have rallied behind a Catholic Center—led government. The German general staff had no love for Adolf Hitler and his brownshirts, and he was a long way from being the undisputed representative of the people. Remember, the Nazis lost seats in 1932. German popular will was not yet decisively behind Hitler or his party.
Without Hitler, the capitalist, democratic world and the communist, totalitarian world led by Joseph Stalin might have butted heads in the 1930s instead of waiting for the cold war. Perhaps even as bloody a war as World War II would have been fought, and perhaps not. Stalin’s Soviet Union might have successfully defended its frontiers, but it probably had nothing like the capabilities of Hitler’s rearmed Germany to wage an aggressive war beyond its borders.
All this is speculation, of course, but there seems little reason to doubt the model’s accuracy in this or the other cases looked at in this chapter, given its track record over thousands of applications. And if we can replay the past accurately and find ways to improve it, as we just did with World Wars I and II, there is no reason to doubt that we can fast-forward the present and work out ways to make it turn out better. That is the whole purpose of this forecasting and engineering enterprise.
In the next chapter, we will play with some of the big issues of our time. I will use my newest model to make live predictions whose accuracy you will be able to check for yourself.
10
DARE TO BE EMBARRASSED!
IT’S ALWAYS NEAT to think about what-ifs, to rewrite the past with the idea that we could have worked things out for the better. But thinking about how to rewrite history is one thing; thinking about how to write a script for the future is quite another. It’s so easy to get the past right when you already know what happened. And while examining alternative pasts is fun and informative, we still never get to find out whether we really could have derailed Sparta’s defeat or stopped Hitler in his tracks. Ultimately, solving a seventy- or eighty-year-old problem is fascinating, but not terribly useful outside of what it teaches us about the gaming process. Working out how to solve today’s problems, like stopping al-Qaeda dead in its tracks—now
In this chapter we will look ahead a year or two from when I am writing this (in April 2009 for the case of Iran- Iraq relations and June 2008 for the Pakistan case). Here is where the rubber really meets the road. We will look at what the United States government could do to diminish the threat of terrorism or insurgency in Pakistan, and the likely relations to develop between Iran and Iraq if President Obama fully withdraws U.S. forces from Iraq or leaves fifty thousand in that country well beyond August 2010.
Back in the spring of 2008 and again in 2009 I taught an undergraduate seminar at NYU in which twenty terrific students in each class used my new forecasting model. This was a great opportunity for me (as well as, I hope, for my students) to find out how hard or easy it is to teach people with no prior experience how to become effective political engineers. Fortunately, my students were willing guinea pigs, and they did a great job.
The main idea behind this course, sponsored by NYU’s Alexander Hamilton Center for Political Economy, was to search for solutions to pressing policy problems based only on logic and evidence. That is the Center’s mission. It leaves no room for partisanship, ideology, opinion, anecdotes, or personal wishes when it comes to crafting solutions. Game-theory models, however, are a way to fulfill the mission. With that in mind, I asked my students to pick any foreign policy problem that intrigued them. They clustered themselves into groups and set to work on Pakistan, the Israeli-Palestinian dispute, global warming, nuclear proliferation, relations between Cuba and the United States, relations between Russia and the Ukraine, and many other critical policy concerns.
Each student studied a problem that he or she really cared about. They took the class knowing that they would use game theory to work out likely future developments and to write a script about how to improve the future from the perspective of any one of the players in the game. They had almost no prior experience with any of the material or models. They had limited access to experts, so they relied on the Internet and major news outlets to put their data together. I mention this to be clear that any hardworking, motivated person can replicate what they did. All this being said, my students used my new model, and I certainly reviewed their work—so any misses are the model’s and mine.
Okay, let’s see what they came up with, remembering that the first class began in January 2008 and had its last meeting on May 5, 2008, and that the second started in late January 2009 and ended in the first week of May 2009. Everything reported here was worked out during those months. No information has been updated or altered to take account of later developments. The students had no prior experience with my old forecasting model or my entirely different and more sophisticated new model. We met for two and a half hours each week in class. They made weekly presentations, got lots of feedback, and spent a fair amount of additional time with me in my office learning how to interpret the new model’s results. They also put in lots of additional time figuring out what questions to ask and how to frame them, assembling the data, and preparing their weekly presentations and final papers. Let’s have a look at what they found out.
PAKISTAN: WHERE HAVE ALL
THE SOLDIERS GONE?
The group that decided to work on Pakistan in 2008 was intrigued by three policy questions. They wanted to know how willing the Pakistani government was going to be to pursue militant groups operating in and around Pakistan, including al-Qaeda, the Pakistani Taliban, and the Afghan Taliban. They also wanted to investigate whether the Pakistani government would allow U.S. military forces to use Pakistani territory to launch efforts to track down militants. Finally, they wanted to forecast the level of future U.S. foreign aid to Pakistan and whether a higher or lower amount of aid was likely to change the Pakistani leadership’s approach to pursuing militants.
These are big questions that go to the heart of U.S. interests in Pakistan. While answering these questions, the students also uncovered answers to a bunch of other important and compelling issues.
By way of background, it is important to remember that when the students started their project, Pakistan was in the midst of a crisis. Benazir Bhutto, Pakistan’s former prime minister, had returned from exile in late 2007 as part of a deal she negotiated with Pakistani president Pervez Musharraf. She was expected to become the next prime minister following the general elections scheduled for January 8, 2008. Instead, she was assassinated on December 27, 2007.
The elections were postponed to February 18, 2008. Musharraf’s party was routed, while the parties of former prime ministers Bhutto and Nawaz Sharif, also recently returned from exile, won control of the national assembly (Pakistan’s parliament). Musharraf continued as president. Mrs. Bhutto’s husband, Asif Ali Zardari, became the new head of her party, the Pakistan Peoples Party (PPP), while the party of former prime minister Nawaz Sharif, the Pakistan Muslim League-Nawaz (PML-N), joined the PPP to form a coalition government.
Neither of the two victorious parties was a friend to Musharraf. He was in the awkward position of having to
