Month: October 2009

Too Late, Too Late, Ctd

A reader writes:

On your latest Afghanistan post, I'm not sure people understand how true your statement is: "What Bush and Cheney threw away Obama cannot recapture."

My wife has worked for Tolo TV, the station that hosts the Afghan version of American Idol. She told me a story very illuminating along the Bush-Cheney front. Tolo sent a crew down to Uruzgan province last year — a clearly Pashtun, clearly pro-Taliban region, historically — and the tribal chiefs were having a big meeting, at which many of them said that shortly after 2001 they decided they would back Karzai's government and the U.S., feeling that the U.S. could and would improve the country and their lives. But no investment, no aid, no improvement ever came. America's resources were in Iraq. And now Uruzgan is a province where a man with white skin dare not walk without a very large military force behind him. Uruzgan reverted back to the Taliban. And it will stay that way for a very long time.

We had our chance once. It's long gone.

HIV Travel Ban Update

Good news: HHS has now forwarded the rule to OMB. That leaves OMB with 60 days to clear the rule for publication. I've been giving the Obama administration some grief for stalling on civil rights. But they've done this very carefully and methodically. Yes, the length of time between the law's passage and the rule change will be around a year and a half. But the change of administration was responsible for half of that and the Obama peeps' determination to do this very, very carefully is responsible for the rest. That care has been taken to make sure the rule change is secure, that every legal obstacle is persuasively overcome and that the details work.

The Obama administration may take its time, but the evidence is showing that it gets there in the end. For me, my family and countless others caught in the HIV net, this is wonderful news. We're grateful. And we'll remember.

Less Than Meets The Eye?

Musing On Iraq addresses yesterday's bombings:

Monthly [Iraqi] deaths are still at their lowest levels since the 2003 U.S. invasion.

The ebb and flow of violence shows the relative weakness of militants. They are only able to launch large attacks every other month. This month does show their increasing ability to carry out headline grabbing bombings however, in their attempt to destabilize the government, just as they did in August when they bombed the Finance and Foreign Ministries. That incident along with today’s undermine Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki’s claim that he has brought security to Iraq, which might hurt his re-election campaign in the 2010 vote.

It’s also important to remember not to track overall security in Iraq based upon such bombings. There is no direct correlation between such attacks and overall security incidents in Iraq or casualties.

Ignatius is positively chipper as well.

Reading The Brits On Afghanistan

Roger Cohen reads the tea leaves on Obama's approach to Af-Pak by speaking at length with the British foreign minister:

When I asked if the mission needed substantially more troops, Miliband said, “What I think that you can see from the prime minister’s strategy is that we believe in serious counterinsurgency. Counterinsurgency is a counterterrorist strategy.” […] That’s a clear rebuttal of the ever-larger school, most often identified with Vice President Joe Biden, advancing the view that Al Qaeda is the real threat, the Taliban much less of one; and so the United States should not commit more military resources to a nation-building struggle in Afghanistan that’s an expensive diversion from core U.S. strategic interests.

Cohen sees an increase of troops in the serious but fewer than 40,000 range. Britain has a reason to give it "one more try":

Three-quarters of all terrorist plots uncovered in Britain in recent years had links to Islamic extremists in Afghanistan or Pakistan.

But is it doable? Or does the attempt to squash it fuel it?

“Diversity,” Ctd

Will of Ordinary Gentlemen writes:

I know this article on race and progressive cities has taken a lot of criticism, but its central observation – that liberal policies and homogeneous cities are closely correlated – seems pretty intuitive. Progressives frequently argue that American hostility to redistribution stems from lingering racial anxiety. Conservatives are less eager to blame our welfare policies on straightforward racism, but many will argue that Scandinavian-style social democracy won’t work in the United States because we lack similar levels of cultural homogeneity. Either way, there seems to be a universal consensus that people from similar backgrounds are more amenable to redistributive policies.