Bill Lind explains why much better than I could:

So what lies behind President Obama’s decision? Domestic political considerations, of course. He has done what politicians always do when faced with difficult choices: he has kicked the can down the road, to a specific date, July, 2011. That is when the President promises we will begin a withdrawal from Afghanistan. The date is meaningless beyond its political meaning, i.e., at that point Obama will again be faced with the same decision he just punted. With a Presidential election looming, he will punt again. Meanwhile, the war’s price, in money and casualties, will have risen, making it even harder to walk away from sunk costs.

The real choice Obama faced was not how many troops to send. We do not have enough troops to commit a militarily meaningful number. The real choice was to get out now or get out later. His duty as Chief Executive, the state of America’s treasury (empty), concern for the well-being of our troops and their families, and the hopelessness of the situation all dictated he get out now. By punting the decision, he showed America and the world what he is made of. December 1, 2009, was the date the Obama Presidency failed.

Obama could not look at the camera on Tuesday because he did not believe what he was saying. And the reason he didn’t believe his own words is simple: he knew he was sending soldiers to their deaths not to defend against an existential threat but to buttress himself from the peculiar exigencies of our domestic politics, whereby the specter of ex-generals making the rounds on the morning tv shows is far more dangerous to his own re-election than any suicide bomber from the FATA is to the nation at large.

Obama spoke with the unfamiliar sobriety of a man who is, in a recess of his conscience he cannot fully identify, ashamed of himself. And rightly so. He ought to be ashamed.

Hopefully by week’s end, when one of said papers comes due, I should be able to get back to a more regular routine.

In the meantime, just so you know, trying to cull the perfect twitter list is a great way to procrastinate. 

*Hot Property. An Australian news documentary on Israeli policy in East Jerusalem. It’s like watching evil in slow motion.

*The relationship between al-Qaeda and the Taliban, it seems, is coming under strain. “Mullah Omar’s Afghan Taliban and al-Qa’ida’s senior leaders have been issuing some very mixed messages of late, and the online jihadi community is in an uproar, with some calling these developments ‘the beginning of the end of relations’ between the two movements.”

*Somali group with al Qaeda ties threatens Israel. A great example of religious outbidding. Al-Shabaab doesn’t have any means of actually targeting Israel, yet by threatening them they now have access to foreign resources which they can use in their domestic conflicts.

*A report from the US military’s Joint Special Operations University advocates a “Manhunting Agency.” Not good. Yet in ten or twenty years, I don’t see how we won’t have this in some form—the only question is whether it will be subcontracted out to mercenaries security contractors (a la the drone program in Pakistan) or whether it will be institutionalized with meaningful congressional oversight.

*Behold the Human Search Engine. Good look at how cell phones and camcorders are, in effect, creating a decentralized surveillance system.

The conventional thinking is that she’s more or less killed the peace process for the time being. And I’m inclined to agree—just look at her retraction:

Mrs Clinton attempted in Morocco last night to massage those remarks. Saying that Israel had expressed to her “a willingness to restrain settlement activity,” she added: “This offer falls far short of what our preference would be, but if it is acted upon, it will be an unprecedented restriction on settlements and would have a significant and meaningful effect on restraining their growth.”

Please. That wheezing sound you hear is the last gasp of Mahmoud Abbas’ political career. No Palestinian leader, much less Abbas, can effectively engage in peace talks while Israel is still building on Palestinian land.

For Netanyahu, that’s obviously not a problem. It’s exactly what he wants—an ineffectual Palestinian leadership gives the Israeli far right carte blanche to continue doing as it pleases.

But in the long run this is disastrous.

The first problem is timing: thanks to the peculiarities of American politics, the chance for building peace only comes once ever four years. The first year of each presidency is really all there is: in the second you run up against congressional elections, and in the third and fourth, an impending presidential campaign. Only in the first year are the inherent risks of the peace process minimized to the point where an entire party can get behind it.

Thus, the next chance for peace is 2013, or possibly, 2017.

The second problem is demographics. At present, the median age in Gaza is 17.4 years. That’s right, 17.4 years. Half of Gaza’s population was born after the first Intifada, and cannot remember the signing of the Oslo accords. Their political memory begins with the second Intifada and ends with the Israeli army’s incursion last December and January.

In four years they will be 21, and will begin entering political life en masse. The more that bulge passes upwards, the more the numbers for a two-state solution simply don’t add up—a generation raised behind walls probably isn’t going to come to the table with anything that the Ehud Baraks and Tzipi Livnis of Israel (much less the Netanyahus) will be willing to accept.

Given all that was on Obama’s plate this year, from Iraq to Afghanistan, a peace agreement was never all that likely.

But now that Hillary has finally put the nail in the coffin for this administration, 2013 is pretty much it for the two-state solution. Beyond that the math just doesn’t work.

1) Faith No More. At Slate, Christopher Hitchens reflects on a year of debating Christians.

2) U.S. set to pay Taliban members to switch sides. Eventually, we’ll be doing this whether we want to or not.

3) Extremism Rising in Indonesia? “In recent years, as part of a decentralization of power away from the capital, Jakarta, at least 50 local governments have used their new authority to pass Shariah-based regulations regarding conduct and dress, though none have gone as far as Aceh to deal with criminal matters.” (NYT)

4) Bloomberg Courts Black Ministers in NYC. Even the black church, it seems, can be bought at the right price.

I’m not sure what that says about me as a person, but there arguments speak for themselves.

Amanpour Argument #1:

Is the world prepared to see the Taliban and their opportunistic allies al Qaeda return to power in Afghanistan? Are people prepared for the terrorists’ dream- photo-op of Mullah Omar and Osama Bin Laden sitting smiling together in Kabul?

Um, nobody is saying this will happen. You can de-escalate Afghanistan and still fight al-Qaeda.

Amanpour Argument #2:

I have been reporting from Afghanistan since 1996 and the one thing I’ve noticed over the years is that every Afghan asks foremost for security. Then next on the list is development to help them earn a decent living and raise their families. They also want a decent government. They know this will take years of patience and effort. They know it will be a hard slog. After all, they have been at war for 30 years now, during which the traditional, honor-bound society they had for decades has all but vanished.

This is a legitimate point, which is essentially that Afghanis ought to be entitled to the same security we currently enjoy. The problem here is not the ideal but, frankly, the reality that stands in the way of achieving it.

Given the size of Afghanistan’s population, it would take about 500,000 to 600,000 troops to fully restore order. You’d have to double both our presence and that of the Afghan National Army to hit that. We can double our troops because we can’t scale our current supply lines through Pakistan or the central Asian republics. You also can’t double the Afghan army, which, to say the least, is strained as it is.

40,000 more troops, the plan that Amanpour effectively supports, won’t make a dent. It will not noticeably improve order, but it will provide more evidence with which the insurgents’ can claim we are an occupying force.

By contrast, Friedman seems to have stumbled his way, at long last, into a reasonable position:

The U.S. military has given its assessment. It said that stabilizing Afghanistan and removing it as a threat requires rebuilding that whole country. Unfortunately, that is a 20-year project at best, and we can’t afford it. So our political leadership needs to insist on a strategy that will get the most security for less money and less presence.

The rest of his piece, which deals with the Middle East more broadly, is worth reading as well.

But this is the salient point, and bears repeating. Obama would be wise to heed it.

Three examples:

1. UN residence attacked, killing five. There’s a fairly insular expat / aid worker community that has, at this point, trudged from Rwanda to Bosnia to Iraq. The Clinton / Holbrooke plan to modernize Afghanistan more or less hinges on the State Dept’s ability to recruit that community wholesale, get them in country, and then scale the current aid and development programs by an order of magnitude. That plan was a longshot at best before this. Now it simply isn’t possible: the move will be seen as too risky for too many, not to mention of dubious legitimacy. Without the development community on board, any troop escalation is pointless.

2. Bombing in a Peshawar market, killing 90. There are two relevant questions to this story. The first is the extent of the damage / death toll. The second is the selection of the target.

Probably the most depressing thing about the news today is that neither the LATimes nor the NYTimes nor the Washington Post even bothered to ask the latter. The presumption is that the terrorists just wanted to kill civilians, regardless of where, in order to diminish public support for the Pakistani Army’s advance into Waziristan and the FATA.

Really? A group sophisticated enough to build a 300 pound bomb lacks the foresight to think through which market to target?

The incuriosity of the press is astonishing. Look at the video or pictures of the scene. It’s pretty clear the stalls were ad hoc establishments, presumably unregulated. That would imply they had the protection of a significant player in Peshawar—and Pakistan being what it is, that someone is probably someone high up in the Pakistani military. 

Yet no press account I’ve seen has even bothered to wonder who that might have been. Consequently the violence yet again appears senseless rather than strategic, and the American press throws its hands up in despair rather than debating the appropriate strategic response.

3. Read this paragraph:

A man described as a leader of a radical Sunni Islam group was fatally shot Wednesday afternoon while resisting arrest and exchanging gunfire with federal agents, authorities said.

It may surprise you to learn that the man was killed in Detroit, his name at birth was Christopher Thomas, and he is black. Apparently, many of the group’s members joined while in prison and are also African-American. According to the AP, the primary mission of the group is “to establish an Islamic state within the United States.”

This group is akin to what I worried about earlier, with regard to La Familia in Mexico being the avant-guard rather than an outlier. 

(That said, I certainly didn’t think it would happen this soon ... though I guess I should have. After all, the incarceration rate for black men in this country is higher than it was in Apartheid South Africa.)

But this quote from Obama is patently ridiculous:

“These bombings serve no purpose other than the murder of innocent men, women and children, and they only reveal the hateful and destructive agenda of those who would deny the Iraqi people the future that they deserve.”

Serve no purpose? Then why is this the eighth time an attack of this magnitude has happened since 2004? Is it really random if lightning strikes the same place with the same voltage eight times in five years?

There is a logic to these attacks. As Obama’s advisors have no doubt told him, they occurred at specific ministries for specific reasons.

Yet as Bush did before him, Obama has opted to portray the attacks as senseless violence—ie, as barbaric acts whose savagery necessarily renders them incomprehensible.

In the short term this will by him some time. But in the long run it will trap him no less than it did Bush: to a wary public, logic can be bested by strategy, but barbarism will only ever demand a response in kind.

*Google as the network-state: “The democratizing power of the Internet has enabled individuals to share their stories with a global audience in ways never before possible, and given a voice to those who wouldn’t otherwise be heard. To commemorate the twentieth anniversary of the fall of the Berlin Wall, we’re launching a YouTube channel — youtube.com/GoogleFreeExpression — to highlight and celebrate free expression around the world, and we want to hear from you.” If the big banks are crushing the American middle class from above, Google (and Amazon) are crushing it from below. Yet unlike the banks, it’s savvy enough to get out ahead of any blowback. It is constantly legitimizing its activity in ways that previously only states did—that is, by releasing propaganda that goes beyond touting the moral value of a given product or service to establishing the legitimacy of the entire system and infrastructure over which it has a monopoly.

*Karl Denninger runs the numbers on credit card debt in the US, and shows why a quick recovery will not be forthcoming.

*Torture and child exorcisms in Nigeria. Partly this is just today’s version of yesterday’s travelogue sensationalism (the savages burn their own children!) but it’s still worth noting. Something clearly got lost in translation; and given its growth, the church clearly has an obligation to get that translation right.

One highlight:

However Sierra attributes evangelical silence on the drug war solely to one thing: fear.

“Churches and leaders fear taking a stand,” he said. “There is the assumption that the drug lords are everywhere and they find out everything. … [Also] people are starting to believe that drug dealers are not necessarily immoral people, because they help build schools and roads.”

Most pastors don’t address the drug violence during church services, except when a kidnapping or other crime hits close to home.

Not to beat a dead horse here, but schools and roads are public goods. The state should be providing them. When it does not, a marketplace emerges in which all non-governmental institutions compete to provide the missing non-rival or non-exclusive goods (such as education, infrastructure, security). The cost of those provisions is substantial, and prices out any organization which cannot generate the surplus revenue needed to finance them.

Now, for historical reasons, Christian churches have been reluctant to provide non-rival public goods. Partly this reluctance has owed to the realization that such goods, and the temporal allegiances they necessarily provoked, interfered with the salvific purpose of the church. But partly too it has owed to the specific exigencies of state formation—in Europe and North America, the state increasingly banned religious institutions from providing non-rival goods during the 18th and 19th centuries,  in order to consolidate its own sovereignty.

But we’re now at a point where the economics of fully sovereign statehood no longer work. And as we’re seeing in Mexico, churches are getting dragged into the sovereignty game as a consequence, whether they want to or not. Either they can sit idly by, and lose legitimacy vis-a-vis the drug cartels, or they can actively compete with them to provide public goods.

They should be taking that challenge head on. At a regional scale, there’s only two ways to generate the kind of revenue you need to finance non-rival goods: transnational illicit commerce or transnational charity. Given its scale, the church has a huge comparative advantage in the latter regard. (Theoretically the UN/NGOs could match them, but realistically that will never happen.)

Given that advantage, the Church has a responsibility to step in wherever the state fails. If they do not, someone else will, and their intentions will not be nearly as benign.