TW3 ... and ambivalance

[Political Waves]

That Was The Week That Was ... wonky. Sex advice from Van Gogh and a pig with the 'vapors' -- and I understand about the tigers; I'm intimidated by chickens too.

News of the day: it's Obama's war now -- although he pleads that it is an international effort, which it is ... but he's gonna take one on the chin from the Left, and the rest of the nation ain't too sure either. 30,000 more troops will deploy shortly after the first of the year, including my young cousin. I hope the Prez is convinced that the various missions he's redirecting will be worth whatever comes next.

The big howl is the time line he's established, to get in and get out; flies in the face of historical militarism. But frankly, if we're going to do this at a million bucks a soldier a year, I think there should be a short shelf life. The faux-government that Bush established there will likely be not help. Obama promised to be tough on corruption; that's one I hope he keeps.

 

The last two pieces in this post speak of ambivalence -- and I have a bit of that, as well. It seems to me, as Obama was quick to point out, this is more about Pakistan Pakistan Pakistan than anything else. Afghanistan has never belonged to anyone but the Afghani's, not too long anyhow; but Pakistan is armed with nukes and full of cutthroats -- the one seems a quagmire but the other seems an imperative.

Before the reads on AfPak ... written prior to Obama's speech tonight ... a little something about the White House gate-crashers that I found worrisome. We don't have that whole story, for sure.

I'm on the plane at o'dark thirty tomorrow, winging home for my annual visit. I'll catch up with you on Friday.

Jude


HARPER'S WEEKLY REVIEW
December 1, 2009

News leaked that President Barack Obama would send roughly
30,000 troops to Afghanistan, with the possibility of
sending 10,000 more in a year, even as NATO allies spoke
about withdrawing their own forces. Both Democrats and
Republicans were skeptical of the strategy; Republican
Senator Jon Kyl (R., Ariz.) said that the call for phased
deployment was "reminiscent of Vietnam." Obama is
expected, in a forthcoming speech at West Point, to
provide a time frame for when American forces will leave
the country and to stress that the goal in Afghanistan is
to "defeat" Al Qaeda. A Senate report revealed that Donald
Rumsfeld, by failing to launch a rapid assault on Osama
bin Laden at Tora Bora in December 2001, allowed bin Laden
to escape capture. Children were finding work as food
smugglers along the border between Pakistan and
Afghanistan. "I want to have an easy job," said
eight-year-old Sabar Mina, a Pakistani girl who earns 20
cents per trip to support her family. "A job where nobody
hits us or hurts us." A survey found that 10 percent of
Americans under the age of 35, facing financial
difficulties, had moved back in with their parents. Obama
pardoned Courage the turkey.

Florida police were searching for a 35-year-old man who
after Thanksgiving dinner fatally shot his aunt, his twin
sisters, and his six-year-old cousin who was in bed
resting before her performance in "The Nutcracker" the
next day. Police in Washington state were searching for a
man who shot and killed four police officers as they
worked on their laptops inside a Forza
coffeeshop. Scientists found that drinking a cup of
Brazilian mint tea can alleviate pain. A Quebec woman who
was on paid sick leave after being diagnosed with
depression said that her insurance company denied her
health benefits after it found photos on her Facebook page
that purportedly prove her capable of having
fun. Photographs on the Facebook page of Michaele Salahi,
a Virginia woman who hopes to become a star on the
upcoming reality show "The Real Housewives of D.C.,"
revealed that she and her husband, Tareq, crashed Obama's
first state dinner, where they shook hands with the
president and received a warm hug from Vice President Joe
Biden. The University of California, Santa Cruz, was
seeking a librarian to catalog the Grateful Dead
archive. Leeds University was searching for a researcher
to study lap dancing, and Copenhagen was worried about sex
slavery, with women on sale for as little as 15,000
kroner. A crowd gathered outside a Sydney clock tower to
watch an Australian couple have intercourse, and Vincent
Van Gogh's complete letters were published. "Eat well,"
Van Gogh wrote to a fellow painter. "Don't fuck too hard;
if you don't fuck too hard, your painting will be all the
spunkier for it."

Scientists counted more than 17,000 species of creatures
living at least three miles below the world's oceans,
5,600 of them previously unknown, including Enypiastes, a
translucent sea cucumber. Lucky, the world's oldest sheep,
succumbed to heatstroke and died, toothless and arthritic,
at the age of 23; zookeepers at the Chongqing Wild Animal
Park, China, were dismayed to find that the zoo's five
white tigers had become so domesticated they were scared
of the live chickens they were meant to eat; and fifteen
firefighters went to an Australian home to look for a
reported gas leak but found instead a fat farting
pig. Hundreds of thousands of Hindus converged in Nepal
for the world's largest animal sacrifice festival, a
two-day event in honor of Gadhimai, a goddess of power,
during which more than 250,000 animals were slaughtered,
including 15,000 male water buffalos and at least 100,000
goats. Wild camels in search of water overran a small
Australian town, trampling fences and smashing water
tanks; authorities planned to corral about 6,000 of the
animals with helicopters and gun them down. A Pittsburgh
man told police that he killed Flip, his girlfriend's
13-week-old puppy, because the pit bull would not behave
before the start of a Steelers game, and Tiger Woods hit a
tree in his SUV. The Swiss banned further construction of
minarets; Christians in Jerusalem wanted Jews to stop
spitting on them; and ten Florida middle schoolers were
suspended for participating in Kick a Jew Day.

-- Claire Gutierrez
http://harpers.org/archive/2009/12/WeeklyReview2009-12-01

bonus


 
Getting Into The White House
Elayne Boosler, writer/comedian, HuffPo
November 30, 2009
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/elayne-boosler/getting-into-the-white-ho_b_374639.html

You don't get into the White House by accident. It is not airport security, where if you get the fat guy thinking about lunch, your hunting knife and your eight ounces of shampoo sail on through the x-ray. It is nothing like that. The only way anybody, and I mean anybody, gets into the White House, let alone a state dinner, is because someone on the inside purposely let him in. I knew news organizations in American were dying, I didn't know I had missed the funeral.

On Fox News Sunday, Indiana Democrat Evan Bayh said, "Like [shoe bomber] Richard Reid, these folks may change the way people go to the White House," and said this breach of security would lead to stricter safety measures at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue. Perhaps he's never gone in as a guest. They couldn't be any stricter.

In 1993 I was the comedian performing at President Clinton's first White House Press Correspondent's dinner. Weeks earlier, I was asked to provide my legal name, address, social security number, date of birth, and on and on. Thank God, unlike when doing Letterman and Leno, I didn't have to provide the jokes in advance for approval. At least the White House understands the spontaneity needed for good comedy. No doubt my entire family history was
checked out, and I was cleared. I went to a private reception with the president, vice president, their wives, and a few others. I had dinner. I performed. A good time was had by all.

No matter. Two years later I was to entertain the president and congress again, this time at Ford's Theater, for an ABC TV special. There was a reception at the White House first. Again, despite having been cleared by the network and okayed by the White House and thoroughly vetted earlier, I filled out all forms in advance. When I showed up with my husband at the White House clearing gate, we were kept there for half an hour while they matched us to our documents, then ran checks. Literally, a half hour outside in the cold. They kept apologizing, but explained this was the way it worked. They made copies of our I.D. My husband had to remove his jacket, and we were frisked: and I mean frisked. I almost bought a pregnancy test on the way home. At every step of the way our passes were checked and rechecked with intense scrutiny. To approach the president and Mrs. Clinton, we were rechecked on the receiving line. Photos were taken. At every step of the way, there were more men with earpieces standing poised than in even the most overblown Bruckheimer movie. Always checking our passes, our demeanor, us.

You don't "breeze on past" White House security by simply "walking in with confidence." It's not a hotspot in the Meatpacking District. The guards are not intimidated, they are of a military mentality, and while they kept us there, we talked about show business. They knew who I was and that I wasn't a danger, and still ran the abc's because that is the protocol.

Something is wrong here. Instead of the press speculating over whether the two gate crashers are asking to be paid for their TV interviews, they should be asking how this couple is allowed to be free at this moment. Instead of bloggers angrily speculating that if this couple was black, they would not have gotten past security, they should be chillingly stunned that anybody not cleared got through security. These kinds of breaches don't just "happen." Somebody in this government is putting this president's life at risk. Reality show? Time to bring back The Mole. And if it really, really, really did "just happen"? Well, a lot of intelligent, hard working people are looking for jobs right now. I suggest replacing the president's detail
with people who weren't rejected by the TSA. Or Wal-Mart. ++


Why I Changed My Mind On Afghanistan
Cenk Uygur, The Young Turks, HuffPo
December 1, 2009
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/cenk-uygur/why-i-changed-my-mind-on_b_374937.html

    
Until about a month ago, I agreed with Barack Obama's strategy in Afghanistan. I thought we should have concentrated on Afghanistan from the beginning. We should have brought in so many more troops. We owed it to the Afghan people to do the best we could for them since we happened to invade their country. I think the Taliban is the scourge of the earth, and the idea that they might take over after we leave is abhorrent to me. We had to stay and get it right.

So, what happened?

The Afghan elections.

Over one million votes were fraudulent. 1.3 million fake votes were thrown out to be exact. That's out of only five million votes. That's ridiculous. Obviously the current government of Afghanistan is a sham. The key to "winning" in Afghanistan is to convince the Afghani people to work with us. They have to side with us over the Taliban. If they don't, we're not helping them, we're fighting them. And that's just about where we are now.

What's the long term strategy? Kill all the Taliban? Do we even know who is Taliban and who is not? Matthew Hoh, the US diplomat who resigned his post in protest of the war, points out that "valleyism" reigns supreme in Afghanistan. That means if you come into my valley, I will fight you. They don't care if you're Russian or British or Persian or American or even an Afghan from the central government. You step into their valley, and they will fight you to the bitter end. And there is no end. They're fighting us because we're fighting them.

Yes, that's all good and fine. The Karzai government has no legitimacy or broad popular support. We can't possibly "win" and we don't even know what it means for us to "win." But what about the Taliban? We can't let them take over Afghanistan. But who is to say they would? Here's what I realized recently - when we leave, it'll be them fighting in the valleys.
The Taliban never had full control of Afghanistan, and they never will. The minute they try to take charge, the Afghans - as is in their nature - will rebel. They'll fight back. They'll fight for their valleys. They'll fight to the bitter end. And there is no end.

How about Al Qaeda? There are very few Al Qaeda fighters left in Afghanistan. And drone strikes work just as well in Afghanistan as they do in Pakistan (or just as poorly, depending on your perspective). Let's focus on getting those guys - remember they're the ones who actually attacked us. But we don't have to occupy a whole country (and rebuild it, too) while we hunt for Al Qaeda. If you think that we do, then under that logic, we should invade Pakistan and occupy it until we capture Osama bin Laden who is hiding in that country.

And we recently showed in Somalia that we can eliminate Al Qaeda operatives with Special Ops Forces on targeted missions. When we went after the Al Qaeda leader in that region, we swooped in with a small team, took out the target and took back off. Imagine if we invaded Somalia instead. Would anyone in their right mind be in favor of that as an alternate policy?

So, is the difference in Afghanistan simply that we're there already? Is that a good enough reason to continue a policy that we otherwise would not and should not carry out?

Finally, the amount of money we're spending on these wars is insane. In Iraq and Afghanistan combined, we have so far spent $937 billion. For that kind of money, we could have already given everyone in the country health care - and not even paid for it. The wars, unlike the current health care proposals, are not deficit neutral. They are enormous budget busters and suck the funding from everything else. Is there really anyone in America who believes a few more years of the Afghanistan war is worth not getting health care coverage for themselves or their family?

The bottom line is that we don't have a viable partner in Afghanistan and we don't have the legitimacy that is essential to rebuilding the country. The Afghans don't view us as their saviors. They view us as the latest intruder in their valley. That is not a visit that is going to work out for us. That's not a visit that's ever worked out for anybody. ++


Where's That Endgame He Promised Us?
Dan Froomkin, HuffPo
12- 1-09
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2009/12/01/wheres-that-endgame-he-pr_n_375511.html

    
There's no longer any doubt that President Obama will announce tonight that he is escalating the military conflict in Afghanistan, sending 30,000 more American troops into harm's way by June. But what's not at all clear is whether, or in what form, he'll deliver that endgame he promised us.

The latest reports are that Obama will announce a general timeframe for withdrawal tonight: In three years --before the end of his first term --most troops will be out. That's an exciting and ambitious target. But if it turns out to be just an unsupported best-case scenario, then his promise is just so many words.

To make the case that the war in Afghanistan will truly end in three years -- or ever -- Obama tonight would need to announce not just a timeframe for withdrawal, but a detailed timeline -- along with unambiguous benchmarks. And he would need to say precisely what happens if the benchmarks aren't met - i.e. if things don't go according to plan.
Because things in Afghanistan never go according to plan.

Otherwise, there will be much more in the speech for neocons and other warhawks than for the majority of Americans who prefer withdrawal over escalation. As Gideon Rose, the managing editor of Foreign Affairs, put it to me in an interview yesterday: "They'll get the troops -- and you'll get some nice rhetoric."

The question that most urgently needs to be answered, says Rose, is this: "If things don't work out the way they want, will they ultimately walk away, or will they stay to keep a lid on things? And that is something that they don't know themselves, perhaps."

The only benchmarks that really matter would speak to whether the Afghans can hold their country together when we leave. For example: The ability of local forces with our training and support -- but without our actual participation -- to maintain security and stability in certain key sections of the country.

If the benchmark is reached, then mission accomplished, we can start going home.

But what if they can't keep order? "If the government cannot maintain order, and will never be able to maintain order by itself, even with our help, then we have no choice but to confront the true dilemma, which is: How important is order there to us?" Rose says.

As long as Obama refuses to make it explicitly clear that if things don't go according to plan, we are out of there, regardless of the consequences, then our policy toward Afghanistan is, in fact, open-ended, regardless of any timeframe.

Obama started rethinking his Afghan policy about 10 weeks ago, and in early November reportedly threw out the four options before him, in search of an exit strategy - a way out. He's been promising one ever since. "I am very confident that when I announce the decision, the American people will have a lot of clarity about what we're doing, how we're going to succeed, how much this thing is going to cost," he told CNN two weeks ago. "And most importantly, what's the endgame on this thing? Which I think is something that unless you impose that kind of discipline, could end up leading to a multi-year occupation that won't serve the interests of the United States."

For Ted Galen Carpenter, vice president for defense and foreign policy studies at the libertarian Cato Institute, the answer is simple: No benchmarks, no troops. "I think he has to stress that there are specific benchmarks, and that he is absolutely serious about the benchmarks," Carpenter tells me. "And if they are not met, we are going to pull back; we are going to begin to de-escalate - and then he has to carry that out, because I suspect it won't be that long until a key benchmark won't be met."

The political dangers of explicitly taking such a position are great, however. As soon as Obama makes it clear that he has a walk-away point short of victory, Rose says, he'll be "automatically attacked as a Democratic, appeasing wimp."

The only thing more politically dangerous would be announcing the only genuine exit strategy: Actually starting the withdrawal right away.

But short of adopting some sort of ultra-bellicose Cheneyesque position, he's going to be attacked for being weak anyway.

Obama, of course, has only made this harder for himself by defining the conflict in Afghanistan as "a war of necessity" in August.

Then, just last week, he insisted that he would "finish the job."

"That wrote a check that he can't possibly cash," Rose says. "There's no possible way, unless he gets really lucky. You can walk away from the problem and bear the risks of doing so, or you can deal with the problem and bear the costs. But how you can manage to wind this down and cut your costs while also cutting down your risks? That is a conjuring trick."

One possibility to keep in mind is that Obama may be setting the stage for making the argument, sometime in the next year or two that we tried, we gave it our best shot, but that our goals are simply not attainable -- and we should therefore withdraw from the country and remain involved only to the extent that if Al Qaeda returns, we will engage them.

"I think that would at least be a credible attempt to square a circle," says Carpenter, who co-authored a Cato Institute white paper titled "Escaping the Graveyard of Empires".

But the moment even that becomes apparent, Carpenter says, "the Republicans are going to smell blood" and accuse him of being "vacillating, inconsistent, and the thing that every Democratic politician since the 1960s has been worried about, namely that he is soft on national security issues."

Carpenter isn't optimistic that Obama will actually do that. But, "if he's willing to take that heat, then ultimately a majority of Americans will support him. But he has to be willing to take some hostile fire." ++


MoveOn Moves Against Obama On Afghanistan
Sam Stein, HuffPo
12-1-09
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2009/12/01/moveon-moves-against-obam_n_375677.html

    

Confessions of an Uncertain Columnist
My mixed feelings about the war in Afghanistan.
Fred Kaplan, Slate
Monday, Nov. 30, 2009
 http://www.slate.com/id/2236148/

Columnists are supposed to have firm views and express them with steadfast certainty. Since I write a column called "War Stories," the least a reader might expect from me is a clear opinion on whether the United States should escalate or pull out of the war in Afghanistan.

Recently, a friend told me that he couldn't quite figure out where I stood on the issue. I replied that I couldn't quite figure it out, either.

My columns, I confess, have hedged, hemmed, and hawed around the question. When I've proposed or endorsed a specific strategy, I've carefully noted that it's an approach the president should take if he decides to deepen U.S. involvement in the war. Sometimes, I've ended the piece with a caveat or a pointed question that suggests deeper involvement might not be such a good idea. Yet I've stopped short of taking a stance on whether he should or shouldn't send more troops or whether doing so is or isn't a good idea.

That's because, when it comes to this war, I am the one thing that a columnist probably shouldn't be—ambivalent. I've studied all the pros and cons. There are valid arguments to justify each side of the issue, and there are still more valid arguments to slap each side down. And if the basic decision were left up to me, I'm not sure what I would do.

As with confronting most messes in life, the initial impulse is to flee. But if we simply pulled out, it's a near-certain bet that the Taliban would march into Kabul, and most other Afghan towns they'd care to, in a matter of weeks. True, the Taliban are not the same as al-Qaida, but there's little doubt that they would provide sanctuary and alliance (as they did after the Soviets were ousted), and this would strengthen al-Qaida in its struggle against Pakistan, the United States, and others.

One might dispute the significance of this, at least for its direct danger to the United States. Al-Qaida, after all, can plan attacks on U.S. territory from other sanctuaries, even from apartments in Western cities. But it's naive to claim that leaving Afghanistan would have no broader effect.

Another problem with withdrawing is that it would signal, correctly or not, a huge victory for anti-American forces generally. If we left Afghanistan to the Taliban (and, by extension, al-Qaida), especially after such a prolonged commitment (at least rhetorically), what other embattled people would trust the United States (or the other putative allies in this war) to come in and protect them from insurgents? None, and they could hardly be blamed.

I am uncomfortable making this case for two reasons. First, it's reminiscent of the bankrupt rationales, involving "credibility" and the "domino theory," for staying in Vietnam long after that war was widely viewed as a horrible mistake. But Afghanistan is different. The Taliban are not the Viet Cong, and Osama Bin Laden is not Ho Chi Minh; there is no case, this time, that the enemy has a just claim to power. And the stakes are much higher: Communists ruling South Vietnam was never a serious threat to our security; al-Qaida controlling a huge swath of South Asia is.

The second reason I'm uncomfortable about even saying this is that the argument can, and almost certainly will, be used to justify staying in Afghanistan if it turns out that this war is futile, too. It's easy to hear the generals saying, a year from now, "Three more brigades should do the trick, Mr. President" and "If we pull out now, Mr. President, our credibility will be severely compromised."

But this part of the argument is moot, since, for better or for worse, no higher-ups in the Obama administration have advocated a total pullout. Withdrawal is a tempting option only to the extent that all others seem, at best, only slightly less miserable.

Holding at the current level of troops, with perhaps some slight rejiggering, is another tempting option, but it's also the clearest recipe for war without end. The constant refrain one hears from soldiers and commanders in the field—confirmed by any journalist who spends much time with them—is that they're strained by the shortage of resources. No matter what strategy President Barack Obama decides on—chasing terrorists, protecting population centers, or some combination of the two—there aren't enough troops now to pursue it with much chance of success.

The existing troops can probably hold the Taliban at bay and keep Afghanistan from falling apart, but little more than that. The war then becomes a contest of endurance, and we're not likely to win. (Yes, lots of American troops stayed in West Germany and South Korea for several decades—some remain there still—but they were deterring wars, not fighting and dying in one.)

As for fighting from afar: With a mix of special-operations forces and airstrikes, it's appealing in the abstract, but it neglects the mundane realities of warfare—that you need good intelligence to know who and where the bad guys are, and that to get good intelligence you need troops on the ground, and more than a handful of commandos, to cultivate and earn the local people's trust.

The proposal made a few months ago by Sen. Carl Levin, Democratic chairman of the Senate Armed Services Committee, to focus more on training than on fighting—and to send no more U.S. troops until the Afghan army has grown substantially—makes sense. Earlier this year, Secretary of Defense Robert Gates said that enlarging the Afghan army was the key to success (and to America's exit). In March, when Obama ordered another 21,000 troops to Afghanistan, Gates assigned 4,000 of them—the 4th brigade of the 82nd Airborne Division, a highly decorated combat unit—specifically to train Afghan soldiers.

However, in this war, "training" is done on the job—not so much by drilling and exercising the Afghan soldiers on bases (though there is some of that) but rather by leading, observing, and fighting alongside them out in the field. In other words, the line between "support troops" and "combat troops," ambiguous to begin with, is fuzzier still here. And at least in the short run (for the next few years), it's unlikely that enough Afghans can be trained quickly enough or thoroughly enough to secure the country on their own.

So we come to the option that President Obama is reportedly going to take, to some degree, in some fashion, in his speech Tuesday night (though press leaks of this sort haven't always been accurate): to send tens of thousands more troops—maybe not the 40,000 extra that Gen. Stanley McChrystal, the U.S. commander in Afghanistan, wants, but some number not much smaller.

The key question here is not so much how many more troops Obama sends but, rather, what he decides they should do (and we don't yet know his decision on that point, either). Still, some questions can be raised in advance.

If he decides on a counterinsurgency strategy (which emphasizes protecting the population more than chasing terrorists), the Army field manual's calculations suggest that something like 400,000 troops would be needed—and, even under the most optimistic assumptions, there's no way that U.S., NATO, and Afghan armies combined will amass anywhere near that many forces anytime soon, if ever.

This is why much of the strategy will likely involve cultivating Pashtun tribal leaders to fight the Taliban and prodding relatively moderate Taliban groups to turn against the more militant ones—in short, buying key people off, whether through persuasion, money, weapons, ammunition, logistical support, or the supply of basic services.

Gen. David Petraeus, the head of U.S. Central Command, has long been saying that success in Afghanistan has to involve, to some extent, striking a deal with enemies. "This is how you end these kinds of conflicts," he said in a speech at the Heritage Foundation in October 2008. There is, he added, "no alternative to reconciliation."

Petraeus is very agile at this sort of enterprise, as he demonstrated in 2003 in Mosul as commander of the 101st Airborne Division, and in 2007, with the "Sunni Awakening," as commander of all U.S. forces in Iraq.

But two concerns arise when mulling the transfer of these notions to Afghanistan. First, Petraeus had something to offer the Iraqi Sunnis. In Mosul, he handed out jobs (for as long as the money lasted, which, alas, wasn't long). In the Awakening, he provided military alliance after the tribal leaders (who initiated the contact) recognized that al-Qaida terrorists posed a greater threat than did the U.S. occupiers. He and McChrystal are now trying to reprise these sorts of deals in Afghanistan, but it's unclear whether they can offer much that's compelling to insurgent or fence-sitting Pashtuns.

Second, as smart as those two generals (and many of their advisers) are, how much do they really know about Afghan tribal politics, which (as they do know) are far more complex than Iraq's ethnic fissures and whose leaders are known to switch sides, and switch back again, at whim or the slightest provocation? (On this latter point, see the opening chapters of Dexter Filkins' 2008 book The Forever War.)

The United States has never fought this kind of war before (unless you count the Philippines, which lasted 40 years and involved a level of brutality that would never be countenanced today). We haven't been fighting this kind of war even in Afghanistan. (As the saying goes, we haven't been fighting for eight years but, rather, for one year, eight years in a row.)

Starting to do so now, as even some of the advocates of escalation admit, is a large gamble with short odds.

So here's what it comes down to: This option might be a good idea if it worked, but the chances of its working are slim (though not zero); all the other options seem to be bad ideas, but they might cost less money and get fewer American soldiers killed (though not necessarily).

Which road is less unappetizing? I don't know. That's why I'm ambivalent.

My guess is that President Obama held so many meetings with his national-security advisers on this topic—nine, plus a 10th on Sunday night to get their orders and talking points straight—because he wanted to break through his own ambivalences; because he needed to come up with a reason (not just a rationalization) for doing whatever it is that he's decided to do, some assurance that it really does make sense, that it has a chance of working, so he can defend it to Congress, the nation, and the world with conviction. Let's hope he found something. A columnist can be ambivalent; a president can't be. ++


The League of Ambivalent Columnists
Joe Klein, Time Magazine
Monday, November 30, 2009
http://swampland.blogs.time.com/2009/11/30/the-league-of-ambivalent-columnists/

Fred Kaplan is ambivalent about what to do in Afghanistan...and makes great arguments against all options, which I fully endorse. There is one argument for continuing the fight that I would add, however:

Pakistan. If the U.S. doesn't remain engaged in Afghanistan, the civilian government in Pakistan--already an incredibly shaky enterprise--will probably fall. Certainly, the Pakistani Army will be further empowered and will likely bolster its support for its Taliban allies in order to prevent India from establishing a foothold in Kabul. The possibility of a Pakistani Army coup scares the bejeezus out of expert like Bruce Riedel. It's not impossible that it would be an Islamist takeover. (Indeed, it's happened before: the coup that brought Zia al-Haq to power in the 1980s.)

The scariest national security problem we now face is the prospect of al-Qaeda-linked jihadis controlling the Pakistani nuclear arsenal. Like Fred Kaplan, I'm not optimistic that the U.S. effort can succeed in Afghanistan. But the notion that a U.S. withdrawal might empower the religious extremists in the Pakistani military does give me pause. ++


"I'm asking you to believe. Not just in my ability to bring about real change in Washington ... I'm asking you to believe in yours."
~ Barack Obama

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