Whether it was Otto von Bismarck or some unheard-of American lawyer who actually originated the famous aphorism about the making of laws and sausages, he was very unfair to sausage-makers. After all, they don’t really try to hide the fact that their final product, the sausage, is a revolting mixture of ground-up bits of waste gristle and fat encased in cleaned-out intestines, or even the fact that they will send you to an early grave. And they’re very clear that they make them in order to make money.
Laws, on the other hand, like the so-called “health care reform” that may eventually pass through Congress, are frequently dressed up to hide the innumerable rat parts that somehow got included in them or at least to distract the average citizen from thinking of them.
The “public option,” in whatever emaciated form might conceivably have emerged, is dead. The passage of an individual mandate requiring that everyone buy health insurance will mean a gigantic boondoggle for private insurance companies, who will at one stroke get 40-odd million new subscribers. In return for making this gigantic sacrifice, insurance companies may be allowed to lower the already low rate of premium repayment; i.e., not only will the numbers of subscribers increase, the profit per subscriber may well increase as well.
On the other hand, the poor and young, who are often just scraping by, will be required by law to give money to insurance companies while in general receiving considerably less health care than they are paying for. If not, they will have to pay a penalty.
Yet another bright idea: an excise tax on so-called “Cadillac plans.” What this may well mean in practice is that those of us with half-decent health insurance through unions or because we are public sector employees will be hit with extra costs to help finance the extra profits of insurance companies. These groups, of course, vote Democratic, so the geniuses on the Hill will be hurting themselves.
Perhaps the most obvious reform was eliminating “rescissions,” the charming practice of many insurance companies by which they retroactively drop coverage when somebody gets sick — without repaying their premiums — if they can find the slightest misrepresentation, accidental or otherwise, on a form. Instead, there will probably be a loophole allowing rescissions in cases of “fraud,” i.e. business as usual.
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About the only real reform will likely be the requirement that insurance companies cease discriminating against people with pre-existing conditions. This is a small price to pay when you are delivered a gigantic new captive market.
There is no doubt a tremendous rogues’ gallery here. One can certainly include every Republican. And then there are various wonderful blue-dog Democrats like Max Baucus, Ben Nelson, Blanche Lincoln, and a sea of political mediocrities. And, as always, the ever-noxious Joe Lieberman, who never met a super-exploitative oligopolistic cartel he didn’t love (except those run by Arabs, of course), and who somehow manages to maintain his air of preening sanctimony whether he is arguing against accountability for torture and sexual abuse or in favor of increasing corporate profits by denying decent health coverage to millions of people.
But, honestly, it takes remarkable contortions to avoid criticizing President Obama for this, as well as every other debacle he is so calmly plunging into. He was exactly right during the primaries when he emphasized that major legislative changes could not be made by worrying about Washington, inside-the-Beltway culture, and picayune partisan politics; in order to get real change, he said, what was needed was broad principled appeals meant to mobilize the masses and force legislators to consider their concerns rather than those of entrenched interests. If you weren’t convinced of that before, watching all those Congressmen in the pockets of insurance companies should have done the job.
The problem was that he resolutely disavowed, then and afterward, every kind of broad principled argument on every conceivable issue. He tried to create a national crusade on health-care “costs,” as if costs were a problem in themselves. Why shouldn’t we spend more money on health care, instead of on plasma-screen TVs and SUVs? The problem is not how much we spend on health care but how little we get for it. And talking about that requires the unmentionable word “profits.” That is divisive and not Niebuhrian and Obama would not do it.
The truth is that we are not more alike than our politics would suggest. We are in large part what our politics make us. The Republicans, crazy as they are, understand this.
It’s always disturbing when one finds oneself agreeing with George Will, but his disparagement in a recent op-ed of the “climate change theater” going on at Copenhagen are right on target.
Barack Obama is talking about a 17% reduction in carbon emissions in the United States (from 2005 levels) by 2020, with an 83% reduction by 2050. So far, the United States has proved itself incapable of even saying in any meaningful way that it will cut carbon emissions — forget any question of actually doing so. Although liberals whined a lot when Bush pulled us out of the Kyoto protocol, the truth is that the Senate never ratified it. Even the pathetic 17% reduction Obama is talking about will only result in a massive barrage of verbiage from the Republicans until it is drowned in nonsense.
And yet we actually talk about how much reduction will be achieved by 2050. That is absurd, in a country where six months ahead is a long-term forecast, but to say that the reduction will be 83% is just insulting to whatever passes for our intelligences. Assuming Will’s numbers are right (and you should never assume this), this will commit us to carbon emissions per capita at the level we had in 1875. Does anyone believe this? Does anyone outside of the radical ecologistic far left even have the courage to talk about what kind of life this would mean?
In truth, as is always the case with claims like this in America, “by 2050” just means “we’re not going to do anything about it now.” And yet on the strength of a couple of cheap numbers, the United States is being hailed for its newly constructive role in climate change politics and Obama will surely be much feted at Copenhagen. It’s just a shame there’s no Nobel Prize for the Environment.
And then there are India and China. They have a valid case for not being treated the same as the countries of the First World. After all, it is the Europeans and their descendants who created the problem, while simultaneously despoiling the Third World (and perhaps even creating it, if you go along with Mike Davis’s thesis in Late Victorian Holocausts). But instead of putting forward an argument in terms of equity, or in terms of the equal right of every individual to the bounties of the earth (per capita emissions even in China are far below those in the United States and still well below those of Europe as well), they have actually attempted to compete with Obama in cynicism.
India says it will reduce its “carbon emissions intensity” by 20% by 2020, and China will reduce it by 40-45%. “Carbon emissions intensity” is a physically and atmospherically meaningless quantity — carbon emissions per dollar of GDP. The environment really doesn’t care how much you say various pieces of paper you produce are worth. Will rightly derides the use of this farcical phrase, although, since he is himself an apotheosis of dishonesty, he doesn’t mention that this is a severe case of “monkey see, monkey do” — the concept of emissions intensity was a creation of the Bush administration intended to prove that the United States was such a good environmental citizen that it didn’t need to do anything.
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Although one must admire these countries’ cleverness in using America’s folly against it, institutionalization of this pernicious concept is a serious price to pay.
The Europeans are no better; with few exceptions, the only countries that have met their Kyoto emissions targets are those of the former Soviet bloc, which did it through imposed deindustrialization and social dislocation.
Let us not forget the other half of “climate change theater,” as underscored by Mike Tidwell of the Chesapeak Climate Action Network — Buying your friends carbon offsets for Christmas, talking about voluntary adoption of compact fluorescent light bulbs, and generally trying to make people think that all they have to do to save the environment is to consume different products.
In the last two years, the level of concern with and belief in global warming among the American public has turned around and started heading down. This has to do in part with the resurgence of the far right wing, which has now taken over right-of-center politics, but it also has to do, I think, with the feeling that it’s being taken care of. You don’t even actually have to buy a compact fluorescent light bulb; just knowing you’re supposed to has almost the same effect on individual psychology.
Nonsensical posturing about targets that no one intends to meet and that are likely not even socially or politically possible to meet is actually part of the problem.
Well, Hamlet has finally made up his mind. After a major strategic review of Afghanistan, an equally major review of the review, and then several months of reviewing both reviews, he has finally committed himself to a course of action. Whether it involves his pretending to be insane or just treating the rest of us as if we are, next week he will be awarded the Nobel Peace Prize just after announcing a major military escalation.
Obama’s speeches have been variously criticized over the past few years for soaring rhetoric untethered to actual facts and circumstances and for dry wonkish attention to policy detail, so he cleverly arranged this time to satisfy all critics by having neither.
Indeed, if you set aside the increase of 30,000 troops, repeatedly telegraphed by the White House, there were only two things noteworthy in the speech — first, his completely unforced reiteration of the commitment to withdraw completely from Iraq by the end of 2011 and second, his bizarre new commitment to start withdrawing the troops he is now throwing into Afghanistan within 18 months.
What the latter means is very unclear. If it were Clinton or Bush, I would ignore it as verbiage, a mere hole in the air, but Obama does not throw away words and has an uncanny consistency between what he says and what he ends up doing — look at how he promised to escalate in Afghanistan while campaigning and has already doubled the U.S. troop presence since taking office.
I would guess the genesis of the promise is the growing pressure on him from Democrats in Congress. On Afghanistan, he is in the unenviable position of being dependent on the Republicans and at odds with his own party. Obama has tried to split the difference, thus pleasing nobody.
Still, being Obama, he no doubt had to convince himself that this commitment motivated by domestic political considerations is actually an important part of the optimal strategy in Afghanistan — presumably, his reasoning is that he is signaling to the U.S.-propped Afghan government and to Hamid Karzai that the U.S. commitment is far from open-ended. He is also, I imagine, trying to signal to himself that he is not Lyndon Johnson.
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The truth, though, is that if you’re going to fight a counterinsurgency — and that is the course he has clearly put us on — this is a ridiculous way to do it. Why not just withdraw now? The chances that something climactic will happen in the next 18 months are minimal — and if it does, it will likely be something horrible. In Iraq, things came to a head within a very short time frame from 2005-2007 because of the descent into a nightmare of internecine carnage, followed by desperate attempts by various groups to step back from the edge of the precipice. Of course, if such a thing were to happen in Afghanistan, it would provide the foundation for another great counterinsurgency “success” like Iraq, but it’s very unlikely — 8 years of occupation has seen no major sectarian violence.
Short of that, 18 months will not suffice to eradicate the neo-Taliban — especially since all indications are that they’re still growing and that things are still in the phase where more counterinsurgency means more insurgency.
I do have some hopes that the increase in troop numbers will not lead to significant additional violence against Afghans because of partial implementation of Gen. McChrystal’s “kinder, gentler” rules of engagement — it’s worth noting that Germany’s August airstrike on a tanker near Kunduz that killed up to 145 people has already caused the resignation of their chief of staff and their defense minister at the time.
Although the lesson that killing civilians may be militarily counterproductive has been absorbed, it is still amazing how many lessons have not. In his introductory boilerplate, Obama attributed the rise of the Taliban to the Soviet occupation, the ensuing civil war, and the fact that American attention had “turned elsewhere;” by some prodigious effort, he has avoided learning that the rise might have had something to do with what America was doing before its attention “turned.” Similarly, he presents Pakistan’s turn to a more militaristic approach as a realization at long last that Pakistan is endangered by “extremism.” In fact, of course, Pakistan faced virtually no internal terrorist attacks before the 2001 war and subsequent ones are entirely a product of American and Pakistani military operations in the area.
Barack Obama was the only American president in living memory capable of absorbing the decidedly non-Western idea that in some cases doing nothing might be more productive than “doing something” — witness his immediate reaction to the election tumult in Iran — but by this point it seems all possibility of insight has drained out of his foreign policy. This lesson is apparently not one that Americans will ever learn.
Sarah Palin’s “auto”-biography is really boring. Having a mere twenty minutes to spare, I only got a chance to read about a quarter of it, but that was enough for me.
The exigencies of expending 400 pages on the non-events of what was until mid-2008 a non-life are not pleasant to imagine; it’s quite obvious that the book was published early because, unlike most political memoirs, there was no need to sift through a mass of facts, anecdotes and musings to refine out a coherent story — all that was need was to add in lots of junior-high prose describing the Alaskan landscape and to recapitulate well-known events from the presidential campaign.
The book is full of distortions and outright lies — the AP put 11 fact-checkers on the story (as Markos Moulitsas pointed out, it might have been nice if they did this for the Iraq WMD story). There is also a lot of cheap score-settling, showcasing Palin’s by-now legendary vindictive, backbiting personality. But the dominant thread is simply the fact that she is a non-entity, with nothing discernible behind the moose-shooting leg-showing façade.
There seem to be sharp disagreements over whether she can be safely dismissed. Frank Rich says she is here to stay as a phenomenon because she taps into something deep in the American soul, a sentiment shared by Maureen Dowd. Matthew Continetti of the Weekly Standard, one of her greatest fans, locates her in a hallowed lineage of hard-nosed American “populism,” following in the footsteps of Andrew Jackson, William Jennings Bryan, and Ronald Reagan, ending his bizarre piece with an injunction to Palin to oppose the crucifixion of America on the “cross of Goldman Sachs.”
My sense, though, among the more explicitly partisan liberals, is that they are salivating at the thought of a Palin presidential campaign, expecting an easy win for the Democrats. It is true that key bloggers like Moulitsas and Matthew Yglesias do frequently express concern for the descent of the Republican Party into insanity and extremism. Some of that is schadenfreude expressed as concern, and some of it is based on the idea that the country needs a two-party system, that implosion of the Republicans because they have stopped representing Americans will in the long run be bad for the polity.
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My guess now is that, no matter how far the Republican Party goes, they will lose very little more of their support. You can already see Obama losing popularity, even though most of what he has done is at least partly in the interest of the lower and middle classes and even though the only prescriptions Republicans have are utter nonsense (or stalking horses for insurance companies, like the call to let them sell insurance policies across state lines, thus freeing them to pick the state with the least onerous regulatory requirements).
This analysis is, I think, especially true with a foreign black Muslim Kenyan in the White House. Although Obama’s victory was indeed a victory for a certain post-racial America (which is very different from an America that has dealt with the injustice of race and racism), there is a large chunk of the country that is not ready to be dragged into the 21st century — or the 20th.
The latest trope in this unsavory group is a bumper sticker saying “Pray for Obama — Psalm 109:8.” In the King James Bible (if it was good enough for Jesus, it’s good enough for me), this reads, “Let his days be few; and let another take his office.” The psalm continues with imprecations against his fatherless children and his widow. The expression of these charming sentiments coincides with a huge rise in death threats against the president, which, along with an increase in related incidents, apparently threatens to overwhelm the Secret Service.
Obviously, a presidential campaign espousing this sort of hatred will get nowhere fast; just as obviously, a non-entity like Palin would be nowhere without it.
Like all good current events, Major Nidal Malik Hasan’s recent shooting spree at Fort Hood, wherein he killed 13 people and wounded over 40, has functioned as a political Rorschach test.
For the right, the blob resolves very easily; indeed, this particular incident was unnecessary. Muslims are scary and can’t be trusted. Hasan was part of a massive “terrorist” ring planning assaults on the U.S. military from within. Joe Lieberman, always one of the stalwarts of anti-Arab paranoia and fundamentalist anti-Islamism, plans to hold hearings designed to ferret out said plots.
A further obvious lesson is that the pinkos and peaceniks running the U.S. military are caught up in “political correctness;” no longer just about keeping white boys on elite college campuses from having good clean fun, now it has a body count.
Interestingly, of all the mainstream commentators, only Frank Rich had the wit to point out the bizarre contradiction at the heart of the “war on terror” for the past six years at least; the very people who jump to support our various expeditions into the Muslim world and excoriate opponents for not wanting to help Muslims and not believing that Muslims are capable of democracy themselves rabidly hate Muslims. It’s apparently not polite to say, but it’s quite obviously true.
For the status-quo defenders of ponderous military bureaucracy, which apparently includes all militant liberals now, the lesson is that there is no lesson. The military’s expansive tolerance and respect for diversity are good things, and Major Hasan’s unfortunate emotional problems have nothing to do with his religion.
For some fervent opponents of the war, I suppose, the incident is a lesson that some incipient groundswell of Muslims is out there, ready to kill our soldiers and drown our empire in blood, and that we should cease to occupy Muslim countries or we will be destroyed.
There are other lessons one might just as easily choose to learn. Instead of the danger of Muslims in the military, one might consider the danger of the casual abuse and prejudice within the military; perhaps the all-too-common practice of soldiers cheerfully referring to people like Hasan as “ragheads” and “hajis” is actually not such a good idea.
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Or one might consider how this incident manifests the severe problems with the provision of psychiatric care within the military; how was it that a man who was clearly in serious need of it himself ended up being charged with providing it to others?
One might even choose to learn the lesson that Hasan himself suggested, at the end of a rambling and semi-coherent PowerPoint presentation with 50 slides that he delivered in 2007 to a mystified group of Army doctors expecting a medical presentation — a presentation that, by the way, was a cry for help that only a complete blockhead could have failed to notice. The last slide contained a single recommendation: allow Muslim soldiers to become conscientious objectors and/or leave the military if they felt too much conflict with the idea of fighting against fellow Muslims. In retrospect, at least, it is hard to argue with this one.
Personally, the main lesson I see, which is, I suppose, partly in line with that of the military brass, is that it’s actually quite amazing how little of a problem Muslim soldiers have been. There have been two incidents of fratricide, that of Hasan Akbar near the beginning of the Iraq war, and this one, and only a handful of cases of conscientious objection or noncooperation.
While the military bureaucracy obviously failed miserably in dealing with Major Hasan, the complacency of the brass is well justified. Muslim soldiers and intelligence agents are a major asset in the prosecution of the “war on terror;” incidents like these are acceptable losses for a militarily sound program. It is quite obvious that these incidents are no more disconnected from the religion and/or ethnicity of the two men in question than membership in AIPAC or the NAACP is, but still they only add up to a minor cost; 13 American soldiers is the number being killed in a week in Afghanistan.
American Muslims, furthermore, have essentially posed no threat, either of terrorist attacks, or even of significant political resistance to the war on terror. They are not only less cohesive than Muslim communities in many European countries, they are apparently much more apolitical. Although there is a great deal of simmering resentment at the reflexive anti-Arab and anti-Muslim prejudice of much of the country, it doesn’t seem to translate into any kind of action.
Naturally, of course, the right wing wants to take one of the few things that America does right and fix it.
The Bengalis, my mother’s people, have a saying: “Anyone who isn’t a Communist at twenty has no heart. Anyone who still is a Communist at forty has no brain.” Unpleasantly redolent of the complacency of age, of the status quo, and of capitalism as it is, it is still worth considering.
I was twenty when the Berlin Wall fell.
I was in the middle of a brief flirtation with anarchism at the time, brought on by my first reading of Chomsky. Like many young leftists, I found it liberating. “Actually existing” communism had produced societies that were nightmares of stultification; the Warsaw Pact countries had no trace of romance or revolution to leaven the image of dull gray lives led by dull gray people, made that way by a dull gray system.
At the time, we were mystified by the anger and despair of the older generation; to us, it betokened a kind of totemic identification with societies and systems because of past connections and reflexive verbal associations with terms like “socialism” and “collective.”
Surely, these countries had no more to do with “real” socialism than Stalin did with “real” Bolshevism — or the Holocaust and the Inquisition with “real” Christianity? The dethroning of Erich Honecker or Todor Zhivkov didn’t change the inherent evils of capitalism and imperialism or the importance of a real alternative.
No sooner were such thoughts formulated, of course, than they were drowned in a welter of Western triumphalism. In some ways, perhaps the older generation was wiser; they saw that, rather than a blow for human freedom, the fall of communism would be a loss for one side and a victory for the other. Many of them even realized that the dissociation of “actual” socialism from “real” socialism — that Platonic ideal form — was a little too facile.
We have now lived through twenty years — my entire adult life — of a world with, as Margaret Thatcher correctly pointed out, no alternatives. We have seen the results. The monstrous tragedies of communism that billions lived through became for the United States nothing more than retrospective justification for its own crimes and follies and cheap fodder for a new global offensive, this one unchecked by the existence of another pole, ideological, political, or military.
Perhaps we have gained enough distance to evaluate the brief interlude that was the history of communism. It is true we still have China, Cuba, Vietnam, and North Korea with us, and a lot of noise from Hugo Chavez, but the term of communism as a living idea in the world began in 1871 with the Paris Commune and ended in 1991 with the dissolution of the Soviet Union.
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What can we say about it? It is true, of course, that the history of communism was one continually thwarted by imperialist reaction and bloodshed, by the machinations of unscrupulous, power-hungry intellectuals, and by the rise of a bloodless bureaucratic elite, who played no part in the revolutions but took for themselves the best of what their societies produced.
There are deeper truths, though. Michael Albert connects the evils of actually existing communism to the rise of what he calls “coordinatorism,” the ideology of a new class defined ideologically by their role in dictating to society what it should do rather than economically by their role in production.
I don’t think this goes deep enough. It has long been a staple of the conservative critique of communism that the very existence of a utopian ideology of social transformation itself inevitably leads to catastrophe. The mass killings of the 20th century lend a great deal of credence to this notion. It is not just Nazism and Communism; the postwar creators of the American empire, who evolved an ideological worldview that James Peck has termed “visionary globalism,” shared the same problem in lesser degree.
The other critique, that communism removed self-interest and thus initiative, certainly did not apply to the builders of the system. Those revolutionaries, dictators, apparatchiks, and political entrepreneurs were engaged in a tremendous act of will. They shook the pillars of Heaven and tried to force the pace of history, all the while proclaiming that they were in the service of historical inevitability.
They weren’t all, or even mostly, evil or purely self-serving. What united them, though — the ones that survived or succeeded — was a shared belief that they must use whatever degree of ruthlessness was required to achieve the dictates of history.
There is a new left in the world, that wishes to disavow any connection with that history of heroism, sacrifice, folly, and destruction, that wishes not to impose a cost on anyone — and much of which also doesn’t wish to bear any.
How will it avoid the mistakes of the past and also avoid the comfort and moral safety of powerlessness? How will it unite the head and the heart — without forgetting the hand?
I’m beginning to think maybe Condoleezza Rice wasn’t such a bad secretary of state. Those who thought that the Bush administration had a monopoly on uncomprehending sanctimony, meaningless and condescending expressions of concern, and blaming others for one’s own faults in foreign relations need only look at what the media has been labeling Hillary Clinton’s recent “charm offensive;” well, the term is half right.
She hectors Pakistanis about the prevalence of poverty and the lack of development. How does a country that consistently ranks in the bottom 20% of rich nations in foreign aid as a percentage of GDP have the face to talk about development? How much more so in Pakistan, whose pattern of massive inequality, feudal social relations, corruption, and autocracy owes so much to consistent reflexive U.S. support for a string of military dictatorships going back almost to the beginning of the Cold War?
Even worse, she hectors Pakistanis about their lack of enthusiasm for America’s war. In a meeting with newspaper editors, she said, “Al-Qaida has had safe haven in Pakistan since 2002…I find it hard to believe that nobody in your government knows where they are and couldn’t get them if they really wanted to.” Remarkably, she made these comments while admitting that she doesn’t really know what the situation is. She then followed this up while talking to students at Government College University in Lahore by extending the accusation to the entire population of Pakistan; why exactly a poor peasant in the tribal areas would want to become a footsoldier in her war is apparently not something she considers worth thinking about.
Although the English-language Pakistani press at least treated her with restraint, it’s hard to imagine too many Pakistanis who didn’t feel the insult. After all, the war in Pakistan, which has claimed several thousands lives, is entirely the fallout from America’s war in Afghanistan. In 2001, militant groups in Pakistan concentrated their actions on Kashmir, and Islamist parties were as significant in elections as the Green Party in the United States. All of that changed when the United States decided first to prosecute the war, and then to let everyone they were pursuing cross the border into Pakistan while they hared off to Iraq.
Those who wish to justify this by saying that it was Pakistan’s policies, like support of the Taliban, that led to 9/11 are simply cutting the timeline at an arbitrary but convenient point. Draw it further back to U.S. support for the virulent dictatorship of Ziaul Haq and its callous support of the Afghan mujaheddin purely for the purpose of bleeding the Soviet Union, with no concern for the effects on Afghanistan and the region, and the point stands.
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The pace of drone strikes has considerably increased under Obama; in the past 10 months, there have been already 30% more than last year. According to a recent study by Peter Bergen and Katherine Tiedemann of the New America Foundation, since 2006 drone strikes have killed 750 to 1000 people, of whom they estimate two-thirds were militants and one-third civilians. An initial tally by Pakistani journalist Amir Mir estimated much higher civilian casualties, but his method seemed to be to assume that anyone who was not a named “high-value target” was a civilian. Of those deaths, half of them have come in 2009.
Had Clinton been better prepared, she would have known the conventional U.S. answer — civilians killed in drone bombings are “collateral damage;” the U.S. is attacking valid military targets. Of course, the same could be said of many of the suicide car bombings carried out by the Tehrik-i-Taliban.
The latest Pakistani offensive in South Waziristan has created 250,000 refugees and set off a series of retaliatory bombings in Peshawar, Rawalpindi, Karachi, Lahore, and across the country that have killed over 300 people. Just from the timing of recent suicide bombings, it’s clear that they are happening because of Pakistani military offensives; most of them would likely not happen otherwise.
Unlike George Bush, Barack Obama is capable of understanding these things if he wants to. He just seems to perceive little need to do so.
After two months of delays in vote-counting, wrangling, fraud investigations, and fevered consultations that make even the American elections look like a paragon of modernist efficiency, plans are finally in place for a runoff election in Afghanistan, to be held on November 7. Although President Hamid Karzai got almost 55% of the votes in the initial tally from the August election, an election audit carried out under the aegis of the U.N. found widespread fraud. Hundreds of thousands of votes were disqualified, bringing Karzai’s share of the vote down to 48%; although his main challenger, Abdullah Abdullah, also benefited from fraudulent votes, the vast majority of the fraud was carried out on behalf of Karzai.
Over here, we have been subject to two months of commentary about the great importance of clean elections to the American counterinsurgency effort. The Afghans must perceive their government to be legitimate; otherwise, there is no way to control the growth of the neo-Taliban. A fraudulent election undermines that legitimacy. This whole stream of commentary grows out of the earlier trope of blaming American failures in Afghanistan on the corruption of the Karzai government; statements that success requires that the Americans pressure Karzai into somehow eliminating corruption abound, at least inside the beltway.
Although the ability of pundits, the chattering classes, and specialized military analysts in the United States to figure out what is relevant to understanding the dynamics of the protracted occupations of Iraq and Afghanistan has certainly increased over the past several years, the discourse still retains a hallucinatory quality.
At a superficial level, the current approach is self-contradictory. As Julia Mahlejd writes on the blog Registan.net, Afghans must be perplexed at the conclusion that Karzai and Abdullah benefited from widespread fraud and that the remedy is to let them have a runoff election. Especially with Karzai, where the scale of the fraud strongly suggests his own complicity, this is a reward for criminality; why not disqualify such candidates and have a runoff between the ones who are clean?
Not that that many cialis 40 mg people knew what karate was. It is available in buy levitra online different doses as well as flavours. Let’s have brief descriptions about physiotherapy cialis prices assistant and Occupational Therapy Assistant and job availabilities. Prevention is better http://raindogscine.com/tag/caddies/ cheap viagra prices than cure. Add to that the fact that turnout in the runoff is expected to be even below the anemic 30% of the August elections, and that some additional polling booths in the war-torn areas, where most of the fraud emanated from, are going to be closed. How is an election supposed to provide legitimacy among a population that won’t actually get a chance to vote and many of whom won’t even know about the election?
More deeply, what is the source of this belief, suddenly emerging in time for the elections, that making a mark on a ballot is of such fundamental significance to the average Afghan? Afghanistan no doubt has its liberal-minded citizens of the world to whom democracy is an abstract virtue of surpassing importance, perhaps even those who believe that marking a ballot to choose who will be the head of a state with no power, no revenue, and no commitment to the welfare of the people involves some realization of that abstract virtue, but such people are few and far between and likely doing little or nothing to support the neo-Taliban insurgency.
On the other hand, consider the weakness of democracy as a principle of legitimation even in the United States, where the population has been steeped in talk about it for over 200 years. When widespread fraud (the illegal disenfranchisement of tens of thousands of voters), followed by a risibly inconsistent Supreme Court decision won Bush the 2000 election in Florida, opinions on the matter divided almost entirely along partisan lines. If you wanted Bush to win, you were for the final verdict; if you wanted Gore to win, you were against. Where was the mass of people to whom democracy itself mattered so much? Now, consider how much experience Afghans have with the rhetoric and practice of democracy — none, except for a few years of rhetorical bombast from Bush administration officials — and ask yourself how much the concept means to them.
It is true, of course, that the corruption and general ineffectuality of the Kabul government are a real problem for the counterinsurgents. But no one is asking why it is that the United States always seems to end up backing corrupt governments with no interest in the people’s welfare — and why it is that at least some of their foes, like the NLF in South Vietnam and apparently at least some of the neo-Taliban groups — are better able to provide security and governance than our allies.
It cannot have escaped anyone’s attention that in the past two months the old reflexive notion that Afghanistan was the unquestionable good war has disintegrated. There had been growing criticism around the margins, but it was only late this summer that a full-fledged public debate erupted. It is undoubtedly a testament to the great virtues of our open democratic society, with its free and active political discussion, that such a debate has broken out a mere eight years into the war.
It is unfortunately something of a surreal debate. The battle lines are drawn between those who believe we must help the Afghans, sacrifice for them, and build them a modern state in order to assure our own security and those who say we should let the Afghans go hang because they are not very relevant to our security.
Stanley McChrystal brought the simmering debate to a boil with his strenuous advocacy of a profound reorientation away from killing insurgents toward “protecting” Afghans and toward serious restrictions on U.S. military rules of engagement, together with a serious emphasis on state-building and the provision of security and other government services. For a number of military people who had already been extremely suspicious of the turn toward what they call the “counterinsurgency” approach, this was the last straw; either the proper role or the capabilities of the American soldier were being dramatically misconceived, with the result that the United States would be drawn further into a Vietnam-like quagmire.
This only intensified with McChrystal’s call for an additional 40,000 troops to be sent, which would bring the U.S. contingent to 108,000 and the total international forces to near 150,000.
The other side ranges from status-quo centrists like Joe Biden, who wants to keep the number at 68,000 but step up drone strikes and anti-insurgent Special Forces raids, to people like George Will at the margins who want to withdraw ground forces entirely but continue to administer death from above.
The debate has distressingly little to do with the good of the Afghan people, although it is constantly used as a rhetorical device, especially by the McChrystal side. For those who take it seriously, it might be a good idea to evaluate the effect of the last eight years on the wellbeing of Afghans.
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Still, that has to be balanced against perhaps 10,000 civilians directly killed and 10 or 15,000 indirectly killed through the cutoff of aid during the 2001 war and 25-30,000 fighters killed. No one has good estimates of these numbers and there is no Les Roberts-style survey of Afghan households that I know of, but these can’t be too far off. Say, 50,000 Afghans are dead because of this war, and close to 1500 members of the international force, including almost 900 Americans.
I don’t know how to weigh those considerations against each other, but what is clear is that the negatives are steadily increasing. The Taliban is more powerful now than at any time since late 2001. How many more will have to be killed to prop up the weak, corrupt government installed by the United States? And will it be worth the price?
Those who favor a full-on counterinsurgency in Afghanistan justify it with reference to Iraq. The “surge” saved Iraq, and maybe something like it can save Afghanistan.
As military men and as proponents of good Western-style technocratic thinking, they are very poorly equipped to understand the central point of the Iraq counterinsurgency: the secret of America’s success was its failure. Many of them might well concede that if they had waged a brutal campaign and killed 500,000 to 1 million people, they would probably have broken the back of any insurgency this side of the South Vietnamese National Liberation Front. Well, the fact that all of those people died, and the bulk of them not at the hands of the United States but in internecine warfare, just made it easier.
A similar failure may well be the prerequisite to “success” in Afghanistan. But don’t expect to hear this point of view on CNN.
The must-read article of the week is definitely Dexter Filkins’s profile of Stanley McChrystal in the New York Times magazine.
One must be careful reading Filkins. He is a very good reporter and an intelligent, insightful person – his profile of Ahmad Chalabi is still the one and only source I’ve seen that gave me any insight into what he could possibly have been thinking in his mad quest to become the new king of Iraq (like so many exiles, he had ignored the passage of time in his country, in particular the collapse of the old feudal order).
There’s only one problem – his attitude toward the U.S. military and their mission, whatever exactly it might be, is roughly akin to that of a typical teenage girl toward the Jonas brothers. His first portrait of Lt. Col. Nathan Sassaman made him out to be a great hero of the brave new world being created in Iraq; Sassaman, who was later forced out of the military because of the coverup of the murder of an Iraqi boy (he wasn’t involved in the murder), was in actuality a brutal overlord and a strong believer in putting the fear of God into the natives. When Filkins went into Fallujah during the second assault in November 2004, he was stunningly incurious about the possible use of chemical warfare by U.S. forces.
And his book The Forever War is a remarkable accomplishment: an acute observation and depiction of the reality of Iraq that actually makes it harder for the reader to understand and evaluate the occupation. His masterful evocation of the depravity to which so many Iraqis descended is not leavened by any useful explanation of the role the United States played in this descent, let alone by any understanding of these terrible acts as the acts of human beings not so different from us.
That said, I believe the general tenor of his reporting on McChrystal. Apparently, he is the Petraeus’s Petraeus; not only has he gone far further than anyone before in the “kinder, gentler” approach to counterinsurgency than any previous American commander anywhere, he can run faster than Petraeus as well.
Filkins recounts a striking incident. A U.S. foot patrol is attacked by a remote-control-detonated bomb. Although no one is seriously injured, the SOP in the past would have been to kick down everyone’s doors and raid their homes, yelling incomprehensibly at the residents. Even after the changes of 2005-2007, the response would have been quite forceful. Now, the soldiers ask for five men from the village to come forward, and plead with them for any information, which, unsurprisingly, they don’t get.
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Perhaps even more striking is the meeting where McChrystal hassles a fellow general for gliding too comfortably past an airstrike that killed civilians.
Although these represent striking departures from business as usual, even under the “counterinsurgency paradigm,” in other ways McChrystal is no different from others. Filkins documents a ludicrous series of exchanges between McChrystal and “ordinary Afghans,” where he goes up to them and without preamble says “What do you need?” Some say security, some say development. It is utterly superficial and means nothing.
We have seen laudatory embedded reporting right from the beginning of the so-called “war on terror,” of course. This is credible, where earlier reporting wasn’t, for two reasons. First, the Obama administration is a conventional modernist rationalist bunch, not thoroughgoing postmodernists like Bush and friends; they understand that there must be some loose consonance between the words and deeds if credibility is to be maintained. Second, whereas “kinder, gentler” actions were earlier conceived as concessions to the laws of war or more often as fodder for PR to American audiences, significant parts of the U.S. military have bought into the idea that “kinder, gentler” is more militarily effective in counterinsurgencies. Mere humanitarian considerations could not have forced such profound changes in the mode of operation so quickly.
Whether this perception is accurate or not is far from clear. It depends on many things, including the strategy of the insurgency. While the changes McChrystal is attempting are very welcome (unlike the 40,000 additional troops he wants), there are two potential problems. First, it is hard to believe that he will be able to remake the basic attitudes, approaches, and inclinations of American solders to such a great degree. Second, it is impossible to believe that the military will hold to such changes in tactics if they prove unsuccessful.
And make no mistake; McChrystal has made himself so vulnerable not just by contradicting Obama but by articulating a vision of a war where the United States has nothing to gain, gives selflessly, and refrains from using violence even in situations where Americans are threatened. Such articulations are welcome and even necessary when they are propaganda for militarism; when they are actually sincere, they make all the important people very uncomfortable.