Pakistani journalist and author Ahmed Rashid, long an astute commentator on matters involving Pakistan and South Asia security, wrote an important OpEd in the Washington Post this Sunday.
As I did in “Afghan Dilemmas – Staying Power”, Rashid highlights the pivotal role that the Pakistani Army must play in untangling the Gordian knot that has generated global sanctuary for al-Qaeda terrorists and regional sanctuary for the Taliban insurgency in the heart of western Pakistan over the past half decade.
In a piece that is very complementary to my American Interest essay, Rashid’s OpEd articulates well what I would argue needs to happen in Pakistan to fully neutralize the most dangerous terrorism sanctuary in the world. Facilitated by a strategic U.S. politico-military commitment to the region, the necessary approach in Pakistan is twofold, just as Rashid writes:
Anchored by a U.S. commitment to a lasting, stabilizing politico-military presence in South Asia via U.S. presence in Afghanistan, only such a two-pronged approach from Islamabad can enable western Pakistan to move beyond its present reality as a terrorist sanctuary and hotbed of radicalism, and toward an area that is tethered to a responsible central government and that is no longer the dominant threat to peace in Afghanistan nor the most likely genesis of a major terror strike elsewhere in the world.
The fiasco of the Olympic Torch Relay has focused attention on the condition of human rights in China. What is the source of human rights abuses in that country today? Many people assume the problem is that China remains a communist dictatorship, and that abuses occur because a strong centralized Chinese state ignores the rights of its citizens. With regard to Tibet and the suppression of the religious movement Falun Gong, this may be right. But the larger problem in today’s China arises out of the fact that the central Chinese state is in certain ways too weak to defend the rights of its people.
The vast majority of abuses of the rights of ordinary Chinese citizens today—peasants who have their land taken away without just compensation, workers forced to labor under sweatshop conditions, or villagers poisoned by illegal dumping of pollutants—occurs at a level far below that of the government in Beijing. China’s peculiar road towards modernization after 1978 was powered by so-called “township and village enterprises” (TVEs), which were local government bodies that were given the freedom to establish businesses and enter into the emerging market economy. The TVEs were enormously successful, and many today have become extraordinarily rich and powerful. In cahoots with private developers and companies, it is they who are producing conditions resembling the “satanic mills” of early industrial England.
The central government, by all accounts, would like to crack down on these local government bodies, but finds itself unable to do so. It both lacks capacity, and depends on local governments and the private sector to produce jobs and revenue. The Chinese Communist Party understands that it is riding a tiger. Each year there are several thousand violent incidents of social protest, each one contained and suppressed by state authorities, who nevertheless cannot seem to get at the underlying source of the unrest.
Americans traditionally distrust strong central government, and champion a federalism that distributes powers to state and local governments. The logic of wanting to move government closer to the people is strong, but we often forget that tyranny can be imposed by local oligarchies as much as by centralized ones. In the history of the Anglophone world, it is not the ability of local authorities to check the central government, but rather a balance of power between local authorities and a strong central government, that is the true cradle of liberty.
The nineteenth century British legal scholar Sir Henry Sumner Maine in his book Early Law and Custom points to this very fact in a fine essay entitled “France and England.” He notes that the single most widespread complaint written in the cahiers produced on the eve of the French Revolution (which Tocqueville also refers to in The Old Regime and the French Revolution) were complaints by peasants over encroachments of their property rights by seigneurial courts. According to Maine, judicial power in France was decentralized and under control of the local aristocracy. By contrast, from the time of the Norman conquest, the English monarchy had succeeded in establishing a strong, uniform, and centralized system of justice. It was the King’s Courts that protected non-elite groups from depredations by the local aristocracy. The failure of the French monarchy to impose similar constraints on local elites was one of the reasons why the peasants who sacked manor houses during the Revolution went straight to the room containing the titres to property that they felt had been stolen from them over the preceding generations. In England, the legitimacy of existing property rights was much more broadly accepted.
State weakness can hurt the cause of liberty. The Polish and Hungarian aristocracies were able to impose their equivalents of the Magna Carta on their monarchs; those countries’ central governments, unlike their English counterpart, remained far too weak in subsequent generations to protect the peasantry from the local lords, not to speak of protecting their countries as a whole from outside invasion.
The same was of course true in the United States. “States’ Rights” and federalism was the banner under which local elites in the South could oppress African-Americans, both before and after the Civil War. American liberty is the product of decentralized government balanced by a strong central state, one that is capable, when necessary, of sending the National Guard to Little Rock to protect the right of black children to attend school.
It is hard to know if and when freedom will emerge in 21st century China. The latter may be the first country where demand for accountable government is driven primarily by concern over a poisoned environment. But it will come about only when popular demand for some form of downward accountability on the part of local governments and businesses is supported by a central government strong enough to force local elites to obey the country’s own rules.
I find myself greatly saddened by the news of Benazir Bhutto’s assassination. I met her for the first time when we took a class together on Middle Eastern Politics at Harvard, while she was still an undergraduate. I saw her twice since then, both occasions on visits to Dehli in December 2003 and then again last March.
The event in March was an India Today conclave where she, along with the Indian Prime Minister, Manmohan Singh, was a keynote speaker. She gave a real stemwinder of a speech, attacking Musharraf’s dictatorship for failing to crack down on al-Qaida and terrorism, and urging a return to democracy as the only way to deal with extremist Islam. She talked about wanting an open or “soft” border with India and broader economic cooperation between the two countries, and said that she was deeply embarrassed by the way that her country was associated with terrorism by the rest of the world. She said she wanted the United States to be consistent in its support for democracy, and to realize that its security interests were better served by a democratic government in Pakistan. After the dinner she called me over to her table and said she had read my latest book, and noted that the neocons wanted good things like democracy and human rights, and that it was important not to give up on those goals.
Benazir was a powerful speaker, and was most impressive handling questions. During the 2003 event the Indian audience was at times hostile, and at one point the former Chief of Staff of the Indian Army asked her point blank as to whether she had ever supported terrorism in Kashmir while she was Prime Minister. She swore that she had not, an assertion that met with skepticism by some of the Indians in the audience. But she was quite possibly telling the truth, since she as Prime Minister never fully controlled the Army or the Inter-Services Intelligence (ISI) organization that was responsible for many of the attacks there and in Afghanistan. During the March event the Indian audience was completely won over by her; my host noted how courageous she was to be giving that kind of speech in Dehli. She obviously made a lot of enemies in her campaign to return to Pakistan, and has now paid with her life.
There was justifiable skepticism as to whether Benazir Bhutto’s return to political life in Pakistan would really mean a return of democracy. She came from the same narrow elite as many of Pakistan’s democratic politicians, an elite whose corruption tainted democracy and paved the way for Musharraf’s takeover. I think though that she was ultimately right that both Pakistan and the war on terrorism would have been better served by a return to democracy. It is Musharraf who has been responsible for undermining Pakistan’s already weak rule of law, for failing to get control over ISI and the Northwest Frontier, and for destabilizing the country in his effort to hang on to power. But her murder, and the manner in which she was killed (at a campaign rally), now throws the whole political process into chaos. There will obviously be charges that Musharraf, if not complicit in her killing, failed to do enough to protect her. Who can emerge at this point as the country’s legitimate leader is anyone’s guess.
I was in Warsaw, Poland, and Aarhus, Denmark last week on the heels of recent elections in both countries. The victory of Donald Tusk’s Civic Platform party over the incumbent Law and Justice party in the Polish case was genuinely uplifting.
Poland has been ruled for the past two years by a pair of identical twins, Lech and Jaroslaw Kaczynski, who served as President and Prime Minister, respectively. (A number of Poles asked whether it shouldn’t be a principle of constitutional law that two branches of government cannot be held by monozygotic twins, since that would violate the principle of separation of powers.) The Kaczynskis’ Law and Justice Party was nationalistic, anti-European, narrow-minded, and populist, picking an unnecessary historical fight with neighboring Germany whose support they badly need. They started a lustration process against people who worked with the Communist secret police, eighteen years after the downfall of the old regime, while denouncing, like the old nomenklatura, those who had done well in the new market economy as cheats and opportunists. The resulting polarization of Polish society has led to cynicism about the state of democracy as such, part of a broader trend that has infected other parts of Eastern Europe in recent years.
Hard as it is for someone my age understand, the generation of Poles who have grown up since the fall of Communism have virtually no historical memory of what it represented; they take Poland’s contemporary democracy for granted and feel little emotional connection to the great struggles of their parents’ generation. Those who haven’t emigrated to other parts of the European Union are preoccupied with getting ahead in their daily lives and have been largely apathetic, if not downright cynical, about politics. Many were embarrassed by the Kaczynskis but felt they couldn’t do much about it—a passive attitude towards political leaders that some of my interlocutors in Warsaw felt harkened back to the days of Communism. Law and Justice by contrast appeals to less educated rural voters who turn out to vote in much higher numbers than their younger urban counterparts. Part of the reason that Donald Tusk’s Civic Platform won the election was that his party and a number of NGOs and political activists organized a massive get-out-the-vote campaign among younger Poles. The election was thus a very valuable lesson for them: participating in democratic politics can make a difference; democracy is something that can never be taken for granted.
Denmark has been governed in recent years by a coalition led by Prime Minister Anders Fogh Rasmussen’s Liberal Party, together with the populist Danish People’s Party. The latter is a backlash party that has campaigned against refugees and immigrants coming into the country. What was interesting about this election was the launching of a new party, the New Alliance, led by a Syrian-born Muslim named Naser Khader. The party’s goal was to permit either the Liberals or the Social Democrats to form a coalition with it, thereby pushing the anti-immigrant People’s Party out of the government. Khader is an interesting character: he has positioned himself as a “moderate” Muslim, who supported the right of the Jyllands-Posten newspaper’s editor Flemming Rose to publish the satyrical cartoons of the Prophet Mohammed in 2005, but he doesn’t like the People’s Party’s intolerance of Muslims. The New Alliance was at one time expected to get as many as 20 seats in parliament, but they only got five, so the old coalition will remain in power.
Fogh Rasmussen’s Liberal Party is liberal in the classic sense of wanting smaller government, but that’s an uphill struggle in contemporary Denmark. The top marginal tax bracket is around 63%, and you reach this with an income of only about €70,000. His government hasn’t done much while in power to lower taxes or cut back the welfare state; unlike France, it’s not clear that it needs much trimming since the economy has been booming in recent years. To me this shows that the “laws” of economics can’t be as universal as they pretend to be, since what kills incentives and creates moral hazard in one society doesn’t necessarily have the same effect in another. Denmark has been quite supportive of the United States, sending troops to both Iraq and Afghanistan (they’re in a tough place, Helmand province); and yet foreign policy was scarcely an issue in the election. So unlike Poland, their recent vote does not seem to be likely to lead to much of a change.
Rabaul sits at the northern end of New Britain island, and is the capital of Papua New Guinea’s East New Britain Province. Physically, Rabaul looks like a South Pacific paradise. Its bay is actually the caldera of a volcano with subsidiary volcanos surrounding the water. They erupted last in 1994, destroying most of the town of Rabaul. A local seismologist told us that on the morning of the eruption, the peak of one of the volcanoes rose six meters in the course of just a few hours. The population fled into neighboring Gazelle province and towns like Kokopo further down the bay. The continuing threat of further eruptions forced the government to relocate the population in zones further away from the volcano, which was supported by a successful World Bank project.
Rabaul became famous during World War II because it was the main Japanese forward operating base for the southeastern Pacific. The Japanese dug 300 kilometers of tunnels into the volcanic soil around Rabaul and put barracks, clinics, maintenance facilities, and ammunition dumps underground. The entrances to these tunnels are clearly visible and have become a tourist attraction, especially now for elderly Japanese who want to visit the graves of their friends and relatives. There are wrecks of perhaps thirty or forty Japanese ships in the bay, and diving to see them is a popular tourist pastime.
Some of the most famous battles of the war were fought in this region. The Battle of Coral Sea, the first naval engagement between carrier battle groups that never appeared within visual range of one another, took place as the Japanese tried to come around the eastern side to Papua New Guinea to take Port Moresby. They dragged an infantry division across the 11,000 foot Owen Stanley range to approach Moresby from the north. The Japanese also tried to block the naval approaches to Australia by pushing southeastward into the Solomon Islands, leading to the prolonged and bloody battles the Marines fought on Guadalcanal and Bougainville.
Visting Rabaul over the summer inspired me to rent DVDs of the series Victory at Sea that was produced in 1952, the year I was born. The episodes were made by NBC in collaboration with the US Navy, and narrated by Leonard Graves. I remember watching the black-and-white series on television as a child, and still own a record of the stirring Richard Rogers soundtrack. It is a fascinating contrast to the Ken Burns series on World War II that has been airing recently on PBS (see the American Interest interview with him)—it is, I suppose, the kind of propagandistic celebration of the war that he deliberately wanted to avoid. Victory at Sea is also not always on the up-and-up, mixing clips from Hollywood movies in with documentary footage. But the series contains some of the most spectacular newsreel footage ever recorded. One of the most vivid shows a stricken Hornet landing on the deck of a carrier, crashing and exploding, with the deck crew then literally leaping into the flames to rescue the pilot. And while it sanitizes the war in many ways, it also contains some poignant scenes, like Japanese mothers being handed the ashes of their sons killed in battle.
What is most striking to me about the 1952 series is its unabashed celebration of collectivism. Americans have two completely divergent ways of seeing themselves, the first as a nation of individualists who fiercely resist authority and strike out for themselves, the second as a united and indivisible nation seeking a common objective. Victory at Sea’s episode about Guadalcanal talks about the long, heroic struggle of the Marines on the island once Japanese airpower cut them off from their sources of supply. But unlike the Ken Burns movie, it never presents the story from the standpoint of a single individual. At the height of the battle, the film rather strangely cuts away from the jungle to scenes of American economic might—wheat fields, steel mills, truck factories, warehouses overflowing with supplies, airplanes coming off the assembly line, and then crowds of faceless Americans in factories, offices, and farms, concluding with soldiers parading in lock step to Rogers’ memorable Guadalcanal March.
The series’ emphasis on the home front is particularly interesting: the humblest office clerk or assembly line worker was dignified by being part of a national project much larger than him or herself. Similar films could have been and were made in Hitler’s Germany and Stalin’s Russia. The collectivism of the war effort is something that has entered America’s national consciousness, and is one of the reasons for people still remembering this a “the good war.”
It goes without saying that none of America’s wars since then have inspired this degree of innocent championing of American unity and common purpose. Korea, Vietnam, and the current Iraq war have been far more divisive. There were celebratory films made about the 1991 Gulf War, but that was a war fought by professional soldiers cut off from a home front that neither participated nor was asked to sacrifice. The cynicism bred by Vietnam has returned in full force as a result of the current war in Iraq, and one wonders whether there will ever be a national struggle in the future that will be commemorated in the manner of Victory at Sea.
The Marines have lost a thousand men in Anbar province over the past few years. Their story is every bit as heroic as those who fought on Guadalcanal, but I suspect that they will be remembered more like their heroic compatriots in I Corps during Vietnam—not as typical representatives of a great and united people, but as individuals caught in a strange and incomprehensible struggle.
Conversation with Bob Wright on Russia, Japan, Papua New Guinea, and other places visited over the summer.
I traveled around Papua New Guinea for two weeks earlier this summer. My interest in coming here was related to my interest in state-building. PNG did not have a state when it was first colonized by Britain and Germany late in the 19th century. The Australians, who took over the colonial mandate from after World War I up until the country became independent in 1975, superimposed a modern state on top of a society whose dominant form of social organization remained the clan or, in pidgin, wantok. Given that there are parts of the highlands that had no contact whatsoever with the outside world until the 1930s (which is why anthropologists like Jared Diamond love studying PNG), the post-independence state has faced enormous obstacles in establishing itself.
Downtown Goroka, Eastern Highlands
The capital Port Moresby, for example, is not connected by road to any of the other major population centers in the country. Many districts in the Highlands are only accessible by plane or on foot, because there are no roads. The country is fragmented to a much greater degree than developing countries in Africa, with over 800 separate linguistic groups. The purpose of the trip was to study the nature of sub-national government in PNG, and how the political system really operates. I visited Kokopo and Rabaul on East New Britain, Goroka and Asaro in the Eastern Highlands, and left the country by walking across the Indonesian border near Vanimo on the northern coast.
Election posters. Dauro District
I was privileged to get access to the electoral commission office in Goroka on one of the last days of the vote counting (the election started in June and by mid-July the count was not yet complete). This was the first national election in which a limited preferential voting system was introduced, modeled on the system used in Australia. It is first-past-the-post, but voters indicate second and third preferences, which are redistributed from losing candidates.
Ballot boxes
The purpose of the LPV system is to encourage broader alliances and get around the problem of “wasted” votes for marginal candidates. (Had the US employed an LPV system during the 2000 presidential election, Al Gore would have been president because the bulk of Ralph Nader’s votes would have been redistributed to Gore.) In PNG, the process is fascinating, because in most districts 30-40 candidates run for a single seat. It thus requires a little less than 30-40 exclusions to produce a candidate with a majority of the votes: a very time consuming process.
Tally Sheet for Limited Preferential Voting
The counting was done in a sports stadium heavily guarded by police and the military, since physical intimidation of vote counters has taken place in previous Highlands elections. The photograph above shows the vote tally sheet during the exclusion process. At this point they were up to something like the 30th exclusion, but still didn’t expect to have the final tally until the following day. The whole process was incredibly well organized; each district had a separate room and a supervisor who directed the activity of perhaps thirty vote counters, along with “scrutineers” representing the different candidates who were to monitor the process. While we were there the chief elections official was able to announce the results of the first of the district races to be completed, something that was done with considerable ceremony.
Counting Ballots
One observer with long experience in PNG noted that it was remarkable how the government could organize an election with such great efficiency and professionalism, and yet could not deliver the most basic health and education services to the same constituents. The reason is, of course, that politicians really care about elections, not out of an abstract love of democracy, but because it is the route to being able to acquire and then distribute resources.
There are two great experiments in authoritarian development going on in the world today, those represented by Russia and by China. The common Western theory, which I have argued in favor of in the past, is that liberal democracy and market economies are mutually complementary; even though countries can develop rapidly under authoritarian governments, eventually demand for political participation and accountability emerges, and indeed becomes necessary to support an advanced market economy. Yet Russia has been following China by growing rapidly, and yet moving steadily away from Western norms of liberal democracy under President Vladimir Putin over the past few years. The question for international politics is whether the Russian path represents a stable model of development that in future years will attract other imitators, as the Chinese model has already done.
To visit Moscow or St. Petersburg today is to enter a completely different world, not just from the one that existed in Soviet times, but from the chaotic decade of the 1990s as well. Moscow in particular looks like a bustling European city, with Armani and Gucci stores filling the city center, and Volvo dealerships and huge suburban shopping malls lining the roads out of town. Wealth is still very unequally distributed, but a lot of it is filtering down to a middle class, and poverty has been reduced substantially since the 1990s. The wild west image that Moscow developed in those years is gone, along with billionaire oligarchs and their machine gun-toting bodyguards.
The Russians have been engaged in classic nineteenth century state-building over the past decade. They have reestablished the government’s monopoly over the use of force, that sociologist Max Weber said was a key element of being a state. Despite the fact that the Putin administration re-nationalized the oil giant Yukos, jailed its CEO Mikhail Khodorkovsky, and strongarmed both Shell and BP out of lucrative gas and oil fields, foreign direct investment is today pouring into Russia. Executives of multinational companies like Coca Cola or General Motors seem to think that property rights in Russia are good enough—no worse, at least, than in China—for them to take the risk of hundreds of millions of dollars of new fixed investment. While there is no justice for the killers of crusading journalist Anna Politkovskaya, there is a growing rule of law in the commercial sector. While high-profile cases like the Yukos and Shell re-nationalizations are highly politicized, medium and small businesses face a much more predictable legal environment than they once did. The government can collect taxes, balance budgets, and even put away cash reserves for a rainy day from their energy earnings.
Given Russia’s prosperity, its growing sense of internal order, and its ability to assert itself against the United States and Europe in foreign policy, it is perhaps not surprising that President Putin is very popular. Polls put him at over 70 approval ratings, much higher than his counterparts in, say, Washington or Tokyo.
The only problem is that the Russians are not building a 21st century state, that is, one characterized by multiple forms of vertical and horizontal accountability. The Russian political model is a hybrid, significantly less democratic than former Eastern European communist satellites like Hungary or Poland. While President Putin was popularly elected, Russia has a highly managed democracy. The government now controls all of the television channels, and has recentralized control of Russia’s provinces. The Putin administration has created a set of loyal political parties in the Duma or lower house and has been able to eliminate virtually all serious opposition in the legislature. It has harrassed and shut down many non-governmental organizations, particularly those with foreign connections. Despite the fact that dissident organizations like Gary Kasparov’s United Civil Front are utterly marginal in today’s Russian politics, the government won’t let them demonstrate peacefully.
Russia for the moment remains more democratic than China. Unlike the Chinese communist leadership, Putin is popularly elected, and will likely step down next March in favor of an admittedly hand-picked successor. The Russians do not censor the Internet the way the Chinese do, and there are more dissident media outlets in Russia than in China. China currently jails many more dissidents than does Russia. So why is it that the United States and Western Europeans are today far more critical of Russia than China, and much more fearful of its rise?
There are several reasons for this. In the first place, many people assume that today’s Russia does not represent a stable political model, but is a waystation on the road to full authoritarianism and a re-nationalized economy. Russia simply cannot get away from its historical legacy as an imperial power, and indeed an imperial power that never overtly renounced its international ambitions. In 2006, when they shut off Ukraine’s gas pipeline in the middle of one of Europe’s coldest winters, they may simply have been engaging in a crude effort to force Ukraine towards market pricing. But no one in Europe or the US interpreted this move as anything but the testing of a new strategic energy weapon on Moscow’s part.
The second reason people are more distrustful of Russia than China is that the former has more of an overt foreign policy agenda. Today’s Russian elite is very bitter about the 1990s. They see the Yeltsin years of the 1990s not as the flowering of democracy, but as a humiliating period of weakness. They believe that the US and NATO didn’t want democracy, but Russian weakness, and took every econmic and political advantage they could while the country was prostrate. The West didn’t rest content with peeling off former Warsaw Pact allies like Hungary and Poland; according to them, with the Rose and Orange Revolutions, they used democracy as a weapon to intrude into Russia’s historical sphere of influence. Now that Russia is strong again, the West is unhappy; but it is through strength alone and confrontation that they can protect their interests.
Given the strength of suspicions on both sides, it is perhaps understandable that there was considerable talk of returning to a new “Cold War” at the time of the G-8 Summit in early June (when President Putin talked of re-aiming nuclear missiles at Europe). There are, however, a number of reasons for being cautious in predicting that Russia is trying to reconstitute itself into the old USSR. Russians are today reconnecting with their pre-Bolshevik past: they flock to Tsarist palaces and stand in line to visit icons in newly reconstructed Orthodox churches. They are still in the midst of a long conversation about their nature of their national identity. Some are going along with Samuel Huntington’s idea that Russia represents a separate civilization from that of the West, or of the Asian countries to their East, but others are much more reluctant to give up on Russia’s European roots. Younger Russians who are better educated and growing up immersed in a Western consumer culture may today vote for Putin out of gratitude for stability, but what will they demand of politics in fifteen to twenty years, when stability can be taken for granted? There is nostaligia for the former USSR among older people, but little, it would seem, among the young. Above all, contemporary Russians want to be rich and secure; they may dream of restoring international glory, but are they willing to pay for it?
What the West needs to do is watch Russia’s actual behavior, and not project onto it the West’s own hopes and fears as occurred over the past fifteen years. Many Westerners are angry with Putin and the Russia he is creating in part because they are jilted lovers: they hoped in the 1990s that the country would transition in short order to a full-fledged liberal democracy, and when it didn’t, they felt cheated. But the fact that a fully democratic Russia did not emerge does not means that a fully authoritarian Russia is now inevitable. Russia’s future will not be inevitably shaped by its past, but by the decisions that contemporary Russians will make, and the opportunities that the international environment provides them to make the right choices.
This article appeared in the Yomiuri Shimbun on July 16.
Some witnesses in front of Congressional committees seem determined to rescue defeat from the jaws of victory, whether through their demeanor, their preparation or their sheer refusal to go along with the gag, even when the facts are on their side.
The last post detailed the recent testimony of Maura Harty, Assistant Secretary of State for Consular Affairs. She took an explosive level of anger from her inquisitors and ratcheted the moment down to an almost perfunctory “t” crossing and “i” dotting session. Now for our “Don’ts” in testifying before the House or Senate, the first of which is the most important:
DON’T LIE.
It seems obvious, but as the former Deputy Secretary of the Interior, J. Steven Griles, found out last week, lying to Congress is a crime. He’ll now have 10 months in prison to think about what else he could have said to the Indian Affairs Committee when he testified about his relationship with Jack Abramoff in 2005.
The rest of our “Don’ts” come from the June 13th Senate Rules Committee confirmation hearing for FEC Commissioner Hans von Spakovsky. As is the case with most botched testimony, what Mr. von Spakovsky said did not matter nearly as much as how he said it and what he did not say at all.
After von Spakovsky’s opening statement, Senator Dianne Feinstein read a letter from six of his former colleagues at the Department of Justice warning of his alleged unfitness for the job. The Commissioner responded, “Many of the things in that letter are inaccurate and wrong,” bringing us to our next “Don’t” for Congressional testimony:
DON’T CONTRADICT THE CHAIR WITHOUT SUGARCOATING IT.
Nobody’s saying you shouldn’t defend yourself, but senators are like eggs- they like to be coddled. Try and remember that if your job is on the line.
As Feinstein got into detailed questions, von Spakovsky offered the following answers, “Uh, I, I, really don’t recall.” “Ma’am, I don’t remember any conversation.” “I do not remember that case.” “I don’t recall that investigation.” We are reminded here both of Alberto Gonzales’ memory-challenged performance before the Judiciary Committee, but also of our next “Don’t”:
DON’T FORGET THE LAST FEW YEARS OF YOUR LIFE.
We all know it’s hard to remember the details of every conversation, but when you’re working at the highest levels of government, you should come up with a system to recall the details of your work, like tying a string around your finger to send your subpoenas out at the end of the day or making up a song to remember sentencing guidelines- whatever it takes.
Your mother probably covered the final and most fatal “Don’t” from Mr. von Spakovsky when she scolded you:
DON’T SASS ME!
As the senators continued to needle the Commissioner, he gave into the urge to defend himself with such ill-conceived comments as, “First of all, Senator…”, “As I made clear on more than one occasion…”, “You need to understand…”, and “That’s privileged, I can’t tell you….”.
Feinstein’s reaction: “You are under oath.”
When Senator Feinstien finished with von Spakovsky, she excused herself from the hearing without acknowledging him or looking at the other three witnesses at the table.
By the time Secretary Harty completed more than two hours of questioning with her subcommittee, she had been called “one of the best in the business.” As the hearing ended, Sen. Bill Nelson apologized almost sheepishly for “all of these pointed questions.” To which Harty replied, “Sir, it’s my job.”
patricia.murphy@the-american-interest.com
Speaking to a Congressional committee is a gold-plated bragging right for anyone who wants his opinion heard or expertise plumbed. While any lucky tourist can get a meet and greet with a member of Congress, only a player gets asked to testify.
But why has it looked so difficult lately? Why have so many Administration officials in particular seemingly gone out of their way to remind us that facing a dozen elected officials is no walk in the park?
Since The American Interest has many authors and even readers who may be asked to testify on the Hill in the future, we offer this quick guide of “Do’s” and “Don’ts” for the successful Congressional witness, illustrated by two very different recent testimonies. Should any of you find yourselves on the round end of a Congressional microphone in the future, whether you are there under hostile or friendly circumstances, these could make the difference between a job well done and not having a job at all.
DO’s:
The best example of how to testify before Congress comes from Maura Harty, Assistant Secretary of State for Consular Affairs. Harty faced the wrath of multiple senators last week when she appeared before a Senate Foreign Relations subcommittee to defend what looked to be a massive blunder by the State Department.
Two years ago, Congress mandated that all U.S. citizens reentering the country from Canada, Mexico or the Caribbean had to carry a U.S. passport. But because the State Department has failed to keep up with a spike in passport demand, the new rule will not take effect for at least six more months.Sen. Bill Nelson opened the hearing by warning Harty, “You’re going to hear a lot of frustration from up here today,” referring to fellow senators Vitter, Lugar, Feingold and others, who had all been inundated by constituents desperate to travel to weddings, business commitments and even family emergencies. In the face of a very hostile Senate subcommittee, Harty began with our first “Do”:
DO TAKE RESPONSIBILTY.
“I would like to identify myself as the captain of this ship,” Harty said to Nelson. Immediately, the tension in the room subsided.
She then went on with our second “Do”:
DO APOLOGIZE, OFTEN, IF NECESSARY.
“I deeply regret (the backlog of passports) personally and professionally and regard the current situation as untenable,” she said.
Another “Do”:
She EXPLAINED THE REASONS FOR THE PROBLEM, including the destruction of the New Orleans passport office in Hurricane Katrina, which reduced that office’s function from handling 2o percent of all passports to none to now 10 percent.Secretary Harty went on to clearly explain the steps that the Passport Agency is taking to eliminate the backlog, including instituting mandatory overtime and directing her staff to work nights and weekends both to process passports and to answer phone calls. She knows the phone calls are being answered because she herself calls the public line once a day to see how long it takes for someone to pick up.
Finally, she embraced the most important “Do”, when she decided to:
RESIST THE TEMPTATION TO PLACE BLAME ELSEWHERE. “I don’t get style points for pointing at somebody else. I am the captain of this ship.”
Well played, Secretary Harty!
Coming in the next post- what NOT to do. Since the House and Senate are both in recess, you’ll still have pleanty of time to prepare your testimony with these in mind.
patricia.murphy@the-american-interest.com
