Month: October 2009

That's what some are saying, after the latest bomb attack. This sentence says a lot:

The key to future stability is to bring the army, civilian government and the opposition onto one page with a common agenda to fight extremism, while amicably resolving other internal disputes, but so far that looks extremely unlikely.

Exum says that Karzai's brother being on the CIA's dole is the most significant news of the week:

[If] this is true, and if the CIA is empowering Ahmed Wali Karzai at the same time in which NATO/ISAF is saying abusive local power-brokers are a threat to mission success, then this is yet another example of NATO/ISAF carrying out one campaign in Afghanistan while the CIA carries out another — with both campaigns operating at cross purposes to one another. I should say here that I am in no position to confirm or deny this report. I can, however, say that numerous military officials in southern Afghanistan with whom I have spoken identify AWK and his activities as the biggest problem they face — bigger than the lack of government services or even the Taliban. And so if AWK is "the agency's guy", that leads to a huge point of friction between NATO/ISAF and the CIA.

Ya think? Look: you can pore over these details for blame-targets all you want. The bottom line is that all occupations of countries as corrupt and as broken as Afghanistan will lead to such a complex network of bribes, threats, unholy alliances and unintended consequences that almost any neo-imperial power will at some point be working against itself. And the US is a neo-imperial power in effect if not in motivation. Tom Friedman's migration toward minimalism mirrors my own:

What if we shrink our presence in Afghanistan? Won’t Al Qaeda return, the Taliban be energized and Pakistan collapse? Maybe. Maybe not. This gets to my second principle: In the Middle East, all politics — everything that matters — happens the morning after the morning after.

Be patient. Yes, the morning after we shrink down in Afghanistan, the Taliban will celebrate, Pakistan will quake and bin Laden will issue an exultant video. And the morning after the morning after, the Taliban factions will start fighting each other, the Pakistani Army will have to destroy their Taliban, or be destroyed by them, Afghanistan’s warlords will carve up the country, and, if bin Laden comes out of his cave, he’ll get zapped by a drone.

The logic of empire is the logic of the welfare state. You begin by helping; you end by fomenting dependency and corruption. The conservative insight is that the solution can be worse than the problem. In Af-Pak and Iraq, it still is.

Staggeringly, despite a long record of point-blank lies, 55 percent of Americans still believe Sarah Palin is honest. 71 percent believe she is unqualified to be president. The real change in the ratings comes in her favorability/unfavorability numbers: favorables down from around 60 percent just after her convention speech to around 40 percent today and unfavorables rocketing from 27 to 51 in a little over a year. Huckabee remains the front-runner. And in an odd way, occupying the space between Romney and Palin surely helps him.

It's hard to see how someone who has just quit her government job in the middle of her term can gain enough experience and qualifications in government to surmount that 71 percent in three years. But Kristol will try.

Andrew Exum takes a swipe at Greenwald, among others:

I like how pundits who spend their time casting doubt on the assessments and opinions of those with in-depth understanding of Afghanistan and NATO operations there jump at the chance to sing the praises of others with in-depth understanding of Afghanistan and NATO operations when they conveniently advance assessments and opinions that match up with conclusions they themselves have already reached. (Here’s but one example.)

Afghanistan and the U.S. presence there is a wicked problem about which many intelligent people can disagree. But suddenly the opinion of a junior State Department employee — talented and patriotic though he may be — is the only opinion that matters? So Matthew Koh [sic] is wise but Carter Malkasian and Kael Weston* are what, fools? Or Rory Stewart is clever but Ashraf Ghani and Clare Lockhart are dim? All three are clever, of course, and that’s what makes policy options on Afghanistan so devilish. Look, if someone writes something and it matches up with your opinion, by all means say so. But I know about 50 really smart people on Afghanistan with lots of time on the ground there, and no two have the same opinion about what U.S. policy should be. Let’s not turn one dude whose opinions on Afghanistan happen to line up with the zeitgeist into the flippin’ Delphic oracle.

*To name two people currently doing the same work as Koh [sic] — in conditions equally tough.

Exum fixed his typo and now has Hoh’s name right at least. The trouble is: most of us trying to understand this from a distance have little option but to read and assess views from various experts, carrying various qualifications. We make our judgment based on a variety of factors. In Hoh’s case, though, I don’t think the impact comes from credentials though. It comes from the sheer content of the letter – its cogency and power and integrity. It makes the most comprehensive sense of our position of any analysis I have read. And it suggests we should leave.

"The time has come to repeal the 1996 Defense of Marriage Act (DOMA). Enacted 13 years ago when the idea of same sex marriage was struggling for acceptance, the Act is a relic of a more tradition-bound time and culture," Senator Arlen Specter (D-PA), a former Republican who not only voted for DOMA but once supported a constitutional amendment.

"If Dick Cheney can support marriage, so can every Senator. So can every Democrat, Republican, Liberal Conservative. Equality should know no bounds, and we must not rest until we have marriage in all fifty of these United States," – Senator Chuck Schumer (D-NY), who opposed marriage equality just last year.

Count them.

A reader writes:

The short answer is, we can't.  In March of 2008, my wife and I signed the paperwork to get our first home under construction.  We opted to go with Bank of America since they had the best offer on a mortgage and we have been with them since they purchased Nation's Bank (and since Nation's Bank purchased Barnett).

About five weeks before our closing, I received a call from BoA saying they could no longer provide us the loan they promised.  Needless to say we were quite upset (we closed all of our accounts and switched to WaMu, now Chase).  Thankfully, we found a smaller mortgage company and closed on the house.  Two weeks after closing we received notice that our loan had been sold to Countrywide, now owned by BoA.  To add insult to injury, we recently refinanced into a lower rate mortgage via Quicken Loans.  Again, three weeks after closing we received notice that our loan had been sold to BoA!  Too big to fail? Probably.  Too big to get away from?  Definitely.

Another reader:

Another reason why individuals tend to favor the big banks is convenience, or appearance of it at least. Most people think that they are responsible, and will avoid any extraneous fees, and instead will focus on fees that will happen by default. Large banks have a presence throughout most of the country, which makes them appealing for avoiding ATM withdrawal fees.

Peter Suderman tackles yours truly for backing the netroots in pressuring Obama to keep his promises while disparaging the tea-partiers for doing the same thing. His point is a decent one. In response, I’d say that I have no problem with Republican activists/insurgents challenging the GOP establishment. On the size and scope of government and on fiscal balance, I’m all for them in theory. In practice: not so much. Why? Because the time to pressure your establishment is when it is in power. Back in Bush’s first term and well into his second, a few of us actually did stand up to the unconservative spending and borrowing, the unconservative Federal Marriage Amendment, the illegal torture regime, and the unconservative recklessness with which both the Afghan and Iraqi wars were waged. Funny thing: none of the tea-partiers were with us. In fact they were mainly cheerleading a trillion dollar war based on false pretenses long after its bankruptcy was exposed. They were rallying for Bush’s re-election. The moments they did wake up – the Harriet Miers nomination for example – were exceptions that proved the rule.  Only now do they actually get organized. And one can be forgiven for seeing it as a toxic mix of Fox-generated partisanship and paranoia, with some ugly populist and cultural under-currents. This is rather different than the netroots or the gay activists actually putting real heat on Obama in his first year. And the difference lies with political seriousness. On the opt-out public option, for example, the matter is in the Congress now, it’s popular in many polls, it may be the only way to restrain costs, and by phasing it in through the states, its efficacy can be tested. My point is that this is a practical way to push for real change, especially since the Obama campaign explicitly embraced this model of citizen input. Ditto the protests for ending the military ban or repealing DOMA. These are tangible goals, already supported by the Democratic leadership, in which base pressure can work – to force the Dems to do what they have promised to do when they can actually deliver. And the activists can claim some measure of integrity: they’re willing to tackle a president they supported. How many conservatives were tackling Bush in his first year even as his betrayal of core conservative values was evident from 2001 onwards. Or his second year? (There were, I think, two of us in Washington. And Bartlett and I were excommunicated for disloyalty). My worry about the tea-partiers is not that just they are Johnny-Come-Latelies (even though most are). It is not that they are partisans (some of them clearly aren’t). It is that they are motivated by an amorphous distrust and loathing of government that never seems to get translated into actual policies (and that is itself more populist than conservative). And they are pushing the GOP leadership to take talk-radio abstract positions, rather than tangible proposals. They are deeply unserious.

If they were proposing a serious set of cuts to entitlement or defense spending, or an alternative to the Democrats’ health insurance plans, or an openness to a VAT to rescue federal finances, I’d be on their side. But what they currently are is a form of ideological protest movement with no hope for or intention of actually bringing any of this about. I feel about them as a small government type the way I used to feel about ACT-UP as an HIV-positive gay man. They’re more about theater and therapy than protest and progress.

They’re also reactionary on several critical areas: gay rights; climate change; accepting a multicultural America; the desire to abolish the Fed; this nonsense about czars; assertions of Biblical verses as if they were public policy arguments, etc etc. I know base movements get fringy. But the fringe here is the base. And I do not feel in any way welcome or included or even addressed.