Ahmed Rashid:

Those who feel the war is futile were bound to be disappointed.

The Economist on Obama, from last November:

He has to start deciding whom to disappoint.

George Packer:

Richard Holbrooke must know that there will be no American victory in this war; he can only try to forestall potential disaster. But if he considers success unlikely, or even questions the premise of the war, he has kept it to himself.

Rory Stewart:

"We're beating the cat."

"Why are you beating the cat?"

"It's a cat-tiger strategy."

Rashid:

Seventy percent of today's ANA recruits are illiterate.

Nathaniel Fick and Vikram Singh:

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

Rashid, back in September:

The Taliban's game plan of waiting out the Americans now looks more plausible than ever.

Elizabeth Rubin, from the Korengal Valley:

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

Afghanistan: The Missing Strategy

Gil Shochat:

It was clear that the impulse toward secrecy and dissimulation Seymour Hersh was forced to combat in the US was operating here, too. Canadians didn't know much about what their government was up to, and politicians wanted to keep it that way.

A cultural shift, if it is to come, will likely have to begin with local initiatives and public pressure.

Decius:

It's important to understand that it isn't Congress that must change -- it is us.

On John Young's Cryptome:

It's like a nihilist art project: Provide your readers with more than 40,000 files of data the government doesn't want you to have, data that exposes the lies of the powerful, and then remind them that you can never, ever know for sure who is lying.

Into the depths:

Having been told that the world rested on a platform which rested on the back of an elephant which rested in turn on the back of a turtle, he asked, what did the turtle rest on?

Another turtle.

And that turtle?

"Ah, Sahib, after that it is turtles all the way down."

The Dark Country

Jon Lee Anderson:

Twenty years ago, there were said to be 300 favelas in Rio. Ten years ago, the number had climbed to 600. No one knows exactly how many favelas there are today, but it is estimated that more than 1,000 exist.

The air stinks heavily of raw sewage, but no one seems to notice.

One young fish to another:

What the hell is water?

Donald Rumsfeld:

Today can sometimes look worse than yesterday -- or even two months ago. What matters is the overall trajectory: Where do things stand today when compared to what they were five years ago?

Alfredo Sirkis:

Nobody wants to make revolution any more. What these people with the guns want today is their immediate share of the consumption culture.

Joe Nocera:

They just want theirs. That is the culture they have created.

A man who knows his place:

Revolutionize your heart out. We'll still have this country by the balls.

Kenneth R. Harney:

Don't feel guilty about it. Don't think you're doing something morally wrong.

Susan Signe Morrison:

Filth in all its manifestations -- material (including privies, dung on fields, and as alchemical ingredient), symbolic (sin, misogynist slander, and theological wrestling with the problem of filth in sacred contexts) and linguistic (a semantic range including dirt and dung) -- helps us to see how excrement is vital to understanding the Middle Ages.

Seth Kugel:

That's not grime you're seeing, it's historical charm.

Michelle Gillmartin:

The world is full of things in need of embellishment.

Roy Wadia:

At first glance, Rocinha is just another crowded neighborhood. Look again.

Jello:

Go and live in the favela ...

John Rapley:

As states recede and the new medievalism 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 the photo gallery:

BOPE is a small group of well-trained officers infamous for their brutality. They are renowned for not carrying handcuffs.

It's Like The Middle Ages

Spencer Ackerman:

Rory Stewart compares the Obama administration's twinning of Afghanistan and Pakistan policy to a policy of dealing with "an angry cat and a tiger," after Council on Foreign Relations' Steve Biddle reiterated his argument that the U.S.'s interests in Afghanistan are primarily about Pakistan.

"We're beating the cat," Stewart said, "and when you say, 'Why are you beating the cat?' you say, 'It's a cat-tiger strategy.' But you're beating the cat because you don't know what to do about the tiger."

Tom Streithorst:

Afghanistan is one of the poorest countries in the world. Its needs are straightforward. Building roads, digging wells, and providing irrigation would make peoples' lives much better at minimal cost. Hiring Afghans to do the labour would put money in their pockets, stimulate their economy, and improve their infrastructure. And yet, despite huge western expenditures, the average rural Afghan is probably no better off today than he or she was five years ago.

Our NGO and government officials are responsible not to the people of Afghanistan, but to their masters in Washington or Brussels or London. So they pepper their policy papers with cliches that will play well at home and remember not to mention that they really don't know what is going on. What they provide our governments is the illusion of understanding and so the illusion of control.

Alex de Waal:

Both Karzai and his opponents know that the surge of 40,000 extra troops proposed by US General McChrystal is unsustainable, and that any agreements dependent on battlefield advances will be short-lived at best. Underneath the old model remains: a political souk where buyers and sellers haggle over the going rate for renting allegiances.

Today, it would be more cost-effective to ditch the extra troops and revert to funding patronage.

The Big Picture:

As casualties mount on both sides, 2009 is shaping up to be the deadliest year yet for coalition troops -- twice as deadly as 2008.

Richard Beeston:

The occasional middleman might be picked off, but the drug barons sleep safely at night in their "poppy palaces", the garish villas that have sprouted up in Kabul. Ask any Afghan politician or journalist and they will readily reel off the names of ministers, generals and businessmen involved in the trade. Many are the same people supp... [ Read More (0.2k in body) ]

Dan Green, for Armed Forces Journal:

In the long run, because this conflict is not about how many casualties counter-insurgent forces impose on the insurgents but about the will to stay in the fight, foreign counterinsurgents tend to grow weary of the amount of blood and treasure they must expend.

While the Taliban's strategic goals of uniting the Pashtuns, ejecting foreign military occupation and imposing Sharia law are well known, their tactical political program is less well understood and its popularity among many Pashtuns even more so.

While the Taliban will impose their will on villagers if they have to, and they often do so violently, they also have a positive agenda that seeks to entice supporters to their banner. The Taliban practice micropolitics to a remarkably high degree of sophistication. Because the people are unable to hold corrupt or ineffective provincial officials accountable, they often turn to the Taliban to address injustices.

To rob the Taliban of their ability to dispense on-the-spot justice, it is imperative that we make the justice sector a viable and dynamic part of the provincial government.

From a year ago:

All parties agreed that the only solution to Afghanistan's conflict is through dialogue, not fighting.

Elizabeth Rubin, from February 2008:

If you peel back the layers, there's always a local political story at the root of the killing and dying.

Decius:

If you give me money, everything's going to be cool, okay? It's gonna be cool. Give me money. No consequences, no whammies, money.

Peter Norvig:

Researchers have shown it takes about ten years to develop expertise in any of a wide variety of areas ...

Paul Graham:

That's barely enough time to get started.

Stewart Brand:

In some cultures you're supposed to be responsible out to the seventh generation -- that's about 200 years. But it goes right against self-interest.

Danny Hillis:

Some people say that they feel the future is slipping away from them. To me, the future is a big tractor-trailer slamming on its brakes in front of me just as I pull into its slip stream. I am about to crash into it.

From a January 2008 town-hall meeting:

Q: President Bush has talked about our staying in Iraq for fifty years.

John McCain: Make it a hundred.

David Kilcullen:

You've got to make a long-term commitment.

Elizabeth Rubin, from the Korengal Valley:

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

The Taliban's political program

George Packer is still worth your time.

And now, his latest work is out from behind the paywall.

Packer:

Unlike Johnson, Obama wanted a serious internal debate about his policy, and he got one, with advisers considering whether the war was already lost. Yet the conclusion was, in a sense, foreordained by the President's campaign promises. Intellectual honesty in the private councils of the White House told you something about the calibre of the officials involved, but in the realm of public policy it made little difference.

Holbrooke must know that there will be no American victory in this war; he can only try to forestall potential disaster. But if he considers success unlikely, or even questions the premise of the war, he has kept it to himself.

Shane McAdams:

If we abstain from real judgment someone will fill the void with an alternative judgment, one that only appears to be critical, but is actually defensive.

Ridley Scott:

How close is cynicism to the truth?

They're almost on the same side of the line. Cynicism will lead you to the truth. Or vice versa.

Ezra Klein:

The implicit assumption of these arguments about strategy is that there is, somewhere out there, a workable strategy. That there is some way to navigate our political system such that you enact wise legislation solving pressing problems. But that's an increasingly uncertain assumption, I think.

Imagine a group of men sitting in a dim prison cell. One of the walls has a window. Beyond that wall, they know they'll find freedom. One of the men spends years picking away at it with a small knife. The others eventually tire of him. That's an idiotic approach, they say. You need more force. So one of the other men spends his days ramming the bed frame into the wall. Eventually, he exhausts himself. The others mock his hubris. Another tries to light the wall afire. That fails as well. The assembled prisoners laugh at the attempt. And so it goes. But the problem is that there is no answer to their dilemma. The problem is not their strategy. It's the wall.

Cormac McCarthy:

At dusk they halted and built a fire and roasted the deer. The night was much enclosed about them and there were no stars. To the north they could see other fires that burned red and sullen along the invisible ridges. They ate and moved on, leaving the fire on the ground behind them, and as they rode up into the mountains this fire seemed to become altered of its location, now here, now there, drawing away, or shifting unaccountably along the flank of their movement. Like some ignis fatuus belated upon the road behind them which all could see and of which none spoke. For this will to deceive that is in things luminous may manifest itself likewise in retrospect and so by sleight of some fixed part of a journey already accomplished may also post men to fraudulent destinies.

The Last Mission

George Packer is worth your time.

Richard Holbrooke, writing on behalf of Nicholas Katzenbach, in 1967:

Hanoi uses time the way the Russians used terrain before Napoleon's advance on Moscow, always retreating, losing every battle, but eventually creating conditions in which the enemy can no longer function. For Napoleon it was his long supply lines and the cold Russian winter; Hanoi hopes that for us it will be the mounting dissension, impatience, and frustration caused by a protracted war without fronts or other visible signs success; a growing need to choose between guns and butter; and an increasing American repugnance at finding, for the first time, their own country cast as "the heavy."

Packer:

Unlike Johnson, Obama wanted a serious internal debate about his policy, and he got one, with advisers considering whether the war was already lost. Yet the conclusion was, in a sense, foreordained by the President's campaign promises. Intellectual honesty in the private councils of the White House told you something about the calibre of the officials involved, but in the realm of public policy it made little difference.

He concludes:

Holbrooke must know that there will be no American victory in this war; he can only try to forestall potential disaster. But if he considers success unlikely, or even questions the premise of the war, he has kept it to himself.

Rory Stewart:

Americans are particularly unwilling to believe that problems are insoluble.

Ahmed Rashid:

Democratic politicians are demanding results before next year's congressional elections, which is neither realistic nor possible. Moreover, the Taliban are quite aware of the Democrats' timetable.

Nir Rosen:

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

Mason, Waters, Wright, and Gilmour:

And you run and run to catch up with the sun, but it's sinking
And racing around to come up behind you again
The sun is the same in a relative way, but you're older
Shorter of breath and one day closer to death

Lisa Moore, in the October issue of The Walrus:

Here's what happens when you turn forty-five. You realize you will only ever read so many books -- how much time have you got left for reading? -- and you had better only read the good ones. There are only so many movies, so many trips, so many new friends, so many family barbecues with the sun going down over the long grass. It has always been this way. Finite. But at forty-five you realize it.

The Last Mission

Ahmed Rashid:

Richard Holbrooke recently told me that Pakistan's cooperation in fighting the Pakistani Taliban was very welcome, but that the Pakistani army now has to go into South Waziristan ... The US military is providing limited fresh equipment and funds to the army for just such an operation.

Obama has attempted to make his Afghan anti-narcotics policy more effective and to involve neighboring countries in a regional settlement. It's an assertive and possibly productive new strategy, but the Obama administration has had neither the time nor the resources to implement it.

In private moments Holbrooke has regretted how the Afghan elections have distracted attention from putting into effect Obama's new strategy. At home Obama has not had the time to show that his policy is the right one to follow, and now the elections themselves are being exposed as riddled with fraud.

For the first time, polling shows that a majority of Americans do not approve of Obama's handling of Afghanistan. Yet if it is to have any chance of success, the Obama plan for Afghanistan needs a serious long-term commitment -- at least for the next three years. Democratic politicians are demanding results before next year's congressional elections, which is neither realistic nor possible. Moreover, the Taliban are quite aware of the Democrats' timetable. With Obama's plan the US will be taking Afghanistan seriously for the first time since 2001; if it is to be successful it will need not only time but international and US support -- both open to question.

The Pakistani military will bide its time until the Americans are really desperate, and then the army will demand its price from the US -- a price to be measured in financial and military support.

The Taliban's game plan of waiting out the Americans now looks more plausible than ever.

Rory Stewart:

It is unlikely that we will be able to defeat the Taliban.

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 just before the election:

Karzai remains well ahead. What happens if he wins? "What will you do then?" I asked an American working for the Obama administration.

"The first step is to shift away from the weekly pat on the back he got from Bush but not be as removed as Obama was," he said. "Then if we can reduce his paranoia and if he has a renewed mandate and if we get the good Karzai, the charming Karzai. ..." It was ... [ Read More (0.2k in body) ]

Time

A Gold Star for David Grann:

Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia, in 2006, voted with a majority to uphold the death penalty in a Kansas case. In his opinion, Scalia declared that, in the modern judicial system, there has not been "a single case--not one--in which it is clear that a person was executed for a crime he did not commit. If such an event had occurred in recent years, we would not have to hunt for it; the innocent's name would be shouted from the rooftops."

Justice Scalia in 2009:

"This court has never held that the Constitution forbids the execution of a convicted defendant who had a full and fair trial but is later able to convince a habeas court that he is 'actually' innocent."

Did I mention the Gold Star for David Grann's article?

In 2003 Decius recommended an interesting web site:

Here you can see the last statements of people executed in Texas.

Sure enough, this site is still in operation, and today, Cameron Todd Willingham's Information Sheet and Last Statement are there, although the Statement is incomplete because the government omitted part of it "due to profanity."

Decius, in 2003:

We have a real problem in America with oversimplified responses to complex problems.

The ABA wants a moratorium on the death penalty.

Decius, in 2005:

IMHO If the state is going to kill you it ought to consider all of the evidence. The idea that it need not seems ignorant of the finality of death.

Finethen, in 2006:

If we must use it, we must make sure it is absolutely humane and does not get misapplied. Unfortunately, both inhumane uses and misapplication are still frequent.

Decius, in 2007:

Americans define themselves with their toughness. Having sympathy for criminals is weak. No one wants to be perceived as weak. The meme here is that caring about what happens to people is the opposite of thinking. The conservative movement paraphrases this as "liberals feel and conservatives think."

Trial By Fire

I'm kind of a farmer -- I start with dirt and make it grow.

Why, I wondered, had I bought into the "weed" label? Why had I so harshly judged an innocent plant?

This time, I decided to set the rules aside.

"It's one of a number of substances that we'll be taking a hard look at."

But will anything really change?