Can We Win in Afghanistan?

President Obama’s campaign focus on Afghanistan as the just war we must win has had results. Not necessarily in Afghanistan, where things seem worse than ever, but in the press, where Afghanistan is the focus of increased scrutiny. Policy proscriptions are mixed, The Economist forcefully argued for staying the course:

The cost to NATO countries is immediately apparent: tens of billions of dollars and the lives of more than 1,200 soldiers. The cost of leaving is harder to measure but is probably larger: the return of the Taliban to power; an Afghan civil war; the utter destabilisation of nuclear-armed Pakistan; the restoration of al-Qaeda’s Afghan haven; the emboldening of every jihadist in the world; and the weakening of the West’s friends.

Our investment of blood and treasure would seem worth it to prevent that grim dystopian future, however, it is easy to combat straw men. We do not have to choose between abject failure and our huge present commitment, indeed I haven’t read anyone who is advocating abandoning Afghanistan. Rather, many reasonable people are starting to wonder if a larger military presence is the the best way to achieve our goals and what exactly are the priorities of the mission.

A Short List of the Worst Lists of all time

1. The List of the Top Ten Useful Inventions that went Bad
Listverse.com is the sort of place I’d normally love to stumble upon when I was trying to distract myself from something I was supposed to be doing.  However their list of the top ten useful inventions that went bad is itself a good idea that went really, really bad.  Let’s examine their top two inventions that didn’t quite work out.

Is Cheesecake Factory Gross?

Ezra Klein weighs in on why Cheesecake factory is so popular, ultimately concluding:

Foodies have an unfortunate tendency to alight on a Unified Field Theory of Corporate Food: It’s bad for the environment and bad for workers and bad for animals and bad for waistlines and, above all that, a fraud, because it also tastes bad. This would be convenient, if true. If people weren’t actually enjoying what they were eating, then getting them
to change their eating habits would be pretty easy. But it’s not true, of course. They keep going back to the Cheesecake Factory because, well, they like it.

While it is certainly true that people enjoy Cheesecake factory (and I remember their firecracker salmon appetizer being pretty solid) there are other reasons for its popularity than the food quality.

Hova Makes His Move

When one of my favorite bloggers, Marc Lynch, talks one of my great loves, hip-hop, my ears naturally perk up. However, while he is characteristically insightful, I think he misses a few key nuances in his analysis of the hegemonic Jay-Z.

The War on Drugs: Graft-Versus-Host Disease

Since it has been mentioned in the last two posts, a full post on prison and drug reform seems warranted.  Eventually, I’d like to discuss the social/economic impact of the current criminalization of drugs, but first I’d like to consider the moral and ethical questions surrounding the issue.

First, why is it illegal to consume certain substances?

Leaders instead of Politicians

During the Bush years, it inspired despair to consider how many things in this country desperately needed to be changed even as we had leadership that seemed blithely unconcerned or unaware of global warming, the exploding cost of health care, income disparity, burgeoning prison populations, a drug war on our own citizens and on and on, with no end in sight.

Oh, but now, we have Obama and his change we can believe in! And truly it is nice to have a leader who at least seems to acknowledge that things could be done better. Yet, his preference for pragmatic, popular solutions rather than really exerting political capital on anything leads to “better than nothing” bills like Waxman-Markley.

Iran’s Party Crashers

After yesterday’s unrest in Iran it is clear that the revolution is hot again, after conveniently taking a week off so the Western media could breathlessly cover the whereabouts of Michael Jackson’s body.  The green revolution is less convenient from the point of view of nearly everyone attempting to prevent Iran’s nuclear program.

After Obama took office his strategy on Iran seemed clear: by taking a hard line with Israel and reaching out to the Muslim World in Cairo he was attempting to reestablish the U.S. as an impartial actor in the region, even as he solidified support from Russia and China to present a unified international front.  Israel was the crucial to this plan, both because progress on a Palestinian final status agreement would weaken Iran’s position in the Muslim world and because Israel’s bluster was the bad cop to Obama’s good cop. 

A Toe in the Icy Water

Every time I try to think about good titles for my blog I end up stuck on the word Omphaloskepsis, so clearly I have mixed feelings about this whole process.  However, at some point you spend so much time reading everyone else’s opinions that the itch to join the conversation must be scratched.  As sad as this sounds, this is what I do for fun: read obsessively about current events and foreign policy (I had an epiphany about the shape of the rest of my life when I found myself packing Foreign Policy Quarterly as the reading material for a vacation).

Now if your own hobbies are a tad more diverse, never fear I’ll try to keep it spicy by letting my mind wander (and calling in plenty of pinch hitters).