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China state paper casts doubt on Obama's platform for change

Jun 16 03:10 AM US/Eastern

China's state-run People's Daily Monday cast doubt on Barack Obama's ability to bring change if elected US president, in a commentary that gave a rare insight into the Chinese government's thinking.

The report in the overseas edition of the newspaper -- the mouthpiece of the Communist Party -- also said Obama's emergence as Democratic Party candidate for the US presidential elections did not challenge racial divisions.

"Obama has not broken through white America's feeling of superiority, on the contrary, his emergence has reinforced that feeling," said the comment, which was written by the paper's senior editor.

China has so far been publicly mute about the US presidential elections -- due in November -- in an effort to remain neutral.

But the comment piece in Monday's People's Daily gave a small glimpse into the Communist Party's thoughts on the US elections after Obama clinched the Democratic Party nomination from rival Hillary Clinton.

Obama has campaigned on a platform for radical change in the US, but the newspaper downplayed his ability to bring about transformation if he was elected.

It took Obama's staunch anti-Iraq war stance as an example, saying questions remained over how to pull troops out of the war-torn country.

"No one believes that on such a complicated issue, only relying on a firm stance can resolve things," the comment piece said.

"The same problem exists for changes in the economy, social security and education."

The paper also pointed to Obama's inexperience compared to rival Republican Party candidate John McCain.

"To borrow a phrase used in Clinton and Obama's campaigns, maybe one can describe the feelings that voters might encounter: Everyone imagine for a moment the person who picks up the red phone at 3am in the morning in the White House -- if it's McCain, they will be at ease."

Experts say China's leaders have traditionally preferred Republican presidents over Democratic ones, partly because they tend to focus less on rights issues.

Afghanistan
How the “good war” could fail

May 22nd 2008
From The Economist print edition
America needs to lean much harder on Afghanistan's President Karzai

IN CONVENTIONAL wisdom it is the “good war” that was neglected to wage the bad one in Iraq. Afghanistan's Taliban regime had provided al-Qaeda with a haven and refused after the attacks of September 11th to give its leaders up. When America invaded there was no twisting of intelligence, as in Iraq, and no great rift at the United Nations. Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton both say that one reason to pull American forces smartly out of Iraq is to reinforce a war that is not only more justified but also—given enough troops—more winnable.

The conventional view contains some truth. But whatever the respective merits of Iraq and Afghanistan, it needs adjusting in one vital respect. The NATO forces in Afghanistan are too small, but that is not the chief threat to the West's purposes there. The weakness and corruption of Afghanistan's elected government matter more. This weakness, moreover, is not the inevitable product of Afghanistan's poverty and backwardness, even though these things play a part. It is the result of a failure of political will in Kabul and in Washington. Afghanistan's President Hamid Karzai is not doing as much as he should to build an effective administration. And George Bush is not doing as much as he could to twist Mr Karzai's arm.
Stalemate and worse

As our briefing this week reports (see article), the military campaign against the Taliban is going reasonably well in parts of the country. Despite having the use of an invaluable cross-border sanctuary in the Pushtun tribal areas of Pakistan, Taliban fighters have little chance of grabbing any major town or city. An American-led campaign of assassinations has picked off many of their experienced commanders. The Taliban prefers now to avoid frontal clashes and concentrates on laying roadside bombs. For the time being, the danger is less that the government will lose more land to the insurgents, more that the war will settle into a stalemate, one in which the Taliban controls much of the countryside in the Pushtun belt and Mr Karzai's government runs the rest.

A military stalemate plus de facto partition is not quite defeat for the West in Afghanistan. But it is not victory either. This, remember, is a place America invaded so as to deprive al-Qaeda of a safe haven. Yet al-Qaeda has now re-established just such a haven straddling the Pakistan border. In the longer run, moreover, a stalemate will be hard to sustain. The slow but relentless toll of NATO casualties continues to sour opinion in troop-contributing countries. Support for the good war will shrivel unless sceptical voters in the West see that they are gaining something useful for their lives and money.

How to prevent this downward spiral? With so much of its army in Iraq, America cannot quickly boost its forces in Afghanistan. The Afghan army is growing, but it will need to be substantially bigger than the planned 80,000. Soldiers, though, are not the most pressing need. Politics, not extra firepower, will in the end determine whether the elected government can expand its reach and squeeze out the Taliban. In particular, Mr Karzai must demonstrate that his government is clean and competent enough to deliver basic services in the areas it controls. Beyond this he must press some process of conciliation that gives the majority Pushtuns a bigger stake in the new order and so detaches more of them from the insurgency.

Mr Karzai is failing on both counts. Worse, he seems hardly to be trying. The hopes that greeted his election in 2004 are dying. He may be untainted personally, but he has not purged the traffickers and warlords close to him, let alone started to unhook Afghanistan from its institution-suborning dependency on poppy and opium. Corruption and incompetence are rampant, especially in the provinces. America and its allies are learning to deliver help directly through provincial reconstruction teams, but these efforts by foreign armies are no substitute for, and often retard, the growth of a national administration. As a result, the legitimacy of the government is leaking away under the pressure of thwarted expectations.

Is it plausible to pin the blame for Afghanistan's disappointments on the under-performance of one man? Obviously not: 30 years of war in a benighted land have left a dearth of able administrators and scars too deep for a single leader to heal. As a Pushtun in a government with roots in the former Tajik-dominated Northern Alliance, Mr Karzai is boxed in from many sides. By the same logic, however, America had better stop vesting so many of its own hopes in the person of Mr Karzai. A decent man with some liberal instincts and a lot of personal courage was just what the doctor ordered in 2001. Later, in Iraq, the Americans longed for a Karzai equivalent. But it should be plain by now that there are no shortcuts in the nation-building business. If the West aims to succeed in Afghanistan it has to do more to build its institutions and invest less faith in the instincts of a picked man.
Ask for more, Mr Bush

This need not mean shoving aside the elected president of a sovereign country. If the Afghans want to replace Mr Karzai, they can do so in next year's election. In the meantime the world is entitled to demand more for the fortune it lavishes on his government. Instead of just forking out at the forthcoming donors' conference in Paris, it should insist on joint auditing of government departments. America should push Mr Karzai to tackle the poppy issue, sack or prosecute the traffickers in his government and intensify the work of political reconciliation.

Afghan politics are opaque, and brutal. Mr Karzai may be too weak to take the action needed to restore the standing of his government. But the same was said of Iraq's prime minister, Nuri al-Maliki, until a recent bout of decisiveness brought excellent results. As for Mr Karzai, he will not know till he tries. And one reason for his failure to try is that Mr Bush has, by all accounts, not been willing to make him. With an eye on his own forlorn legacy, Mr Bush may prefer to count down his last months in office without risking any action that could disturb the impression of Afghanistan being the good war. But good is relative, and the alternative to some tough love now could well be stalemate, drift—and eventual failure.

The farm bill

A harvest of disgrace
May 22nd 2008 | WASHINGTON, DC
From The Economist print edition

Congress at its worst

IF YOU measure the success of a pressure group by its ability to cram lousy policy through Congress, you might imagine that Big Oil or Wall Street would top the league: they are the lobbies most berated on the campaign trail. You would be wrong. If there were any doubt, the past few days should have confirmed that America's farmers are the capital's handout kings.

Consider their latest masterpiece, the 2007 farm bill that Congress this week delivered, several months late, to George Bush. Congress and the farmers have conspired to make an already unjust agricultural policy—a system that has subsidised the “farming” activities of such paupers as David Letterman and David Rockefeller—even worse. Through a complicated and overlapping system of government-sponsored insurance, counter-cyclical assistance, disaster aid and legacy payments tied to nothing, the five-year, $307 billion bill lavishes cash on wealthy farm households, the main restriction on collecting it being a means test that applies to couples making more than $1.5m a year. And even that can be avoided by employing a reasonably competent accountant.

Shockingly, the bill's authors tied some future subsidy payments to today's record commodity prices, therefore guaranteeing already well-off farmers high incomes. Commercial farm households, which get most of the largesse, will have an average income of $229,920 in 2008, says the Agriculture Department. And it means, as the department points out, that the government could owe billions in subsidy payments to these big farmers if and when prices dip again.

Farmers of all kinds get a slice of the action. American sugar producers, for example, are guaranteed 85% of the domestic sugar market, according to the bill. This measure will drain $1.3 billion over ten years from federal coffers, and will force consumers to pay an extra $2 billion a year in higher sugar prices.

The bill invites new trade disputes: Brazil is already considering a WTO suit over the barriers to ethanol produced from sugar cane. Congress has also ignored the world's hungry, declining to soften a rule requiring the government to buy all foreign food aid from American farmers and transport it on American ships.

Most legislators probably know the farm bill is a disgrace, but they voted for it overwhelmingly anyway, revealing the cynical genius of the farm lobby. The bill's backers scared urban congressmen about losing money for food stamps, a programme contained in the bill. They scared rural ones into worrying about offending farmers. They scared Speaker Nancy Pelosi and the Democratic leadership about maintaining their House coalition, which is built on new wins in rural districts.

Resistance disintegrated when a few sops were thrown. Urban interests were promised support for the purchasing power of food stamps, which has declined since the 1990s. Ms Pelosi and other western legislators got money for fruit and nut growers. Mitch McConnell, the Senate's minority leader, even got tax breaks for the racehorse industry in his native Kentucky.

Mr Bush vetoed the measure on May 21st. But the bill won so much support in Congress that the legislative branch has enough votes to override him, thanks to Republicans voting with the Democrats against their own president. John McCain boldly voted against the bill; Barack Obama didn't. The fat cats of agribusiness can rest easy for now.

Intelligence Agency Joins U-Md. Research Center
By Anita Huslin
Washington Post Staff Writer
Monday, June 16, 2008; D01

The University of Maryland's newest tenant is not in the business of advertising its existence or its work.

The Intelligence Advanced Research Projects Activity is the new corollary of the military's Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, created in 1958 in the wake of the Sputnik launch to develop new defense technologies. Among other things, DARPA's work led to the development of the Internet, global positioning systems and unmanned aircraft. IARPA is expected to perform similar work for the 16 U.S. intelligence agencies.

Maryland congressional and university officials see the agency as a boon to the university and local contracting community. IARPA is temporarily located in the university's Center for Advanced Study of Language, which is supported by the National Security Agency and, among other things, teaches Arabic to Iraq-bound Marines and researches cross-cultural interrogation techniques.

Ground is expected to be broken this summer on IARPA's new digs: a 120,000-square-foot sensitive compartmentalized information facility designed to provide the highest level of security for government intelligence work. It will be in the university's M Square research park, just off campus. Similar to DARPA, in a nondescript, unlabeled brick building in Arlington, IARPA is not expected to advertise its presence, nor are officials permitted to discuss any details about it.

This is what the region's first research park has been waiting for, members of the university and research community say.

"Projections are, it's going to become an enormous enterprise and there will be undoubtedly lots of companies, both as contractors and otherwise, that will locate around the building," said William E. Kirwin, chancellor of the University of Maryland system.

"I think it will be substantial," University of Maryland president C.D. Mote Jr. said of the new IARPA presence. "This is expected to be the premier supporter of the most advanced thinking in far-reaching intelligence research -- new stuff that hasn't been thought of."

What does that mean in terms of budgets, employees, contracting jobs?

No one at the university can say. And the agency's new director, who just recently put up help-wanted postings on the Internet for her top three project management jobs, is not available to talk about it, according to a spokeswoman for the Office of the Director of National Intelligence.

The organization's budget is classified. In seeking congressional funding for the agency, officials last year said that IARPA will be significantly smaller than DARPA, which has a $3 billion annual budget. Its staff will consist of 35 national intelligence and 21 CIA employees, and research will be outsourced to contractors. Focuses will be language processing, quantum science, nanotechnology, biometrics, deception detection, counter-biological warfare and tagging, tracking and locating.

Last month, in an interview with the technology trade group IEEE, IARPA Director Lisa Porter suggested that the agency's new location at the University of Maryland indicates that it will be open to people and organizations, like academia and industry, that traditionally may not be able to access the intelligence research world.

"It sends a nice message that we're embracing the broad community to help us solve these challenging problems," she told the IEEE. "This is a great place for people with a great idea. It's really risky, the potential payoff is huge, and failure is okay -- that kind of environment is pretty hard to find."

Medicine
Smart drugs
May 22nd 2008
From The Economist print edition

Drugs to make you cleverer are in the test-tube. Good

Illustration by Claudio Munoz

THIS drug is peddled on every street corner in America, and is found in every country in the world. It is psychoactive, a stimulant and addictive. Users say that it increases alertness and focus, and reduces fatigue. But the high does not last and addicts must keep consuming it in increasing quantities.

Put this way, sipping coffee sounds more like an abomination than the world's most accepted form of drug abuse. But centuries of familiarity have put people at their ease. In the coming years science is likely to create many novel drugs that boost memory, concentration and planning. These may well be less harmful than coffee—and will almost certainly be more useful. But will people treat them with as much tolerance?

High time
The new cognition-enhancing drugs are designed to treat debilitating diseases such as Alzheimer's, attention-deficit disorder and schizophrenia. But because they act deep in neural pathways of the brain, some of them are bound also to enhance people's power to think and learn (see article). Such drugs will inevitably be used by healthy people too. That is the lesson from medicines such as Ritalin (methylphenidate) and Provigil (modafinil), which are now widely used “off label” to boost performance, as Nature has found. When the British journal asked its scientifically aware readers earlier this year, one in five of those who answered said they had used such drugs non-medically, to help them concentrate or learn.

For many, drug is a four-letter word. Unapproved use is at best worrying and unfair, and at worst dangerous and immoral. Such thinking leads to strict controls or even prohibition and criminalisation. In Britain, for instance, Ritalin is a class B drug. Yet strict controls would be both futile and wrong.

Futile, because if people really want medicines, they can easily get hold of them. Nature's drug users procured their stashes from prescriptions from doctors or over the internet. As anyone with an e-mail address knows, the difficulty is not scarcity, but keeping the offers for Viagra, real or fake, at bay.

And wrong because such drugs promise to do a lot of good. Many people already use Provigil to cope with night-shift work, jet lag and lack of sleep, and suffer few side-effects. Others use beta-blockers to overcome the anxiety and stress of performance. Scientists use off-label drugs to increase their focus. If that helps them unravel the mysteries of the universe, so much the better. If chemical assistance can help increase the useful human lifespan, the benefits could be huge.

Some worry about the unfair advantage and peer pressure that comes from these drugs. However, millions suffer from untreated but mild memory loss. Is it fair to deny them help? If the shy or the scatterbrained take cognitive enhancers, it is not obvious whether this is levelling their playing field or giving them an unfair advantage. Is it “natural” to prop up the ageing body with a nip and a tuck, but to restrict help for the ageing mind to brain-training on the Nintendo?

Punishing the off-label use of cognitive enhancers may also be unfair to those who find these drugs medically useful in unexpected ways. Schizophrenics, it has recently been found, are likely to be heavy smokers because nicotine is good for their condition. Genetic variations between people are associated with different levels of working memory. People using Provigil or Ritalin may eventually be found to have a legitimate but previously unknown need for the drug.

There will always be risks, but no more than for other medicines. Remember that the new drugs will have passed clinical trials because they are treatments for a disease, even if they have not been licensed as cognitive enhancers. There will be a lot of habitual off-label takers, more people than in the trials, so the regulators need to monitor them for side-effects—especially in children. But detailed and accessible information about the side-effects of drugs is to everyone's advantage.

With any compound, the task is to minimise harm while maximising the freedom to choose. It may even be that, like Viagra, society largely welcomes the arrival of a chemical that does, far better, what omega-3s, ginseng, vitamins and all the other quackery have failed to do. Unless of course, you want to outlaw double espressos too.