The War in Afghanistan: Problems and Prospects in the Wake of Karzai’s Visit
Working Groups on the Economics Crisis
Co-sponsored by The New America Foundation and Ronald Reagan Building & International Trade Center
Program
Welcoming Remarks: James K. Galbraith — Economists for Peace and Security
Session One: Unnecessary and Counterproductive (video)
Chair: Michael Lind — New America Foundation, Economic Growth Program
Steve Clemons — New America Foundation, American Strategy Program
Matthew Hoh — Former Foreign Service Officer, State Department
Paul Pillar — Georgetown University Center for Peace and Security
StudiesHillary Mann Leverett — Stratega
The Hon. Tom Andrews — Win Without War/New Security Action, Former Member, U.S. House of Representatives
Keynote: Ambassador Peter Galbraith (video)
Session Two: Better Uses for $700 billion (video)
Chair: Richard Kaufman — Bethesda Research Group
Warren Mosler
Michael Lind — New America Foundation, Economic Growth Program
Winslow Wheeler — Center for Defense Information Straus Military Reform Project
Michael Intiligator — UCLA, the Milken Institute
Miriam Pemberton — Institute for Policy Studies
Participant Biographies
Thomas H. Andrews
Hon. Thomas H. Andrews is the Executive Director of New Security Action, a 501c4 advocacy organization. He serves as National Director of the Win Without War coalition and as Senior Advisor to the National Democratic Institute for International Affairs. As a member of Congress, Andrews served as president of his freshmen class, a Deputy Majority Whip and member of the House Armed Services Committee. Andrews is a well known and widely respected political strategist and organizer who has fought for progressive causes throughout his career.
Steve Clemons
Steven Clemons directs the American Strategy Program at the New America Foundation, which aims to promote a new American internationalism that combines a tough-minded realism about America's interests in the world with a pragmatic idealism about the kind of world order best suited to America's democratic way of life. He is also a Senior Fellow at New America, and previously served as Executive Vice President.
Publisher of the popular political blog The Washington Note, Mr. Clemons is a long-term policy practitioner and entrepreneur in Washington, D.C. He has served as Executive Vice President of the Economic Strategy Institute, Senior Policy Advisor on Economic and International Affairs to Senator Jeff Bingaman (D-NM) and was the first Executive Director of the Nixon Center.
Prior to moving to Washington, Mr. Clemons served for seven years as Executive Director of the Japan America Society of Southern California, and co-founded with Chalmers Johnson the Japan Policy Research Institute. He is a Member of the Board of the Clarke Center at Dickinson College, a liberal arts college in Carlisle, Pa., as well as an Advisory Board Member of the C.V. Starr Center for the Study of the American Experience at Washington College in Chestertown, Md. He is also a Board Member of the Global Policy Innovations Program at the Carnegie Council on Ethics and International Affairs and on the advisory board of the Robert Bosch Foundation Alumni Association.
Mr. Clemons writes frequently on matters of foreign policy, defense, and international economic policy. His work has appeared in many of the major leading op-ed pages, journals, and magazines around the world.
James K. Galbraith
James K. Galbraith teaches economics and a variety of other subjects at the LBJ School. He holds degrees from Harvard (B.A. magna cum laude, 1974) and Yale (Ph.D. in economics, 1981). He studied economics as a Marshall Scholar at King's College, Cambridge in 1974-1975, and then served in several positions on the staff of the U.S. Congress, including Executive Director of the Joint Economic Committee. He was a guest scholar at the Brookings Institution in 1985. He directed the LBJ School's Ph.D. Program in Public Policy from 1995 to 1997. He directs the University of Texas Inequality Project, an informal research group based at the LBJ School. Galbraith maintains several outside connections, including serving as a Senior Scholar of the Levy Economics Institute and as Chair of the Board of Economists for Peace and Security. He writes a column called "Econoclast" for Mother Jones, and occasional commentary in many other publications, including The Texas Observer, The American Prospect, and The Nation. He is an occasional commentator for Public Radio International's Marketplace.
Ambassador Peter W. Galbraith
Peter W. Galbraith has served in senior positions in the US Government and the United Nations. Most recently, he was Deputy Special Representative of the Secretary-General of the United Nations to Afghanistan and an Assistant Secretary-General of the UN. He was recalled on October 1, 2009, after he urged the UN take more forceful action to deal with fraud in Afghanistan’s presidential elections.
From 1993 to 1998, Peter Galbraith was the first US Ambassador to Croatia where he mediated 1995 Erdut Agreement that ended the Croatia War. From 2000 to 2001, Galbraith was Director for Political, Constitutional and Electoral Affairs for the United Nations Transitional Administration in East Timor (UNTAET) and a Cabinet Member in the First Transitional Government of East Timor. He designed the territory’s first interim government and the process to write East Timor’s permanent constitution. He also negotiated two treaties on East Timor’s behalf with Australia that effectively quadrupled East Timor’s share of oil and gas in the Timor Sea.
Ambassador Galbraith is one of America’s foremost experts on Iraq, having been a regular visitor to the country since the early 1980s. As a staff member for the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, he uncovered Saddam Hussein’s murderous “al-anfal” campaign against the Iraqi Kurds, documenting chemical weapons attacks on Kurdish villagers and the depopulation of rural Kurdistan. During the 1991 uprising, Galbraith was in rebel-held northern Iraq, narrowly escaping across the Tigris as Iraqi forces recaptured the area. His written and televised accounts provided early warning of the catastrophe overtaking the civilian population and contributed to the decision to create a safe haven in northern Iraq. In 1992, Galbraith brought out of northern Iraq 14 tons of captured Iraqi secret police documents detailing the atrocities against the Kurds.
Galbraith is a principal of the Windham Resources Group LLC, a Townshend, Vermont-based firm that specializes in international negotiations for government and corporate clients. His most recent books are The End of Iraq: How American Incompetence Created a War Without End (2006) and Unintended Consequences: How War in Iraq Strengthened America’s Enemies (2008).
Matthew Hoh
Matthew Hoh is a former State Department official who resigned in protest from his post in Afghanistan over US strategic policy and goals in Afghanistan in September 2009. Prior to his assignment in Afghanistan, Matthew served in Iraq; first in 2004–5 in Salah ad Din Province with a State Department reconstruction and governance team and then in 2006–7 in Anbar Province as a Marine Corps company commander. When not deployed, Matthew worked on Afghanistan and Iraq policy and operations issues at the Pentagon and State Department from 2002–8. Matthew’s writings have appeared in the Wall Street Journal and Washington Post and his resignation letter has been cited as an Essential Document by the Council on Foreign Relations. Matthew was recently named the 2010 Ridenhour Prize Recipient for Truth Telling.
Michael Intriligator
Michael D. Intriligator is Professor of Economics at the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA) where he is also Professor of Political Science, Professor of Public Policy in the School of Public Affairs, and Co-Director of the Jacob Marschak Interdisciplinary Colloquium on Mathematics in the Behavioral Sciences. He is also a Senior Fellow of the Milken Institute in Santa Monica. He has been a member of the UCLA faculty since 1963, teaching courses in economic theory, econometrics, mathematical economics, international relations, and health economics, and he has received several distinguished teaching awards. He has served as the Director of the UCLA Burkle Center for International Relations and its predecessor, the UCLA Center for International and Strategic Affairs.
Dr. Intriligator received his undergraduate S.B. degree in Economics at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology; his M.A. degree at Yale University, where he was the recipient of the Woodrow Wilson Fellowship; and his Ph.D. in Economics at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology where he worked with Robert M. Solow and Paul A. Samuelson both of whom were later awarded the Nobel Prize in Economics.
Dr. Intriligator is the author of more than 200 journal articles and other publications in the areas of economic theory and mathematical economics, econometrics, health economics, reform of the Russian economy, and strategy and arms control, his principal research fields.
Dr. Intriligator is Vice Chair and a member of the Board of Directors of Economists for Peace and Security (EPS) and was President of the Peace Science Society (International) in 1993. He edits the Elsevier Series, "Handbooks in Economics" with Stanford Nobel Laureate Kenneth Arrow, and he serves on the Editorial Boards of Economic Directions, Defence and Peace Economics, and Conflict Management and Peace Science. He is currently Immediate Past President of the Western Economic Association International, a Fellow of the Econometric Society, a Senior Fellow of the Gorbachev Foundation of North America, an AAAS Fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science, a Foreign Member of the Russian Academy of Sciences. and an elected member of the Council on Foreign Relations (New York) and the International Institute for Strategic Studies (London).
Richard Kaufman
Richard Kaufman is a member of the board of directors and a vice chair of Economists for Peace and Security. He was formerly a staff economist and general counsel of the Joint Economic Committee of the U.S. Congress where he directed and authored numerous studies on national and international security issues including defense spending, procurement, research and development, and economic trends in Russia and China. Most recently he directed and co-authored EPS reports on missile defense and the space program.
Michael Lind
Michael Lind is the Whitehead Senior Fellow at the New America Foundation. He is the author, with Ted Halstead, of The Radical Center: The Future of American Politics (Doubleday, 2001). He is also the author of Made in Texas: George W. Bush and the Southern Takeover of American Politics (New America Books/Basic, 2003) and What Lincoln Believed (Doubleday, 2005). Mr. Lind has been an editor or staff writer for The New Yorker, Harper’s Magazine, and The New Republic. From 1991 to 1994, he was executive editor of The National Interest. He has also been a guest lecturer at Harvard Law School. Mr. Lind has written for The Atlantic Monthly, Prospect (U.K.), The New York Times Magazine, The Washington Post, the Los Angeles Times, The Financial Times, and other leading publications, and has appeared on C-SPAN, National Public Radio, CNN’s Crossfire, and PBS’s The NewsHour with Jim Lehrer.
Mr. Lind’s first three books of political journalism and history, The Next American Nation: The New Nationalism and the Fourth American Revolution (Free Press, 1995), Up From Conservatism: Why the Right Is Wrong for America (Free Press, 1996), and Vietnam: The Necessary War (Free Press, 1999) were all selected as New York Times Notable Books. He has also published several volumes of fiction and poetry, including The Alamo (Houghton Mifflin, 1997), which the Los Angeles Times named as one of the Best Books of the year, and a prize-winning children’s book, Bluebonnet Girl (Henry Holt, 2004). His ground-breaking study of American grand strategy, The American Way of Strategy: U.S. Foreign Policy and the American Way of Life was published by Oxford University Press in October 2006.
Hillary Mann Leverett
Hillary Mann Leverett is CEO of STRATEGA. She has more than 20 years of academic, legal, business, diplomatic, and policy experience working on Middle Eastern, Central Asian, and African issues.
In the Bush Administration, Leverett worked as the Director for Iran, Afghanistan and Persian Gulf Affairs at the National Security Council, Middle East specialist on the Secretary of State's Policy Planning Staff, and as Political Advisor for Middle East, Central Asian and African issues for the U.S. Mission to the United Nations. From 2001-2003, she was one of a small number of U.S. diplomats authorized to negotiate with the Iranians over Afghanistan, al-Qaida and Iraq. In the Clinton Administration, Leverett also served as Political Advisor for Middle East, Central Asian and African issues for the U.S. Mission to the United Nations, Associate Director for Near Eastern Affairs at the National Security Council, and as Special Assistant to the Ambassador at the U.S. embassy in Cairo. She was awarded a Fulbright Scholarship and a Watson Fellowship, and from 1990-1991 worked in the U.S. embassies in Kuwait, Saudi Arabia, the United Arab Emirates, Qatar, Egypt and Israel.
Leverett has published Op Eds on Middle Eastern and South Asian issues in The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, al Hayat, The National Interest, and Salon, and has appeared on news and public affairs programs on BBC, CNN, MSNBC, and al Jazeera. Along with her husband, Flynt Leverett, she was profiled in a feature story in the November 2007 issue of Esquire magazine. She has provided expert testimony to the U.S. House Government Reform and Oversight Committee. Leverett is a graduate of Harvard Law School and Brandeis University. She also studied at the American University in Cairo and Tel Aviv University.
Warren Mosler
2003–Present, relocated Valance Co, Inc. the corporation that owns the shares of III Offshore Advisors and III Advisors, the companies that manage AVM and III, to the US Virgin Islands from Florida, where he currently resides and conducts his principle business activities.
1983–Present AVM, L.P. Founder and Principal - AVM is a broker/dealer that provides advanced financial services to large institutional accounts.
1982–Present: Founder and Principal, Illinois Income Investors (III)
Developed numerous successful strategies that utilized US Government securities, mortgage backed securities, LIBOR swaps and LIBOR caps, and financial futures markets in a market neutral, 0 duration strategy. Originated the 'mortgage swap' in 1986. Orchestrated the largest futures delivery to date (over $20 billion notional) in Japan in 1996. Created the current euro swap futures contract.
Miriam Pemberton
Miriam Pemberton is a Research Fellow at the Institute for Policy Studies, writing and speaking on demilitarization issues for its Foreign Policy In Focus project. She has recently published a report, "Military vs. Climate Security: Mapping the Shift from the Bush Years to the Obama Era," a follow-up to her other publication, "The Budgets Compared: Military vs. Climate Security." Miriam also leads a group that produces the annual “Unified Security Budget for the United States.” Formerly she was editor, researcher and finally director of the National Commission for Economic Conversion and Disarmament. She holds a Ph.D. from the University of Michigan.
With William Hartung of the New America Foundation, she is co-editor of the book "Lessons from Iraq: Avoiding the Next War" (Paradigm Publishers, 2008).
Paul Pillar
Professor Pillar retired in 2005 from a 28-year career in the US intelligence community, in which his last position was National Intelligence Officer for the Near East and South Asia. Earlier he served in a variety of analytical and managerial positions, including as chief of analytic units at the CIA covering portions of the Near East, the Persian Gulf, and South Asia. Professor Pillar also served in the National Intelligence Council as one of the original members of its Analytic Group. He has been Executive Assistant to CIA's Deputy Director for Intelligence and Executive Assistant to Director of Central Intelligence William Webster. He has also headed the Assessments and Information Group of the DCI Counterterrorist Center, and from 1997 to 1999 was deputy chief of the center. He was a Federal Executive Fellow at the Brookings Institution in 1999-2000. Professor Pillar is a retired officer in the U.S. Army Reserve and served on active duty in 1971-1973, including a tour of duty in Vietnam.
Winslow Wheeler
Winslow T. Wheeler worked on national security issues for 31 years for members of the US Senate and for the US General Accounting Office (GAO). In the Senate, Wheeler worked for Jacob K. Javits, R-NY, Nancy L. Kassebaum, R-KS, David Pryor, D-AR, and Pete V. Domenici, R-NM. He was the first, and according to Senate records the last, Senate staffer to work simultaneously on the personal staffs of a Republican and a Democrat (Sens. Pryor and Kassebaum).
In 2002, Wheeler authored an essay, under the pseudonym "Spartacus," about Congress' reaction to the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorists attacks ("Mr. Smith Is Dead: No One Stands in the Way as Congress Lards Post-September 11 Defense Bills with Pork"). When Senators complained about Wheeler's criticisms, he was invited to resign from his position with the Republican staff of the Senate Budget Committee. He is now a senior fellow and director of the Straus Military Reform Project at the Center for Defense Information.
Wheeler is the author of “The Wastrels of Defense: How Congress Sabotages US Security” from the US Naval Institute Press. The book has been the subject of commentary and interviews on 60 Minutes, C-SPAN’s Book Notes, and various newspapers and radio stations.
He has also authored a 2002 essay on Congress’ authorization of war against Iraq, “The Week of Shame: Congress Wilts as the President Demands an Unclogged Road to War,” and he wrote various commentaries on Congress and national security, which have appeared in The Washington Post, Proceedings of the Naval Institute, Government Executive, Defense Week, Barron’s, Army Times, CounterPunch, and elsewhere.
As a Senate staffer, Wheeler worked extensively on hundreds of bills and amendments that are now US law. These included the War Powers Act, multiple proposals to reform Pentagon procurement, and to require more realistic weapons tests and more accurate reports about them to the secretary of defense and Congress.
While at the GAO, Wheeler directed comprehensive studies on the U.S. strategic-nuclear triad and the air campaign of Operation Desert Storm. Both studies found compelling evidence that prevailing conventional wisdom about the performance of both U.S. and foreign weapons systems, such as Soviet strategic nuclear delivery systems and US “high tech” tactical weapons, was highly inflated and unsupported by the evidence available in the Department of Defense.