Pakistan has just held a historic election with the highest voter turnout in four decades. For the first time, a civilian administration completed its full term and handed power to new civilian leadership. The military stayed in its barracks and did not openly seek to tilt the electoral playing field, as in the past. Youth turnout was strong. From the ground, where I was part of a delegation from the National Democratic Institute observing the election, Pakistan did not look like a failed state. Rather, it appeared to be a country whose people desperately want good governance and economic opportunity, and believe their democratic choice may help deliver it.

Yet there is another Pakistan, one in which nearly 150 people - including political candidates and their supporters - were killed by the Pakistani Taliban over the past month. Leading politicians from national and regional parties were unable to campaign as militants placed "head money" not only on candidates but on their wives and children. A former prime minister's son, running for a parliamentary seat, was kidnapped in broad daylight at a political rally just days before the vote. And the chairman of the nation's ruling party had to campaign from abroad, so fearful was he of assassination by militants. Dozens were killed in election-day violence in Karachi, the country's commercial capital - despite the nationwide deployment of 300,000 extra security forces to ensure peaceful balloting.

Incoming Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif, whose Pakistan Muslim League (PML-N) faced down a late surge by Imran Khan's Pakistan Tehreek-e-Insaf (PTI), now confronts enormous expectations. During the previous five years of rule by the Pakistan People's Party (PPP), the country's energy infrastructure fell further behind the burgeoning demand, while economic growth lagged badly. Corruption among the country's governing elite reached new heights, despite Pakistan's enormous socioeconomic deficits. The Pakistani Taliban strengthened its position not only in the rugged borderlands along the Afghan frontier but in major urban centers. Sectarian violence between Sunni extremist groups and persecuted Shia and Christian minorities spiked. In short, Pakistan began to look ever more like a failing state, with leaders unable or unwilling to confront vexing national challenges.

Sharif has pledged to focus on expanding reliable energy supply and economic reforms to catalyze growth and job creation. Although Pakistani democracy received a fillip from Saturday's vote, the authoritarian temptation will return if this government cannot put the country on a sustainable economic trajectory. That will require a prime minister who not only can leverage his private-sector background to press for real reforms, but also roll back the corruption and misgovernance that have condemned Pakistan to lackluster economic growth.

Another hoped-for incentive for reform will be the long shadow cast by PTI leader Imran Khan, whose party fell short in the elections but captured the imagination of young, urban Pakistanis with its challenge to politics-as-usual. Khan has been playing a long game, sitting out the last elections in 2008 because he did not believe they would be free and fair, establishing intra-party democracy that highlights the dynastic qualities of the other parties, and speaking bluntly about the failure of the Pakistani state to reflect its people's aspirations. Given demographic and socioeconomic shifts in Pakistani society, his party threatens to displace the PPP and challenge the PML-N as Pakistan's leading political movement. To placate and co-opt Khan's fervent supporters, Sharif will need to deliver on his promises or risk fueling Khan's anti-establishment narrative.

Pakistan's new leaders will also need to manage relations with other internal constituencies, including an activist judiciary and a powerful military lurking just offstage. This year will see the retirement of the assertive chief justice of the Supreme Court, the departure of the president from office, and the retirement of the chief of army staff. The choice of their successors will do much to shape Sharif's ability to deliver on his governing agenda.

Finally, the external environment may become more favorable to Pakistani reform and growth. India hopes to resume the détente that started with the 1999 Lahore Declaration during Sharif's previous tenure as prime minister. The drawdown of Western forces in Afghanistan will create instabilities, but they also create the opportunity for Pakistan and the United States to enjoy a more normal relationship not premised on Pakistani cooperation (or lack thereof) in a third country. Pakistan's successful democratic transition, combined with its increasingly dangerous pathologies, suggest that it is high time the West dehyphenated Af-Pak and focused on how Islamabad can deliver on its people's aspirations to live in a thriving, peaceful nation -- not a Talibanized one.

A version of this article appeared as a German Marshall Fund Transatlantic Take (www.gmfus.org) .

North Korea is yanking the world's chain yet again, sending all relevant parties hither and yon. As we contemplate what to do and the Kim clan perfects its ability to deliver its growing nuclear arsenal to targets in South Korea, Japan and the United States, we could do worse than turn to a rising star of Korea analysis: Sung-Yoon Lee of Tufts University. Dr. Lee provides a much-needed dose of reality about what exactly we are dealing with. The basics are not a bad place to start in thinking or rethinking how to deal with the criminal-nuclear enterprise that we call North Korea. Here is an edited version of what he said at a conference in Seoul last week (my commentary is in italics and the final thoughts are my own).

1.    North Korea is "uniquely unique." It is the world's sole communist hereditary dynasty, the world's only literate-industrialized-urbanized peacetime economy to have suffered a famine, the world's most cultish totalitarian system, and the world's most secretive, isolated country -- albeit one with the world's largest military in terms of manpower and defense spending proportional to its population and national income. The result is an exceptional state, perhaps the world's most influential regional power commensurate with its territorial and population size and economic and political power.

That is, North Korea has managed some seemingly impossible feats. It has remained a cultish communist dictatorship even though all its like-minded brethren have been relegated to the ash heap of history. It has managed to produce a spate of famines despite the fact that its population is urbanized and literate. And through its combination of supremely disproportionate spending on military forces, its nuclear program, and its unique ability to outfox, out-negotiate, and outplay the world's industrialized powers, it has become a regional nuclear power with disproportionate influence in Northeast Asia despite its poverty and privation.

2. The other Korea, the one south of the 38th parallel, is a global leader in trade, shipping, automobiles, and electronics. It is also a free democratic polity. And on December 19, South Korea elected Park Geun-hye as president. Park is the first elected female leader in Korea and also in Confucian civilization, which consists of China, Japan, the two Koreas, Taiwan, Singapore, and Vietnam and makes up nearly a quarter of the world's population. The contrast between the two Koreas could not be starker -- beyond the obvious, you have a cultish male hereditary dictatorship in the North, and a freely elected female leader in the South.

Development experts and theorists of democratization take note. South Korea has the same culture, historical legacies, and so on as its neighbor to the North. And yet it is an advanced industrial economy and a thriving democracy that has just, despite its Confucian culture, elected a woman as president. It has managed to reach this high point of prosperity and human dignity because of -- to reduce a complex set of phenomena to its minimal essence -- different institutions than those in the North: democratic and capitalist ones. (I realize that I may be violating some tenet of doctrinaire realism with this observation. For the less doctrinaire, the contrast between the two Koreas is a useful reminder of why we try and favor and even push for democratic capitalism). Given the stark contrast between the two countries one can safely draw at least one conclusion: There is nothing inherent in culture or history that ipso facto should keep a country poor and enslaved.

3. The Park Geun-hye administration and the Obama administration should ... not deprive themselves of the credible, non-military deterrent that would weaken or debilitate the Kim regime. They should attack the North Korean regime's two most glaring systemic contradictions: 1. Over-reliance on its shadowy palace economy instead of making licit goods that are competitive on the world market or opening up to foreign investment and trade worthy of the name. Pyongyang's palace economy is particularly vulnerable to tools designed to counter international money laundering. 2. [T]he unfeasibility of controlling the population over the long-term through its vast network of prison camps, fear, and thought police; that is, its egregious human rights violations.

The North Korean state is essentially two things: 1) a large money-laundering concern; 2) the world's largest prison and slave labor camp. Now, however, it is a large money-laundering concern and prison camp that has additionally extorted its way to nuclear weapons. Any U.S. policy should begin and end with the knowledge of what North Korea really is. It is not a state engaged in the normal give-and-take of diplomacy, seeking "security assurances" in return for "denuclearization" or some other such deal conjured up by diplomats whose experience is in dealing with real countries who negotiate in good faith. Rather, North Korea has had a pretty good run with its current approach of extortion, criminality and the deprivation of its own people.

4. The Obama administration is in a position to take the lead on squeezing Pyongyang's palace economy. It should designate the entire North Korean government a Primary Money Laundering Concern, which is a legal term for entities that fail to implement adequate safeguards against money laundering. It should also enforce Executive Orders 13382 (signed June 2005) and 13551 (signed August 2010), which call for the freezing of suspect North Korean entities' assets and those of third-country entities suspected of helping North Korea's WMD proliferation (and criminal) activities. Furthermore, the incoming Park Geun-hye administration is in a position to take the lead in implementing a sustained human rights campaign against Pyongyang. It should vastly increase funding for information transmission efforts into North Korea, encourage North Korean defection and reinforce resettlement programs, and raise global awareness on the Kim regime's egregious human rights violations so that people living in democratic societies around the globe come to think less of the Kim regime as an oddity or an abstraction and more as a threat to humanity.

North Korea's nature underscores its vulnerabilities. It cannot survive without laundering money for its dangerous and illicit activities. It should not be treated as a normal country when most of its people are enslaved. The countries threatened by Pyongyang have in their toolkit the ability to treat the entire state apparatus as a criminal enterprise and can block it and anyone (including many Chinese banks and enterprises) doing business with it from engaging in transactions within the international financial and commercial system. Rather than pretending that they are negotiating with just another regime, the United States and South Korea should instead unleash a campaign to highlight just how abnormal and illegitimate the Kim family is. Here is a simple formula that policymakers can use in setting our approach to North Korea: North Korean existence=criminal activity + human enslavement + nuclear exhortation. There may be little to nothing the world can do now about the fact that it has allowed the North to become a nuclear weapons state. But it can and should treat it like one big criminal/slave state.

Some Concluding Thoughts: South Korea and Japan, for reasons that should be obvious (North Korea, China, an unsteady and retrenching American presence), have elected right-of-center hawkish governments. They are uniquely open to dealing with reality, not a common occurrence in international politics. Reality in this case means taking all necessary deterrent measures against a nuclear state (Tokyo and Seoul appear poised to actually call North Korea a nuclear-weapons state, which -- for those unfortunate to have witnessed to the unfolding tragedy of North Korea policy -- is a big deal). Rather than engage in diplomatic conferences that result in more North Korean extortion, more North Korean nuclear weapons, and more illusions that through combined U.S. and Chinese exertions North Korea can actually be persuaded (against all evidence) that the illegal possession of nuclear weapons actually has a price, we would be wise to consider Dr. Lee's basic idea. Let's deal with North Korea as Dr. Lee describes it -- a criminal enterprise whose crimes can and must be stopped.

There is another looming problem. A second term in a presidency seems to provide a unique temptation to American secretaries of state across administrations to go for the brass ring-a Nobel Peace Prize for "solving" the North Korean problem. In this case, at least from Pyongyang's perspective, there is nothing to be solved. North Korea has pretty much what it wants. But now that Seoul and Tokyo (hopefully Washington too?) are ready to call North Korea a nuclear power, there may be one thing to discuss with Mr. Kim: What would happen if he dared use those weapons?

Perhaps to guard against the "North Korea Nobel Peace Prize" temptation, a parallel prize can be created, awarded to those diplomats who avoid attempts to bargain away that which the North has never put on the table, and instead achieve the more modest task of bettering the lot of the North Korean people and putting an end to the many crimes of Kim Jong Un and his cronies.  

Do we really need another lesson on the folly of attempting to appease dictators?

Apparently, Foreign Affairs thinks so -- albeit inadvertently. They recently posted a piece, "Our Man in Havana," about the heroic efforts of some Obama administration officials to give the Castro regime everything it wanted for the release of jailed development worker Alan Gross. Specifically, this meant gutting the official U.S. democracy program for Cuba that Gross was operating under. In the end, however, they just could not overcome the intransigence of -- not the Castro regime -- but the "Cuban-American Lobby" in Congress.

Indeed, not only did they not wind up with the long-suffering Gross's freedom, but, to boot, former Assistant Secretary of State Arturo Valenzuela was forced to sit through a humiliating meeting with Cuban officials ranting about all the dictatorship's grievances against the United States. As the article puts it, "The Cubans were far less flexible than the Americans expected." (One doesn't know whether to laugh or cry.)

The central figure in this drama of high diplomacy is one Fulton Armstrong, a controversial former CIA analyst who began a second career as a staffer for Senate Foreign Relations Committee Chairman John Kerry (D-MA). (Today, he is affiliated with American University.) Armstrong was such an unabashed promoter of U.S.-Cuba normalization in the inter-agency process that he was shipped off to Europe during the Bush 43 administration, although not before playing a role in trying to scuttle John Bolton's nomination to serve as U.S. representative to the United Nations.

Apparently, Armstrong was enlisted by the administration to serve as a go-between with the Castro regime, no doubt due to the fact that he was a "friendly face" in the eyes of the Cubans. His mission: convince the Castro regime that the Obama administration agrees with them that USAID's Cuba democracy programs "are stupid" and that, in the words of Armstrong, "we're cleaning them up. Just give us time, because politically we can't kill them."

The article also includes other Armstrong-sourced inanities meant to further discredit the USAID program: that he was told by a "State Department official" that Gross's mission was "classified" and by another that Gross "likely worked for the Central Intelligence Agency." Apparently, Armstrong needs new sources, because such assertions are nonsense and known to be by anyone remotely associated with the program (as I was during my time with the Bush administration.)

The ever-resourceful, man-on-a-mission Armstrong even enlisted his former boss, Senator Kerry, in the appeasement effort, arranging for him to meet with Cuban officials in New York. The article reports, "there was no quid pro quo, but the meeting seemed to reassure the Cubans that the democracy programs would change, and the Cubans expressed confidence that Gross would receive a humanitarian release shortly after his trial." (That was in March 2011.)

Enter the villain: Senator Bob Menendez (D-NJ), a member of the nefarious "Cuban American Lobby." He supposedly called Denis McDonough, Obama's deputy national security adviser, to say basically hands off the Cuba program. According to a former government official, "McDonough was boxed in." Now, there's a tough call: side either with a lawless dictatorship or with an influential U.S. senator from your own party.

In the end, the effort to appease the Castro regime ended predictably: no freedom for Alan Gross and only utter contempt from Castro regime lackeys. Indeed, is there any mystery why Gross continues to languish in a Cuban jail cell when, according to Armstrong, unnamed administration officials signal to the Cubans that they think the democracy program is "stupid" as well? Moreover, offering to gut a democracy program because a dictatorship opposes it sends a terrible message to authoritarian regimes around the globe.

As I have written several times before, the best approach to securing Alan Gross's freedom is not giving in to the demands of an illegitimate regime, but by denying it things it wants and needs, such as U.S. tourists spending hard currency under currently licensed travel programs. Let's hope this Fulton Armstrong-led fiasco puts an end to any more appeasement attempts and the issue is placed in the hands of those with a more sober understanding of the nature of the Castro regime

Juan Forero's article, "Latin America's New Authoritarians," in the Washington Post on Monday is in many ways an excellent piece. It sheds light on the kinds of authoritarian regimes that have come into being in the region over the last decade or so. But in his reporting and in some of the experts he quotes, there is a use of language that shies away from calling these regimes exactly what they are: undemocratic, dictatorial, and arguably, tyrannical. In several places in the article these new regimes are contrasted with the former Latin American dictatorships (presumably of Pinochet, the Argentine junta, and others), leaving readers to draw the inference that the new forms are worrying but not as bad as the old forms. It is as though there is a form of authoritarianism that is obviously bad and must be dealt with, and then a new form that should cause us concern, but is not yet the threat or the evil that the old form was.

As an academic and former official at USAID in charge of programs that supported democrats around the world, I find this kind of talk and the implications it leaves troubling. We cannot support democracy and the brave people who seek our help if we quibble about who is and who is not "really" a dictator. While both diplomats and political scientists have to be subtle and use nuance sometimes, fundamentally we should be clear in terms of the objectives our interests compel us to work towards. So even to suggest that Hugo Chavez is somehow better than Pinochet is missing the point -- and risks giving aid and comfort to him and causing despair for his democratic opposition.

As a congressional staffer in the late 1990s when Chavez was coming to power, I agreed with a number of congressmen and staff who noted that the general attitude in the U.S. government was unrealistic when it came to who Chavez was and what he intended. We were right.

We are now in the 13^th year of "Bolivarian democracy" in the form of Hugo Chavez's Venezuelan regime. Over the years, a few more have joined him (with his aid) in Latin America by creating their own modified "democracies." Correa's Ecuador, Morales's Bolivia, and Ortega's Nicaragua all count as non-democratic states in my view if we are trying to be honest about the essence of democracy. (We dodged a bullet with Lugo's Paraguay and Humala's Peru since they have proved to be too weak -- or smart -- to go full-on Chavez.) It is worth noting that this is not a region-bound phenomenon; witness Putin's "controlled democracy." Nor is it time-bound. Robespierre's French republic was not a democratic state as I understand the term when the guillotine was the state symbol and when more liberty caps than powdered wigs adorned the heads plopping into the basket. Dictators have been putting adjectives in front of their use of the term democracy to dress up their authoritarian regimes for a long time. Thank you Jean-Jacque Rousseau, among others.

But we should be clear: Such regimes as Chavez's are an offense to the idea of democracy (constitutional republicanism, if you will) and mushy linguistic constructs and semantics are an offense to the English language -- or any other language in which it is written that a regime is an "authoritarian democracy," a "people's democracy" or a "revolutionary democracy." If you have to modify it, it isn't really a democracy. In Venezuela, Ecuador, Bolivia, and Nicaragua, the citizens simply do not live under democracy. They are not living in a constitutional republic. Yes, there are constitutions, yes, there are regular elections according to codified rules (most of the time). But much intervenes that is intimidating, repressive, and sometimes violent, so much so that the meaning of democracy is voided.

Here is a listing of the sins against democracy that occur in each of these states (as is the case in Russia, it is worth noting):

Intimidation of voters by using technology to nullify the secret ballot and to tie a person's vote to her employment.

Intimidation of the press by blackmail, repressive regulation, forced bankruptcy, and unfair prosecution.

Intimidation of business people by forcing them to serve the state's interests or lose their enterprises, thus putting the economic well-being of many citizens solely in the hands of the regime.

Manipulation of electoral law and use of the state's purse to provide the regime with a compliant legislature.

And finally, what might well be the worst tactic of all, intimidation of judges and the judicial branch. Democracy is not simply about people being allowed to vote, which is why I earlier referred to constitutional republicanism. It is about individuals being treated as citizens who live under law, not the rule of men. For that to occur, the law must be inviolate and the judges must be free to make impartial rulings without having to prefer the regime's interests. When the judges are intimidated into compliance, or simply removed and replaced with party hacks, the safeguard of democracy is gone, and I would argue, so is democracy in all but name.

Those oppressed by the forgoing means number in the hundreds of thousands, if not millions. So what if in some cases they aren't poor? They are citizens, and they deserve all the rights provided in a democracy.

Just because there are currently few or no desaparecidos or violent suppressions in South America does not mean there is no dictatorship à la Pinochet or the Argentine junta. Just because Chavez or Morales have killed fewer people when suppressing protests than the authoritarians of the 70's and 80's did does not mean they are not running a dictatorship. Just because Ortega has not assassinated opposition figures or declared martial law does not mean he has not just as effectively silenced his opposition. He gets no laurels for having forced them to withdraw from politics -- or to Miami.

As a political scientist, I can appreciate the need to be as descriptive as possible and to define terms with granularity. As one who was formerly responsible for supporting U.S. diplomacy as a development official, I can appreciate that sometimes nuanced language in formal settings is appropriate. But U.S. policymakers (and the Europeans and a growing number of other countries) don't have the luxury of being academic about their work if they expect to clearly articulate that our interests include a world with more real democracies and prospering free peoples. Mr. Feroro is right to point out that the U.S. and the Brazilians, to name two, could do more regarding the new authoritarians. But no one who purports to promote democracy and to support democrats around the world should kid himself: If policy is founded on a muddled view of what democracy is and isn't, then democracy and democrats around the world will suffer. Let us settle at the outset that democracy means real freedom, not pretended freedom, and craft our policy that way.

With last week's headlines dominated by Egypt's presidential elections, negotiations on Iran's nuclear program, and fresh atrocities in Syria, it would have been easy to miss a major development out of Iraq that in time could have equally momentous consequences for the future of the Middle East. I'm referring to the announcement that the Kurdistan Regional Government (KRG) and Turkey have agreed -- in principle at least -- to build a series of pipelines that will allow the Kurds to export oil and gas directly to Turkey and, from there, onward to the rest of the world. The U.S. should be paying close attention.

Until now, the KRG's ability to develop its substantial energy riches has been held hostage to its dependence on export pipelines controlled by the central government in Baghdad. To get any oil to international markets -- and, in turn, to get its fair share of revenue from those sales -- the KRG has largely been at Baghdad's mercies.

Iraq's oil ministry has sought to exploit its position of strength to coerce concessions from the KRG on a long-stalled national hydrocarbons law. In particular, Baghdad has demanded veto power over exploration and development contracts that the Kurds are negotiating with international oil companies. At least 40 such contracts have already been signed over the central government's vociferous objections -- including a breakthrough agreement late last year with the global energy giant, Exxon Mobil.

Baghdad has struck back on multiple fronts. Companies signing contracts in Kurdistan have been black-balled from competing for concessions in the mega-fields of southern Iraq. Kurdistan's access to Iraq's pipelines has been restricted. And as often as not, the central government has simply withheld payments that foreign operators are owed under their Kurdish deals. The latest row over compensation led the KRG in April to suspend exports altogether, which were scheduled to be as high as 175,000 barrels per day in 2012.

The oil dispute, of course, is at the center of a much larger argument, still unresolved, about the very nature of the new Iraqi state. The Kurds, scarred by a brutal history of subjugation at the hands of Arab rulers in Baghdad, are determined that their survival -- political, economic, and, yes, physical -- will never again be subject to the central government's diktats. Yearning in their hearts for independence, the Kurds since 2003 have reluctantly bowed to geo-political realities and agreed to work toward a unified Iraq -- but only on the condition that the country evolve toward a truly federal state, with Baghdad's authority strictly limited by constitutional guarantee and the Kurdistan region's autonomy assured. Having primary say over the fate of its energy resources, and a reliable, equitable claim on Iraq's revenue stream, are for the KRG essential elements of any durable national compact. 

Baghdad, needless to say, has had a much different view. Under Prime Minister Maliki, the inclination has clearly been to revert to the modern Middle Eastern norm of a strong, centralizing state, where all political, economic, and security issues of consequence are directed by the national government. From this perspective, full-blown federalism is no recipe for stability, but rather a prescription for weakness, chaos, and fragmentation. Lebanon at best; the former Yugoslavia at worst. The KRG's oil contracts are perceived as a dagger aimed at the heart of the Iraqi state: disrupting policy with respect to the nation's most important resource; undermining the authority of the central government; and ultimately intended to underwrite a future Kurdish dash for independence that would rip the country asunder.

It's not hard to see how these conflicting visions, left unmediated, could trigger an unvirtuous action-reaction cycle. And the dynamic has only been exacerbated in the wake of the U.S. withdrawal from Iraq last December, as Maliki's bent for concentrating power is increasingly viewed -- by Kurds, for sure, but by many other Iraqis as well -- as veering dangerously in the direction of a new authoritarianism. Political opponents have been targeted for arrest, including Iraq's Sunni vice president. More than 18 months into his second term, Maliki -- in contravention of a power-sharing agreement -- has yet to yield personal control over the defense, interior, and intelligence ministries. He has further been accused of politicizing Iraq's judiciary and central bank, while subverting the army's chain of command and turning its best equipped, best trained units into his own praetorian guard. And the list goes on.

Read on

I am in Panama for the second time in seven years, and it certainly is a very different place today. Skyscrapers are sprouting up all over the city and there has been explosive growth here. Constant sunshine, no earthquakes, fabulous location, peaceful Costa Rica to the north and a natural buffer of the Darien region to the south make Panama a stable and peaceful democracy. Americans are not perceived as an alien presence but a welcome partner. To be an American in Panama, especially an American who speaks Spanish, is to feel very, very welcome.

The Embassy estimates as many as 45,000 American citizens down here while the Panamanian government estimates as many as 250,000. One of the reasons for the discrepancy in estimates is that many Panamanians, for legacy reasons, possess U.S. passports and dual citizenship. In short, the U.S. legacy in Panama is obvious. At one point the U.S. had 35 military bases here to protect the canal from Japanese attacks in World War II, but today there are no U.S. bases in Panama. Many of the former U.S. bases have become urban renewal projects similar to the Presidio in San Francisco, and the new U.S. Embassy is built in one of these old sites.

Though this past year Panama's growth rate was 8.5 percent, services account for over three-quarters of the economy and English is a big need here. There is a shortage of skilled workers, and English is not as strong as it might be, or as strong as many locals think (although many call centers have been built here). The weakness of English in Panama is the legacy of dictator Omar Torrijos, who deemphasized English, going so far as to ban the teaching of English in public schools and stopping an entire generation from learning the language. Anecdotes tell of English teachers at public schools who have a hard time conducting visa interviews with the U.S. embassy in English.

For years, the Panamanians have been stalling building the last piece of the Pan-American Highway through the Darién region, and the U.S. has supported them for a number of reasons -- preventing the northward spread of foot and mouth disease, environmental worries, and perhaps other security concerns relating to narcotrafficking.

When I was last here, there were discussions about building an extension of the Panama Canal. The expansion is well underway, and ideally the expanded canal will be up and running in 2014 though more likely this will happen in 2015. You may have heard of the "Panamax" class of boats, but the expansion was needed for the "New Panamax" class of ships. At its narrowest portion, the canal can only run one way at a time right now for the largest ships, but after 2015 it will be able to run both ways at all points. The U.S. administered the canal as a public utility until 1999 and therefore hardly made any money. Today, the Panamanians run the canal like a business and it generates around $1 billion annually in profits for the Panamanian Treasury. This figure will increase considerably after the expansion.

In October, Congress finally approved the Panama Trade Promotion Agreement. It took way too many years under the current administration to sign this agreement. Though it is more a signaling effect, the upshot of this is the elimination of tariffs that were making it difficult for American goods to compete in Panama.

As far as security for U.S. interests in the region, there is little concern here over Hugo Chavez's influence except perhaps rumors of mischief with labor unions, and there are likewise no murmured concerns about Chinese influence. Nor do there seem to be any agricultural, mineral, or fuel resources that attract the attentions of China. In fact, Panama has kept official relations with Taiwan over China. I also asked about the ownership of Pacific and Atlantic ports through Hong Kong's Hutchison Port Holdings. It was met with a series of shrugs from U.S. officials and old Panama hands.

The FARC has used Panama's Darién region as a base of "rest and relaxation" but the current center-right government has taken a notably harder line than in the past. The FARC is almost exclusively interested in drug trafficking here, unlike in Colombia, where the group poses a threat to the state. According to U.S. officials, Panama yearly seizes about 40 tons of drugs in partnership with the U.S. There are also gang problems here but nowhere near the level of trouble that other Central American countries have been having over the last decade or so. Perhaps the biggest challenge to Panama's future is the weakness of its institutions and the persistent whispers of endemic corruption in the society. If Panama can confront this challenge, it will be on its ways to being as wealthy as the United States.

Two hours by plane to Mexico City, 40 minutes to San José (Costa Rica), less than an hour to Bogotá, and 4.5 hours to Washington. Panama, with a population of 3.4 million, is truly the hub of the region and a great American ally.

The United States is very good at making war. It is awful at state building. No matter how often Washington has tried over the years to pour its human and material resources into what is currently and euphemistically termed "reconstruction and stabilization," it has fallen short at least as often as it succeeds. In places where it has succeeded -- in Germany, Japan, Taiwan, and South Korea -- the recipient country put as much, if not more, effort into rebuilding its polity and economy as did the United States. Where Washington has failed -- the Philippines, Haiti (several times), Somalia, and now Afghanistan -- the country in question simply was on the take.

The United States has defeated al Qaeda in Afghanistan. It is hammering the Taliban. But, as the recently issued Senate Foreign Relations Committee report has made abundantly clear, it has utterly failed to construct a viable political and economic structure that can be expected to outlast the departure of most U.S. forces from that country in 2014. It has not been for want of trying: Washington has poured some $19 billion into Afghanistan in the past decade. Rather, it is due to policy-makers' indifference to the implementation of their plans, lack of timing, and inability to deploy sufficient numbers of civilians to that war-torn country. Equally, it is due to the nature of the country itself: a collection of fiercely independent tribes and ethnic groups that, as they have for centuries, are often at war with one another when not united in warring with outsiders. 

As I point out in my recently published A Vulcan's Tale, Washington missed the boat when it came to Afghan reconstruction. From 2002 to 2004, Afghanistan was quiet, and the Taliban (and al Qaeda) had gone into hiding. The country was suffused with optimism; the U.S. was popular. That was the time to move significant resources, and civilian personnel, into the country -- to forestall reliance on the poppy crop, to build up small business, to train the military and police. Instead, Afghanistan became yesterday's news as Iraq moved to the forefront of policymakers' concerns, while the Office of Management and Budget stubbornly ignored pleas from the State Department and the USAID for more resources. At the same time, few civilians volunteered to serve in the country, and contractors took the lead in "reconstruction" -- and in reaping the profits thereof. Add to that the United States' overreaction to that indifference that resulted in a flood of money into Afghanistan beginning in the latter part of the past decade, as well as a cultural tone-deafness that persists to this day, and it should come as no surprise that the majority of Afghans have not benefited from U.S. largesse.

The State Department has, as might be expected, issued a rebuttal to the Senate report. But the statistics it cites regarding economic growth mask the fact that Afghan governance is riddled with corruption, while its economy (excluding revenues from narcotics crops) is not much more than $8 billion, despite all the funds that have poured into it since 2002. Civilians still are chary about serving in Afghanistan -- the civilian surge of about 1100 personnel not only is dwarfed by the U.S. military presence, but is also almost invisible in a country the size of Texas with a population of some 30 million.

There remains a strong case for providing training assistance to Afghanistan's security forces, though it is nothing short of amazing that, until three or four years ago, virtually nothing was done to provide trainees with even a modicum of literacy proficiency. Likewise, there is a case for a significantly reduced but still potent military presence to ensure that the Taliban, and, in particular, al Qaeda, cannot return to the pre-September 11 status quo ante. But it makes no sense for the United States to pour billions into reconstruction assistance when the current effort to reform USAID is in its infant stages, when civilians can still refuse to serve in Afghanistan, and when contractors will continue to dominate U.S. assistance activities. 

Meanwhile, the rest of the United States' allies, many of whom have had far more success in implementing state-building projects, sit on their hands and withhold their money. Secretary of Defense Robert Gates was right to castigate the United States' NATO allies for their blithe refusal to pull their weight in Afghanistan and, for that matter, Libya. At a minimum, the Europeans and other putative members of the coalition in Afghanistan should take the lead in providing the human and material resources for the non-military aspects of that country's reconstruction. It is the least that they can do -- and they happen to be better at the job than we are, or are likely to be for some time.

It is not fair to criticize the Obama administration too harshly for its failure to come up with a single, robust policy regarding the spreading street unrest in the Middle East and North Africa. The administration has been playing catch-up and has often been a step or two behind, but I think that is inevitable when one is confronting revolutionary cascades. Moreover, the region is dotted with very different governments, ranging from friendly autocrats who have been liberalizing (albeit too slowly) to thuggish despots who used almost every tool at their disposal to oppress their people and frustrate U.S. interests in the region. The popular movements rising in the region may share some features in common, but the regimes they are threatening are very different. It would be very hard to come up with a one-size-fits-all policy that would endure given these conditions.

So I have some sympathy for the way the Obama administration has handled, for instance, the situation in Bahrain. The regime there has supported key U.S. policies over the years, and securing long-term access to the home port of the 5th Fleet is an important U.S. national interest. The ethnic mix in Bahrain is volatile, and the Sunni rulers have good reason to fear Iranian adventurism -- long a staple in the region. For precisely those reasons, however, the administration is right to use its influence to pressure the regime into avoiding bloodshed and accommodating legitimate political grievances of the protesters. Calibrating the pressure and the message is hard, but the core U.S. interests involved are fairly straightforward.

I have less sympathy for the same equivocation with regard to Libya. The Qaddafi regime is no friend of the United States. While Qaddafi did make a major concession on WMD in 2003 on the heels of the U.S. invasion of Iraq, it is likely that that deal would be honored (or an even better one secured) by any regime installed after its ouster. Moreover, the level of atrocities the regime has inflicted upon the street protesters goes well beyond what the other regional autocrats have done. Full-throated condemnation would seem an easy call for the administration. As former Deputy Secretary of Defense Paul Wolfowitz notes in a tough column today, the U.S. message has not been all that full-throated, not yet anyway.

The Obama administration needs to do more, but I would not go as far as some who advocate having U.S. forces impose a no-fly zone. I share their outrage at the way Qaddafi had his Air Force strafe defenseless citizens, but involving the U.S. military in this way would constitute a major escalation and it would be hard to walk back if the situation further unraveled. What if Qaddafi shifted to tanks? Would we then be obligated to have our planes destroy the tanks? And without U.N. authorization, the United States would be entirely on its own. Not even our European allies, who otherwise would join in condemning the Qaddafi regime, would approve of U.S. military action without U.N. authorization.

The United States has acted without U.N. authorization before and rightly so, most famously in the Kosovo war of 1999, although there we were joined by all of our NATO allies. (Academics also debate whether the 16 prior UNSC resolutions on Iraq provided adequate legal cover for the 2003 invasion of Iraq or whether the Bush administration needed a 17th.) But in these cases, the action came after considerable diplomatic efforts at the United Nations and elsewhere. Other avenues of pressure were tried and found wanting, and only then was a resort to extraordinary force taken.

As Wolfowitz and others note, there is much the United States can do and pressure other states into doing short of unilateral military actions. The Obama administration should take those steps, and quickly.

The Washington Post is running a series of articles highlighting failed projects funded by the U.S. military in Iraq and Afghanistan. Nearly $5 billion in funds has been appropriated through the Commander's Emergency Response Program (CERP), which gives military forces in combat money to put toward humanitarian assistance and development projects that advance the war effort, to include reducing unemployment and building support for U.S. objectives. The articles highlight numerous projects that have been abandoned once under the control of the Iraqi and Afghan governments, with the implication that the programs were scandalously wasteful. And that may be right in many cases; but the Post articles also give no context for whether CERP funded projects are more or less successful than other development assistance. Here are three points they ought to have addressed but did not.

No. 1: A project that is abandoned now does not mean it wasn't beneficial.
I realize it's a difficult argument to make that wasted money is a good thing; but CERP funds aim for short term effect in a combat zone. They are not projects for the ages, they are designed to affect the here and now decisions of insurgents and the population that may permit them to operate with impunity. The Post concludes that "have created no more than a temporary illusion of progress," but temporary progress can be vital in creating or sustaining momentum in warfare. If the Iraqi government does not now make a water park (one of the projects) a priority, that does not mean it wasn't a hopeful and useful sign to Iraqis three years ago when we were trying to convey that violence was dramatically down, it was safe for Iraqis to engage in normal pursuits, and our objectives were a peaceful and prosperous Iraq.

No. 2: Development assistance is an inherently speculative undertaking.
What proportion of businesses started here in the United States fail? Add to that the complexities of societies coming out of authoritarian governance or decades of war, developing law and judicial practice while democratizing, and it's not at all surprising that a large number of projects will be abandoned or unsuccessful. If we expect a guaranteed return on investment with our development assistance, we would actually not be assisting development very much. Those projects tend toward large infrastructure guaranteed by local governments, and even those are often rife with corruption and mismanagement. Part of what development assistance does is teach the practices of capitalism, and failure is a part of capitalism, so we should not balk at failed attempts.

No. 3: The U.S. military is not particularly good at development assistance.
It's not their job. They will optimize funding to projects that advance their war fighting objectives, predominantly near-term security. To make the military good at development assistance, as Carl Schramm has advocated in his Expeditionary Economics article in Foreign Affairs, would require a major diversion of effort from fighting and winning the country's wars. We actually have a branch of the U.S. government whose job it is to provide assistance; that would be the Agency for International Development. The real disappointment of so much money being channeled through CERP is that our government proved incapable of working together to prioritize and fund both near-term and long-term assistance in Iraq and Afghanistan when they are essential to our war efforts.

Nouri al-Maliki appears close to a deal that will put Iraq's Shi'ia parties in power. After seven months of political wrangling, it would be tempting to believe that any government formed by Iraq's squabbling political leaders is progress. It is not.

The political slate that garnered the most seats in the parliamentary elections, Ayad Allawi's non-sectarian bloc, ought to have had the first shot at forming a government. Prime Minister Maliki's manipulations of electoral commission findings and superseding of judicial decisions accrued that advantage instead to his second-place finish.

Even with the advantages of incumbency in a system newly empowered and without strong legal constraints, Maliki has been unable to cobble together a coalition. Other parties fear a "soft coup" of Maliki consolidating power and have been unwilling to join a government with him as prime minister.

Read on

Paleoconservative columnist George Will is on a crusade against nation building, and in particular, against nation building in Afghanistan. In June he called it a "fool's errand," that is "staggeringly complex," and claimed it is "rash or delusional" to try it because it is a "cannot-be-done" mission. In May he called it the "civilianization of the military." In September 2009 he called for the United States to withdraw from Afghanistan, saying Afghanistan was so backwards that "nation building would be impossible even if we knew how, and even if Afghanistan were not the second-worst place to try" after Somalia.

Will articulates a view that sounds increasingly plausible to opposite poles of the political spectrum. Left-wing Democrats seeking an end to the war in Afghanistan, as well as some Tea Party neo-isolationists, echo some of Will's arguments (Angelo Codevilla's otherwise fascinating Tea Party manifesto included an odd broadside against trying to win hearts and minds in Iraq and Afghanistan). Will's view is, basically, that it was all a mistake. The United States should not seek to transform regions because it is beyond our capabilities. We should not foster democracy overseas because it rarely grows in inhospitable places. Above all, we should never, ever attempt nation building because it is a misuse of military resources and a hubristic neo-imperial fool's errand.

Will is wrong. I will write later about why the growing skepticism about the war in Afghanistan is unfounded, but today I want to take issue with Will's skepticism about nation building. While I think there are valid arguments in favor of nation building on idealistic grounds, I want to highlight three reasons why I think realists should support nation building.

Read on

The administration has decided that promoting economic development around the world is essential. Foreign assistance is a crucial part of how the United States relates to the developing world and plays a critical role in U.S. national security policy. To date, however, U.S. programs have not been as effective as they ought to have been. Aid flows through too many channels and there is poor overall coordination among the relevant agencies scattered through the government. It is time for this to change.

The preceding paragraph was pretty easy to write, since those were key themes of Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice in 2006. The paragraph works equally well this week, as the Obama administration unveils its own approaches. I'm well-versed in the earlier version, since I had the privilege of working on those issues as a member of her policy planning staff. After an extensive review of foreign assistance programs and countless intra- and interagency discussions about how the sprawling aid apparatus might be improved, Secretary Rice implemented a series of reforms, most prominently featuring tighter integration between the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID) and the State Department.

Skip forward four years. After not one, but two extensive and concurrent reviews, the Obama administration is poised to tackle the same problems. It is doing so in the context of a United Nations discussion of the (limited) progress that has been made toward the Millennium Development Goals. Herewith, some places to look for potential changes.

Read on

By Philip Zelikow

Will Inboden wonders in his otherwise very good post how folks might have imbibed the long-held view that President Bush regarded development as a priority right alongside defense and diplomacy -- one of "three D's" -- placing development as one of the top three priorities of the United States. Some referred to the 2002 National Security Strategy (NSS). But, Will writes, he checked that document, and "it nowhere privileges development as the third pillar of some type of new national security trinity."

Will believes he solved the puzzle by finding a USAID official who heard something at a White House meeting and embellished it. That's a good story. I have another. This one traces the origins to a White House official ... George W. Bush.

In his remarks at the World Bank on July 17, 2001, President Bush said that, to build a better world, the United States "must be guided by three great goals." The first was to keep the peace with a balance of power that favors freedom. The second was "to ignite a new era of global economic growth through a world trading system that is dramatically more open and more free." Finally, Bush said, "our third goal must be to work in true partnership with developing countries to remove the huge obstacles to development, to help them fight illiteracy, disease, unsustainable debt."

Working on the NSS in late 2001 and early 2002, I was quite struck by the trinity of priorities announced in this July 2001 speech, and the rank it gave to development.  Condi Rice confirmed to me that this was deliberate. President Bush soon followed up with his Monterrey speech in March 2002 announcing the plan to increase development assistance by 50 percent and create the Millennium Challenge Account initiative, displaying an international side to his ideal of compassionate conservatism. Although the NSS ended up not adopting such a trinitarian structure, at the time I cited the conceptual structure of President Bush's World Bank speech to many people as illustrative of the emphasis he had placed on development.

So perhaps a more likely explanation for the belief in President Bush's "three D's" is that many people internalized the structure the president had used in his speech, adjusting the middle principle into one of "diplomacy" in order to create a useful and memorable catechism.

But, since Will recently served on the White House staff as one of the custodians of authoritative presidential guidance, the story serves another purpose. It illustrates how fragile institutional memory is in our government, even within the White House of the same president.