Karzai Goes Rogue

The revelation (NYT) that Afghan President Hamid Karzai has been secretly negotiating with the Taliban behind our backs helps explain his erratic behavior of late:

The reports confirm suspicions that Karzai’s recently-increased antipathy towards the U.S. is fueled by a desire to appeal to Taliban leaders. Last month Karzai went so far as to claim that suicide and other attacks, which the Taliban had already taken responsibility for, were actually orchestrated by the U.S. The insistence that Washington was behind the attack makes more sense as an attempt to justify a failing Taliban negotiation than an actual complaint against the U.S. government.

The kicker for Chotiner is that Karzai making no progress:

These actions have enraged American officials, as has the idea that Karzai would reach out to groups that are killing Afghans and American soldiers. But what’s truly embarrassing and maddening about Karzai’s unilateral initiative is that it is, er, absolutely pointless. As the Times reports: “The clandestine contacts with the Taliban have borne little fruit, according to people who have been told about them. But they have helped undermine the remaining confidence between the United States and Mr. Karzai, making the already messy endgame of the Afghan conflict even more volatile.”

Noah Feldman, however, thinks we should let him try:

Karzai’s efforts have a potential upside that the U.S. negotiations lack. For Karzai’s life to be spared and his presence to be tolerated would be a powerful signal to Afghans who allied themselves with the U.S. that Taliban rule will not come with vicious retaliation. The Taliban right now must be asking themselves whether to engage in de-Americanization in a post-conflict Afghanistan. A glance at U.S. efforts to de-Ba’athify Iraq, which led to bloodshed and chaos, may be all it takes for them to conclude that the benefits are not worth the costs. Why resort to a reign of terror if the people are already willing to accept your rule?

Jim White suggests a way to move things along:

If the US truly cared about bringing peace to Afghanistan, an interesting new bargaining position would be to threaten both Karzai and the Taliban that they intend to stay in Afghanistan beyond the end of the year even if Karzai doesn’t sign the [bilateral security agreement (BSA)], but that if a peace agreement is reached, the US would leave and provide a portion of the funding that the US now dangles as incentive for signing the BSA. Such a position by the US would allow the Taliban and Karzai to unite behind their one common goal–the removal of all US troops. With public opinion of the US effort in Afghanistan at an all-time low, promoting a full withdrawal would be a welcome development in the US.

Can An Anti-War Republican Win?

Senators Gather To Caucus Over Hagel Nomination

It’s the $64,000 question of the next GOP primary cycle. First up: let’s note a fascinating new development. Republican views of the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq have shifted quite dramatically. In the latest Pew poll (pdf), only 36 percent of Republicans now believe that the US achieved its goals in Iraq – basically the same as Democrats and Independents. Only 39 percent believe we succeeded in Afghanistan. So hefty majorities of Republicans now believe that both wars were failures. They haven’t yet fully absorbed the cost of those failures. But surely the fiscal blow will have some traction with Tea Partiers.

Larison, ever hopeful, believes that Rand Paul’s “greatest advantage over other Republican politicians is that he has reliably been an early and vocal opponent of unnecessary wars”:

Unlike every other Republican in elected office today, Paul was on record as an opponent of the Iraq war from the beginning. Today even most Republicans acknowledge that the war was a failure, and there is clearly no appetite for anything like that again. While other Republicans were berating Obama for intervening in Libya too slowly, Paul was opposed to the war, and he was likewise an early critic of attacking Syria and arming the opposition. This has put him on the right side of public opinion and distinguished him from the Obama administration on a few high-profile issues.

But Colin Dueck sees Paul’s foreign policy views as a liability:

A whopping 73 percent of Republicans believe Iran is “not serious” about addressing concerns about its nuclear weapons program. Some 80 percent of Republicans believe the United States is “less respected” than it was a decade ago. (It is unlikely that those Republicans view this as a good thing.) The highest foreign policy priority listed for Republicans was “protecting U.S. from terrorism.” Moreover, the December Pew poll found that 51 percent of all Americans view Obama as “not tough enough” on foreign policy and national security, 37 percent view him as “about right,” and only five percent view him as “too tough.” It is more than likely that the proportion of Republicans, specifically, who view Obama as “not tough enough” is well above 51 percent.

These findings are consistent with similar foreign policy polls by Pew, Gallup, and numerous other organizations. Over 70 percent of Republicans support drone strikes against suspected terrorists (Wall Street Journal, June 5, 2013); favor airstrikes against Iran rather than allowing that country to develop nuclear weapons (Haaretz, March 19, 2013); believe that U.S. military spending today is either about right or too low (Gallup, February 21, 2013); and think the “best way to ensure peace is through military strength” (Pew Center, June 4, 2012).

Last week, Paul is announced that he is against the Iran sanctions bill. Allahpundit wonders whether this will come back to haunt him:

It’s bound to figure in the debates next year, maybe prominently. If negotiations break down, it’s a cinch that the field’s more hawkish candidates will use his wait-and-see approach to bludgeon him for his dovish naivete. Paul will have defenses to that — he voted for Iran sanctions in the past, and he says here that he’d prefer to keep existing sanctions in effect until there’s proof that Iran’s complying with the Geneva terms (although Iran never would have agreed to that) — but no one knows if they’ll work. The whole thrust of his opponents’ criticism on foreign policy will be that he’s too much like his father to be trusted to defend the country robustly. They’re looking around for data points to support that thesis; if negotiations collapse, this’ll be seized eagerly.

(Photo: Alex Wong/Getty)

Why Do We Procrastinate?

It might be because we see our future selves as separate from our current selves:

Using fMRI, [researcher Hal] Hershfield and colleagues studied brain activity changes when people imagine their future and consider their present. They homed in on two areas of the brain called the medial prefrontal cortex and the rostral anterior cingulate cortex, which are more active when a subject thinks about himself than when he thinks of someone else. They found these same areas were more strongly activated when subjects thought of themselves today, than of themselves in the future. Their future self “felt” like somebody else. In fact, their neural activity when they described themselves in a decade was similar to that when they described Matt Damon or Natalie Portman. And subjects whose brain activity changed the most when they spoke about their future selves were the least likely to favor large long-term financial gains over small immediate ones.

Walking In A Circle Of Hell

Morgan Meis interprets the philosophy of the Coen brothers through their latest film, Inside Llewyn Davis, which he likens to “a light brush with evil, a stroll through the outermost circle of hell”:

The problem of having nowhere to be is actually the problem of evil. That sounds extreme, but it is something the Coen Brothers have always understood. The plot structure of Inside Llewyn Davis is the structure of an endless loop. Davis sings “Oh Hang Me” in the first scene of the movie. He is back singing the same song in the same place at the end of the movie. The same thing happens to him each time. His life is repeating itself. It is not hard to understand why. Llewyn Davis is trying to connect space and time in ways that don’t fit. He is trying to fit old wine into new wineskins. There is no traction. And so his life spins on its own axis. …

The theologian Stanley Hauerwas once wrote about Augustine and the problem of evil. Hauerwas wrote that, in his Confessions:

Augustine finally came to understand, paradoxical though it may sound, that evil does not exist because “existence” names all that is created and everything created is good. He observes that there are separate parts of God’s creation, which we think of as evil because they are at variance with other things.

The idea is that evil is not a force in and of itself, but a side effect of disconnection, of things being put together in a way that doesn’t fit. Evil isn’t some thing that opposes another thing: the good. Evil is when good things are rubbed up against one another in such a way that they produce nothing. Evil is reduction for the sake of reduction, nothing for the sake of nothing. It is thus hard to get your arms around evil, to understand it or even to see it for what it is.

A Scandal Without An Off-Ramp

Jeffrey Toobin suspects Bridgegate “will take longer than anyone expects to resolve”:

Ultimately, [U.S. attorney Paul] Fishman will probably give immunity to Kelly and Stepien, meaning that they will testify before a grand jury. At that point, they will be called before the legislative committee, because they won’t be able to take the Fifth anymore. By then, it will probably be summer at the earliest. If there are indictments, they probably will not be issued until fall—and trials, if any, would be held in 2015.

In short (or rather, long), Chris Christie can look forward to many months of investigations. News leaks will abound. Like most U.S. Attorney operations, Fishman’s investigation has been largely invisible to the public, but the legislators, especially the Democrats, live to embarrass the governor. And this is really the best-case scenario for Christie, one in which the investigators do not find anything that would seriously implicate him. Events are now firmly out of his control. All Christie wants to do is put this whole matter behind him. It will be increasingly apparent that he has a long road ahead of him.

Beutler bets that it will only get worse for Christie:

[T]he slowly effluviating nature of the scandal suggests that more and more stink will accrete around him over the coming weeks in the form of more bad actors for him to alienate. And he’s alienating former allies at such a rapid pace that he could easily end up having several more strange stories to tell about why all the people in his inner circle were obvious liabilities from the start.

Russia’s Gay-Bashing Culture, Ctd

HRW highlights anti-gay assaults in Russia:

I just recorded a new Deep Dish podcast with Masha Gessen on the state-of-play in Russia (stay tuned). Meanwhile, Jeff Sharlet traveled to Russia to meet with LGBT activists and their opposition. He talked to Timur Isaev, who torments gay Russians:

As young men, he and his friends liked to hunt and beat gays. “For fun,” he says. But then he became a father. Like many parents, he worried about the Internet. Late at night, he studied it. He watched YouTube. “Girls,” he says, “young girls, undressing themselves.” Using a special “tool for developers,” he says, he was able to discern that the other people watching these videos at 2 a.m. were homosexual men. “The analysis of their accounts,” he says, “showed that they also watched young boys.” That’s when Timur realized he must become an activist. For the children.

Timur bought a video camera, a very good one. He began documenting LGBT life. At first, demonstrations; then he began idling outside activists’ offices, filming and photographing people coming and going. He showed me one of his galleries: dozens, maybe hundreds of faces. Some he has photographed himself, others he finds online. He is a great policeman of VK, Russia’s version of Facebook. These days he stays up late at night searching for homosexual teachers. It’s kind of his specialty.

Notice the various leaps of logic: the Internet has porn showing young women; gays are into the Internet; gays are watching girls; gays are watching boys; gays are after our children. Worse: gays represent everything that’s terrifying about the sexual mores of the West, now available online in every Russian home. So bashing gays is a defense of children and of the fatherland. When these kinds of irrational, illogical memes are floating around, Putin’s endorsement of them pours gasoline onto the fire of hatred. What he has created is an atmosphere in which gay people are seen not just as a despised minority but as infiltrators destroying the nation. If you do not recall the dangers of that kind of eliminationist rhetoric toward a minority, you are in denial.

At the same time, it seems to me we need to be careful not to misread the specific cultural context here. There’s a worrying tendency for some gay activists to assume that because a foreign country is not identical to the US on the question of gay rights, it’s an outrage that must be immediately confronted and changed. But America, only a decade ago, was not identical to the US today. Many states still have in their very constitutions the relegation of gay people to second class status. The last president of the US, George W Bush, wanted to enshrine the inferiority of gay couples in the federal constitution. It’s been only a few years since gays were able to serve openly in the US military. To turn around and then be shocked and appalled that homophobia is still very much alive and well in the Russian rural heartland is more than a little obtuse.

These changes take time.

They may take decades to evolve, if ever, in many countries. And the danger of lecturing and haranguing Russians – or Saudis or Ugandans or Nigerians – is that it may make matters worse. It may actually buttress various regimes attempts to equate homosexuality with a foreign Western plot; it runs the risk of putting gay people in danger, of disturbing unique and different cultures in ways that hurt gays rather than helps them. What we’re seeing here, I think, is a consequence of the web creating a global virtual culture that  local actual cultures cannot easily absorb, and so precipitating a backlash. And it’s one thing if that backlash happens in response to domestic pressure, and another if it happens in response to foreign intervention. The latter could be far more dangerous.

We should be aware that our zeal may also not be matched by the gays in the countries we are protesting and confronting:

“I haven’t heard of these laws, but I think it’s fine,” a kid named Kirill tells me at a hidden gay club called Secrets. “We don’t need gay pride here. Why do we need to show our orientation?” He shrugs. He has heard of the torture videos popular online, the gangs that kidnap gays, the police that arrest gays, the babushkas with their eggs and their stones. But he hasn’t seen them. He prefers not to. “Everybody wants to emigrate, but not me.” He shrugs again; it’s like a tic. “I love Russia. This is their experience, not mine.” He says he does not know what the word closet means.

Meanwhile, Dickey finds that American anti-gay activists are having an impact overseas:

Take American evangelist Scott Lively author of The Pink Swastika, blaming the Holocaust on Nazi homosexuals. He is also the co-founder of a group that the hate-trackers at the Southern Poverty Law Center, calls “the virulently anti-gay” and “currently active more in Eastern Europe than in the U.S.” And Lively proudly takes credit for his role campaigning since 2006 for the law passed last year by the Russian Duma, which ostensibly bars homosexual “propaganda” targeting children. “Go Ruskies!” he proclaimed at the time.

That law was just part of a wider gay-bashing campaign in Russia. Paul Cameron, often described in the United States as a “discredited” psychologist, was welcomed in Moscow to talk about “family values.” Brian Brown of the National Organization for Marriage, one of the most polished anti-gay activists, addressed the Duma last year to argue against adoptions by homosexual couples, and a few days later, the ban was written into law.

Previous Dish on homosexuality in Russia here, here, here, and here.

24,740

That’s the number of auto-renewing subscriptions the Dish now has. I know we’ve been pestering you through this renewal process, but I hope you understand it’s because we needed to create a solid base to build and grow this community and conversation. We’ve now got the dustysnowyay.jpgfoundations for long-term survival as an independent site. We took the hardest route to get to the most solid ground. We are not in a daily desperate search for page-views and ad dollars, like so many other sites. We are incentivized entirely to make sure readers want to renew their subscriptions each year and don’t want to cancel.

I don’t know of another news and opinion site online that has close to 25,000 subscribers. I don’t know of another that has no ads. So I just wanted to thank you for this unique achievement. And to pledge to you we will use every penny to make the Dish the best single source for news and opinion on the web. We cannot begin to express the gratitude we now feel, and the excitement for what we are about to build.

Clinton’s Achilles Heels, Ctd

Yesterday I asked readers:

What have been Hillary Clinton’s major, signature accomplishments in her long career in public life? What did she achieve in her eight years as First Lady exactly? What stamp did she put on national policy in her time as Senator from New York? What were her defining and singular achievements as secretary-of-state?

One response:

Hmm. Let’s see, she was a senator for the 8 years while W was President. Not a lot of opportunity there, but if you look at her sponsored or co-sponsored legislation during that period, she was amazingly productive. (I’m sure she had some help, but still.) About her record as First Lady, she attempted a wholesale reform of healthcare and was beaten back by the Republicans – not an “accomplishment” perhaps, but her experience in this area would be invaluable as the ACA matures. And she served as Secretary of State during a challenging time – that is certainly an accomplishment in itself and gives her experience that no other candidate has.

Weak. Lame. Notice the absence of any specifics. Because there aren’t any:

The first thing that came to mind was her work, internationally, on human rights: particularly women’s and LGBT rights. Here’s her 2011 speech to the United Nations on LGBT rights. This was really important! To say these kinds of things to the international community matters, even when we’re still sorting out the details at home.  And she’s been doing this kind of thing since the beginning of her career in public life. Here’s her similarly historic speech as First Lady on women’s rights that she gave in China in the ’90s. I get that she doesn’t have a perfect track record on human rights, given US policy during her tenure as Secretary of State. That being said, it’s my opinion that women’s rights and LGBT rights have been her top priority whenever she’s had the chance.

There’s a difference between what she has said and what she has done. John Kerry has done more in one year than she managed in four at Foggy Bottom. A common retort from readers:

You ask for Hillary’s accomplishments? What does it matter? What were Barack Obama’s accomplishments in 2008? Voting against the Iraq War is not really a “major, singular accomplishment.” I think that being the first woman president along with her “long career in public life” will be enough.

But Obama had been in the national spotlight for only four years in 2008, while Clinton has had almost two decades to tally up specific accomplishments. She’s running on experience. And her record is close to invisible. Another reader:

Her signature issue, what she will run on, is her tenacity and defense of the Democratic principles. She will fight for her agenda, and it will be a classic Democratic agenda, but she will do so with the tenacity and will to win the President has not shown. The President is simply too willing to compromise and his default position is to be bipartisan. Clinton will be clearly and unabashedly partisan. She will be the Democratic’s Democratic. Honestly, if she needs to pull the still beating heart out of Chelsea’s chest on national television to pass a stimulus or extend unemployment insurance, I know she will do it. Essentially, her issue is she will kick Republican butt and not take prisoners.

Funny how I don’t remember the Clinton presidency as anything like that. Au contraire, actually. Another is more succinct:

Because, fuck Republicans.

I need no other reason.  They’re going to hate and demonize whoever is occupying the Oval Office. Given that, I might as well have a president who will be fierce enough to fight back, who will take no prisoners, and who, to some extent, will probably deserve their hatred and fear. I want Clinton to brutalize them and make them think of 2008-2016 as the good ol days.

About that ferocity:

I would agree that her caution poses a real danger for her – something which can be gleaned in this NYT piece about AIPAC’s retreat on the Iran sanctions bill:

On Monday, 70 House Democrats sent Mr. Obama a letter backing his diplomatic efforts and opposing new sanctions. Former Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton added her voice to those urging no legislation.

Clinton was silent on the AIPAC bill until it was safe for her to take a stand. A stand which – surprise! – is now the safe position within the Democratic establishment. For someone wanting to lead the country, this is (though characteristic of the Clintons) more than a little underwhelming.

But another reader liked her record in New York:

Two words for you: Bread and Butter. Hillary was my Senator, and I still remain impressed with her relatively quiet, modest, bread-and-butter focus. She was all over the GOP-leaning Upstate, where I am from, helping keep factories from moving, helping with Post 9/11 redevelopment in NY. She was a frequent visitor to Rochester, and was well-versed in the local economic issues (impressing my dad when he chatted with her at a small potatoes university engineering conference). She was really popular even in Republican areas, because she stayed away from the hot button issues, and just showed she cared about people of all stripes.

When you look at the Republicans running for Congress, it’s all about the big flashy issues, some of them popular, but how often do you ever hear of any of them actually helping people? Just like in Ohio in the last election for Obama, factory jobs trumped guns and God and race and all the rest of it. I mean, climate change, are you kidding me? Voters want better-paying jobs and growing economy. And as a woman, with the legacy of the Clinton economy, and a very successful small-bore bread-and-butter focus as a Senator, I think she is very well positioned.