Afghanistan Quagmire Watch

Once again, I'll remind you that "winning" the war in Afghanistan requires a central government that serves and protects its people. Who said so? Gen. Stanley McChrystal, whose 2009 memo pushed President Obama into doubling down on the war there. From the memo:

The weakness of state institutions, malign actions of power-brokers, widespread corruption and abuse of power by various officials,and ISAF's own errors, have given Afghans little reason to support their government. These problems have alienated large segments of the Afghan population. They do not trust GIRoA to provide their essential needs, such as security, justice, and basic services. This crisis of confidence, coupled with a distinct lack of economic and educational opportunity, has created fertile ground for the insurgency. 

...eventual success requires capable Afghan governance capabilities and security forces.

 How's that working out?

KABUL, Afghanistan — Local police forces trained and financed by the United States have killed and raped civilians, stolen land and carried out other abuses against the Afghan villagers they are charged with protecting, according to a report released on Monday by Human Rights Watch. 

The accusations of violence, theft and impunity raise new questions about whether the local police and government-supported militias in Afghanistan, which are meant to play a major role in defending small villages against the Taliban, are instead undermining security at a critical moment for the country and the NATO-led war effort.

We're not winning. This, in fact, is exactly what it means to be losing in Afghanistan. After 10 years, it seems reasonable to ask if it's possible to ever win, or if the cost is reasonable. On the last count, the answer sure seems to be "no."

National Review is for mandatory service—unless Obama is

At National Review today, Col. Kenneth Allard proposes that all young Americans be pressed into a form of national service—or else they lose the privileges of citizenship:

The draft worked well in the 20th century, but in the 21st we need to create a graduated system of national service. The education benefits now granted more or less freely could be tied to the completion of national service after age 18. Each young adult would be required to complete a year of service in return for enjoying the lifetime privileges of American citizenship. Completing that minimum requirement would also determine future eligibility for education benefits.

I do find it intriguing that a publication that editorializes against the health insurance mandate as an unconscionable infringement upon liberty and against the Constitution seems willing to entertain the idea that citizens should be forced to donate their bodies and labor to the government for a year. 

And I'm just old enough to remember when then-Senator Barack Obama proposed an expanded community service program in which young Americans would freely volunteer for 50 or more hours a year and get a $4,000 tax credit in return—nothing mandatory, but very enticing perhaps—NRO's John Derbyshire responded with this headline: Arbeit Macht Frei. That's a phrase best-associated with Nazi concentration camps, of course.

So: Incentives to volunteer? Reminiscent of Naziism. A year of forced labor as a requirement of citizenship? Consistent with liberty! Welcome to National Review's universe.

Rod Dreher on the free market

Makes sense to me:

As a conservative, my basic approach to economics is that of Pope John Paul II, who said that man was not made for the market, but the market was made for man. He meant that the free market is only moral if it serves the end of authentic human flourishing. If it undermines human flourishing, then the market must be reformed. The point is, the market is not an end, but a means to the proper end, which is the health of the community — especially, in Catholic teaching, the family.

Philadelphia newspapers move into the tablet age

This will be an interesting experiment: Philadelphia Media Network—owner of the Inquirer and the Daily News—starts a project today to distribute 5,000 discounted Android tablets pre-loaded to discounted digital editions of both newspapers. The Inky doesn't say what kind of Android tablet, but it's worth noting none of the Android tablets released so far have posed much of a challenge to Apple's iPad. So there's a bit of a "government cheese" feel to the project: If information can't be free, I'm not sure if it does your brand a huge amount of good to be associated with a (discounted!) second-tier product. On the other hand: Several other newspaper chains are considering a similar move, so perhaps desperate newspapers will popularize the Android tablet platform to an extent that Android couldn't do on its own.

The Inquirer, meanwhile, is launching its own "new multimedia Inquirer tablet app"for iPad. (Actually, it launched Aug. 26, but is just now being announced.) It's not that new—it's a single-branded version of the multi-newspaper PressReader app that the Inquirer was already promoting as its tablet app—and it's not that multimedia: Basically it's a PDF of the paper, and if you push a button a computer voice will read the stories to you.

You've got to applaud the Philadelphia Media Network for trying something bold with its tablet experiment. On the other hand, the replica edition that's available seems like weak tea. We'll see if it works.

UPDATE: Ad Week has more details. 

9/12: Why disunity is OK, and why it's not

In a slightly nihilistic moment last week, I bitterly lamented the loss of post-9/11 unity. " We are sweatily intimate with the details of what divides us in this country," I wrote. "So much so, at this point, that I believe the next terror attack would be more likely to further expose those rifts than to eventemporarily obscure them."

I still think that's true, but a couple of essays in the last few days have convinced me that the disunity hasn't been entirely bad—and that, in fact, it might even be a good thing. One was David Cole's piece at the New York Review of Books, which acknowledged the encroachment on civil liberties in the aftermath of 9/11, but also celebrated the pushback by institutions and individuals that kept many of those encroachments from gaining ground permanently:

Yet despite the fact that no detainee has been released by court order, more than 600 of the 775 people once held at Guantánamo Bay have been released. Torture and inhumane treatment are no longer official US policy. The NSA spying program now has a statutory footing and is subject to judicial approval and oversight. Widespread preventive detention of Muslim and Arab immigrants in the United States has not been repeated. There have been no reports of rendition to torture in years. And the CIA’s black sites are closed. 

If these changes cannot be attributed to judicial enforcement or congressional mandates, what was the moving force? The answer is not to be found in the institutions of government, but in civil society—in the loosely coordinated political actions of concerned individuals and groups, here and abroad. Following September 11, many organizations took up the task of defending liberty—among them the American Civil Liberties Union, the Center for Constitutional Rights, Human Rights First, Human Rights Watch, the Council on American-Islamic Relations, and the American Arab Anti-Discrimination Committee. Most of these groups did not even exist in the McCarthy era, our nation’s last security crisis.

The other piece was my friend Steve Hayward's post at Power Line, pointing out that unity has always been fleeting in wartime:

Fred Siegel’s terrific and underappreciated book, Troubled Journey: From Pearl Harbor to Ronald Reagan, reminds us that “Wartime surveys taken by the Army revealed that troop morale was dangerously low.” The isolationist America Firsters did not go away, but, like 9/11 Truthers today, spread the word that FDR was complicit in a plot to bring about Pearl Harbor: “They were convinced that a devilishly clever Roosevelt had maneuvered the country into an unnecessary war against the wrong foe just as he had used his wiles at home to foist the alien measures of the New Deal’s ‘creeping socialism’ on an unsuspecting nation.” A number of Republicans complained openly they while we should of course fight Japan, why are we fighting in Europe? (Shades of the criticism of our war against Iraq a few years ago.)

Steve's invocation of Iraq, combined with Cole's celebration of the pushback against the Bush Administration's post-9/11 excesses, made me realize that the dissolution of the post-attack unity was probably a good and healthy thing. Really. Simply put, we had very real, very legitimate differences over how to proceed after 9/11. It would have been bizarre if those differences had never emerged.

After 9/11, some people thought it was a good idea to invade Iraq. Some of us didn't. After 9/11, some people thought it was good to use waterboarding and other "enhanced interrogation" techniques. Some of us didn't. After 9/11, some people thought it that warrantless wiretapping, with no oversight, was justified in the name of national security. Some of us didn't. And after 9/11, some of us thought that the invocation of "war" against terrorism meant the president and the executive branch had carte blanche to ignore whatever laws and treaty obligations the United States had committed itself to over the previous few decades.

Some of us didn't.

I count myself largely in the "some of us didn't" group on all those counts, of course. But in my most generous moments, I have to acknowledge that many people—many of our leaders—were so frightened of another attack and the effect it might have on the national well-being that they were willing to take almost any step to prevent a repeat of that horrible, awful day in New York, Washington, and Shanksville. In my most generous moments, I have to acknowledge that men—and they were overwhelmingly men—who made the decisions that I criticize were very often acting in what they thought were the best interests of the country, and of keeping it safe.

In my less generous moments, I get a bit cynical when reading all the way to the end of Steve's post:

Next time you hear some lefty say something along the lines of “it’s our fault” or “we had it coming on 9/11,” just say, “Yeah—just like the Japanese at Hiroshima,” and sit back and watch the reaction. Because as we all know you can only use that argument on America.

Now, there are surely some "America had it coming" folks on the left. (And in the GOP presidential primary field!) But as a general rule, most of us who were in the "some of us didn't" group didn't see it that way. We thought, and think, we were challenging America to be true to itself—to the rule of law, to the Bill of Rights, to checks and balances. We found ourselves labeled "objectively pro-terrorist" as a result. And we saw folks like Karl Rove push such nasty ideas—exploit and exacerbate those differences—as a means of consolidating political power for Republicans.

It's OK that we didn't maintain our unity after 9/11, because I suspect a healthy country needs both people who vigorously advocate for security and people who vigorously advocate for liberties. To the degree I'm angry and cynical about the dissolution of that unity, it's not for unity's sake—but because some people used those differing ideas to paint the rest of us as un-American, and un-worthy of the freedoms we were trying to exercise. In such cases, continued "unity" would've meant hopping on a bandwagon to hell. Good riddance to that.

Glenn Greenwald is wrong about Osama bin Laden

Lots of my conservative friends like to accuse Salon's Glenn Greenwald of "moral equivalency," but I generally am glad that there's somebody with a halfway prominent media voice who brings a quality of hard-nosed empathy to our political debates. We Americans can become overly enamored of our own righteousness, to the point that we assume other people see us as we see ourselves—a sometimes fatal blinkeredness. Greenwald has repeatedly asked this question: If you were a run-of-the-mill Muslim family in the Middle East and your child died in an accidental NATO bombing, how would you react? It's not a bad question, and it's even strategically useful, but it makes lots of people mad that he keeps doing that.

Nonetheless, I think Greenwald takes his tendency a little too far with his reaction to the GOP audience that cheered Texas' 234 executions at the Republican debate the other night.

This morning's orgy of progressive condemnation made me think of very similar death-celebrations that erupted at the news that the U.S. military had pumped bullets into Osama bin Laden's skull and then dumped his corpse into the ocean. Those of us back then whoexpressed serious reservations about the boisterous public chanting and celebratory cheering of executions were accused by Good Democrats of all manner of deficiencies. 

Yes, the 9/11 attack was an atrocious act of slaughter; so were many of the violent, horrendous crimes which executed convicts unquestionably (sometimes by their own confession) committed. In all cases, performing giddy dances over state-produced corpses is odious and wrong.

Perhaps I'm overly parsing here, but I see a real difference. I thought the GOP reaction was a bit repugnant because it cheered government-sponsored death generally, and in the context of questioning a governor who seems to have overseen the execution of an innocent man and blocked any real investigation into the possibility of both the man's innocence and the governor's indifference to it.

I didn't participate in the "giddy dancing" over bin Laden's death—in part because I'd had major emergency surgery a few hours earlier, but also because I'm temperamentally inclined to believe that even on the rare occasions when government-sponsored death  is necessary and right, it's still an awful and grim business. But I don't blame people for celebrating, either. They weren't—like the GOP crowd—celebrating death. They were happy that a rough justice had been served upon a specific man—a villain, actually—responsible for nearly 3,000 deaths on 9/11 and a decade of misery and quagmire that has followed. There was bound to be an extremely emotional reaction to bin Laden's death or capture. That reaction was an instinct; the GOP audience, meanwhile, was cheering on possibly mistaken executions as a matter of thoroughly considered ideology.

Like I said, I find much of Greenwald's work useful. But not all government-sponsored death is equivalent, or equivalently bad. (If it was, we could never allow our police to shoot at Columbine or Virginia Tech gunmen.) In this matter, he's simply wrong.

Post-9/11 unity isn't coming back

I may be feeling particularly nihilistic this morning, but I don't see the point of spending much energy lamenting the loss of our post-9/11 "unity," as President Obama does in an op-ed for USA Today:

Firefighters, police and first responders rushed into danger to save others. Americans came together in candlelight vigils, in our houses of worship and on the steps of the U.S. Capitol. Volunteers lined up to give blood and drove across the country to lend a hand. Schoolchildren donated their savings. Communities, faith groups and businesses collected food and clothing. We were united, as Americans. 

This is the true spirit of America we must reclaim this anniversary — the ordinary goodness and patriotism of the American people and the unity that we needed to move forward together, as one nation.

Ten years on, that unity seems like a mirage. We are sweatily intimate with the details of what divides us in this country—so much so, at this point, that I believe the next terror attack would be more likely to further expose those rifts than to even temporarily obscure them. Each side would suspect—and accuse—the other of exploiting the attack to further whatever agenda was already on their plate. And each side would probably be right. Instead of grief and anger, we'd just have anger.

There is no more good faith. We can't wish it back.