Month: January 2009

The Most Dangerous Nation

By Patrick Appel
William Dalrymple reviews Descent into Chaos by Ahmed Rashid:

The blowback from the Afghan conflict in Pakistan is more serious still. In less than eight months, Asif Ali Zardari’s new government has effectively lost control of much of the North-West Frontier Province (NWFP) to the Taliban’s Pakistani counterparts, a loose confederation of nationalists, Islamists, and angry Pashtun tribesmen under the nominal command of Baitullah Mehsud. Few had very high expectations of Zardari, the notoriously corrupt playboy widower of Benazir Bhutto. Nevertheless, the speed of the collapse that has taken place under his watch has amazed almost all observers.

A Long Way From HillaryCare

by Chris Bodenner
Many great nuggets of reporting in Joe Klein’s new column, but this one seems most apt in the wake of yesterday’s confirmation:

In some ways, the most surprising of his appointments — Hillary Clinton, the new Secretary of State — has emerged as an exemplar of Obamism. … Clinton, who can be spiky, has re-emerged as a natural diplomat. When she heard that Holbrooke and General David Petraeus had never met, she invited them over to her Washington home on a Friday night before the Inauguration. The two men spent two hours in front of a roaring fire with Clinton, getting to know each other, talking about the diplomatic and military division of labor in Afghanistan and Pakistan. Clinton’s was an Obamian gesture — enticing the lion to lie down with the lion — the sort of attention to detail that seems to have been replicated across the policymaking spectrum during the Obama transition.

Also, we’re a long way from Gennifer Flowers:

Toward the end of the campaign, Michelle Obama asked me if I was going to write a novel about them like Primary Colors, my satiric account of the 1992 presidential race. I was at a loss for words, in part because the thought hadn’t even vaguely crossed my mind. "He can’t write a novel about us," Barack Obama reassured his wife. "We’re too boring."

You Can Keep Your Senate Seat

By Patrick Appel
Nate Silver states the obvious:

If the news is true that Caroline Kennedy has withdrawn her bid for the Senate, then one of two things has happened. The first possibility is that David Paterson decided some days ago to go with another candidate, and gave Kennedy the opportunity to save face by withdrawing her name from consideration. You know: the old "You Can’t Fire Me! I Quit!" shtick.

The second possibility, not entirely mutually exclusive with the first, is that Kennedy was just not all that into being a senator in the first place.

Whatever the reason, this is probably for the best.

Quicker Than A Recount

by Chris Bodenner
From the White House pool report:

At 735 pm, [Chief Justice John} Roberts administ[e]red the oath of office again to obama in the map room. Robert gibbs said the wh counsel, greg craig, believes the oath was fine Tuesday, but one word was out of sequence so they did this out of "an abundance of caution." "We decided it was so much fun…" Obama joked while sitting on a couch.

Obama stood and walked over to make small talk with pool as roberts donned his black robe. "Are you ready to take the oath?" Roberts asked. "I am, and we’re going to do it very slowly," obama replied. Oath took 25 seconds. After a flawless recitation, roberts smiled and said, "congratulations, again."

“Curiosity”

by Chris Bodenner
Hanna Rosin:

This is the word that stood out for me in Obama’s list of values yesterday: "hard work and honesty, courage and fair play, tolerance and curiosity, loyalty and patriotism." The rest have echoes in traditional and more safe political dialogue. But curiosity has a different sort of resonance. Curiosity is what led his mother on the many of what must have seemed like reckless adventures, that eventually created the motley family he has today. For a post-PC age, curiosity is a much better word than tolerance with its implications of holding your nose.

Her colleague Jessica Grose (like Andrew) plucked "non-believers" from the usual rhetoric:

There’s been much talk of Obama’s ushering in a "post-racial" America, but will he also be welcoming a post-religion America?  Doubtful, but at least it’s a step in the right direction.

It’s just one anecdote, but: I stood with mostly African-Americans during the speech and the only time I ever heard booing of Obama, from many directions, was his shout-out to "non-believers."

(For PEW’s latest stats on race and religion, and a firsthand take on the "isolating experience" of being a black atheist, check out this post.)

Face Of The Day

Workerchrishondrosgetty3
An Iraqi worker pauses from work on a leaky pipe in the massive Iskandariyha power plant on January 21, 2009 in Iskandariyha, Iraq. Built in the early 1980s, the Iskandariyha plant is Iraq’s largest and most important providing a significant percentage of the country’s total electrical power. Years of neglect by Saddam’s government, as well as a 1991 aerial strike by the US during the Persian Gulf War, have left the plant hobbled sometimes only operating at half capacity. The plant burns Iraq’s plentiful crude oil to generate power with almost no modern environmental regulations while its employees, numbering over 1000, work on dirty, oil-slicked floors with little safety equipment. By Chris Hondros/Getty.

The Trouble With Afghanistan II

By Patrick Appel Dov Zakheim considers the challenges:

We would not be where we are today if the Office of Management and Budget, in its myopia, had not withheld significant funds for aid to Afghanistan in 2001-2003, a time when there were perhaps 30,000 troops — from all nations — in the country, when the drug trade had not yet blossomed, when the Taliban was on the run. A serious infusion of such financial and economic assistance would have given the Afghan central government considerably more credibility, and given Afghan farmers a viable alternative to poppies. And it would have made the Taliban even less attractive to the ordinary Afghan.

Obama is not being unilateral by doubling our troops.

We can, and should, demand more economic and financial assistance, as well as materiel support to our forces, from the Europeans, as well as the Asians and the Arabs — as we did in 2002-2004, with some success. (Full disclosure: in my job as civilian DOD coordinator for Afghanistan, I spent a lot of time rattling the tin cup around the world.) Involving these states materially, as well as the EU, multilateralizes the war in Afghanistan in a very real way, creates support in the UN, and helps us to work alongside otherwise skeptical NGOs as well.