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Ellen Belcher is the Dayton Daily News opinion pages editor. She writes about state government, education, the environment, higher education and all things Dayton.
Martin Gottlieb is an editorial writer and columnist for the Dayton Daily News opinion pages. He focuses on the political process itself and does such national issues as war, the economy, taxes and Social Security, as well as a hodge-podge of local and state issues.Home > Blogs > A Matter of Opinion > Archives > 2009 > December > 03
Thursday, December 3, 2009
Martin Gottlieb: Bosnia agonies becoming bigger threat to ‘Dayton’
Last month, some Dayton- area people paused in connection with the 14th anniversary of the Dayton peace talks on Bosnia — sort of.
They attended one or more sessions associated with the annual Dayton Literary Peace Prize, which grew out of the talks. That was entirely appropriate.
But there was little talk about Bosnia itself, or, at least, about Bosnia today. It wasn’t the subject of the books being honored.
If there’s not much talk about Bosnia even in Dayton — a city whose name is linked with Bosnia throughout the world — even on an anniversary, that underlines a point being made by Bosnia watchers: the country isn’t getting the attention it needs from the world at large, especially from world powers.
Hotter spots crowd Bosnia out of public and official attention.
When you do check back in with Bosnia, you find bad news. The bitter divisions between religious groups — the cause of war in the 1990s — are still the primary political characteristic of the place.
The country is dysfunctional. On that, there’s little disagreement among outside observers. Whether renewed violence is in the air is more open for discussion. In the years immediately after the Dayton talks, Bruce Hitchner was the most visible Daytonian on matters Bosnia. The University of Dayton professor would convene annual conferences attended by big players from the Balkans and the U.S. State Department.
He’s now at Tufts University in Massachusetts, but he’s still engaged on Bosnia, promoting a new constitution.
In an e-mail, he says, “The anniversary of the Dayton Agreement (is) not even commemorated throughout Bosnia, only in the Republika Srpska (the ‘Serb Entity’). The situation in the country is not good, though no outbreak of violence is likely.”
In a paper for a Hungarian think tank, he writes, “The Dayton Agreement’s creation of a multi-layered, ethnically-based governmental system may have been a necessity for bringing peace,” but the structure “has proved to be deeply dysfunctional, expensive, often corrupt, and thus incapable of providing essential services.”
The national government, he says, “is devoid of legal supremacy and powers of enforcement, both of which now reside in the increasingly weak OHR.” That’s a reference to the Office of the High Representative, the international agency still overseeing the country.
Richard Holbrooke, the father of the Dayton accords, far from taking offense at such criticisms, makes similar points and complains about “a distracted international community.”
Until this year, he complained about a distracted Bush administration. Despite distractions, though, the “international community” has poured enormous amounts of money into Bosnia, easily topping per-capita spending to rebuild Germany and Japan after World War II.
But now that form of attention is starting to dry up, as fatigue sets in. The money has failed to produce the self-sufficient economy that has been the goal.
For those still hoping that the Serbs, Muslims and Croats might eventually start to let loose of old grudges, Hitchner notes, “Political conditions have deteriorated since 2006.”
He laments the absence of “a shared sense of nationhood.” He’d like to substitute, at least, loyalty to a new constitution.
European countries have offered an incentive to Bosnia to get its act together: membership in the European Union — along with its trade and travel possibilities. But that hasn’t been enough.
George Will wrote in these pages in September that the Bosnia story shows the futility of nation-building in Afghanistan. If it’s been so hard in Europe — with so much money coming in — imagine how hard it would be in “remote, mountainous, tribal Afghanistan.”
Maybe that’s why we didn’t hear much nation-building talk in President Barack Obama’s Afghanistan speech this week.
To lament Bosnia isn’t, Will acknowledged, to criticize what happened in Dayton. What happened here brought 14 years of peace, at least. And nobody had any better idea.
But future events could still tarnish the international word “Dayton,” could still make it a symbol of dashed dreams.
The Dayton talks have not turned out to be a model for resolving other world conflicts. Others haven’t lent themselves to the technique of knocking heads together over a negotiating table.
But “Dayton” has become a symbol in some circles of American power. Washington stepped in where European capitals had been flailing for years.
Now, once again, the European option — the promise of EU membership — is failing. And now Holbrooke is back in government — if somewhat distracted.
Permalink | Comments (10) | Post your comment | Categories: Columns, Dayton Peace Accords and Other Peace Initiatives, Martin Gottlieb
TweetEditorial: Dayton still counting on Third Frontier
As much as any area in the state, Dayton has a stake in what the legislature does next with the Third Frontier program.
That $1.35 billion effort seeds high-tech research and pays to bring renown scholars (and their research contracts) to Ohio’s universities. Earlier this year, a state-funded analysis said that $681 million in Third Frontier spending has leveraged $6.6 billion in new investment and created 48,000 new jobs.
The program is mostly funded by borrowing approved by voters. The first time out, Ohioans rejected the idea. On the second try, they embraced selling bonds for this purpose.
Since then, businesses, colleges and almost all the politicians agree that the Third Frontier initiative has been a phenomenal success.
The big reason for the support is that grants are awarded in a competitive process that is judged by technical people.
Equally significant, getting an award requires serious collaboration among businesses and researchers. Nobody gets financial assistance to go off and do their own thing.
The Dayton Development Coalition estimates area businesses and universities have benefitted to the tune of $120 million. For example, $28 million in Third Frontier money helped fund the University of Dayton’s IDCAST, which is researching and identifying commercial applications for remote sensors.
daytaOhio, a non-profit housed at Wright State University, also received funding. It specializes in visualization technology.
And businesses at the National Composite Center and the Mound Advanced Technology Center also have won awards.
The Third Frontier is funded through June 2011. Some Democrats and the Ohio Business Roundtable want to ask voters to renew the funding next spring. They want to assure businesses and universities that the program isn’t going to go away.
At the same time, the Strickland administration wants to ask for $1 billion, doubling the amount that was borrowed last time.
Some Republicans are in a snit because they say they’ve been cut out of the decision-making. They question the timing of the renewal. (If it passes next spring, the governor will be touting that fact in his fall re-election campaign.) And they worry that $1 billion might be going too deeply in debt.
There are important details to iron out, but there is nothing to fight about here.
The Third Frontier program is one thing Ohio is doing right. The initiative is attracting scholars and companies to the state; it is creating jobs in advanced and high-tech industries.
Ohio’s borrowing capacity isn’t infinite. But Chancellor Eric Fingerhut, who shepherds the awarding of the Third Frontier money, says that even with Ohio’s financial struggles, it can afford doubling the program.
As good as that is to hear, he should have to justify that to the legislature, and lawmakers are entitled to challenge him.
Though interest rates are low now — making borrowing cheap — that could change.
The most worrisome thing, though, is that Ohio will be hurting for money in the next two-year budget because it won’t have the benefit of a federal stimulus.
The state likely will be faced with making more big cuts, meaning lawmakers have to be concerned about how much they’re running up in interest costs.
Chancellor Fingerhut counters that he can show that the borrowing expense will be more than offset by money generated through new economic development.
If the politicians use the Third Frontier to try to score political points against each other, they will confuse voters and they will create doubt about something that the state and Dayton need.
The Republicans are entitled to answers to sincere questions.
The Democrats shouldn’t be pretending that they invented this idea.
And the business community, which is 100 percent behind the initiative, needs to take a stand against either political party playing politics with a program that is helping Ohio’s economy.
A renewal won’t pass if voters don’t believe in the integrity and soundness of a program that is working.
Permalink | Comments (2) | Post your comment | Categories: Editorials, Ellen Belcher, Local Business, Ohio government, Ohio politics
TweetEditorial: Obama must keep Afghan goals limited
“Like many, we wonder what happened to Mr. Obama’s special envoy for Afghanistan and Pakistan, Richard Holbrooke, who established a bureaucratic fiefdom at the State Department but has been neither seen nor heard from during this critical period.” — Washington Post editorial, Oct. 21.
You know Afghanistan is a tough place when Richard Holbrooke goes over there and disappears.
Not normally one to disappear, the father of the Dayton peace accords on Bosnia has been unable to bring any magic to bear in his newest assignment.
In truth, he has made some changes. And, of course, he has been in on the big policy discussions. He sided with the generals in calling for more American troops, a policy that President Barack Obama has now embraced, in the absence of magic.
The president has always favored more aggressive prosecution of the war in Afghanistan. He made that clear in the 2008 campaign. He sent 20,000 more troops early on. He’s now sending 30,000 more, while saying he will start withdrawals in less than two years.
The president took his time about making the decision. That resulted in criticism, of course. (Dayton-area Rep. Michael Turner: “The president’s delay has caused our allies and Afghanis to question his commitment and resolve to fighting al-Qaida and the Taliban.”)
But the difficulties of the decision he faced are clear to any fair-minded person. Afghanistan was the training and organizing site for the 9/11 terrorists. Now, the main force fighting against the government is the very force — the Taliban — that hosted al-Qaida.
But Afghanistan turns out to be hellaciously difficult to pacify.
One of the lessons of the Iraq war is that sometimes there’s a right way and a wrong way to go about a task like that. The president had to sort through a lot.
He’s decided on something like the “surge” of the Iraq war. Like that increase in troops, this one is designed to be temporary.
The president’s critics are pretending he has announced a deadline for withdrawal. (U.S. Rep. Jim Jordan, R-Urbana, responding to the president’s speech: “Our goal is to win, not to announce to the enemy the date we are leaving.”)
But saying when the withdrawal will be begin is saying next to nothing. It’s a political statement designed to quicken the step of the government of Afghanistan toward becoming more self-sufficient and to reassure the American people that the commitment is not open-ended.
The real doubt to be raised about the president’s plan is simply whether it will work. If it will, it should be undertaken, because Afghanistan really is directly relevant to American security, even if Iraq wasn’t.
Anybody who lived through the Iraq experience should be chastened about expressing certainty about what will and won’t work. Just about everybody was wrong at one stage or another.
What can be said is that this time a very smart president took his time, got advice from military and foreign policy people who have become, by now, pretty knowledgeable about that part of the world, and decided to give it a shot. He made a decision that largely reflects the views of the foreign policy establishment.
Yes, the surge is smaller than the one in Iraq, but, as in Iraq, the military is getting roughly what it asked for (especially if additional troops are forthcoming from NATO).
The president must keep his goal limited. It can’t be to pacify Afghanistan completely or turn it into our kind of democracy. The idea is to combat international terrorism.
The burden on American troops will be substantial. People in units stationed locally that will or might be affected have generally indicated to the media that they are ready, that they know the risks, that they see the need, and that they know they volunteered at one stage or another.
Still, they will need a lot of moral support from back home.
The reason there has been no Holbrooke miracle is that Afghanistan simply isn’t ready for peace. A lot of Americans will be doing good work in trying to move it in that direction.
Permalink | Comments (9) | Post your comment | Categories: Dayton Peace Accords and Other Peace Initiatives, Editorials, Martin Gottlieb, Wright Patterson Air Force Base
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