?

As the world’s financial storm gathered speed and intensity in recent months, the inadequacy of the traditional forums of industrial countries—the G8 group of leaders and the G7 group of finance ministers—became obvious. Does this mean that the G8 and G7 are a matter of the past? Most likely not. We would expect these forums to continue to meet for some time to come, playing a role as caucus for industrial countries. In any event, the G20 finance ministers will take on an enhanced role, since it will be the forum at which minister-level experts will lay the ground on key issues of global financial and economic management to ensure that they are effectively addressed at summit level by their leaders. The G20 Summit of November 15 was prepared by a meeting of G20 finance ministers in this fashion.

It may well be that the dynamics of interactions within the G20 will cause coalitions to be formed, shifting over time as issues and interests change. This could at times and on some issues involve a coalition of traditional G7 members. However, with increasing frequency, we would expect that some industrial countries would temporarily team-up with emerging market country members, for example on agricultural trade policies, where a coalition of Argentina, Australia, Brazil and Canada might align itself to challenge the agricultural protection policies of Europe, Japan and the United States. Or in the area of energy, a coalition among producer states, such as Indonesia, Mexico, Russia and Saudi Arabia might debate the merits of a stable energy supply and demand regime with an alliance among energy users, such as China, Europe, Japan, South Africa and the United States. It is this potential for multiple, overlapping and shifting alliances, which creates the opportunities for building trust, forcing trade-offs and forging cross-issue compromises that makes the G20 summit such an exciting opportunity.

What Should Be the Agenda of Future G20 Summits?

The communiqué of the November 2008 G20 Summit identified three main agenda items for the April 2009 follow-up summit: (1) A list of key issues for the containment of the current global financial and economic crisis; (2) a set of issues for the prevention of future global financial crises, including the reform of the international financial institutions, especially the IMF and World Bank; and (3) a push toward the successful conclusion of the Doha Round of WTO trade negotiations.

The first item is obviously a critical one if the G20 is to demonstrate its ability to help address the current crisis in a meaningful way. The second item is also important and timely. The experience with reform of the global financial institutions in the last few years has demonstrated that serious governance changes in these institutions will have to be driven by a summit-level group that is as inclusive as the G20. We would hope that Prime Minister Gordon Brown, as chair—with his exceptional economic expertise and experience in the international institutions, especially the IMF—will be able to forge a consensus at the April 2 summit in regard to reform of the international financial institutions. The third agenda item is also important, since the Doha Round is at a critical stage and its successful conclusion would send a powerful signal that the world community recognizes the importance of open trade relations in a time of crisis, when the natural tendency may be to revert to a protectionist stance.

However, we believe three additional topics should be added to the agenda for the April 2009 G20 Summit:

• First, there should be an explicit commitment to make the G20 forum a long-term feature of global governance, even as the group may wish to note that its size and composition is not written in stone, but subject to change as circumstances change.
• Second, the communiqué of the November summit stated that the G20 countries are “committed to addressing other critical challenges such as energy security and climate change, food security, the rule of law, and the fight against terrorism, poverty and disease”. This needs to be acted upon. These issues cannot be left off the table, even as the global financial and economic crisis rages. If anything, the crisis reinforces some of the key challenges which arise in these other areas and offers opportunities for a timely response. The U.K.-hosted summit should launch a G20 initiative to develop framework ideas for the post-Kyoto climate change agreement at Copenhagen.
• Third, assuming the April 2009 summit commits itself—as it should—to a continuation of the G20 summit format into the future, it must begin to address the question of how the summit process should be managed. We explore some of the possible options next.

How Should the G20 Summit Process Be Managed?

So far the G7, G8 and G20 forums have been supported by a loose organizational infrastructure. For each group the country holding the rotating year-long presidency of the forum takes over the secretariat function while a team of senior officials (the so-called “sherpas”) from each country meets during the course of the year to prepare the agenda and the communiqué for leaders and ministers. This organization has the advantage of avoiding a costly and rigid bureaucracy. It also fosters a growing level of trust and mutual understanding among the sherpas.

The problem with this approach has been two-fold: First, it led to discontinuities in focus and organization and in the monitoring of implementation. For the G20 of finance ministers, this problem was addressed in part by the introduction of a “troika” system, under with the immediate past and future G20 presidencies would work systematically with the current G20 presidency to shape the agenda and manage the preparation process. Second, particularly for the countries in the G20 with lesser administrative capacity, the responsibility for running the secretariat for a year during their country’s presidency imposed a heavy burden.

For the G20 summit, these problems will be amplified, not least because these summits will require first-rate preparation for very visible and high-level events. In addition, as the agenda of the G20 summit broadens over time, the burden of preparing a consistent multi-year agenda based on strong technical work will be such that it cannot be effectively handled when passed on year to year from one secretariat in one country to another secretariat in another country, especially when multiple ministries have to be engaged in each country. It is for this reason that the time may have come to explore setting up a very small permanent secretariat in support of the G20 summit.

The secretariat should only provide technical and logistical support for the political leadership of the troika of presidencies and for the sherpa process, but should not run the summit. That is the job of the host member governments. They must continue to run the summits, lead the preparations and drive the follow-up. The troika process will help strengthen the capacity of national governments to shoulder these burdens. Summits are the creatures of national government authorities where they have primacy, and this must remain so, even as the new summits become larger, more complex and more important.

Implications for the Obama Administration

The November 2008 G20 Summit opened a welcome and long-overdue opportunity for a dramatic and lasting change in global governance. It will be critical that the leaders of the G20 countries make the most of this opportunity at the next G20 Summit on April 2. The presence of U.S. President Obama will be a powerful signal that the United States is ready to push and where necessary lead the movement for global change. President-elect Obama’s vision of inclusion and openness and his approach to governing, which favors innovative and far-reaching pragmatic responses to key national and global challenges, make him a great candidate for this role.

We would hope that President Obama would make clear early on that:

• He supports the G20 summit as the appropriate apex institution of global governance for now;
• He may wish to discuss how to fine-tune the summit’s composition for enhanced credibility and effectiveness but without fundamentally questioning the G20 framework;
• He supports cooperative solutions to the current financial crisis along with a serious restructuring of the global financial institutions;
• He will look to the G20 summit as the right forum to address other pressing global issues, such as climate change, energy, poverty and health; and
• He is ready to explore an innovative approach to effectively manage the G20 summit process.

These steps would help ensure that the great promise of the November 2008 G20 Summit is translated into a deep and essential change in global governance. This change will allow the world to move from a governance system that continues to be dominated by the transatlantic powers of the 20th century to one which reflects the fundamentally different global economic and political realities of the 21st century. It would usher in a framework of deliberation, consultation and decision making that would make it possible to address the great global challenges and opportunities that we face today in a more effective and legitimate manner.

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Nearly eight years after a U.S.-led invasion toppled the Taliban regime, Afghanistan remains far from stable. As President Barack Obama considers alternatives to increasing the number of U.S. troops in Afghanistan, his administration’s new counternarcotics strategy meshes well with counterinsurgency and state-building efforts in the country. It is a welcome break from previous ineffective and counterproductive policies. The effectiveness of the policy with respect to counternarcotics, counterinsurgency and state-building, however, will depend on the operationalization of the strategy. The details are not yet clear, but the strategy potentially faces many pitfalls.

Efforts to bankrupt the Taliban through eradication are futile and counterproductive since they cement the bonds between the population and the Taliban. But interdiction is very unlikely to bankrupt the Taliban either. Security needs to come first before any counternarcotics policy has a chance of being effective. Counterinsurgent forces can prevail against the Taliban, without shutting down the Taliban drug income, by adopting an appropriate strategy that provides security and rule of law to the population and by sufficiently beefing up their own resources vis-à-vis the Taliban. Rural development is a long term and multifaceted effort. Simplistic strategies that focus simply on price ratios or try to raise risk through “seed-burn-seed” approaches are ineffective. Wheat replacement strategy as a core of the alternative livelihoods effort is singularly inappropriate for Afghanistan. Shortcuts do not lead to sustainable policies that also mitigate conflict and enhance state-building.

The Obama administration will need to reduce expectations for quick fixes and present realistic timelines to Congress, the U.S. public and the international community for how long rural development and other counternarcotics policies in Afghanistan will take to show meaningful and sustainable progress that advances human security of the Afghan people, mitigates conflict and enhance state building. Unless this is conveyed, there is a real danger that even a well-designed counternarcotics policy will be prematurely and unfortunately discarded as ineffective.

The New Strategy in Afghanistan’s Context

In summer 2009, the Obama administration unveiled the outlines of a new counternarcotics policy in Afghanistan. The new policy represents a courageous break with previous misguided efforts there and thirty years of U.S. counternarcotics policies around the world. Instead of emphasizing premature eradication of poppy crops, the new policy centers on increased interdiction and rural development. This approach strongly enhances the new counterinsurgency policy focus on providing security to the rural population, instead of being preoccupied with the numbers of incapacitated Taliban and al Qaeda.

In Afghanistan, somewhere between a third and a half of its GDP comes from poppy cultivation and processing and much of the rest from foreign aid, so the illicit poppy economy determines the economic survival of a large segment of the population. This is true not only of the farmers who cultivate opium poppy frequently in the absence of viable legal and illegal economic alternatives. But, as a result of micro- and macro-economic spillovers and the acute paucity of legal economic activity, much of the economic life in large cities is also underpinned by the poppy economy. After a quarter century of intense poppy cultivation, the opium poppy economy is deeply entrenched in the socio-economic fabric of the society. Islamic prohibitions against opiates notwithstanding, the poppy economy inevitably underlies Afghanistan’s political arrangements and power relations. Profits from taxing poppy cultivation and protecting smuggling rings bring substantial income to the Taliban. A recent CRS report (August 2009) estimates the income at $70-$100 million per year, which accounts for perhaps as much as half of Taliban income. But many other actors in Afghanistan profit from the opium poppy economy in a similar way: former warlords cum government officials; members of Afghanistan’s police; tribal chiefs; and independent traffickers.

Moreover, the Taliban and many others who protect the opium poppy economy from efforts to suppress it derive much more than financial profits. Crucially, they also obtain political capital from populations dependent on poppy cultivation. Such political capital is a critical determinant of the success and sustainability of the insurgency since public support or at least acceptance are crucial enablers of an insurgency. Indeed, as I detail in my forthcoming book, Shooting Up: Counterinsurgency and the War on Drugs, along with providing order that the Afghan government is systematically unable to provide and capitalizing on Ghilzai Pashtun sentiments of being marginalized, protection of the poppy fields is at the core of the Taliban support. By not targeting the farmers, the new counternarcotics strategy is thus synchronized with the counterinsurgency efforts because it can deprive the Taliban of a key source of support. Its overall design also promises to lay the necessary groundwork for substantial reductions in the size and impacts of the illicit economy in Afghanistan.

However, while appropriate in its overall conception, the new strategy has pitfalls. Specifically how to operationalize interdiction and rural development will to a great extent determine the effectiveness of the strategy—not only with respect to the narrow goal of narcotics suppression, but also with respect to counterinsurgency and state-building. While many of the details still remain to be developed, some of those that have trickled out give reasons for concern.

Effects of Previous Eradication-Centered Policy

During the 2008-09 growing season, the area of cultivation in Afghanistan fell by 22% to 123,000 hectares and opium production fell by 10 percent to 6,900 metric tons (mt). Much of this decline in cultivation was driven by market forces largely unrelated to policy: After several years of massive overproduction in Afghanistan that surpassed the estimated global market for opiates by almost three times, opium prices were bound to decline. Even at 6,900 mt, production still remains twice as high as world demand, leading to speculation that someone somewhere is stockpiling opiates.

More significant, the persistence of high production betrays the ineffectiveness of simplistic policies, such as premature forced eradication before alternative livelihoods are in place, which since 2004 (until the new Obama strategy) was the core of the counternarcotics policy in Afghanistan. Policies that fail to address the complex and multiple structural drivers of cultivation and ignore the security and economic needs of the populations dependent on poppy cultivation generate vastly counterproductive effects with respect to not only counternarcotics efforts, but also counterinsurgency, stabilization and state building.

The eastern Afghan province of Nangarhar provides a telling example. For decades, Nangarhar has been one of the dominant sources of opium poppy. But over the past two years, as a result of governor Gul Agha Shirzai’s suppression efforts—including bans on cultivation, forced eradication, imprisonment of violators and claims that NATO would bomb the houses of those who cultivate poppy or keep opium—cultivation declined to very low numbers. This has been hailed as a major success to be emulated throughout Afghanistan.

In fact, the economic and security consequences were highly undesirable. The ban greatly impoverished many, causing household incomes to fall 90% for many and driving many into debt. As legal economic alternatives failed to materialize, many coped by resorting to crime, such as kidnapping and robberies. Others sought employment in the poppy fields of Helmand, yet others migrated to Pakistan where they frequently ended up recruited by the Taliban. The population became deeply alienated from the government, resorting to strikes and attacks on government forces. Districts that were economically hit especially severely, such as Khogiani, Achin and Shinwar, have become no-go zones for the Afghan government and NGOs. Although those tribal areas have historically been opposed to the Taliban, the Taliban mobilization there has taken off to an unprecedented degree. The populations began allowing the Taliban to cross over from Pakistan, and U.S. military personnel operating in that region indicate that intelligence provision to Afghan forces and NATO has almost dried up. Tribal elders who supported the ban became discredited, and the collapse of their legitimacy is providing an opportunity for the Taliban to insert itself into the decision-making structures of those areas. And all such previous bans in the province, including in 2005, turned out to be unsustainable in the absence of legal economic alternatives. Thus, after the 2005 ban, for example, poppy cultivation inevitably swung back.

The Ingredients of Success

Security
The prerequisite for success with respect to narcotics is security, i.e. sustained state control of territory. Without it, Afghanistan cannot be stabilized and the state strengthened; nor can counternarcotics policies be effective. Whether one adopts iron-fisted eradication or sustainable rural development as the core of a counternarcotics policy, security is essential. Without security first, counternarcotics efforts have not yet succeeded anywhere. Suppression without alternative livelihoods in place requires firm control of the entire territory to prevent illicit crop displacement and harsh suppression of the population dependent on illicit crops. Apart from being problematic with respect to human rights, this harsh approach is also very costly politically. Rural development requires security, otherwise investment will not come in, the population will not make risky long-term investments in legal crops and structural drivers of cultivation will not be effectively addressed. Development under a hail of bullets simply does not work, and in the context of insecurity, illicit economies persist and dominate.

Nor have counternarcotics policies, such as eradication or interdiction, succeeded in bankrupting or severely weakening any belligerent groups profiting from drugs anywhere in the world. Not in China, Thailand, Burma, Peru, Lebanon or even Colombia. Instead, they cement the bonds between marginalized populations dependent on illicit crops and belligerents plus severely reduce human intelligence flows to the counterinsurgent forces.

But counterinsurgent forces can prevail against insurgents and terrorists without stopping or reducing the terrorists’ drug-based financial inflows—either by increasing their own forces and resources vis-à-vis the belligerents or by adopting a smarter strategy that is either militarily more effective or wins the hearts and minds. This was the case in China, Thailand, Burma, and Peru where counterinsurgents succeeded without eradication. Evidence that counterinsurgent forces can prevail without bankrupting the belligerents through eradication also holds in the case of Colombia where the FARC has been weakened militarily not because of the aerial spraying of coca fields, but in spite of it. Today, more coca is grown there than at the beginning of Plan Colombia; but as a result of U.S. resources and training, Colombian forces were capable of greatly weakening the FARC even though forced eradication virtually eliminated human intelligence from the population to the government.

Interdiction with the Right Focus
The broad focus of the new counternarcotics strategy on interdiction is well placed, but interdiction’s effectiveness will depend on its objectives and execution. Just like eradication, interdiction will not succeed in bankrupting the Taliban. The Taliban has many other sources of income, including donations from Pakistan and the Middle East, taxation of legal economic activity, smuggling with legal goods, wildlife and illicit logging. In fact, it rebuilt itself in Pakistan between 2002 and 2004 without access to the poppy economy. Overall, drug interdiction has a very poor record in substantially curtailing belligerents’ income, with only a few successes registered in, for example, highly localized settings in Colombia and Peru.

Instead, the objective of the policy should be to reduce the coercive and corrupting power of organized crime groups. But achieving that requires a well-designed policy and a great deal of intelligence. Previous interdiction efforts in Afghanistan have in fact had the opposite effect: they eliminated small traders and consolidated the power of big traffickers, giving rise to the vertical integration of the industry. They also strengthened the bonds between some traffickers and the Taliban (although many traffickers continue to operate independently or are linked to the government).

Large-scale interdiction that targets entire networks and seeks to eliminate local demand for opium from local traders, which some are arguing for, is extraordinarily resource-intensive given the structure of the Afghan opium industry. Prioritization will need to be given to devoting scarce resources to drug interdiction or directly to counterinsurgency. The odds of success are not high. But even if such an interdiction strategy did succeed in shutting down local demand, the policy would become counterproductive since in local settings its effects would approximate the effects of eradication, thus once again alienating the population. Such large-scale interdiction is thus not currently appropriate for Afghanistan.

But even the NATO-led selective interdiction of targeting designated Taliban-linked traffickers (the United States has identified fifty such traffickers) is not free from pitfalls. First, selective interdiction can actually provide opportunities for the Taliban to directly take over the trafficking role or strengthen the alliance between the remaining traffickers and the Taliban, thus achieving the opposite of what it aims for. In fact, interdiction measures in Peru and Colombia frequently resulted in tightening the belligerents-traffickers nexus and belligerents’ takeover of trafficking.

Second, uncalibrated interdiction can provoke intense turf wars among the remaining traffickers, thus intensifying violence in the country and muddling the battlefield picture by introducing a new form of conflict. Mexico provides a vivid example of such an undesirable outcome. In the Afghan tribal context, such turf wars can easily become tribal or ethnic warfare.

Third, such selective interdiction can also send the message that the best way to be a trafficker is to be a member of the Afghan government, thus perpetuating a sense of impunity and corruption and undermining long-term state building and legitimacy.

Finally, the effectiveness of interdiction is to a great extent dependent on the quality of rule of law in Afghanistan plus the capacity and quality of the justice and corrections systems, all of which are woefully lacking in Afghanistan and are deeply corrupt.

Comprehensive Rural Development
Rural development appropriately lies at the core of the new strategy because, despite the enormous challenges, it has the best chance to effectively and sustainably strengthen the Afghan state and reduce the narcotics economy. But for rural development to do that, it needs to be conceived as broad-based social and economic development that focuses on improvements in human capital—including health care and education—and addresses all of the structural drivers of opium poppy cultivation. In Afghanistan, these drivers include insecurity; lack of physical infrastructure (such as roads), electrification and irrigations systems; lack of microcredit; lack of processing facilities; and the absence of value-added chains and assured markets. They also include lack of land titles and, increasingly, the fact that land rent by sharecroppers has become dependent on opium poppy cultivation as land concentration has increased over the past eight years. Poppy cultivation and harvesting are also very labor-intensive, thus offering employment opportunities unparalleled in the context of Afghanistan’s economy.

The price-profitability of poppy in comparison to other crops is only one of the drivers and frequently not the most important one. Without other structural drivers being addressed, farmers will not switch to licit crops even if they fetch more money than the illicit ones. By the same token, however, farmers are frequently willing to sacrifice some profit and forgo illicit crop cultivation as long as the licit alternatives bring them sufficient income and address all of the structural drivers, including the insecurity to which farmers are exposed in illicit economies.

Unfortunately, the wheat distribution program that was the core of rural development in Afghanistan last year (and that is slated to be its key component this year) is likely to be woefully ineffective for several reasons. First, in 2008, the program was based solely on an unusually high price ratio of wheat to poppy, driven by poppy overproduction and a global shortage of wheat. However, this price ratio is unlikely to hold; Afghanistan’s wheat prices are dictated anyway by surrounding markets, such as Pakistan and Kazakhstan. Second, the program did nothing to address the structural drivers. In fact, it had counterproductive effects because the free distribution of wheat undermined local markets in seeds. Afghan farmers can obtain seeds; their challenge lies in how to obtain profit afterwards. Thus, some sold the wheat seed instead of cultivating it. Third, those who actually cultivated wheat frequently did so not for profit, but for subsistence to minimize costs of buying cereals on the market. In fact, because of land distribution issues, many Afghan farmers do not have access to enough land to cover even their subsistence needs with wheat monocropping. A key lesson from alternative development over the past thirty years is that monocropping substitution strategies are particularly ineffective. Fourth, if all of current poppy farmers switched to wheat cultivation, Afghanistan would experience a great increase in unemployment since wheat cultivation employs 88% less labor than poppy cultivation and harvesting do.

Instead of wheat, rural development in Afghanistan needs to emphasize diversified high-value, high-labor-intensive crops, such as fruits, vegetables and specialty items like saffron. Generating lasting off-farm income opportunities will also be important, but even more challenging than jump-starting legal agromarkets.

After eight years of underresourcing and neglecting agriculture development, the new counternarcotics policy’s focus on the farm is appropriate. But the new strategy needs to take care not to throw away the baby with the bath water. The effort still needs to include developing value-added chains and assured internal and external markets plus enabling sustained access to them. Once again, thirty years of history of alternative livelihoods show that without value-added chains and accessible markets even productive legal farms become unsustainable and farmers revert back to illicit crops.

Finally, rural development requires time. Perhaps in no country in the world since Mao wiped out poppy cultivation in China in the 1950s did counternarcotics efforts face such enormous challenges as they do in Afghanistan—in terms of the scale of the illicit economy, its centrality to the overall economy of the country and hence its vast marco- and micro-economic and political effects, the underdevelopment of the country and its human capital and the paucity of viable economic alternatives. Even under much more auspicious circumstances along all the above dimensions, counternarcotics rural development in Thailand took thirty years.

Conclusion

Clearly, there is a need to quickly bring some economic, social and rule of law improvements to the lives of the Afghan people. Without such quick, visible and sustainable change, it will become impossible to rebuild the confidence of the Afghan people in the future, harness their remaining aspirations and to persuade them that the central state with support of the international community is preferable to the Taliban or local warlord- or tribal-based fiefdoms. But there is an equal need to urge strategic patience in the United States—both for counterinsurgency and for counternarcotics.

Eradication can be a part of the mix of counternarcotics policies, but should only be adopted in areas that are free of violent conflict and where sufficient legal economic alternatives are available to the population. Interdiction needs to focus on reducing the coercive and corrupting power of crime groups. Before interdiction measures are undertaken, an analysis of second and third- order effects needs to be conducted. It needs to be carefully calibrated with the strength of law enforcement in Afghanistan to avoid provoking dangerous turf wars, ethnic violence and cementing the relationship between the Taliban and the traffickers. It also needs to target top traffickers linked to the Afghan government. Interdiction needs to encompass building the justice and corrections system in Afghanistan and broad rule of law efforts. Rural development needs to address all structural drivers of poppy cultivation. It needs to focus not only on the farm, but also on value-added chains and assured markets. It needs to emphasize diversified high-value, high-labor intensive crops, and not center on wheat.

Evaluations of counternarcotics policies need to back away from simplistic and inappropriate measures, such as the numbers of hectares eradicated or traffickers caught. Instead, the measures need to encompass the complexity of the issue, including, size of areas cultivated with licit as well as illicit crops, human development indexes, levels of education, the number of resource-poor farmers dependent on illicit crops for basic subsistence or vulnerable to poverty-driven participation in illicit economies, food security, availability of legal microcredit, prevalence of land titles and accessibility of land, infrastructure density and cost of infrastructure use (such as road tolls), availability of non-belligerent dispute resolution and arbitrage mechanisms, quality of property rights, prevalence of value-added chains, and accessibility of markets. The United States and its allies must reduce public expectations for quick fixes and dedicate increased resources to rural development for a long time. Although U.S. forces do not need to stay in Afghanistan for decades, economic development will take that long.

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Policy Brief #174

A nation’s education system is a pillar of its economic strength and international competitiveness. The National Bureau of Economic Research analyzed data from 146 countries, collected between 1950 and 2010, and found that each year of additional average schooling attained by a population translates into at least a two percent increase in economic output. A 2007 World Bank policy research working paper reported similar results. Based on these findings, if the United States increased the average years of schooling completed by its adult population from the current 12 years to 13 years—that is, added one year of postsecondary education—our gross domestic product would rise by more than $280 billion.

The story also can be told by focusing on the returns to education for individuals. The difference in income between Americans who complete high school and those who drop out after 10th grade exceeds 50 percent. Large income differentials extend throughout the continuum of education attainment, with a particularly huge gap occurring between an advanced degree and a four-year college degree.

Although education clearly pays, the education attainment of the nation’s youth has largely stagnated, falling substantially behind that of countries with which we compete. In 1960, the United States led the world in the number of students who graduated from high school. Today young adults in many countries, including Estonia and Korea, exceed their U.S. counterparts in education attainment.

	RECOMMENDATIONS
	America’s economic productivity and competitiveness are grounded in education. Our public schools and our higher education institutions alike are falling behind those of other nations. Four policy proposals offer substantial promise for improving American education, are achievable and have low costs: Choose K–12 curriculum based on evidence of effectiveness. Evaluate teachers in ways that meaningfully differentiate levels of performance. Accredit online education providers so they can compete with traditional schools across district and state lines. Provide the public with information that will allow comparison of the labor market outcomes and price of individual postsecondary degree and certificate programs.

The problem of low education attainment is particularly salient among students from low-income and minority backgrounds. The graduation rate for minorities has been declining for 40 years, and majority/minority graduation rate differentials have not converged. Hispanic and black students earn four-year or higher degrees at less than half the rate of white students.

The economic future of the nation and the prospects of many of our citizens depend on returning the United States to the forefront of education attainment. Simply put, many more of our students need to finish high school and graduate from college.

At the same time, graduation standards for high school and college must be raised. Forty percent of college students take at least one remedial course to make up for deficiencies in their high school preparation, and a test of adult literacy recently given to a random sample of graduating seniors from four-year U.S. institutions found less than 40 percent to be proficient on prose and quantitative tasks.

Barriers to Innovation and Reform

Our present education system is structured in a way that discourages the innovation necessary for the United States to regain education leadership. K-12 education is delivered largely through a highly regulated public monopoly. Outputs such as high school graduation rates and student performance on standardized assessments are carefully measured and publicly available, but mechanisms that would allow these outputs to drive innovation and reform are missing or blocked. For example, many large urban districts and some states are now able to measure the effectiveness of individual teachers by assessing the annual academic growth of students in their classes. Huge differences in teacher effectiveness are evident, but collective bargaining agreements or state laws prevent most school district administrators from using that information in tenure or salary decisions.

Further complicating K-12 reform is the fact that authority for education policy is broadly dispersed. Unlike countries with strong national ministries that can institute top-down reforms within the public sector, education policy and practice in the United States are set through a chaotic network of laws, relationships and funding streams connecting 16,000 independent school districts to school boards, mayors, and state and federal officials. The lack of central authority allows the worst characteristics of public monopolies to prevail—inefficiency, stasis and catering to interests of employees—without top-down systems’ offsetting advantage of being capable of quick and coordinated action.

The challenges to reforming higher education are different. The 6,000-plus U.S. postsecondary institutions have greater flexibility to innovate than do the public school districts—and a motive to do so, because many compete among themselves for students, faculty and resources. However, while output is carefully measured and publicly reported for public K-12 schools and districts, we have only the grossest measures of output for post secondary institutions.

Even for something as straightforward as graduation rates, the best data we have at the institutional level are the proportion of full-time, first-time degree-seeking students who graduate within 150 percent of the normal time to degree completion. Data on critical outputs, including labor market returns and student learning, are missing entirely. In the absence of information on issues that really matter, postsecondary institutions compete and innovate on dimensions that are peripheral to their productivity, such as the winning records of their sports teams, the attractiveness of their grounds and buildings, and their ratio of acceptances to applications. Far more information is available to consumers in the market for a used car than for a college education. This information vacuum undermines productive innovation.

Examining Two Popular Reforms

Many education reformers across the political spectrum agree on two structural and governance reforms: expanding the public charter school sector at the expense of traditional public schools and setting national standards for what students should know. Ironically, the evidence supporting each of these reforms is weak at best.

Charter schools are publicly funded schools outside the traditional public school system that operate with considerable autonomy in staffing, curriculum and practices. The Obama administration has pushed to expand charter schools by eliminating states that don’t permit charters, or capping them, from competition for $4.35 billion in Race to the Top funding. Both President Obama and Education Secretary Arne Duncan have proposed shuttering poorly performing traditional public schools and replacing them with charters.

What does research say about charter schools’ effects on academic outcomes? Large studies that control for student background generally find very small differences in student achievement between the two types of public schools.

For example, on the 2005 National Assessment of Educational Progress (the “Nation’s Report Card”), white, black and Hispanic fourth graders in charter schools performed equivalently to fourth-graders with similar racial and ethnic backgrounds in traditional public schools. Positive findings do emerge from recent studies of oversubscribed New York and Boston area charter schools, which use lotteries to determine admission. But these results are obtained from children whose parents push to get them into the most popular charter schools in two urban areas with dynamic and innovative charter entrepreneurs.

What about common standards? Based on the belief that high content standards for what students should know and be able to do are essential elements of reform and that national standards are superior to individual state standards, the Common Core State Standards Initiative has signed up 48 states and 3 territories to develop a common core of state standards in English-language arts and mathematics for grades K-12. The administration has praised this joint effort by the National Governors Association and Council of Chief State School Officers, made participation in it a prerequisite for Race to the Top funding, and set aside $350 million in American Recovery and Reinvestment Act funding to develop ways to assess schools’ performance in meeting common core standards.

Does research support this approach? The Brown Center on Education Policy at Brookings examined the relationship between student achievement outcomes in mathematics at the state level and ratings of the quality of state content standards in math. There was no association. Some states with strong standards produce high-achieving students, such as Massachusetts, while other states with strong standards languish near the bottom in terms of achievement, such as California. Some states with weak standards boast high levels of achievement, such as New Jersey, while others with weak standards experience low levels of achievement, such as Tennessee.

Four Ideas

For every complex problem there is one solution which is simple, neat, and wrong. — H. L. Mencken

I will avoid Mencken’s approbation by proposing four solutions rather than one. Although education has far too many moving parts to be dramatically reformed by any short list of simple actions, we can start with changes that are straightforward, ripe for action and most promising, based on research and past experience.

Link K-12 Curricula to Comparative Effectiveness

Little attention has been paid to choice of curriculum as a driver of student achievement. Yet the evidence for large curriculum effects is persuasive. Consider a recent study of first-grade math curricula, reported by the National Center for Education Evaluation and Regional Assistance in February 2009. The researchers randomly matched schools with one of four widely used curricula. Two curricula were clear winners, generating three months’ more learning over a nine-month school year than the other two. This is a big effect on achievement, and it is essentially free because the more effective curricula cost no more than the others.

The federal government should fund many more comparative effectiveness trials of curricula, and schools using federal funds to support the education of disadvantaged students should be required to use evidence of effectiveness in the choice of curriculum materials. The Obama administration supports comparative effectiveness research in health care. It is no less important in education.

Evaluate Teachers Meaningfully

Good education outcomes for students depend on good teachers. If we have no valid and reliable system in place to identify who is good, we cannot hope to create substantial improvements in the quality of the teacher workforce.

A substantial body of high-quality research demonstrates that teachers vary substantially in effectiveness, with dramatic consequences for student learning. To increase academic achievement overall and address racial, ethnic and socioeconomic achievement gaps, we must enhance the quality of the teacher workforce and provide children from poor and minority backgrounds with equitable access to the best teachers.

Despite strong empirical evidence for differences in teacher performance—as well as intuitive appeal, demonstrated when we remember our own best and worst teachers—the vast majority of public school teachers in America face no meaningful evaluation of on-the-job performance. A recent survey of thousands of teachers and administrators, spanning 12 districts in four states, revealed that none of the districts’ formal evaluation processes differentiated meaningfully among levels of teaching effectiveness, according to a 2009 report published by The New Teacher Project. In districts using binary ratings, more than 99 percent of teachers were rated satisfactory. In districts using a broader range of ratings, 94 percent of teachers received one of the top two ratings, and less than one percent were rated unsatisfactory. In most school districts, virtually all probationary teachers receive tenure—98 percent in Los Angeles, for example—and very small numbers of tenured teachers are ever dismissed for poor performance.

Conditions of employment should be restructured to recruit and select more promising teachers, provide opportunities for them to realize their potential, keep the very best teachers in the profession, and motivate them to serve in locations where students have the highest needs. The precondition for these changes is a valid system of evaluating teachers.

The federal government should require school districts to evaluate teachers meaningfully, as a condition of federal aid. Washington also should provide extra support to districts that pay substantially higher salaries to teachers demonstrating persistently high effectiveness and serving in high-needs schools. But, because many technical issues in the evaluation of on-the-job performance of teachers are unresolved, the federal government should refrain, at least for now, from mandating specific evaluation components or designs. The essential element is meaningful differentiation—that is, a substantial spread of performance outcomes.

Accredit Online Education Providers

Traditional forms of schooling are labor-intensive and offer few economies of scale. To the extent that financial resources are critical to education outcomes, the only way to improve the U.S. education system in its current configuration is to spend more. Yet we currently spend more per student on education than any other country in the world, and the appetite for ever-increasing levels of expenditure has been dampened by changing demographics and ballooning government deficits. The monies that can be reasonably anticipated in the next decade or two will hardly be enough to forestall erosion in the quality of the system, as currently designed. The game changer for education productivity will have to be technology, which can both cut labor costs and introduce competitive pressures.

Already, at the college level, online education (also termed “virtual education” or “distance learning”) is proving competitive with the classroom experience. Nearly 3.5 million students in 2006—about 20 percent of all students in postsecondary schools and twice the number five years previously—were taking at least one course online, according to a 2007 report published by the Sloan Consortium.

In K-12, online education is developing much more slowly. But, the case for online K–12 education is strong—and linked to cost control. A survey reported on page one of Education Week (March 18, 2009) found the average per-pupil cost of 20 virtual schools in 14 states to be about half the national average for a traditional public school.

Local and state control of access to virtual schooling impedes the growth of high-quality online education and the competitive pressure it contributes to traditional schooling. Development costs are very high for virtual courseware that takes full advantage of the newest technologies and advances in cognitive science and instruction—much higher than the costs for traditional textbooks and instructional materials. These development costs can only be rationalized if the potential market for the resulting product is large. But, states and local school districts now are able to determine whether an online program is acceptable. The bureaucracy that may be most disrupted by the introduction of virtual education acts as gatekeeper.

To overcome this challenge, K-12 virtual public education would benefit from the model of accreditation used in higher education. Colleges and universities are accredited by regional or national bodies recognized by the federal government. Such accrediting bodies as the New England Association of Schools and Colleges and the Accrediting Council for Independent Colleges and Schools are membership organizations that determine their own standards within broad federal guidelines. Once an institution is accredited, students residing anywhere can take its courses, often with the benefit of federal and state student aid.

Federal legislation to apply this accreditation model to online K-12 education could transform public education, especially if the legislation also required school districts to cover the reasonable costs of online courses for students in persistently low-performing schools. This approach would exploit—and enhance—U.S. advantages in information technology. We are unlikely to regain the international lead in education by investing more in business as usual; but we could leapfrog over other countries by building new, technology-intensive education systems.

Link Postsecondary Programs to Labor Market Outcomes

On a per-student basis, the United States spends two and one-half times the developed countries’ average on postsecondary education. Although our elite research universities remain remarkable engines of innovation and are the envy of the world, our postsecondary education system in general is faltering. The United States used to lead the world in higher education attainment, but, according to 2009 OECD data, is now ranked 12th among developed countries. We have become a high-cost provider of mediocre outcomes.

Critical to addressing this problem is better information on the performance of our postsecondary institutions. As the U.S. Secretary of Education’s Commission on the Future of Higher Education concluded in 2006:

Our complex, decentralized postsecondary education system has no comprehensive strategy, particularly for undergraduate programs, to provide either adequate internal accountability systems or effective public information. Too many decisions about higher education—from those made by policymakers to those made by students and families—rely heavily on reputation and rankings derived to a large extent from inputs such as financial resources rather than outcomes. Better data about real performance and lifelong working and learning ability is absolutely essential if we are to meet national needs and improve institutional performance.

Ideally, this information would be available in comparable forms for all institutions through a national system of data collection. However, achieving consensus on the desirability of a national database of student records has proved politically contentious. One of the issues is privacy of information. More powerful is the opposition of some postsecondary institutions that apparently seek to avoid accountability for their performance.

The way forward is for Congress to authorize, and fund at the state level, data systems that follow individual students through their postsecondary careers into the labor market. The standards for such state systems could be recommended at the federal level or by national organizations, to maximize comparability and eventual interoperability.

The public face of such a system at the state level would be a website allowing prospective students and parents to compare degree and certificate programs within and across institutions on diverse outcomes, with corresponding information on price. At a minimum, the outcomes would include graduation rates, employment rates and average annual earnings five years after graduation. Outcomes would be reported at the individual program level, such as the B.S. program in chemical engineering at the University of Houston. Price could be reported in three ways: advertised tuition,average tuition for new students for the previous two years, and average tuition for new students for the previous two years net of institutional and state grants for students eligible for federally subsidized student loans. These different forms of price information are necessary because institutions frequently discount their advertised price, particularly for low-income students. Students and families need information about discounts in order to shop on the basis of price.

Many states, such as Washington, already have data that would allow the creation of such college search sites, at least for their public institutions. The primary impediment to progress is the federal Family Educational Rights and Privacy Act (FERPA), which makes it very difficult for postsecondary institutions to share data on individual students with state agencies, such as the tax division or unemployment insurance office, in order to match students with information on post-graduation employment and wages. Congress should amend FERPA to allow such data exchanges among state agencies while maintaining restrictions on release of personally identifiable information. To address privacy concerns, Congress also should impose substantial penalties for the public release of personally identifiable information; FERPA currently is toothless.

Creating a higher education marketplace that is vibrant with transparent and valid information on performance and price would be a powerful driver of reform and innovation. Easily addressed concerns about the privacy of student records and political opposition from institutions that do not want their performance exposed to the public have stood in the way of this critical reform for too long. America’s economic future depends on returning the United States to the forefront of education attainment. Simply put, many more of our students need to finish high school and graduate from college. Investments in improved data, along with structural reforms and innovation, can help restore our leadership in educational attainment and increase economic growth.

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Policy Brief #180

	EXECUTIVE SUMMARY
	The year 2010 in Afghanistan had some encouraging signs but on balance it was less positive than had been hoped. In 2011, therefore, it is important to do two things: first, look for further improvements in our strategy; and second, develop a backup plan, should the current approach not yield the kind of progress that is necessary and expected. This policy brief addresses the first challenge, improving the U.S./NATO counterinsurgency campaign. The basic logic of current strategy is accepted, but several new initiatives or ideas are explored to make it more promising and more effective. Three main ideas are developed: Promoting Afghan political organizations built around ideas and platforms, not individuals and ethnicities, in a change from longstanding American policy that could improve the quality of governance in the country. Taking pressure off the bilateral U.S.-Afghan relationship on the issue of anticorruption, largely by creation of an international advisory board consisting of prominent individuals from key developing countries like Indonesia and Tanzania that have had considerable success improving their own nations' governance in recent times. Offering a civilian nuclear energy deal to Pakistan, conditional on clear action by Islamabad to shut down insurgent sanctuaries that are currently using its territory to attack the Afghan government as well as NATO forces.

The past year was not without good news in Afghanistan. It saw a successful deployment of nearly another 40,000 NATO troops to Afghanistan; twice as much growth in Afghan security forces together with a much more robust approach to their training; increases in American civilian capacity in Kabul and in the field; and highly effective targeting of Afghan (and Pakistani) insurgents within Afghanistan and just over the border with Pakistan. I would also count the September parliamentary elections as more good than bad, since it was Afghans who held other Afghans accountable for infractions, and since the Karzai government appears on balance to be tolerating an outcome that will reduce the strength of its cronies in the elected assembly (though this issue remains a work in progress). Finally, NATO's decision at the November Lisbon Summit to emphasize the year 2014 as the time when Afghanistan would assume full control of security operations-rather than President Obama's earlier preference to emphasize July 2011 as the point when the U.S. departure would begin-clarified the American and international commitments to get the job done right before going home. Among other benefits, this change should help convince more Afghan and Pakistani fence-sitters that they can count on us, rather than encouraging hedging behavior out of fear of a premature, hurried NATO exit.

However, 2010 also witnessed a roughly 50 percent increase in the overall level of violence that can only partially be explained by our increased presence and tempo of operations. That increase reflects a very resilient insurgency. Problematic relations between the Obama administration and the Karzai government have also continued, the corruption problem has remained intractable (largely fueled by the western presence with all of its trappings), and the Pakistani government still tolerates sanctuaries for the Haqqani network and the "Quetta Shura Taliban" (that is, the Afghan Taliban) on its territory.

For the most part, the strategy of the International Security Assistance Force (ISAF) under General David Petraeus, and the efforts of the international community more broadly, seem sound. The paramount goal in Afghanistan is to put the country's government in a position to control its own territory. That is the way to ensure that no large terrorist sanctuaries re-emerge there that could threaten the United States, nuclear-armed Pakistan, or other core western interests. But to achieve that goal, a comprehensive counterinsurgency approach that helps build up the Afghan state is needed, because establishing control of territory requires that the government possess a certain legitimacy among its people-which in turn requires some measure of economic and political progress. Hence, to achieve a fairly simple goal, we have properly undertaken a fairly ambitious strategy, after having tried the opposite, minimalist approach for the first half dozen years of the war only to see the Taliban make a comeback. Yet the strategy still needs improvement to address its two main vulnerabilities: the weakness and corruption of the Afghan government, and the schizophrenic approach to the war on the part the Pakistani government. This policy brief proposes ideas to address each of these problems. The proposals would also improve the prospects of any sound backup plan that might have to be considered this year, such as the concept that Brookings Senior Fellow Bruce Riedel and I have recently developed that we call a "Plan A-" for the country.

Afghan Governance and Anti-Corruption Efforts

Working with the Karzai government is an inherently complex matter. On the one hand, we have no choice but to partner with Afghanistan's elected leader, who in fact remains reasonably popular among his own people with a 62 percent favorability rating according to the latest polls. On the other hand, the government is widely seen as ineffective by many of its own citizens, helping generate motivation and recruits for the insurgency. So do we work with Karzai, or work around him? In fact, we must do both. We need a better way to help the Afghan government improve its performance without inciting periodic public spats along the way that set back our efforts to cooperate. And we also need a way to help build for Afghanistan's post-Karzai future, the sooner the better.

Improving Afghan Governance and Fighting Corruption

General Stanley McChrystal's 2009 assessment of the situation in Afghanistan famously and dramatically concluded that corruption in the Afghan government was comparable to the insurgency itself in posing a serious threat to the country. As such, General Petraeus has been right to focus intently on corruption since assuming command, including assigning the formidable Brigadier General HR McMaster to the task, and some positive things are happening as a result. More intelligence assets are being devoted to the problem. Field commanders and development specialists are more aware of the need to understand the power of money, and to be cognizant of whom they are empowering or embittering through their contracting processes and economic development efforts.

Yet problems remain. Corruption remains very serious. And disputes about corruption with President Karzai still go public too often. The United States and the international community more generally should reframe the issue of fighting corruption, as Marine Colonel Greg Douquet and I have previously argued. The challenge should be seen and described primarily as one of improving governance in Afghanistan rather than tackling a culture of criminality.

Blantant, extreme corruption must be prosecuted. But by criminalizing routine corruption, we not only encourage unrealistic expectations in the U.S. Congress and elsewhere about the progress that is achievable over the next few years, we may miss opportunities to work with Afghan "reconciliables"-individuals who may have had some corrupt tendencies yet also try to provide a certain level of effective governance. We also fail to recognize our own past role in the dynamic. Pumping billions of dollars a year into a poor economy, and inadvertently favoring certain power brokers and tribes over others in the process, feeds the very corruption that we so abhor.

Research on fighting corruption and improving governance points to a better way of thinking about this problem. One key insight from renowned development expert Paul Collier and others is that young democracies with weak checks on presidential powers and an easy source of cash tend to have major problems with corruption-so Afghanistan's challenges, rather than being viewed primarily as criminal, should be expected in some ways. Taking this tone with the Karzai government can improve atmospherics and bolster our odds of eliciting cooperative behavior from Kabul.

Another key finding from MIT's Benjamin Olken and other researchers is that trained, independent auditors deployed from the central government to various parts of the country can improve the quality of government performance. Government auditors could also counter the "inverse pyramid" patronage network that is common in the Karzai administration, a network in which corrupt officials "invest" in purchasing government positions and their "dividends" are paid to them in the form of bribes and extortion. Reforming Afghanistan's government will require reversing this trend, or at least mitigating it, through such auditors and other governmental improvements.

And perhaps most important of all, the development literature shows that a number of countries around the world have made headway in combating corruption and improving governance over the years. Brookings and World Bank scholars Daniel Kaufmann, Aart Kraay and Pablo Zoido-Lobaton document progress in places including Indonesia, Hong Kong, Georgia, Albania, Tanzania and Rwanda. We should try to involve more experts from such countries in the effort. President Karzai and others might react more positively to hearing suggestions about how to reduce bribes, check nepotism, and improve governance from Indonesians or Tanzanians rather than Americans.

With U.S. assistance, Afghanistan's government has improved. We are now seeing points of light in the anticorruption effort, such as President Karzai's new specialized anticorruption agency-the High Office of Oversight. Several key ministers in the Karzai cabinet are also exemplary on this front, including for example Minister of Interior Mohammadi. We should emphasize their sound efforts more often. But there is clearly a long way to go, and an international contact group may help.

Strengthening Afghan Political Parties and Institutions

Afghanistan's corruption problem is largely rooted in the fact that the young political system is still too driven by personalities-and to a lesser extent ethnicity-and not enough by ideas.

Part of the challenge is to make sure that Mr. Karzai relinquishes power in 2014, when he reaches the constitutional limit of two full presidential terms. Prudence requires that we assume Mr. Karzai will seek to change the constitution or otherwise manipulate the electoral and legal process to stay in office-not out of any megalomania, but as much as anything out of fear for himself and his friends and relatives given the uncertainty of who might follow him in office. As such, it is possible that Karzai could declare martial law and suspend future elections. He could seek a peace deal with insurgents that makes him the compromise candidate under a future modified constitution. He could even consider a military coup.

It is important to deflate this possibility before it gains momentum. U.S. policymakers should, for example, mention publicly that Mr. Karzai will no longer be president after 2014. This is unobjectionable as a point of legal fact-at least right now-so there is no reason to shy away from saying so. Talking about it enough will help clarify the international community's intentions and expectations. And given Afghanistan's long-term need for international security and economic assistance, Afghan leaders would have to take notice.

The second imperative is to strengthen Afghan political organizations. That means helping Afghanistan's reformers and patriots, of whom there are many, to form strong political movements. Mr. Karzai has chosen some good cabinet officials and governors, but these are just a few individuals. Afghanistan's organized political parties are very weak. There are some fledgling new movements-like the one spearheaded by former foreign minister and presidential candidate Abdullah Abdullah. But they are loosely organized and have relatively vague policy platforms.

Afghanistan needs political movements tied to ideas and governing principles rather than ethnicity or individuals. Mr. Karzai has so far discouraged their formation. He has argued that Afghans dislike political parties because of the legacy of Communist Party abuses in the late 1970s and 1980s. But the 1980s are increasingly ancient history. Those who oppose parties today seem motivated mostly by their own desire to divide and conquer a weak, inchoate opposition.

It is time for the U.S. government and the many other governmental and nongovernmental organizations present in Afghanistan to strongly support the activities of new political movements. They should encourage and fund Afghans as they hold policy conferences, create research institutes, do grass-roots political organizing, and talk policy and politics in print, on television and on the radio. This approach need not be anti-Karzai; the president himself could form a party.

Such dynamics could affect even the shorter-term calculations of Afghan politicians. If Afghan voters in 2014 and thereafter are empowered to make real policy choices, candidates will take notice and start developing ideas they can run on. That may be as good an antidote to weak governance and rampant corruption as we can find-not only for the future but for today as well.

Getting Pakistan Off the Fence

Pakistan arguably remains the most complex ally the United States has ever had in wartime. Nine years into the campaign, we still cannot clearly answer the question of whether Pakistan is with us or against us. America needs bold new policy measures to help Islamabad-in all its many dimensions and factions-make up its mind.

Despite allowing massive NATO logistics operations through its territory and helping the United States pursue al Qaeda operatives, Pakistan tolerates sanctuaries on its soil for the major insurgencies fighting in Afghanistan. These include the Afghan Taliban (known as the Quetta Shura Taliban because its principle base remains in Quetta in the Pakistani province of Baluchistan) as well as the Haqqani and Hezb-i-Islami Gulbuddin (HiG) networks. The Haqqanis straddle the border between the Afghan provinces of Khost, Paktia, and Paktika as well as North Waziristan and other tribal areas within Pakistan; HiG is further north, operating in and around the Khyber Pass connecting Kabul and Jalalabad in Afghanistan with Peshawar and points east in Pakistan. Thus, all three major Afghan insurgent groups have home bases in Pakistan, and despite the occasional drone strike are generally beyond NATO's reach as a result.

Pakistan has taken some worthy actions against extremists in its remote northern and western areas in recent years. Specifically, it has recognized the so-called Pakistani Taliban (the Tehrik-i-Taliban Pakistan, or TTP) as a mortal threat to the Pakistani state and responded accordingly in some tribal areas. Pakistanis argue, however, that limited numbers of ground troops combined with the past year's devastating floods prevent them from doing more. Quetta, North Waziristan, and other key places remain dens of iniquity, havens for extremists who continue to attack NATO and Afghan troops across the border and then return home for rest, regrouping, and fresh recruiting. Major command-and-control hubs are permanently located within Pakistan as well, and key insurgent leaders like Mullah Omar (to say nothing of Osama bin Laden) probably remain safely ensconced on Pakistani territory where U.S. forces cannot get at them. But it is perhaps not just a matter of available troops. Pakistan would rather have the Taliban and the Haqqanis back in power, especially in the country's south and east, than any group like the former Northern Alliance, which it views as too close to India. Since Islamabad cannot be sure that the current Afghan political system will survive, therefore, it keeps a backup plan based largely on the Taliban and its associates.

Under these circumstances, part of the right policy is to keep doing more of what the Obama administration has been doing with Pakistan-building trust, as with last fall's strategic dialogue in Washington; increasing aid incrementally, as with the new five-year, $2 billion aid package announced during that dialogue; encouraging Pakistan-India dialogue (which would help persuade Islamabad it could safely move more military forces from its eastern border to its western regions) and coordinating militarily across the Afghanistan-Pakistan border region. But President Barack Obama needs to think bigger. The clarification that the U.S.-led ISAF mission will continue until 2014, and indeed beyond, at the November Lisbon summit was a step in the right direction but more is needed.

Obama should offer Islamabad a much more expansive U.S.-Pakistani relationship if it helps win this war. Two major incentives would have particular appeal to Pakistan. One is a civilian nuclear energy deal like that being provided to India, with full safeguards on associated reactors. Pakistan's progress on export controls in the wake of the A.Q. Khan debacle has been good enough so far to allow a provisional approval of such a deal if other things fall into place as well, including Islamabad’s compliance with any future fissile production cutoff treaty. Second is a free trade accord. Struggling economically, Pakistan needs such a shot in the arm, and a trade deal could arguably do even more than aid at this point.

But the key point is this: Pakistan should be told that these deals will only be possible if the United States and its allies prevail in Afghanistan. Small gestures of greater helpfulness are not adequate; bottom-line results are what count and what are needed. If Afghanistan turns around in a year or two, the deals can be set in motion and implemented over a longer period that will allow the United States to continually monitor subsequent Pakistani cooperation in the war. These terms are really just common sense, and they are based on political realism about America's domestic politics as well as its strategic interests, since there is no way the Congress would support such a nuclear deal if Pakistani policy ultimately contributed to our losing the war in Afghanistan.

Conclusion

Current strategy in Afghanistan is built on reasonably sound counterinsurgency principles and is fairly promising in its prospects for the year ahead. But every such operation is different. That is a basic corollary of counterinsurgency theory, with its emphasis on local politics, conditions, and personalities-meaning that there is no reason to believe that current strategy is good enough just because its fundamentals are time-tested.

A number of other policy reforms, beyond those discussed here, may be worth considering in the coming months as well. The numerical goal for the Afghan security forces is probably still too low, and should approach 400,000 uniformed personnel rather than the current 305,000 target (this debate is well underway as of this writing). The legal system remains weak, with glaring problems such as a major dearth of judges and severely inadequate pay for prosecutors, as well as no clear strategy for linking the formal justice system to the local, traditional justice systems that remain important in Afghanistan today. Finally, in the aftermath of the September 2010 parliamentary elections, some patchwork solution to the disenfranchisement of Pashtuns in provinces like Ghazni where many of them could not vote (or had their votes thrown out) is probably needed. Perhaps some additional modest number of Pashtuns could be given non-voting adjunct status in the parliament, allowing their voices to be heard even if they were ultimately not able to win seats.

But the three changes to our current approach discussed in this policy brief are central, and have not received their due attention. On the anticorruption front, adoption of a less bilateral approach that includes a high-level international advisory body on good governance for the Karzai government could improve the tone and substance of the effort. On the Afghan politics front, the international community should be unapologetic about supporting Afghan political parties built on ideas and agendas more than personalities and ethnicities. And finally, in regard to Pakistan, an informal but public U.S. offer to pursue a bilateral civilian nuclear energy deal should Pakistan help us win the war by clamping down on insurgent sanctuaries, might motivate greater efforts by our on-again off-again allies across the border. Adoption of these recommendations would improve our prospects for at least moderate success in Afghanistan and help make 2011 the belated turnaround year that we so badly need.

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Policy Brief #181

The new normal for local, state and federal governments is fiscal austerity. Although President Obama supported education during his State of the Union address and in his budget proposal to Congress, cash-strapped localities and states—which foot most of the bill for educating America’s children—may have to balance their budgets with cuts to schools and teachers. The recession exposed a long-developing structural imbalance between public expenditure versus raising the revenue for public services. Especially on education, reality has set in, with a vengeance.

Cutting public expenditure is not necessarily a bad thing. There are, however, some activities that have become so fundamentally governmental and so critically important to the nation’s future that they require special care during a period of severe budget trimming. Education is one such example.

The Brown Center on Education Policy at Brookings has recently developed proposals to ensure that federal investments in education have impact. These proposals present the dual advantage of low costs of implementation at the federal level coupled with the promise of considerable leverage at the state and local level. Two of those proposals are presented in this brief: increasing digital and virtual education and expanding consumer information on higher education.

	RECOMMENDATIONS
	One important path to individual opportunity is higher levels of educational attainment. The U.S. economy is marked by an increasing economic divide between those who are educated and those who are not. In a time of fiscal austerity, every federal dollar invested in education must have a return. Congress should: Increase digital and virtual education. In reauthorizing the No Child Left Behind Act, provide that parents of economically disadvantaged students who are eligible for federal Title I funding should be able to direct that the funding associated with their child be spent to cover the costs of enrolling their child in virtual courses or in a virtual school.   Expand consumer information in higher education. Amend the Higher Education Act (HEA) to require that states that receive federal funds for statewide longitudinal data systems provide information on completion rates, employment levels, and annual earned income for each degree or certificate program and for each degree-granting institution that operates in the state. This information could be disseminated on the Internet.

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The full story of the killing of Michael Brown, a young, black, unarmed man shot by a policeman in Ferguson, Missouri, is still unfolding—and the truth will not be known for some time. It is only after full investigations are completed that an objective evaluation of the incident can be made. Nonetheless, there is no doubt that the killing of the young man was unfortunate and has generated a serious debate about race relations in America, and on the relations between police and the communities that they are supposed to protect. The riots and massive looting portrayed not only the extent of criminality in America’s inner cities, but also the economic marginalization of the minority communities.

Coming not long after the successful U.S.-Africa Leaders Summit held in Washington, the Ferguson incident and the follow-up demonstrations have been rather unfortunate in as far as how Africans view America—in a way questioning America’s standing as a protector of human rights. The hostility towards the United States in regard to its treatment of African-Americans has dominated social media with claims that the incident shows that America should not claim leadership when it comes to human rights. Such criticisms by many other countries, including Russia and China, are widespread.

I was particularly surprised by the comments in the Kenyan media coverage of this topic. Here are some statements on the topic by readers of the most popular paper there—the Daily Nation:

(This is an apparent reference to the fact that the United States government issues travel advisories to countries like Kenya when such incidents occur and there are riots.)

(This statement is in reference to the U.S. government’s actions following the 2007-2008 post-election violence in Kenya.)

       

After years of warnings from the public health community about the growing threat of antibiotic resistance, yesterday the White House announced a national strategy to combat the growing problem of antibiotic resistance within the U.S. and abroad. The administration’s commitment represents an important step forward, as antibiotic-resistant infections are responsible for 23,000 deaths annually, and cost over $50 billion in excess health spending and lost productivity.  The administration’s National Strategy on Combating Antibiotic-Resistant Bacteria includes incentives for developing new drugs, more rigorous stewardship of existing drugs, and better surveillance of antibiotic use and the pathogens that are resistant to them.  President Obama also issued an Executive Order that establishes an interagency Task Force and a non-governmental Presidential Advisory Council that will focus on broad-based strategies for slowing the emergence and spread of resistant infections. 

While antibiotics are crucial for treating bacterial infections, their misuse over time has contributed to a rather alarming rate of antibiotic resistance, including the development of multidrug-resistance bacteria or “super bugs.” Misuse manifests throughout all corners of public and private life; from the doctor’s office when prescribed to treat viruses; to industrial agriculture, where they are used in abundance to promote growth in livestock. New data from the World Health Organization (WHO) and U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) confirm that rising overuse of antibiotics has already become a major public health threat worldwide.

The administration’s announcement included a report from the President’s Council of Advisors on Science and Technology (PCAST) titled “Combatting Antibiotic Resistance,” which includes recommendations developed by a range of experts to help control antibiotic resistance. In addition, they outline a $20 million prize to reward the development of a new rapid, point-of-care diagnostic test. Such tests help health care providers choose the right antibiotics for their patients and streamline drug development by making it easier to identify and treat patients in clinical trials.  

The Need for Financial Incentives and Better Reimbursement

A highlight of the PCAST report is its recommendations on economic incentives to bring drug manufacturers back into the antibiotics market. Innovative changes to pharmaceutical regulation and research and development (R&D) will be welcomed by many in the health care community, but financial incentives and better reimbursement are necessary to alleviate the market failure for antibacterial drugs. A major challenge, particularly within a fee-for-service or volume-based reimbursement system is providing economic incentives that promote investment in drug development without encouraging overuse.

A number of public and private stakeholders, including the Engelberg Center for Health Care Reform and Chatham House’s Centre on Global Health Security Working Group on Antimicrobial Resistance, are exploring alternative reimbursement mechanisms that “de-link” revenue from the volume of antibiotics sold. Such a mechanism, combined with further measures to stimulate innovation, could create a stable incentive structure to support R&D. Further, legislative proposals under consideration by Congress to reinvigorate the antibiotic pipeline, including the Antibiotic Development to Advance Patient Treatment (ADAPT) Act of 2013, could complement the White House’s efforts and help turn the tide on antibiotic resistance. Spurring the development of new antibiotics is critical because resistance will continue to develop even if health care providers and health systems can find ways to prevent the misuse of these drugs.

       

Food safety is not a problem unique to China, though it is certainly one of the country’s most pressing and persistent challenges. On April 28, 2016, the John L. Thornton China Center hosted a public event to discuss food safety in China and what new regulations might mean for consumers and businesses.

Revised food safety law a step in the right direction

China’s revised Food Safety Law, enacted in October 2015, is intended to strengthen the regulation of food companies in China and enhance oversight along the supply chain. The law imposes tougher consequences on violators of food safety regulations. The revised Food Safety Law is a step in the right direction, but improving food safety will require more than just new regulations. Greater inter-agency coordination is needed among the various government entities with regulatory responsibility for food safety, including the China Food and Drug Administration, the Ministry of Agriculture, the National Health and Planning Commission, and the General Administration of Quality Supervision, Inspection and Quarantine.

China has done relatively better in enforcing food safety and quality standards for its food exports than it has for its domestic food market. A disparity between export quality and what is found in local markets is not uncommon in developing countries. But after several large-scale food safety incidents, domestic Chinese consumers are now paying close attention to the quality of their food and are no longer willing to accept such a disparity. Setting and enforcing higher food safety standards domestically is important for maintaining public health and for increasing consumer confidence. The latter will take time but is an indispensable component of the consumption-driven economy that China seeks.

Industry consolidation needed

One of the biggest obstacles facing Chinese food safety regulators is a still-fragmented domestic food industry with many small players. The increase in regulatory requirements and inspections mandated by the new law will raise the costs of doing business and likely lead to industry consolidation, which would help make the domestic Chinese food industry more manageable from a regulatory perspective. Emerging trends that see consumers buying food products from small and perhaps unverified retailers online actually make the jobs of regulators more difficult. This is because products are harder to trace—and, if there is a problem, to recall—when transactions occur through nontraditional retail channels. Traceability is critical to ensuring food safety because it allows problematic food items to be identified. The responsible firm can then correct the situation and each actor in the supply chain can be held accountable.

The Chinese government is already supporting initiatives that aggregate production units at the farm level. These farmer production bases enable farmers to coordinate food production and marketing to larger retailers. Participating farms have been provided with safe pesticides and guidelines on pesticide application; they are also able to sell to large retailers directly. These direct farmer-retailer relationships allow for greater traceability and facilitate the spot-checking that is necessary for verification. This model holds promise for improving food safety, especially as it pertains to pesticide application, but it will need to be scaled up to have a meaningful impact on China’s domestic food market.

What can China learn from other countries?

Since China is not alone in facing food safety challenges, it can learn lessons from the experiences of other countries. According to Vivian Hoffmann of the International Food Policy Research Institute, “there are many ways in which the public sector can harness the capacity and energy of the private sector to make food safety regulation more efficient.” For instance, China could consider greater co-regulation, which is a strategy that involves the private sector in regulation. Allowing firms to give input when regulators are setting standards can help prevent situations where unattainable standards are either crippling for companies or just ignored altogether. Hoffman is clear to note that allowing firms to give input does not mean compromising on consumer safety. Rather, it would create a more transparent process that would allow companies time to work up to higher standards if necessary. Private companies could be involved in testing their own products, but verification testing would still be needed.

Open communication with consumers is also important. The risk-based approach to food safety, which is the international norm and which China has also adopted, entails a particular challenge: Sometimes what consumers think is the most dangerous aspect of the food supply is different from scientists’ perceptions and knowledge of risk. For example, scientists may focus on biological contaminants while consumers worry about pesticides and additives. The concerns of consumers should be taken into account when setting priorities, but experts also need to explain why their concerns may be different. Communication and transparency are essential for bridging this disconnect. Chenglin Liu of St. Mary’s School of Law similarly stresses transparency as a key ingredient in improving China’s food safety situation. Broader capacity building efforts—as it relates to rule of law, an independent judiciary, and independent journalism—will help improve the enforcement of regulations.

The country’s revised Food Safety Law is a step in the right direction, but it is not enough to resolve China’s food safety woes. Regulatory enforcement remains a challenge. Fortunately, it is by no means an insurmountable one. Vigilant consumers will continue to demand higher-quality and more-traceable food products, a trend that puts increasing pressure on regulators to enforce high standards and that also presents great opportunities for proactive businesses.

       

On Thursday, July 7, the International Monetary Fund (IMF) revised its economic outlook for South Africa. Despite “considerable economic and social progress” since 1994, the IMF report cited high income inequality, among other factors, in its projection of slow growth and increased unemployment in the medium term. Earlier this year, in the Brookings Africa Growth Initiative’s Foresight Africa 2016, we explored this pressing problem—high income inequality—across the continent. The initial takeaway was that sub-Saharan Africa has greater in-country income inequality than other developing countries around the world. However, after separating seven outlier economies—Angola, the Central African Republic, Botswana, Zambia, Namibia, Comoros, and South Africa—we noted that income inequality, measured by the Gini coefficient, in the rest of the region actually mirrors the rest of the developing world, which currently stands at 0.39. All seven outlier economies have Gini coefficients above 0.55, a level reached by only four other countries worldwide: Suriname, Haiti, Colombia, and Honduras. 

It is important to explore precisely why this disparity exists. Notably, sub-Saharan Africa is not only an outlier in income inequality, but also in the relationship between economic growth and poverty reduction. Generally, in the developing world, every 1 percent of growth reduces poverty 4 percent. In sub-Saharan Africa, however, every 1 percent of growth only reduces poverty by 3 percent. In Foresight Africa 2016, Brookings Nonresident Senior Fellow Haroon Bhorat suggests that this disparity may be because of the commodity booms that have sustained growth periods in African economies, which bring extraordinary returns to capital but limited job growth. Alternatively, these commodity booms may have accompanied a fall in manufacturing output; growth is thus concentrated in the low-productivity services sector. In any case, this graph forces us to consider exactly what type of structural transformation is necessary for continued economic growth and acknowledge that inequality in sub-Saharan Africa might require different solutions in different countries.

For a more in-depth discussion on this issue, see Foresight Africa 2016 and Bhorat’s discussion of African inequality in relation to the Sustainable Development Goals.

Omid Abrishamchian contributed to this post.

       

       

       

       

       

       

       

Breakthrough therapy designation (BTD) is the newest of four expedited programs developed by the U.S Food and Drug Administration (FDA) to accelerate the development and review of novel therapies that target serious conditions. The public response to the program has been largely positive, and dozens of drugs have successfully received the designation. However, the FDA denies many more requests than it grants. In fact, as of March 2015, less than one in three of the BTD requests submitted have been granted. By contrast, roughly 75 percent of the requests for fast track designation (another of the Agency’s expedited programs) were granted between 1998 and 2007. This discrepancy suggests ongoing uncertainty over what exactly constitutes a “breakthrough” according to the FDA’s criteria.

On April 24, the Center for Health Policy at Brookings will host an event, Breakthrough Therapy Designation: Exploring the Qualifying Criteria, that will discuss qualifying criteria for the BTD program using real and hypothetical case studies to explore how FDA weighs the evidence submitted. Below is a primer that describes the definition, value, and impact of BTD.

What is BTD?

BTD was established in 2012 under the Food and Drug Administration Safety and Innovation Act, and is intended to expedite the development and review of drugs that show signs of extraordinary benefit at early stages of the clinical development process. However, BTD is not an automatic approval. The drug still has to undergo clinical testing and review by the FDA. Rather, BTD is designed to facilitate and shorten the clinical development process, which can otherwise take many years to complete.

What criteria does FDA use to evaluate potential breakthroughs?

In order to qualify for the designation, a therapy must be intended to treat a serious or life-threatening illness, and there must be preliminary clinical evidence that it represents a substantial improvement over existing therapies on at least one clinically significant outcome (such as death or permanent impairment).

In considering a request for BTD, FDA relies on three primary considerations:

1) the quantity and quality of the clinical evidence being submitted;

2) the available therapies that the drug is being compared to; and

3) the magnitude of treatment effect shown on the outcome being studied.

In practice, however, it can be difficult to define a single threshold that a therapy must meet. The decision depends on the specific context for that drug.  In some cases, for example, the targeted disease has few or no treatments available, while in others there may be several effective alternative treatments to which the new therapy can be compared. The request may also be made at different stages of the clinical development process, which means that the amount and type of data available to FDA can vary. In some cases, early evidence of benefit may disappear when the drug is tested in larger populations, which is why FDA reserves the right to rescinded the designation if subsequent data shows that the therapy no longer meets the criteria.

How many therapies have received the designation?

As of March 2015, FDA had received a total of 293 requests for BTD. Of these, 82 received the designation, and 23 have since been approved for marketing. Ten of these approvals were new indications for already approved drugs, rather than novel therapies that had never before received FDA approval.

What are the benefits of BTD?

For drug manufacturers, it is about the intensity and frequency of their interactions with FDA. Once the designation is granted, the FDA takes an “all hands-on-deck” approach to providing the manufacturer with ongoing guidance and feedback throughout the clinical development process. Products that receive BTD are also able to submit portions of their marketing application on a rolling basis (rather than all at once at the end of clinical trials) and BTD can also be used in combination with other expedited programs in order to further reduce the product’s time to market.

For patients, the potential benefits are straightforward: earlier access to therapies that may significantly improve or extend their lives.

How does BTD relate to the other three expedited programs?

The other three expedited review and development programs—fast track designation, priority review, and accelerated approval—are also geared at facilitating the development and approval of drugs for serious conditions. These other programs have been in place for over 15 years, and have played a significant role in accelerating patient access to new therapeutics (Table 1). In 2014 alone, 66 percent of the 41 drugs approved by FDA's Center for Drug Evaluation and Research used at least one of these four pathways, and 46 percent received at least two of the designations in combination.

Table 1: Overview of FDA’s Expedited Review Programs

 Adapted from FDA's Guidance for Industry: Expedited Programs for Serious Conditions - Drugs and Biologics

      

Event Information

Register for the Event

Established by the Food and Drug Administration Safety and Innovation Act of 2012, breakthrough therapy designation (BTD) is one of several programs developed by the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) to speed up the development and review of drugs and biologics that address unmet medical needs. In order to qualify for this designation, the treatment must address a serious or life-threatening illness. In addition, the manufacturer (i.e., sponsor) must provide early clinical evidence that the treatment is a substantial improvement over currently available therapies. The FDA is working to further clarify how it applies the qualifying criteria to breakthrough designation applications.

On April 24, under a cooperative agreement with FDA, the Center for Health Policy convened a public meeting to discuss the qualifying criteria for this special designation. Using examples from oncology, neurology, psychiatry, and hematology, the workshop highlighted considerations for the BTD application process, the evaluation process, and factors for acceptance or rejection. The discussion also focused on key strategies for ensuring that the qualifying criteria are understood across a broad range of stakeholder groups.

Video

• Breakthrough therapy designation: Two and a half years in
• Applying the breakthrough therapy criteria: Oncology
• Applying the breakthrough therapy criteria: Neurology
• Applying the breakthrough therapy criteria: Anti-infective/psychiatry/hematology
• Summary and discussion of lessons learned

Event Materials

• Breakthrough Therapy Designation_final
• Breakthrough therapy slide deck

      

Many proposals to accelerate and improve medical product innovation and regulation focus on reforming the product development and regulatory review processes that occur before drugs and devices get to market. While important, such proposals alone do not fully recognize the broader opportunities that exist to learn more about the safety and effectiveness of drugs and devices after approval. As drugs and devices begin to be used in larger and more diverse populations and in more personalized clinical combinations, evidence from real-world use during routine patient care is increasingly important for accelerating innovation and improving regulation.

First, further evidence development from medical product use in large populations can allow providers to better target and treat individuals, precisely matching the right drug or device to the right patients. As genomic sequencing and other diagnostic technologies continue to improve, postmarket evidence development is critical to assessing the full range of genomic subtypes, comorbidities, patient characteristics and preferences, and other factors that may significantly affect the safety and effectiveness of drugs and devices. This information is often not available or population sizes are inadequate to characterize such subgroup differences in premarket randomized controlled trials.

Second, improved processes for generating postmarket data on medical products are necessary for fully realizing the intended effect of premarket reforms that expedite regulatory approval. The absence of a reliable postmarket system to follow up on potential safety or effectiveness issues means that potential signals or concerns must instead be addressed through additional premarket studies or through one-off postmarket evaluations that are more costly, slower, and likely to be less definitive than would be possible through a better-established infrastructure. As a result, the absence of better systems for generating postmarket evidence creates a barrier to more extensive use of premarket reforms to promote innovation.

These issues can be addressed through initiatives that combine targeted premarket reforms with postmarket steps to enhance innovation and improve evidence on safety and effectiveness throughout the life cycle of a drug or device. The ability to routinely capture clinically relevant electronic health data within our health care ecosystem is improving, increasingly allowing electronic health records, payer claims data, patient-reported data, and other relevant data to be leveraged for further research and innovation in care. Recent legislative proposals released by the House of Representatives’ 21st Century Cures effort acknowledge and seek to build on this progress in order to improve medical product research, development, and use. The initial Cures discussion draft included provisions for better, more systematic reporting of and access to clinical trials data; for increased access to Medicare claims data for research; and for FDA to promulgate guidance on the sources, analysis, and potential use of so-called Real World Evidence. These are potentially useful proposals that could contribute valuable data and methods to advancing the development of better treatments.

What remains a gap in the Cures proposals, however, is a more systematic approach to improving the availability of postmarket evidence. Such a systematic approach is possible now. Biomedical researchers and health care plans and providers are doing more to collect and analyze clinical and outcomes data. Multiple independent efforts – including the U.S. Food and Drug Administration’s Sentinel Initiative for active postmarket drug safety surveillance, the Patient-Centered Outcomes Research Institute’s PCORnet for clinical effectiveness studies, the Medical Device Epidemiology Network (MDEpiNet) for developing better methods and medical device registries for medical device surveillance and a number of dedicated, product-specific outcomes registries – have demonstrated the potential for large-scale, systematic postmarket data collection. Building on these efforts could provide unprecedented evidence on how medical products perform in the real-world and on the course of underlying diseases that they are designed to treat, while still protecting patient privacy and confidentiality.

These and other postmarket data systems now hold the potential to contribute to public-private collaboration for improved population-based evidence on medical products on a wider scale. Action in the Cures initiative to unlock this potential will enable the legislation to achieve its intended effect of promoting quicker, more efficient development of effective, personalized treatments and cures.

What follows is a set of both short- and long-term proposals that would bolster the current systems for postmarket evidence development, create new mechanisms for generating postmarket data, and enable individual initiatives on evidence development to work together as part of a broad push toward a truly learning health care system.

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The breakthrough therapy designation (BTD) program was initiated by the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) in 2012 to expedite the development of treatments for serious or life-threatening illness that demonstrate “substantial improvement” over existing therapies. The program has since become a widely supported mechanism for accelerating patient access to new drugs. As of March 2015, FDA has received a total of 293 requests for BTD. However, it has granted just  82 (28%), which indicates an ongoing lack of clarity over what exactly meets the criteria for the designation.

On April 24, the Center for Health Policy at Brookings convened a public meeting to explore the designation’s qualifying criteria and how FDA applies those criteria across therapeutic areas. Panelists used real-world and hypothetical case studies to frame the discussion, and highlighted major considerations for the application process, the FDA’s evaluation of the evidence, and the key factors for acceptance or rejection. The discussion also identified strategies to ensure that qualifying criteria are well understood. Here are the five big takeaways:

1.  The BTD program is viewed positively by drug companies, researchers, advocates, and others 

Across the board, participants expressed enthusiasm for the BTD program. Industry representatives noted that their experience had been extremely positive, and that the increased cooperation with and guidance from FDA were very helpful in streamlining their development programs. Receiving the designation can also raise a drug company’s profile, which can facilitate additional investment as well as clinical trial patient recruitment; this is particularly important for smaller companies with limited resources.

Patient and disease advocates were likewise supportive, and expressed hope that the early lessons learned from successful breakthrough therapy approvals (which have been mostly concentrated in the oncology and antiviral fields) could be translated to other disease areas with less success. However, while BTD is an important tool in expediting the development of new drugs, it is just one piece of broader scientific and regulatory policy landscape. Accelerating the pace of discovery and development of truly innovative new drugs will depend on a range of other factors, such as developing and validating new biomarkers that can be used to measure treatment effects at an earlier stage, as well as establishing networks that can streamline the clinical trial process. It will also be important to develop effective new approaches to collecting, analyzing, and communicating information about these treatments once they are on the market, as this information can potentially be used by FDA, providers, and patients to  further improve prescription drug policy and medical decision-making.

2.  BTD requests far outnumber those that actually meet the qualifying criteria

Since the program began, less than 30 percent of requests have received BTD designation. A substantial majority were denied at least in part due to either a lack of data or problems with the quality of the data, or some combination of the two. For example, some sponsors requested the designation before they had any clinical data, or submitted the request using clinical data that was incomplete or based on flawed study designs. Many requests also failed to meet the Agency’s bar for “substantial improvement” over existing therapies.

One reason for the high denial rate may be a lack of a clear regulatory or statutory bar that could be used as a definitive guide for sponsors to know what is needed to qualify for the designation. BTD denials are also confidential, which means that sponsors effectively have nothing to lose by submitting a request. Going forward, manufacturers may need to exercise more discretion in deciding to request the designation, as the process can be resource- and time-intensive for both sides.

3.  There is no single threshold for determining what defines a breakthrough therapy

About 53 percent of the 109 total BTD denials were due at least in part to the fact that the drug did not represent a substantial improvement over existing therapies. During the day’s discussion, FDA and sponsors both noted that this is likely because the criteria for BTD are inherently subjective. In practice, this means there is no clear threshold for determining when a new therapy represents a “substantial improvement” over existing therapies. Designation decisions are complex and highly dependent on the context, including the disease or condition being targeted, the availability of other treatments, the patient population, the outcomes being studied, and the overall reliability of the data submitted. Given the multiple factors at play, it can be difficult in some cases to determine when a new product is potentially “transformational” as opposed to “better,” especially for conditions that are poorly understood or have few or no existing treatments. In making its determinations, FDA considers the totality of the evidence submitted, rather than focusing on specific evidentiary requirements.

4.  Early communication with FDA is strongly recommended for BTD applicants

Roughly 72 percent of the BTD denials related at least in part to trial design or analysis problems, which led several people to suggest that sponsors engage with FDA prior to submitting their request. Though there are several formal mechanisms for interacting with the agency, informal consultations with the relevant review division could help sponsors to get a better  and much earlier sense of what kind of data FDA might need. This early communication could both strengthen viable BTD requests and reduce the number of frivolous requests.

5.  FDA may need more resources for implementing the BTD program

Drugs that receive breakthrough designation are subject to much more intensive FDA guidance and review. However, when the program was established in 2012, Congress did not allocate funding to cover its costs. There have been ongoing concerns that the program is exacting a significant toll on FDA’s already limited resources, and potentially affecting the timeline for other drug application reviews. These concerns were reiterated during the day’s discussion, and some suggested that Congress consider attaching a user fee to the BTD program when the Prescription Drug User Fee Act comes up for reauthorization in 2017.

      

Summary

Global education plays an important role in contributing to U.S. foreign policy objectives. In a recent speech, Secretary of State Hillary Clinton highlighted education, along with health, agriculture, security, and local governance as the core areas for U.S. international development investment. She emphasized the importance of education, particularly of girls and youth, in improving global stability, speeding economic growth, and helping global health, all of which advance U.S. interests in the world.

But how effective has the U.S. government been in supporting global education? Unfortunately, its many good education activities and programs are not leveraged for maximum impact on the ground, especially in situations of armed conflict and state fragility. Challenges of U.S. foreign assistance—for example, fragmentation across multiple agencies, lack of policy coherence, diminished multilateral engagement—generally affects its work in education. Luckily some of the core strengths of U.S. assistance have an impact as well, specifically the large amount of resources (in total terms, if not relative terms) devoted to education and the vast breadth and depth of American academic, philanthropic and NGO partners engaged in pioneering work on education in the developing world.

This report analyzes the effectiveness of U.S. government education work specifically in relation to conflict-affected and fragile states. Findings across five domains—global reach, resources, technical expertise, policy and multilateral partnerships—show that U.S. education aid falls critically short of what it is capable of achieving. The U.S. government has substantial strengths in this area, especially in global reach, resources, and technical expertise, demonstrating a real comparative advantage in the field of education in situations of conflict and fragility. However, its fragmented policy across agencies and its limited multilateral engagement prevent it from maximizing its strengths, leaving it punching below its weight on this important issue. In this sense, the U.S. government is a classic underachiever, failing to efficiently deploy its many capabilities and potential for maximum impact.

There has never been a better time for looking at the aid-effectiveness of U.S. government education work. The Obama administration is bringing increased focus on the Paris Principles for Aid Effectiveness to its development initiatives. The U.S. Congress is actively engaged with pending legislative action to modernize foreign assistance and improve U.S. support for universal education. Two major reviews of foreign assistance are underway: the Quadrennial Diplomacy and Development Review led by the Department of State and USAID, and the Presidential Study Directive on U.S. Global Development Policy led by the White House.

Questions about foreign assistance reform asked in these two reviews can be applied to the education sector. For example, how can the U.S. government improve its education assistance by using a “whole-of-government” approach, by focusing on comparative advantages and strengths, and by improving coordination and by increasing multilateral engagement?

Careful analysis and answers to these questions can help propel the U.S. from its current position as an underachiever to being a leader in global education, specifically in contexts of conflict and state fragility.

This report makes nine specific recommendations, many of which could be achieved without any substantial increase in funding, that would enable the U.S. government to greatly increase the effectiveness of its education aid to populations living in contexts of conflict and state fragility.

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Federal Reserve chair Janet Yellen just gave a speech in Philadelphia that acknowledges a weak jobs report last Friday. She rightly cautions us not to place too much weight on any single month’s numbers. Overall, her talk seems to have raised confidence in the financial markets about where the economy is heading, based on a wider range of recent indicators besides the numbers reported in the jobs report, for example, on consumer spending and home construction. These suggest areas of continued strength in the economy.

Still, the report last Friday was really lousy, and not really a one-off event (and not just due to the Verizon strike). Since the end of 2015, the job growth numbers have been on a pretty steady downward trend, with growth above 200,000 in only one month (February). A few other indicators in the report were also quite disappointing: the numbers of workers in part-time jobs because they can’t find full-time work bounced back up; and labor force participation dropped considerably. Indeed, about 800,000 workers have left the labor force in the last 2 months, including many who are well below retirement age. Their exit reverses some of the progress in labor force participation we had seen late last year and early this year.

On the other hand, not all numbers in the report were terrible. Wage growth held up reasonably well. Over the past 2 months, wages have risen by over 3 percent (on an annualized basis), suggesting a labor market that is tight enough to finally generate some earnings improvements for workers who already have jobs.

Overall, the different indicators highlight two sets of forces driving the labor market: Demand-side problems, suggesting employers still need too few workers to generate full employment; and supply-side problems, where worker availability and skills are starting to constrain the amount of hiring going on.

Indeed, the latter problems might explain the peculiar combination of weak and strong indicators we see in the report. For instance, if the drop in labor force participation is permanent, then the 4.7 percent unemployment rate accurately suggests that the amount of slack in the labor market is lower than we thought. Employers are likely finding it a bit harder to hire the workers with the skills and experience they really want. Consequently, our long economic expansion is finally translating into higher wage growth for those already employed or about to be.

Another possibility, perhaps, is that productivity growth is finally rebounding a bit, after the dismal numbers we’ve observed in the past few years, where GDP growth has been modest but employment growth has been strong. Indeed, some recovery in productivity is a precondition for real wage growth to last, even in a tighter labor market. In this scenario, output growth would now be more robust than employment growth, reversing some of the striking declines we’ve observed in the productivity numbers.

Of course, what might be most convincing is a combination of the labor demand- and supply-side stories, along the following lines: the labor market is gradually approaching capacity, though it is not there yet. I don’t think it will get there until we are closer to 4 percent unemployment. But employer difficulties finding skilled workers matter more in this type of market than in the earlier years of recovery after the Great Recession. Such pressure raises wages for employed workers and those with appropriate skill levels. On the other hand, workers with weaker skills still face dismal prospects, and their exit from the labor force reflects their bleak prospects. The growth of labor demand might really be shrinking, as productivity rebounds a bit and as weakness in business investment and export demand are felt in the job market.

We won’t know for sure how much of this story is accurate until we get more jobs and productivity reports over the next few months. But, in the meantime, my bet is on just such a mixed reading, which suggests that a very gradual lifting of economic stimulus is appropriate, without, however, moving too quickly in the opposite direction.

      

Ghana attained middle-income status after rebasing its National Accounts, pushing per capita gross domestic product (GDP) of the country above $1,000 in 2007. After recovering from economic recession in 1984 on account of the Bretton Woods sponsored economic reform introduced at that time, Ghana’s growth has been remarkably strong, with its lowest economic growth of 3.3 percent recorded in 1994. The country’s growth rate reached its peak of 15 percent in 2011 on the back of the commencement of commercial production of oil, making it one of the fastest growing economies globally during that year. This has translated into increased per capita income, which reached a high of about $1,900 in 2013.

The concern, however, has been the ability of the country to sustain this growth momentum given the level and quality of education and skills, and, more importantly, the failure of this strong growth performance to be translated into the creation of productive and decent jobs, improved incomes and livelihoods. The structure of the economy remains highly informal, with a shift in the country’s national output composition from agriculture to low-value service activities in the informal sector. The commencement of commercial production of oil raised the share of the industrial sector in national output. However, the continuous decline in manufacturing value added undermines Ghana’s economic transformation effort to promote high and secure incomes and improve the livelihoods of the people.

Structural change towards higher value added sectors, and upgrading of technologies in existing sectors, is expected to allow for better conditions of work, better jobs, and higher wages. But the low level and quality of human resources not only diverts the economy from its structural transformation path of development but also makes it difficult for the benefits of growth to be spread through the creation of gainful and productive employment. Thus, productive structural economic transformation hinges on the level and quality of education and labor skills. A highly skilled, innovative and knowledgeable workforce constitutes a key ingredient in the process of structural economic transformation, and as productive sectors apply more complex production technologies and research and development activities increase the demand for education and skills. However, the observed weak human capital base does not provide a strong foundation for structural economic transformation of Ghana.

Ghana’s employment growth lags behind economic growth, with an estimated employment elasticity of output of 0.47, suggesting that every 1 percent of annual economic growth yields 0.47 percent growth of total employment.

There is also widespread concern about the quality of the country’s growth in terms of employment and inequality, as well as general improvement in the livelihood of the people (see Alagidede et al. 2013; Aryeetey et al. 2014; Baah-Boateng 2013). A key indicator for measuring the extent to which macroeconomic growth results in gains in the welfare of the citizenry is the quality of jobs that the economy generates. Ghana’s employment growth lags behind economic growth, with an estimated employment elasticity of output of 0.47 (see Baah-Boateng 2013), suggesting that every 1 percent of annual economic growth yields 0.47 percent growth of total employment. Besides the slow rate of job creation is the dominance of vulnerable employment and the working poverty rate in the labor market. In 2010, 7 out of 10 jobs were estimated to be vulnerable while only 1 out of 5 jobs could be considered as productive jobs that meet the standard of decent work (Baah-Boateng and Ewusi 2013). Workers in vulnerable employment tend to lack formal work arrangements as well as elements associated with decent employment such as adequate social security and recourse to effective social dialogue mechanisms (Sparreboom and Baah-Boateng 2011). The working poverty rate remains a challenge with one out of every five persons employed belonging to poor households.

The article seeks to provide an analytical assessment of Ghana’s economic growth as one of Africa’s growth giants over a period of more than two decades and the implication for labour market and livelihood outcomes. Growth of labor productivity at the national and sectoral level is examined, as well as the sectoral contribution to aggregate productivity growth. The article also analyses the effect of growth on employment and the employment-poverty linkage in terms of elasticity within the growth-employment-poverty nexus in Ghana. It also delves into a discussion of the constraints on growth and productive employment from both demand and supply perspectives, and identifies skills gaps and the opportunities offered in the country, which has experienced strong growth performance. The article has five sections, with an overview of Ghana’s economic growth performance in Section 2, after this introductory section. This is followed by an overview of the developments in the labor market, specifically in the area of employment, unemployment, poverty, and inequality in Ghana in Section 3. The growth-employment-poverty linkage analysis is carried out in Section 4 followed by a discussion of constraints to growth and employment generation in Section 5. Section 6 provides a summary and conclusion, with some policy suggestions for the future.

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Over the past two decades, Ghana’s economy experienced an average annual growth rate of 5.8 percent, and became a low-middle income country in 2007. Though Ghana’s average annual employment growth between 1993 and 2013 has been higher than sub-Saharan Africa’s—3.7 percent versus 3.0 percent—its overall employment growth has not kept up with its economic growth. Notably, Ghana’s impressive economic growth has largely stemmed from crude oil exports, mining, and financial intermediation—all sectors and subsectors in which labor absorption is low. Given these trends, Ghana’s ability to transform its growth gains into better livelihoods for its citizens is being challenged.

In their paper, Understanding Ghana’s growth success story and job creation challenges, Ernest Aryeetey and William Baah-Boateng examine the sustainability of the high growth Ghana has experienced over the last two decades and advise Ghanaian policymakers to rethink their growth strategy.

For a more in-depth look at these and related topics, such as labor productivity, you can read the full paper here.

Ghana’s labor trends

Like in many other sub-Saharan African countries, the agriculture sector is the largest employer in Ghana, though its employment share is decreasing from 61.1 percent in 1984 to 44.7 percent in 2013. In addition, while industry’s employment share has slightly grown from 13.7 percent to 14.6 percent over the same period (and the manufacturing subsector has decreased from 10.9 percent to 9.1 percent), services has grown from 25 percent to 40.9 percent—leading to what the authors refer as a “missing middle.”

As noted above, the authors emphasize that the sectors that have been driving Ghana’s growth are not labor-intensive, namely mining, oil extraction, and finance. While labor has been moving from agriculture to services, the authors note that the trend “may not reflect a structural and productive transformation,” largely because the jobs created in the services sector are mostly informal and have low productivity. Indeed, services sector maintained the lowest annual average growth of labor productivity between 1992 and 2013. As part of these shifts, informal employment—which represented 88 percent of Ghanaian employment in 2013—grew by 3.7 percent on average while formal employment grew by only 2.6 percent during this period.

Unemployment in Ghana remains low, at 5.2 percent, though has experienced significant swings from 2.8 percent in 1984 to 10.4 percent in 2000 to 3.1 percent in 2006. The authors note, though, that these numbers might be deceptive due to the high numbers of informal, vulnerable, and “discouraged workers” (those who are jobless and available for work but fail to make the effort to seek work for various reasons) in Ghana. In fact, they state that, in 2006, after accounting for discouraged workers the unemployment rate more than doubled from 3.1 percent to 6.5 percent.

Vulnerable employment and the working poor

Despite Ghana’s relatively low unemployment rate, many laborers still live in poverty: According to the authors, 22 percent of working people are poor. Many others work in “vulnerable employment”—which the authors define as “a measure of people employed under relatively precarious circumstances indicated by their status in employment. It consists of own account and contributing family work that are less likely to have formal work arrangements, access to benefit or social protection programs, and are more ‘at risk’ to economic cycles (ILO 2009).” This definition is opposed to “productive employment,” or “paid employment and self-employed with employees.” Vulnerable workers are usually found in the informal sector and tend to have lower earnings—a situation exacerbating the ever-widening earnings gap and growing income inequality.

According to the authors, working poverty is closely linked with vulnerable employment, for which seven of 10 jobs in Ghana qualify (Table 1).  Some policies, which could combat working poverty, have been somewhat ineffective in reducing poverty: For example, Ghana has been consistent in raising its minimum wage, keeping it largely above the rate of inflation, but this policy tends to only affect those in the formal sector, leaving out workers in the informal sector. This trend has also increased Ghana’s inequality: The Gini coefficient increased from 35.4 percent in 1987/88 to 42.3 percent in 2013.

Table 1: Quantity and quality of employment (percent of employed)

Economic sector	1984	1992	1999	2000	2006	2010	2013
Employment-to-population (ratio, SSA)	—	64.3	64.1	64.1	64.9	65.2	65.5
Employment-to-population (ratio, Ghana)	80.2	72.9	73.9	66.9	67.7	67.4	75.4
Economic sector
Agriculture	61.1	62.2	55.0	53.1	54.9	41.6	44.7
Industry	13.7	10.0	14.0	15.5	14.2	15.4	14.6
Manufacturing (part of industry)	10.9	8.2	11.7	10.7	11.4	10.7	9.1
Service	25.2	27.8	31.0	31.5	30.9	43.0	40.9
Institutional sector
Public	10.2	8.4	6.2	7.2	5.7	6.4	5.9
Private	6.0	6.1	7.5	8.9	7.0	7.4	6.1
Informal	83.8	85.5	86.1	83.9	87.3	86.2	88.0
Type of employment
Paid employees	16.2	16.8	13.8	16.0	17.5	18.2	22.5
Self-employment	69.6	81.3	68.7	73.4	59.5	60.8	52.6
Contributing family worker	12.5	1.9	17.2	6.8	20.4	11.6	22.3
Other	1.7	—	0.3	3.8	2.6	9.4	2.6
Quality of employment
Gainful/productive employment*	20.9	—	—	21.2	22.0	23.1	28.7
Vulnerable employment**	77.4	82.5	80.8	74.9	75.4	67.5	68.7
Working poverty	—	48.7	35.4	—	25.6	—	22.3

Notes: * Gainful/productive employment comprises paid employment and self-employed with employees.

** Vulnerable employment comprises own account and contribution family work.

Source: Computed from Ghana Living Standards Survey (GLSS) 3, 4, 5, and 6; Population Census 1984, 2000, and 2010.

Overall, though, Ghana has made great strides. Vulnerable employment has been declining, and productive employment has risen, gains the author attributes to the drop in working poverty—down from 48.7 percent in 1992 to 22.3 percent two decades later (Table 1). However, they also hint that these improvements could have been even larger had job growth been concentrated in paid employment and self-employed with employees.

The skills gap

In their paper, the authors posit that job creation has occurred in less productive sectors due to a lack of skills and education in the workforce—and skill-intensive jobs/vacancies are instead getting filled by foreign laborers. While the proportion of the labor force with no formal education has significantly fallen from 44.1 percent in 1992 to 25.6 percent in 2013, post-primary education rates have barely risen—from 5.7 percent to 12.1 percent during that same period for secondary, vocational, and technical education. Tertiary is even less—from 2 percent to 5.4 percent. Ghanaian universities have not been training engineers, scientists, and technical workers that could increase the productivity and grow the industrial sector. A shortage of technical and vocational skills also limits this sector. Thus, the authors note, employers are forced to look outside of the country to find the workers with the skills required to do the job. The authors emphasize:

[P]roductive structural economic transformation hinges on the level and quality of education and labour skills. A highly skilled, innovative, and knowledgeable workforce constitutes a key ingredient in the process of structural economic transformation, and as productive sectors apply more complex production technologies and research and development activities increase the demand for education and skills. However, the observed weak human capital base does not provide a strong foundation for structural economic transformation of Ghana.

At the same time, the more educated in Ghana also tend to be more likely to be unemployed due to limited job creation for them in the formal sector. In 2013, the unemployment rates for those with secondary education and above (including tertiary) was over 6 percent. The unemployment rate for those with basic education or less was under 3.3 percent. The authors suggest that this trend is due to the fact that those with less education are more likely to take an informal job, while more educated laborers struggle to find jobs in the small formal sector.

Recommendations

Though Ghana has outperformed many of its sub-Saharan neighbors in terms of job creation and growth, its challenges with declining manufacturing, high informal employment, and low education attainment endanger its momentum. To tackle these obstacles, the authors recommend:

1. Adjust the priorities of the growth strategy to promote manufacturing, and reconsider the goal of economic growth for growth’s sake by acknowledging that sustainable growth must be coupled with generation of productive and high-earning jobs for all.
2. Create a manufacturing and business-friendly environment by addressing the country’s high interest rates, high taxes, and chronic energy problems, among others.
3. Enact policies to enhance the high-productivity, high-labor-absorbing agricultural sector, such as improving agricultural extension, develop irrigation plans, among others.
4. Develop policies to increase the number of secondary school graduates as well as students studying science, technology, engineering, and math.

For further discussion and recommendations, read the full paper here.

Note: The African Lions project is a collaboration among United Nations University-World Institute for Development Economics Research (UNU-WIDER), the University of Cape Town’s Development Policy Research Unit (DPRU), and the Brookings Africa Growth Initiative, that provides an analytical basis for policy recommendations and value-added guidance to domestic policymakers in the fast-growing economies of Africa, as well as for the broader global community interested in the development of the region. The six papers, covering Mozambique, Kenya, Ghana, South Africa, Ethiopia, and Nigeria, explore the key constraints facing African economies as they attempt to maintain a long-run economic growth and development trajectory.

      

       

       

I was honored today to speak at the kick off meeting of the new ReFormers Caucus. This group of over 100 former members of the U.S. Senate, the House, and governors of both parties, has come together to fight for meaningful campaign finance reform. In the bipartisan spirit of the caucus, I shared speaking duties with Professor Richard Painter, who was the Bush administration ethics czar and my predecessor before I had a similar role in the Obama White House. 

As I told the distinguished audience of ReFormers (get the pun?) gathered over lunch on Capitol Hill, I wish they had existed when in my Obama administration role I was working for the passage of the Disclose Act. That bill would have brought true transparency to the post-Citizens United campaign finance system, yet it failed by just one vote in Congress.  But it is not too late for Americans, working together, to secure enhanced transparency and other campaign finance changes that are desperately needed.  Momentum is building, with increasing levels of public outrage, as reflected in state and local referenda passing in Maine, Seattle and San Francisco just this week, and much more to come at the federal, state and local level.

       

President Paul Kagame of Rwanda has been a very effective leader for his small Central African nation. First, he led the Rwandan Patriotic Front when it ended the 1994 genocide and brought a measure of stability to a land that had just suffered a terrible holocaust. Then as vice president until 2000, and president since then (being formally elected under the current constitution twice, in 2003 and 2010), he has helped usher in remarkable economic growth and human development. Many Western leaders have personally offered high praise for Kagame—calling him a “visionary” and among “the greatest leaders of our time”—and have marshalled considerable resources to aid in Rwanda’s post-genocide development.

But his leadership has not been without controversy. There have been some excesses and allegations of abuses of political opponents during the Kagame years. And his abuses of power have arguably increased in recent years—suggesting that, whatever his past accomplishments, his real motives for wanting to stay in office may have less to do with a call to service and more with his increasingly autocratic tendencies.

On balance, though, he has been an effective leader who has saved countless lives. Does that legacy justify his seeking what would be a third seven-year term in the nation’s 2017 presidential elections? Rwandan voters choose today whether to approve a constitutional amendment—already passed by the Senate—that would allow President Kagame another stint in power.

Murky waters 

Kagame has been for his nation arguably what Franklin D. Roosevelt was for our own, given the nature of the emergencies facing Rwanda that led to his ascent to power. And we elected FDR four times. To be sure, after the fact, we thought better of it and decided never to allow that again. But we did it. George Washington chose not to run for a third term, but he was blessed with a legion of founding fathers of remarkable ability all around him, and was succeeded by Adams and Jefferson. Lincoln never had the chance to consider a third term—and maybe we would have been better off in the day if he could have served for many years. 

I am not comparing Kagame with Washington, Lincoln and Roosevelt to assert that he belongs in their league. But to dramatize the issue, suppose that he is just as important to his nation as those three gentlemen have been to ours. Would that justify another term? Putting the question this way muddies the waters, but I think it is the only fair way to address the issue. 

More often than not, of course, two terms is more than a given leader deserves. Witness President Hamid Karzai in Afghanistan, or Pierre Nkurunziza in Burundi who just garnered a third term amidst much violence, or Joseph Kabila next door in the Democratic Republic of Congo who is due to step down next year. Indeed, Kabila may or may not do so—and it would be unambiguously bad for his country and American interests if he stayed past that date. All the more reason that, for consistency, we should want Kagame to step down—otherwise leaders like Kabila could use his behavior to excuse and justify their own attempts to hold onto power indefinitely. 

But is it really so simple in his case, and is it really such an easy call? Another tough case is President Yoweri Museveni of Uganda, who has brought a degree of peace and development to his nation after the Amin and Obote periods—but who is now in his sixth term. Perhaps once in a blue moon, a nation can benefit from multiple terms in office for a particularly gifted leader at a particularly fraught and important period in a country’s history.

Mr. Kagame: Prove us wrong 

Ultimately, institution building and the establishment of solid democratic procedures are the only sure guarantor of long-term national stability. Kagame is only 58, but he will not live forever. At some point, Rwanda really will need a succession strategy. 

So I hope Kagame chooses not to run again. But if he does run, we need to pressure him to justify it in terms of the legacy he is helping to create so that Rwanda will have future leaders and institutions that can keep the country moving forward.

Ultimately, institution building and the establishment of solid democratic procedures are the only sure guarantor of long-term national stability.

Thus, if Kagame does persuade the public to change the constitution and does win a third elected term, we should cut aid (though not impose stronger measures like trade sanctions) to show our disapproval. That is, we should cut aid unless he uses the third term—which must certainly be his last—to show his countrymen and the world that in fact his rule is about improving his country, not turning it into another fiefdom run by an African strongman. 

For us, taking this approach will necessitate creating a method for evaluating whether Rwanda’s institutions gradually move closer to true democracy in the years ahead so that, whatever might happen with a third term, a fourth term becomes entirely unjustifiable. Presidents for life are bad for their countries while they are alive, and they are dangerous for their countries when they die. Kagame needs to understand this basic fact before he becomes the next world leader who starts out a noble man and then allows power to corrupt him.

More than two decades after the genocide, Rwanda is ready for a more vigorous democratic process—and any responsible leader should be building up the institutions to prepare for that eventuality. Stronger political parties that do not have exclusive ties to just one ethnic group, clear laws constraining and regulating the nature of political competition so that it is inclusive and nonviolent, strong courts—these are the essence of an established democracy, and Rwanda needs them.

       

President Obama is right to keep at it in Afghanistan, argues a new policy brief by Michael O’Hanlon, senior fellow and director of research for the Brookings Foreign Policy program.

Some have criticized the president’s decision to maintain a significant troop presence there (5,500 troops), instead of following through on the planned military withdrawal. But Afghanistan remains very important to American security, O’Hanlon contends, and the situation in the country is far from hopeless in spite of recent setbacks. We should reinvigorate American efforts in Afghanistan, he argues—not returning to levels seen in previous years, but ramping up somewhat from our current posture.

O’Hanlon calls Obama’s resolve in Afghanistan commendable, but writes that he and his administration are still making mistakes on U.S. policy toward the war-torn country. He advises that Washington make two specific changes to its military strategy in Afghanistan:

1. Allow U.S. and NATO airpower to target the Islamic State and the Taliban (currently, they can only fight those groups if directly attacked). The narrow rules of engagement constraining foreign forces were intended to push Afghan armed forces to defend their territory themselves. While a worthy goal, O’Hanlon says, these rules often prevent us from attacking ISIS (though the targeting strategy towards the group may be changing) as well as the Taliban. They also impose unrealistically high demands on Afghan forces and make too fine a distinction between an array of aligned extremist groups operating in the country.
2. Expand U.S. force presence from the current 5,500 troops to around 12,000 for a few years. In O’Hanlon’s opinion, our current numbers are not enough to work with fielded Afghan forces, and skimping on ground forces has contributed to security challenges in places like Helmand, for instance, which experienced new setbacks in 2015. More broadly, leaders in Washington and Brussels should stress the value of a long-term NATO-Afghanistan partnership, rather than emphasizing an exit strategy. This will signal Western resolve to the Taliban and other groups. While the next commander in chief should set the United States on a gradual path toward downsizing American troops in Afghanistan, he believes it would be a mistake for Obama to do so in the short term.

The long haul

O’Hanlon also argues that the United States needs to take a longer-term perspective on key political and economic issues in Afghanistan. On the economic front, there seems to be little thinking about an agricultural development plan for Afghanistan, associated infrastructure support, and land reform, among other challenges. On the political front, conversations often tend to focus on shorter-term issues like organizing parliamentary elections, reforming the Independent Election Commission, or modifying the current power-sharing arrangement. In the process, conversations about foundational political strategy focusing on Afghan institutions and the health of its democracy get short-changed. The parliament is in need of reforms, for instance, as is the political party system (which should encourage Afghans to group around ideas and policy platforms, rather than tribes and patronage networks).

O’Hanlon concludes that the situation in Afghanistan today, while fraught, is understandable given the Taliban’s resilience and NATO’s gradual withdrawal of 125,000 troops. We should not be despondent, he writes—rather, we should identify specific strategies that can help improve the situation. At the end of the day, Afghans must make the big decisions about the future of their country. But as long as the United States and its partners are still providing tremendous resources—and as long as security threats emanating from South Asia continue to threaten the United States—leaders in Washington should use their influence wisely.

       

       

       

According to multiple press reports, European Union leaders are poised to choose Italy’s Foreign Minister Federica Mogherini as the EU’s next foreign policy chief at a summit on Saturday. A previous summit to discuss the position ended in deadlock in July when the Baltics and several Eastern European states objected to Mogherini due to concerns that she was too soft on Russia and lacked foreign policy experience, as she has only been in her position since January.

Now decision day has arrived and Italy’s Prime Minister Matteo Renzi is determined to push her candidacy through even if some disagree. As one EU diplomat told the Financial Times, “You still have a group of countries who will be quite unsatisfied, but they don’t have a blocking minority.” In a comment that could have been made by Stringer Bell in “The Wire,” Italian Minister Sandro Gozi previewed this strategy in July, saying, “The possibility of a majority vote ... is part of the game and cannot be ruled out.”

This highly consequential foreign policy decision is being made on the basis of criteria that have nothing to do with foreign policy. No one claims that Mogherini is the best person to deal with Russia but asking who is is not seen as a relevant question. The sharing of the spoils of several top jobs between the parties means that it must go to a socialist and Europe’s socialist leaders want to help Renzi. There is pressure to appoint a woman because EU leaders have failed to nominate women for other top posts or for the rest of the commission. Merkel had concerns but she is apparently willing to let it slide if it means stopping Italy from diluting the EU’s budget rules. Others are doing their own deals. The bottom line is that foreign policy is almost entirely absent from the discussion.

In normal times, this would be a bit unseemly but not outrageous. These are not normal times however. It is easily forgotten in Rome and Paris but Russia poses a real and near-term threat to some EU members—Latvia, Estonia and maybe even Lithuania. These states have asked for more assistance and support from their allies in NATO and from other EU members. They are deeply concerned by Mogherini’s nomination. Italy has strong economic ties with Russia and has frequently opposed tougher sanctions. Mogherini’s visit to Moscow early this year and her language of respecting Russian interests raised concerns about exactly what those interests are and whether she understands where the fault lies.

In a clear reference to Mogherini, Lithuania's President Dalia Grybauskaitė said that the EU must not pick someone who is “pro-Kremlin”—an exaggerated charge, perhaps, but indicative of the sensitivity and concern her candidacy has caused. But above all is the view that others are better qualified to deal with the Russian challenge—not just in terms of years clocked on the foreign policy beat but in the substance of what they say and do about it. Carl Bildt, Sweden’s foreign minister, is a leading example. Polish Minister of Foreign Affairs Radek Sikorski is another. Bulgaria’s Kristalina Georgieva, currently EU commissioner for humanitarian aid, would be a good compromise candidate.

One would think that the views of these member states would be taken extremely seriously by the rest of the EU. Instead, isolating and defeating them is just another “part of the political game.” Needless to say, this is not a game. It is the most serious security threat Europe has faced in over two decades. Two hundred and twelve EU citizens were killed by a Russian missile fired by Russian backed separatists in July. Thousands have died in Ukraine as a result of the war Russia started. And in recent weeks, Russian forces have begun a formal invasion of Ukraine.

It is mind-boggling that in a week when Russia opened a third front in Ukraine, European leaders are even considering appointing anyone other than someone with a proven track record of understanding and meeting Russia’s challenge, let alone a person who has consistently underestimated the risk. It’s as if a climate skeptic from the oil industry was to be appointed as environment minister.

It is true, of course, that the foreign policy chief, whoever he or she is, will not make EU policy. That will continue to be the domain of individual member states, especially Germany. But appointing the wrong person will do no good and may do some harm. Appointing the right person could serve the purpose of rallying the member states, pressuring them to stick to their previous declarations, and being a powerful voice for Europe’s values and its interests in a peaceful and free continent.

The EU owes it to its own citizens to make a decision of this magnitude solely on foreign policy grounds. It should not sell out the Baltics to keep the gravy train flowing. This is no time for business as usual.

      

Five years pass so quickly. It seems like only yesterday that EU leaders were emerging from an unseemly and apparently ad hoc appointment process to announce that Catherine Ashton, a member of the British House of Lords and a recently appointed European trade commissioner, would be the first-ever high representative for foreign affairs and security policy -- a sort of EU foreign minister. One existential currency crisis and two Russian invasions of Ukraine later, the EU is picking her successor.

With the passage of time and the rush of events, the stakes have become much higher. Yet the EU continues to select its leaders as if its postmodern continental paradise were not under siege from the south, because of the disintegration of the Arab world, and to the east, thanks to Russian aggression. Just like last time, the selection of the new high representative, Federica Mogherini, was undignified, full of haggling, and more focused on her gender, party affiliation, and nationality than on her actual qualifications for the job. And those are few: Mogherini emerged from obscurity just a few months ago to become Italy’s foreign minister.

Critics look at Mogherini’s lack of experience and assume that the EU’s underperformance in foreign policy will continue. This is a real possibility, and with crises brewing to Europe’s east and south, this is a particularly bad moment for the EU to descend into a bout of internal squabbling. But Mogherini can transcend the process that selected her and be the foreign policy representative the EU needs if she learns a few lessons from the recent past.

Back in 2009, pundits were filled with hope about the new EU foreign policy chief. The post was new and newly empowered to set up a diplomatic corps, the European External Action Service (EEAS). Against this backdrop, the choice of Ashton, an unknown British politician with no foreign policy experience, came as a cold shower. Her appointment reinforced the perception that the EU leaders’ stated resolve to raise the union’s foreign policy profile was rhetorical rather than real.

Although understandable, both the high expectations and the subsequent disappointment were misplaced. Even a high representative with an impeccable résumé would not have turned the EU into a foreign policy juggernaut. After all, the EU high representative is not a U.S. secretary of state with plenty of space to set U.S. foreign policy, but a bureaucrat operating within the much narrower limits of intergovernmental decision-making. In the EU, it is the member states -- not Brussels -- that make decisions on the most consequential issues of foreign policy.

Ashton has operated well within this limited sphere and carefully picked her issues. She has understood that the role of the high representative must change depending on the degree of agreement among the states. When there is a strong consensus, the high representative’s role most closely resembles that of a normal foreign minister -- he or she has great leeway to devise and implement policies. The 2013 normalization of relations between Serbia and Kosovo is a good case in point: there was sufficient consensus among member states that Ashton was able to spearhead an agreement between the two countries, for which she deservedly earned credit.

If there is a lack of consensus but also an imbalance of interest among member states, ad hoc groups of interested member states tend to take the initiative -- as did the United Kingdom, France, and Germany in 2003 on Iran’s nuclear program and Poland and Lithuania during Ukraine’s 2004 Orange Revolution. The high representative’s task here is not to lead but to help devise a policy course acceptable to all member states and, once the policy has been created, lend it the political weight of the whole EU. Ashton has carefully interpreted this role in the nuclear talks with Iran, which she has conducted on behalf of the P5+1 (the five permanent members of the UN Security Council plus Germany).

Finally, when member states have conflicting interests and all care about a particular issue, as they often do with regard to Russia, the high representative is limited to proposing lowest-common-denominator options that, however unsatisfying, represent what the EU can reasonably do. Ukraine, for better or for worse, is an example in which it would serve the EU little for the high representative to try to lead the member states to a destination that they have not (at least yet) agreed they want to go.

The high representative’s job description thus includes policy shaping, consensus building, and conflict management skills. The measure of his or her success is less a function of foreign policy chops than of the interpersonal skills the representative brings to the job. Measured against these requirements, Ashton’s record is decent. By the same token, there might be less reason to worry about Mogherini than some expect.

Mogherini is the high representative that EU leaders want. She is a woman, she is from the center-left, and she compensates the Italians for their recent losses in the international ranking of influential countries. Perhaps most significant, thanks to her lack of experience and high profile, she is unlikely to be able to challenge the member states’ principal role in EU foreign policy. Attesting to this is the fact that a number of EU member states agreed to her appointment despite having expressed concerns about Italy’s tendency to seek accommodation with Russia at a moment when Russia is invading its neighbor. However unhappy these countries may be with Mogherini’s selection, they are confident that her personal opinion on Russia will not affect the EU’s consensus-based foreign-policy-making process.

Mogherini’s weaknesses are real, but if she concentrates on what the EU high representative can realistically do, she can turn them into strengths. Her lack of defined policy positions on most issues will allow her to reflect consensus when it exists and to rely on the EEAS, which Ashton so assiduously built, to implement policies. This might make her an effective bridge builder between member states that disagree and also allows her to be more supportive than someone with a more established profile when vanguard groups of interested states want to move forward on specific issues on their own. Her lack of gravitas is more an issue of relative inexperience than a lack of personality. If she interprets correctly the multitasking role of the high representative, her standing will grow accordingly, as has happened with Ashton. Even on Russia policy, Mogherini has a unique opportunity. Although EU members are divided on what to do, Russia’s escalating aggression in Ukraine is slowly bringing them together. As an Italian associated with a relatively pro-Russian stance, her eventual calls to confront the Kremlin could be all the more effective.

The EU and the United States need a more unified and effective European foreign policy. But the EU is what it is. A U.S.-style secretary of state with a strong vision and lust for the spotlight would not transform the union because he or she would lack the legal authority and political legitimacy to do so. But a good high representative can still move the EU in the right direction, as long as he or she understands the subtleties of the role. And with the support of skilled advisers from the EEAS, Mogherini can be the high representative the EU needs.

This piece was originally published in Foreign Affairs.

      

Editors’ Note: While much has been made of U.S. plans to counter ISIS in Libya, little is known about the role the Italians are playing, write Matteo Garavoglia and Leore Ben Chorin. Italians and Americans should better coordinate their efforts. This post originally appeared on The National Interest.

The ISIS buildup in Libya is undeniable. U.S. Commander General of Africa Command David Rodriguez testified to the Senate Armed Services Committee on March 8 that the Islamic State in Libya represents a serious and growing threat to the security and interests of America and its allies throughout the region.

While the United States, Italy and other coalition members continue to pressure Libyans to endorse a U.N.-brokered national unity plan, the same coalition members are starting to weave together plans for the “day after,” should a unity government be formed. Should such a government request international assistance, only hours or days will pass before more coalition forces will be on the ground, in the air and at sea. Among these coalition partners and throughout this buildup, Italy is bound to play a key role in the coalition. This is because of colonial ties, the influx of migrants that seek daily to cross the Mediterranean, the two countries’ geographic proximity and their shared economic interests.

While much has been made of U.S. plans, little is known about the role the Italians are playing and the assets they bring to the coalition. In January, Italy and the United States reached an agreement allowing American armed drones to fly from its Sigonella Naval and Air Station in Sicily, while over fifty Italian special operations forces were deployed in Libya two weeks ago. This is on top of the over forty Italian intelligence officers sent to Libya since July 2015, and the long-standing Italian presence on the ground, aimed at collecting human intelligence. More forces are expected in the weeks to come. The Italian contributions complement Washington's unrivaled convening power to seek a diplomatic path toward a unity government. Additionally, the United States has superior overhead imagery capabilities and the ability to carry out two-thirds of all precision strikes needed to counter ISIS.

[T]wo different clocks are ticking: a diplomatic one to establish a Libyan unity government, and a military one to counter ISIS. The two are out of sync.

Within this context, two different clocks are ticking: a diplomatic one to establish a Libyan unity government, and a military one to counter ISIS. The two are out of sync. Rome is unwilling to assume a leading role in Libya until a unity government is in place. Washington will not wait indefinitely to step up operations against ISIS. At the same time, the Italians are acutely aware that an ISIS stronghold in Libya would present a fundamental threat to their security. Equally, the Americans are reticent to further stretch themselves politically and militarily and would welcome strong Italian leadership. The diplomatic and military clocks must be aligned for Rome and Washington to effectively work together.

Italians and Americans should coordinate their efforts by playing “good cop, bad cop.” Rome should emphasize to the Libyans that forming a unity government would enable them to play a more proactive role in shaping the agenda of an Italian-led international engagement. At the same time, Rome should highlight that there is a limit to the extent that Italy can restrain Washington from escalating a military intervention beyond the control of all Libyan stakeholders. While continuing to support diplomatic efforts, the United States should up the tempo of its military preparations and surgical interventions. This would put pressure on bickering Libyans by showing them that they are running out of time to reach an agreement. Cajoling Libyans into forming a unity government would better align the American and Italian efforts to fight ISIS. Most importantly, it would give Libyans a say in the future of their country.

       

Editor’s Note: The following is a transcript of the House of Representatives’ Special Select Committee hearing on the Benghazi scandal, taking place in a parallel universe not very far away. It is satire, obviously, but perhaps only because of an almost random quirk of fate.

Representative Trey Gowdy: I would like to call this hearing to order. We are gathered today to get to the bottom of the horrific events of March 18 to 25, 2011, when over 100,000 inhabitants of Benghazi were cruelly killed in the worst act of genocide since Rwanda. Libya has since descended into a catastrophic civil war on a par with Syria, and yet Colonel Gadhafi is still in power. Worse, the situation has exacerbated extremism and threatens to spur Islamic terrorism throughout the region. The recent intervention of Russian forces in the Libyan civil war ensures that any chance the United States had of ending Gadhafi’s cruel tyranny has been missed. 

This was the greatest moral and strategic failure of U.S. foreign policy in 20 years. And yet there has been little or no accountability. Former U.N. Ambassador Susan Rice was even promoted to Secretary of State, while former National Security Council staffer Samantha Power stepped down, apparently in quiet protest at the president and Secretary Hillary Clinton’s weak and morally vacuous policy. Ms. Power's new sequel "A Problem From Hell" has now been made into the Oscar-winning movie "Hotel Benghazi." This scandal, this moral failing is now seared into the conscience of our nation.

This Special Select Committee was stood up 18 months ago and has been working diligently since that day to build on the work of multiple other congressional inquiries to get at the truth of this national shame. We know that the Obama administration had intelligence about the risk of genocide in Benghazi but it decided not to act. Indeed, the entire world knew. The questions we want answered are: What did the administration know about the approaching genocide? And when did it know it? 

We are joined by former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton. Madam Secretary, we appreciate you taking time off from the campaign trail. I understand you have a short statement. 

Secretary Hillary Clinton: Thank you, Representative Gowdy. This is my fourth time appearing before the U.S. Congress on this issue; 37 members of my staff and family have appeared, and my dog is currently fighting a subpoena. So I will keep this brief.

While we deeply regret the Benghazi genocide, we must remember that we had incomplete information about Colonel Gadhafi's intentions. We were faced with a difficult choice: Should we intervene to stop an uncertain atrocity, committing U.S. troops to an uncertain mission with no exit plan and no vital national interest? Or should we try to shape events without the use of U.S. forces, using the many other tools at our disposal? 

We decided that U.S. military intervention was not prudent. We were worried about a failed state and losing U.S. personnel on the ground. The administration instead sought to mobilize the international community to prevent any genocide and ultimately to bring Gadhafi and his henchmen to justice at the International Criminal Court. 

We continued throughout my tenure as secretary of state—and until this day—to work to bring the civil war to an end and to help the moderate Libyan opposition to overthrow the regime. 

We made some tough calls and we must acknowledge that we were not always right. Knowing what we know now, I wish that we had acted more forcefully. Indeed, I was personally in favor of a no-fly zone to protect Libyan civilians. But hindsight is twenty-twenty and the president decided to stay out. 

Representative Gowdy: Madam Secretary, with all due respect, Gadhafi's intention was quite clear. Just days before the slaughter he said, and I quote: “All of these germs, rats and scumbags, they are not Libyans.” He told them "It's over…We are coming tonight…We will find you in your closets, ” adding: “We will show no mercy.” U.S. NGOs on the ground provided detailed information of troop movements. What more evidence did you need of imminent war crime? Why did you not act? Isn’t the role of the secretary of state to persuade the president? 

If something went wrong, I would be the first to say war is unpredictable and involves risk. I am confident the Congress would have fully supported you.

Secretary Clinton: Congressman, with all due respect, Congress at the time steadfastly opposed our intervention. Had we acted and had the aftermath been messy—as we fully expected—I have no doubt that you would be calling me here to account for that, noting that our own assessments showed we had no capacity to bring stability to Libya. What if we had lost U.S. military personnel or diplomats? What if a U.S. overthrow of the Gadhafi regime merely led to more and different chaos and violence, as we saw in Iraq?

Representative Gowdy: Madam Secretary, the greater shame is clearly inaction in the face of a moral imperative. I can assure you, and I feel confident I speak for all of my colleagues, that had you acted, we would have had your back, come what may. If something went wrong, I would be the first to say war is unpredictable and involves risk. I am confident the Congress would have fully supported you. 

Secretary Clinton: Thank you Congressman, but you will excuse me if I still have some doubts on that score. I guess we’ll never know. 

      

On Thursday, when former Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton appears before the Senate Benghazi Committee for a new round of hearings, reporters with vivid historical imaginations will be pining for an epic battle. Melodramatic journalists may recall the 1950-1951 Kefauver Committee investigating organized crime, which introduced politicized television dramas to millions of Americans. They may evoke the 1954 Army-McCarthy hearings, when the aristocratic Boston lawyer Joseph Welch cold-cocked the anti-communist Senator Joe McCarthy by asking: “Have you no sense of decency, sir, at long last? Have you left no sense of decency?” They will yearn for the constitutional grandeur of the 1973 Senate Watergate hearings, which exposed Richard Nixon’s corruption. Alas, most likely, we will endure yet another round of the 1990s’ tawdry Clinton follies, which diminished both parties and helped trigger our current political depression.

Although Hillary Clinton often performs well under pressure and probably has rehearsed a dramatic soundbite or two to rile her partisan base, these hearings are bad news for her campaign. The email server scandal has gotten more traction than the Clintonites would have expected. It stirs fears that both Hillary and Bill Clinton are so convinced of their own goodness, their own idealism, their own contributions to the public good, that they exempt themselves from the rules ordinary Americans must follow. The scandal also reminds many of the Clintons’ moral blindspot, their ethical sloppiness that led them into the cozy, overlapping, ambiguities, and occasional lies behind the Whitewater mess, the Travelgate coverup, the Paula Jones sexual harassment, the Monica Lewinsky obstruction of justice, and a host of lesser Clinton catastrophes.

Many Americans had Clinton fatigue by 2000, despite Clinton’s record high approval ratings. And with our Canadian neighbors just having voted in Justin Trudeau due to Stephen Harper fatigue, Hillary Clinton should remember that American voters want a fresh start after enduring a decade and a half of terrorist fears and economic woes, preceded by a scadal-plagued, hyper-partisan period of peace and prosperity in the 1990s.

Democrats also should worry that Hillary Clinton’s best defense is pretty offensive. She will play the partisan card. In the final question of the Democratic debate, Anderson Cooper asked “Which enemy are you most proud of?” Hillary Clinton answered: “Well, in addition to the NRA, the health insurance companies, the drug companies, the Iranians. Probably the Republicans.” In his presidential announcement-esque I’m-not-running speech Vice President Joe Biden pointedly said: “I don’t think we should look at Republicans as our enemies.” How does a candidate who compares Republicans to Iranians woo centrist voters in crucial swing states? And you can imagine the general campaign commercials asking: How does a president who demonizes her rivals work with them after Election Day?

Republicans should not be too cocky about these hearings either. The male senators pounding away at millions of American women’s best chance at a female president should beware the Anita Hill effect. During the 1991 fight over the sexual harassment allegations during Clarence Thomas’s Supreme Court nomination hearings, hostile senators interrogating Thomas’s female accuser looked like bullies who, in the parlance of the time, “just didn’t get it.” For the last six years, the Democrats have cleverly cast the Republicans as the party of no. In the 1990s, the Clintons cleverly cast the Republicans as a party of Ken Starrs, prosecutorial prigs abusing congressional and federal powers to subvert the political process and undermine the Constitution.

Moreover, Hillary Clinton’s defense during the last set of hearings more accurately reflects the public mood. Four brave Americans died. Their Islamist terrorist murderers are the guilty ones, not whatever mistaken spin the Obama administration may or may not have put on it subsequently.

Since the 1990s, gotcha journalism and politics have ruined politicians’ reputations and soured Americans on politics. Unlike the Watergate scandal, which produced heroes defending the Constitution like Judge John Sirica and Senator Sam Ervin, the Clinton scandals, and especially the Monica Lewinsky debacle, tarnished everyone involved. Journalists and Republicans looked like bullies, invading people’s privacy, treating personal indiscretions as high crimes not even misdemeanors. Feminists and Democrats sounded like hypocrites, excusing sexual harassment and the White House as a hostile workplace for women as long as the perpetrator was a pro-choice liberal. The people’s business suffered. In post Watergate America, the Pig-Pen-like cloud shrouding the Clintons, and their supporters’ “everybody does it” defense, had once naïve Americans now cynically grumbling, “they’re all guilty of something.”

Inevitably, after the Thursday hearings, too many Republicans and Democrats will assess the results based on quickie polls suggesting who “won” or “lost” the exchange, and whether Hillary Clinton’s popularity rises or falls. Washington should start tracking a different set of poll results. Back in the 1950s and the 1960s, the vast majority of Americans trusted their government. The most recent Gallup poll has only 19 percent of Americans surveyed agreeing that “you can trust government to do what is right.” Those metrics suggested that both Democrats and Republicans, all the presidential candidates, the president, Congress, and the Supreme Court, have disappointed the American people. A healthy democracy needs citizens with more faith in their government, we don’t need more recriminations, the criminalizing of politics, or more partisan clashes. Perhaps it is time for Senate Republicans to join Democrats in creating a bipartsan committee to investigate that problem, and begin by inviting all presidential candidates to testify about what they will do to make Americans believe in Washington again.

       

Editors’ Note: While much has been made of U.S. plans to counter ISIS in Libya, little is known about the role the Italians are playing, write Matteo Garavoglia and Leore Ben Chorin. Italians and Americans should better coordinate their efforts. This post originally appeared on The National Interest.

The ISIS buildup in Libya is undeniable. U.S. Commander General of Africa Command David Rodriguez testified to the Senate Armed Services Committee on March 8 that the Islamic State in Libya represents a serious and growing threat to the security and interests of America and its allies throughout the region.

While the United States, Italy and other coalition members continue to pressure Libyans to endorse a U.N.-brokered national unity plan, the same coalition members are starting to weave together plans for the “day after,” should a unity government be formed. Should such a government request international assistance, only hours or days will pass before more coalition forces will be on the ground, in the air and at sea. Among these coalition partners and throughout this buildup, Italy is bound to play a key role in the coalition. This is because of colonial ties, the influx of migrants that seek daily to cross the Mediterranean, the two countries’ geographic proximity and their shared economic interests.

While much has been made of U.S. plans, little is known about the role the Italians are playing and the assets they bring to the coalition. In January, Italy and the United States reached an agreement allowing American armed drones to fly from its Sigonella Naval and Air Station in Sicily, while over fifty Italian special operations forces were deployed in Libya two weeks ago. This is on top of the over forty Italian intelligence officers sent to Libya since July 2015, and the long-standing Italian presence on the ground, aimed at collecting human intelligence. More forces are expected in the weeks to come. The Italian contributions complement Washington's unrivaled convening power to seek a diplomatic path toward a unity government. Additionally, the United States has superior overhead imagery capabilities and the ability to carry out two-thirds of all precision strikes needed to counter ISIS.

[T]wo different clocks are ticking: a diplomatic one to establish a Libyan unity government, and a military one to counter ISIS. The two are out of sync.

Within this context, two different clocks are ticking: a diplomatic one to establish a Libyan unity government, and a military one to counter ISIS. The two are out of sync. Rome is unwilling to assume a leading role in Libya until a unity government is in place. Washington will not wait indefinitely to step up operations against ISIS. At the same time, the Italians are acutely aware that an ISIS stronghold in Libya would present a fundamental threat to their security. Equally, the Americans are reticent to further stretch themselves politically and militarily and would welcome strong Italian leadership. The diplomatic and military clocks must be aligned for Rome and Washington to effectively work together.

Italians and Americans should coordinate their efforts by playing “good cop, bad cop.” Rome should emphasize to the Libyans that forming a unity government would enable them to play a more proactive role in shaping the agenda of an Italian-led international engagement. At the same time, Rome should highlight that there is a limit to the extent that Italy can restrain Washington from escalating a military intervention beyond the control of all Libyan stakeholders. While continuing to support diplomatic efforts, the United States should up the tempo of its military preparations and surgical interventions. This would put pressure on bickering Libyans by showing them that they are running out of time to reach an agreement. Cajoling Libyans into forming a unity government would better align the American and Italian efforts to fight ISIS. Most importantly, it would give Libyans a say in the future of their country.