Brad Delong and Stephen Cohen in Foreign Policy:

For more than a quarter century now the countries of the world have been dreaming the neoliberals' dream. They have been trying to shrink their states back to their core competencies to promote economic efficiency, global economic integration, and growth, and to slash through red tape, rent-seeking, and simple corruption. They have been actively privatizing state holdings. They have hugely reduced their ownership and their active involvement in “national champion” companies. They have cut back on interventions to affect market outcomes and on regulation to scrutinize and control market players.

But now they are waking up. And the neoliberals' dream is at an end.

To understand why, we need to journey back to the mid-20th century. The coming of World War II ensured that whatever money still remained in Britain left quickly. Franklin Delano Roosevelt ruled an isolationist country that he wished to cajole into engaging in the war with Hitler as early and as completely as he could. But part of Roosevelt's strategy (and a not-altogether unwelcome consequence, for many who worked in the State, War, and Navy Building-a Victorian-era structure just west of the White House that looked like a French brothel) was to make Britain broke before American taxpayers' money was committed in any way to the fight against Hitler. Only after Britain had sold off the family silver to pay for the nozzle would America “lend” Britain its garden hose to fight the Hitlerian fire.

America did come to the aid of its closest, cherished, and most important embattled overseas ally after Britain was broke. The Grand Alliance was the great moment in the grand story of the English-speaking nations. It does remain Churchillian in the inherited grandeur of its narrative. And America did come to the rescue of England, and together-with enormous although unloved assistance from the Red Army of the Soviet Union and Josef Stalin-America did save the world from the horrors of the Nazis. But while we were gearing up to come to the rescue, we squeezed the British, and when World War II was over, the United States, not Britain, had the money. When the British borrowed money from us, it had to be repaid in dollars, not in sterling. And imports into Britain had to be rationed well into the 1950s.

Will the United States be similarly squeezed? No. We are not engaged in a total war. We do not domestically produce only 1,200 calories of food per citizen per day. We are still by far the world's largest national economy. The United States is technologically powerful and resourceful and is still the center of world finance. World finance is still transacted in dollars. And the United States remains the world's only military superpower, whatever that may turn out to mean.

But the United States is losing the money. America is now massively in debt to foreigners and will be more in debt with each passing year as far into the future as forecasters can see. It will not be squeezed as it squeezed Britain, but it will be constrained.

Sean Carroll is hosting a book club on his new book, From Eternity to Here, over at Cosmic Variance. Sean:

I want to give some behind-the-scenes insight about what was going through my mind when I put each chapter together — a little exclusive for readers of the blog. Of course, in the comments I hope we can discuss the substance of the chapters in as much detail as we like. I’m going to try to participate actively in all the discussions, so I hope to answer questions when I can — and certainly expect to learn something myself along the way.

The book is divided into four parts: an overview, spacetime and relativity, entropy and the Second Law, and a discussion of how it all fits into cosmology. You can find a more detailed table of contents here, and here is the prologue to get you in the mood. Part Three is definitely the high point of the book, so be sure to stick around for that.

So see you next Tuesday! Get reading!

Part One: Overview

* January 19: Chapter One (What is time?)

* January 26: Chapter Two (Entropy and the Second Law)

* February 2: Chapter Three (The expanding universe)

Eve Ottenberg in In These Times:

In The Devil in the Holy Water, Darnton, a Harvard professor and director of the Harvard library, explores “how the experience of literature under the Ancien Regime [of France’s Bourbon kings] fed into the radical politics of the revolution.” With summaries of many famous libels, Darnton’s book teems with intrigue, deceit, double-dealing, disguises, blackmail, bribery, extortion and smut.

“For all their venality and disingenuousness, libelers prefigured in some ways the modern investigative reporter,” Darnton writes. Indeed, the French Revolution ushered in an era of a free press with a vast multiplication in the number of newspapers. It also brought with it the full flowering of libel literature—the denunciation of someone as a counter-revolutionary. In 18th-century France, such attacks often led to the guillotine. More recently, under Hitler and Stalin, they have led to gas chambers and labor camps.

Darnton writes that like novels “about real people … libels came to occupy an important sector of the book market by the end of the 17th century.” He leads readers through the slums, garrets and “tawdry cafes” of 18th century London and Paris to illuminate how libelers culled news from their sources, mixed fact and fiction and, with no concept of copyright, lifted from each other extensively. Most news traveled by word of mouth. The libelers then patched together anecdotal rumors and bits of gossip into pamphlets, which sold like hotcakes.

These writers were exquisitely personal in the damage they inflicted, though their aims were often political. “The inability of aristocrats to propagate their line provided a libeler with a favorite theme, along with venereal disease transmitted from brothels to the court,” Darton writes. What better symbol of royal rot than sterility and VD?

When Caroline Kennedy managed to say “you know” more than 200 times in an interview with the New York Daily News, and on 130 occasions while talking to The New York Times during her uninspired attempt to become a hereditary senator, she proved, among other things, that she was (a) middle-aged and (b) middle class. If she had been a generation younger and a bit more déclassé, she would have been saying “like.” When asked if the Bush tax cuts should be repealed, she responded: “Well, you know, that’s something, obviously, that, you know, in principle and in the campaign, you know, I think that, um, the tax cuts, you know, were expiring and needed to be repealed.” This is an example of “filler” words being used as props, to try to shore up a lame sentence. People who can’t get along without “um” or “er” or “basically” (or, in England, “actually”) or “et cetera et cetera” are of two types: the chronically modest and inarticulate, such as Ms. Kennedy, and the mildly authoritarian who want to make themselves un-interruptible. Saul Bellow’s character Ravelstein is a good example of the latter: in order to deny any opening to a rival, he says “the-uh, the-uh” while searching for the noun or concept that is eluding him.

more from Christopher Hitchens at Vanity Fair here.

Bob Dylan wrote that there are “maybe a thousand kings in the world,” and for a time in the nineties, the Mexican-born artist Gabriel Orozco was one of them. Orozco was a primal navigator—a canny artist who effectively inspected the gap between physicality and immateriality, the micro and the macro, the industrial ready-made and everyday detritus. Few contemporary artists mined the space between the ordinary and the strange better than Orozco did. These days, however, his work often feels more ordinary than strange, and the Museum of Modern Art’s twenty-year survey provides the perfect window to compare the good and the bad. Arresting works are spread out over two floors, among too many tasteful objects and a flock of medium-size mediocre found-object sculptures. The show is sometimes stirring and surprising, sometimes only elegant, and occasionally empty, knowing decoration. You see the good Orozco right up front. His photos from the early nineties show the artist finding his art in the world and turning the world into his art. They give everyday things the weight of thought: A sleeping dog looks dead, and stacked stuff eerily mimics New York’s skyline (with the World Trade Center). An empty shoe box just sits there, like Duchamp’s urinal but more casual—still confounding viewers, transcending itself restlessly.

more from Jerry Saltz at New York Magazine here.

Continued discrimination against Roma in Europe not only violates human dignity, but is a major social problem crippling the development of eastern European countries with large Roma populations. Spain, which has been more successful in dealing with its Roma problem than other countries, can take the lead this month as it assumes the European Union presidency. Up to 12 million Roma live in Europe today, primarily in the east. Despite the region’s overall economic growth over the past two decades, life for many Roma is worse now than ever. During the communist era, Roma received jobs and housing. But the heavy industries in which many were employed have now closed, and unemployment is widespread. Many Roma live in deplorable conditions unworthy of modern Europe.

more from George Soros at The Guardian here.

Before the Word

Corn is great, on the cob or otherwise,
but before corn in the ear there was life.
Fire is holy especially for Zoroastrians,
but before fire too there was life.
Before the bowstring and the flint arrow sang,
there was life.

The word is great,
yet there was life before the word.
We can’t turn romantic and say
we were into bird speech or river-roar then,
into the silence of frost
or the language of rain.
But forest speech and swamp speech
came through easier to us.
When lightning crashed,
the cry of the marsh bird was our cry,
and we flung ourselves to the other branch
like any other baboon.

As winter whined on windy cliff,
we shivered with the yellow grass.
In winter-dark a hundred eyes
flared yellow in the jungle scrub.
When seasons changed, blood coursed with sap
and flowered in meadows. We were at home.
Nor eyes nor bat cries bothered us.
What if we didn’t know
a bat assessed reality
from the ricochet of its cry?

Though there were no words,
fear had a voice with many echoes.
Worship was quieter, adoration
spoke only through the eyes or knees.

What was it like before language dropped like dew,
covering the scuffed grass of our lives?

by Keki Daruwalla

Collected Poems 1970-2005; Penguin, 2006

From Scientific American:

In the north of Burkina Faso, not far to the east of one of the best-known backpacker destinations in West Africa, the Bandiagara Escarpment in Mali, lies the town of Koumbri. It was one of the places where the Burkina Ministry of Health began a mass campaign five years ago to treat parasitic worms. One of the beneficiaries, Aboubacar, then an eight-year-old boy, told health workers he felt perpetually tired and ill and had noticed blood in his urine. After taking a few pills, he felt better, started to play soccer again, and began focusing on his schoolwork and doing better academically. The Burkina Faso program, which treated more than two million children, was both a success story and an emblem of the tragedy of disease in the developing world. For want of very simple treatments, a billion people in the world wake up every day of their lives feeling sick. As a result they cannot learn in school or work effectively.

Most people in richer countries equate tropical disease with the big three—HIV/AIDS, tuberculosis and malaria—and funding agencies allocate aid accordingly. Yet a group of conditions known collectively as neglected tropical diseases (NTDs) has an even more widespread impact. They may not often kill, but they debilitate by causing severe anemia, malnutrition, delays in intellectual and cognitive development, and blindness. They can lead to horrific limb and genital disfigurement and skin deformities and increase the risk of acquiring HIV/AIDS and suffering complications during pregnancy. They not only result from poverty but also help to perpetuate it. Children cannot develop to their full potential, and adult workers are not as productive as they could be.

Morehere.

From MSNBC:

A green sea slug appears to be part animal, part plant. It's the first critter discovered to produce the plant pigment chlorophyll. The sneaky slugs seem to have stolen the genes that enable this skill from algae that they've eaten. With their contraband genes, the slugs can carry out photosynthesis — the process plants use to convert sunlight into energy. “They can make their energy-containing molecules without having to eat anything,” said Sidney Pierce, a biologist at the University of South Florida in Tampa.

Pierce has been studying the unique creatures, officially called Elysia chlorotica, for about 20 years. He presented his most recent findings Jan. 7 at the annual meeting of the Society for Integrative and Comparative Biology in Seattle. The finding was first reported by Science News. “This is the first time that multicellar animals have been able to produce chlorophyll,” Pierce told LiveScience. The sea slugs live in salt marshes in New England and Canada. In addition to burglarizing the genes needed to make the green pigment chlorophyll, the slugs also steal tiny cell parts called chloroplasts, which they use to conduct photosynthesis. The chloroplasts use the chlorophyl to convert sunlight into energy, just as plants do, eliminating the need to eat food to gain energy.

More here.

James K. Galbraith in Thought and Action:

Krugman contends that Tweedledum and Tweedledee [new classical economists and the New Keynesians] “mistook beauty for truth.” The beauty in question was the “vision of capitalism as a perfect or nearly perfect system.” To be sure, the accusation that a scientist—let alone an entire science—was seduced by beauty over truth is fairly damaging. But it ’s worth asking, what exactly was beautiful about this idea?

Krugman doesn’t quite say. He does note that the mathematics used to describe the alleged perfection was “impressive-looking”—”gussied up” as he says, “with fancy equations.” It ’s a telling choice of words. “Impressive-looking”? “Gussied up”? These are not terms normally used to describe the Venus de Milo.

To be sure, mathematics is beautiful, or can be. I’m especially fond of the com- plex geometries generated by simple non-linear systems. The clumsy mathematics of the modern mainstream economics journal article is not like this. It is more like a tedious high school problem set. The purpose, one suspects, is to intimidate and not to clarify. And with reason: an idea that would come across as simple-minded in English can be made “impressive-looking” with a sufficient string of Greek symbols. Particularly if the idea—that “capitalism is a perfect or nearly-perfect system” would not withstand the laugh test once stated plainly.

As it happens, the same John Maynard Keynes of whom Krugman speaks highly in his essay, had his own view of the triumph of the economists’ vision— specifically that of the first great apostle of drawing policy conclusions by deduc-tive reasoning from first principles, that of David Ricardo over Thomas Robert Malthus. Keynes wrote:

It must have been due to a complex of suitabilities in the doctrine to the envi- ronment into which it was projected. That it reached conclusions quite different from what the ordinar y uninstructed person would expect added, I suppose, to its intellectual prestige. That its teaching, translated into practice, was austere and often unpalatable, lent it virtue. That it was adapted to carr y a vast and logical superstructure, gave it beauty. That it could explain much social injustice and apparent cruelty as an inevitable incident in the scheme of progress, and the attemp to change such things as likely on the whole to do more harm than good, com- mended it to authority. That it afforded a measure of justification to the free activ- ities of the individual capitalist, attracted to it the support of the dominant social force behind authority.

Note that Keynes does not neglect the element of beauty. But he embeds this point in a much richer tapestr y of opportunism, venality, and apologetics.

[H/t: Mark Blyth]

Ethan Watters article from a few days ago in the NYT has gotten a fair bit of coverage:

AMERICANS, particularly if they are of a certain leftward-leaning, college-educated type, worry about our country’s blunders into other cultures. In some circles, it is easy to make friends with a rousing rant about the McDonald’s near Tiananmen Square, the Nike factory in Malaysia or the latest blowback from our political or military interventions abroad. For all our self-recrimination, however, we may have yet to face one of the most remarkable effects of American-led globalization. We have for many years been busily engaged in a grand project of Americanizing the world’s understanding of mental health and illness. We may indeed be far along in homogenizing the way the world goes mad.

Some thoughts on the piece from Greg Downey in Neuroanthropology:

Certainly, Western ideas about mental illness are directly affecting expectations of psychic distress around the world; see, for example, Vaughan at Mind Hacks discussing Did Antidepressants Depress Japan?. Here Vaughan highlights another force, one touched on by Watters but not explored; pure mercenary impulses, as drug companies try to persuade new markets that the individuals ‘need’ their products, suffering as they do from disorders of which they were previously unaware. Here, the idea that it’s just the ‘beliefs’ about illness held by therapists and authorities obscures the naked greed that goes into public relations campaigns designed to produced disorder.

My argument is not so much that Watters is wrong, as that culture is not just in the ideas people have about disease; these changes in mental illness are also provoked by the social, technological, and material world, for example, how the export of Western-style education affects childhood elsewhere (and thus illuminates ‘disorders’).

Tom Milne in the Guardian:

In Arthur Penn's intelligently unconventional private eye thriller Night Moves (1975), Gene Hackman's hero – who finds the mystery he faces as unfathomable as his personal relationships – is asked by his wife whether he wants to go to an Eric Rohmer movie. “I don't think so,” he says. “I saw a Rohmer film once. It was kind of like watching paint dry.”

Behind that exchange lies a jab at ­Hollywood's mistrust of any film-maker, especially a French one, who neglects plot and action in favour of cerebral exploration, metaphysical conceit and moral nuance. The Dream Factory, after all, had proved through trial and error that cinema is cinema, literature is ­literature, and the twain shall meet only provided the images rule, not the words.

Of the major American film-makers, perhaps only Joseph Mankiewicz allowed his scripts, fuelled by his own sparkling dialogue, to wag the tail of his movies. While acknowledging the ­brilliance, Hollywood punditry never failed to complain that Mankiewicz characters simply talked too much.

Rohmer, who has died aged 89, pushed even further into this disputed territory. The oldest of the group of critics associated with the film review Cahiers du Cinéma, who launched the French new wave in the late 1950s, Rohmer had (writing initially under his real name of Maurice Schérer) established impeccable credentials for a future film-maker. Among the objects of his admiration were Dashiell Hammett, Alfred Hitchcock (about whom he wrote a monograph with Claude Chabrol), Howard Hawks, and above all FW Murnau, the great visual stylist of the German expressionist era (on whose version of Faust he published a doctoral thesis). As a film-maker, however, he turned instead to such literary-philosophical luminaries as Blaise Pascal, Denis Diderot, Choderlos de Laclos and Jean-Jacques Rousseau.

H. Allen Orr reviews Robert Wright's The Evolution of God in the NYRB:

Several themes emerge from Wright's analysis of religion that are reminiscent of those that characterize the evolution of life. For one thing, the history of religion has, Wright says, a discernible direction. Just as organisms have generally grown more complex over the last four billion years, so man's views of God have generally grown more abstract and—most important for Wright—more attractive morally over the last several thousand years. Also, evolutionary change in religion, like that in species, is typically gradual: “you don't see whole new religions coming out of nowhere,” presumably because religions reflect preexisting social conditions.

The Evolution of God is not, however, concerned solely with the past. Wright also emphasizes that an appreciation of the power of non-zero-sum dynamics might help us resolve certain contemporary political tensions, including those between the Islamic world and the West, groups that potentially have much to gain from each other.

Describing Wright's approach to religious history as materialist may seem to imply that he is uncomfortable with loftier visions of religion—the view, for example, that there might actually be something divine that underlies the physical universe. This is not the case. Wright is sympathetic to religion and to at least some of its larger claims. Indeed he purports to provide an account not only of the evolution of man's view of God but, at least possibly, of God himself.

Wright's book has several strengths. Perhaps the most conspicuous is the prose. Although the book is long, it doesn't feel it. Wright is a skillful writer and he knows how to keep a story moving. His discussion is also surprisingly erudite. The Evolution of God is full of footnotes and the literature cited in them is consistently the literature one would hope for: heavy on scholarly studies and light on popular treatments. In a climate in which discussions of religion, and especially of the intersection of religion and science, often seem superficial or rushed, Wright is to be commended for his close study. He is also to be commended for his refreshingly dispassionate tone. All this combines to provide an absorbing (and rant-free) tour of Western religion.

But Wright's book cannot be judged only, or even primarily, by whether it presents a capable history of religion. Instead it must be judged by whether his new theory of religion succeeds. And here, as we'll see, The Evolution of God is less satisfying.

The year 1969, subject of a current exhibition spanning the entire second floor at P.S.1 Contemporary Art Center, provides a compelling starting point for examining artistic production and contemplation, then versus now. With every work dating from the year in question, minus a few select contemporary works by younger, emerging artists, the show serves as a kind of thermometer for the vast range of avant-garde thought and practice emerging in the late 1960s and early 1970s. Nearly every work comes straight from the permanent collection of the Museum of Modern Art, of which P.S.1 is an affiliate, revealing patterns of acquisition that mark an institution both ahead of its time and flawed. The show was organized by Neville Wakefield, P.S.1 Senior Curatorial Advisor; Michelle Elligott, MoMA Archivist; and Eva Respini, MoMA Associate Curator of Photography 1969 counters the surface, buoyant stance on artistic practice exemplified in the Whitney’s 2008 ‘Summer of Love: Art of the Psychedelic Era.’ The tone of 1969 is of a darker, more restrained hue, reflecting not just the instability and turmoil of that year, but the marked change in what was considered avant-garde—absence of color, de-materialization of the art object, an ever-closer merging of art and life. Throughout the show we are taken on a journey through the predominant narrative of 1960s art history, as told by the institution that has dictated modern art as we know it. As a result, it is unsurprising that female and black artists are under-represented—particularly absent are Eva Hesse, Adrian Piper, and the late Nancy Spero.

more from Abbe Schriber at artcritical here.

One day while he was living near Seattle, the Senegal-born linguistics professor Fallou Ngom forgot to close a window before a rainstorm passed through, and the next morning discovered the wind had blown some of his papers to the floor. On one of them, a sheet several years old, his late father had recorded a debt. Ngom’s father was considered illiterate because he couldn’t read and write in the country’s official language, French. But like many Senegalese had for centuries, he wrote daily information in his native tongue using a modified form of Arabic script known as Ajami. Ngom was struck by the irony: Here was his “illiterate” father communicating with him years after his death, in writing. Ngom realized that this was more than just a touching personal moment. It also represented an immense opportunity. Ajami script had been widely used across Africa for day-to-day writing in a dozen languages, and Ngom knew those writings had been largely overlooked in the official story of the continent – in part because so few historians could read them. How many other documents like this existed across the continent? How many had simply been missed, or ignored?

more from Kenneth J. Cooper at the Boston Globe here.

After Making Love we Hear Footsteps

For I can snore like a bullhorn
or play loud music
or sit up talking with any reasonably sober Irishman
and Fergus will only sink deeper
into his dreamless sleep, which goes by all in one flash,
but let there be that heavy breathing
or a stifled come-cry anywhere in the house
and he will wrench himself awake
and make for it on the run – as now, we lie together,
after making love, quiet, touching along the length of our bodies,
familiar touch of the long-married

,
and he appears – in his baseball pajamas, it happens,
the neck opening so small
he has to screw them on, which one day may make him wonder
about the mental capacity of baseball players –
and flops down between us and hugs us and snuggles himself to sleep,
his face gleaming with satisfaction at being this very child.

In the half darkness we look at each other
and smile
and touch arms across his little, startling muscled body –
this one whom habit of memory propels to the ground of his making,
sleeper only the mortal sounds can sing awake,
this blessing love gives again into our arms.

by Galway Kinnell

from The Seashell Anthology;
Park Lane Press, 1996

From Science:

Migraine sufferers often retreat to a dark room or pull the shades down. Any light just makes the searing pain worse. Now, scientists think they know why–thanks to some help from blind volunteers. Just why bright light exacerbates migraines is unclear, because brain regions that govern vision don't overlap with those that transmit pain. To narrow down which vision cells might be behind this, anesthesiologist Rami Burstein, who works at Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center and Harvard Medical School in Boston, and colleagues tracked down migraine sufferers who also happened to be blind. Of the 20 blind individuals who volunteered for the study, six couldn't perceive light at all; they lacked eyes or had a severely damaged optic nerve, which connects the eye to the brain. The other 14, who suffered from genetic and other conditions that lead to blindness, couldn't see, but they could sense certain shades of light.

Not surprisingly, the six people who had no vision at all didn't experience pain from light when they had a migraine. But the other 14 did. This was an interesting clue, because these individuals had faulty rods and cones, cells in the retina that do most of the work of light detection. They did, however, have other retinal cells that functioned fine, particularly those with a type of receptor called melanopsin. Melanopsin doesn't help people see shapes, but it does react to light–specifically, blue light. At this point, says Burstein, “we needed to follow the melanopsin,” to see whether the cells expressing it might link up with cells that transmit pain. And indeed, in the rat brain, axons from the light-sensitive melanopsin cells hooked up to specific nerve cells in the thalamus that play a role in pain sensation, the team reports online this week in Nature Neuroscience.

More here.

Nicholas Wade in The New York Times:

Walking through the Tai forest of Ivory Coast, Klaus Zuberbühler could hear the calls of the Diana monkeys, but the babble held no meaning for him. That was in 1990. Today, after nearly 20 years of studying animal communication, he can translate the forest’s sounds. This call means a Diana monkey has seen a leopard. That one means it has sighted another predator, the crowned eagle. “In our experience time and again, it’s a humbling experience to realize there is so much more information being passed in ways which hadn’t been noticed before,” said Dr. Zuberbühler, a psychologist at the University of St. Andrews in Scotland.

Do apes and monkeys have a secret language that has not yet been decrypted? And if so, will it resolve the mystery of how the human faculty for language evolved? Biologists have approached the issue in two ways, by trying to teach human language to chimpanzees and other species, and by listening to animals in the wild. The first approach has been propelled by people’s intense desire — perhaps reinforced by childhood exposure to the loquacious animals in cartoons — to communicate with other species. Scientists have invested enormous effort in teaching chimpanzees language, whether in the form of speech or signs. A New York Times reporter who understands sign language, Boyce Rensberger, was able in 1974 to conduct what may be the first newspaper interview with another species when he conversed with Lucy, a signing chimp. She invited him up her tree, a proposal he declined, said Mr. Rensberger, who is now at M.I.T.

More here.

Sean McFate in Foreign Policy:

In May 2004, I was hired for an unusual job: The U.S. State Department contracted DynCorp International, a private military company, to build Liberia's army. I was tapped as an architect of this new force. Previously I had worked for both the U.S. military and Amnesty International. I was a rare bird — an ex-paratrooper and human rights defender — and thus a good fit for this unprecedented task.

When I arrived in Liberia in 2004, the country's army was, at best, a mess. After decades of civil war, soldiers' hands were as bloodied as any rebels'. The troops were undisciplined, unpaid, and undertrained. They were a motley crew that protected no one in a country where pretty much everyone was vulnerable to violence. And it was our job to turn them into a professional military.

Today, just five years later, Liberia's soldiers are among the best in the region. They have been vetted, trained, paid, and readied for action. The difference was the impact of that little-known U.S. initiative — the first of its kind — that literally rebuilt the Liberian army from scratch. Our goal was for the Liberian army to fill the role of U.N. peacekeepers as the latter were slowly phased out, and it worked astonishingly well.

Now that model might be of use again. President Barack Obama's strategy for Afghanistan is predicated on creating Afghan security forces to replace coalition soldiers.

More here. [Thanks to Feisal H. Naqvi.]