Mustaches, Windbags and Backpedalling

So Thomas Friedman – he of the thousand (frequently nonsensical) catchphrases, the apneatic writing skills and an embarrassing record of cheerleading for the Iraq war – has refound his less-than enviable foreign policy chops. The subject? Apparently the Iraqi judiciary has decided to not prosecute a lawmaker for visiting Israel for a counterterrorism seminar – proof that an independent judiciary is cohering in Iraq, according to Friedman. And there’s a sweetener, too – 400 Kurdish and Arab intellectuals signed a letter, published in a newspaper, defending the lawmaker’s visit. The sweet sound of democracy, right? Energetic printing presses, a vocal judiciary, and the freedom-loving chitchat of intellectuals. If that was where the column ended, it would be fine – I think it’s great that Iraq is slowly growing an independent judiciary, if that’s what is happening (I have a little more trouble than Friedman does in interpreting this as a clear bellwether of freedom). Friedman continues, though, in a stunningly boldfaced revision of history that leaves you wondering whether his sources for information on the Iraq war extend much further than Donald Rumsfeld:

It’s a reminder of the most important reason for the Iraq war: to try to collaborate with Iraqis to build progressive politics and rule of law in the heart of the Arab-Muslim world, a region that stands out for its lack of consensual politics and independent judiciaries. And it’s a reminder that a decent outcome may still be possible in Iraq, especially now that the Parliament has endorsed the U.S.-Iraqi plan for a 2011 withdrawal of American troops.

Was that the most important reason for the Iraq war? Really? I mean I guess, in a sense, Friedman is right – all of the previous reasons have been found wanting, to say the least (WMDs, revenge for 9/11, regional stability, etc.). Acknowledging that these are the most important reason,s of course, would assume that progressive politics and the rule of law were somehow priorities over the last eight years in the Bush Administration – a bit of a stretch, to say the least.

While the Baathist regime was undoubtedly a horrible one, a war supporter’s discussion of the war’s legacy – which includes hundreds of thousands dead, millions of refugees, a devastated infrastructure, at least a generation of heavily psychologically damaged citizens, a reinvigorated and swaggering Iran, a destabilized region, a hopelessly corrupt government and rebuilding effort, and the rise of tens of thousands, if not hundreds of thousands, more terrorists – would wisely drop any mentions of progressive politics or an independent judiciary. It just serves to even more boldly illuminate how tragically wrong he was in the first place. In fact, while Friedman is better left discussing nothing at all, I would even go so far as to argue that his ham-handed discussions of the green economy – hampered, of course, by the fact he lives in an 11,000 sq ft mansion – are better than him hammering out nonsensical diatribes of conventional knowledge and mendacity about foreign policy. Ugh – dude is the worst. I’ll get back to more important stuff, soon, I promise.

Gonna be some sweet sounds, coming down, from the night shift…

And those sweet sounds are the Bush administration sending out emails to allies encouraging them to man up and oppose limits on greenhouse gas emissions. Wow – the worst president ever just got WORSE(R). This long passed farce.

A Brief Hiatus

So, with American Thanksgiving and all that, I won’t be posting much until Friday or Saturday. But Dave did ask me what I thought of the new Kanye album, so here goes:

I think it’s pretty great. I don’t think it’s flawless, or even his best album – in fact, I think it’s probably his worst thus far – but it’s very, very good. I think he really shot for an overall feel to the album – isolation, loneliness, depression, etc. – and I think he nailed it, both production-wise and lyrically. The use of the auto-tune to get that mood across was a brilliant move as well. The most important part of the album, though, is what it means for Kanye the artist – unlike most of his peers, who seem to be more than happy just recycling the same old formula on album after album, Kanye is still growing. Listening to his progression as an artist, from College Dropout through 808s and Heartbreak, is astounding. He is consistently the most inventive voice in pop music and rap, and this is just another step for him. I doubt he’ll go back down this road again – two albums of this would be overkill, and artistically I think he’s squeezed about all the juice out of the autotune that he can – but it was definitely an enjoyable detour. I really believe Kanye is the greatest talent in music right now, and I think 808s just cements that claim. And ‘Welcome to Heartbreak’ and ‘Street Lights’ are both absurdly great songs. Thoughts, anyone?

He did it for hip-hop

In an act that can only be described as bewildering, Bush pardoned former Fugees collaborator and rapper John Forte, who was busted for attempting to bring $1.4 million of cocaine through the Newark Airport and has been in prison since 2000. Wow – check out the details here. Apparently the pardon was a result of the rich and famous connections Forte picked up in private school. Even Sen. Orrin Hatch campaigned for his release! How did I not hear of this before???? Now if we can only get Shyne and Remy Ma out, we’ll be good…

And speaking of hip-hop, I’ve been meaning to post this song for a while – ‘I Do it for Hip-Hop’ by Ludacris, feat. Nas and Jay-Z. All three rappers come correct (um…), but for my money Jay-Z comes out on top with one of the best verses I’ve heard in a while. I can’t get the first two lines out of my head: ‘Hip hop, it started out in the park / I used to do it to avoid the narcs / I used to do it so my homeboy Clark could get the fuck off my back while I knocked off these packs.’ Brilliant. I was a little worried about Jay for a while – his flow was off, he wasn’t as deft as he used to be, and his wordplay was significantly less mind-blowing than it used to be. Well, he’s back, and in grand fashion. The entire song kills, but his verse? Damn. Reminds me why, even when faced with even the most artistically stultifying of times, I never give up on hip-hop. Speaking of which, the new Kanye album? Nails, as far as I’m concerned. Thoughts?

Surging to Slough

Somewhere amidst the frightening disaster Obama is going to inherit in a couple of short months is Afghanistan. On the scale of importance, it occupies that nebulous region between the economy on the important side, and campaign finance reform on the other. What makes Afghanistan more important than your average run-of-the-mill quagmire, though, is Pakistan – coincidentally, where a good portion of Aghanistan’s insurgents are dribbling in from. And to solve the problem with Afghanistan, you have to solve the problem with Pakistan, which is really, really fucking difficult. So in the next little bit I want to tackle both of these separately – tonight I’ll be writing about Afghanistan, and sometime soon Pakistan. In case you care, of course…

As far as Afghanistan goes, Obama has been speaking of trying to do some type of Iraq-like troop surge. On the one hand it’s kind of a compelling idea – the surge is (kind of) working in Iraq, right? But on the other hand, I think it would be a mistake, as the reasons that the surge is (kind of) working in Iraq have little to do with the surge itself, per se, and much more so to do with the particularities of Iraq.

First, you’ve got the Sunni Awakening, where Sunni tribes made a deal with the U.S. to fight against al-Qaida in Iraq. This was a massive reason, likely the main, for the (potentially temporary) change of tides in Iraq. Plus, a good portion of these tribes and former insurgents were brought over by paying them. That leaves us with the main reason things are going well in Iraq is that some Sunni tribes hate al-Qaida more than they hate the U.S. (if only slightly), and they like American ducats.

And second, you have a change in strategy, from walling American forces in geographically isolated superbases to getting them out on the streets and mingling with the people (like community policing, sort of).

And only then do you have the extra 25,000 troops, who – in the end – made a far smaller difference than the Sunni Awakening and the shift in strategies did.

Already the fallacy of equating the success of the surge in Iraq with its potential success in Afghanistan is clear – and that’s before you get to all of the other assorted details that make it a baseless comparison, which I’ve stolen from here (a great piece on why the surge won’t work):

Iraq’s insurgency is based in Iraq; Afghanistan’s Taliban insurgents are based mainly across the border in Pakistan. Iraq is urban, educated, and has great wealth, at least potentially, in its oil supplies; Afghanistan is rural, largely illiterate, and ranks as one of the world’s five poorest countries. Iraq has some history as a cohesive nation (albeit as the result of a minority ruling sect oppressing the majority); Afghanistan never has and, given its geography, perhaps never will.

Moreover, the Taliban’s insurgency is ideological, not ethno-sectarian (except incidentally). Therefore, while some warlords and tribes have allied themselves with the Taliban for opportunistic or nationalistic reasons, and therefore might be peeled away and co-opted, the conditions are not ripe for some sort of Taliban or Pashtun “Awakening.” Nor is there any place where walls might isolate the insurgents.

Ugh. And all of that is before considering the fact that the success of the Iraqi surge hinges on an assortment of unsteady variables, from the continued antipathy of the Sunni tribes to AQI, to the continued friendliness of the Sunni tribes with the U.S. forces, to the continued flow of cash that is providing the foundation for that friendliness, and so on.

So what to do, then? Does the U.S. and NATO just keep on stumbling toward an uncertain future in Afghanistan, with no resolution in sight? The status quo certainly isn’t working – soldier casualties are increasing at an alarming rate, and the occasional military incursions into Pakistan are a recipe for a disaster that would make Afghanistan look like a (kava) tea party. What, then?

The best thing to do is exactly what Obama has said he would do with less-than-friendly heads of state – negotiate. While the idea of it may be tough to swallow (especially for the military in Afghanistan), it’s going to have to be done (Petraeus even said that there is no “alternative to reconciliation.”) You coopt the cooptable – bring the more opportunistic Taliban insurgents to the negotiating table, compromise where possible, and begin to work on incorporating some of those former Taliban fighters into the national government. At the same time, do a better job in bringing order to the government and rooting out corruption – it’s a largely thankless, unsexy, mammoth task, but by doing that you can impose a lot of the order that is so desperately absent in the country right now (anarchy that has, in many areas, triggered the rise of the Taliban, as a brutal, unforgiving order is often better than no order). Negotiations, compromise and order will do far better than increased air support (and civilian casualties) and troops will do.

There are, of course, a host of other things to consider – while there is a reasonable fear of Afghanistan collapsing into a brutal theocracy again, there is perhaps just as much a possibility of collapsing into a narco-state. With the country supplying about 90 percent of the world’s heroin, and substantial chunks of the government and the Taliban dependent on the flourishing opium industry, the country’s fate is intrinsically linked to narcotics. And the worst thing to do here is what the U.S. has done in Columbia and a host of other states – destroy the farms and leave the farmers with little other viable ways of making a living. Growing poppy is leaps and bounds more lucrative than other crops, and without acknowledging that – and actively working to transition farmers (including with incentives) – the poppy fields will continue to thrive. And that’s just one of the problems – Afghanistan’s economy, forever mired in the lower ranks of the world, needs a dramatic revamping before the country can even consider muddling its way up the ranks of the world’s countries.

I digress, though. The three biggest aspects of the solution, I think, are:

1) Recognize the appeal of the Taliban – Tragically, this is the what didn’t happen in Somalia in 2006, an event that is tragically representative of the myopia of Bush’s war on terror. When the Islamic Courts Union took over chunks of Somalia in 2006, the U.S. – worried about radical Islam taking root in a ‘failed state’ – helped launch an Ethiopian invasion of the country, plunging it into further chaos. What the U.S. failed to realize was that there was a reason the ICU was being welcomed with open arms in decent-sized portions of the country – because it was bringing order into the chaos-filled vacuum of the warlords. And that is precisely what the Taliban has been doing in large areas of Afghanistan. Of course, the tactics are brutal and reprehensible, but the key to the solution – completely lost in the Somalia catastrophe – is order. There is an appeal to the Taliban – order in chaos – and recognizing that appeal and replicating it (in less brutal and more palatable fashion) is critical.

2) Governing deradicalizes – The very act of being forced into political negotiations and compromise can significantly deradicalize otherwise extremist groups. One of the greatest American (and Israeli) foreign policy blunders in the Middle East (there is plenty of competition, unfortunately) was tossing out Hamas’ victory in the 2006 Palestinian elections. Even when its rightful fruits of victory were stolen from it, it managed to somewhat deradicalize – had it been able to serve in parliament, it would have done so further. Hezbollah in Lebanon is another example of the moderating effects of politics. The Obama administration would do well to learn that.

3) Bring other countries into the mix – Of course, the NATO countries will be involved. More importantly, though, Iran should be involved, as its interests cross with America’s in this case – the last thing Iran wants is a Sunni extremist takeover of Afghanistan, especially with an assortment of Sunni extremists itching to seize the reins of power in bordering Pakistan. To quoth dead prez – ‘My enemy’s enemy is my man.’

That, I think, is how the U.S. and NATO should go about things in Afghanistan, hopefully allowing for a withdrawal fairly soon. Staying in the country indefinitely – or worse, calling for an indefinite troop surge – won’t do anything but prolong the agony. Negotiate, compromise, and order – it’s the only way to go. Let’s hope the Obama administration agrees.

Here is an astounding article I read on Afghanistan recently – a journalist embeds with theTaliban and takes a trip into the frightening heart of the country. Required reading, yo.