Partisan gridlock and political extremism threaten to tear down the pillars of public policy and render the U.S. government utterly dysfunctional, argues Senior Fellow Thomas Mann, co-author with Norman Ornstein—resident scholar at the American Enterprise Institute—of It’s Even Worse Than It Looks (Basic Books, 2012). He argues that a flood of super-PAC money, negative ads and cowed mainstream news media are contributing to the problem.

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• Blame for Gridlock Is Squarely on Republican Party

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We don’t talk about “victory” any longer. In Afghanistan, we now talk about “good enough.”

And what does that mean? It means an exit that is politically acceptable to the American people, especially in an election year.

But, before we go any further, let’s doubleback to Iraq for a moment. Remember Iraq? All American combat troops were withdrawn last December, and security was left in the hands of the Iraqi army and police. Now, according to The New York Times, the multibillion-dollar program designed to train the Iraqi police, the biggest U.S. aid program since the Marshall Plan in post-WWII Europe, may come to a crashing halt in December of this year. The reasons are two-fold: the United States cannot afford it, and the Iraqis don’t want it. Apparently, they have had enough of the United States. With neighboring Iran now pushing its own candidate for the key job of Iraq’s top mullah, and with Syria, another neighbor, now crumbling into an ugly civil war, likely to spill over national borders, Iraq’s Shite leaders have begun to look inward, stressing their sovereignty and rearranging their national policies. They now see wisdom in sharply reducing their dependence on the United States, which is not the way the United States had imagined its post-war relations with Iraq. President George W. Bush thought he was building a true democracy in the Middle East, and President Barack Obama, who never approved of the Iraq War in the first place, just wanted to get out of there.

Now, back to Afghanistan, where recent developments in Iraq have relevance and resonance. During his first presidential campaign, Obama pledged that the United States would “win the war” in Afghanistan. But, over the last few years, as he has grappled with the dangers and complexities of the war, he has changed his mind and his policy. Now he wants out of there, too, but his explanatory rhetoric clearly lacks candor. When talking to American troops, he sounds positive and even optimistic. When he acts, though, he looks like a president hurrying to the nearest door. All combat troops—out by the end of December, 2014. All combat operations—over by December, 2013.

This weekend, NATO leaders will convene in Chicago to announce next steps. France’s newly-elected president, Francois Hollande, says he will withdraw all French forces by the end of this year. The British, in a second-dip recession, may soon come to the same decision. Everyone knows that Obama will reduce U.S. troop strength in Afghanistan to 68,000 by the end of this summer.

The Afghan War has become the longest in American history; and when the Afghans we have trained for their own self-defense turn their guns on us, that is a depressing signal that, like the Iraqis, they don’t want us there. Or, if they do, it is to be strictly on their terms. This year alone, 21 NATO troops have been killed by Afghans, trained and equipped by NATO. That’s 14% of total NATO casualties.

Who is kidding whom? Obama wants out but won’t say so. GOP candidate Romney wants to kill the Taliban until they surrender, which is most unlikely. And, after the experience in Vietnam, no American president wants to be sitting in the Oval Office while the United States loses another war.

Result: “good enough.” If the United States can somehow find an exit strategy that is politically acceptable to the American people, then it will seize it. Ask an American official for a clear definition of American policy in Afghanistan, and you are likely to hear the words “good enough.” And then you fill in the blanks.

Gridlock and political dysfunction. Partisanship at record levels. Attack politics run amok. And public approval of Congress scraping the single digits (Sen. John McCain is fond of saying it’s down to blood relatives and paid staff).

We’ve all heard the laments — we’ve made some of them ourselves — that Washington is broken, that our political system can’t grapple with the nation’s big, long-term problems. So what can be done about it? Unfortunately, the cures that get tossed around are often misguided, sometimes even worse than the disease. Here are five much-praised solutions we should avoid, followed by four that have a chance to make a meaningful difference.

A third party to the rescue

Ah, if only we had a third force, an independent movement that could speak plain truths to the public and ignite the silent, centrist majority around common-sense solutions.

Sound familiar? In recent decades, Ross Perot, John Anderson and George Wallace have pursued a serious third-party route, although only Wallace managed to win any electoral votes. But that hasn’t stopped high-profile columnists such as Tom Friedman of the New York Times and Matt Miller of The Washington Post from singing this siren song, along with former elected officials such as Republican Christine Todd Whitman, Democrat David Boren and many others. The much-hyped Americans Elect group — which was to harness the democratic spirit of the Internet to find a centrist third-party presidential candidate for the 2012 race — is a prime example of this approach.

Read the full piece at The Washington Post »

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The capacity for clean technology innovation and technological expertise is spreading across the developing world. Technology innovation and diffusion have shifted away from a unidirectional north-south flow and the majority of scalable clean technology innovation is taking place in emerging economies, with very little taking place elsewhere. The challenge is to ensure that least developed countries do not miss out on this technological transformation.

On May 17, Global Economy and Development at Brookings hosted a discussion on how international organizations can help fill capacity building and financing gaps in clean technology innovation in developing and least developed countries. Panelists included Tim Richards, managing director for International Energy Policy at General Electric Company; Alfred Watkins, executive chairman of the Global Innovation Summit; Dr. Romain Murenzi, executive director of the Academy of Sciences for the Developing World; and Brookings Nonresident Fellow Nathan Hultman, director of the Environmental Policy Program at the University of Maryland School of Public Policy. Brookings Senior Fellow Katherine Sierra moderated the discussion.

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• Green Growth Innovation for Developing Countries

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