The Good War?

The President has been involved in protracted deliberations over the strategy needed in Afghanistan. Amazingly, former Vice President Cheney has chosen to criticize the President for being deliberate in his decisions. Amazing criticism from a man who encouraged his President into making a huge string of strategic mistakes, from the conduct of the war in Afghanistan during the Bush Administration, to invading Iraq, to the general tenor of our foreign policy to idiotic and disastrous domestic policies to participating in the outing of a covert CIA officer.

That rant aside, the President has an incredibly tough decision to make.

Like much of what he inherited, President is faced with a range of shitty options, none of whom hold great promise.

Withdrawal on some sort of timetable and leaving the Afghanistani's to their own devices would be terribly difficult to sell politically even if he wasn't already in the middle of two other very important political debates.

Keep with the current force levels and strategy. Probably the one choice no one is advocating.

Bulk up our forces by 40,000 or more troops to expand the current strategy of take, hold, and build that was the concept behind his first troop increase in March. Basically doubling down on his earlier strategy.

Shift the focus from anti-insurgency and nation building implicit in take, hold, and build to a focused anti-terrorist strategy that utilizes special forces and targeted munitions to target Al Queda in Afghanistan and Pakistan and essentially withdraw from the Afghani civil war.

There may be other options, these are the ones I have heard of.

And they are all terrible options.

Any strategy that is focused on building the institutions and military structure of the Afghani government in Kabul runs headlong into the debilitating corruption of the Karzi government. And there is no real evidence that his opponent in the upcoming runoff will be any less corrupt. And this is why any strategy built on nation building in Afghanistan begins to look and feel more and more like Vietnam. And that image scares me.

I don't know how different a strategic picture we would be seeing in Afghanistan if the Bush Administration had not screwed the pooch so completely, but we may now be at the point where the Taliban cannot be defeated. They have used money and what almost looks like effective governance to establish a very strong position in much of the country. And they can easily present us as invaders and occupiers and history shows that Afghanistan is not kind to invaders and occupiers. And what passes for a central government in Kabul is riddled with corruption and ineptitude. How can we try to build a nation based on that central government? Though it would be easy to criticize President Bush for picking Karzai, I don't know of any other Afghani leader who could have been effective at creating a national government in a nation that has never really had one. If there is a leader who would not be corrupt himself and who could create a government largely free of corruption, I have not heard his name.

Take, hold, and build might possibly work if we could bring in enough troops and keep them there long enough, but the more troops we bring in, the more we look like occupiers. The longer we stay, the more we look like occupiers. The more we support a corrupt central government the more we look like occupiers.

I supported President Obama in the election and I supported his decision to increase our force level in Afghanistan early in his Presidency. Now I am not so sure.

Increasingly I believe it’s time for us to accept that we cannot enforce our will on Afghanistan. Maybe we never could have. Maybe even if the Bush Administration had focused on Afghanistan from the beginning it would still look the same, I don't know.

But I don't see any good outcome here. We will continue to lose good men and women fighting a war trying to build a stable nation in Afghanistan and I don't see any realistic way for us to succeed. Unlike Iraq, Afghanistan doesn't really have any history of central governance. It has always been a tribal society where people are far more faithful their faith and their tribe than to their nation. Can come together and stop fighting each other when the need to deal with invaders and occupiers, but they don't see themselves as a nation. Afghanistan is, after all, a nation created by western colonial powers drawing lines on a map that had little or nothing to do with reality on the ground.

We have screwed up here. We gleefully helped the Afghani people defeat the Soviets. The Soviets pulled out and the first Bush Administration patted itself on the back and walked away from a country we helped break. Maybe if we had stayed then, maybe if we had worked with the Pakistani's and the Afghani's to build civil structures and build infrastructure that would give people other options than growing poppies, maybe it might have worked then. My natural inclination is that since we broke it, we have to fix it. I just don't think we can.

We need to be finding a way out. Sooner rather than later.

The world is full of Irony

"Torture anywhere is an affront to human dignity everywhere... I call on all governments to join with the United States and the community of law-abiding nations in prohibiting, investigating, and prosecuting all acts of torture."-- George W. Bush, June 2003

Throwing President Bush under the Bus

Its been fun in a sick way to watch how the Republican Party has thrown President Bush completely under the bus then made sure it ran over him a couple of times.
Bobby Jindall's Republican response to the President's address was only part of it.
You hear current Republican Congressmen and Senators talk like none of the excesses and stupidities of the Bush years have anything to do with them.
All of a sudden they have discovered fiscal responsibility.
Some how they were the party in power when the FEMA so completely botched its response to Hurricane Katrina.
Now that he is no longer a candidate for President of the US, Senator McCain is saying the war in Afghanistan is lost
After 8 years of Earmarks run amok, all of a sudden earmarks are evil and have to be opposed at every turn.
Fortunately, it doesn't seem that the public is buying it. Despite their lackluster performance, public approval for the Democrats in Congress is up, almost to 50% whild approval for Republicans is still in the 20's.
And President Obama's approval is in the 60's
After 8 years of defending and supporting George Walker Bush, the entire Republican establishment has thrown the man under the bus.
Its funny.

Wrong Again

I am wondering if Republicans ever tire of being wrong, seriously mind-numbingly wrong??

In 1993, President Bill Clinton inherited record Budget Deficits and a faltering economy. He pushed through an Economic Plan that included raising taxes. It got not a single vote in the House. Republicans predicted economic doom and disaster. What we got was the 8 years of strong economic growth, 21 million new jobs, and a Budget Surplus.

In 2001, President Bush inherits a Budget Surplus and a faltering economy. He pushed through massive tax cuts, only by limiting them to 10 years because of their huge cost, promising strong economic growth. Instead what we got was 8 years of anemic job growth, growing income disparities, a sputtering Stock Market and obscene deficits. By the time President Bush and the Republicans were through, we had an economic collapse to rival the Great Depression, Trillion Dollar Deficits, more than doubling of the National Debt, a banking system that won't lend, a diminished prestige in the world and two wars, one of which should never have been fought, the other should never have been ignored. Oh, and a ruined city.

Now its 2009, President Obama has inherited more challenges than perhaps any President in history with the possible exception of Abraham Lincoln. And now, a badly needed stimulus package has passed the House without a single Republican vote. Sound familiar.

Do they ever get tired of being wrong

About the Economy
About regulation
About Global Warming
About Invading Iraq
About the importance of Competence
About Torture

I almost looks like they like being wrong.

Investigate, Prosecute, Convict

One of the issues that our new President has to face is the call to investigate and possibly prosecute members of the Administration of George W Bush for a myriad of crimes, most importantly torture.

President Obama has made it clear he would prefer not to go there. He understands, as most do, that prosecuting members of the previous administration would be a major distraction from what he is trying to accomplish, would damage his efforts to move forward on issues in a Bipartisan fashion, and might, in the end, only yield minor convictions of peripheral characters.

He should do it anyway.

I have no interest in seeing Congress doing the investigating. It would be immediately politicized, Congress would give immunity to people we should be investigating or even prosecuting, and they have more important things to do.

Attorney General Eric Holder should appoint a Special Prosecutor. Perhaps Patrick Fitzgerald after he is done with Blogovich. Or a career prosecutor that was hired by the Bush Justice Department, or another holdover US Attorney.

There is little doubt that employees of the United States Government tortured people held in their custody. The Convening Authority for the Military Tribunals has already dismissed all charges against one of the prisoners held at GITMO specifically that person had been tortured by military interrogators. President Bush admitted to and defended water boarding of prisoners. At the end of WWII we prosecuted Japanese Officers for Water boarding our prisoners. How can we argue that we are above the law, that its OK for us to torture?

The Bush Administration argued exactly that. They were wrong. Torture is immoral and illegal.

It is also clear that the Bush Administration monitored the phone calls, some of them purely domestic phone calls, without a warrant. A clear and unequivocal violation of the Constitution ever Military Officer and every President swears to protect.

One of the ways that we can and should recover our standing in the world is by showing that we don't' hold ourselves to be above our own laws, let alone international laws.

As an aside, were the tables reversed, I have no doubt that a Republican Administration, and/or a Republican controlled congress would pursue those investigations with vigor.

We must pursue the investigations, in as non-partisan and transparent was as possible to remind ourselves and prove to the rest of the world that we are a Nation of Laws.

Despite the cost, despite the distraction, its something we must do.