KABUL, Afghanistan -- Drawdown plans announced by the U.S. and more than a dozen other nations will shrink the foreign military footprint in Afghanistan by 40,000 troops at the close of next year, leaving Afghan forces increasingly on the frontlines of the decade-long war.
The United States is pulling out the most – 33,000 by the end of 2012. That's one-third of 101,000 American troops who were in Afghanistan in June, the peak of U.S. military presence in the war, according to figures provided by the Pentagon.
Others in the 49-nation coalition have announced withdrawal plans too, while insisting they are not rushing to leave. Many nations have vowed to keep troops in Afghanistan to continue training the Afghan police and army in the years to come. And many have pledged to keep sending aid to the impoverished country after the international combat mission ends in 2014.
Still, the exit is making Afghans nervous.
They fear their nation could plunge into civil war once the foreign forces go home. Their confidence in the Afghan security forces has risen, but they don't share the U.S.-led coalition's stated belief that the Afghan soldiers and police will be ready to secure the entire nation in three years. Others worry the Afghan economy will collapse if foreigners leave and donors get stingy with aid.
Foreign forces began leaving Afghanistan this year.
About 14,000 foreign troops will withdraw by the end of December, according to an Associated Press review of more than a dozen nations' drawdown plans. The United States is pulling out 10,000 service members this year; Canada withdrew 2,850 combat forces this summer; France and Britain will each send about 400 home; Poland is recalling 200; and Denmark and Slovenia are pulling out about 120 combined.
Troop cutbacks will be deeper next year, when an estimated 26,000 more will leave. That figure includes 23,000 Americans, 950 Germans, 600 more French, 500 additional Britons, 400 Poles, 290 Belgians, 156 Spaniards, 100 Swedes and 50 Finns.
Gen. James F. Amos, commandant of the Marine Corps, told the AP that the number of Marines in Helmand province in southern Afghanistan will drop "markedly" in 2012, and the role of those who stay will shift from countering the insurgency to training and advising Afghan security forces.
Amos declined to discuss the number of Marines expected to leave in 2012.
There are now about 19,400 Marines in Helmand, and that is scheduled to fall to about 18,500 by the end of this year.
"Am I OK with that? The answer is `yes,'" Amos said. "We can't stay in Afghanistan forever."
"Will it work? I don't know. But I know we'll do our part."
Additional troop cuts or accelerated withdrawals are possible.
Many other countries, including Hungary and Italy, are finalizing their withdrawal schedules. Presidential elections in Europe and the European debt crisis also could speed up the pullout. Australian Prime Minister Julia Gillard said this week that Australia's training mission could be completed before the 2014 target date.
Back in June, then-U.S. Defense Secretary Robert Gates said that when the Obama administration begins pulling troops from Afghanistan, the U.S. will resist a rush to the exists, "and we expect the same from our allies." Gates said it was critically important that a plan for winding down NATO's combat role by the end of 2014 did not squander gains made against the Taliban that were won at great cost in lives and money.
"The more U.S. forces draw down, the more it gives the green light for our international partners to also head for the exits," said Jeffrey Dressler, a senior research analyst at the Institute for the Study of War in Washington. "There is a cyclical effect here that is hard to temper once it gets going."
U.S. Army Lt. Col. Jimmie Cummings Jr. said the cutbacks that have been announced will not affect the coalition's ability to fight the insurgency.
"We are getting more Afghans into the field and we are transferring more responsibility to them in many areas," Cummings said, adding that many leaders of the Taliban, al-Qaida and the Haqqani militant networks have been captured or killed.
Afghan security forces started taking the lead in seven areas in July. They soon will assume responsibility for many more regions as part of a gradual process that will put Afghans in charge of security across the nation by the end of 2014.
Some countries are lobbying to start transition as soon as possible in areas where they have their troops deployed – so they can go home, said a senior NATO official, who spoke on condition of anonymity to discuss transition. The official insisted that those desires were not driving decisions on where Afghan troops are taking the lead.
The official said that because they want to leave, a number of troop-contributing nations faced with declining public support at home have started working harder to get their areas ready to hand off to Afghan forces.
"The big question (after 2014) is if the Afghan security forces can take on an externally based insurgency with support from the Pakistani security establishment and all that entails," Dressler said. "I think they will have a real challenge on their hands if the U.S. and NATO countries do not address Pakistani sponsorship of these groups."
Some questions to consider:
1. Will this hurt or help the USA? How?
2. Will this hurt or help Afghanistan, or both?
3. What is the cost in lives, money for both countries either way?
4. Does this article seem biased?
___
Lekic reported from Brussels. AP National Security Writer Robert Burns in Helmand contributed to this report.
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2011/11/29/withdrawal-from-afghanistan_n_1117972.html
Friday, December 2, 2011
Wednesday, November 16, 2011
Will Dropouts Save America?
Michael Ellsberg is the author of “The Education of Millionaires: It’s Not What You Think and It’s Not Too Late.”
I TYPED these words on a computer designed by Apple, co-founded by the college dropout Steve Jobs. The program I used to write it was created by Microsoft, started by the college dropouts Bill Gates and Paul Allen.
And as soon as it is published, I will share it with my friends via Twitter, co-founded by the college dropouts Jack Dorsey and Evan Williams and Biz Stone, and Facebook — invented, among others, by the college dropouts Mark Zuckerberg and Dustin Moskovitz, and nurtured by the degreeless Sean Parker.
American academia is good at producing writers, literary critics and historians. It is also good at producing professionals with degrees. But we don’t have a shortage of lawyers and professors. America has a shortage of job creators. And the people who create jobs aren’t traditional professionals, but start-up entrepreneurs.
In a recent speech promoting a jobs bill, President Obama told Congress, “Everyone here knows that small businesses are where most new jobs begin.”
Close, but not quite. In a detailed analysis, the National Bureau of Economic Research found that nearly all net job creation in America comes from start-up businesses, not small businesses per se. (Since most start-ups start small, we tend to conflate two variables — the size of a business and its age — and incorrectly assume the former was the relevant one, when in fact the latter is.)
If start-up activity is the true engine of job creation in America, one thing is clear: our current educational system is acting as the brakes. Simply put, from kindergarten through undergraduate and grad school, you learn very few skills or attitudes that would ever help you start a business. Skills like sales, networking, creativity and comfort with failure.
No business in America — and therefore no job creation — happens without someone buying something. But most students learn nothing about sales in college; they are more likely to take a course on why sales (and capitalism) are evil.
Moreover, very few start-ups get off the ground without a wide, vibrant network of advisers and mentors, potential customers and clients, quality vendors and valuable talent to employ. You don’t learn how to network crouched over a desk studying for multiple-choice exams. You learn it outside the classroom, talking to fellow human beings face-to-face.
Start-ups are a creative endeavor by definition. Yet our current classrooms, geared toward tests on narrowly defined academic subjects, stifle creativity. If a young person happens to retain enough creative spirit to start a business upon graduation, she does so in spite of her schooling, not because of it.
Finally, entrepreneurs must embrace failure. I spent the last two years interviewing college dropouts who went on to become millionaires and billionaires. All spoke passionately about the importance of their business failures in leading them to success. Our education system encourages students to play it safe and retreat at the first sign of failure (assuming that any failure will look bad on their college applications and résumés).
Certainly, if you want to become a doctor, lawyer or engineer, then you must go to college. But, beyond regulated fields like these, the focus on higher education as the only path to stable employment is profoundly misguided, exacerbated by parents who see the classic professions as the best route to job security.
That may have been true 50 years ago, but not now. In our chaotic, unpredictable economy, even young people who have no interest in starting a business, and who want to become professionals, still need to learn the entrepreneurial skills that will allow them to get ahead.
True, people with college degrees tend to earn more. But that could be because most ambitious people tend to go to college; there is little evidence to suggest that the same ambitious people would earn less without college degrees (particularly if they mastered true business and networking grit).
And while most people who end up starting businesses likely have college degrees, those degree-bearers should be well aware (as they learned in their freshman statistics classes) that correlation does not equal causation. Assuming that college was responsible for their success gives higher education more credit than it deserves.
AFTER all, there is not one job market in America, but two. The formal market we always hear about — jobs that get filled through cold résumé submissions in reply to posted ads — accounts for only about 20 percent of jobs.
The other 80 percent get filled in the informal job market. Any employer knows how the informal job market works: you need a position filled, so you ask your friends, colleagues and current employees if they know anyone who would do a good job.
In this informal job market, the academic requirements listed in job ads tend to be highly negotiable, and far less important than real-world results and the enthusiasm of the personal referral.
Classroom skills may put you at an advantage in the formal market, but in the informal market, street-smart skills and real-world networking are infinitely more important.
Yet our children grow up amid an echo chamber of voices telling them to get good grades, do well on their SATs, and spend an average of $45,000 on tuition — after accounting for scholarships — while taking on $23,000 in debt to get a private four-year college education.
It’s time that we as a nation accepted a basic — and seldom-mentioned — fact. You don’t need a degree (and certainly not an M.B.A.) to start a business and create jobs, nor is it even that helpful, compared with cheaper, faster alternatives.
Parents could turn the system on its head if they weren’t so caught up in outmoded mentalities about education forged in the stable economy of the 1950s (but profoundly misguided in today’s chaotic, entrepreneurial economy).
Employers could alter this landscape if they explicitly offered routes to employment for those who didn’t get a degree because they were out building businesses.
And the government could divert some of the money it now spends encouraging college for all, and instead promote the idea that creating a start-up is a worthy, respectable alternative to academics. This would go a long way to helping our unemployment problem.
If I were betting on the engines of future job creation, I wouldn’t put my money on college students cramming for tests and writing papers with properly formatted M.L.A.-style citations in order to bolster their résumés for careers in traditional professions and middle-management jobs in large corporate and government bureaucracies.
I’d put my money on the kids who are dropping out of college to start new businesses. If we want to get out of the jobs mess we’re in, we should hope that more will follow in their footsteps.
http://www.nytimes.com/2011/10/23/opinion/sunday/will-dropouts-save-america.html?pagewanted=1&partner=rssnyt&emc=rss
Some questions to think about:
1. What do you think about this article?
2. Typical college costs are in the neighborhood of $200,000 for four years. Does that affect your
thinking about any of this?
3. What do you think the purpose of college is, or should be?
4. Are there other ways to get an education?
5. what are the positives of college?
I TYPED these words on a computer designed by Apple, co-founded by the college dropout Steve Jobs. The program I used to write it was created by Microsoft, started by the college dropouts Bill Gates and Paul Allen.
And as soon as it is published, I will share it with my friends via Twitter, co-founded by the college dropouts Jack Dorsey and Evan Williams and Biz Stone, and Facebook — invented, among others, by the college dropouts Mark Zuckerberg and Dustin Moskovitz, and nurtured by the degreeless Sean Parker.
American academia is good at producing writers, literary critics and historians. It is also good at producing professionals with degrees. But we don’t have a shortage of lawyers and professors. America has a shortage of job creators. And the people who create jobs aren’t traditional professionals, but start-up entrepreneurs.
In a recent speech promoting a jobs bill, President Obama told Congress, “Everyone here knows that small businesses are where most new jobs begin.”
Close, but not quite. In a detailed analysis, the National Bureau of Economic Research found that nearly all net job creation in America comes from start-up businesses, not small businesses per se. (Since most start-ups start small, we tend to conflate two variables — the size of a business and its age — and incorrectly assume the former was the relevant one, when in fact the latter is.)
If start-up activity is the true engine of job creation in America, one thing is clear: our current educational system is acting as the brakes. Simply put, from kindergarten through undergraduate and grad school, you learn very few skills or attitudes that would ever help you start a business. Skills like sales, networking, creativity and comfort with failure.
No business in America — and therefore no job creation — happens without someone buying something. But most students learn nothing about sales in college; they are more likely to take a course on why sales (and capitalism) are evil.
Moreover, very few start-ups get off the ground without a wide, vibrant network of advisers and mentors, potential customers and clients, quality vendors and valuable talent to employ. You don’t learn how to network crouched over a desk studying for multiple-choice exams. You learn it outside the classroom, talking to fellow human beings face-to-face.
Start-ups are a creative endeavor by definition. Yet our current classrooms, geared toward tests on narrowly defined academic subjects, stifle creativity. If a young person happens to retain enough creative spirit to start a business upon graduation, she does so in spite of her schooling, not because of it.
Finally, entrepreneurs must embrace failure. I spent the last two years interviewing college dropouts who went on to become millionaires and billionaires. All spoke passionately about the importance of their business failures in leading them to success. Our education system encourages students to play it safe and retreat at the first sign of failure (assuming that any failure will look bad on their college applications and résumés).
Certainly, if you want to become a doctor, lawyer or engineer, then you must go to college. But, beyond regulated fields like these, the focus on higher education as the only path to stable employment is profoundly misguided, exacerbated by parents who see the classic professions as the best route to job security.
That may have been true 50 years ago, but not now. In our chaotic, unpredictable economy, even young people who have no interest in starting a business, and who want to become professionals, still need to learn the entrepreneurial skills that will allow them to get ahead.
True, people with college degrees tend to earn more. But that could be because most ambitious people tend to go to college; there is little evidence to suggest that the same ambitious people would earn less without college degrees (particularly if they mastered true business and networking grit).
And while most people who end up starting businesses likely have college degrees, those degree-bearers should be well aware (as they learned in their freshman statistics classes) that correlation does not equal causation. Assuming that college was responsible for their success gives higher education more credit than it deserves.
AFTER all, there is not one job market in America, but two. The formal market we always hear about — jobs that get filled through cold résumé submissions in reply to posted ads — accounts for only about 20 percent of jobs.
The other 80 percent get filled in the informal job market. Any employer knows how the informal job market works: you need a position filled, so you ask your friends, colleagues and current employees if they know anyone who would do a good job.
In this informal job market, the academic requirements listed in job ads tend to be highly negotiable, and far less important than real-world results and the enthusiasm of the personal referral.
Classroom skills may put you at an advantage in the formal market, but in the informal market, street-smart skills and real-world networking are infinitely more important.
Yet our children grow up amid an echo chamber of voices telling them to get good grades, do well on their SATs, and spend an average of $45,000 on tuition — after accounting for scholarships — while taking on $23,000 in debt to get a private four-year college education.
It’s time that we as a nation accepted a basic — and seldom-mentioned — fact. You don’t need a degree (and certainly not an M.B.A.) to start a business and create jobs, nor is it even that helpful, compared with cheaper, faster alternatives.
Parents could turn the system on its head if they weren’t so caught up in outmoded mentalities about education forged in the stable economy of the 1950s (but profoundly misguided in today’s chaotic, entrepreneurial economy).
Employers could alter this landscape if they explicitly offered routes to employment for those who didn’t get a degree because they were out building businesses.
And the government could divert some of the money it now spends encouraging college for all, and instead promote the idea that creating a start-up is a worthy, respectable alternative to academics. This would go a long way to helping our unemployment problem.
If I were betting on the engines of future job creation, I wouldn’t put my money on college students cramming for tests and writing papers with properly formatted M.L.A.-style citations in order to bolster their résumés for careers in traditional professions and middle-management jobs in large corporate and government bureaucracies.
I’d put my money on the kids who are dropping out of college to start new businesses. If we want to get out of the jobs mess we’re in, we should hope that more will follow in their footsteps.
http://www.nytimes.com/2011/10/23/opinion/sunday/will-dropouts-save-america.html?pagewanted=1&partner=rssnyt&emc=rss
Some questions to think about:
1. What do you think about this article?
2. Typical college costs are in the neighborhood of $200,000 for four years. Does that affect your
thinking about any of this?
3. What do you think the purpose of college is, or should be?
4. Are there other ways to get an education?
5. what are the positives of college?
Thursday, October 27, 2011
How is the Wealth Divided?
As the Data Show, There’s a Reason the Wall Street Protesters Chose New York
By SAM ROBERTS
Published: October 25, 2011
When the federal income tax was first imposed in 1913, the richest 0.1 percent of households reaped 8.6 percent of the nation’s income. In 2007, as the recession began, the share going to that sliver of megarich Americans was 12.3 percent.
Multimedia
Related
Top Earners Doubled Share of Nation’s Income, Study Finds(October 26, 2011)
New Poll Finds a Deep Distrust of Government (October 26, 2011)
Times Topic: Occupy Wall Street
Related in Opinion
And an even more exclusive club — the top 0.01 percent of households — is collecting a greater share of total income than ever before recorded.
Those numbers suggest that theOccupy Wall Street protesters can make a compelling case when they complain that the economic scales are unfairly tilted toward the wealthy. The megarich hold more of the nation’s wealth and collect more of the overall income today than at any time since right before the Great Depression.
Certainly, the protesters picked the right city in which to start their campaign. Among the 1 percent of American households with the highest income, a significant portion, 13 percent, live in the New York metropolitan area, with 4.4 percent living in Manhattan, according to an analysis by Andrew A. Beveridge, a sociologist at Queens College. In three Manhattan neighborhoods, the Upper East and Upper West Sides and Greenwich Village, more than 11 percent of the households make enough to qualify for the top 1 percent.
Making precise comparisons to earlier periods can be difficult: Some income and wealth numbers are estimates, and income is only one way of measuring wealth. Still, there are some notable ways to measure gilded ages.
In the late 1890s, when the average American worker’s weekly wage was less than $10, John D. Rockefeller was earning about $192,000 a week. When he died in 1937, the estimated annual investment return on his $1.4 billion wealth produced an income equal to that of about 116,000 American workers, according to Branko Milanovic, lead economist for the World Bank research group and the author of “The Haves and the Have-Nots.” Today, Bill Gates’s annual income equals that of about 75,000 workers.
“If you compare Rockefeller’s income and the average income in the United States, then the gap was even greater in those days,” Dr. Milanovic said. “In the 1920s, though, the overall distribution of income is about the same as now in terms of inequality — very high.”
J. Bradford DeLong, an economics professor at the University of California, Berkeley, largely agreed. “Because the economy was smaller back then, fewer people — John D. Rockefeller, Andrew Carnegie, J. P. Morgan — were more powerful in the country,” he said.
But comparisons of disparity are not just about income or even only about money.
“Right-wingers will say that even though the relative income and wealth gaps are about the same, that the lifestyle gap between rich and poor is much less than it was back then,” Professor DeLong said. “Nearly everybody today can afford to overeat to their heart’s content and watch ‘Hamlet’ when they choose, while a century ago only the rich could afford to overeat or watch ‘Hamlet.’ ”
Another economist, Diana Furchtgott-Roth, a senior fellow at the Manhattan Institute, said that income inequality may have risen during the recession, but that generally, when dual-earner couples and government benefits and taxes were figured in, the overall increase in disparity was obscured.
Jacob S. Hacker, a political science professor at Yale and co-author of “Winner-Take-All Politics,” said measuring wealth gaps missed changes in sources of income over time. “The super-rich today are not rentiers living off their accumulated wealth, as was frequently true in early part of the last century,” he said. “The majority are financial and corporate executives.”
The wealthiest of the wealthy control more of the country’s treasure than at any other time for which data are available. In 1913, the share of national income going to the top 0.01 percent of households was 2.8 percent, Professor Hacker said. In 2007, that same percentage of households earned 6 percent of national income.
“In 1917, average income — including capital gains — among the top 0.1 percent was 127 times the average income of the bottom 90 percent,” Professor Hacker said. “Average income among the top 0.01 percent was 509 times as great. In 2007, average income among the top 0.1 percent was 220 times average income among the bottom 90 percent. Average income among the top 0.01 percent was 1,080 times as great.”
Over the past century, according to a study by Emmanuel Saez, an economics professor at Berkeley, the share of income collected by the top 1 percent of Americans peaked at 24 percent in 1928 — a high that was not matched until 2007.
While there are more very rich Americans today, the richest are very different from their predecessors. For starters, by most measures they are not as rich. By some counts, John D. Rockefeller was worth more than Bill Gates or Michael R. Bloomberg.
When Rockefeller died in 1937, his $1.4 billion fortune constituted one sixty-fifth of the gross national product, according to an analysis in 1996 by Michael Klepper and Robert Gunther in their book “The Wealthy 100.” That placed Rockefeller first in their compilation. Bill Gates ranked 31st, with his $15 billion net worth at the time then comprising one four hundred twenty-fifth of G.N.P.
Now, Mr. Gates’s net worth of $59 billion, according to the latest Forbes magazine ranking, is about one two hundred thirty-seventh of G.N.P., and would place him 12th on the 1996 list, after Henry Ford. Mr. Bloomberg, with about $19 billion, would be 58th, behind Julius Rosenwald, the early-20th-century president of Sears, Roebuck.
Mr. Gates, like Ford, Rosenwald and Mr. Bloomberg, also gives a lot of his money away (last year, he and Mr. Bloomberg were among 40 of the wealthiest Americans who pledged to give away at least half of their fortunes). Ron Chernow’s biography of Rockefeller recalls that his philanthropy was inspired, in part, by Andrew Carnegie, who wrote in 1889 that the gulf between rich and poor threatened the very survival of capitalism.
“The man who dies thus rich dies disgraced,” Carnegie said, which is another version of Mr. Bloomberg’s vow to bounce his check to the undertaker.
Some suggested response questions:
1. Does this situation seem ok, or could it create problems?
2. Does this situation have any common ground with the Enclosure Movement?
3. Are things getting better, worse, or staying the same?
4. Do you have any suggestions?
5. Does any of this concern you?
FROM: New York Times http://www.nytimes.com/2011/10/26/nyregion/as-data-show-theres-a-reason-the-wall-street-protesters-chose-new-york.html?scp=1&sq=As%20the%20data%20show&st=cse
See Related NYTimes Graph: http://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2011/10/26/nyregion/the-new-gilded-age.html?scp=1&sq=NewGilded%20Age&st=cse
Tuesday, September 20, 2011
Blogging Directions 2011-12
Blog posts will happen every two to four weeks, depending on the schedule. Students submit proposals for posts, and the Blogwizard will select among them through a formula including 1) variety of source and submitter 2) controversy of topic 3) importance of discussion 4) wind direction. Blogs should be proofread, and should have original ideas and/or refer to other posts. The most interesting comments express a clear viewpoint. Grading: 0 is no submission, 1 is poorly proofed and expressed, 2 is fair/good, 3 is excellent. Blogging will generally be over a weekend. No submissions after 2pm Friday, and no comments should be submitted after 9pm Sunday. Suggested length is 100 to 150 words. Wise bloggers write in WORD, proof, and paste comments.
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