Elizabeth Rubin, reporting from Afghanistan:

"I swear," Akhundzada went on, eyes agog, "I have not killed a cat in all my life." With that he took off with his rifle-toting guards and disappeared into his armored SUV.

...

I recently asked an old friend of Karzai's why Karzai would choose as his running mate Muhammad Fahim, a controversial figure who has been accused of multiple human rights abuses over many years. "Karzai believes that his two greatest mistakes as president were the removals of Sher Muhammad Akhundzada and Marshal Fahim," he said. Both happened under intense Western pressure. The reason he regretted their removal was not that he thought they were honest statesmen but that he found they were more trouble out of office. Fahim's removal lost him mujahedin support, and Akhundzada's removal triggered the fall of Helmand Province to the Taliban.

...

The consensus in Afghanistan is that if the Aug. 20 elections are somehow fair -- which is impossible to guarantee -- there will most likely be a runoff in a second round.

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 a lot of ifs.

Rory Stewart:

Americans are particularly unwilling to believe that problems are insoluble.

You may recall Rubin's last Afghanistan story, "Battle Company Is Out There":

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

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

When Bill Keller refers to "quality journalism", he's talking about Elizabeth Rubin:

By quality journalism I mean the kind that involves experienced reporters going places, bearing witness, digging into records, developing sources, checking and double-checking, backed by editors who try to enforce high standards. I mean journalism that, however imperfect, labors hard to be trustworthy, to supply you with the information you need to be an engaged citizen. The supply of this kind of journalism is declining because it is hard, expensive, sometimes dangerous work.

Karzai in His Labyrinth

From late last November:

Mr. Gibbs said one of the main challenges for Mr. Obama was tamping down expectations a bit without making anyone think he was moving away from the promises of his campaign.

From a few weeks before that, in the Economist:

He has to start deciding whom to disappoint.

From late in the campaign, Senator Obama:

What this crisis has taught us is that at the end of the day, there is no real separation between Wall Street and Main Street. There is only the road we're traveling on as Americans, and we will rise and fall on that as one nation, as one people.

From last December, Nouriel Roubini:

Things are going to be awful for everyday people.

Now, from 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.

Long ago, from a young(er) Donald Rumsfeld:

For every human problem there is a solution that is simple, neat and wrong.

Simply because a problem is shown to exist doesn't necessarily follow that there is a solution.

And yet still now, Rory Stewart observes:

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.

Americans are particularly unwilling to believe that problems are insoluble.

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 Wall

Aaron Swartz:

I've spent the past year and change working on a site that publishes government information online. In doing that, I've learned a lot. But I've also become increasingly skeptical of the transparency project in general.

The way a typical US transparency project works is pretty simple. You find a government database, work hard to get or parse a copy, and then put it online with some nice visualizations.

The problem is that reality doesn't live in the databases. Instead, the databases that are made available, even if grudgingly, form a kind of official cover story, a veil of lies over the real workings of government.

So government transparency sites end up having three possible effects. The vast majority of them simply promote these official cover stories, misleading the public about what's really going on. The unusually cutting ones simply make plain the mindnumbing universality of waste and corruption, and thus promote apathy. And on very rare occasions you have a "success": an extreme case is located through your work, brought to justice, and then everyone goes home thinking the problem has been solved, as the real corruption continues on as before.

In short, the generous impulses behind transparency sites end up doing more harm than good.

Recently:

The Sunlight Foundation Labs has announced the winners for their transparency coding contest.

Transparency is Bunk

Barack Obama:

"I don't want to quell anger. I think people are right to be angry. I'm angry. What I want to do, though, is channel our anger in a constructive way."

While Mr. Obama never explicitly said how he believed that anger should be channeled, he essentially suggested that Americans should follow his lead: let off a little steam and move on.

Colin Powell, from years ago:

Get mad, then get over it.

The Shoveller:

We struck down evil with the mighty sword of teamwork and the hammer of not bickering.

Jules Winnfield:

The truth is you're the weak. And I'm the tyranny of evil men. But I'm tryin', Ringo. I'm tryin' real hard to be a shepherd.

As the Public Simmers, Obama Lets Off Steam

Henry Blodget:

If the "TARP bonus" bill the House passed today becomes law, any of the hundreds of thousands of people who work for Citigroup, Bank of America, AIG, and nine other major US corporations will have to fork over 90 cents of every bonus dollar that puts their household income over $250,000.

That's household income, not individual income. If you're married and filing singly, you'll have to surrender anything over $125,000. Indefinitely.

Paul Graham:

It will always suck to work for large organizations, and the larger the organization, the more it will suck.

Barry Ritholtz:

This current generation is pretty much fucked.

Now We Really ARE Screwed

Cass Sunstein:

In a well-functioning deliberative democracy, a wide range of perspectives is a virtue rather than a vice, at least if the constitution has the proper structure.

Richard Hofstadter:

The Fathers hoped to create not a system of party government under a constitution but rather a constitutional government that would check and control parties.

... Although Federalists and Anti-Federalists differed over many things, they do not seem to have differed over the proposition that an effective constitution is one that successfully counteracts the work of parties.

Michael Lopp:

You should pick a fight, because bright people often yell at each other.

Sunstein again:

The antifederalists rooted the problem of faction in that of corruption.

Madison argued that conscious attempts to eliminate the factional spirit would not promote liberty but instead destroy it.

Marcia Angell:

There seems to be a desire to eliminate the smell of corruption, while keeping the money.

James Madison:

To suppose that any form of government will secure liberty or happiness without any virtue in the people, is a chimerical idea.

Niall Ferguson:

Chimerica is really the key to how the global financial system works, and has been now for about a decade. Both sides stand to lose from a breakdown of Chimerica, which is why both sides are affirming a commitment to it. The Chinese believe in Chimerica maybe even more than Americans do. They have nowhere else to go.

There was a time when if you said the United States was going to suffer a lost decade like Japan did in the 1990s, everybody would have said you were a mad pessimist. That begins to look like quite a good scenario.

Alexander Hamilton:

When occasions present themselves in which the interests of the people are at variance with their inclinations, it is the duty of the persons whom they have appointed to be the guardians of those interests to withstand the temporary delusion in order to give them time and opportunity for more cool and sedate reflection.

Some time ago:

To be sure, time marches on.

Yet for many Californians, the looming demise of the "time lady," as she's come to be known, marks the end of a more genteel era, when we all had time to share.

The Enlarged Republic -- Then and Now

Jeffrey Gettleman:

"Pirates? Pirates?" he exclaimed, staring at me like I was an idiot. "This jail is full of pirates! This whole city is pirates!"

I quickly learned the pirates had special status here. One after the other told me about how rich he was, how rich they all were, how they had so much money they could have whatever they wanted.

One of them, Jama Abdullahi, was a tall, lean pirate with a checkered, Arab-style scarf and a serious case of ADD. "We got more than 500 people working for us," he said. "We make millions."

Who knows, maybe this was true. Maybe for a bunch of them it was true. Maybe they had million-dollar homes in New Boosaaso with Land Rovers parked in front of them. Maybe when they went into town, the women swooned around them and gave them whatever they desired. Certainly this was the case for some of Somalia's pirates, but the more I talked to these guys, the more their bravado struck me as an act and the sadder it began to seem.

The real pirate money was going elsewhere, to men who wore suits and had secretaries and went to offices in towering buildings, men who would never see this jail and likely never even see the shitty, lawless city of Boosaaso. The notion that the Somali pirates were Robin Hoods fighting back by going after the boats that have raped their seas--that notion is nothing but a sentimental fantasy to lay over the much uglier reality of Somalia. At best, the richest men in Boosaaso are just the current iteration of the country's infamous warlords, making millions off the chaos around them and spreading some of that wealth to the grunts beneath them. That wasn't these guys. These guys were fighting just to survive. They picked up a Kalashnikov and got on a boat because it was their way to eat.

More Jeffrey Gettleman:

Somalia is a state governed only by anarchy. A graveyard of foreign-policy failures, it has known just six months of peace in the past two decades. Now, as the country’s endless chaos threatens to engulf an entire region, the world again simply watches it burn.

"The Pirates Have Siezed The Ship"

Kathleen Parker:

Optimistic disappointment is the new holding pattern.

Giving up being liked is the ultimate public sacrifice.

From last November:

He has to start deciding whom to disappoint.

From a year ago:

In all his speeches, John McCain urges Americans to make sacrifices for a country that is both “an idea and a cause”.

He is not asking them to suffer anything he would not suffer himself.

But many voters would rather not suffer at all.

From last October, Juan Enriquez:

A solution requires the country to begin to spend what it earns, reduce its mountainous debt, and address massive liabilities, restructure Social Security, pension deficits, military, and Medicare. No wonder politicians would rather spend more of your money now rather than address these problems.

From last November, Slavoj Žižek:

The danger is thus that the predominant narrative of the meltdown won't be the one that awakes us from a dream, but the one that will enable us to continue to dream.

From 2006, Walter Russel Mead:

The difference between fundamentalists and evangelicals is not that fundamentalists are more emotional in their beliefs; it is that fundamentalists insist more fully on following their ideas to their logical conclusion.

Last week, I commented on the following statement in Obama's inaugural address:

We will begin to responsibly leave Iraq to its people, and forge a hard-earned peace in Afghanistan.

On the same day, Steve Coll wrote:

It is not hard to imagine the marginalia that produced this slightly odd language. “To Speechwriting: No more ‘victories,’ please.”

Also, “peace” has a pleasing relationship with “stability,” which is emerging as the realist, scaled-down, but nonetheless daunting goal in Afghanistan among many foreign-policy types who, for one reason or another, believe that the United States ought to trim its ambitions in that country to match our resources and abilities.

Regarding the strategy of Uncoupling, Coll is critical:

This line of thinking has obvious appeal after the Bush Administration’s policies of operatic overreach, but it is erroneous for two reasons.

First, the Taliban are not indigenous to Afghanistan—their history and their present strength cannot be assessed in isolation from their relationship with the Pakistani state and other radical elements inside Pakistan. They are partially an Afghan problem and increasingly a Pakistani problem, too.

Second, the Taliban are now so large and diverse, and have been so much changed by the international environment in which they fight today, that to generalize about their strategic intentions is to, well, guess, as we did, unsuccessfully, in the run up to September 11th.

Steve Coll, on "Hard-Earned Peace" and the Uncoupling

On Tuesday, President Obama delivered his highly anticipated inaugural address. Many observers noticed and commented on the respectful reference to nonbelievers. But just a few sentences beforehand, Obama referred to the Taliban and al Qaeda. These remarks have not drawn the same level of attention, although I'd argue they are more significant.

Let's take a look.

Obama said:

We will begin to responsibly leave Iraq to its people, and forge a hard-earned peace in Afghanistan. With old friends and former foes, we will work tirelessly to lessen the nuclear threat, and roll back the specter of a warming planet. We will not apologize for our way of life, nor will we waver in its defense, and for those who seek to advance their aims by inducing terror and slaughtering innocents, we say to you now that our spirit is stronger and cannot be broken; you cannot outlast us, and we will defeat you.

He ends this paragraph with a forceful declaration about our collective will to defeat al Qaeda. This is status quo rhetoric.

Far more significant, however, is the carefully worded reference to "peace in Afghanistan" which opens the paragraph.

One hopes it is not, in fact, "too late" to achieve the Uncoupling.

In any case, time will tell.

From October 2008:

The solution for people who have spent a long time in Afghanistan was ... to work with the Taliban and somehow to uncouple the Afghan fighters from al-Qaeda. Seven years of killing later, it feels a bit too late to try that now. So, western policy seems glued to fighting a war that many people in the know are now saying the west is never going to win.

From October 2008:

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

From January 2009:

We will not be able to eliminate the Taliban from the rural areas of Afghanistan’s south, so we will have to work with Afghans to contain the insurgency instead. All this is unpleasant for Western politicians who dream of solving the fundamental problems and getting out. They will soon be tempted to give up.

Two or Three Things I Noticed About The Speech