Human Rights and Withdrawal from Afghanistan

A contrarian view of the human rights impact of continuing the war in Afghanistan, but given the author it's not one to easily dismiss: a woman who "was elected to Afghanistan"s parliament in 2005 and kicked out in 2007 by the warlords".

Eight years ago, women's rights were used as one of the excuses to start this war. But today, Afghanistan is still facing a women's rights catastrophe. Life for most Afghan women resembles a type of hell that is never reflected in the Western mainstream media.

In 2001, the U.S. helped return to power the worst misogynist criminals, such as the Northern Alliance warlords and druglords. These men ought to be considered a photocopy of the Taliban. The only difference is that the Northern Alliance warlords wear suits and ties and cover their faces with the mask of democracy while they occupy government positions. But they are responsible for much of the disaster today in Afghanistan, thanks to the U.S. support they enjoy.

The U.S. and its allies are getting ready to offer power to the medieval Taliban by creating an imaginary category called the "moderate Taliban" and inviting them to join the government. A man who was near the top of the list of most-wanted terrorists eight years ago, Gulbuddin Hekmatyar, has been invited to join the government.

I wish the ideas were better developed, rather than fitting within the @800 word limit of an op/ed column, but if I were to infer why she favors withdrawal it's likely because U.S. policy seems likely to cement in place a corrupt, misogynistic government.

Should We Withdraw from Afghanistan

The Guardian offers essays on continuation of the war in Afghanistan, arguing both sides of the question (from a British perspective). The argument to stay first observes the effect of seven years of the Bush Administration's neglect and incompetence:

By 2008, the situation had deteriorated so far that, with the Taliban established in outlying districts of the city, friends in Kabul who had returned in 2002 were wondering where to go if forced to flee again.

Things have since improved:

Now, finally, with Barack Obama in the White House and an American military which, for all its faults, has shown an impressive ability to learn (or relearn), we have in place the strategy that we should have had years ago. It depends on restricting the air strikes and the indiscriminate firepower, deploying troops to protect the population rather than treating them as a neutral terrain on which to hunt insurgents, training local troops, creating secure physical space for commerce, political space for some kind of process potentially leading to the eventual creation of a broadly legitimate government structure linked to broader regional initiatives.

That sounds good, right?

But will this strategy work?

Probably not.

To put it mildly, ouch. (Read the editorial for a list of everything that has gone wrong, that we're unlikely to be able to right.)

The human rights argument is weak, too. It is almost certain that any stable Afghanistan is going to be much more conservative, much more anti-western and much more authoritarian than we would like. Better than a Taliban-run state perhaps but more like Saudi Arabia than Sweden. A continued commitment will not guarantee girls the right to go to school across the entire country.

So why fight then? Why send more young men to their deaths? Why spend more money that could be used for hospitals, schools or saving banks?

For the simple reason that we owe it to the Afghans to try to make the new strategy work. Every death is a tragedy, but the price in lives and money is not an exorbitant one given the size, wealth and military history of the UK. After years of errors, we finally have a chance to do something right. In two or three years, we will know if there is a chance that the strategy can succeed. If it does, we can be proud. If it doesn't, at least we are unlikely to have made things worse. More important, we can at least honestly say to the Afghan people that we did our best.

Within the context of a strategy that does not depend upon Hamad Karzai (or his successor) being honest, competent or helpful, with the moderate goal of creating a society that's "merely" extremely oppressive to women as opposed to extraordinarily oppressive... conceding the narrow scope of what we're likely to achieve is a bitter pill. I don't think that argument is likely to persuade anybody who doesn't have a sense of how atrocious life became for women under the Taliban, but I can understand why the author, familiar with that history, wants to give it one more honest effort before we give up.

No More Subsidies?

Thomas Friedman, in a shallow analysis of the intractable Israel-Palestine conflict, concludes,

If the status quo is this tolerable for the parties, then I say, let them enjoy it. I just don’t want to subsidize it or anesthetize it anymore.

No more subsidies? To either side?

"Independents"

David Brooks offers his own special insight into what independents want, coincidentally what Brooks himself wants:

If I were a politician trying to win back independents, I’d say something like this: When I was a kid, I had a jigsaw puzzle of the U.S. Each state was a piece, and on it there was a drawing showing what people made there. California might have movies; Washington State, apples; New York, fashion or publishing. That puzzle represented an economy that was diverse and deeply rooted.

We’ve lost that. First Wall Street got disproportionately big, then Washington. It’s time to return to fundamentals. No short-term fixes. Government should do what it’s supposed to do: schools, roads, basic research. It should not be picking C.E.O.’s or setting pay or fizzing up the economy with more debt. It should give people the tools to compete, not rig the competition. Lines of restraint have dissolved, and they need to be restored.

But here's the thing: independents aren't a monolith. Like the supporters of the major political parties, you'll find independents who self-describe as liberal, conservative and moderate. You'll find people who choose a libertarian candidate, a Conservative Party candidate, vote Green, or fervently pray that Pat Buchanan will make another run for President. It's inaccurate to assume that independents hover between the two major political parties and that either could score their votes. Among other factions you have:

• People who for a variety of reasons don't want to associate themselves with a specific political party, but nonetheless always (or almost always) vote for a specific political party;

• People who either don't have the time or inclination to follow politics - the type of people who argued with sincerity back in 2000 that there was "no difference between Gore and Bush".

• People who want the Republican Party to move further to the right, or the Democratic Party to move sharply to the left.

• People who think both parties are corrupt and/or incompetent, even if they have slightly different approaches to paving the road to hell.

But let's play Brooks' game, and assume that independents are looking for... an authoritative parent?

Independents support the party that seems most likely to establish a frame of stability and order, within which they can lead their lives. They can’t always articulate what they want, but they withdraw from any party that threatens turmoil and risk. As always, they’re looking for a safe pair of hands.

That does help explain the level of hysteria that the Republican Parties have been trying to whip up over everything President Obama does. "OMG - he sneezed; he wants everybody to catch Swine Flu! While he takes away your health insurance! That's proof that he supports death panels!" Less sarcastically, as Dan Larison points out in the context of Obama's absence from ceremonies commemorating the fall of the Berlin Wall, the attack machine is nothing more than that:

If people are tired of hearing from Obama and tired of him inserting himself into so many things, as we hear so often from the GOP, his absence from Berlin this week should be a welcome sign that Obama is learning that he needs to have priorities in how he uses his time. Just a few weeks ago, we were hearing how outrageous it was for Obama to shirk his duties and go to Copenhagen, and now it is supposed to be outrageous that he is not going on yet another foreign trip.

If Brooks sees the future of the Republican Party as making platitudinous statements about childhood jigsaw puzzles - a cute image, but essentially a false argument that we can somehow return to the simple days before globalization - and the notion that the government shouldn't exercise oversight even over the companies it bails out, and shouldn't be concerned about the executives of the industry that almost brought down the world economy even as regular, hard-working Americans can't find work - or do, but at a fraction of what they previously earned - all the more power to him. Seriously, "Wall Street got too big, so let's bail it out at taxpayer expense but not regulate it or its pay structure"? Not that the Republican Party has done badly in the past by following the Brooks/Barnum approach of never overestimating the intelligence of the American People.

Whether it's the latest party memo, or the inevitable post-election spin, there are any number of editorials about "the center" and how the only way for Obama to win the next election is to stop governing as a centrist and to start running as a Republican. Brooks' entry may not be particularly impressive, but compared to, say, Krauthammer's latest screed or Gerson's drooling on his keyboard.... But still, aren't we really just revisiting Brooks' "lunch period poli sci",

The only real shift between school and adult politics is that the jocks realize they need conservative intellectuals, who are geeks who have decided their fellow intellectuals should never be allowed to run anything and have learned to speak slowly so the jocks will understand them.

With "conservative intellectuals" still meaning "David Brooks, but with the term "independent voters" substituted for "jocks"?

Afghanistan: In or Out?

George Will is so convinced that the U.S. should withdraw from Iraq, that he comes close to complimenting President Obama:¹

On July 24, 2008, in Berlin, Obama stressed the need to "defeat the Taliban." Then, however, he spoke as a "citizen of the world," not as president. Now he is being presidential by reconsidering some implications of the politically calculated rhetoric that helped make him president. He is rightly ignoring those who cannot distinguish thinking from dithering....

Whatever strategy Obama adopts, its success cannot depend on America teaching Afghans to [elect good men]. If he is looking for a strategy that depends on legitimacy in Kabul, he is looking for a unicorn.

Here, Will is correct - Karzai's removed any doubt about how he is going to run Afghanistan, or at least those portions under which he (backed by the U.S. military) actually exercises control, and his priorities are quite different from ours. We cannot afford to hope that Karzai and Afghanistan's government somehow magically reform themselves, and a strategy that depends upon that hope is doomed to fail. (One wonders why it took some people seven years to figure that out, but there you go.)

Remember, back in the day, when the neocons were describing themselves as wanting to move away from realpolitik? How they wanted to build real nations, with real, functional, honest governments, and not simply replace one tyrant with another who was more willing to bend to the will of the U.S.? Is anybody still trying to advance that argument? If so, where can I find an example of their putting that into practice? Isn't it the paleocons who have more consistently advocated against military adventurism, the notion that governments can be magically replaced with U.S.-friendly regimes that are also competent, ethical and democratic? Sneering that the paleocons would install somebody like, you know, Karzai doesn't work so well when it's the neocons who most want U.S. soldiers to shed blood to keep him in power. And when it comes to backing traditional U.S. values, such as the ethical treatment of prisoners captured by the military, once again don't the paleocons have the moral high ground?

Turn the page and see exactly what I mean. Yet another unsigned editorial from Fred Hiatt's editorial board, insisting that we back Karzai:

As President Obama pointedly noted in recognizing Mr. Karzai's reelection a day earlier, "the proof is not going to be in words. It's going to be in deeds." True enough -- but it's also the case that the direction of Mr. Karzai's deeds is going to depend to a large degree on whether he believes he can depend on the United States, its forces and especially its president to back him up.

That's true, but not in the sense the editorial intends. Backed in the manner the Post demands, Karzai will continue to be corrupt and self-dealing, unconcerned with establishing a competent, stable government, and unconcerned with the consequences of electoral corruption that demolish our effort to nudge his nation toward democracy. Isn't that the lesson of the past seven years?

Senior envoys such as Vice President Biden have quarreled with him in private, even as Mr. Obama has held Karzai at arm's length in public. This might have made some sense if there were an alternative to Mr. Karzai. But there is none.

Well, um, yeah, there are alternatives. Sure, Bush and Cheney squandered most of the good ones, and even toyed around with a bad one, but no question there are alternatives.

A fair question, what does Karzai actually bring to the table? He undermines our effort to democratize Afghanistan. He undermines our effort to establish good governance. He happily enriches himself at the expense of his people, aligns himself with warlords and Taliban leaders... Is it enough that he looks good on camera? That he presumably pledged his pliance to the Bush Administration? Karzai depends upon useful idiots like Hiatt, always willing to give him "another chance" because "there aren't any alternatives", rather than insisting that he demonstrate that he's worthy of another chance.

But more to the point, how can Hiatt's and his crew, or any neocon, argue in support of the perpetual, unquestioning support of Karzai without admitting that their concerns about establishing good governance in troubled or lawless nations were a fiction? Because here's the rub: If you truly want an Afghanistan that is less tribal, less radical, less fundamentalist, at least tolerant of women's rights, you need to do a lot better than Karzai. Hoping that he'll change, or not even hoping but insisting that he's our Obi-Wan Kenobi,² is unlikely to turn out any better than Russia's experiment with Mohammad Najibullah.

I hate to harp on this, but if the best strategy we can come up with for Afghanistan is to prop up Karzai and significantly expand our military presence in order to just tread water, with no strategy for success or even a concept of what success will look like,³ we're not doing favors to anyone... Well, except Karzai. I would detest a future for Afghanistan that involved a resurgent Taliban, but it's unrealistic to expect that the U.S. will tread water indefinitely.
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1. Ever since Clinton's election, Will's had something of a pathological need to insult Democrats; even, or perhaps especially, when he criticizes Republicans, he traditionally makes sure to suggest that the Democrats are nonetheless worse.

2. "Help me Obi-Wan Kenobi. You're our only hope."

3. The "Groundhog Day" approach.

Another Stimulus Bill?

Paul Krugman interprets President Obama's comments on budget deficits, "that now is the time to 'get serious' about reducing debt", as "an unfortunate tendency to echo 'centrist' conventional wisdom". While I grant that if employment is on a significant upswing a year from now, the size of the deficit won't much affect the election, I think Krugman is missing a couple of important factors.

First, Obama is not merely echoing "centrist convential wisdom". If you take him at his word, he's likely in the same boat as a majority of Americans, and is concerned about the ramifications of Bush's financial recklessness, the cost of two wars, the financial industry collapse, and stimulus spending, on top of the rest of the federal budget. Clearly Obama isn't obsessed with balancing the budget - take a look at the numbers - but he's right to be concerned.

Second, let's assume that Obama doesn't believe that reducing the budget deficit should be a priority within the context of the current economy. He still has to deal with a Congress that does, at least when domestic spending is involved. No matter how compelling the argument, I would expect Congress to reject a new stimulus bill in the current fiscal year.

President Obama is already testing the waters for a second stimulus bill - for now that means sticking a toe in the water and pulling back when the sharks start to bite. If the political climate becomes more friendly to additional stimulus spending, and the bill passes on next year's budget such that Obama can still claim an overall deficit decrease (even if the total deficit remains very high), I think it's quite possible Obama will push additional stimulus spending.

I think that when Krugman and Robert Reich advocate for additional stimulus spending, they help lay the groundwork that could help Obama advance a new stimulus bill. Yet it's not lip service to centrism, but acknowledgment of reality, that unless things get suddenly and drastically worse it's not happening in the current fiscal year. (I'll buy you a cookie if I'm wrong - but you'll have to come here to collect.)

Brooks on Dating

Poor David Brooks seems to think his children's romantic lives will be ruined by 'texting'. For the most part he's unintentionally funny, but then there's this:

Once upon a time — in what we might think of as the “Happy Days” era — courtship was governed by a set of guardrails. Potential partners generally met within the context of larger social institutions: neighborhoods, schools, workplaces and families. There were certain accepted social scripts. The purpose of these scripts — dating, going steady, delaying sex — was to guide young people on the path from short-term desire to long-term commitment.

You know why we think of that as a "Happy Days" era? Because it's a history of dating that can best be gleaned from "Happy Days" reruns. Seriously. Most charitably, the "Happy Days" version of dating represents a brief moment, not particularly representative of what came before or what has come since.

The "decline" of "Happy Days" dating has more traditionally been blamed on birth control. Except in the televised world of Richie Cunningham, it was largely accepted that "boys will be boys" - that "delaying sex" was the role of a "good girl". In reality, sex wasn't always delayed - a lot of young women took unexpected, extended "vacations" that coincidentally were just long enough to cover up a pregnancy and childbirth. A lot of others got married. Does Brooks truly not know the prevalence of teen pregnancy in the 1950's?

The rate of teen childbearing in the United States has fallen steeply since the late 1950s, from an all time high of 96 births per 1,000 women aged 15-19 in 1957 to an all time low of 49 in 2000....

Further, other than that "fairy tale" moment found principally on TV sitcoms, the "script" for dating has looked more like this: The parents arrange the marriage of a young girl to and older male. She's expected to be a virgin, but he's not. The couple was "guided" to long-term commitment by fault-based divorce laws (or the unavailability of divorce) and, for much of history, the fact that the children were the husband's property so the price of divorce to the mother would be that she would have to leave her children. How... idyllic. It's a darn shame that texting has come along.

Our Corrupt Allies

Pat Buchanan is upset that the media is paying so much attention to the corruption and ineptitude of Hamad Karzai. He argues that when we're involved in military action in a state or region, and depict a leader as corrupt, it means we're about to abandon our support for him.

When Chiang Kai-shek, who fought the Japanese for four years before Pearl Harbor, began losing to Mao’s Communists, we did not blame ourselves for being a faithless ally, we blamed him. He was incompetent; he was corrupt.

We did not lose China. He did.

Let's take a look at that allegation:

Mao Zedong’s communists eventually came to power in 1949. A year earlier, in June 1948, Chiang wrote in his diary that the Kuomintang had failed, not because of external enemies but because of disintegration and rot from within.

You see, sometimes when a foreign leader or his administration is depicted as corrupt and incompetent, the depiction is accurate.

Buchanan similarly complains that South Vietnam's President Diem was depicted as "a dictator... who had lost touch with his people", something he fails to demonstrate is in any way false. He similarly whines that Cambodia's Lon Nol "got the same treatment", again failing to demonstrate that the treatment was undeserved. For some reason, he neglects to mention such illustrious leaders once supported by the United States, including the Shah of Iran, Manuel Noriega... the laundry list of thugs and despots the U.S. has at times supported in South and Central America.... Should we include Saddam Hussein?

Yes, when it's convenient we have historically dropped support for such "allies", and it's no coincidence that the public narrative goes from their being "important allies to the U.S." to "corrupt and incompetent, an impediment to our goals in the region", but the convenient timing of the admission of corruption doesn't make it any less true. It instead highlights how we care more about advancing our interests in a given region than we do about whether that region enjoys honest, scrupulous governance. Buchanan was an assistant to Richard Nixon - yet he claims to know nothing of realpolitik?

Buchanan's memory cannot be so short that he has forgotten his time in the Reagan Administration. Perhaps he remembers a guy named Pol Pot - an incompetent, genocidal leader responsible for the deaths of probably millions of Cambodians. What did Ronald Reagan do after Vietnam toppled Pot's regime?

Rollback was the American end of the proxy war fought between the two superpowers for power and influence in the developing world. The basis was childishly simple: my enemy's enemy is my friend.

To that end the Reagan administration insisted on recognising the deposed Khmer Rouge government in exile at the UN, mostly because it was the pro-Soviet Vietnamese that had done the deposing. This recognition helped maintain a civil war in which many Cambodians were killed and many thousands of landmines were laid.

What defense does Buchanan now offer for Rios Montt, whom Reagan described as "a man of great personal integrity"? Reagan's high praise for Jonas Savimbi? Is it problematic that those leaders are now judged based upon the facts, not upon Reagan's (I would hope knowingly) fabricated songs of praise?

No, fundamentally, Buchanan knows the charges are true. The problem is that the truth is becoming known:

That there are warlords who are war criminals, allied with the Afghan regime and us, that drug-traffickers are abetted by high officials, that Karzai stole the election, no one denies.

That the Pakistani intelligence services are shot through with elements loyal to a Taliban they helped bring to power in Kabul, that there are Pakistani army officers who believe they should be defending their country against India, not fighting America’s war in Waziristan, is also undeniable.

But what does it avail us to insult these people who have cast their lot with us, many of whom will, with famines and friends, pay a far more terrible price than we if we lose these wars.

I'm sorry, but I don't feel any great sympathy for people who "cast their lot with us", enrich themselves, their families and their clans at the expense of their countries and countrymen, undermine U.S. political goals and military efforts, and ultimately lose our support due to true allegations of their greed, corruption and incompetence. I can't feel sorry for somebody who thought that "casting his lot" with the U.S. meant "winning the lottery", and who if deposed will most likely live out his life in a billionaire's exile, supported by the money he has stolen from his (and our) country.

Does Buchanan really believe it's too much to ask of somebody like Karzai to steal a little bit less, or to accept a small risk of losing an election he probably could have won honestly, in order to help us achieve our goals of improving and stabilizing the country he claims to lead? Well, yeah, I guess he does. Because they "trusted us", apparently, to not care if they demolished the foundation of our efforts.

The Washington Post Wants Us Out of Afghanistan?

Of course not. Hiatt and his boys serve up a typically insipid, unsigned editorial suggesting the opposite. But their image of us standing on the edge of a slippery slope, with their hands at our back ready to push us down, is in may ways a compelling argument to bring our experiment to an end:

One of the rhetorical questions frequently tossed out in the debate over Afghanistan concerns the brewing trouble in Somalia and Yemen, both of which are known to host al-Qaeda cadres and training camps. If it's necessary to pacify Afghanistan to protect U.S. security, goes the taunt, must we also intervene in Somalia and Yemen?

The presumed answer is: "Of course not -- and therefore why bother with Afghanistan?" The more sensible response is: If something is not done soon about these lawless places, one or the other may well become the next Afghanistan -- a place where U.S. military intervention was compelled by a devastating attack on the homeland.

In other words, although it (as usual) has no concept of what a victory would look like or how it would be achieved, and no explanation of how it would improve U.S. security, the Post wants us to invade every nation that could become "the next Afghanistan". When Hiatt and friends pose the rhetorical question, "If it's necessary to pacify Afghanistan to protect U.S. security, goes the taunt, must we also intervene in Somalia and Yemen?" they have already rejected the answer, "Well, maybe it's not necessary to pacify Afghanistan." The only "solution" they can conceive involves spending additional trillions to invade additional nations that we can't realistically pacify, forcing the al-Qaeda camps into other "lawless nations" or across the border into "friendly" states that become de facto safe havens, and in turn become increasingly radicalized and destabilized.

Even if we assume that we have the money and troops to fund unlimited war, how is that a recipe for the long-term security of the United States? What is the actual danger to U.S. interests posed by these training camps? Could it be that it's U.S. military action that's causing al-Qaeda to metastasize, inspiring it to extend into other nations where anti-U.S. sentiment is high and new recruits are easy to find? Where those camps, and associated military action, destabilize neighboring countries? Might we not be more secure if the camps were concentrated in Afghanistan? For that matter, how much direct danger do these camps pose to U.S. interests? The training that put us most at risk wasn't that learned in Afghan camps - it was the training terrorists obtained at U.S. flight schools.

Where can we find even slight evidence that al-Qaeda is any more tied to Somalia than it was to Afghanistan... fighting them "there" so we don't have to fight them "here" doesn't work so well if they leave, let us fight the locals, and carry on business as usual from other nations, and can easily return to fill any void we leave behind. Hiatt doesn't seem honest enough to admit it, but his board's editorial boils down to "Everything we've tried so far has failed, so let's double down!"

"Third Parties Can Fix Everything!"

In keeping with his penchant to prove how little he knows about... pretty much everything, Ross Douthat argues today in favor of third parties:

Regional parties often start out as ideological enforcers. New York’s Conservative Party, for instance, exists to punish Republicans for drifting too far left — a part it played to perfection by supporting Hoffmann’s candidacy.

But there’s more that such parties could accomplish. They could provide a counterweight to the corruption associated with one-party rule, whether in solidly red states or deep-blue cities. They could get unorthodox candidates elected, and win hearings for unorthodox ideas. And they could help fulfill the promise of federalism, by organizing themselves around local particularities, rather than the national political divide.

Were Douthat to think before he typed, it might have occurred to him that a region "associated with one-party rule" doesn't actually need a third party - it needs an effective second party. I also have to wonder, does Douthat picture the leader of a third party in the role of Two-Face from Batman, flipping a coin to decide whether to be an ideological enforcer or to be a more responsible version of the party in control of government? Really, Douthat wants it both ways.

Let's step back for a minute, and consider what a true third party might do to a state like California, in which supermajority requirements already enable a minority party can already wreak havoc with the budgeting process. Douthat's responsible party could insist upon taxes or spending cuts that neither major party wants to pass, rendering it impossible to pass a budget. (And yes, we're assuming that this third party would in fact be responsible, and not out to enrich special interests by using its minority presence to extort huge concessions just to keep the government running.) Douthat's "ideologically pure" party would refuse to let one side or the other compromise to pass a budget, insisting upon whatever form of purity they're presumed to advocate. Sounds like... heaven.

Really, look at nations that have strong third parties. Occasionally there will be a realignment, with parties merging or with the long-standing third party switching places with one of the others; but you almost never see a strong fourth party, and elections are almost always functionally between the two major parties. A minority government or coalition government is in constant jeopardy of failing, with minority parties often able to extort disproportionate reward for remaining inside the coalition. In countries that offer strong protections to third parties and their role in government, the net result result seems to be gridlock and often what seems like an increase in corruption. At least in parliamentary systems, a government can call an election at its convenience and try to capture more seats. In our system, structured around the two party system with elections at fixed intervals, a proliferation of successful third parties would likely leave us stuck with gridlock until the next scheduled election.

Douthat personifies the problem he pretends to identify. Speaking of Doug Hoffman's role in the race (formerly) between Dede Scozzafava and Bill Owens, Douthat scoffs that Scozzafava "is arguably more liberal than her Democratic opponent" (although he doesn't even try to make the argument), and

Hoffmann has irritated liberals. Scozzafava was their kind of Republican, and by derailing her candidacy — which she suspended over the weekend after polls showed her slipping to third place — he’s turned a sleepy contest between two left-of-center politicians into an ideologically-charged election.

So for all of his lip service to the various contributions a third party can make, Douthat's biggest concern is ideological purity. He sees it as better for Republicans to backstab a member of their own party for not being ideologically pure than for their to worry about such things during the nomination process or to draw lessons of moderation from inside the tent as opposed to from a third party candidate. He also overlooks the fact that the Conservative Party (and other parties) run candidates in a lot of elections around the nation - the difference this time is not that Hoffman is somehow more compelling, but that Republican leaders are so willing to "eat their own" in the name of ideological purity.

Were Douthat honest, he would admit also that in calling Scozzafava a liberal he's really speaking of her views on social issues - she doesn't share his anti-choice views or his contempt for gay rights. When he argues that Hoffman "injected real substance into their races, and they’ve given voters a much more interesting choice than they would have otherwise enjoyed", he's admitting that he actually knows nothing about Hoffman... or elections. As is the case in many Congressional districts around the nation, having a Conservative Party candidate (or other third party candidate) on the ballot is anything but unusual. In 2008, five parties were on the ballot for NY23. It's not the presence of a third party candidate that is making this race more "interesting" - it's the fact that so many Republican ideologues have aligned their endorsements and their money machines behind the third party candidate.

Moreover, Hoffman offers nothing of substance:

I'm running for Congress because I sense the America I love is being taken away from us. I want to tell Washington: No more bailouts. No more taxes. No more trillion dollar deficits. That's what I'm fighting for.

I've searched for a link that leads to a deeper take on the issues, but no... that's all Hoffman has to offer. But he'll bring back the... love?¹

Particularly at the local level, it often seems that the better approach is to go nonpartisan. That may satisfy Douthat's "counterweight to corruption" or "bringing in unorthodox views" argument, but as he makes plain he doesn't actually care about that side of things. Is he concerned that Scozzafava is corrupt and is not being honest about her views? That she didn't intend to serve her district to the best of her ability? That she was too orthodox? No, to the contrary, those are the things that bothered him about her. His preference for Hoffman is predicated upon a two-pronged ideological litmus test that has nothing to do with what's best for his party, the district, or the nation.

It's also telling that Douthat doesn't want third parties to run for President - "part priest-king, part ritual scapegoat — that chief executives need to represent the broadest possible coalition to have any chance of success". Sure, a third party candidate might highlight problems with the status quo, shed light on corruption, and... oh, yeah. He might force the Republican candidate away from Douthat's ideological litmus test. Besides, who needs a philosopher king, when we can have a scapegoat-priest-king.
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1. Hoffman also states,

In 1980, I helped Lake Placid with our Olympics when the US beat the Russians in hockey...

Um... did he cheer loudly, or something?

Priorities

Robert Reich, who to date has been arguing that a healthcare bill must be passed before a limited window of opportunity closes, today argues that it's the wrong priority - that instead Obama should be trying to pass additional stimulus measures. Perhaps this isn't the "loss of discipline" Reich warned us about, but results from Reich's concern that the legislation that is likely to pass gives up too much to pharmaceutical and health insurance companies. But Reich doesn't offer much of an explanation.

The problem I have with this type of argument, whether from Reich or anybody else, is that it presupposes that the government is capable of only doing one thing at a time, and also that the government's priorities should change along with their own. Obama has largely deferred the healthcare reform debate to Congress, so who's to say he hasn't been working on other issues? More to the point, there's reason to believe that a healthcare reform bill, even if flawed, will pass, but there's no compelling reason to believe the same of another stimulus bill. I suspect that if Obama were to follow Reich's advice, abandoning healthcare reform while advocating for a @$trillion stimulus bill, he would look silly - and he would fail.

The optimist in me says Obama can pivot off a health-care victory and launch some new initiatives that palpably and quickly spur job growth. The realist says there aren't any such initiatives -- at least none that can work fast enough to reverse the tide of unemployment before the midterm elections.

Is the concern the long-term welfare of the nation, getting people back to work, or the next election? If a job-creating stimulus bill is good policy, it remains good policy even if its effects aren't felt for two years. With due respect to Reich's concern that "getting the nation back to work" is more important than healthcare reform, I can't help but feel that a failure to pass a healthcare bill combined with what now appears to be an unavoidably slow recovery would be worse.

Reich argues that, by focusing on the economy,

Clinton avoided Carter's failure and won re-election handily. But the Clinton years produced few if any major social reforms. Clinton spent so much of his initial political capital, as well as his time and energy, on deficit reduction that he didn't have enough left to enact health care in 1994.

So when he cautions Obama,

If Obama and the Democrats lose one or both houses of Congress in the midterms, it will be because the president learned only the most superficial lesson of the Clinton years. Health-care reform is critically important. But when one out of six Americans is unemployed or underemployed, getting the nation back to work is more so.

I can't help but wonder if it's Reich who learned the superficial lesson of Clinton. Taking an "it's the economy, stupid," approach seems likely to similarly deprive Obama of the political capital necessary to enact healthcare or other reforms. And while Clinton did win reelection, it seems fair to observe that his inability to deliver on issues such as healthcare first cost the Democrats their Congressional majority, and later contributed to the election of G.W. Bush.

Something Always Changes

While Robert Samuelson offers his softball argument against stimulus spending, Paul Krugman continues to advocate for greater stimulus spending.

Without the recovery act, the free fall would probably have continued, as unemployed workers slashed their spending, cash-strapped state and local governments engaged in mass layoffs, and more.

The stimulus didn’t completely eliminate these effects, but it was enough to break the vicious circle of economic decline. Aid to the unemployed and help for state and local governments were probably the most important factors. If you want to see the recovery act in action, visit a classroom: your local school probably would have had to fire a lot of teachers if the stimulus hadn’t been enacted.

That seems accurate, and highlights the unfortunate effect of the losses of tax revenue by state and local government - rather than having a stimulus boost infrastructure spending, it seems to have largely allowed governments to tread water. It would not be a good thing if more teachers were laid off and more schools closed, and its reasonable to recognize the benefits of the stimulus, but it's no surprise that stimulus spending to date hasn't done much to improve (as opposed to maintain) employment.

Unless something changes drastically, we’re looking at many years of high unemployment.

Krugman alludes to economic growth under Clinton, but recall that the growth was driven by something people didn't anticipate - the rise of the Internet, followed by the Internet bubble. We bounced out of the post-bubble recession thanks to the real estate bubble, and... well, I'm not arguing in favor of building an economy based on bubbles, but I think it's fair to observe that things happen - sometimes good things, like the burst of innovation that grew out of the Internet. While I'm not going to argue that we should build public policy based upon wishful thinking, and on the whole it's responsible to look to general economic trends when advocating tax and spending policy, the (largely¹) unexpected is going to happen.

What I keep hearing from Washington is one of two arguments: either (1) the stimulus has failed, unemployment is still rising, so we shouldn’t do any more, or (2) the stimulus has succeeded, G.D.P. is growing, so we don’t need to do any more. The truth, which is that the stimulus was too little of a good thing — that it helped, but it wasn’t big enough — seems to be too complicated for an era of sound-bite politics.

My concerns are a bit different than those of Washington. I find it unlikely that additional stimulus spending will truly be directed at expenditures that qualify as investment in the future. I am troubled by the concept of bailing out struggling state and local governments to the extent that it enables those governments to avoid revisiting tax and spending policies that contribute to their plight. There seems to be little political will to actually invest in infrastructure improvement, or to invest in schools and colleges to ensure their continued quality and affordability.

I think we're past the point of emergency. To the extent that people advocate for additional stimulus spending, I think it's fair to move out of the bank bailout mode - throw buckets of money on the flames and hope to smother out the fire - and to spell out how much money is being allocated to any particular stimulus goal, along with a responsible argument as to how the spending will bring about a return for the economy.
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1. The real estate bubble was predicted, but the voices of doubt were largely drowned out by those who believed that you really could have perpetual, 20% increases in housing prices and that this should be viewed as a "good thing", not wildly out-of-control housing inflation.

Stating the Obvious Isn't Necessarily Helpful

Robert Samuelson lectures us about debt and taxes:

Despite huge deficits, interest rates on 10-year Treasury bonds have hovered around 3.5 percent. In time of financial crisis, investors have sought the apparent sanctuary of government bonds. But the correct conclusion to draw is not that major governments (such as Japan and the United States) can easily borrow as much as they want. It is that they can easily borrow as much as they want until confidence that they can do so evaporates - and we don't know when, how or whether that may happen.

So we get a conclusion that's both obvious (how many people aren't aware that there are limits on how much a nation can successfully borrow) and useless (if we borrow too much, however much that happens to be, bad things of one sort or another will happen at some point in the future). With due respect to Samuelson's talk of the difficulty of balancing the budget by cutting spending or increasing taxes,¹ and the possibility that taking those steps could also cause bad things of one sort or another at some point in the future, he's tossing out marshmallows. He concludes,

The arguments over whether we need more "stimulus" (and debt) obscure the larger reality that past debt increasingly constricts governments' economic maneuvering room.

To a degree, that observation is as obvious (and useless) as everything else Samuelson has to say. The argument against any stimulus, let alone a larger one, has been that "we can't afford it".

The countervailing argument is that we can't afford not to have a stimulus, even if it means significant short-term borrowing, as without significant stimulus spending our economy will continue to sputter and stall. Samuelson's concern that short-term spending might tie the government's hands in the future reminds me of the concerns of his other friends at the Post, who at best offer lip service to out-of-control spending that goes to things they support (such as wars in the Middle East) but switch from chicken hawk to deficit hawk mode the second we're talking about domestic spending. Samuelson's version of political "truth", similarly, involves slashing Medicare, Medicaid and Social Security, but makes no mention of military spending.

Perhaps Samuelson hasn't noticed that tax revenues have plummeted in this recession. A stimulus that hastens an economic recovery, a rebound in employment, and improved tax revenues could in fact be much better for the country than wringing our hands and doing nothing out of concerns for nebulous, theoretical economic consequences that... we know wouldn't result from a stimulus even two, three or four times as large as the one the government passed. Unless you're from the "If you can't pay for it in cash, you can't afford it" school of economics, you should recognize that sometimes you borrow not just to spend but to invest.
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1. Samuelson's argument on taxes seems to hold a mirror to GW's. While GW argued that tax cuts were the solution for every economic situation (the economy's strong - let's cut taxes; the economy's faltering - we must save it by cutting taxes; we're in a recession - we must cut taxes), Samuelson seems to be arguing that no matter how strong or weak the economy it's a huge gamble to increase taxes to cover government expenditures. His preference for deficit spending over responsible budgeting is evidenced by his slippery slope argument leading to default, not to a realization that taxes must go up in order to prevent default, even though (with due respect to the timing of tax increases) our nation can afford higher taxes.

While We're Talking About Insults Directed at Obama....

Robert Kagan suggests that Obama is being "played" by Iran. The thesis here appears to be that we have three tools to use with Iran: diplomacy, sanctions, and war. And although Kagan is presently directing his insults at Obama, I expect he was equally derisive of Bush's choice of diplomacy. That said, Kagan's argument is silly.

Kagan doesn't believe that diplomacy will work, or in the alternative doesn't believe that a diplomatic solution will prevent Iran from continuing to advance a nuclear weapons program. I suspect that he's correct - that Iran will continue to work to develop nuclear weapons even if slowed by a diplomatic solution. But Kagan is willfully blind to the fact that sanctions could have a more pronounced effect - even if we could convince the rest of the world to go along with them - causing Iran to cast off any pretense that its nuclear program is about peaceful energy generation and to accelerate its nuclear weapons program.

But more to the point, as Kagan concedes, Russia is part of the game. How does Kagan propose that the U.S. could effectively sanction Iran without the cooperation of a permanent member of the U.N. Security Council? Unilaterally? By trying to get other nations to voluntarily team up with us, even as goods continue to flow into Iran through nations that are not cooperating?

Meanwhile, Iran plays an important role in both Afghanistan and Iraq, and as difficult as they can be they can make important contributions to stabilizing or destabilizing our efforts in those nations. If we cast aside diplomacy and unilaterally impose what amount to toothless sanctions, we not only risk making Iran seem tough - unafraid to stand up to the U.S., and unfazed by our sanctions - but we may jeopardize our progress in two major wars.

But really, Kagan is less interested with succeeding with non-military options than he is with forcing military action. He would be profoundly disappointed with a diplomatic success, but he would be ecstatic with a failure of sanctions - a failure that would take our two non-military options off the table. We would then be left with the choice of looking weak - folding our cards and walking away - or bombing Iran. Never mind that few think that bombing Iran will succeed in eliminating its nuclear program - while again allowing it to claim to have stood up to U.S. aggression.

The question is thus much less "Is Obama being played [by Iran]" than it is whether Kagan and friends can successfully play Obama. So far, despite considerable effort, they appear to have failed. I somehow don't think that Obama's so insecure that Kagan's swipe at him will have any effect. And, despite the possibility that Iran will continue to develop nuclear weapons despite the present round of agreements, that's a good thing. (For goodness sake, if this type of attack by the likes of Kagan didn't work on Bush, why would he expect them to work on Obama?)

"Fixing" Afghanistan

Among the many incompetent decisions of the Bush Administration were its decisions to team up with camera-friendly, English-speaking, but exceptionally corrupt leaders whom it hoped would rule over Afghanistan and Iraq. With Iraq overshadowing Afghanistan, not many people paid attention to the regime of Hamid Karzai, until the recent election fraud. Now his corruption, unpopularity, inability to govern outside of Kabul, and familial ties to the drug industry are getting considerable media attention.

We're dealing with similar phenomena in Iraq and Afghanistan - ethnic allegiances that trump the concept of national unity. It seems pretty clear that in both countries the factions that don't feel that they will benefit from "national unity" govenrments, or don't feel that they'll get a suitably proportionate (or disproportionate) share of power, influence and money through a democratic process, are content to wait us out. Years ago, George W. Bush told us that "The Surge" would be a failure if it didn't bring about significant, quantifiable political progress. It has turned into an escalation that certainly has helped segregate warring factions, but the political progress we've been repeatedly promised seems to be at a standstill. Meanwhile, following his seven years of neglect, the situation in Afghanistan is deteriorating - although my guess is that the Karzai family's wealth is now assured for generations, even in exile.

Proponents of continued war in Afghanistan have no suggestions on how to achieve national unity. They have no plan for defeating the Taliban (the Taliban being native to Afghanistan and borne of the numerically dominant Pashtuns, 40% of the nation's population). They have no plans for defeating corruption. Some explicitly eschew the notion of rebuilding (or is it building) the country. They offer little explanation beyond nebulous talk of al-Qaeda getting its safe haven back (one it presently enjoys across the border in the territory of our ally, Pakistan), as to the U.S. foreign policy interest in perpetuating the occupation. Still, they insist, we must fight the war until we "win", whatever that means.

First case in point, David Brooks, who serves up an appeal to anonymous people he contends are authorities on... something:

[The people I consulted but choose not to identify] are not worried about his policy choices. Their concerns are more fundamental. They are worried about his determination.

These people, who follow the war for a living, who spend their days in military circles both here and in Afghanistan, have no idea if President Obama is committed to this effort. They have no idea if he is willing to stick by his decisions, explain the war to the American people and persevere through good times and bad.

There's an inherent tension here: If in fact the military experts trust Obama to make good policy choices, then they trust him to make a good decision as to whether the U.S. should stay in Afghanistan or end the war. That should pretty much end the debate. Instead, Brooks turns it into some sort of test of toughness. Sure, Obama could do the "intellectual, good policy choice" thing and end the war, but then the unnamed, tough-guy military experts would accuse him of wimping out. While I'm sure President Obama is touched by Brooks' concern, somehow I doubt that he's too concerned about sticks and stones from "experts" who don't even have the courage to attach their name to their superciliousness.

Most of them, like most people who have spent a lot of time in Afghanistan, believe this war is winnable. They do not think it will be easy or quick. But they do have a bedrock conviction that the Taliban can be stymied and that the governments in Afghanistan and Pakistan can be strengthened. But they do not know if Obama shares this gut conviction or possesses any gut conviction on this subject at all.

Funny, how every single expert Brooks (supposedly) consulted said exactly the same thing, coincidentally exactly what Brooks believes, and like Brooks offers nothing but empty-headedness when it comes to explaining how a war in Afghanistan might be won, how we would create a stable government for Afghanistan (even if we discard any notion that it be progressive or friendly to the West), or how we would keep a post-occupation government from devolving into the same type of ethnic warfare that followed the end of the Soviet occupation. The various warring factions of Afghanistan know that the occupier always leaves. To a degree, Brooks knows this:

And if these experts do not know the state of President Obama’s resolve, neither do the Afghan villagers. They are now hedging their bets, refusing to inform on Taliban force movements because they are aware that these Taliban fighters would be their masters if the U.S. withdraws.

But doesn't that betray Brooks' fundamental ignorance of Afghanistan? He sees, I guess, a nation of urbanites from Kabul, and "villagers" in other areas. Pasthun, Tajik, Uzbek, Hazara, Turkmen? What's the difference, right? A commentator who knew enough to be discussing this issue might be skeptical that "villagers" who aren't Pashtun, who don't want a return of the Taliban, are afraid to cooperate with the U.S. - if he was truly speaking to experts, it's not like any of this is a secret.

Nor does President Hamid Karzai know. He’s cutting deals with the Afghan warlords he would need if NATO leaves his country.

Get real. Karzai may be corrupt but he's not stupid. If Karzai's government fails, he'll be on the first plane out of the country.

It's wonderful to speak of what we can accomplish for women in Afghanistan, something that seems to be at best an afterthought for people like Brooks, but it's not clear that we're being particularly successful in that goal even now, let alone that improved status and opportunity for women can be sustained in the event of U.S. withdrawal, whenever it occurs. On the other hand, it's useless to talk about Afghanistan as a "safe haven" for al-Qaeda, when they already have a safer haven in Afghanistan.

The simple question for war proponents is thus, "What does victory look like", with the equally simple follow-up, "How do we achieve it?" Brooks has no answer, save perhaps for a blank stare, so he implies that it would be wimpy to withdraw before the undefined concept of victory is magically achieved.

Second case in point, Charles Krauthammer, who is having a major temper tantrum over the fact that G.W.'s many policy failures are being described in accurate terms. Never mind that Bush's incompetent strategy in Afghanistan, and his choice to pursue a war of choice in Iraq led to seven years of neglect and deterioration of military efforts in Afghanistan. Darn it, Krauthammer supported all of that and how dare Obama question Krauth... I mean Bush's competence. Look how he soft-pedals Bush's incompetence, both in Afghanistan and Iraq:

In both places, the deterioration of the military situation was not the result of "drift," but of considered policies that seemed reasonable, cautious and culturally sensitive at the time but that ultimately turned out to be wrong.

I wonder if any of the anonymous "experts" consulted by Brooks would agree with that... that "we'll be greeted as liberators" was sound policy for going into Iraq with insufficient troops to provide even basic post-war security, or that "we need those troops to invade Iraq" was a good reason to neglect the situation in Afghanistan.

The logic of a true counterinsurgency strategy there is that whatever resentment a troop surge might occasion pales in comparison with the continued demoralization of any potential anti-Taliban elements unless they receive serious and immediate protection from U.S.-NATO forces.

Yet, again, we're not going to stamp out the Taliban in Pashtun areas. We may cause it to recede during a period of escalated combat, but Afghanistan is the Taliban's home. It's not going anywhere, and its members will wait us out. So again we have a recipe for endless war and occupation, without any thought toward what a victory will look like or how it will be achieved. We may end up with better segregation of warring ethnic factions, and a sufficiently "stable" governing structure that (assuming we can convince Karzai to stop committing election fraud) could conceivably vote on post-occupation power-sharing. But is there any reason to believe that the government we leave behind will be any more stable, or any more resistant to civil war, than the government left behind by the Soviets?

Seriously, enough with the attacks on Obama. If you advance the continuation or escalation of the war in Afghanistan but can't articulate a strategy for victory, let alone articulate what a victory would look like, you have nothing to contribute to the debate.