My First Dictionary:

Today's word is disillusioned.

Virginia Postrel on Obama:

The pleasure and inspiration may be real, but glamour always contains an illusion. The image is not entirely false, but it is misleading.

James Lileks:

The Apple tablet is the Barack Obama of technology. It's whatever you want it to be, until you actually get it.

The Economist on Obama, from November 2008:

He has to start deciding whom to disappoint.

George Packer, this week:

What if people around the world want more than a humble adjustment in America's tone and behavior?

What if American overtures to nasty regimes fail, because those regimes have a different view of their own survival?

Randall Munroe:

What if I want something more than the pale facsimile of fulfillment brought by a parade of ever-fancier toys?

To spend my life restlessly producing instead of sedately consuming?

Is there an app for that?

An exchange:

Ernie: Is there anything fluffier than a cloud?

Big Tom: If there is, I don't want to know about it.

Christopher Alexander:

A building or town will only be alive to the extent that it is governed by the timeless way.

The search which we make for this quality, in our own lives, is the central search of any person ... It is the search for those moments and situations when we are most alive.

Anne Frank:

As long as you can look fearlessly at the sky, you'll know that you're pure within and will find happiness once more.

Elizabeth Rubin:

A sudden wail pierced the night sky. It was Slasher, an AC-130 gunship, firing bullets the size of Coke bottles. Flaming shapes ricocheted all around the village. Flaming rockets flashed through the sky. Thunder rumbled and echoed through the valley. Then there was a pause. Slasher asked Caroon whether the insurgents were still talking. Kearney shouted over to Yarnell in his ditch, "You picking anything up?" Nothing. More spitting rockets.

"O.K., I've done my killing for the week. I'm ready to go home."

Barbara Elias:

The reason the Taliban have chosen repeatedly not to seek legitimacy through governance or diplomatic compromise has little to do with the incentives offered them and everything to do with how their leaders see the world. The fact is that the Taliban and al Qaeda are neither permanently bound by ideology nor held together merely by a fleeting correspondence of interests. Their relationship is rooted in more complex issues of legitimacy and identity.

The Taliban cannot surrender bin Laden without also surrendering their existing identity as a vessel for an obdurate and uncompromising version of political Islam. Their legitimacy rests not on their governing skills, popular support, or territorial control, but on their claim to represent what they perceive as sharia rule. This means upholding the image that they are guided entirely by Islamic principles; as such, they cannot make concessions to, or earnestly negotiate with, secular states.

Since the Taliban won't give al Qaeda up, the United States has little choice but to destroy al Qaeda, and since the Taliban cannot be meaningfully split or co-opted, Washington, unfortunately, has no real option but to prepare itself for a long struggle in the region.

Mark Twain:

When an entirely new and untried political project is sprung upon the people, they are startled, anxious, timid, and for a time they are mute, reserved, noncommittal. The great majority of them are not studying the new doctrine and making up their minds about it, they are waiting to see which is going to be the popular side.

Rory Stewart:

When we are not presented with a dystopian vision, we are encouraged to be implausibly optimistic. This misleads us in several respects simultaneously: minimising differences between cultures, exaggerating our fears, aggrandising our ambitions, inflating a sense of moral obligations and power, and confusing our goals. All these attitudes are aspects of a single worldview and create an almost irresistible illusion.

It is a language that exploits tautologies and negations to suggest inexorable solutions. It makes our policy seem a moral obligation, makes failure unacceptable, and alternatives inconceivable. It does this so well that a more moderate, minimalist approach becomes almost impossible to articulate. Afghanistan, however, is the graveyard of predictions.

Know Thine Enemy | Foreign Affairs

Rory Stewart:

When we are not presented with a dystopian vision, we are encouraged to be implausibly optimistic. This misleads us in several respects simultaneously: minimising differences between cultures, exaggerating our fears, aggrandising our ambitions, inflating a sense of moral obligations and power, and confusing our goals. All these attitudes are aspects of a single worldview and create an almost irresistible illusion.

It is a language that exploits tautologies and negations to suggest inexorable solutions. It makes our policy seem a moral obligation, makes failure unacceptable, and alternatives inconceivable. It does this so well that a more moderate, minimalist approach becomes almost impossible to articulate. Afghanistan, however, is the graveyard of predictions.

It is unlikely that we will be able to defeat the Taliban. But the Taliban are very unlikely to take over Afghanistan as a whole.

My First Dictionary:

Today's word is disillusioned.

Ira Glass:

If you're not failing all the time, you're not creating a situation where you can get super-lucky.

From the archive:

The average Afghan spends one-fifth of his income on bribes.

Nir Rosen:

"You Westerners have your watches," the leader observed. "But we Taliban have time."

Graeme Wood:

“Is the boy a Talib?” I asked. “Future Talib,” he said.

Elizabeth Rubin, from the Korengal Valley:

It didn’t take long to understand why so many soldiers were taking antidepressants.

Nora Johnson, from 1961:

An Englishman said to me recently, "You Americans live on a much higher plane of expectancy than we do. You constantly work toward some impossible goal of happiness and perfection, and you unfortunately don't have our ability just to give up. Really, it's much easier to accept the fact that some things can't be solved." He is right; we never accept it, and we kill ourselves trying.

Rory Stewart, from today:

Americans are particularly unwilling to believe that problems are insoluble.

The Irresistible Illusion

Center for a New American Security:

The Center for a New American Security was honored to host the launch event for CNAS Senior Fellow and counterinsurgency expert David Kilcullen on his new book The Accidental Guerrilla: Fighting Small Wars in the Midst of a Big One, a book that takes an infinitely complicated situation like global terrorism and localized guerrilla warfare within the larger framework of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan and makes them both understandable and interesting. The discussion and subsequent reception was Wednesday, April 1, 2009, from 6:00pm to 9:00pm, in the Willard's Crystal Room.

From one week before the CNAS talk, here's Kilcullen:

We're now reaching the point where within one to six months we could see the collapse of the Pakistani state. The collapse of Pakistan, al-Qaeda acquiring nuclear weapons, an extremist takeover -- that would dwarf everything we've seen in the war on terror today.

From that long-ago era we may one day know as B.S. (Before Surge):

After 9/11, when a lot of people were saying, ‘The problem is Islam,’ I was thinking, It’s something deeper than that. It's about human social networks and the way that they operate.

From the book jacket:

Kilcullen sees today's conflicts as a complex pairing of contrasting trends: local social networks and worldwide movements; traditional and postmodern culture; local insurgencies seeking autonomy and a broader pan-Islamic campaign. He warns that America's actions in the war on terrorism have tended to conflate these trends, blurring the distinction between local and global struggles and thus enormously complicating our challenges.

A Discussion with David Kilcullen on His New Book, "The Accidental Guerrilla"

Robert Levine, former deputy director at CBO:

The macroeconomic perils faced by the global economy are deeper and likely to last longer than those presented by the current financial crisis.

In most macroeconomic crises, the worst case -- depression or inflation -- is fairly clear, and modern policymakers have the tools at hand to cope. The worst case now may be both -- stagflation.

The following analysis begins with the Great Depression, then examines five subsequent periods. The final section makes some policy suggestions for escaping the worst effects. The conclusions are not optimistic.

The Great Depression brought the New Deal to the United States. It brought the rest of the world Nazism and universal war. This time, though, many nations have nuclear weapons.

"Maybe we could" is the limit of optimism in this paper. The world ahead looks difficult.

From 2005, Freeman Dyson:

It's very important that we adapt to the world on the long-time scale as well as the short-time scale. Ethics are the art of doing that. You must have principles that you're willing to die for.

From 2006, John Rapley:

As states recede and the new mediaevalism advances, the outside world is destined to move increasingly beyond the control -- and even the understanding -- of the new Rome. The globe's variegated informal and quasi-informal statelike activities will continue to expand, as will the power and reach of those who live by them. The new Romans, like the old, might not enjoy the consequences.

From 2008, Nir Rosen:

"You Westerners have your watches," the leader observed. "But we Taliban have time."

From last week:

A Pakistani court freed one of the most successful nuclear proliferators in history, Abdul Qadeer Khan, from house arrest on Friday, lifting the restrictions imposed on him since 2004 when he publicly confessed to running an illicit nuclear network.

The Dangerous Road Ahead

A selection of letters to the editor of The Walrus Magazine, in reply to an article by Charles Montgomery in the December issue.

From Maureen Mayhew, an NGO worker in Kabul:

It’s typical for the media to focus on the hopelessness of the situation in Afghanistan. But I was also here during the Taliban regime, and I can assure readers there have been many positive changes since then. Maybe if reporters had witnessed this change themselves, they would see fit to broadcast some hope.

From Yasin Khosti, Co-founder and former president of the Society of Afghan Architects and Engineers:

Charles Montgomery writes, “Aid dollars, opium profits, and war booty [have] transformed the Afghan capital into a manic showcase of glittering mansions, glaring inequity, and militarized urbanity.” While this may be true, I feel the author forgets that the peaceful West is beset with similar problems.

Have you seen "Revolutionary Road"?

Hopeless emptiness. Now you've said it. Plenty of people are onto the emptiness, but it takes real guts to see the hopelessness.

The Key to Kabul

Dexter Filkins, from Kabul:

The Americans making Afghan policy, worried that the war is being lost, are vowing to bypass President Hamid Karzai and deal directly with the governors in the countryside.

A White House favorite in each of the seven years that he has led this country since the fall of the Taliban, Karzai now finds himself not so favored at all. Not by Washington, and not by his own.

William Wood, the American ambassador: "I think frankly that everyone — the international community, the United States, the United Nations, Western Europe, the international press — were unrealistically optimistic about the problem of Afghanistan following the ouster of the Taliban."

From October:

The average Afghan spends one-fifth of his income on bribes.

Leader of Afghanistan Finds Himself Hero No More

Despite the flurry of American activity, it's by no means clear that Washington is any closer to understanding the dynamics in South-Central Asia.

The United States is already failing to grasp not only the details of other powers' maneuverings in Afghanistan and Pakistan, but the extent to which these dealings could eclipse even the most brilliant US shuttle diplomacy by Holbrooke.

China's long-term strategy is clear: It has become the largest investor in Afghanistan, developing highways to connect Iran and the giant Aynak copper mine south of Kabul.

Building roads and controlling their usage has for centuries been the foundation of spreading Silk Road influence, as well as the key to success in the 19th-century Great Game. Today's struggle for control follows similar rules.

Recently, in another context, Jim Kunstler said:

All parties join in a game of "pretend," that nothing has really happened to the fundamental equations of business life, as the whole system, the whole way of life, enters upon a circle-jerk of mutual denial in a last desperate effort to forestall the mandates of reality.

How long will these games go on?

The Road to Kabul Runs Through Beijing (and Tehran)

Roger C. Altman, in Foreign Affairs:

The financial crisis has called into serious question the credibility of western governments and may precipitate an eastward shift of power.

Chinese households save an astonishing 40 percent of their incomes.

Recently:

There used to be a time if you didn't have money to buy something, you just didn't buy it.

We're all losers now. There's no pleasure to it.

From 2006:

As states recede and the new mediaevalism advances, the outside world is destined to move increasingly beyond the control -- and even the understanding -- of the new Rome. The globe's variegated informal and quasi-informal statelike activities will continue to expand, as will the power and reach of those who live by them. The new Romans, like the old, might not enjoy the consequences.

The Great Crash, 2008

Robert Skidelsky, in The New York Review of Books:

Money, according to Niall Ferguson, is not a thing but a relationship -- above all, a relationship between creditor and debtor.

From the Economist, earlier this year:

Financial progress is about learning to deal with strangers in more complex ways.

Niall Ferguson, in early 2006:

If history is any guide, our present golden age of globalization is unlikely to endure.

Niall Ferguson, in late 2008:

This crisis is about much more than just the stock market. It needs to be understood as a fundamental breakdown of the entire financial system.

Roger Altman:

The United States will remain the most powerful nation on earth for a while longer. Its military strength alone ensures this. But the crash of 2008 has inflicted profound damage on its financial system, its economy, and its standing in the world; the crisis is an important geopolitical setback.

Can You Spare a Dime?