So What About the Risk of Inflation?

From the FT.Com today comes news that interest rates on short term U.S. debt has been bid into negative territory. The lesson here? Watch what they do and not what they say. We have been treated to a deluge of "news" lately on an impending inflation disaster arising from public sector debt. Well, if that is the case, then why are banks and others willing to pay the U.S. government to lend money to them, suggesting that defaul and inflationary concerns are, ahem, somewhat exaggerated.

Another Voice Heard

Rick Salutin has a column in today's Globe&Mail on the Colvin testimony from yesterday. He too is suggesting that the lesson here is that the Afghan mission is deeply flawed, is enhancing if not increasing the efficacy of those it claims to fight and should be ended as soon as possible.

Yet like the Peter Desbarats interview I described earlier, I think this misses the point. Mr. Colvin is suggesting that we are complicit in the same war crimes that we so loudly condemn the U.S. for. If what he has claimed is true, and I see far less reason to doubt his veracity than I do officials such as Minister McKay or former CDS Rick Hillier, then an extremely serious crime has been committed. This deserves to be investigated in the most transparent manner possible. It is not a matter of spin or image or polling but of justice. And until justice is done, the current minister needs to stand aside.

Peter Desbarats on Afghanistan and Torture

Respected journalist and former Somalia Inquiry commissioner Peter Desbarats is on CBC's The Current this morning (no transcript or audio available at this time). He seems to feel quite strongly (and I agree) that a public inquiry would simply be an opportunity for the Harper government to punt this potentially devastating issue up the road.

He also feels that the issue is unlikely to have legs. Canadians, he suggests, are showing no outrage in this. Our understanding of the Afghan mission is minimal. More important, we get far more mileage, apparently, out of pointing our fingers at those awful Americans rather than looking at our own actions. We are allegedly complicit in the torture of innocent civilians. Our government. Our military. Our civilian officials. Just like the evil Bushies.

This is tragic.

Horror in New Orleans

While I have followed convincing allegations of involuntary euthanasia following Hurricane Katrina, and had not until now realized the extent to which race-based vigilantism occurred.

Hence this incredibly disturbing video from Democracy Now:

John Gray on Keynes

The current London Review of Books has an excellent review of Akerlof and Schiller's groundbreaking work on behavioral econcomics, Animal Spirits: How Human Psychology Drives the Economy and Why it Matters for Global Capitalism, by noted political philosopher John |Gray.

While the review is generally positive, the telling point that Gray makes is that the error addressed by Keynes and the one that drove last year's crisis was not psychological, as Akerlof and Schiller would have it, but epistemological. As Gray puts it:

The central flaw of the economic orthodoxy against which Keynes fought in the 1930s was to imagine that an insoluble problem – human ignorance of the future – had been solved. The error was repeated in the 1990s, when economists came to believe that complex mathematical formulae could tame uncertainty in the murky world of derivatives. Steeped in history as they were, this was a delusion that none of the classical economists entertained. It began to shape economics only towards the end of the 19th century, with the rise of Positivism, according to which the natural sciences are the only legitimate repository of human knowledge. It was the formative influence of this philosophy on the Chicago School that enabled the orthodoxy of the 1930s to re-emerge triumphant, and the result was an immense boost to the prestige of economics as a discipline. Economists could claim to be scientists, who with the aid of their mathematical magic could pierce the veil that conceals the future.

The hegemony of Positivism in economics obscured Keynes’s scepticism about probabilistic knowledge, his most important contribution to the discipline.

This was of course the core of Hayek's work -- his insistence that where individual knowledge fails the collective wisdom of markets will succeed. Yet s Gray notes

Hayek said that governments could never know enough to plan the economy successfully – a claim vindicated by the miserable record of central planning in Communist countries. At the same time, he attributed near omniscience to markets, and never doubted that if left to its own devices the economy would liquidate mistaken investments and return to equilibrium. Against this, Keynes had shown that there is no market mechanism that ensures revival; economic contraction can be self-reinforcing, and only government action can then create a way out.

From this Gray draws the obvious inferences that

Keynes and the classical economists before him knew that there is no realm of market exchange that obeys laws of the kind that can be formulated in the natural sciences. Economics and politics are not separate branches of human activity, and economic life cannot be studied independently of social divisions and political conflicts among populations, along with their cultures and religions. Familiar to Keynes and most of the economists of his generation, these truisms have been forgotten, or rejected, by many economists today. The result is an economic imperialism that tries to explain every human activity in terms of a conception of rational action that does not work even when applied to the behaviour of markets.

Thus while behavioral economics may be a useful expansion of the scope of economic analysis,

[i]t must be doubted, though, that the authors will succeed in persuading economists of the inadequacy of the conception of rational action. The profession is one of the few areas of human activity in which that conception is applicable. In its intra-academic varieties, at any rate, economics is insulated from the world not only by its narrow explanatory methodology but also because it rewards the mathematical modelling that resulted in nearly all of its members failing to anticipate the financial crisis. As institutionalised in universities, the notion of rational decision-making is self-perpetuating. Economics as currently practised may have only a slight grip on market behaviour, but it seems to be powerfully predictive of the behaviour of economists.

A Little Bit of Fun

A little example of the excellence of The Onion

Boy Finds Own Real-Life E.T.

Bringing it Home

Stalin famously quipped that one death is tragedy while a million is a statistic. This story from Jesus Manifesto underscores the tragedy that the larger issue often misses:

The two young parents and their three small children were returning from the nearby city of Yatta to their home village of Tuba. At 11:00 a.m., they encountered CPTers just south of the village of At-Tuwani. After the CPTers warned the Palestinians about the settlers seen earlier in the morning, the family chose a longer path toward Tuba, accompanied by the CPTers.

As the group crossed Mashakha Hill, they saw four settler men on a ridge fifty meters above them. The settlers ran toward the Palestinians and began to circle them. A fifth settler, masked and hooded, appeared from the valley below. When the Palestinian man told them he was only trying to walk home, a settler shoved him.

As the CPTers attempted to step between the Palestinians and settlers, the settlers pushed them to the ground, hit and kicked them, and stole their two video cameras. The settlers then walked to the illegal settlement outpost of Havat Ma’on (Hill 833), where they disappeared among the trees twenty minutes later. The Palestinian family arrived home safely.

For decades, residents of Tuba Village had a direct road to the village of At-Tuwani, and onward to the regional economic hub of Yatta. The Israeli settlement of Ma’on and its neighboring outpost of Havat Ma’on were built directly on that road, blocking all Palestinian traffic and forcing villagers onto long dirt paths through the hills, taking them as much as two hours out of their way.

Colvin Transcript

Here is a complete transcript of Richard Colvin's opening remarks yesterday:

Why should Canadians care?

One may ask rhetorically, 'Even if Afghan detainees were being tortured, why should Canadians care?' There are five compelling reasons.

First, our detainees were not what intelligence services would call 'high-value targets,' such as IED (improvised explosive device) bomb-makers, al-Qaida terrorists or Taliban commanders. 'High-value targets' would be detained under a completely different mechanism that involves special forces and targeted, intelligence-driven operations. The Afghans I am discussing today were picked up by conventional forces during routine military operations, and on the basis typically not of intelligence but suspicion or unproven denunciation.

According to a very authoritative source, many of the Afghans we detained had no connection to the insurgency whatsoever. From an intelligence point of view, they had little or no value. Frankly, the NDS (Afghan intelligence service) did not want them.

Some of these Afghans may have been foot soldiers or day fighters. But many were just local people - farmers, truck drivers, tailors, peasants; random human beings in the wrong place at the wrong time; young men in their fields and villages who were completely innocent but were nevertheless rounded up. In other words, we detained, and handed over for severe torture, a lot of innocent people.

A second reason Canadians should care is that seizing people and rendering them for torture is a very serious violation of international and Canadian law. Complicity in torture is a war crime. It is illegal and prosecutable.

Third, Canada has always been a powerful advocate of international law and human rights. That is a keystone of who we are as Canadians, and what we have always stood for as a people and nation. If we disregard our core principles and values, we also lose our moral authority abroad. If we are complicit in the torture of Afghans in Kandahar, how can we credibly promote human rights in Tehran or Beijing?

Fourth, our actions were counter to our own stated policies. In April 2007, Prime Minister Stephen Harper said publicly that "Canadian military officials don't send individuals off to be tortured." That was indeed our official policy. But behind the military's wall of secrecy, that, unfortunately, is exactly what we were doing.

And finally, even if all the Afghans we detained had been Taliban, it would still have been wrong to have them tortured. The Canadian military is proud and professional organization, thoroughly trained in the rules of war and the correct treatment of prisoners.

I would like to quote the authoritative military manual on counter-insurgency. It says that "the abuse of detained persons is immoral, illegal and unprofessional .... Torture, and cruel, inhuman and degrading treatment, is never a morally permissible option, even if lives depend on gaining information .... The methods used (by the military) must reflect the nation's commitment to human dignity and international humanitarian law."

Even when we look at our U.S. allies, who work with us in Kandahar, their top commander Gen. David Petraeus lists 10 'big ideas' of counter-insurgency. One is 'Live your values.' He said that "whenever we place expediency above our values, we end up regretting it." In a counter-insurgency, "when you lose moral legitimacy, you lose the war."

Canada's counter-insurgency doctrine makes the same points: "Persons not taking part in hostilities" - including fighters who have been detained - "must be treated humanely. Once (local) citizens have lost confidence in (foreign) military forces ..., their sympathies and support will be transferred to the insurgents."

Counter-insurgency is an argument to win the support of the locals. Every action, reaction or failure to act become part of the debate. In Kandahar, Canada needs to convince local people that we are better than the Taliban, that our values were superior, that we would look after their interests and protect them. In my judgment, some of our actions in Kandahar, including complicity in torture, turned local people against us. Instead of winning hearts and minds, we caused Kandaharis to fear the foreigners. Canada's detainee practices alienated us from the population and strengthened the insurgency.

Thank you.

Hospitality as Faith

At the very core of Gospel life is the practice of hospitality. We are called not only to see Christ in the other but to personally to reach out. To deny others, particularly the lowliest and most difficult of others, is, we are told, to deny Christ.

I recently read Christine Pohl's work on Christian Hospitality, Making Room. A practical and thorough guide not only to the practice of hospitality but its subversive nature, it nevertheless left me somewhat uncomfortable as rather than acknowledge the necessary risk in reaching out to others as a necessary and indeed core element of hospitality, it concerned itself with alleviating such risks. So while it drew at length on the work of Dorothy Day among others, it failed to acknowledge how Day and her Catholic Worker houses of hospitality refused to be deterred by the risks arising from their work.

I am reminded of Deitrich Bonhoeffer's remark in The Cost of Discipleship that when Christ calls us he bids to follow him and die, or John Howard Yoder's in The Politics of Jesus that our journey of discipleship does not end at the foot of the cross but on it. The risk of hospitality is not a problem, it is the point.

Nor can we legitimately insulate ourselves from this through the creation of institutions specializing in hospitality. The point of engaging the other is not to transform her or him but ourselves. We cannot have this done for us by others. This is a point that Ivan Illich made so poignantly in has later work, and that others drawing on his work, particularly John McKnight, have made so clearly since.

So it was somewhat concerning to see a radical faith site such as The Jesus Manifesto discuss hospitality recently with such an emphasis on risk. Yes, in reaching out we will meet sketchy and perhaps even dangerous people. We need not approve what they do, but we are called to avoid judging, condemning or shunning them. The world already has an abundance of this. The Church is called not to reinforce this but to transcend it.

The Smoking Gun

Perhaps the key link in the emerging Afghan horror is current Ambassador the the PRC, David Mulroney. In 2007, Mulroney was an ADM for Foreign Affairs on the Afghanistan file. Richard Colvin is insisting that his supervisor at the time made every effort to both silence him and make sure that no paper trail existed, according to CBC news.

A 2007 bio for Mr. Mulroney notes

his direct responsibility to the Prime Minister to co-ordinate all Canadian government activities in Afghanistan including the efforts of DND, DFait, CIDA, SolGen etc. The new overarching responsibility permits the high level focusing & merging of Canadian efforts to a common goal.

In other words, if our PM did not know about this it was either willful ignorance or incompetence. Choose your poison, Mr. Prime Minister.