Phi Beta Iota: WIRED Magazine has put together a number of questions that ably illustrate the confusion in the public mind over why we are in Afghanistan and what that has to do with Pakistan. Based on the history of the Cold War, which appears to have been a Fity Year Wound, In Search of Enemies, or as General Smedley Butler, USMC (Ret) put it, War is a Racket, we have to wonder. When one combines the scandals associated with health care (50% waste according to PriceWaterhouseCoopers), the economy (a fraudulent Federal Reserve and phantom wealth leveraged by Wall Street to the detriment of the commonwealth), and all of the other pressing problems facing America, the larger question is not really about Afghanistan or Pakistan but rather about process. Is America a democracy? Is our policy process reasoned and informed? Is the public interest being served? Does the White House really understand The True Cost of Conflict/Seven Recent Wars and Their Effects on Society?
In today's cameos [summary attached below] on the Sunday talk show circuit, Defense Secretary Gates (no doubt the Surge's wily deus ex machina) and Secretary of State Clinton (Gates' transparent accomplice) stated again that there is no deadline for a withdrawal of US forces from Afghanistan. This proves again, as if any more proof were needed after their appearances before Congress last week, the whole Surge-and-Withdrawal Strategy enunciated by President Obama in his West Point speech last Tuesday was a Bait-and-Switch Strategy to sucker the anti-war base of the Democratic Party, while locking in the long-term budgetary benefits of the Long War on Terror for the cash-bloated MICC. Which begs the question: Is Mr. Obama the real decision maker or an empty suit carrying the water for an emergent National Security Regency chaired by Secretary Gates, with Secretary, CJCS Admiral Mullen, and General McChrystal as the senior voting members? Unfortunately, the postmortem purporting to analyze Obama's “decision” process in today's New York Times does little to clarify this important question.
Alex P. Schmid, one of a handful of trully expert scholars in the field of terrorism and counter-terrorism, and his colleague Rashmi Singh, have created a summary that is devasting on multiple fronts. The “Global War on Terror” or GWOT has lasted longer than World Wars I and II combined; the money expended (the authors do not include the military costs of occupying Afghanistan and Iraq) has been enormous, and in all that time, no one has defined the metrics by which to measure the endeavor. The chapter in included in After the War on Terror: Regional and Multilateral Perspectives on Counter-TerrorismStrategy
Last night President Obama crossed the Rubicon and made the Afghan War his war. Will this decision come back to haunt him? Juan Cole argues that this is likely to be the case, because Obama's escalation decision is based on a flawed analogy.
Reasoning by analogy is powerful albeit particularly dangerous form of thinking. A valid analogy can unleash the creative mind to see new connections that were previously not seen, but a false analogy can capture the imagination and cause one to see and believe visions of things as they are not. False analogies are perhaps the most powerful mental engine for taking an otherwise rational decision maker off the cliff. Nevertheless, The courtiers in the Court of Versailles on the Potomac, addicted as they are to snappy sound bytes, love analogies, the more simple minded the snapping sound, the better.
Juan Cole, professor of modern Middle Eastern and South Asian history at the University of Michigan
Full Story Online
author of widely read blog Informed Comment explains how Obama has been taken to the cleaners and induced to bet his Presidency by buying into the fatally flawed Beltway Consensus that (1) the Iraq Surge was an unambiguous success and (2) its corollary, namely the analogy to Afghanistan that posits a similar kind of surge will produce a similar “success” in Afghanistan. Cole makes his argument by using the simple technique of describing and comparing likenesses and differences, something Obama and his advisors should have done.
Phi Beta Iota: The Salon story is complemented by the below blog from the same author.
10. The biggest threat of derailment comes from an American public facing 17 percent true unemployment and a collapsing economy who are being told we need to spend an extra $30 billion to fight less than 100 al-Qaeda guys in the mountains of Afghanistan, even after the National Security Adviser admitted that they are not a security threat to the US.
Tom Friedman had an especially fatuous column in Sunday's New YorkTimes, which is saying something given his well-established capacity for smug self-assurance. According to Friedman, the big challenge we face in the Arab and Islamic world is “the Narrative” — his patronizing term for Muslim views about America's supposedly negative role in the region.
Steve Walt
. . . . . . .
I heard a different take on this subject at a recent conference on U.S. relations with the Islamic world. In addition to hearing a diverse set of views from different Islamic countries, one of the other participants (a prominent English journalist) put it quite simply. “If the United States wants to improve its image in the Islamic world,” he said, “it should stop killing Muslims.”
Phi Beta Iota: The chart is below the fold, or at the Full Story Online
Secession is Constitutional, Abraham Lincoln's unconstitutional pillaging and looting of the South not-with-standing. Few are sufficiently educated to actually know that Lincoln did not free the slaves of the north and west and did not have the Constitutional authority to suspend habeas corpus, conscript men of the north, borrow money to wage war on peacefully seceeeding members of the Union of STATES that voluntarily entered a compact, or to occupy the south by force of arms for twelve years. In Canada the Supreme Court has found for Quebec on the matter of secession, and the Yukon and Northwest Territories are both acutely aware of the options they have. Further North Greenland has declared independence from Denmark. Alaska remains a wild card–Sarah Palin could have been President of the North, but got sucked into the ideological maelstrom of an imploding Republican Party. All that by way to introduction to the Vermont Commons. Maine and Vermont are two of the states most likely to actually seceed from the Union if the US Government does not heal itself fairly soon. The only way to preserve the Union going into the next decade is to rapidly restore the legitimacy and efficacy of governance–this can only be done by getting a grip on reality and devising policies, programs, and budgets in harmony with reality.
Below are some Reviews that bear on the above subject.
KABUL — Some powerful Afghan politicians and tribal leaders have expressed doubts that more U.S. troops can turn the tide of the war, as President Barack Obama prepares to unveil a new Afghanistan strategy Tuesday.
U.S. Army’s own specialists in Afghanistan’s culture and society are warning that relying on the tribes there may be a waste of time. “Most of Afghanistan has not been ‘tribal’ in the last few centuries,” notes a recent report from the Army’s Human Terrain System at Ft. Leavenworth, Kansas. “In fact, many scholars are reluctant to use the word ‘tribe’ at all for describing groups in Afghanistan.”
