Maduro and Import Substitution

Toyota has stopped production in Venezuela, citing its inability to get the hard currency necessary to import parts. Nicolás Maduro is angry about it and blames Toyota for not having developed an import substitution plan years ago.

“Pareciera que su único plan a veces, de algunos de estos gerenticos, es dólares, dólares y dólares ¿Y la capacidad productiva para sustituir importaciones? ¿Dónde está la capacidad para crear los productos en Venezuela si ya tienen 10 años?”, preguntó el jefe de Estado.

I agree fully with the idea that Venezuela should be able to produce its own parts, but Maduro has this exactly backwards. Rail at them as you will, but companies are trying to profit and it makes no sense to criticize them for doing so. A much better question is why, after 10 years, Venezuela produces virtually nothing but oil. Where has the Venezuelan state been in terms of nurturing business that can foster backward linkages?

Basically, Maduro is mad that Toyota is not developing Venezuelan nationalism, and perhaps a socialist ethos to forge backward linkages even if it is not profitable. From his perspective, that would be the ideal scenario, but objectively we should never expect Toyota to do so.

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U.S. and Latin American Relations writing (Part 3)

Another two weeks since I've updated progress on the 2nd edition revisions. A snow day last week helped me tremendously, as I spread my work out at the kitchen table and got at it, only stopping periodically to mess around with my kids outside. I am moving slowly but steadily, and that will pick up a bit once my Understanding Latin American Politics text goes into print, as right now I am also in the middle of the copy editing process. On the other hand, the later chapters have a lot more dated material so will take more time.

Progress (Deadline: August 1, 2014)

Chapter 1 - Revised but not polished
Chapter 2 - edited with red pen but not revised
Chapter 3 - edited with red pen but not revised
Chapter 4 - edited with red pen but not revised
Chapter 5 - Printed but not yet edited 
Chapter 6 - n/a
Chapter 7 - writing (3 pages)
Chapter 8 - n/a
Chapter 9 - n/a
Chapter 10 - n/a

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Criticizing Human Rights Watch

Human Rights Watch has been a target for governments in Latin America and elsewhere for years--Hugo Chávez even had the director booted out of the country in 2008. An article in NACLA Report on the Americas now calls it essentially a puppet of the United States against leftist governments in Latin America.

To believe this, I need some evidence. The analysis, though, is weak. The argument is that if the United States violates human rights and HRW does not criticize them (or criticizes them adequately) then the human rights reports in Latin America should be ignored. The latter, though, does not follow logically from the former.

What's missing entirely is an examination of HRW's reports--especially for Venezuela--and showing how they are wrong. It's really not enough to call Michael Shifter an indirect tool of the CIA. There's lots of casting aspersions but virtually nothing on what HRW has actually published on Latin America. Here, for example, is HRW's 2013 report for Venezuela. It is definitely critical, but goes unmentioned in the article. If you could show how the report published untruths, then you have a good story. Mentioning how someone on the HRW board works for a bank is not so much.

Other parts are just hyperbolic:

HRW has taken its double standard to cartoonish heights throughout Latin America. At a 2009 NED Democracy Award Roundtable, José Miguel Vivanco described Cuba, not the United States, as “one of our countries in the hemisphere that is perhaps the one that has today the worst human-rights record in the region.” As evidence, he listed Cuba’s “long- and short-term detentions with no due process, physical abuse [and] surveillance”—as though these were not commonplace U.S. practices, even (ironically) at Guantánamo Bay.¹⁵ 

It's not cartoonish to argue that Cuba has a worse human rights record than the United States, even taking Guantánamo into account. Here is the latest HRW report on Cuba, which includes a lot more than just detentions--which part of it is false? For the U.S., we do need to discuss and condemn treatment of all kinds of people, especially immigrants, but this has nothing to do with Cuba. And the U.S., for all its faults and repressive practices, is not worse than Cuba.

In sum, what I'd like to see is an article showing not where HRW's directors used to work, but precisely how their reports are factually wrong. If that can be shown, then they're in deep trouble. But I don't see that here.

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Academic Blogging and Mixtapes

In response to the ISA controversy, Marc Lynch compares hip hop and mixtapes to academic blogging, an unlikely sort of endeavor that ultimately works. Here are two notable paragraphs

That's what academic bloggers have been doing for the last decade: ignoring hierarchies and traditional venues and instead hustling on our own terms. Instead of lamenting over the absence of an outlet for academics to publish high-quality work, we wrote blogs on the things we cared about and created venues like the Middle East Channel and the Monkey Cage. Academic blogs and new primarily online publications rapidly evolved into a dense, noisy, and highly competitive ecosystem where established scholars, rising young stars, and diverse voices battled and collaborated.

.... 

Blogs and other online publications should be seen as the equivalent of the mixtapes in the hip-hop world.Mixtapes emerged in hip-hop, far more than in most other musical genres, as a way for rising artists to gain attention, build a fan base, display their talents, and battle their rivals. Sometimes they would be sold at shows or on websites, but more often they would be given away for free on the Internet. Mixtapes would often feature tracks that weren't quite ready for prime time or were recorded over somebody else's beat, but demonstrated the quality and originality of the artist's vision.

This is a nice way of thinking about blogging because it captures both the nature of blogs and the periodic establishment reaction to them.

It is amazing to think about how slowly academia moves. I've been blogging for eight years, which is a pretty long time, but still I was very late to the game. Academic blogging goes back a long way, yet too many professors still view it as some newfangled and potentially dangerous activity. I've long since taken for granted what blogging is all about, which makes it easy to forget that there are plenty of others who feel it's a threat, or a waste of time, or an exercise in insulting others.

Instead, like a mixed tape, you put things in exactly the way you want them, communicating exactly as you want, which makes your own research that much more enjoyable. It's rough and people can get annoyed by it--even criticize it--but it's all yours, and you can put more polished work in other, more traditional, venues.

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Celebrating Coups

Imagine a situation where a government is becoming more unpopular, there are protests, there is inflation, there is a general sense that the economy is off the rails. As a result, there is a coup attempt. Would this be something you would celebrate? If you are the Venezuelan government, then the answer is yes. But, of course, only yes if the year is 1992 (22 years ago today) but certainly not if it is 2014.

The link above has a lengthy discussion of the heroic actions of Hugo Chávez and how wonderful the coup attempt--excuse me, military rebellion--was. Of course it wasn't a coup attempt, just like the Chilean military insisted that 1973 was a "military pronouncement" rather than a coup.

This reminds me of Egypt as well. Coups for your side are good. Similar actions by the opposition represent treason, treachery, and self-interest. Your side is for "the people." The other side is for narrow evil interests.

No matter how you slice it, coups are not propitious for future stability. Celebrating them is a bad idea. Having the state do so officially is even worse.

Update: according to Nicolás Maduro's Twitter account, it was a "Day of National Dignity" rather than a coup attempt, and it is semi-religious to boot.

Update 2: the cup of coup love overfloweth. Chávez's coup showed him to be "the Giant of New History," whatever that is.

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No More Simplistic Left and Right

Via Conrad Tribble on Twitter (who you should follow if you're interested in U.S.-Cuban relations), Roberta Jacobson (Asst Sec State for Western Hemisphere Affairs) wrote this letter to the Washington Post:

The old left vs. right framework is no longer an accurate or meaningful way to look at Latin America, and attempts to sort the region’s governments by that dated rubric lead one down a confused path to contorted conclusions. 

There are indeed some lines of difference in the region with respect to open markets, global economic engagement and strengthening democratic institutions. I am confident that the positive returns for those choosing more open and globally engaged economies will create a self-reinforcing trend over time. But amid those differences is, perhaps as importantly, a consensus emerging across the political spectrum on the need for more inclusive, opportunity-oriented agendas. 

This has become a central organizing principle for virtually all the governments in the region and mirrors a similar discussion that the United States is having among our own citizens on how best to spread the benefits of prosperity to all citizens and how to expand educational opportunity more wisely and ensure that our people have the right skills for the 21st-century workforce. The exact answers may vary, but we see this new consensus in Latin America not as cause for concern but rather as an opportunity to work together on shared challenges.

How nice to hear that from a senior policy maker for Latin America. This had come up just today because of the media attention on El Salvador, where there is an obsession with labeling the candidates in narrow ideological terms.

The left-right labeling puts leaders and even entire countries in boxes that just don't reflect reality. This blog is now 8 years old, and not long after starting I had already complained about the rigid "good" and "bad" lefts, among other silly labels.

I know they will persist because they offer very easy ways to show whether you approve or not of a given person/country and/or want to project a certain image of them. "Contorted conclusions" is a nice way of putting it. We should have more concerted effort to avoid the simple labels.

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Stress on Immigration Judges

Fantastic story in the Washington Post about federal immigration courts, the backlog of which I've written about numerous times. Any discussion of immigration reform needs to take courts and judges into consideration. I've done expert witness testimony in a number of cases, and I have seen firsthand how judges have a very short amount of time to sort out a large amount of evidence and then make a life-altering decision for another human being and--often--their family. As a result, those judges burn out while Congress looks the other way.

A group of psychiatrists surveyed immigration judges about their work in 2008 and concluded that the job was “impossibly stressful,” with burnout rates exceeding those of prison guards or physicians in busy hospitals, and since then the courtroom conditions had only worsened. The law becomes more complex each time widespread reform defaults to more piecemeal solutions. A hiring freeze has reduced 272 judges to 249, and a congressional proposal to hire 225 more stalled last year in the House. Nearly half of the judges who are left will be eligible for retirement in the next year, which means caseloads are again expected to rise.

This is crazy. The judge followed by the reporter had an average of seven minutes to decide each of his January cases.

While Congress and the White House make promises about the future of undocumented immigrants, this is the place where decisions must be made — day after day, case after case, in one of the 57 overwhelmed immigration courts across the country. Here, on the second floor of a high rise in Crystal City, tissue boxes are stacked near the courtroom entrance and attorneys push rolling file cabinets, because a briefcase is no longer sufficient to hold caseloads that have tripled in the past decade.

There seems to be this impression that Congress can create new laws and somehow everything will just magically work. Immigration reform cannot work at all until the court system itself is reformed, and that means hiring a lot more judges. In the future, if there is a way for 12ish (or more) million undocumented immigrants to apply for some type of legal status, the current system simply will not be able to handle the load.

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What China Isn't in Latin America

Mark Weisbrot makes the case that China may be a source of stability for Latin America, especially Venezuela and Argentina, because with lines of credit it can ease currency problems. Whether or not that would actually be enough is open to debate, but at least it's debatable.

What's not so debatable, though, is to assert that China basically has no power ambitions and just wants a strong United Nations and an emphasis on international law. The extent to which China does not criticize human rights abroad, for example, is directly related to its desire not to have the UN or anyone else actually cite international law for the Chinese government's treatment of its own people. Its main interest in Latin America, moreover, is economic. China has slowed recently, but has been sucking needed commodities out of Latin America. That's not about brotherhood, but rather a state looking out for its own interests, as we would expect.

We can debate what China is in Latin America: opportunity, threat to U.S. hegemony, neutral, whatever. But it isn't a benevolent partner in a shared utopian vision of world order.

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49er Gold Rush 2014

It is that time of year again for the 5K on the UNC Charlotte campus, one of my favorite races. I blogged about it eight years ago when it was the homecoming race, which I think was the first one--now homecoming is in the fall but the race stayed and just changed names. Campus has changed a lot since then but it is still hilly. It was chilly but clear and sunny when the race started and it warmed up pretty quickly.

It was a milestone for us because all three of my kids ran the race. We brought the jogger stroller for my youngest daughter, who is five, but she ran the whole way instead. This will mark the end of running strollers for us.

She also greeted Norm, the UNC Charlotte mascot:

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House Republicans on Immigration

House Republicans released a one-page statement on immigration reform, which outlines what their version would look like. As you would expect, its importance is more symbolic than substantive. Most prominently, its existence serves as open acknowledgment that it is quite impossible to deport or detain the millions of people living in the country illegally, and therefore a humane solution is required. It is akin to admitting the sky is blue after insisting for years that it was green. It is also equivalent to holding up a sign that says, "Dear Latinos, we don't hate you as much as it seems."

So that part is at least a small step forward, but you have wonder how this mouthful will be translated into concrete policy:

Our national and economic security depend on requiring people who are living and working here illegally to come forward and get right with the law. There will be no special path to citizenship for individuals who broke our nation's immigration laws – that would be unfair to those immigrants who have played by the rules and harmful to promoting the rule of law. Rather, these persons could live legally and without fear in the U.S., but only if they were willing to admit their culpability, pass rigorous background checks, pay significant fines and back taxes, develop proficiency in English and American civics, and be able to support themselves and their families (without access to public benefits). Criminal aliens, gang members, and sex offenders and those who do not meet the above requirements will not be eligible for this program. Finally, none of this can happen before specific enforcement triggers have been implemented to fulfill our promise to the American people that from here on, our immigration laws will indeed be enforced.

What does it mean to prove the ability to support yourself? Sadly, these days a minimum wage does not allow a family to live without food stamps or other support. How will people come up with the cash for "significant" fines if they're also going to support themselves? Further, I've written before about enforcement triggers--Obama has cracked down harder on undocumented immigrants than any president in the history of the United States, so it's unclear how measurement will work.

The "no special path to citizenship" doesn't mean no citizenship, but rather just following the same cumbersome and inefficient system everyone else suffers through. My hunch is that this will not be a major stumbling block given other concessions, but I could be wrong. I'd need to see more about whether it's accurate to estimate that half of current undocumented immigrants wouldn't ever be eligible for citizenship.

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Tabling ISA Proposal

So the International Studies Association has tabled the ridiculous proposal to censor journal editor blogging. Something about this whole episode has been bouncing around my mind and I am trying to sort it out. Basically, there seems a disconnect between "ISA" as a big organization and actual people who write policy. As far as I know, no one has ever said anything about who wrote it, and what prompted them to do so. I don't mean this in terms of calling them out or shaming them, but rather getting at the root of why this happened in the first place.

This prompted a very quick Twitter exchange with Steve Saideman, where I asked if bureaucracy was part of the problem, and he thought no.

Perhaps "bureaucracy" isn't exactly the right word, but I feel like instead of responsibility, or open discussion, the issue takes on Robert's Rules of Order-speak: it is "tabled" and "sent to committee." It may just go die in committee. Of course that has nothing to do with Steve, who made an admirable and successful effort to draw public attention to the proposal.

I'm glad he was successful and it is going away, but a bigger question persists: what are the characteristics of academics who believe blogging is unprofessional? Why do they believe that? What type of discussion would be optimal to bridge the obvious gap? I hope those sorts of questions are addressed rather than just having it tabled and sent to committee to die.

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Censoring Journal Editor Blogs

This is unbelievably stupid. And I mean unbelievably. The International Studies Association has proposed that journal editors should not be allowed to maintain their own blogs because it is unprofessional.

Proposal from the Executive Committee to the Governing Council on Changes to ISA’s code of conduct policy

Background

The Preface to the ISA Code of Conduct states: “The purpose of this document is to provide an authoritative statement regarding the expectations for professional conduct for all who participate in ISA meetings and conventions, and it will be especially useful for those who are new to the profession and/or the ISA. It is borne out of the ISA’s commitment to maintaining and promoting a professional environment at its meetings and other organized activities, and it is guided by the conviction that the advancement of knowledge flourishes most readily in an atmosphere of constructive debate in which all members treat one another with dignity and respect.”

The issue of “maintaining and promoting a professional environment” is particularly pertinent to the material that is made public through the use of blogs. It is the sense of the ISA executive committee that ISA’s Code of Conduct applies not only to individual members but also to ISA publications. The committee believes that any connection between blogs and ISA journals should be severed or separated. There should be no connection between independent/personal blogs and ISA journals.  

Proposal

The Executive Committee requests that the Governing Council of the ISA add language to ISA’s code of conduct policy that will state the following:  “No editor of any ISA journal or member of any editorial team of an ISA journal can create or actively manage a blog unless it is an official blog of the editor’s journal or the editorial team’s journal. This policy requires that all editors and members of editorial teams to apply this aspect of the Code of Conduct to their ISA journal commitments. All editorial members, both the Editor in Chief(s) and the board of editors/editorial teams, should maintain a complete separation of their journal responsibilities and their blog associations. Adoption of this policy requires either stepping down from any such editorial responsibilities, or removal of affiliation with, and any participation in, external blogs for the duration of ISA editorial duties.”

Holy crap, who wrote this nonsense?? The idea of censoring people for no good reason should not ever make it this far anywhere, but certainly not academia. This attitude toward blogging is archaic and uninformed.

Here is Steve Saideman, then again, Will Moore, and Dan Drezner.

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Cuba: No MOOCs for You!

The U.S. government is quite good at finding new and innovative ways to shoot itself in the foot with Cuba. If you offer a MOOC, then enterprising Cubans (and in Cuba this would not be easy) who want to connect to the U.S. are told they cannot:

Federal regulations prohibit U.S. businesses from offering services to countries subject to economic sanctions -- a list that includes Cuba, Iran, Syria and Sudan -- but as recently as this month, students in those countries were still able to access Coursera’s MOOCs. When a student last week attempted to log in from a Syrian IP address, the website produced an error message.

At least it seems possible to get a waiver:

The only option for students in the sanctioned countries may be edX, the MOOC provider founded in partnership between Harvard University and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Tena Herlihy, edX’s general counsel, said the company has since last May worked with the U.S. State Department and the Treasury Department’s Office of Foreign Assets Control, and has so far applied for and received company-specific licenses for its MOOCs to enroll students in Cuba and Iran (a third license, for Sudan, is still in the works).

But of course we also make it as hard as possible for Cuban academics to attend the Latin American Studies Association meeting, because by virtue of being Cuban they are probably terrorists.

These regulations are ridiculous. The U.S. government should be in the business of showing Cubans how it is different from the Castro regime. They're accustomed to being blocked from information, so the U.S. should be doing the opposite.

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The Latin American Right in Decline?

An article in the Washington Post suggests that the Latin American right is "in retreat." There is, though, a more nuanced view within the article itself:

Latin America’s right could once identify itself as pro-business and supportive of law and order and as closely aligned with the United States. But many of the region’s leftists and centrists have co-opted some of those issues as they have become more moderate, regional observers say, leaving conservatives with less to run on.

What this really suggests is that the supposed leftward tilt masks a pretty significant rightward one, leading to moderation in most countries. For all the talk of populism and hyped Venezuelan case, there is not much argument about what economic measures are required to keep inflation down and foreign investment up, and these are high priorities. This is true even in countries we love to label leftist, such as Bolivia and Ecuador.

In other words, unlike the Cold War-era, the pro-business right does not feel terribly threatened by leftist candidates. As long as it is making money, then not winning elections isn't automatically a problem.

Update: some comments on Twitter that I am missing Argentina on the one hand as a case where economic measures are not agreed upon; and Honduras and Paraguay as examples of a still coup-prone right. Fair enough. I guess the broader point should be that generalization is tough, though I still think that in general the right is far less coup prone than in the past, and that the left has incorporated some of the right's economic ideas more than in the past. Yet there are exceptions.

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Anticipating the ICJ Ruling for Chile and Peru

It's not easy to sum up the feeling as Chile and Peru wait for tomorrow's ruling from the International Court of Justice in The Hague--there is a lot of anticipation but not excessive, and there is nationalism but muted. As a reminder, the stake is a chunk of Pacific Ocean, which dates back to the War of the Pacific (with updates in 1952 and 1954) and is currently valuable for fishing, mostly anchovies:

Source: Defense-Update

Both presidents have made a show of meeting with their respective predecessors (well, not Fujimori!) and to that Sebastián Piñera even added a very public meeting of his National Security Council. I see this is as good for public consumption, as it makes a show of national unity even while the presidents make moderate statements.

So this is the sort of thing that Ollanta Humala has been saying:

“We have a shared commitment to abide by and enforce the judgment to be rendered by the International Court of Justice that will turn, I am sure, the paradigm of our relationship toward a profitable and enduring one for the future of our peoples,” President Ollanta Humala of Peru said from the United Nations General Assembly in September last year.

And this is the sort of thing that Piñera has been saying:

He added “we have also tried to maintain an atmosphere of harmony and peace with our Peruvian neighbors, because Peru will be our neighbor before, during and after the ruling by The Hague.”

Another positive sign is that Michelle Bachelet announced that Heraldo Muñoz, a very well-known and moderate diplomat, will be the new foreign minister. The Peruvian government immediately signalled its approval of the choice.

This matters much more in Peru than it does in Chile, since Peru has felt aggrieved for well over a century, while Chile has generally felt a sense of superiority, so at least on the surface can better afford to appear magnanimous. So probably the biggest question is what the Peruvian response will be if the decision goes against them. A secondary question might be what Peru's response is if Chile loses, but then drags its feet, since the government has indicated any change would have to be "gradual."

At any rate, we will see starting tomorrow.

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Refining Oil in Latin America

Really interesting Bloomberg article on how Latin America is importing more refined oil products from the United States, which has been a trend for some time. And why? The problem I've mentioned too many times to count, namely lack of infrastructure. Latin America, after all, has plenty of oil:

In the past decade, oil companies in Latin America chose to invest in exploration instead of more capital intensive refining capacity, Hart’s Favela said. It’s cheaper to import from the U.S. than to produce domestically, he said.

Building refineries is an expensive, long-term project that produces no short-term political gain. Making announcements about oil discoveries, meanwhile, provides plenty of great political sound bites. It's sexy. You just have to hope that nobody pays much attention when it doesn't pan out, as in Brazil.

This brings us back to the core of dependency. Latin America has oil, but cannot refine it, so ultimately finds it cheaper to rely on the United States to do so, thereby crippling its capacity to do so on its own. The last Latin American refinery was built in 1992.

A last, unrelated, point. There are lots of stories about how ridiculously cheap Venezuelan gas is. But gasoline in the United States is the 11th cheapest in the world. We complain mightily when the price of gas goes up, but as in Venezuela it's all relative. We're not as exceptional as we like to believe.

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U.S. and Latin American Relations writing (Part 2)

My last post was two weeks ago and I have made far too little progress. Unfortunately, with three meetings and an invited guest speaker today I don't expect to get much, if any, writing done on this particular project at all.

Progress (Deadline: August 1, 2014)

Chapter 1 - Revised but not polished
Chapter 2 - edited with red pen but not revised
Chapter 3 - editing (on page 25)
Chapter 4 - old version printed but not touched
Chapter 5 - n/a 
Chapter 6 - n/a
Chapter 7 - writing (3 pages)
Chapter 8 - n/a
Chapter 9 - n/a
Chapter 10 - n/a

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Survey on Ideology

I got a request from a political science student asking if I would post a link to a national survey she and her faculty advisor are doing on ideology. I already took it, and if any of my readers are interested, you can click here for the survey, which is not long. The initial page explains more.

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Migration and Proxies in Central America

Jonathan Hiskey, Mary Malone, and Diana Orcés, "Violence and Migration in Central America." AmericasBarometer Insights n. 101 (2014).

Abstract:

Over the past decade, much of Central America has been devastated by alarming increases in crime and violence. For most of this timeframe, migration from many of these same countries to the United States increased as well, at least until the 2008 financial crisis deflated migration numbers. In the following Insights report, we examine the possible relationship between high levels of violence and Central Americans’ migration intentions. Though conventional views of the motivations behind migration tend to highlight economic and familial factors as the principal causes of migration, we find that crime victimization and perceptions of insecurity among Central Americans also play a significant role in determining the extent to which an individual considers migration as a viable strategy. Nonetheless, in the face of consistently high levels of crime and violence, perceptions of insecurity among Central Americans over the past ten years have been declining, suggesting perhaps a populace that has become accustomed to a high crime context and thus one less inclined to let crime influence future migration patterns.

These findings are consistent both with the previous literature and with anecdotal evidence (and, really, common sense). However, there is an interesting measurement question.

The powerful effect that receiving remittances has on the probability of planning to migrate, along with the age and gender profile of the likely migrant, all suggest that our dependent variable, migration intentions, serves as an adequate proxy for migration itself, despite not measuring actual behavior.

The AmericasBarometer data is survey data, so does not measure migration, only a question about intent to migrate. Why, I wonder, not include migration data? The simple answer may just be that this type of short research note isn't intended to do so; rather, it is intended to highlight ways to use AmericasBarometer data. Nonetheless, I need a bit more convincing about how intent to migrate is a good proxy for migrating.

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Foreign Policy Means Foreign Solutions

Via Robin Grier: a great interview with Rory Stewart. He has a lot of interesting things to say, but this paragraph jumped out at me the most:

Stewart came home when he realised that even the least-educated Afghan housewife in a mountain village knew more about the country than he did. Fluent in Dari, along with nine other languages, he'd thrown himself into the coalition mission with great conviction, but had to conclude that: "In the end, the basic problem is very, very simple. Why don't these interventions work? Because we are foreigners. If things are going wrong in a country, it's not usually that we don't have enough foreigners. It's usually that we have too many."

That encapsulates many of the criticisms I've leveled at the countless calls for U.S. policy makers to "do more" in Latin America, usually ticking off points. You don't know what you're doing and we have the answer, so just do THIS.

Ten years ago he would have listed 10 things Afghanistan needed to build a new state: rule of law, financial administration, civil administration and so on. "And, then you would say, well, how do you do that? Well, I'd say, by a mapping of internal and external stakeholders, definition of critical tasks – all this jargon talk. And I've only now just begun to realise these words are nonsense words. I mean, they have no content at all. We should be ashamed to even use them."

And then we see the U.S. government doing exactly that. There is one example I always use in class because it simply glows the paternalism that he describes, which is the Bush administration's Commission for Assistance to a Free Cuba from 2004. It is so detailed with specific points that it practically gets to "assisting" Cubans about how to tie their own shoes. Yet this is the model we tend to follow, even while critics call for more because we aren't doing enough.

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