graymail

i've always thought that erik prince had the perfect name for the head of a mercenary outfit. he sounds like someone who would be a james bond villain!

and now it seems that maybe he is a bit of a villain in the spy world. it's not a good state of affairs but it somehow seems appropriate for mr. prince.

my one beef with the nation article is that the author managed to spell "kazakh" two different ways, both of them wrong, in the same sentence. obviously, i'm not usually a stickler for spelling, but the same sentence!

beyond vietnam

it seems like vietnam comparisons are all the rage among people criticizing obama's escalation in afghanistan. but why is it always vietnam?

now that we have iraq as part of our national history, we don't need to rely on "vietnam" every time we want an example of a pointless costly war. it seems to me that iraq is a much better one to use. pretty much everyone who is politically aware now has some first-hand memories of iraq, most don't have any first hand memories of the vietnam war.

i'm forty years old and i don't. i learned about that war through books, movies and history class. the iraq war i understand as a contemporary. these days it's just a better paradigm for a fucked up war.

obama's afghanistan policy

i meant to write something about the president's big afghanistan speech but never got the time yesterday.

the bottom line is that as much as i am opposed to an "afghan surge" it's been pretty much inevitable since the election. also the fact that it would be a 30,000 troop increase had leaked out prior to the speech. really the only thing that i was interested in hearing is: (1) an explanation of what the president thinks the u.s. is trying to accomplish in afghanistan, and (2) a clear end game (that is, a clear articulation of how and when the u.s. will leave).

with regard to #1, the president basically repeated the explanations that i think, quite frankly, don't hold up to any serious scrutiny. denying al-qaeda safe havens doesn't make much sense because there are so many potential safe havens out there, the u.s. can't possibly deny them every one. if we assume that the u.s. could somehow completely eliminate all safe havens in afghanistan, anti-u.s. militants would just move to the tribal areas of pakistan, or somalia, or southern algeria, or northern mali, et cetera. the cost of relocating operations for al qaeda is low and the cost to the u.s. to clear a safe haven is high. that's a game of whack-a-mole that can't possibly be won by the u.s., even if we assume that completely "eliminating safe havens" is ever possible anywhere. it's a fool's errand.

which brings me to #2. with a goal that can never be completely achieved how can we have an end game? the president answer is that we won't have to achieve it because eventually we'll turn over the job to afghan forces. that "eventually" will begin in roughly 18 months.

on the one hand, i'm glad he set a vague timeline for when forces should expect to leave. but i'm only glad about that because of the low low bar set by the prior administration of refusing to talk about leaving in any fashion. topping george bush in articulating an end game to a military operation is like beating a blind man in a vision test. and it's pretty amusing to watch the right slam obama for giving even his tepid 18 months figure. the right spent much of the 1990s slamming clinton's military excusions in the former yugoslavia and somalia (although technically, that was originally bush the first's excusion) because they had no clear exist strategy. the W years seem to have made "no exit strategy to military operations" one of those unbreakable principles of rightwing doctrine, like the idea that cutting taxes is appropriate under every circumstance.

but i digress.

getting back to obama's strategy, his goal of beginning to remove troops after 18 months just isn't good enough, especially because the goal (eliminating safe havens and propping up the karzai government) can never be definitively achieved 100%. likewise with the training of afghan forces. who can say when that's done? the president has promised to "begin" to bring troops home after 18 months, but hasn't said when that will finish. when we hit that 18 month mark it will be very easy to delay because someone can always point to some remote region of the country and say "what about those safe havens over here?" or to some dilapidated afghan army unit to argue that the training mission needs more time.

by view of where afghanistan went wrong is basically what matthew yglesias said last week:

The main reason policy toward Afghanistan is so vexing, in my view, is that we basically failed in our main mission back in 2001 and 2002. Demands were made on the Taliban to hand over key al-Qaeda leaders, the Taliban refused, we went to war, and even though we succeeded in marginalizing the Taliban we didn’t succeed in achieving for ourselves what we’d been demanding the Taliban do. Having failed at that mission, we then shifted gears into a hazily defined effort to remake Afghanistan.

despite obama's laudable insistence on having an exit strategy, he is still basically meandering along that hazy goal of remaking afghanistan, a project with no definable end point.

there probably wasn't a speech the president could give that would satisfy me. it looks like it may have satisfied some people. but the glow of the speech will quickly fade and we're still left with afghanistan. one thing i am reassured by is the fact that the 18 months runs out in mid-2011, just as the 2012 presidential election season will be getting started. i predict that the afghan war will still be unpopular then and that will give the president some incentive to follow through and remove forces. i just don't see how all the deaths in the meantime will be worth it.

ugh

you know it has been a long day when the highlight is the part when you get swine flu squirted upyernoz.

quick change

i've been holding off commenting on obama's plan for afghanistan, notwithstanding the fact that all or most of it seems to have leaked out already. but what i find remarkable is how quickly public sentiment about the war in afghanistan has changed.

from late 2002 until this year, afghanistan has been mostly ignored in american discourse. to the extent it came up, it was almost always as the "good war" contrast to the "bad war" of iraq. that's why obama ran on the idea of escalation in afghanistan. in his famous 2002 iraq was speech he said: "I am not opposed to all wars. I’m opposed to dumb wars." iraq was the "dumb war" but to prove it, he need a not-dumb war. and that was afghanistan.

which was a pretty safe choice. lot's of iraq war critics had used that same iraq = bad war/afghanistan = good war formulation. john kerry criticized george bush for taking his eye off the ball of afghanistan to invade iraq when he ran in 2004. the good war/bad war dichotomy had been used for years. it allowed them to freely slam iraq war policy without being lumped in with the hippies.

but then it changed. in 2008 iraq started to fall off the headlines. the war correspondents who spent years in baghdad started going back to kabul. with iraq disappearing from the public's radar, the good war/bad war thing didn't work anymore. without the mess of iraq as a foil, afghanistan just doesn't look very good on its own.

also after obama was elected, that freed up a few conservatives to call for a withdrawal from afghanistan, something that would have been unthinkable when their guy was in the white house. at the same time, obama's announcement of the pullout from iraq freed up antiwar people to rediscover that other conflict. suddenly, support for the war in afghanistan went from being one of the safest political choices you could make to one that was fraught with complications. polls started showing the "good war" to be unpopular, and it seems pretty unlikely that will change. the good war has completely transformed into just another quagmire.

i'm still surprised by how quickly it happened.

iphone question

i'm trying to figure out what to do about my iphone when i'm in kazakhstan. i basically have three options:

(1) go to kazakhstan with the iphone and pay the AT&T international roaming charges

the roaming rates absolutely suck. it's $4.95/minute¹ for both making and receiving calls, and data costs $0.0195/KB (in the u.s. data is free, which is what 99% of my phone usages is). those charges are on top of the $70 monthly charge i'd still have to pay for my regular monthly allotment of minutes that i won't be able to use.

(2) jailbreak my iphone, get a kazakh sim card and take advantage of the much-lower local cell phone rates

i'm a little worried about messing with the operating system in a place where internet access may not be easy and where i'll have a lot of other things i'll want to deal with other than a bricked iphone. i'm also wondering how reversible the jailbreak would be when i get home.

(3) leave the iphone home, and get cheap kazakh phone while we're there

this is the option i've been leaning towards. but 2 months is a long time. i'm gonna miss it. and what about my precious podcasts? i'll fall hopelessly behind!!!

any thoughts?

----------------
1-AT&T has a "world traveler" plan that would add $5.99 to my regular monthly fee and would get me discounts to the roaming rate in a lot of countries. but in kazakhstan the "world traveler" rate is $4.95/min. and $0.0195/KB, exactly what it is if i didn't pay the extra $5.99 add-on.

answering the question that's been plaguing scientists for ages

can hamsters ride subways?

it's got just as much scientific merit as this. first prize!

(via)

NATO

a nice thing about 20th anniversary of the fall of the berlin wall are all the articles about what was going on behind the scenes at that time. they are particularly interesting to me because i remember that period in broad strokes but not so much of the day-by-day news that added up to the end of the cold war.

which is why i found mary elise sarotte's piece in today's NYT to be so fascinating. it looks like the reunification of germany really was based on a misunderstanding. the USSR agreed to pull out of east germany on the condition that NATO would not expand to include former warsaw pact members. the US unofficially made that offer, but later backed away from it. because there was no comprehensive written agreement outlining the terms, each side went away thinking they got what they wanted. later when NATO expanded and russia cried foul, the US didn't know what it was talking about. russia really did get screwed in the deal, but i don't think the US intended to screw them. the story also explains one of the reasons why to this day russia is upset about NATO expansion.

which raises one of my pet issues about why NATO survived the end of the cold war. it was formed as an anti-soviet alliance and should have ended with the end of the soviet threat.it seems to me that NATO survived due to the inability of the political and military leaders of the time to break out of the cold war mentality that they had grown up with. Over the past 20 years as NATO has survived beyond its original purpose there have been periodic attempts to attribute some new point to the alliance, like stopping genocide in eastern europe or fighting terrorism. both are fine goals, but it's really not clear why an alliance to accomplish those things has to exclude russia. any claims that it is no longer an anti-russian alliance are undermined by the fact that russia is the only eastern european country that has never been invited to join.

so it's just about snubbing france?

i didn't know a country that wasn't a former british colony could do that. it makes me question the point of the whole commonwealth thing.

the bibi freeze

the UN, backed by all security council members, has demanded that iran immediately freeze its uranium enrichment program. i keep waiting for iran to respond by agreeing to the freeze, but add that its freeze will be netanyahu-style.

the israeli government recently announced a "freeze" in settlement construction that doesn't doesn't apply to whatever the israel's decides to call "east jerusalem", doesn't freeze the construction of 3,000 or so projects that were already approved (even though many were approved in anticipation of the current settlement freeze) and which doesn't apply to the construction of public buildings on settlements. (which is how they approved the construction of 28 new buildings at the same time they announced the freeze).

so why doesn't the iranian government announce a "freeze" of uranium production that doesn't apply to its main enrichment facility at natanz, doesn't apply to any processing that is already in progress and doesn't apply to any enrichment for public purposes? they could even call it a "bibi freeze." sure, it isn't everything the west wants, but it's progress, right? no doubt the west will understand the internal pressures the iranian government is facing and view a loophole-filled freeze as a welcome move.

40

woo-hoo! i'm now protected by the ADEA!!!

(39, 38, 37, 36, 35, 34)