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AT: Soft Power – Alt Causes



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AT: Soft Power – Alt Causes

Multiple actions are a prerequisite to effectively deploying Soft Power


Lord and Cronin 10 Lord is vice president and director of studies at the Center for a New American Security and a former special adviser to the U.S. undersecretary of state for democracy and global affairs, Cronin is a senior adviser and senior director at the Center for a New American Security, Washington and a former assistant administrator for policy and program coordination at the U.S. Agency for International Development (Kristin, Parker, April 12, 2010, “Deploying Soft Power,” http://www.defensenews.com/article/20100412/DEFFEAT05/4120314/Deploying-Soft-Power)//DR. H
Despite this unprecedented commitment to soft power, the U.S. government still lacks the ability to translate words into action. America remains strangely ill-equipped to combine hard power and soft power. The U.S. military filled this void over the last nine years while fighting two wars, but it is time to fix what is broken. Unless the U.S. government strengthens its diplomatic, informational and economic tools of power, this admirable new commitment to soft power will fail.

A key challenge is to integrate the elements of power consistently, and not just in Washington strategy sessions but also overseas. We offer four steps forward:

å We need to create a fund that supports surging our civilian work force into conflict zones. Sen. John Kerry, D-Mass., chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, and Sen. Richard Lugar, R-Ind., the ranking minority member, have made clear that a civilian surge is one of the prerequisites for success in Afghanistan. Since Pentagon officials agree, it's time to put our money where our mouths are by using Defense Department money to create a fund for surging our civilian work force in stabilization missions and other complex contingencies.

å We need to create civilian-led equivalents of military combatant commands that can unify our diplomatic, development, public engagement and defense efforts. The military has taken on new development and public diplomacy missions because it has the ability to integrate these tools, the operational capacity to use them and a broad regional focus - but it is neither enthusiastic nor best-positioned to carry out these tasks.

Washington-based agencies focus on formulating and coordinating policy, not implementation. That step must occur in the field. This does not necessarily mean simply placing a civilian on top of an existing military command, such as U.S. Africa Command, where a civilian is a prominent deputy. It may mean creating regional or subregional hubs, regional equivalents of embassy country teams, that enable U.S. agencies to integrate diplomacy, development, public engagement and defense more effectively.

å We need a new type of interagency professional, expert in the tradecraft of one agency but with vast networks across parochial governmental departments. We envision a national security cadre in which defense, diplomacy and development agencies create career paths of experts skilled in managing complex global activities. Hybrid challenges require hybrid professionals. With expertise in interagency strategy, planning and implementation, this network of managers would create a vital capacity to combine soft and hard power effectively.

å We need a larger civilian expeditionary force to respond to international crises when necessary. The failure of the State Department and the U.S. Agency for International Development to send more than 1,000 civilians to Afghanistan in less than one year to support President Barack Obama's new strategy and a force growing to 100,000 troops illustrates the challenge.

The government's Civilian Response Corps has set a relatively meager goal of 250 active civilians who can deploy into stabilization and reconstruction missions. Unfortunately, this is insufficient for today's operational needs and tomorrow's possible contingencies. Without a small but permanent civilian capacity, even the most brilliant strategy that integrates diplomacy, development and defense cannot bear fruit.



National security leaders should have no illusions that this will be easy. A first step to wielding soft power well is to recognize not just its potential but also its limits. Using soft power is hard. It relies on persuasion, negotiation, attraction and public engagement - the effects of which are rarely visible or swift.

With coercion, change is quick, but unintended consequences can linger. For this reason, Mullen did something unpopular among many in uniform: He called for limited, restrained, precise uses of force. Victory demands looking past the immediate killing of enemies, which can engender deep wells of anti-Americanism.



Soft power is different. Though the long-term effects can be pivotal, there is no instant gratification. Since it is complicated to establish a cause, it can be hard to know when soft power is working.

*Reforestation Takeout – 1NC—Squo Solves




Obama recently invested $1 billion in worldwide reforestation initiatives

US Department of State, et al. 10 (“U.S. REDD+ Programs: Addressing Climate Change by Conserving and Restoring the World’s Forests” U.S. Department of State, U.S. Agency for International Development, U.S. Department of Treasury, U.S. Department of Agriculture (including U.S. Forest Service), U.S. Environmental Protection Agency, NASA, U.S. Department of the Interior (including U.S. Geological Survey), December 2010, http://kosovo.info.usaid.gov/our_work/environment/climate/docs/UnitedStatesREDD+Brochure.pdf) MLR
As an important part of President Obama’s new Global Development Policy and the United States’ commitment to “fast start” financing in the Copenhagen Accord, we are dedicating $1 billion over the FY2010-2012 timeframe to REDD+ plus activities that help countries to slow, halt, and eventually reverse deforestation.1 U.S. REDD+ fast start financing focuses on reducing emissions from deforestation and forest degradation, and enhancing sequestration by forests. Other landscapes with high mitigation potential, such as peatlands and wetlands, may also be addressed. REDD+ activities offer cost-effective opportunities to reduce global greenhouse gas emissions while providing other sustainable development benefits, such as improved local livelihoods, economic growth, and enhanced ecosystem services. The United States recognizes, as does the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change, that all nations should promote sustainable development and the realities of climate change require a sustainable, low emissions development path. This path offers opportunities for countries to improve the living standards of their people by ensuring sound economic growth while protecting the environment. As part of the Global Climate Change Initiative (GCCI) under the Administration’s Global Development Policy, the United States seeks to mobilize financing from all sources, including the private sector, to leverage the respective strengths of multilateral and bilateral assistance mechanisms. We will work to ensure that our climate finance is efficient, effective, and innovative, based on countryowned plans, and focused on achieving measurable results. We will focus our bilateral efforts on those countries and regions where we have a comparative advantage, and will coordinate closely with other donors. The United States is taking a multipronged approach to the problem. A variety of U.S. agencies are working to help countries get “ready” for REDD+ actions, including USAID as well as our technical agencies which are collaborating with developing countries to share the best of U.S. science, technology, and expertise through global, regional, and bilateral initiatives.
Reforestation solves emissions comparatively better than CCS

Zhao 9 – pursuing environmental science and chemistry degree at Franklin and Marshall College, organized the first International Youth Summit on Energy and Climate Change in Beijing (Yupu, “Will Forests Help Mitigate Climate Change? (part 1)” TH!NK: Climate Change, December 14 2009. http://climatechange.thinkaboutit.eu/think4/post/will_forests_help_mitigate_climate_change_part_1/) MLR
Beginning to realize the dire consequences of inaction, many climate mitigation strategies have been proposed by scientists and politicians alike in recent years. Yet, many of these options, such as mass deployment of renewable energies, or developing carbon capture and storage (CCS) that would inject CO2 directly into underground geological formation, require huge investment in research and development (R&D) and are not likely to make significant impact on global carbon emissions in the short term. The IPCC report noted that preventing deforestation and better reforestation programs would be the mitigation option with the largest and most immediate carbon stock impact globally (9). Consequently, increasing attention has been given to policies that influence forestry and land-management practices, both domestically and abroad. The on-going United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) negotiations have focused on issues relating to reducing emissions from deforestation and forest degradation in developing countries (REDD). In the US, the American Clean Energy and Security Act (also known as the Waxman-Markey Bill), which was passed in the US House of Representatives in June, 2009, proposed a cap-and-trade system that would allow US corporations to offset their carbon emission through forestry and land-management activities. The prevailing bill in the Senate, proposed by Senator John Kerry and Barbara Boxer, also suggests a similar forestry carbon offset policy (8). Why do forestry activities receive special attentions from experts of IPCC and other institutions? This is because forests play an essential role in the global carbon cycles, in at least three ways. First, forests are major contributors to the terrestrial carbon sink as they cover nearly 30% of the global land surface. Annually, terrestrial ecosystems remove approximately 3 billion tons of anthropogenic carbon through net growth, absorbing nearly 33% of all carbon dioxide emissions from fossil fuel burning and land-use change (1, 2). Second, forest ecosystems store large reservoirs of carbon. According to the UN Food and Agriculture Organization’s report on global forest resources in 2005, the total amount of carbon stored in forests is twice as much as it in the atmosphere (3). Third, not only are forests a major absorber and storehouse for carbon dioxide, they have been adding CO2 into the atmosphere as deforestation and forest degradation intensified throughout the world, especially in the tropics. The IPCC 4th assessment report estimated emissions from deforestation in the 1990s at a striking 5.8 Gt CO2/year (9). According to the Union of Concerned Scientists data, the tropic deforestation alone accounts for about 15 percent of greenhouse gas emissions (6)!



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