TURKEY AND AFGHANISTAN; BUDGETARY SIMPLICITY VS ACTS OF FAITH

On my oft repeated bias toward a greater role for Muslim Turkey in helping to achieve political stability in the region, Turkey has now said it was willing to host an office in Istanbul for the Taliban to promote peace talks in Afghanistan. Turkey has contributed non-combat troops to the NATO military involvement in Afghanistan.

It is difficult to know where all of this is going, if anywhere, but it is one more possible avenue for getting a political settlement with the Taliban to end the 10-year old war there. Supposedly there are back stage talks already between the Taliban and the government of Afghan President Karzai, with some U.S. involvement. But it is unknown if these are continuing talks and whether any progress has been made. The Turkish offer could add to the negotiation architecture of any peace talks, but there is still a missing major player, at least publicly, in any negotiations that may be going on. That missing player is Pakistan which hosts major elements of the Taliban within Pakistan and which has a history of support of the Taliban.

Turkey's willingness to host a Taliban office might also help determine the power structure of the Taliban itself. It is not a single, hierarchical organization. There are competing factions within Pakistan and the Taliban insurgents within Afghanistan may be operating independently. If the Taliban are to be part of any meaningful political settlement, a necessary first step must be having some confidence that a Taliban office in Turkey has some clout with Taliban factions in both Pakistan and Afghanistan.

There is another advantage of Turkey's offer. Since the governments of Muslim Afghanistan and Pakistan do not trust each other, it puts another Muslim nation in the role of middle man, a nation that already has a growing role in quietly helping in efforts to bring political stability to the region.

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As President Obama and the Republicans attack each other on their competing plans for fiscal 2012, the GOP would seem to have at least one advantage. Despite its meat ax approach to cutting spending and dealing with health care entitlements and its clear bias toward further enriching the wealthy, it does have the advantage of deceptive simplicity. A look at the alternative approaches to deal with the fiscally draining effects of medicare illustrates that simplicity.

The GOP approach to restricting medicare is to convert the current federally funded fee for service approach to a voucher system that would provide federal subsidies to purchase health insurance from the insurance industry. The current medicare funding system is open ended, just submit the bills and the federal government will pay them. The GOP proposes having fixed costs for the program. Aside from the issues of sending huge sums of taxpayer money to the insurance industry and continuing the insurance industry's gate keeper role over accessing needed health care, the general conclusion about the voucher approach is that over time the subsidies to the insurance purchaser will fall behind the increasing costs of the insurance policy. In that regard it certainly is a political risk for the GOP among the growing population of the elderly and its concern for uncertainty about health care and what it will cost them. But it is a seemingly simple solution to cutting the cost and controlling the growing fiscal burden of medicare. And simply cutting costs is central to the agenda of the right wing fiscal hawks.

The Obama approach to cutting the costs of the program is more of an act of faith. The President's plan for cutting costs relies in part on decreasing the cost of medicare through greater efficiency and a crackdown on waste and fraud. But his key to containing costs is having an independent panel which would have the power to slow the cost of medicare by limiting medicare spending if it is growing faster than the growth of the gross domestic product (GDP), plus some wiggle room. If medicare spending rises too much beyond the growth of GDP, the panel would have to come up with ways to keep that growth within the limits of GDP growth. If that isn't complicated enough, the panel's recommendations are then submitted to Congress which can choose to vote or not vote on the recommendations, but politically Congress in effect loses control of its current power to write the rules of the game.

It is a complicated process that challenges any simple understanding except to Congress which realizes how it would limit the role of the lawmakers. The act of faith comes in the willingness to believe that such a panel can deal with all of the complexities involved in determining what health care delivery really costs and then take the steps to cut those costs. Despite the complexity, however, it should be noted that Obama's plan does address the big problem of reducing the growing costs of health care; the GOP plan does not.

So if simplicity has any political advantage, the score is 1-0 GOP. But as stated in the previous post, both Obama's and the GOP's budget plans are just opening bids with "any" final result to be worked out through the traditional process of bargaining and compromise, ugly words to the tea party and its right wing fellow travelers.