Obsidian Wings

The truth hurts: Newsweek's Palin cover

By Lindsay Beyerstein  

Newsweek used this photograph of Sarah Palin as this week's cover shot.

The headline reads, "How do you solve a problem like Sarah? She's bad news for the GOP--and everybody else, too."

It's a damned good question, and I couldn't think of a better image to make the point.

Palin posed for this picture as part of a photo essay captioned Governor Palin, The Runner, which ran in the August issue of Runner's World. When I saw this image in its original context, I was appalled that a sitting governor would pose for a shot like this; or this stretching shot that puts the visual center of gravity squarely on her crotch.

Maybe Palin didn't realize that the photographer, Brian Adams, was depicting her this way. If so, he totally fucked her over. [NB: In an earlier version of this post, I misspelled Brian Adams' name "Bryan Adams." Today, I got an email from a firm called Web Sheriff telling me that they'd take legal action if I didn't apologize to the rock star Bryan Adams and ACI for any injury I might have caused to his reputation. So, I sincerely apologize to Bryan Adams. I wouldn't want my name associated with these ridiculous pictures either.] But I think she was on board with the concept. If Palin had assailed Runner's World for making fun of her, I might now take her complaint about Newsweek seriously. She liked the Runner's World spread, though. She thought it was appropriate.

There's nothing scandalous about Palin showing some skin, or wearing Spandex. But this cover image is deliberately styled to make the then-governor of Alaska look like a Vargas pinup girl. Unlike the other images in the series, this one references her status as a governor. As she poses like a swimsuit model, she's clutching one icon of political power--the Blackberry--and leaning on another. The theme isn't Sarah Palin, athlete. The theme is Sarah Palin, Sexy Governor. (As in: one of those dime store Halloween costumes: sexy cop, sexy ladybug, sexy sanitation worker...)

Predictably, Palin complained that Newsweek's use of the image was sexist. Yes, the image was plucked from its original context. The whole point was that the picture was appalling it its original context. Newsweek is holding this picture up to the world and asking: Who does this? 

The bottom line is that Palin's a clown. She doesn't get a pass because her chosen clown persona is stereotypically feminine.

She caricatures herself. Day in and day out. Good for Newsweek for pointing and laughing.

The story is about why Sarah Palin is a problem for the GOP. The picture answers the question. She's a problem because she's a freak with no judgment who regularly makes a spectacle of herself.  Obviously, she's a potential problem for America because she's an incompetent leader who supports terrible policies. But that's not Newsweek's question.

Newsweek's question is why she's bad for the GOP. The answer is that she's dragging down her party because it's impossible for adults to take her seriously. Not because she's beautiful or maternal or fit, but rather because she has no decorum, no dignity, and no common sense. I mean look at her, she's working the goofy MILF persona like that's a perfectly normal thing for a governor with presidential aspirations to be doing. (As a political pro pointed out to me, it's shocking that her staff let her do the shoot without checking the Runner's World contract to make this couldn't happen.)

Palin's not even bad news for her party because she's ignorant or radically reactionary. Lots of American politicians are both and they do just fine. Palin has the double whammy of being ignorant and absurd. She's absolutely not ready for prime time. John McCain plucked her from obscurity as a publicity stunt and he lived to rue the day.

The tighter the wingnut base embraces Palin, the more clownish they reveal themselves to be.

Big Uncle Knows Best

by Eric Martin

Colonel Gian Gentile, the antidote to the epidemic of irrational exuberance invested in the ability of counterinsurgency doctrine (COIN) to solve any insoluble military/political conundrum, offers yet another reality check:

History shows that occupation by foreign armies with the intent of changing occupied societies does not work and ends up costing considerable blood and treasure.

The notion that if only an army gets a few more troops, with different and better generals, then within a few years it can defeat a multi-faceted insurgency set in the middle of civil war, is not supported by an honest reading of history.

Algeria, Vietnam and Iraq show this to be the case. Regrettably we don’t seem to be learning anything from history with regard to Afghanistan. We are making the same blunders.

When I was a combat battalion commander in West Baghdad in 2006, I asked an Iraqi Army general how long it would be before the civil war ended in Iraq. “Four hundred years,” was his answer.

It took the United States almost a hundred years to end its most divisive political and social issue, slavery, and it required a cataclysmic civil war. Could an outside force have come into the United States in the 1850s and resolved its internal conflicts at the barrel of a gun?

So why do we think we have ended Iraq’s civil war at the barrel of a gun over the past two years — or that we can do it in Afghanistan? 

There are myriad good reasons why outside powers have such a hard time prevailing in another country's civil war.  That number of reasons is multiplied when the outside power is geographically removed and has little cultural understanding or connection to the underlying country and its people.  Ultimately, the interests, traditions and patience of the indigenous people are more determinative of outcomes than the fleeting ambitions, grand designs and enthusiasm of would-be foreign conflict shapers.  As many Afghan insurgents are fond of pointing out, "You have the watches, we have the time."  They have more than that: they also know the place first hand.

A hint at the difficulties we're encountering is revealed in the concern on the part of so many observers that if we significantly reduced our troop presence (or withdrew altogether), the conglomerate of insurgent factions lumped together under the misleading label "Taliban" would soon take over the country (this would apparently be true even if we kept up aid, and possible air support, for the Karzai government faction). 

Let's assume, for the sake of argument, that this is how events would in fact play out.  Consider what that says about the relative popularity/support of the various warring factions.  In essence, the Afghan people are so uninterested in fighting for the cobbled together, massively corrupt, alien-seeming government formed under our watch that the government faction would soon collapse without its foreign patrons (and army) around to prop it up.  Even aid from afar would be insufficient to overcome its lack of dedicated local support.

Worse still from our perspective, a widespread conversion of Afghan hearts and minds seems unlikely in the near future.  This is evidenced by our continuously stymied efforts to field a motivated and committed army and police force. Those efforts suffer from the same apathy and disinterest as our attempts to rally the population around the political body of the Karzai regime.  Fundamentally, we are having difficulty motivating the Afghan people to fight the war that we want them to fight, for the causes and factions that we want them to champion.  They have different notions about what is, and isn't, worth fighting for. 

Which is predictable given that foreign powers, with little cultural and geographical connection to a target country, can rarely manufacture enough enthusiasm for its foreign-imposed faction/concepts to prevail in a civil war - or a multi-faceted civil war/insurgency hybrid. Basically, the Afghan people don't view their conflicts and culture through an American-lens.  The allure of democracy, whiskey, sexy only goes so far when there are more pressing needs such as food, livelihood, cultural values, security and, generally, staying alive.  Steve Coll touched on an aspect of this phenomenon in a recent piece:

Since the Soviet Union invaded Afghanistan, in 1979, attempts by foreign powers to shape events there have repeatedly been thwarted by what intelligence analysts call “mirror imaging,” which is the tendency of decision-makers in one country to judge counterparts in another through the prism of their own language and politics. The Politburo, for example, engaged in energetic debates about the extent to which Afghanistan might conform to the stages of revolutionary development contemplated in Marxist-Leninist theory.

As the Obama war cabinet now debates its choices, American discourse barely refers to Afghan leaders by name or to the particular equations of the country’s diverse provinces. Instead, historical analogies and abstract concepts from political-theory texts abound—arguments about “legitimacy” and “governance,” as if the Taliban were motivated primarily by the “Rights of Man.” Obama and his advisers might profitably consult the Democratic Party’s own book of rules, specifically an entry composed by a peaceable boss from Massachusetts: All politics is local. In the case of Afghanistan, there is a corollary: All local progress, or failure, will be political. 

Adding: All local progress, or failure, will be political and determined by the locals.  Even if we think we know better.  The best we can do is help the locals to set up their own political framework for addressing these conflicts, and then get out of the way.

My Father Is by No Means Perfect, but...

by Eric Martin

Apropos of nothing in particular, this childhood remembrance by one of Osama bin Laden's sons published in Vanity Fair caught my interest.  A brief excerpt from an otherwise intriguing piece:

Since the time I could observe and reason, I have mainly known my father to be composed, no matter what might be happening. That’s because he believes that everything of earthly life is in the hands of God. It is difficult, therefore, for me to imagine that he became so excited when my mother told him I was about to be born that he momentarily misplaced his keys.

After a frantic search, I’m told he settled my mother hastily in the car before spinning off at a reckless speed. Luckily he had recently purchased a new automobile, the latest Mercedes, because on that day he tested all its working parts. I’ve been told it was golden in color, something so beautiful that I imagine the vehicle as a golden carriage tearing through the wide palm-tree-lined boulevards of Jeddah, Saudia Arabia.

Within a short while after that chaotic journey, I made my appearance, becoming the fourth child born to my parents.

Worth a look.

Mind the Gap

by Eric Martin

Last week, the Washington Post published a story detailing some of the tensions between the Taliban and al-Qaeda, as recently discussed on this site.  According to the Post story, the Taliban is increasingly assuming a dominant role (or returning to a dominant role after the down period that occurred post-US invasion):

As violence rises in Afghanistan, the power balance between insurgent groups has shifted, with a weakened al-Qaeda relying increasingly on the emboldened Taliban for protection and the manpower to carry out deadly attacks, according to U.S. military and intelligence officials.

The ascendancy of the Taliban and the relative decline of al-Qaeda have broad implications for the Obama administration as it seeks to define its enemy in Afghanistan and debates deploying tens of thousands of additional troops.

Although the war in Afghanistan began as a response to al-Qaeda terrorism, there are perhaps fewer than 100 members of the group left in the country, according to a senior U.S. military intelligence official in Kabul who spoke on the condition of anonymity.

This trend comes amid news that the lucrative and vital flow of cash from wealthydonors in the Gulf region that al-Qaeda used to great effect in the past has been increasingly shifting to the Taliban.

The Post piece also highlights some recent Taliban political/strategic adjustments that have created quite a stir in the jihadi community because of the potential schism with al-Qaeda indicated by these shifts:

Omar's mission is to force U.S. and NATO troops from Afghanistan and to recapture the country. His group is particularly active in attacking U.S. troops in southern Afghanistan, his home base.

This year, Omar's military committee published a rule book for followers, calling on them to protect the population and avoid civilian casualties -- much like U.S. counterinsurgency principles. He has railed against the corruption of President Hamid Karzai's government, an issue that resonates with Afghans. He has also solicited support from other Muslim countries. But al-Qaeda's agenda of global holy war and taste for mass-casualty attacks, no matter how many Muslim civilians are killed, complicate that goal.

In a February interview with al-Samoud magazine, Taliban political committee leader Agha Jan Mutassim praised the Saudi Arabian government, called for Muslim unity and said the Taliban "respects all different Islamic schools and branches without any discrimination" in Afghanistan.

Such positions may put Omar's Taliban at odds with al-Qaeda's extremist Sunni agenda of overthrowing what it sees as corrupt Muslim governments and targeting Shiites. Analysts said that Omar, who leads a council of Taliban commanders based in or around the Pakistani city of Quetta, wants such countries as Saudi Arabia, the United Arab Emirates and Pakistan to recognize the Taliban as a legitimate government if it regains power and that he has little interest in fomenting war elsewhere.

"We assure all countries that the Islamic Emirate of Afghanistan, as a responsible force, will not extend its hand to cause jeopardy to others," Omar said in a written statement in September.

The messages from the Taliban leadership since the spring amount to something of a "revolution," said Wahid Mujda, a political analyst who was a Foreign Ministry official under the Taliban government. "Al-Qaeda's path is now different from the Taliban's path, and they are growing more separated."

However, not all groups lumped together under the clunky "Taliban" moniker are moving in the same direction as Mullah Omar's faction.  Importantly, the powerful Haqqani faction is strengthening its ties:

Although that may be true of Omar's faction, observers here say that other segments of the Taliban have become more closely entwined with al-Qaeda than ever.

The Haqqani-led faction, which is blamed for many of the deadliest attacks on U.S. troops in eastern Afghanistan, works so closely with al-Qaeda that distinctions between the groups may be irrelevant, officials said.

In the lawless border town of Miran Shah in Pakistan's North Waziristan region, where insurgents hold sway and experience little interference from the Pakistani army, Haqqani's Taliban works side by side with al-Qaeda. Haqqani developed close ties with Arab fighters during the war against the Soviets in the 1980s, during which he received funding from the CIA and Pakistan's Inter-Services Intelligence agency. One of his wives is Arab. When bin Laden fled the U.S. invasion in 2001, he took refuge with Haqqani in a safe house between the Afghan city of Khost and Miran Shah, according to Pakistani author Ahmed Rashid.

Haqqani's network, which experts say maintains links with Pakistani authorities, fights in eastern Afghanistan.

It will be interesting to see to what extent, if any, the NATO military presence focuses on Haqqani's network in the east, rather than Omar's in the south.  Or whether or not US military officials attempt to probe this potential divide and drive a wedge to deepen it. 

To the Victors, but Will it Spoil?

by Eric Martin

Nir Rosen has a fascinating piece on recent events in Iraq in the Boston Review.  This portion is about as concise and accurate a recounting of the evolution of the conflict as I've come across: 

Since the occupation began, Muqtada has been the most controversial public figure in Iraq. A populist anti-American leader, he came from a lineage of revolutionary Shia clerics who opposed the Saddam’s regime and who gave voice to Iraq’s poor Shia majority. Capitalizing on his slain father’s network of mosques and the family name, Muqtada and his followers, called Sadrists, seized control of Shia areas in Iraq when Baghdad fell, especially the slums of Basra and the capital. He rallied marginalized Shias against the occupation, its puppet government, and eventually against Sunni extremists as well. His movement provided social services, and his militia, Jeish al Mahdi—the Mahdi Army or JAM—fought the Americans and defended Shias from extremist Sunni terrorism.

But the Mahdi Army and its rivals eventually propagated sectarian violence, fighting in the civil war and expelling or killing innocent Sunnis. After the February 2006 bombing of the Samarra shrine, a Shia holy site, the two-year-old civil war intensified. With attacks against Sunnis escalating, the largely Shia Iraqi police often looked the other way. The bloodshed was indiscriminate.

By 2007 Muqtada was no longer in control of the militias, many of which had become mere criminal gangs. In August of that year, fearing that the Surge would mean an all-out American assault on Shia communities controlled by his militias, he called for a ceasefire. But he did not tell his men to disarm, and fighting continued, especially resistance attacks against the Americans by recalcitrant former Mahdi Army fighters, who viewed Muqtada’s ceasefire as a betrayal.

Prime Minister Nuri al Maliki’s government tacitly supported Shia militias throughout the civil war, but in March 2008 Maliki surprised everyone by launching “Charge of the Knights,” a 15,000-man Iraqi Army operation intended to crush Shia militias—especially Muqtada’s followers—who had Basra in their grip. The assault floundered until American backup rescued the beleaguered Iraqi security forces and drove the militias out. Maliki managed to chalk it up as a victory, and his decision to crush Shia militias in Basra, Baghdad, and elsewhere won him the support of many Sunnis.

Jassim Ahmad, deputy head of the Sunni Islamic party in Basra, confirmed the offensive’s impact. He told me that their previous headquarters had been destroyed following the 2006 Samarra bombing with the complicity of local police. Many Sunni sheikhs had been murdered as well. But some Sunnis had returned after Charge of the Knights, with about 400 of them in the local police and army by the end of 2008, according to his figures.

In downtown Basra the campaign’s success was plain. The local economy was thriving, and women could once again walk on the streets without wearing the veil if they chose to. As Ahmad put it, “now the Sunni sect doesn’t have problems in Basra.”

After the operation, local officials held a conference to discuss rebuilding. Despite the conference’s distinctly Shia tone, speakers expressed relief that the militias and “criminals” were gone. They praised Iraqi forces for providing security. There was no mention of the British or the Americans. It felt like a post-occupation Iraq, and the mood of the meeting inspired hope that when the Americans inevitably reduced their numbers, the country would not again fall into civil war.

In a nearby slum, four Mahdi Army men complained that the army stole from homes, but they vowed to support Maliki, despite his crackdown. “We obey Muqtada, and whatever he says, we do, and he said, ‘don’t fight the government,’” they told me. “We are not against the government or the people, just against the occupation. We are giving the government an opportunity.”

It was clear that something significant had changed in Iraq. While resentment lingered and murders continued, the sectarian violence had subsided, and there was a willingness to think about a future in which different Iraqi communities would live together in peace.

Still, talk about a “post-sectarian future” is premature. The situation is complex and fluid, and people in the communities most ravaged by the civil war understandably tell each other a range of conflicting stories about the roots of the change. One explanation that few are prepared to discuss openly is that Iraq’s civil war ended because Shias won: violence against Sunnis ceased after Sunnis were brutally cleansed from Basra and large swaths of Baghdad, and Shias gained firm control of government ministries and local police. Sunnis knew they were defeated and Shias no longer worried that Ba’athist oppression would resume. With no external enemy, Shia militias began to fight each other and turned into criminal gangs terrorizing their own communities. The defeat of the Sunnis and divisions among Shias created space for new possibilities, and the government and American forces occupied that space.

Other stories emphasize the resurgence of a latent pan-Iraqi nationalism, the consolidation of Iraqi national security forces, the exhaustion of sectarian violence, the shift in views about the militias—from heroes to enemies of the people—and the massive pay-off of mostly Sunni militiamen.

Indeed it was a combination of all these things, the early 2007 “Surge” in U.S. forces playing a smaller role than American claims often suggest. The Surge benefitted from other changes. Troop increases and a determined counterinsurgency policy came at a time when they could finally be tolerated in anti-occupation neighborhoods because the main struggle had shifted from liberating Iraq from the Americans to inter-Iraqi fighting. Had the Surge occurred a year earlier, it would have met far greater resistance.

Rosen himself provides evidence that the Maliki government's past support for sectarian cleansing was a little more than "tacit."  From his conversations with an Iraqi Army captain Mushtaq:

According to Mushtaq, at the time, much of the government supported the Mahdi Army, so the fighters had access to good information...

“We captured a lot of Mahdi Army guys back then,” Mushtaq told me, “but we got orders from the prime minister’s office and Baghdad operations center to release them.”

When the Mahdi Army was at its peak, Mushtaq explained, it had the support of two individuals in the Prime Minister’s office: Major General Adnan al Maksusi, an intelligence officer, and Dr. Basima al Jadhri, an advisor to Maliki on the Ministries of Interior and Defense, and later on Reconciliation. “They used to fire all officers who were against the Mahdi Army or who arrested [members of] the Mahdi Army.”

Eventually, that support waned and then reversed into active opposition - although moreso with respect to the outaw splinter JAM cells, if not as intensely for Muqtada al-Sadr and the core Sadrists themselves. 

Rosen's concluding paragraphs adeptly describe the current situation in Iraq: a picture of guarded optimism matched with grim reality, painted on a canvass of imense tragedy. 

Despite the relative calm, it was clear during my trips to Iraq in 2008 and 2009 that the post-civil war order was one of enshrined sectarianism. At the Ministry of Interior, I saw televisions in the lobby and waiting room tuned to Shia religious channels. Shia religious music blared from the radios of police vehicles. Shia religious banners hung on the Ministry of Interior and other ministries while Shia religious flags waved in the wind above the nearby Ministry of Oil and other government buildings. On the walls of the Baghdad Council there was a large mural of Shia pilgrims marching to Karbala. A confident expression of Shia identity, much as I saw at the airport in Basra, was now the most common manifestation of sectarianism. The state now belonged to the Shias.

Since 2003 millions of Iraqis have lost their homes. Hundreds of thousands have died. Tens of thousands have been imprisoned by the Americans. Iraq’s demographic distribution has been irrevocably changed. Sectarianism rules, if less explicitly violently than it once did. The new government is among the most corrupt in the world. It is beginning to resemble its Baa’thist predecessor in its authoritarianism and brutality. But it faces no immediate threats, and its strength gives it some form of legitimacy, even among Sunnis. An ugly peace may indeed hold in Washash and the rest of Iraq.

Let's hope that peace holds, and that, in time, the hard edges soften.

I say hello and it's goodbye again

by von

I realize that the blog has been a bit sparse of late, post-wise.  We're working on it.  In a meantime, here are a couple of loosely-related rants that I've been keeping to myself for far too long:

Rant One.  Based solely on this clip, I give 90-1 odds against M. Night Shyamalan's version of Avatar:  The Last Airbender being anything other than crappy.  I got bored halfway through the teaser.  Crap, I can blow out candles.  Whoop-de-doo.  Next you'll make Sokka a grim warrior who worships Crum and never jokes.  I give up.  Readers:  it's not too late to catch the original series in re-runs. 

Rant Two. While I'm on the subject of children's films, let me explain why the movie adaptation of Horton Hears a Who sucks.  Horton Hears a Who, by Dr. Seuss, tells the story of an elephant who hears a (actually, several) "Whos" -- microscopic beings on a small speck of dust floating by through the air.  The problem is that no one else in the Jungle of Nool can hear the Whos, and thus no one believes Horton's claims that Whos exist.  In part to restore the peace, and in part to save Horton from his own purported delusions, the residents of Nool decide to dunk the dust-speck in a boiling hot pot of beezel-nut oil.  The Whos are only saved when they shout loud enough so that they are heard by their would-be killers.

So, it's correct to say that Horton is about genocide.  That in itself a pretty significant achievement for a book targeted to young kids.  But the genius of Horton does not stop in finding a way to spin a good yarn about mass murder to the under-6 crowd.  The genius of Horton lies in what it says about the limits of empiricism and the dangers of mob rule.  No one in the mob is on Horton's side until the Whos prove their existence to the mob's satisfaction.  Until then, every character in the book is against Horton and the Whos.  This is aptly summed up by the little kangaroo's repeated refrain of "Me Too!" to every pronouncement against Horton by the leader of the mob (the big kangaroo).

These are pretty deep themes for any book to explore.  Horton is basically an indictment of not only the baser instincts of humanity, but also the better, including humanity's much-prized intelligence and rationality.  After all, the mob, for all its mob-ish-ness, is doing exactly what most of us would ordinarily find praiseworthy.  The mob is reasoning from the facts that it has.  A mob for the scientific method, if you will.  And, yet, there are times when the prudent thing to do is not to reason from the facts that you have, but to accept that you might not have all the facts. And so you should, at least temporarily, suspend judgment.  Every time I read the book -- and I have young kids, so this is a frequent occurrence -- I am amazed at how Dr. Seuss managed to present these themes in all their complexity to a very young audience without dumbing them down.

The movie adaptation, of course, erases all nuance by giving Horton the Elephant a coterie of youngsters who believe in him.  Even the young kangaroo -- the vice-inquisitor of the book, just as eager to fry the Whos in oil as anyone else -- is secretly on Horton's side.  In place of Dr. Seuss's nuanced themes, we get more crap about how parents just don't understand.  Which may itself be true, but (a) isn't one of Horton's themes and (b) was much better said by The Fresh Prince and D.J. Jazzy Jeff.  

And those are my rants for the weekend.  All the best!  

p.s. Yes, the title of this post loosely relates to Friday the 13th, which is today's date. I'm sure that one of our Emocore-iffic commentators can fill you in ....

LATE UPDATE:  The original version of this post misspelled "Seuss" throughout by transposing the "u" and "e".  My only excuse is that I'm an idiot (you have to admit that's a good excuse).

I Like Eik

by Eric Martin

The news emanating from the White House is that President Obama is unsatisfied with the various proposals for Afghanistan policy recently submitted by his review team (each of which called for a substantial increase in the number of troops, with indefinite timelines).  He has asked the working group to come back to the table with new options, and Spencer Ackerman provides a hint at what Obama might be looking for:

“They are pulling together the alternatives [Obama] requested” on refining options for resourcing the war, the NSC staffer continued. “They have until Friday to give him three new ones with withdrawal timetables.” [emphasis added]

This development coincides with a leaked memo indicating that one of Obama's top advisors, US Ambassador to Afghanistan General Karl W. Eikenberry, has counseled against any troop increase at all.  The Times' version of events confirms the above supposition from Ackerman's story:

Mr. Obama asked General Eikenberry about his concerns during the meeting on Wednesday, officials said, and raised questions about each of the four military options and how they might be tinkered with or changed. A central focus of Mr. Obama’s questions, officials said, was how long it would take to see results and be able to withdraw.

“He wants to know where the off-ramps are,” one official said.

The president pushed for revisions in the options to clarify how — and when — American troops would turn over responsibility to the Afghan government. He raised questions, officials said, about the exit strategy for American troops and sought to make clear that the commitment by the United States would not be open-ended.

These noises are all to the good, as the multi-decade open-ended commitment/escalation preferred by General McChrystal is simply not in the interests of the United States when weighed against the costs.  Nor does the strategy seem likely to bring about the desired outcomes in terms of creating stability in Afghanistan and Pakistan (our policies in the region have, in fact, destabilized Pakistan), while somehow managing to bolsterthe legitimacy of the unpopular Karzai regime such that a divided and warring population is wonover en masse.  

Further, Leah Farrall (who knows a thing or two about al-Qaeda) makes a point previously argued on this site: staying in Afghanistan long term plays directly into al-Qaeda's hands, so using the goal of thwarting al-Qaeda as a rationale for staying in Afghanistan misses the big picture strategic goal - big time. Military occupations are a terrible tool for counterterrorism in general, and given al-Qaeda's agenda, such occupations in such countries are particularly ill-suited.  Says Farrall:

The Obama administration will shortly unveil its new strategy for the Afghan conflict.

A key objective is the denial of al-Qa'ida access to sanctuary in Afghanistan -- a goal the Bush administration also shared. There has been vigorous debate within the US political establishment about what strategy will best achieve this goal. Counter-insurgency proponents argue for increased troop levels while others believe it can be achieved by a targeted counter-terrorism campaign with a lighter force footprint.

Both of these approaches rest on the longstanding premise that al-Qa'ida wants another safe haven in Afghanistan. However, this premise is based on a fundamental misunderstanding of its strategic intentions. Afghanistan's value to al-Qa'ida is as a location for jihad, not a sanctuary. [...]

This was one of the driving reasons behind Osama bin Laden's decision to attack the US with the specific aim of inciting it to invade Afghanistan. For bin Laden, this created a new, exploitable jihad. Since the US invaded Afghanistan and then Iraq, al-Qa'ida has become the pre-eminent group fighting a self-declared jihad against an occupying force. These invasions allowed al-Qa'ida to exploit allegations that the US was intent on occupying Muslim lands.

A withdrawal of coalition forces from Afghanistan would undoubtedly hand al-Qa'ida and the Taliban a propaganda victory. However, a victory would deny al-Qa'ida its most potent source of power, influence, funding and recruits -- the armed jihad.

Without a jihad to fight, al-Qa'ida would be left with only its franchises -- all of which are involved in deeply unpopular confrontations with government regimes in the Islamic world. Their indiscriminate acts of violence as well as hostility towards other Muslims not sharing their views have badly damaged al-Qa'ida's brand. This has driven al-Qa'ida to refocus on Afghanistan because jihad against an occupying force attracts a level of support and legitimacy that attacking Muslim governments does not. It provides additional justification for al-Qa'ida and those supporting it to continue striking US targets.

A reorientation of US strategy away from counterinsurgency or a full or partial withdrawal of US troops is therefore not in al-Qa'ida's strategic interest. [...]

The Afghan Taliban is moving away from al-Qa'ida and redefining itself as a national liberation movement. For al-Qa'ida, Taliban statements condemning colonialism and inviting good relations with its neighbours put a question mark over their relationship. The solution is the same: to attack the US, forcing a surge in American troop numbers.

This would tie the Afghan Taliban's hands. Taliban leader Mullah Omar's legitimacy would be jeopardised were he to publicly disassociate from al-Qa'ida and guarantee he would not again provide it sanctuary. His refusal to do so would then feed the justification for a counterinsurgency campaign against the Taliban in Afghanistan, ensuring the US remains engaged in the conflict.

Al-Qa'ida will continue to try to goad the US into staying involved in the conflict because the sustenance and empowerment the conflict gives al-Qa'ida far outweighs the benefits of a safe haven in Afghanistan. Until this is recognised, the strategies the US employs to protect itself from further attacks are likely to inspire more of them and, more importantly, sustain al-Qa'ida.

Since at least last March of this year, I've been holding out hope that Obama was ultimately gearing up for one last military push in Afghanistan to try to better our leverage/negotiating position ahead of an attempt to disentangle ourselves militarily from the web of conflicts in that region.  Here's hoping these recent reports are indicative of Obama's intention to do just that.  It does seem like a good time to stop dancing to bin Laden's beat now doesn't it.

Yeah, but Where Was the Ersatz Pimp?

by Eric Martin

I think what we need to do is pass a lawtargeting the entire ACORN organization because some low-level ACORN employees were caught in a video entrapment sting engaging in unethical and, possibly in some instances, illegal behavior (while others behaved quite admirably):

Top executives at Blackwater Worldwide authorized secret payments of about $1 million to Iraqi officials that were intended to silence their criticism and buy their support after a September 2007 episode in which Blackwater security guards fatally shot 17 Iraqi civilians in Baghdad, according to former company officials. [...]

Blackwater’s strategy of buying off the government officials, which would have been illegal under American law, created a deep rift inside the company, according to the former executives. They said that Cofer Black, who was then the company’s vice chairman and a former top C.I.A. and State Department official, learned of the plan from another Blackwater manager while he was in Baghdad discussing compensation for families of the shooting victims with United States Embassy officials.

It is an unthinkable outrage that even one federal dollar could end up going to an organization like ACORN.  I expect the media to blanket this comparatively enormous scandal with unrelenting, breathless coverage.

You Understand Less As the Pages Turn

by Eric Martin

Back in 2006, a wise man said this:

It's time to admit that no amount of American lives can resolve the political disagreement that lies at the heart of someone else's civil war.

And yet, three years and a rather precipitous political ascent later, that same person - now President Barack Obama - is contemplating just how many more troops to add to Afghanistan's roiling civil war - that would be on top of the 21,000 additional troops already deployed by Obama. Nader Mousavizadeh (via) is right about the nature of the conflict in Afghanistan, and our ability to impose a solution through enduring military occupation:

Two conclusions are inescapable from the fiasco of Afghanistan's presidential elections and the McChrystal assessment: There is no electoral solution to Afghan government's crisis of legitimacy, and there is no military solution to the challenge of the Taliban. And when observing the current Afghan conflict not from the perspective of America's post-9/11 intervention, but from Afghanistan's own quarter-century of warfare, a third conclusion becomes still more apparent: What we confront is not, in fact, an insurgency but rather a civil war -- one whose resolution can only be found in a new decentralized Afghan politics based on the enduring, if ugly, realities of power there, and not through another decade of Western military intervention.

If there is one lesson to be drawn from the withdrawal of Hamid Karzai's main rival from the second round of the elections -- and his own subsequent appointment as president for another term -- it is that the ability of outsiders to influence the existing politics of Afghanistan is now near zero, even when the object of our entreaties is a politician whose very existence has long depended entirely on Western support and funding. Like a patient rising from a hospital bed after a near-death experience only to rob his doctor blind on the way out the door, Karzai has conclusively demonstrated that his utility to Western interests -- as well as to the Afghan people whom he's grossly robbed of a chance for representative government -- is over.

As previously discussed on this Site, while much of the US-based discourse on Afghanistan frames the discussion in terms of defending the "Afghan people" and "Afghan nation" from the Taliban, in truth, the Taliban are a multifaceted, multi-ethnic coalition of cobbled together factions that are, by most accounts, almost entirely comprised of Afghans.  In fact, the term "Taliban" has become a euphemism for any and all groups opposed to the Karzai government and NATO forces.  The euphemism has been so liberally applied that the current compilation of opposition fighters commonly referred to as "Taliban" in government and media reports is, in actuality, almost entirely non-Taliban. 

Nearly all of the insurgents battling US and NATO troops in Afghanistan are not religiously motivated Taliban and Al Qaeda warriors, but a new generation of tribal fighters vying for control of territory, mineral wealth, and smuggling routes, according to summaries of new US intelligence reports.

Some of the major insurgent groups, including one responsible for a spate of recent American casualties, actually opposed the Taliban’s harsh Islamic government in Afghanistan during the 1990s, according to the reports, described by US officials under the condition they not be identified.

“Ninety percent is a tribal, localized insurgency,’’ said one US intelligence official in Washington who helped draft the assessments. “Ten percent are hardcore ideologues fighting for the Taliban.’’

US commanders and politicians often loosely refer to the enemy as the Taliban or Al Qaeda, giving rise to the image of holy warriors seeking to spread a fundamentalist form of Islam. But the mostly ethnic Pashtun fighters are often deeply connected by family and social ties to the valleys and mountains where they are fighting, and they see themselves as opposing the United States be cause it is an occupying power, the officials and analysts said.

In other words, the conflict in Afghanistan is a civil war.  The civil war has ethnically tinged roots that reach past to the days preceding the US invasion.  Robert Naiman had an informative piece on the subject which, itself, paraphrased some recent Times articles:

It depends on the yardstick

by von

The CBO's numbers are out on the GOP's health care plan and they are .... well, not bad.  If you measure it by the right yardstick, that is. 

Yes, this is gonna be one of those von posts that generates a little fire in the comments among our left-leaning commentators.  You're just gonna have to ride it out.

The important thing to realize is that the GOP plan is not a comprehensive reform effort.  It has a small but measurable impact on the uninsured.  I'll readily concede, however, that the small-but-measurable is all-but-negligible when it comes to the scope of the problem.  The GOP plan doesn't do anything that I can tell to resolve the problem of covering folks with preexisting conditions. Nor does it separate health insurance from employment -- the bete noir of the current health insurance market, at least for me.   

If you assess the GOP's plan by the yardstick of incremental improvements, however, it isn't bad at all.  The GOP plan cuts the deficit by $68 billion over ten years.  It cuts insurance costs for current enrollees "by 7 percent to 10 percent in the small group market, by 5 percent to 8 percent for individually purchased insurance, and by zero to 3 percent in the large group market."  The health-insurance haves -- who are the vast majority of people -- probably gain more under the Republican plan than under most Democratic proposals.  Republicans can also claim that their plan helps the "have nots" a bit, although, as noted above, it's a very little bit.  And the GOP does all of the above without raising taxes or cutting Medicare spending, unlike Democratic plans. 

Now, nothing in the GOP plan will satisfy someone who thinks that the current system requires immediate reform.  And the GOP plan is ultimately unsatisfying to me because it defers a lot of the hard choices.  On the other hand, if you think that the Democratic plan is worse than the status quo, maybe a little deferring is a good thing. 

And there's the political problem for Democrats:  Although the Democratic plan is more comprehensive, expands coverages, and arguably fixes more problems -- while potentially creating others -- the Republican plan is likely better for more folks who already have insurance.  It is also likely be perceived as being better for seniors because, unlike the Democratic proposals, it doesn't cut Medicare.   Folks who already have health care and seniors are not just the vast majority of voters, they also vote in vastly greater numbers than the primary beneficiaries of the Democratic plan.

I was complaining a little while back that Republicans didn't have a response to Team Obama on health care.  I take it all back.  The GOP plan is pretty good, if you apply the right yardstick.  The question for the electorate is:  which yardstick are you gonna apply?

* * * * * * *

As for me, I'll wait a bit longer and see what develops in the Senate.  The GOP plan is attractive on the merits* only if I become convinced that the Democratric cure is worse than the disease.  That's because the GOP plan is, essentially, a good punt.  I'm not ready to punt yet.

One prediction, though:  Olympia Snowe just got a lot more powerful. 

The CBO's formal letter to Rep. Boehner is here [.pdf].

*That's not to say that I'm not in favor of individual parts of the GOP plan.  For example, like Andrew Sullivan, I'd like to see med mal reform.  Unfortunately, that's not gonna happen while the Democrats control Congress.