This Is What I Get for Reading Georgie Anne Geyer

Pakistan is doomed because some bearded men want to run madrassas and cut off the hands of thieves? Note to Geyer and the people who clean up her first drafts: our nominal friends cut off the hands of thieves, keep women off the road, even get cops to beat the shit out of people who owe them money. It's evil; we tolerate it because we benefit. There was an open insurrection in Swat, with de facto rule by the Pakistani Taliban, before the cease-fire -- there were beheadings before the cease-fire. There is calm now. What do you want?

That said, Pakistan is not going to fall. Anywhere but the Pakistani equivalent of Winnetka there is civil society and the rule of law. (It's funny how the right loves the American outback, is all about self-rule, and can't stomach the sight of Islamic self-rule.) Pakistanis themselves are pissed about the truce, because they, like you and I, Georgie, have television. Also, the Pakistani army is going to pick its battles -- they won't let the bomb walk into the hands of bearded men.

Calm down. Swat was not destroyed by the February cease-fire. The Taliban cannot convert by force a nation of 200 million people...this would be like a violent insurgency of Jehovah's Witnesses getting self-rule in South Dakota and suddenly, within six months, taking over New York. Sufi Muhammad knows he'd be laughed out of town...

We Are a Bunch of Rubes

Make no mistake. I am pleased that the American people saw fit to elect President the only responsible actor still running for office. I like BHO. I'm a fan. But I have principles that were operative during Bush, and to suspend their operation for a guy I like can only be done for so long before it is unjustified. So, you know, put that in your Situation Ethics and smoke it.

I'm tired of getting played for a fairy; I hope the left does boot Democrat moderates out of the party. There deserves to be an all-do-nothing party, an American Kadima, the USA Patriot Waterheads. Or the Know-Nothings.

And I understand why BHO's situation in Afghanistan is different from GWB's in Iraq. A surge is necessary to stop the bloodletting. We cannot afford to lose in Afghanistan. Unfriendly regional powers, read Iran, will be emboldened by our failure, which I repeat is imminent without the surge. It's going to be hairy.

Wait, those are all the same rationalizations for Bush's surge...my mistake. Will the Afghan Surge work? In Afghanistan, the other key elements of quelling civil war -- paying off militants to form US-legitimized gangs, and the major militant group's discovery that politics is more lucrative than assassination -- are absent.

So let's repeat, 15,000 more US troops are moving into the world's worst country, with an illiterate population of poppy growers, entirely cowed by terror, to hunt an entrenched guerrilla force with a cross-border safe zone, no natural enemies, and no interest in the political process?

Got it. This sort of thing was not OK in 2006. And it's OK now. I totally understand. It's called triangulatin', and I did not just fall off the turnip truck.

But the idea doesn't look ripe for success, and it may not be necessary. 2200 Afghan civilians died in violence last year. That's a bad month in Iraq ca. 2006. Die-hard Al Qaeda members might number 300. We have drones in Pakistan that are both wasting dudes who need to be wasted (let's bracket the why-questions, shall we) and killing some innocents. How does this add up to imperative?

Pakistan thinks enough of itself that it can sign peace deals with militants and pay attention to real threats, you know, like India, or Baluch separatists. I haven't bought the "bomb slips out of Pakistan's hands" theory, largely because I think the Pakistani military establishment sees its long term, existential struggle as being with India. And India has the bomb. You think career men are gonna let some dudes with beards walk off with nuculur weapons? Nope. Then why do we have to shore up Pakistan, crumbling Pakistan? And even if we did need to do so, what good are 15,000 soldiers going to do for a nation of, holy shit, 200 million people?

What good will 52,000 Americans do for an Afghanistan still ruled by Hamid Karzai? Same amount of good 37,000 did.

But I'm not trying to player-hate. BHO is right to have different opinions about different surges. This surge is, it turns out, different from Bush's: it's even worse.
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First, a Note from the Future President

On 28 December 2006, Barry Hussein wrote:

Escalation Is Not The Answer

As the New Year approaches, we are told that the President is considering the deployment of tens of thousands of additional troops to Iraq in the desperate hope of subduing the burgeoning civil war there.

This is a chilling prospect that threatens to compound the tragic mistakes he has already made over the last four years.

In 2002, I strongly opposed the invasion of Iraq because I felt it was an ill-conceived venture which I warned would "require a U.S. occupation of undetermined length, at undermined cost, with undetermined consequences." I said then that an invasion without strong international support could drain our military, distract us from the war with al-Qaeda in Afghanistan and further destabilize the Middle East.

Sadly, all of those concerns have been borne out.

Today, nearly three thousand brave young Americans are dead, and tens of thousands more have been wounded. Rather than welcomed "liberators," our troops have become targets of the exploding sectarian violence in Iraq. Our military has been strained to the limits. The cost to American taxpayers is approaching $400 billion.

Now we are faced with a quagmire to which there are no good answers. But the one that makes very little sense is to put tens of thousands more young Americans in harm's way without changing a strategy that has failed by almost every imaginable account.

In escalating this war with a so-called "surge" of troops, the President would be overriding the expressed concerns of Generals on the ground, Secretary Powell, the bipartisan Iraq Study Group and the American people. Colin Powell has said that placing more troops in the crossfire of a civil war simply will not work. General John Abizaid, our top commander in the Middle East, said just last month that, "I believe that more American forces prevent the Iraqis from doing more, from taking more responsibility for their own future." Even the Joint Chiefs of Staff have expressed concern, saying that a surge in troop levels "could lead to more attacks by al-Qaeda" and "provide more targets for Sunni insurgents." Once again, the President is defying good counsel and common sense.

As I said more than a month ago, while some have proposed escalating this war by adding thousands of more troops, there is little reason to believe that this will achieve these results either. It's not clear that these troop levels are sustainable for a significant period of time, and according to our commanders on the ground, adding American forces will only relieve the Iraqis from doing more on their own. Moreover, without a coherent strategy or better cooperation from the Iraqis, we would only be putting more of our soldiers in the crossfire of a civil war.

There is no military solution to this war. Our troops can help suppress the violence, but they cannot solve its root causes. And all the troops in the world won't be able to force Shia, Sunni, and Kurd to sit down at a table, resolve their differences, and forge a lasting peace. In fact, adding more troops will only push this political settlement further and further into the future, as it tells the Iraqis that no matter how much of a mess they make, the American military will always be there to clean it up.

That is why I believe we must begin a phased redeployment of American troops to signal to the government and people of Iraq, and others who have a stake in stabilizing the country - that ours is not an open-ended commitment. They must step up. The status quo cannot hold.

In November, the American people sent a resounding message of change to the President. But apparently that message wasn't clear enough.

I urge all Americans who share my grave concerns over this looming decision to call, write or email the President, and make your voices heard. I urge you to tell them that our soldiers are not numbers to add just because someone couldn't think of a better idea, they are our sons and daughters, our brothers and sisters, our neighbors and friends who are willing to wave goodbye to everything they've ever known just for the chance to serve their country. Our men and women in uniform are doing a terrific job under extremely difficult conditions. But our government has failed them so many times over the last few years, and we simply cannot afford to do it again. We must not multiply the mistakes of yesterday, we must end them today.

May this New Year bring a turn in our policy away from the stubborn repetition of our mistakes, so we can begin to chart a conclusion to this painful chapter in our history and bring our troops home.

Sincerely,

U.S. Senator Barack Obama

Show me the Brita...

...and I won't blow myself up in this public place?

Hamas gained popular support in a context of official fecklessness. The equation is not simply, provide general welfare = win elections. Hamas won the Palestinian assembly because it gave people, over the course of decades, the material wealth that Fatah hoarded for itself, the Arafat family, and sundry cronies.

Point is, it doesn't matter how much American civilian aid / reconstruction gets doled out. If we are still bombing civilian targets on flawed intelligence, if we are still occupying territory, we are the enemy.

I mean, never mind the fact that there is not such thing as unfettered distribution of reconstruction aid: we and the Iraqi government have some problems building those precious water treatment plants.

There is always a government on the ground that is not our government, and sometimes it does things like fire all the dudes who blow the whistle on fraud.

Pakistan under Musharraf, and I'm guessing this won't change under Zardari, said thanks but no thanks to that reconstruction aid, adding, "Could we please have some of those F-16s though? We need a rapid-response delivery vehicle for our nuclear weapons, you see."

Reconstruction aid is a bridge to nowhere. Only a legitimately elected regional government will be able to deal with the NW Frontier. Our best bet in the meantime is targeted assassinations of Qaeda and Taliban leaders. Preferably not from airplanes/drones. If that would be made easier by breaking Pakistan into little bits (a Baluch republic in the southwest, bantustans around the Khyber) so be it. Eff with the bull, you get the horns.
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Toll, Maliki : Terrorism is "so over"

It was weird to come back to work after the holiday weekend, thinking for days in a row that the whole world was not in fact on fire, only to discover that reports of peace breaking out in Iraq were greatly exaggerated...

My dear print edition of the Inquirer showed me two headlines, face-to-face, declaring the banality of events in Iraq: Maliki Declares Terrorism Over, and UAE Forgives Iraq Debt. Now, I already understand that Nouri al-Maliki is prone to speak in metaphor, or to ingnore nuances of tense. Maybe he meant, "Terrorism is so over," as in "passe"? So I ignored the piece. Looking to my left, I found the Emir of Dubai, a man who finds so few things in the world worth spending his money on he built islands instead, magnanimously forgiving Saddam Hussein's tiny debt. Did 'em a solid. Security not an issue, money comin' in. So I ignored that story too, failing utterly to catch the little bleeding blurb tacked on at the end:

A Kurdish party member was injured yesterday in an assassination attempt by a roadside bomb that killed seven people and wounded three others in Iraq's eastern Diyala province. [...]Also yesterday, a car bomb in the northern Shiite Baghdad district of Shaab killed six people and injured 14, including three police officers, according to police and medical officials.

Right. I'll accept the shame of not reading the whole news. My bad.

But the same death toll in Islamabad got play in the Inqy as the beginning of armageddon, using "blast" four times and hyping connections to last year's dispute over the Red Mosque. With no group claiming responsibility, the piece inserts a sheepish: "It was not clear if the events were linked, and a mosque official condemned the attack."

Again, I can hardly blame Chairman Toll for diminishing the footprint of Iraqi violence while exaggerating that of violence in Pakistan. These are AP stories. All he's doing is pulling shit in off the wire. No one is fabricating the news. No, that would take effort.

Sloth, not avarice, is the motivator. The news source for the fifth-largest city in the US can't send people overseas to actually get their own version of events. The editors of the Inquirer are too lazy even to concoct an individuated appraisal of what they pull off the wires. If, officially, Iraq Is Pacified And Our Next War Is In Pakistan, who is Bruce Toll to say no? Confronting conventional wisdom isn't part of the Inquirer brand. Leave that to the Washington Post:

BAGHDAD, July 6 -- A wave of attacks in Baghdad and areas north of the capital Sunday shattered a relative lull in violence, killing 16 people and injuring 15 a day after Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki declared that Iraq's government had defeated terrorism.