On the culture of grievance

Ta-Nehisi:

The notion of being besieged–the idea that Obama is a threat to gun-owners, that the gays somehow want something more than to just live out their lives in peace–is essential to justifying the fear-mongering. Much like no one says “Me and my friends are going to kick your ass, because we feel like it,” no one ever comes out and says, “I hate fags” or “I hate niggers.” What they say is that the feminist are attacking our military, or the president “hates white people,” or the president is giving out reparations disguised as health-care.

Very few bullies like to think of themselves as bullies. So they craft narratives in which they’re the victims. Happens all the time.

Lock up Roman Polanski and throw away the key

Hey, I liked Rosemary’s Baby as much as anybody else. But he raped a 13-year-old girl and has spent three decades evading punishment for it. I’m somewhat bewildered that the man has defenders.

Like the L.A. Times‘ Patrick Goldstein, for instance:

I think Polanski has already paid a horrible, soul-wrenching price for the infamy surrounding his actions. The real tragedy is that he will always, till his death, be snubbed and stalked and confronted by people who think the price he has already paid isn’t enough.

What price has he had to pay? That he had to spend 30 years living in France? He was arrested in Switzerland — apparently feeling safe to go there because he had a chalet that he regularly visited. What price is that, exactly?

Then there’s Anne Appelbaum:

I am certain there are many who will harrumph that, following this arrest, justice was done at last. But Polanski is 76. To put him on trial or keep him in jail does not serve society in general or his victim in particular. Nor does it prove the doggedness and earnestness of the American legal system. If he weren’t famous, I bet no one would bother with him at all.

Ah, yes, the wages of fame: Being held accountable for child rape. Regular working-class child rapists don’t know how good they’ve got it!

I understand Polanski’s victim wants the charges dropped and the case to go away. I won’t pretend to know her mindset on why she’s made that decision. But the final decision doesn’t really belong to her. A sexual assault on a 13-year-old girl is an assault on society and its good order; evading punishment for that crime is a further assault. Polanski was able to evade justice for three decades because he was rich and famous and could flee to France; I have no problem making an example of him.

UPDATE: Brendan says it angrier.

The death of socialism

It’s important to note that while President Obama is regularly slurred as a European-style “socialist,” actual European socialists are having a rough time of it. There’s a middle ground between unregulated free-market anarchy and strict national control of industry. Capitalism will not die if we move just a little bit to the left.

The Facebook “assassinate Obama” poll

While I was on the treadmill at the gym this morning, CNN spent 20 minutes talking about the Facebook poll about Barack Obama’s assassination. Which was at least 19 minutes too much. Somebody was being an ass on Facebook; that doesn’t really tell us anything about the state of race relations in this country.

Gitmo: Not quite closed for business

I bet a conservative friend a small bottle of nice scotch that Gitmo would be closed by the Obama Administration’s one-year deadline. Looks like I’d better start shopping.

A protest against the new arts tax

Or: How I spent my lunch break…

What the terror case tells us about Afghanistan

You’ve probably heard by now about the case of Najibullah Zazi, the Afghan immigrant charged with plotting to carry out bomb attacks in the United States. It’s a scary case, a reminder that there really is an Al Qaeda that really likes to do horrific things — and wants to do them to us.

What’s interesting, though, is how Zazi apparently came by his Al Qaeda connections:

If government allegations are to be believed, Mr. Zazi, a legal immigrant from Afghanistan, had carefully prepared for a terrorist attack. He attended a Qaeda training camp in Pakistan, received training in explosives and stored in his laptop computer nine pages of instructions for making bombs from the same kind of chemicals he had bought.

Pakistan? Isn’t that country kinda sorta an ally in the war on terror?

Here’s a problem with increasing the United States’ commitment to Afghanistan in the name of waging the broader “war on terror”: it may not matter that much.

Al Qaeda, after all, used to be headquartered in Sudan, but wore out its welcome there.

So Al Qaeda moved its headquarters to Afghanistan, under the protection of the Taliban. The United States invaded Afghanistan and Al Qaeda fled to Pakistan where — though much diminished — it has still been able to inspire attacks in Spain, Indonesia and England.

This is the thing about “stateless” terrorism: It’s stateless. Which makes building up a fragile state like Afghanistan as a means of beating Al Qaeda a dubious proposition.

Stephen Biddle has an article in The American Interest arguing for continued war in Afghanistan. It says, essentially, that things might not get better — but they could, maybe, get a whole lot worse if we leave. But even he has a hard time with the Afghanistan as “safe haven” theory of continuing the war.

The Taliban movement in Afghanistan is clearly linked with al-Qaeda and sympathetic to it, but there is little evidence of al-Qaeda infrastructure within Afghanistan today that could directly threaten the U.S. homeland. If the current Afghan government collapsed and were replaced with a neo-Taliban regime, or if the Taliban were able to secure political control over some major contiguous fraction of Afghan territory, then perhaps al-Qaeda could re-establish a real haven there.

But the risk that al-Qaeda might succeed in doing this isn’t much different than the same happening in a wide range of weak states throughout the world, from Yemen to Somalia to Djibouti to Eritrea to Sudan to the Philippines to Uzbekistan, or even parts of Latin America or southern Africa. And of course Iraq and Pakistan could soon host regimes willing to put the state’s resources behind al-Qaeda if their current leaderships collapse under pressure.

(Snip)

We clearly cannot afford to wage protracted warfare with multiple brigades of American ground forces simply to deny al-Qaeda access to every possible safe haven. We would run out of brigades long before bin Laden ran out of prospective sanctuaries.

Right. Winning Afghanistan doesn’t win the war on terror; it doesn’t even necessarily give us a draw. It doesn’t necessarily make America safer. And that makes Afghanistan look like a big expense in blood and treasure for relatively little return.

That said: While I’m lately leaning toward withdrawal and an Al Qaeda-focused mission, there are still reasons that keep me from fully committing. One, I was reminded of last night while reading the New Yorker’s profile of Richard Holbrooke, the Obama Administration’s man in charge of crafting policy for the “Af-Pak” region. (I don’t have a full link, so I’m paraphrasing from memory.) One of his aides is an Afghani woman; she makes the case that the United States has a “moral obligation” to Afghanis — and particularly Afghani women — not to abandon them to the Taliban. I’m not sure that it’s a decisive factor — we’re not obligated, in the end, to do what we cannot sustainably afford to do — but it haunts me.

The other is this: The United States was so eager to move on to Iraq after the initial fall of the Taliban that it never really committed to building national structures and guaranteeing security against Taliban remnants for most of the last eight years. We’ve half-assed it, in other words. Now we might have the opportunity to at least try to do it right. Maybe something good will come from it. Who knows?

That, however, is a slender reed upon which to hang one’s support for the war. And there is still the problem of reforming Afghanistan’s government into an effective and relatively corruption-free institution: America can do everything right, but it won’t matter if Afghanistan’s leaders don’t get their act together. Yesterday I suggested that withdrawing might be a bad option, but there may not be any good options. Today, I’ll admit that you can say the exact same thing about staying.

Morning shuffle

Best thing I heard on my iPod this morning:

Afghanistan, again

After my dithering the other day, I decided to actually go read Gen. Stanley McChrystal’s memo about the situation in Afghanistan. While the media reports have focused largely on his request for more troops, that’s not really what the memo is about about.

There are two big takeaways from this memo, as far as I’m concerned:

• America and its NATO allies have so far fought the war in Afghanistan horribly, committing too few resources and soldiers – thanks again for Iraq, President Bush! — and not using the resources and soldiers it has in an effective manner: Not bothering, really, to learn the local culture or take the steps to attract the support and assistance of common Afghanis. These are things that America can change and fix — and if it were simply a matter of making these changes, I’d be more enthusiastically rooting for the continuation of the war.

• But there’s a problem that America, really, can’t so easily fix: The Afghan government. It’s ineffective and corrupt. Period. And while the Taliban is hardly popular among Afghanis, its ability to offer effective, corruption-free — though certainly brutal — governance in the areas it holds make it, for many Afghanis, a tolerable alternative to the current government and its Western allies. This is not my liberal whiny projection: This is McChrystal’s analysis.

Winning the war, McChrystal says, will require remaking the Afghan government into an effective, relatively uncorrupt institution that can win the support of its own people. But where he’s fairly specific about what the U.S. can do to improve its efforts in Afghanistan, he’s rather less so when it comes to improving Afghani governance. There’s stuff the U.S. can to do assist that process, but it will have to be done by the Afghanis themselves.

Given what we know of Afghanistan’s history, do we really want to commit the lives of more American soldiers to fighting there on the hope the country’s native government will get its act together?

McChrystal is, from what I can tell, honorable and smart. He wants to win the war he’s been given, and that’s his job. But his analysis about how to win the war has a gaping hole that I’m not sure can be filled. Perhaps it’s time for the U.S. to give up the nation-building mission, leave Afghanis to make or unmake their own culture, and focus solely on military actions that bloody Al Qaeda’s nose. This is far from a perfect solution; there probably are no perfect solutions.

Obama hates America

Michael Ledeen, at National Review Online, about President Obama:

I think that he rather likes tyrants and dislikes America.

This is the face of supposedly respectable, thoughtful conservatism in the United States. God save us.

UPDATE: The always-entertaining Conor Friedersdorf nails it:

Why, if Hitler were alive today, he’d probably forgo setting buildings afire, instead marching right down to Congress to say, okay, enough talk about health care — now pass my bill!