The Dish

Jim Burroway looks at it.

As an assessment of military strategy, support troops may not be the best indicator of what will work or not. But as a political matter, it surely matters that many more Americans will be sent to Afghanistan this year by Obama than the headline number. The WaPo has an excellent primer on this. The Obama escalation is already huge – approaching 68,000, double what Bush had when he left office. And yet the war machine demands yet more. This is an enormous human and economic investment that should only be made if we are sure it can work. And even McChrystal, to his credit, cannot and will not guarantee that.

Jeremy Clarkson laments that the British have become so dumb they can't even appreciate Monty Python any more:

Novel Writing is at the very heart of what makes Monty Python so brilliant. The notion of Thomas Hardy writing his books, in front of a good-natured bank holiday crowd in Dorset, while cricket-style commentators and pundits assess every word he commits to paper is a juxtaposition you don’t find in comedy very much any more.

To get the point you need to know that while Hardy may be seen as a literary colossus, there’s no escaping the fact his novels are dirge. We see these attacks on intellectualism throughout Python. To understand the joke, you need to know that René Descartes did not say, I “drink” therefore I am. You need to know that if you cure a man of leprosy, you are taking away his trade. And that really Archimedes did not invent football.

He didn't?

Shep Smith goes after Krispy Kreme doughnut cheese-burgers for some reason.

DiA draws an interesting parallel:

[F]or some reason we believe that American policy is capable of accomplishing things in Pakistan and Afghanistan that we would never dream it could do in Mexico, even though Mexico is right next door. Nobody in America is under the illusion that some policy shift by America is going to solve all of Mexico's problems on any timeframe, let alone one of a few years. We have a healthy recognition that problems like the drug trade and the gun trade, the unhealthy interdependence of America's desire for cheap labour and Mexico's low levels of economic development, and the shaky legitimacy and effectiveness of local Mexican governance in many places are long-term, intractable problems. We recognise this because Mexico is right next door. The place feels real to us; it's not some kind of abstraction we can remake in our optimistic fantasies. It would be encouraging if the Obama administration adopted a similarly realistic attitude towards its aims in Afghanistan.

A soldier I was talking to recently who was one of the first into Afghanistan explained it this way: "They want to live that way. There's nothing we can do about it." I've long been a skeptic of nation-building from afar. In fact, that used to be a Republican mantra. But nation-building in Afghanistan? It's a fantasy. Obama must know this. The entire project is an intellectual bubble that should have been burst years ago. And if American national security is dependent on turning every Muslim failed state in the world into a stable one, then there is no such thing as national security – just various degrees of insecurity – and we might as well man up and deal with it.

There are obvious logistical questions about what the US does now.

And it still seems sensible to see how various factors now play out – the Afghan election fraud and the Pakistani military's current campaign against the Taliban. But I simply cannot see an ambitious counter-insurgency strategy changing these core dynamics of a foreign power trying to recreate a country that is not a country, especially when the foreign power is bankrupt. This is too hard – culturally, militarily, politically. A long-term commitment at the scale necessary to even have a chance will never get a solid majority of Americans behind it.

(Photo: a gathering of Afghan elders by John Moore/Getty.)

The combination of a reporter's ear and an intellectual's mind is a rare thing, which is why I'm grateful for David Brooks, and particularly excited about his burgeoning interest in and study of neuroscience. It seems quite likely to me that this relatively new field will be the most fecund in the future for understanding just who we mortals be. Nuggets like these leap out:

Jonathan B. Freeman of Tufts and others peered into the reward centers of the brain such as the caudate nucleus. They found that among Americans, that region was likely to be activated by dominant behavior, whereas among Japanese, it was more likely to be activated by subordinate behavior — the same region rewarding different patterns of behavior depending on culture.

The complex interaction of environment and genes, and the fluidity and flexibility of the human mind, take us beyond what we used to think of as science and what we used to think of as being human:

Reem Yahya and a team from the University of Haifa studied Arabs and Jews while showing them images of hands and feet in painful situations. The two cultures perceived pain differently. The Arabs perceived higher levels of pain over all while the Jews were more sensitive to pain suffered by members of a group other than their own.

Maybe that's why Jews tend to be liberal. And maybe that's a useful insight into the politics of the Middle East.

The WaPo is right about this: the president is not responsible for not legislating something; and everything the gay rights movement wants is a legislative act right now. So aim the pressure at the appropriate people. Why does Nancy Pelosi believe the US should still be firing soldiers solely because they're gay? Has anyone put her on the spot about that lately?

Alex Massie reports on an attempt to undo constitutional guarantees dating from 1688.

I'd just absorbed the "wait till 2017" message from HRC's Joe Solmonese and was at a poorly attended AIDS vigil Saturday night when I was asked by Reel Gay TV to speak my mind. Hence the anger. I was wrong to personalize this, but at some point the anger needs to be expressed. I'm not a politician and this video helps explain why. I should have let myself cool down before gabbing in front of a camera. I really do believe that many people working for and with HRC are good people and they do good work (Maine right now is one such example); and I should not have called anyone "self-loathing." HRC are not self-loathing; they're just, in my view, misguided in being too eager to please DNC power-brokers. Maybe it was the memory of my friends who died that got to me, but I've learned over the years that anger has its place; and a refusal to go along to get along has its place. The message I want to give is: reform HRC to make it more accountable and less coopted. Keep the pressure up. Keep their feet to the fire as much as any politician. Because they can so easily turn into politicians.