"Defending Liberty, Pursuing Justice" is the motto of the American Bar Association, and among the association's four stated goals, one is to "advance the rule of law." Toward this goal, the ABA is committed to "hold governments accountable under law," "assure meaningful access to justice for all persons," and "preserve the independence of the legal profession and the judiciary."

Given these pledges, it may seem odd that the association's newly appointed president has worked as both a lawyer and lobbyist for some of the world's most repressive regimes, as well as institutions and corporations connected to them. Nonetheless, it is true: Carolyn Lamm, a D.C.-based corporate attorney who was named ABA president in August, has registered as a lobbyist in the past for such authoritarian states as Libya and Zaire. A longtime partner at the prestigious international firm White & Case, Lamm has also had close ties in recent years to entities associated with the tyrannical government of Uzbekistan and its ruling family, working, for example, as the legal counsel of Zeromax, a massive Swiss-registered company widely reported to be controlled by Gulnara Karimova, the eldest daughter of Uzbekistan's authoritarian President Islam Karimov.

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Lamm declined to comment for this story, and an ABA spokeswoman stated in an email refusing to comment that "she is comfortable that her work with a wide range of clients around the world speaks for itself."

A repressive state often said to be the most "Soviet" of the post-Soviet republics, Uzbekistan is considered one of the world's worst human rights offenders. According to international observers, its legal proceedings are often show trials, and it regularly tortures prisoners and jails those considered political dissidents -- even boiling them alive, according to the U.S. State Department. Islam Karimov, 71, the last head of the republic's Communist Party, has ruled the government since the Soviet collapse led to independence in 1991. The autocratic government rules with the aid of a massive internal-security apparatus. In U.S. NGO Freedom House's current "Freedom in the World" survey, Uzbekistan is given the worst possible score.

Of course, there is nothing inherently improper with a lawyer representing any client, but David Scheffer, professor of law at Northwestern University and director of its Center for International Human Rights, who is also a member of the ABA's human rights advisory council, says attorneys have an obligation not to "distort the truth or manage your representation of the client in such as way that you are overlooking the legitimate interests and complaints of rights-abuse victims."

This is even more true when the attorney in question is tasked with representing the American legal profession as a whole. While not commenting on Lamm specifically, Scheffer noted, "the president of the ABA represents a high level of ethical and professional conduct."

Lamm's ties to Uzbekistan go beyond representing one company. Her firm White & Case was registered to lobby on behalf of the Uzbek government from 1997 through 2005. She also serves as general counsel and vice president of the board of the American-Uzbekistan Chamber of Commerce (AUCC), according to its Web site. The AUCC promotes trade and investment ties between the United States and Uzbekistan and lobbies against U.S. sanctions on Karimov's government. Following the 2005 Andijan massacre -- in which hundreds of unarmed protesters were mowed down by Uzbek security forces -- the organization's president, James Cornell, wrote to then-Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice urging her to take into account the "special context" of Andijan and "not rush to conclusion or ignore the thorough investigation carried out by the government of Uzbekistan."

Credible independent investigations following the events found Uzbek security forces responsible for hundreds of civilian deaths and rejected the Uzbek government's claims that the demonstrators were motivated by Islamic extremism. According to Human Rights Watch, Uzbekistan's government has refused to cooperate with international investigations, cracked down further on civil-society groups, and sought the forcible return of those who fled the country after the violence.

The AUCC declined to comment on Lamm's involvement with the organization, but her official biography shows that she's been active with the group since at least 1994.

Another of Lamm's ties to Uzbekistan is through Zeromax, a holding firm formed in 2001 that is widely reported to be controlled by Gulnara Karimova. "Zeromax is essentially one of the facades behind which Gulnara Karimova continues to tighten her grip on any and all available sources of income in the country by any means she deems necessary, with little or no regard for legal niceties," says one Central Asian analyst.

Karimova has denied any ties to the company, though some press accounts have reported that she controls it through intermediaries. Zeromax is alleged to have bullied competitors with extralegal methods, including kidnapping, extortion, and racketeering; the firm reportedly often simply takes over competitors, as reported by Harper's magazine. In Interspan Distribution Corp. v. Liberty Insurance Underwriters, Inc., a lawsuit filed in federal court in Houston, an American company claims that Zeromax used its influence with the government to drive it out of the country, even arresting or threatening to arrest its employees to force them to sign over assets. Currently, Zeromax dominates the oil and gas, uranium, agriculture, and gold-mining sectors, according to its Web site and the International Crisis Group. White & Case is the company's general counsel in London, Moscow, and Washington D.C., according to Zeromax's Web site, and Lamm served as the company's lead counsel in a 2007 lawsuit.

U.S. Federal Agent Registration Act documents show that Lamm has lobbied on behalf of other authoritarian states. She registered to lobby for Libya in 2008, at a time when the United States and Libya were in the process of normalizing relations. She was also registered as a lobbyist for the Bank of Zaire -- now the Democratic Republic of the Congo -- from 1981 through 1984, and White & Case was registered as a lobbyist for the Bank of Zaire from 1980 to 1991.

That the ABA would overlook Lamm's ties to Uzbekistan is all the more surprising given the organization's past advocacy on behalf of democracy and rule of law in the country. The association established an office of its Central European and Eurasian Law Initiative, or CEELI, in the 1990s to "furnish technical assistance on a wide range of issues essential for further consolidation of the rule of law" in the former Soviet Union and Central and Eastern Europe. In Uzbekistan, the program ran human rights clinics at government law institutes and supported public-defender centers.

In the wake of the international condemnation of the Andijan massacre, Uzbekistan's Ministry of Justice ordered ABA/CEELI to close it operations, as it did virtually all other NGOs. Currently, the ABA runs an "offshore" program for lawyers from Uzbekistan in neighboring Kazakhstan. A U.S. speech in March 2009 by the program director spoke of the many challenges of running such an initiative, most of which involved "ensuring the security" of the Uzbek participants invited to programs in Kazakhstan or Turkey.

The concerns about security are understandable. As Freedom House notes in its country report on Uzbekistan, "the judiciary is subservient to the president, who appoints all judges and can remove them at any time ... Police routinely abuse and torture suspects to extract confessions, which are accepted by judges as evidence and often serve as the basis for convictions."

Lamm declined to be interviewed for this story and it is unclear whether her ties with Uzbekistan will have an effect on her policies as ABA president. She has committed herself to updating the association's ethics guidelines to reflect "our changing world," and, in an August 2009 speech upon assuming the presidency of the ABA, stated, "It is not just the rule of law we are called to strengthen, but the rule of just law."

A noble goal indeed, and surely one that would be welcome by the beleaguered citizens of Uzbekistan.

This week, U.S. President Barack Obama, the son of a black father and white mother, is making his landmark visit to Asia, including a Wednesday stop in Seoul, where South Korea is in the midst of a racial reckoning. His visit could have positive repercussions for years to come. Race is a thorny issue in the country, and biracial persons especially so. Both North and South Koreans embrace pure bloodlines, untainted by non-Korean DNA. Biracial children are broadly considered unadoptable, and children and adults of mixed race endure ostracism and bullying. But in the past few years, a number of events and people have made South Koreans reconsider racism and persons of mixed race.

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Last July, Bonojit Hussain, an Indian research professor at Seoul's Sungkonghoe University, was on a bus with a female friend when a 31-year old Korean man went on a 10-minute foul-mouthed tirade, calling him a "stinking bastard" and an "Arab," and his companion a "whore."

Hussain and his friend went to a nearby police station to report the matter. The police did not believe that Hussain really was a professor and spoke to him in what Koreans call banmal, a register used when speaking to an insolent brat or a disobedient dog. The verbal assailant was at the police station also, and continued to hurl racist insults at him in front of the officers there, who did nothing to stop him.

(Maybe it's something about buses that bring out the best and worst in people. In 1955, Alabama's Rosa Parks refused to give up her seat for a white person on a segregated bus. She said she was "tired of giving in" and was arrested -- but her actions became a turning point in the U.S. civil rights movement. It might be so for Korea, too.)

This wasn't the first time Hussain had experienced racial abuse, and he was tired of it. With the police unwilling to do anything, he filed a petition with the National Human Rights Commission. When his story appeared in the Korean media, prosecutors arrested his harasser for "criminal insult" -- the first time the charge has been used for racial hate speech. His case is still in court. In the meantime, the Korean legislature is putting together the country's first detailed anti-discrimination laws. This would be a landmark victory for the thousands of migrant laborers from Vietnam, Pakistan, Nepal, and other Asian countries who are typically treated as South Korea's second class citizens.

While Hussain awaits the outcome of his court case, another man of color is boldly working to improve race relations in South Korea. Hines Ward was unknown in the country until he won the 2006 Super Bowl as a player for the Pittsburgh Steelers, and was also named the game's most valuable player. The South Korean media -- which constantly trolls for news of any successful ethnic Koreans abroad -- heralded him as a victor and one of Korea's own.

Ward is half Korean and half black, and has used his fame and his heritage to shine a light on the plight of biracial children in Korea. The wide receiver visited South Korea with his mother, Kim Young-hee, shortly after the Super Bowl win, and the two of them took time to speak to the media about race.

Kim described in stark terms the discrimination she experienced before she immigrated to the United States. "What do you think would have become of us if I had kept living here with Hines? He would probably never have been able to be anything but a beggar. Do you think I would even have been able to get work cleaning houses?" she said while visiting the Pearl S. Buck Foundation in Seoul. "Koreans of the same skin color are even more racist among themselves. It doesn't make sense. If everybody hates our children so much because their skin is a different color, then why do Koreans run around dying their hair blond and red?"

The Buck Foundation helps Asian and mixed race children deemed unadoptable in their home country. It has opened offices and orphanages throughout Asia, with Ward part of the team. He personally helps to bring biracial children from South Korea to stay with host families in Pittsburgh, where nobody gives them a second glance in regard to the color of their skin. For the past four football seasons, he has participated in the project to bolster the children's self esteem during the arduous adoption process, giving them hope and confidence.

The Hussain case,and Ward's activism have all brought the issue of race and biracial persons to the fore, and thus the timing of Obama's visit could not be better. South Koreans have succeeded in advancing their country as a power in economics and industry, but meanwhile they've ignored the human side of globalization: the matters of love, opportunity, and passports that cause people of different races to come together.

Ultimately, they'll have to acknowledge it. Because of South Korea's gender imbalance, bachelors -- most of them farmers from rural areas - now use matchmaking brokers to marry brides from Southeast Asia, Mongolia, and Uzbekistan. This year, the Ministry of Food, Agriculture, Forestry, and Fisheries found that half of children born in rural Korea will be biracial. In the coming decades, changing racial demographics will force South Koreans to re-examine their notions of pure bloodlines. But before then, they will have to grapple with isolated incidents of racial hatred. Seeing the biracial head of the world's only superpower on Asian soil, they can decide for themselves if being of darker skin or having a heritage of mixed ethnic origin is such a big deal after all.

Picture Afghanistan two decades from now. Difficult? Not really -- if you're a demographer.

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The two agencies that independently publish population estimates -- the U.N. Population Division and the U.S. Census Bureau's International Programs Center -- routinely project an array of demographic statistics for the world's nearly 200 countries on a timeframe of decades. Until now, the U.S. and U.N. agencies closely matched one another's projections for an Afghanistan-to-be. Not anymore. The U.N. believes Afghanistan's population (around 28 million today) will pass the 50 million mark by 2030, whereas the Census Bureau foresees a 2030 population under 43 million.

If the Census Bureau's prognostications are right -- if Afghanistan experiences a sharp decline in family size and slower subsequent growth -- this change would represent a milestone in Afghanistan's development. But if Afghan population growth remains at a high level, auguring a continued surfeit of young job seekers, their disaffection and armed violence, the breakdown of schooling and health services, and the perpetuation of high fertility, it bodes very poorly indeed.

Unbeknownst to much of the foreign-policy community, the population of this impoverished Texas-sized pseudo-state is among the world's fastest growing. In 1950, there were barely 8 million Afghans, a population about the same size as New York City today. Since then, the population has nearly quadrupled, despite horrendous rates of childhood death and three decades of warfare.

This trend, should its pace continue, guarantees a lengthy perpetuation of Afghanistan's extraordinary "youth bulge." Today over half of the country's adults are 15-to-29 year olds, compared with only 26 percent in the United States. So much competition in an opportunity-sparse society is bad news for young men seeking employment or land ownership -- and good news for extremist recruiters.

This pace of growth strains government services as well. This year alone, Afghanistan's school-age population grew by more than 3 percent, or 250,000 children. Even if the Taliban stopped destroying schools and obstructing attendance, the government would face a momentous challenge in furnishing enough classrooms and teachers for this burgeoning generation.

These population factors, if unaddressed, diminish the possibility that a coherent Afghan state, if one emerges, could remain intact. Then why have we heard so little mention of this issue from either the Afghan or U.S. governments, or for that matter, the press? Perhaps because an honest discussion leads unavoidably to two touchy (and tightly interwoven) topics: the status of Afghan women and the size of Afghan families.

It's not that the West has failed to acknowledge that Afghan women are being deprived of their basic human rights. It's that Western governments have failed to recognize the degree to which such deprivation in half the population is incompatible with the notion of a viable, politically stable state. Fewer than half of all the school-age daughters of rural Afghan families are receiving basic education. Many are married during adolescence, and are then limited to performing household chores. If abused, most have no recourse to a fair judicial system. It is little wonder then that, according to the Census Bureau, on average, Afghan women can expect to bear 5.6 children in their lifetime -- a rate that appears to have dropped from pre-invasion levels, which ranged between 7 and 8 children per woman. Evidence for this decline is supported by a 2006 health survey conducted by Afghan survey teams (organized by the ministry of health and Johns Hopkins School of Public Health, and supported by the World Bank). It shows that contraceptive use among married women has increased from 5 percent in 2003 to 16 percent at the time of the survey -- at least in the rural areas surveyed. 

This is reason to be hopeful. If Afghanistan's ministry of health can continue the difficult job of extending the reach and quality of its maternal and child health services, as it has in the years since the Taliban were first evicted, fertility will probably continue on its downward path. As it does, the numbers of maternal and infant deaths are bound to drop from today's extreme levels. In 2005, the World Health Organization estimated that one in eight Afghan women die from pregnancy-related causes (in the United States, the lifetime risk is one in 4,800 -- and that's high for an OECD country). To put this figure in perspective, in 2008, about four times as many women died from pregnancy and childbirth in Afghanistan than anyone did from battle-related causes within its borders.

Is it possible that Afghanistan's society is on the verge of a rapid transition to the two-child family, already achieved by its neighbor, Iran? Doubtful. Iran's family-planning program drew support from its Islamic government (believe it or not), and offered services in a stable, albeit authoritarian, political environment within a society that encourages education for women. But where the Taliban governs, the chances of even a slow, steady fertility decline, the type assumed by the Census Bureau projections -- and even the U.N.'s less optimistic projections -- are negligible.

Nowhere does the connection between women's low status and long-term instability make itself more apparent than in Afghanistan. This relationship helps explain why the Taliban uncompromisingly maintain traditions of female subjugation and roll back any hint of social reform, and why they intimidate families who send their daughters to school and murder teachers who nurture them. Whenever the United States and its allies decide that it's time to leave Afghanistan on its own, they may do so before women's lives significantly improve, and before their government sufficiently expands education, health care, family planning, and economic opportunity. If that should occur, don't be surprised if, a few decades later, a foreign power (perhaps the United States, again) finds it prudent to intervene -- this time, in a much more populous, and perhaps an even more impossibly problematic Afghanistan.

Tuesday's appointment of an administrator to lead the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID) was met in Washington with some relief. The post at the head of the independent executive agency -- with its multibillion budget, 1,800-person staff, and round-the-world presence -- had sat empty for 10 months, rankling the aid and foreign-assistance community outside government and in, including Senators John Kerry and Richard Lugar.

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Over the course of the year, many prominent names were bandied about for the position. Paul Farmer, the visionary leader of Partners in Health, which provides medical services in poor countries, reportedly couldn't get past vetting. George Rupp, the president of the International Rescue Committee, and Nancy Birdsall, the founding president of the Center for Global Development, also allegedly were front-runners who did not pass muster in a process Secretary of State Hillary Clinton called "frustrating beyond words."

In the end, it was Rajiv Shah, a virtual unknown, who was named to the position -- amid much confusion and questioning. As one former USAID employee put it, "Who the hell is this guy? He's 35 years old, has been in Washington for about 10 minutes, and nobody's ever heard of him."

In fact, Shah -- actually 36, a physician, native of Michigan, and longtime resident of Seattle -- has been a player in the aid world for years, though not in Washington. He worked on Al Gore's 2000 presidential campaign as a health-care advisor and then joined the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, the largest charitable organization in the world. He ascended the ranks to become the head of its massive agricultural development program and five months ago came to Washington to join the U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA) as undersecretary for research, education, and economics and chief scientist. Easily winning congressional confirmation on May 12, he has managed $2.6 billion and more than 10,000 employees during his tenure.

It's ample experience for a young guy. But it is not necessarily experience relevant to USAID. The agency is responsible for a broad spectrum of initiatives relating to trade, democracy promotion, health, agriculture, humanitarian assistance, economic development, and emergency aid. Shah has scant experience in many of those core sectors. He has never been a member of the foreign service. He has never been based abroad, where virtually all of USAID's work happens. And he hasn't really worked inside the Beltway, either.

Several USAID employees and people who work with the agency with whom I spoke had never even heard of Shah before. Ron Capps of Refugees International noted, "The [nomination] process isn't transparent, and Shah wasn't one of the people I had heard were being considered for the role."

Shah's nomination has not just left questions about the man himself -- but about the Obama administration's position on USAID. Will Shah be a weak leader, auguring the diminution of its responsibilities? Or is he going to be a strong, efficient technocrat, re-establishing USAID's policy heft and independent status?  Nobody is sure, but the nomination of an unknown to an undermined agency seems to augur the former.

Shah -- who is expected to sail through the confirmation process, given that his post at USDA required congressional review -- will take over USAID during a time of crisis. It is, put simply, shriveling up, and its 10 months without leadership haven't helped. During George W. Bush's administration, it met with numerous scandals over contracting. Scores of international postings remain unfilled. It has lost 40 percent of its staff in the past 20 years. Staff morale is low, and defections are high.

The agency's dwindling has been long coming. But 2006 was a particular annus horribilis, at least from the perspective of workers within the agency. That year, Condoleezza Rice became secretary of state and started to undertake reforms within the paradigm of "transformational diplomacy." She named the new USAID administrator, Randall Tobias, to a concurrent position within the State Department; he became the director of foreign assistance, with a deputy secretary ranking. Tobias then collapsed USAID's policy planning department and the agency started taking directives from the State Department. This marked, in many in Washington's view, the end of USAID as a true independent agency. Another USAID employee put it bluntly: "They, in effect, lobotomized USAID."

The Obama administration came into Washington promising to fix it. But in the 10 months USAID's top position has been unfilled, numerous other government bodies, including the State, Defense, and Agriculture departments, have stepped up where it has faltered. And it isn't clear how or whether the White House and State Department want to bolster USAID.

Currently, there are a number of strategic reviews attempting to answer that question, though they are black boxed, opaque until completed. The first is the Quadrennial Diplomacy and Development Review (QDDR) -- the brainchild of Secretary of State Hillary Clinton -- which is reviewing and suggesting reforms for the State Department's internal structure, bolstering its capacity to deal with nonstate actors, for instance. Some have suggested that the QDDR might be an opportunity to absorb USAID into the State Department, though the Obama administration has insisted that is not an option. The second is a Presidential Study Directive on development policy, a whole-of-government review. Finally, the staff of Rep. Howard Berman, the chair of the House Foreign Relations Committee, is overhauling the 1961 Foreign Assistance Act, which controls USAID's mandate and funding.

All three could radically alter USAID. None is finished yet. And the Obama administration hasn't shown its cards at all on how it hopes to shape the agency's future.

For now, the crucial indicators on the administration's viewpoint will be Shah's job title and his boss. If Shah holds a concurrent State Department position as the director of foreign assistance, it would imply that the White House intends to usher the development-focused USAID closer to the diplomacy-focused State Department. It also matters whom Shah answers to -- whether it is Jack Lew, the deputy secretary of state for management and resources (a position Secretary Clinton created) or to the secretary herself. Historically, the head of USAID has been a deputy secretary himself, and persons close to the process said having Shah answer to Lew, as Clinton has said she wants, would signal a significant demotion.

This uncertainty may explain the White House's difficulty in filling the USAID position, people familiar with the process told Foreign Policy. According to one close observer, the administration had reached out to more than a dozen people who declined the position.

All of the chaos surrounding the nomination will inevitably take its toll on Shah's perception in the aid community. Andrew Natsios, a former USAID administrator and currently a Georgetown University professor, said he knew Shah from his work at the Gates Foundation and respected him personally, but was concerned about him taking a job that appeared to have no authority: "The question is, what is going to happen to the development function in the U.S. government when people in the State Department are making decisions who have no expertise, no experience, and don't know development literature or development theory or the Third World?"

Shah's nomination might raise more questions than it answers -- but those questions increasingly point to a diminished USAID.

Today, U.S. President Barack Obama met with top advisers to debate four proposals for a new military strategy for Afghanistan, most of which include increased troop levels. Gen. Stanley McChrystal has requested an additional 40,000 soldiers to neutralize the insurgency, stabilize the government, and increase U.S. security. Vice President Joe Biden and others propose a lighter-footprint counterterrorism strategy aimed at fighting al Qaeda rather than the Taliban that would keep approximately the same number of troops in place.

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The truth is: None of the proposals would have much effect.

We used forecasts from statistical models to determine how the two strategies under Obama's consideration might play out: the chances that insurgency will abate and democracy will strengthen, as well as the impact on the stability of Afghanistan's democratic government and its neighbors, like Pakistan. Unfortunately, we found that regardless of what the United States does, the chance of violent insurgency remains woefully high -- and that a larger force deployment might actually endanger the weak Afghan state.

To perform this analysis, we studied similar efforts by foreign powers to establish democracy during the 20th century -- the Allied forces in Germany and Japan after World War II, for instance, and Sudan after the British colonial occupation. We studied the correlation between the occurrence of insurgency in foreign-created democracies and factors such as the level of economic development, social divisions, number of neighboring democratic states, and historical episodes of political violence. In turn, we studied how these characteristics and the insurgencies they spur influence the durability of democracy. We input data on historical conflicts and current conditions in Afghanistan to generate forecasts for each of the force deployment strategies under Obama's consideration.

We studied the prospects for Afghanistan on a two-year time frame under several scenarios: a same-sized U.S. force, an increased U.S. force, and an increased Afghan force, for instance. In all of our models, regardless of the number of soldiers deployed, the probability of insurgency in the years after the force deployment -- and, thus, continued violence and instability in Afghanistan -- remains so high as to seem certain.

The current cadre fighting al Qaeda and the Taliban includes 68,000 U.S. troops, 40,000 NATO troops, and 94,000 soldiers from the Afghan National Army (ANA). If that same force stays in place, there is a 93.6 percent probability of insurgency over the next year. Regardless of how many additional troops arrive -- or who sends them -- the chance of insurgency in 2010 and 2011 remains more than 90 percent. If the ANA achieves its force target of 134,000 troops, for instance, the probability of insurgency reduces negligibly. Deploying 15,000 more U.S. troops reduces the risk a scant 0.1 percent in 2010. Deploying 60,000 more -- the largest additional U.S. force suggested -- reduces the risk just 0.1 percent further than that.

What explains the inability of any additional deployment to reduce the likelihood of insurgency in Afghanistan? Our analysis suggests that the U.S. counterinsurgency swims against two very strong currents.

First, the combustible mix of Afghanistan's relatively immutable social and political characteristics -- its ethnic and religious divisions, low level of economic development, and large population -- almost guarantees continued insurgency. The country's poverty and large population encourage competition for scarce resources, and that competition gins up violence. Democracy itself seems to further destabilize the country: Our analysis shows that when foreign countries institute democracy in countries with deep ethnic and religious divisions (and Afghanistan is a tribal-based society), insurgency results.

A second factor suggesting that additional U.S. troops won't do much to quell political violence is the length of the war in Afghanistan. Insurgency develops momentum and is more difficult to eliminate the longer it persists. A force that might nip a fledgling insurgency in the bud is unlikely to do so once it is embedded -- and the rebels in Afghanistan have been around for nearly a decade.

While the continued high probability of insurgency in Afghanistan is bad news by itself, its implications for the survival of democracy in Afghanistan are even more sobering. Indeed, the same ethnic and religious divisions, poverty, and large population that make Afghanistan ripe for the Taliban also undermine the viability of the democratic government -- and additional foreign soldiers do little to ameliorate those underlying conditions.

If the United States keeps the current force in place, our analysis predicts a nearly 20 percent chance that democracy will fail in Afghanistan within three years, 40 percent in five years, and 62 percent in 10 years. The most aggressive force expansion, adding 60,000 troops, actually increases the risk of democratic failure, to 22 percent in a three-year time frame and 73 percent in 10 years. Our analysis indicates that larger force deployments increase the risk of democratic failure because they stimulate discontent within the civilian populace -- even if they increase security -- making the durability of the elected government more tenuous.

We also explored the consequences that continued insurgency in Afghanistan might have for its regional neighbors. Our research shows that the successful development of democracy in Afghanistan would promote regional democratization and peace, creating a powerful example for the wider region to follow and encouraging democracy in Pakistan and Iran. But democratic failure in Kabul would carry severe negative effects. In particular, the failure of democracy in Afghanistan raises the risk of civil conflict in Pakistan by a non-negligible 4.2 percent. Not only would the failure of the fledgling Afghan democracy undermine regional hopes for democracy, but the instability would no doubt spill over the country's borders.

Ultimately, our forecasts paint a bleak picture for Afghanistan, regardless of the strategy Obama chooses. Our analysis clearly shows that the time for the stabilization of Afghanistan, if such time existed at all, has passed. The deployment of additional troops to Afghanistan shows little chance of either ending the insurgency or sustaining Afghan democracy. At the same time, the collapse of democracy in Afghanistan raises the specter of something even more worrying: instability in a nuclear-armed Pakistan. As such, our analysis suggests that the resources proposed for the continuation of a losing bet in Afghanistan would be better applied to supporting Pakistan and maintaining its stability.

The world changed in 1989.

At the start of the year, the globe's strategic map looked much like it had since the end of World War II. Communist leaders in China and the Soviet Union held power. Their American counterparts, skeptical of recent calls for change throughout the communist world, prepared for a reinvigorated Cold War of unknown duration and ferocity. Meanwhile, Europe prepared for another year divided along fault lines imposed by conquering armies nearly a half-century before.

A year later, communism would be dead in Eastern Europe and dying in the Soviet Union itself. China would be once more in the grip of hard-liners wary of reform, and once more on the precipice of isolation. Washington would be looking to capitalize on its Cold War victory. Europe would soon be rejoined. The future -- our 21st-century present -- would be at hand. And no one had seen it coming, least of all perhaps China, where the first of 1989's cracks in communism would begin.

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Following decades of enforced deprivation, justified by the quest for ideological purity, Chinese leader Deng Xiaoping and his ruling cadre sought to change their country, but without simultaneously losing the communal zeal and nationalism that had largely defined China since its 1949 revolution. More immediately, they sought some means of managing the social and political transformation sure to result from their economic reforms, believing only strict government control could ensure that the mayhem and violence of China's recent past did not reappear.

In March 1989, dismayed by the growing power of reform movements throughout the Soviet-dominated half of the communist world, Chinese Communist Party officials met to discuss "the unrest in Eastern Europe," concluding that "every effort should be made to prevent changes in Eastern Europe from influencing China's internal development." What was undermining communist rule abroad, they worried, might infect their own country. In 1989, they proved right to worry.

By April, Chinese masses were demanding change to a degree unseen in a generation. Students began to march in favor of reform. Others quickly followed their lead. From the hinterland, protesters surged into the city. While Chinese officials debated, the crowds continued to grow in size and enthusiasm. By May 15, more than 500,000 people filled Tiananmen Square. Just two days later they would number more than a million.

When Deng saw protesters filling the very central square of his capital promising that "turmoil was imminent," he knew it was time to act. The government's official mouthpiece, the Renmin Ribao (People's Daily), had in late April castigated the protesters. The editorial, derived from Deng's own words, read: "Under the banner of democracy," the protesters "were trying to destroy the democratic legal system. ... This was a planned conspiracy, a riot, whose real nature was to fundamentally negate the leadership of the Chinese Communist Party and to negate the socialist system." According to Deng, they were stirring forces that they could not hope to control and that could not therefore be tolerated.

But on the morning of May 16, Deng arrived in high spirits at the Great Hall of the People, located at Tiananmen Square. He was there to meet Mikhail Gorbachev, the first head of the Soviet Union to visit China in 30 years.

The meeting went well. While defending Beijing's stand in the Chinese-Soviet split, Deng acknowledged that, like Moscow, Beijing also "had made some mistakes" in the Chinese-Soviet polemic leading to the split. The thrust of Deng's presentation, though, was not about the past but about the present and the future. Gorbachev seemed to echo Deng's opinion, saying that the Soviets were very pleased to see that a new and promising phase in relations between the two parties and countries. Their strategic consensus to enhance Sino-Soviet relations, would strengthen both countries' positions in managing domestic challenges, while also enhancing their positions in international affairs. Furthermore, the session also meant that for the first time since the late 1950s and early 1960s, the international communist movement would not be burdened by the animosity and mutual exclusion of two of its most important members.

But the 1989 envisioned by Deng and Gorbachev was not to be. Four days after the Deng-Gorbachev summit, the Chinese Communist Party's leadership, headed by Deng, responded to the hundreds of students holding a collective hunger strike by imposing martial law in Beijing. When the student protest persisted, force was employed to crush it. On June 4, People's Liberation Army (PLA) soldiers fought their way into Tiananmen Square, leading to an unknown number of civilian deaths.

The events of Tiananmen Square shocked the whole world. Ironically, it was the rapprochement between Beijing and Moscow that exposed the crackdown to a global audience, as hundreds of journalists and cameramen who reported on Gorbachev's visit stayed to cover the students' demonstrations. They showed, often on live television, how bloody violence was used. The scene of one young man standing alone in front of the PLA's tanks was broadcast repeatedly, often moving the global audience to tears. This was a defining moment in 20th-century history, a moment that would begin to slowly drain international Communism of any moral strength that it once might have possessed. It was the beginning of the end.

The effects of the Tiananmen tragedy ricocheted throughout the entire communist bloc, especially in the Soviet Union and the Soviet bloc countries of Eastern Europe. In Moscow, Gorbachev, in spite of his disapproval of the CCP leadership's behavior, tried to avoid criticizing Beijing directly (though the impact of the Tiananmen crackdown indirectly restricted his ability to influence and control developments in the Soviet Union, and he was even less willing and likely to resort to force in dealing with activities related to the disintegration of the Soviet Union).

In almost every East European country, the pro-democracy movements grew rapidly in the following summer and fall of 1989. These opposition movements took the opportunity of international Communism's deepened legitimacy crisis to wage new offensives against the Communist authorities in their own countries. The Communist leaderships were all facing difficult dilemmas -- they could neither afford to take a totally defensive attitude toward the pro-democracy movements nor dare resort to violent means.

During the following summer and fall, Eastern Europe experienced great unrest, eroding the political foundation and undermining legitimacy of every Communist regime there, culminating on Nov. 9 and 10, 1989. In Germany, the uprising masses brought down the Berlin Wall and with it the symbolic divide between the East and the West. By December -- with the execution of Romania's Communist dictator Nicolae Ceausescu -- the communist bloc in East Europe had virtually collapsed.

Somehow, the Chinese Communist regime survived the shock waves of 1989. After a three-year period of stagnation, Deng used a dramatic tour of southern China in the spring of 1992 to regenerate the "reform and opening-up" project, initiated by Deng and the CCP leadership in the late 1970s. What has followed, as is well known today, is China's rapid economic growth -- despite continuous stagnation in the country's political democratization -- in the last decade of the 20th century and entering the 21st century.

Twenty years after the Tiananmen tragedy and the fall of the Berlin Wall, we have gained some perspective on those events, their causes, and their immediate consequences. Still, China's story in 1989 -- how China shaped the specific course of that year's events and helped define the immediate aftermath -- remains full of questions. In China itself, 1989 has been a "forbidden zone" in the press, scholarship, and classroom teaching. After 20 years, it remains inconceivable for scholars to access Chinese archival sources and many other key documents related to 1989.

The impact of this fateful year continues to play a role in defining the trajectory of China's development. The Chinese experience of 1989, and the Tiananmen tragedy in particular, remains a knot that must be untied and a barrier that must be removed in China's continuous advance toward modernity. Without doing so, the legitimacy narrative of the Chinese "communist" state will always be burdened by its fundamental inability to justify itself.

Something that might augur a truly titanic shift in foreign affairs happened this week. It involves possibly sweeping foreign-policy changes in two of the world's five official nuclear states. It promises to alter the Middle East peace process, negotiations with Iran, and policies regarding Russian missile defense. It will likely necessitate scores of new embassies. It directly affects 500 million people and indirectly affects the rest of the world.

On Tuesday, Vaclav Klaus, president of the Czech Republic, grumblingly signed the European Union's Lisbon Treaty. His was the last signature needed to ratify the agreement, which streamlines Brussels's byzantine and slow-moving policymaking process and creates two leadership roles, an elected president with a 30-month term and a high representative for foreign policy.

Most focus has centered on the former position, whose precise responsibilities and powers EU leaders plan to hash out at a Nov. 11 summit. (The treaty comes into formal effect in December, and the new president is expected to take office on New Year's Day.) The somewhat sexy idea of a European president has led to wild speculation as to who might fill it, with dozens of potential candidates mentioned, most often the silver-tongued and internationally renowned Tony Blair and the barely known center-right Dutch leader Jan Peter Balkenende.

But it's actually the latter gig that has the most potential to transform how Brussels works and how Europe relates to the world. The president is likely to be just a figurehead rather than any kind of revolutionary leader. Just this week, a joint statement from the leaders of Denmark, Finland, and Ireland stressed that the president should be a "chairman," not a "chief." The characteristic most often cited as necessary is "consensus-building." For the eight years that the Lisbon Treaty and its prior incarnations have wended their way through various EU and European institutions, the concern has always been that the president might have too much authority, not too little.

The foreign-policy position and other structural changes built around it, on the other hand, are certain to bring real change. The point of the new role is to create a single, strong negotiator for the European Union. Currently, control over European foreign and defense policy is split between many people and institutions. NATO takes care of continental security, though each country is ultimately responsible for its own. Brussels deploys troops on peacekeeping missions, but doesn't keep its own army. The European Union does have common policies and a high representative for them -- currently, Secretary-General Javier Solana -- but it requires all 27 members to agree before action, a somewhat rare occurrence. As a result, European foreign policy and diplomacy is disaggregated and as diverse as Europe itself, a mishmash of foreign ministers, prime ministers, presidents, European council figures, and EU representatives.

This fracturing ensures that each country represents its own sovereign interests -- important, given Europe's diversity and the introversion of its foreign policy, which often consists of neighbors arguing among themselves. But many have lamented that Europe has no single, strong voice on the global stage -- increasingly dominated by the heavyweights China and the United States -- even despite Europe's economic heft, large population, and consensus on many issues.

Susanne Nies, a director of the French Institute of International Relations, told the Los Angeles Times, "The EU has kind of been ignored, kind of scorned by foreign powers despite its impressive wealth" because it "was not always clear who you were dealing with." Former U.S. Secretary of State Henry Kissinger once famously asked, "Who do I call if I want to call Europe?" -- and it's a tough question to answer.

The Lisbon Treaty does much to centralize Europe's foreign-policy power under the high representative, combining the authority held by Solana (who primarily handles relations between the European Union, national governments, and international bodies) and the external relations commissioner (who controls the budget and the bureaucracy). The new mandate is broad and deep, with the foreign-policy czar doing everything from chairing meetings of member-country ministers to controlling the European intelligence-sharing unit, the Situation Center. "It gives that person a sway and a ... regularization of power," says Charles Kupchan, a Europe expert at the Council on Foreign Relations and Georgetown University.

Most importantly, the high representative will control an entirely new foreign service, the European External Action Service (EEAS), proposing the budget and holding oversight over staffing. The EEAS will comprise thousands of analysts and diplomats from member countries and various EU bodies, creating policies to be voted upon by member-countries. The 125 European Commission representative offices will become EU embassies, with ambassadors appointed by Brussels. The EEAS will also control the EU missions in Bosnia, Kosovo, Afghanistan, Georgia, and elsewhere.

The tasks -- from intelligence sharing to peacekeeping to diplomatic negotiations -- aren't new. The revolutionary aspect of Lisbon is to ensure that they happen under a single roof, making the goal of a unified EU foreign policy (if not a monolithic one) more of a reality. The potential policy footprints for the EEAS and the high representative are, simply, enormous, far beyond the scope of any other single EU figure or agency at the moment. And big names are already being mentioned for the role, most often David Miliband, the British foreign minister.

Questions remain about how it will work, and the new high representative and foreign service aren't due to come into full effect until 2012. Two groups in particular might pose strong opposition to the proposals under consideration: small countries fearful of ceding sovereignty and big countries with strong foreign ministers, like Germany, fearful of ceding power. "Small countries are likely to feel completely overshadowed -- partly because they already do," Kupchan says. On the other side, he asks, "How willing are the foreign ministers of France, Germany, and Britain to take a back seat to the so-called high representative in Brussels?"

Although such considerations might mean a diminution or dilution of the Lisbon Treaty's bold changes, the major structural transformation is sure to take place, and that structural transformation suggests a major change in how Europe engages with the world. At least as proposed, it seems that come 2012 a single agency will write and mediate the European Union's foreign policy and a single figure will be the primary negotiator of its interests abroad -- meaning, too, that a single person will pick up the phone when would-be Kissingers decide to call.

"This is not a geopolitical earthquake," Kupchan notes. "On the other hand, it is precisely these kinds of institutional changes that, in the long run, change the world."

Few images epitomize Western fears of terrorism since the September 11 attacks better than that of the long-bearded jihadist, such as Osama bin Laden himself. Ironically, many Afghans have come to share the West's pogonophobia. But Afghans don't just fear the bearded Taliban. They also fear bearded Western special operations forces.

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The wearing of beards by U.S. and allied special operations forces dates back to the invasion in 2001, when small teams of troops worked with Northern Alliance forces to overthrow the Taliban. The Western men grew beards in part to blend in on arduous and isolated missions in rural parts of Afghanistan, where long beards are still typically the norm and were the law under Taliban rule.

Beards remain, by and large, the distinctive hallmark of special operations forces in Afghanistan. They allow Afghans to distinguish regular U.S. and allied military units from special operations forces, the highly trained teams like the Green Berets and Navy SEALs. But for most Afghans, these beards now carry a negative connotation.

In Kandahar province's Zhari district, elders refer to the "bearded Americans," who they say behave very badly, and the "shaven Americans," who aren't so bad. Likewise, in Uruzgan province, locals have complained about "bearded Americans" using foul language and manhandling respected community elders and government officials.

Of course, not all members of special operations forces -- U.S. or allied -- wear beards, and not all regular troops are cleanshaven. Moreover, special operations soldiers tend not to be Rambo-types; they are often unassuming, if quietly confident, men, chosen as much for their mental as their physical aptitude.

But (often bearded) special operations forces are responsible for the most dangerous and controversial missions. Special operations forces, not regular troops, for instance, capture and kill key al Qaeda and Taliban figures. Apart from the civilian casualties these operations sometimes cause, they also bring these soldiers into close contact with Afghan society at places and times where it is most vulnerable and sensitive. Special operations forces, for example, perform late-night raids of Afghan homes, a deeply humiliating and dishonorable event in the local culture -- in particular, the searching of women's quarters.

It is so shameful that some Afghans have cited the searches as the reason for their joining the growing ranks of the internally displaced. As one former resident of Khas Uruzgan recounted to local researchers, "I went to Spin Boldak to save my dignity. We don't want to see our wives and daughters without their shawls, searched in front of us. We were humiliated."

Further, these missions sometimes end in arbitrary arrests and indefinite detentions at Bagram Airfield, where the moral, legal, and political conundrums thrown up by the prison there perhaps equal those of Guantánamo Bay, but with much less public attention. And, in the past, the missions have even caused problems for regional International Security Assistance Force (ISAF) commanders whose efforts to build trust with locals were complicated by controversial special forces operations about which they knew nothing in advance.

This should provide those advocating a renewed narrow focus on the counterterrorism mission in Afghanistan with food for thought. It may seem a cheaper and cleaner alternative to the counterinsurgency approach the Pentagon advocates. But it would come at a high cost for the local population and for the West's reputation, relying on the most resented soldiers, compromising the United States' goal of winning hearts and minds.

It is significant that the man now charged with turning things around in Afghanistan, Gen. Stanley McChrystal, was previously the head of U.S. Joint Special Operations Command and oversaw these types of direct-action operations by special forces. By some accounts, McChrystal has adopted the Army's broader counterinsurgency mission with all the zeal of a convert. Serious questions remain about whether even a fully resourced counterinsurgency approach will work in Afghanistan, but a key measure of its success will be one that McChrystal has himself established: the protection of civilians.

This goal has led McChrystal to place, very publicly, limits on the use of air power by coalition forces. The high civilian death toll in the recent airstrike on a hijacked oil tanker in Kunduz province demonstrated both the importance of this new injunction and the difficulty of implementing it.

An equal measure of McChrystal's commitment to protect Afghans will be how he uses the special operations forces he once led and whose activities remain shrouded in secrecy. In a recent speech at the International Institute for Strategic Studies in London, the ISAF commander emphasized yet again that Afghans need protecting: from the Taliban and other insurgents who kill, maim, exploit, and extort, as well as from the warlords whose predatory instincts have not been dulled by the fact that some are today ministers in the national government.

But as McChrystal made clear, if the West is to win in Afghanistan, sometimes the allied forces will "need to protect [Afghans] from our own actions" as well.