Revealed: secret Taliban peace bid
By Jason Burke, The Observer, September 28, 2008

The Taliban have been engaged in secret talks about ending the conflict in Afghanistan in a wide-ranging ‘peace process’ sponsored by Saudi Arabia and supported by Britain, The Observer can reveal.

The unprecedented negotiations involve a senior former member of the hardline Islamist movement travelling between Kabul, the bases of the Taliban senior leadership in Pakistan, Saudi Arabia and European capitals. Britain has provided logistic and diplomatic support for the talks – despite official statements that negotiations can be held only with Taliban who are ready to renounce, or have renounced, violence.

Sources in Afghanistan confirmed the controversial talks, though they said that in recent weeks they had ‘lost momentum’. According to Afghan government officials in Kabul, the intensity of the fighting this summer has been one factor. Another is the inconsistency of the Taliban’s demands.

‘They keep changing what they are asking for. One day it is one thing, the next another,’ one Afghan government adviser with knowledge of the negotiations said. One aim of the initiative is to drive a wedge between Osama bin Laden’s al-Qaeda and the Taliban. [continued…]

Editor’s Comment — Had America not been burdened by a bonehead in the White House surrounded by neoconservative handlers, a weak-kneed Congress, and a too easily terrorized populace, serious dialogue with the Taliban could have started in September 2001. With patience and perhaps not even a single shot fired, al Qaeda could have been dismantled and its leadership captured and there would have neither been a war in Afghanistan, nor in Iraq.

Over the intervening seven years who can say with any certainty that either the Taliban or Saddam would have been able to retain power? At the same time, so many ruptures across the region and around the globe could without doubt have been avoided.

A lack of courage forestalled the quiet approach, while an excess of fear drove the recourse to violence.

Why the West thinks it is time to talk to the Taliban
By Jason Burke, The Observer, September 28, 2008

For the past few months an incongruous figure has passed through the airports of the Middle East and Europe: a senior Afghan cleric who defected from the Taliban. Bearded and in traditional dress, he has unsurprisingly needed the help of the Saudi Arabian and British intelligence services – among others – to pass unhindered between capitals.

He has always travelled in great secrecy, his movements known only to a few individuals at the highest levels of the Afghan government, in Riyadh and among certain Western allies. His mission: to talk to the Taliban leadership about a possible peace deal.

The backing given by the West to these talks is a measure of how badly things have gone wrong in Afghanistan, and how far Western governments are prepared to go to stabilise a deteriorating situation which is costing more in men, money and political capital than they ever imagined. The equally worrying situation in Pakistan, where the Taliban are largely based and where a separate but related insurgency has broken out, has given the initiative a new urgency. [continued…]

McCain’s suspension bridge to nowhere
By Frank Rich, New York Times, September 28, 2008

What we learned last week is that the man who always puts his “country first” will take the country down with him if that’s what it takes to get to the White House.

For all the focus on Friday night’s deadlocked debate, it still can’t obscure what preceded it: When John McCain gratuitously parachuted into Washington on Thursday, he didn’t care if his grandstanding might precipitate an even deeper economic collapse. All he cared about was whether he might save his campaign. George Bush put more deliberation into invading Iraq than McCain did into his own reckless invasion of the delicate Congressional negotiations on the bailout plan.

By the time he arrived, there already was a bipartisan agreement in principle. It collapsed hours later at the meeting convened by the president in the Cabinet Room. Rather than help try to resuscitate Wall Street’s bloodied bulls, McCain was determined to be the bull in Washington’s legislative china shop, running around town and playing both sides of his divided party against Congress’s middle. Once others eventually forged a path out of the wreckage, he’d inflate, if not outright fictionalize, his own role in cleaning up the mess his mischief helped make. Or so he hoped, until his ignominious retreat. [continued…]

Palin punching over her weight on foreign policy
By Jeff Stein, CQ, September 26, 2008

In recent days, conservatives have been circulating an e-mail equating Palin’s meager executive experience with that of Theodore Roosevelt, who had been governor of New York for only two years when William McKinley picked him as his running mate in 1900.

Like Palin, the colorful, outspoken patrician was ridiculed by his opponents.

But there the comparison ends. Roosevelt, who traveled widely, had a passionate, omnivorous intellect.

He wrote 35 books on subjects ranging from wildlife to the history of the American West. He had been a combat unit commander — the famous Rough Riders — in Cuba, and an assistant secretary of the Navy.

Equating him to Palin is obscene. But if a comparison be made, it is this: Roosevelt knew what he was talking about.

Palin is a babe in the woods. And the wolves are ready. [continued…]

In search of Sarah Palin
By Nancy Gibbs, Time, September 27, 2008

I was struck watching her in St. Paul, where she appeared after five days of relentless media pressure and blew the doubts away, that she had the jauntiness of one who knew her own gifts: knew she could connect to a crowd and raise the roof and stomp her opponent with her sensible high heels. And of course, benefit from her critics’ instinct to underestimate her.

Now that confidence seems gone, replaced by cockiness — which is just insecurity on steroids. With Charlie Gibson the waters were smooth if shallow; with Katie Couric she seemed forever at risk of drowning in her own syntax. But if she’s growing less surefooted with each passing day of cramming, who can blame her, when the highly experienced Republican pols around her don’t seem to trust her to talk past her talking points. Talk about undermining your brand; if she was picked as the Outsider Original Maverick with the experience and courage to help clean up Washington, you can’t argue that she’s not giving interviews because the press is so mean to her. She’s ready for a cage fight with Nancy Pelosi but won’t sit down with Campbell Brown? [continued…]

Editor’s Comment — The fact that Sarah Palin is neither ready nor likely would ever be ready to become vice president of president, does not need to be belabored. And the fact that she has remained shielded from the press merely reveals either that she’s as scared as are her handlers of the risks involved in speaking for herself, or, she can’t stand up for herself.

The most important questions now are not about Palin but about the process that led to her choice. Either McCain didn’t know enough about her — in which case he’s a reckless fool — or he was so cynical, arrogant and contemptuous as to imagine that her appearances could be stage-managed so rigorously that her deficits could sufficiently be concealed for just two months. In other words, he saw her as an expendable commodity. He took a wager on a Palin tactic but had no interest in a Palin strategy.

What a surge can’t solve in Afghanistan
By David Ignatius, Washington Post, September 28, 2008

If there was one foreign policy issue on which Barack Obama and John McCain agreed during Friday night’s debate, it was that the United States should send more troops to Afghanistan. The bipartisan enthusiasm for this surge is so strong that there has been relatively little discussion of whether this strategy makes sense.

So here’s a skeptical look at the issue, drawn from conversations during a visit to Afghanistan this month with Defense Secretary Robert Gates. Rather than more troops, the real game-changer in Afghanistan may be Gates’s plan to spend an extra $1.3 billion on surveillance technology to find and destroy the leadership of the insurgency. [continued…]

Taliban revival sets fear swirling through Kabul
By Christina Lamb, The Sunday Times, September 28, 2008

Maryam Rahmani was asleep in her parents’ house in Kabul last month when she was woken by loud praying in the street. “Most of us when we heard that thought, ‘This is it, the Taliban have come to the city’,” she said, nervously fingering the orange shawl wrapped round her against the autumn chill.

In fact it was a lunar eclipse and people had come outside to offer special prayers. But Rahmani’s reaction reflects the jumpiness in Kabul as the Taliban move to within 20 minutes’ drive of the Afghan capital.

“Everyone’s nervous, particularly educated women,” said Rahmani, 26, who works at a women’s project and is completing an economics degree at Kabul University. “I’m hurrying to finish my thesis so I can get my diploma in case the Taliban come back. All my friends are applying for Indian visas.” [continued…]

Bush’s third war
By Andrew J. Bacevich, Los Angeles Times, September 27, 2008

President Bush will leave office without concluding either of the two wars he initiated after 9/11. Now, in the waning months of his administration, the president seems intent on expanding his “global war on terror” still farther. To the existing fronts in Afghanistan and Iraq, he is adding a third: Pakistan.

Eclipsed perhaps only by Iraq, Pakistan ranks in the very top tier of the Bush administration’s foreign policy blunders. Even as it vowed following 9/11 to never compromise with evil, the administration wasted no time in forging an alliance with Pakistani President Pervez Musharraf, the army general who seized power in 1999 through a military coup. Although Musharraf was anything but a democrat, Bush proclaimed him a close friend and ally. Washington quickly began funneling military and economic aid toward Islamabad, the total since 2001 exceeding $13 billion.

Unfortunately, Musharraf was not only a dictator, he was incompetent. Two themes defined his presidency: a gradual erosion of domestic legitimacy that paralyzed and then doomed his regime, and a steady erosion of Pakistan’s already shaky control over its frontier provinces bordering Afghanistan. For Taliban and Al Qaeda fighters ousted from their Afghan sanctuaries, the Pakistani Northwest Frontier became a refuge in which to establish training camps and support areas. Although U.S. civilian and military officials pushed and prodded Musharraf to crack down on this Taliban and Al Qaeda presence, little effective action resulted. [continued…]

The long road to chaos in Pakistan
By Dexter Filkins, New York Times, September 28, 2008

Hours after a truck bomber slew 53 people last weekend at the Marriott Hotel in Islamabad, Pakistan, the country’s interior minister laid responsibility for the attack on Taliban militants holed up in the Federally Administered Tribal Areas, or FATA, the remote, wild region that straddles the border with Afghanistan.

“All roads lead to FATA,” Interior Minister Rehman Malik said.

If the past is any guide, Mr. Malik’s statement is almost certainly correct.

But what Mr. Malik did not say was that those same roads, if he chose to follow them, would very likely loop back to Islamabad itself. [continued…]

Race for president builds characters
By Todd Gitlin, Los Angeles Times, September 28, 2008

This election campaign is about more than its issues, slogans, proposals, strategies, tactics, attacks or counterattacks. Like most presidential elections, it represents a collision of myths. Every four years, various versions of America wrestle with one another, and through this combat, the nation inspects itself, turns itself over and over, striving to choose not only how it wants to be led but what it wants to affirm, how it wants to be known — really, what it wants to be.

Americans, of course, aren’t always focused on these grand stakes; day to day, they see a more down-to-earth campaign — the stump speeches, the barbs and one-liners, the attack ads. Pettiness consumes the attention of journalists and the prurient interest of the jaded. Sometimes the combat rises to the level of issues and policies. Sometimes it even approximates a rational contest as the candidates try to explain what they think is wrong and what they propose to do about it. Petty or substantive, all these are elements of the surface campaign, which may, in the end, determine who wins and loses but also obscures what is really at stake.

The true campaign is the deep campaign, the subsurface campaign, which concerns not just what the candidates say but who they are and what they represent — what they symbolize. [continued…]

Everybody calm down. A government hand in the economy is as old as the republic.
By Robert J. Shiller, Washington Post, September 28, 2008

It has become fashionable to fret that the current crisis on Wall Street marks the end of American capitalism as we know it. “This massive bailout is not the solution,” Sen. Jim Bunning (R-Ky.) warned Tuesday. “It is financial socialism, and it is un-American.” It is neither. The near-collapse of the U.S. financial system and Washington’s sudden and massive intervention to try to shore it up certainly mark a major turning point, but a bailout would represent a thoroughly American next step for our economic system — and one that will probably lead to better times.

Americans may assume that the basics of capitalism have been firmly established here since time immemorial, but historical cataclysms such as the Great Depression strongly suggest otherwise. Simply put, capitalism evolves. And we need to understand its trajectory if we are to bring our economic system into greater accord with the other great source of American strength: the best principles of our democracy. [continued…]

The lost tycoons
By Ron Churnow, New York Times, September 28, 2008

With breathtaking speed, the world of large Wall Street investment banks has vanished. Fabled firms, some more than a century old, have been merged out of existence (Bear Stearns, Merrill Lynch), gone bankrupt (Lehman Brothers), or sought asylum as commercial bank holding companies (Goldman Sachs, Morgan Stanley). Why on earth did this happen?

The death of Wall Street has been a long-running, slow-motion crisis, barely discernible to participants who had still booked huge profits in recent years. Beneath the razzle-dazzle of trading desks and the wizardry of esoteric finance lay the inescapable fact that these firms had shed their original reason for being: providing capital to American business. [continued…]

It’s judgment day for McCain
By Thomas Frank, Wall Street Journal, September 24, 2008

Last week, Republican presidential candidate John McCain called for a commission to “find out what went wrong” on Wall Street. It was an excellent suggestion: Public inquiries into Wall Street practices served the country well in the 1930s.

And Mr. McCain has a special advantage to bring to any such investigation — many of the relevant witnesses are friends or colleagues of his. In fact, he can probably get to the bottom of the whole mess just by cross-examining the people riding on his campaign bus. So the candidate should take a deep breath, remind himself that the country comes first, pull the Straight Talk Express over at a rest stop, whistle up his media pals, and begin.

Topic A should be deregulation. Financial institutions are dropping everywhere after playing with poorly regulated financial instruments; the last investment banks standing are begging the government for stricter oversight; and some of our nation’s leading champions of laissez faire have ditched that theory in an extraordinary attempt to rescue the collapsing industry.

The philosophy of government that has dominated Washington for almost three decades is now in ruins, and it is up to Mr. McCain to find out exactly why we believed it in the first place. Why did government stand back and permit all the misconduct that generated all this bad debt? What particular ideas led us to believe that government should just keep its hands off and let markets run their course? [continued…]

McCain aide’s firm was paid by Freddie Mac
By Jackie Calmes and David D Kirkpatrick, New York Times, September 23, 2008

One of the giant mortgage companies at the heart of the credit crisis paid $15,000 a month from the end of 2005 through last month to a firm owned by Senator John McCain’s campaign manager, according to two people with direct knowledge of the arrangement.

The disclosure undercuts a remark by Mr. McCain on Sunday night that the campaign manager, Rick Davis, had had no involvement with the company for the last several years. [continued…]

The power of negative thinking
By Barbara Ehrenreich, New York Times, September 24, 2008

Greed — and its crafty sibling, speculation — are the designated culprits for the financial crisis. But another, much admired, habit of mind should get its share of the blame: the delusional optimism of mainstream, all-American, positive thinking.

As promoted by Oprah Winfrey, scores of megachurch pastors and an endless flow of self-help best sellers, the idea is to firmly believe that you will get what you want, not only because it will make you feel better to do so, but because “visualizing” something — ardently and with concentration — actually makes it happen. You will be able to pay that adjustable-rate mortgage or, at the other end of the transaction, turn thousands of bad mortgages into giga-profits if only you believe that you can.

Positive thinking is endemic to American culture — from weight loss programs to cancer support groups — and in the last two decades it has put down deep roots in the corporate world as well. Everyone knows that you won’t get a job paying more than $15 an hour unless you’re a “positive person,” and no one becomes a chief executive by issuing warnings of possible disaster. [continued…]

Editor’s Comment — As people mature, so do cultures. American culture is still in its infancy. It craves instant gratification. It has boundless energy and little sense of caution. It lives through sensation but has yet to master conceptualization.

Barbara Ehrenreich’s remedy of realism for what she sees as an excess of positivity is easy to advocate, but human beings — whether shaped by a culture in its infancy or one that has acquired maturity — are, as living entities, unrealistic. The will to live, is by its nature, death-denying. In perfect realism, we should be reconciled to our non-existence but the thrust of life pushes us elsewhere.

America is not so much burdened by its positivity than it is by the banality of its aspirations. It’s not that we want too much, but that what we want is so lacking in value. We don’t think too big; we don’t think big enough.

The United States of Mind
By Stephanie Simon, Wall Street Journal, September 23, 2008

Certain regional stereotypes have long since become cliches: The stressed-out New Yorker. The laid-back Californian.

But the conscientious Floridian? The neurotic Kentuckian?

You bet — at least, according to new research on the geography of personality. Based on more than 600,000 questionnaires and published in the journal Perspectives on Psychological Science, the study maps regional clusters of personality traits, then overlays state-by-state data on crime, health and economic development in search of correlations. [continued…]

Rebuilding America, rebuilding ourselves
By William J. Astore, TomDispatch, September 23, 2008

Seventy-five years ago, our country faced an even deeper depression. Millions of men had neither jobs, nor job prospects. Families were struggling to put food on the table. And President Franklin Delano Roosevelt acted. He created the Civilian Conservation Corps, soon widely known as the CCC.

From 1933 to 1942, the CCC enrolled nearly 3.5 million men in roughly 4,500 camps across the country. It helped to build roads, build and repair bridges, clear brush and fight forest fires, create state parks and recreational areas, and otherwise develop and improve our nation’s infrastructure — work no less desperately needed today than it was back then. These young men — women were not included — willingly lived in primitive camps and barracks, sacrificing to support their families who were hurting back home.

My father, who served in the CCC from 1935 to 1937, was among those young men. They earned $30 a month for their labor — a dollar a day — and he sent home $25 of that to support the family. For those modest wages, he and others like him gave liberally to our country in return. The stats are still impressive: 800 state parks developed; 125,000 miles of road built; more than two billion trees planted; 972 million fish stocked. The list goes on and on in jaw-dropping detail. [continued…]

Guantanamo: government says six years is not long eough to prepare evidence
By Andy Worthington, Huffington Post, September 24, 2008

Imagine being seized in Afghanistan or Pakistan, where you were, perhaps, a completely innocent man, sold for a bounty, or a Muslim soldier, fighting other Muslims in a civil war whose roots lay in the resistance to the Soviet occupation of the 1980s, which was partly funded by the United States.

Then imagine that, both during and after being treated with appalling brutality by US forces, you are given no opportunity to establish whether you are an innocent man seized by mistake, a soldier, or the victim of bounty hunters, and you are, instead, flown halfway around the world to an experimental offshore prison, where you are interrogated about your connections to al-Qaeda and Osama bin Laden.

At no point are you offered the protection of the Geneva Conventions (to which your captors are a signatory), which were designed to prevent the “humiliating and degrading treatment” of prisoners seized during wartime, and also to prevent their interrogation (prisoners may be questioned, but any form of “physical or mental coercion” is prohibited). Moreover, if you struggle to answer the questions put to you — perhaps because you know nothing about al-Qaeda or Osama bin Laden — you are not only interrogated relentlessly, you are also subjected to an array of “enhanced interrogation techniques,” which contravene the UN Convention Against Torture and Other Cruel, Inhuman or Degrading Treatment or Punishment, to which your captors are also a signatory.

Now imagine that, after six and a half years of this imprisonment — in which, unlike convicted criminals on the US mainland, you have never been charged or tried, and have not been allowed a single visit from your loved ones — the highest court in the United States rules, in Boumediene v. Bush, that you have habeas corpus rights; in other words, the right to know why you are being held. And finally, imagine that, in response to this ruling, when the judges responsible for establishing the reviews have ordered the cases to be addressed “as expeditiously as possible,” and have set a deadline for the government to comply, your captors turn around and say that, after holding you for up to 2,444 days in Guantánamo, they need more time to prepare a case against you. [continued…]

High stakes in Islamabad and Washington
By Simon Tisdall, The Guardian, September 23, 2008

George Bush and Pakistan’s president, Asif Ali Zardari, have more in common than one might think. As younger men, both had reputations as playboy hell-raisers. As the current, more sober leaders of their respective countries, both are deeply unpopular with large numbers of fellow citizens. For his part, Bush is on his way out. And if the Islamists who bombed the Islamabad Marriott at the weekend have their way, Zardari, husband of the murdered Benazir Bhutto, will surely follow him – one way or another.

The stakes for this odd couple are high. Zardari is engaged in an increasingly fraught political and military campaign not only to retain power but, more importantly, hold the country together in the teeth of an existential threat to democratic, secular governance. The war in Afghanistan has taken deep root inside Pakistan and is now spreading beyond the tribal areas and North-West Frontier Province. Afghan Taliban and foreign jihadis from Kunan, in eastern Afghanistan and beyond, temporarily abandoning the fight with Nato, are now reportedly flocking to Bajaur, Kohat and Swat to join battle with the Pakistani army.

Pakistani military analysts and commentators warn that the challenge to the country’s integrity, though seemingly familiar, is growing more formidable with each passing week. Suicide bombings, almost unknown five years ago, have claimed over 300 lives this year. Recent days have seen heavy fighting, with the army claiming to have killed 60 insurgents. The economy is in deep, destabilising trouble. The UN meanwhile launched an emergency appeal today for $17m to assist more than a quarter of a million internally displaced people in the western border areas. [continued…]

Gates is pessimistic on Pakistani support
By Ann Scott Tyson, Washington Post, September 24, 2008

Pakistan’s leaders and military cannot publicly support U.S. cross-border operations against militant groups in Pakistan’s western tribal areas, but such strikes are needed to protect American troops in Afghanistan and defend the United States against its gravest terrorist threat, Defense Secretary Robert M. Gates said yesterday.

“We will do what is necessary to protect our troops,” Gates told the Senate Armed Services Committee. Asked whether Pakistan’s government would back unilateral U.S. military operations into Pakistan, he said: “I don’t think they can do that.”

Gates said that despite a growing insurgency in Afghanistan, fueled by fighters from Pakistan, the spring of 2009 is the earliest the Pentagon would be able to send as many as three more U.S. combat brigades there to meet a request of American commanders for about 10,000 more troops. [continued…]

CEO pay emerges as bailout barrier
By David Rogers and Patrick O’Connor, Politico, September 22, 2008

Flying in the face of Congress and both presidential campaigns, Treasury is resisting efforts to impose pay limits on Wall Street executives and bankers whose companies stand to be helped by the government’s $700 billion rescue plan for the financial markets.

As markets reopen Monday, the issue is a surprising flash point between Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson and House Democrats, who have drafted a bill giving Paulson much of what he wants but requiring that Treasury also demand “appropriate standards for executive compensation.”

Treasury argues that such requirements would make it harder to persuade companies to sell their troubled assets to the government. But Democrats, who otherwise admire Paulson, say that the former Goldman Sachs chairman is blind to the politics of the situation and the huge divide between the average taxpayer and the financial world now seeking relief from bad debts that have clogged the credit system — and that threaten the entire economy. [continued…]

Editor’s Comment — Here we are, supposedly, on the brink of global economic catastrophe, but the government’s rescue plan might fail if a few fat cats on Wall Street are forced to take a pay cut. Are they so well insulated from the impending calamity that the worst that could happen to them is that they could lose a multimillion dollar bonus?

The idea that constraints on excessive executive compensation in return for public funding could be described as “punitive” is absurd and obscene. What seems called for here is a new criminal designation: crimes against society.

This is a label that would apply to those offenses less egregious than genocide; crimes which might seem mundane in as much as they are far more commonplace but which involve harm to thousands or millions of people as the result of the ruthless pursuit of self-interest by those who wield immense economic or political power.

For those CEOs who would regard a pay cut as punitive, I would propose that the alternative would be that they be charged with the above described crimes against society and that they face the possibility of neither imprisonment nor fines but of destitution (through losing the right to own property) and public humiliation (through a 21st century equivalent of being placed in the stocks).

These parasitic CEOs should be grovelling in gratitude at the idea they might suffer something so minor as a pay cut. What sort of hyper-inflated vanity could regard such a thing as punitive?

A TIMELY REMINDER: How the Bush Administration stopped the states from stepping in to help consumers
By Eliot Spitzer, Washington Post, February 14, 2008

Several years ago, state attorneys general and others involved in consumer protection began to notice a marked increase in a range of predatory lending practices by mortgage lenders. Some were misrepresenting the terms of loans, making loans without regard to consumers’ ability to repay, making loans with deceptive “teaser” rates that later ballooned astronomically, packing loans with undisclosed charges and fees, or even paying illegal kickbacks. These and other practices, we noticed, were having a devastating effect on home buyers. In addition, the widespread nature of these practices, if left unchecked, threatened our financial markets.

Even though predatory lending was becoming a national problem, the Bush administration looked the other way and did nothing to protect American homeowners. In fact, the government chose instead to align itself with the banks that were victimizing consumers.

Predatory lending was widely understood to present a looming national crisis. This threat was so clear that as New York attorney general, I joined with colleagues in the other 49 states in attempting to fill the void left by the federal government. Individually, and together, state attorneys general of both parties brought litigation or entered into settlements with many subprime lenders that were engaged in predatory lending practices. Several state legislatures, including New York’s, enacted laws aimed at curbing such practices.

What did the Bush administration do in response? Did it reverse course and decide to take action to halt this burgeoning scourge? As Americans are now painfully aware, with hundreds of thousands of homeowners facing foreclosure and our markets reeling, the answer is a resounding no. [continued…]

Loan titans paid McCain adviser nearly $2 million
By David D Kirkpatrick and Charles Duhigg, New York Times, September 22, 2008

Senator John McCain’s campaign manager was paid more than $30,000 a month for five years as president of an advocacy group set up by the mortgage giants Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac to defend them against stricter regulations, current and former officials say.

Mr. McCain, the Republican candidate for president, has recently begun campaigning as a critic of the two companies and the lobbying army that helped them evade greater regulation as they began buying riskier mortgages with implicit federal backing. He and his Democratic rival, Senator Barack Obama, have donors and advisers who are tied to the companies.

But last week the McCain campaign stepped up a running battle of guilt by association when it began broadcasting commercials trying to link Mr. Obama directly to the government bailout of the mortgage giants this month by charging that he takes advice from Fannie Mae’s former chief executive, Franklin Raines, an assertion both Mr. Raines and the Obama campaign dispute.

Incensed by the advertisements, several current and former executives of the companies came forward to discuss the role that Rick Davis, Mr. McCain’s campaign manager and longtime adviser, played in helping Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac beat back regulatory challenges when he served as president of their advocacy group, the Homeownership Alliance, formed in the summer of 2000. Some who came forward were Democrats, but Republicans, speaking on the condition of anonymity, confirmed their descriptions. [continued…]

Editor’s Comment — A major campaign story — one would think. But apparently not in the eyes of the editors of the NYT — it didn’t merit a place on the front page!

Cash for trash
By Paul Krugman, New York Times, September 22, 2008

Some skeptics are calling Henry Paulson’s $700 billion rescue plan for the U.S. financial system “cash for trash.” Others are calling the proposed legislation the Authorization for Use of Financial Force, after the Authorization for Use of Military Force, the infamous bill that gave the Bush administration the green light to invade Iraq.

There’s justice in the gibes. Everyone agrees that something major must be done. But Mr. Paulson is demanding extraordinary power for himself — and for his successor — to deploy taxpayers’ money on behalf of a plan that, as far as I can see, doesn’t make sense. [continued…]

Visible hands
By Irwin Stelzer, The New Republic, September 22, 2008

When Hank Paulson, a successful investment banker turned Republican treasury secretary, caps his career by nationalizing two financial institutions so large that even Norman Thomas in his socialist heyday would have paused before taking them onto the government’s balance sheet, and a conservative central banker agrees to bail out an insurance company to the tune of $85 billion, you know that a fundamental change is underway. The day when that engine of capitalism, the financial market, was allowed to operate more or less unimpeded by government has passed. We are entering an era in which a high tolerance for risk is being replaced by the eager embrace of regulation, and where the overriding imperative, efficiency, has been replaced by an increasing desire for equity. [continued…]

A prescription for recovery
By Robert H. Dugger, Washington Post, September 22, 2008

This week, Congress is expected to commit hundreds of billions of taxpayer funds to a revitalization program to halt our financial hemorrhaging. Twenty years ago, in the midst of another financial crisis, I was part of a banking industry effort to solve the savings and loan problem. The result of that effort was the Resolution Trust Corporation, which, under Bill Seidman’s masterful leadership, cleaned up the S&L mess in 48 months.

The situation then was very different. The S&L problem involved only one sector of the economy and was just 3 percent of gross domestic product. We were not so dependent on foreign savings, and the crushing pressure on our federal budget from tax policies and entitlements was far off. This crisis is many times larger than that created by the S&Ls. We are deeply dependent on savings from other countries, and our fiscal resources are limited and shrinking.

One lesson is clear: If Congress commits money without firm principles to guide its use, the cost to taxpayers will be far higher and the economy will remain weaker longer. Before the 1989 legislation, efforts to stem losses growing inside the S&L industry lacked firm principles; as a result, they did not remove the swelling tumor of losses and in some instances actually helped it grow. [continued…]

Paulson’s folly
By Robert Kuttner, The American Prospect, September 22, 2008

The deal proposed by Paulson is nothing short of outrageous. It includes no oversight of his own closed-door operations. It merely gives congressional blessing and funding to what he has already been doing, ad hoc. He plans to retain Wall Street firms as advisers to decide just how to cut deals to value and mop up Wall Street’s dubious paper. There are to be no limits on executive compensation for the firms that get relief, and no equity share for the government in exchange for this massive infusion of capital. Both Obama and McCain have opposed the provision denying any judicial review of decisions made by Paulson — a provision that evokes the Bush administration’s suspension of normal constitutional safeguards in its conduct of foreign policy and national security.

Though the administration’s line is that these securities are not trading because of a crisis of confidence, so many are ultimately backed by loans that will not be paid back that they will eventually be sold for a fraction of their face value. Firms that have marked these securities down or have otherwise gotten them off their books have valued them at around 30 cents on the dollar or less. If Paulson had proposed such a deal in his old job as CEO of Goldman Sachs — putting $700 billion of the firm’s capital at risk in exchange for junk bonds of unknown value — he would have been fired in short order. But this is merely taxpayer money. [continued…]

Big financiers start lobbying for wider aid
By Jenny Anderson, Vikas Bajaj and Leslie Wayne, New York Times, September 22, 2008

Even as policy makers worked on details of a $700 billion bailout of the financial industry, Wall Street began looking for ways to profit from it.

Financial firms were lobbying to have all manner of troubled investments covered, not just those related to mortgages.

At the same time, investment firms were jockeying to oversee all the assets that Treasury plans to take off the books of financial institutions, a role that could earn them hundreds of millions of dollars a year in fees.

Nobody wants to be left out of Treasury’s proposal to buy up bad assets of financial institutions. [continued…]

When atheists attack
By Sam Harris, Newsweek, September 20, 2008

The problem, as far as our political process is concerned, is that half the electorate revels in Palin’s lack of intellectual qualifications. When it comes to politics, there is a mad love of mediocrity in this country. “They think they’re better than you!” is the refrain that (highly competent and cynical) Republican strategists have set loose among the crowd, and the crowd has grown drunk on it once again. “Sarah Palin is an ordinary person!” Yes, all too ordinary.

We have all now witnessed apparently sentient human beings, once provoked by a reporter’s microphone, saying things like, “I’m voting for Sarah because she’s a mom. She knows what it’s like to be a mom.” Such sentiments suggest an uncanny (and, one fears, especially American) detachment from the real problems of today. The next administration must immediately confront issues like nuclear proliferation, ongoing wars in Iraq and Afghanistan (and covert wars elsewhere), global climate change, a convulsing economy, Russian belligerence, the rise of China, emerging epidemics, Islamism on a hundred fronts, a defunct United Nations, the deterioration of American schools, failures of energy, infrastructure and Internet security … the list is long, and Sarah Palin does not seem competent even to rank these items in order of importance, much less address any one of them. [continued…]

The evolution of John McCain
By Chip Ward, TomDispatch, September 22, 2008

Despite the media feeding frenzy, we still may be asking ourselves, “Just who exactly is Sarah Palin?” Mixed in with the Davy-Crockett-meets-SuperMom vignettes — all those moose hunting, ice fishing, snowmobiling, baby-juggling, and hockey-momming moments — we’ve also learned that she doesn’t care much for her former brother-in-law and wasn’t afraid to use her office to go after his job as a state trooper; that she was for the “bridge to nowhere” before she was against it; that she’s against earmarks unless they benefit her constituents; that she can deliver a snappy wisecracking speech, thinks banning books in libraries is okay, considers herself a pit bull with lipstick, and above all else, wants to drill the ever-lovin’ daylights out of every corner of her home state (which John McCain’s handlers have somehow translated into being against Big Oil, since she insisted on a marginally bigger cut of the profits for Alaskans).

Oh, and — not that this is very important to Americans or the planet — she now thinks that global warming might possibly be human-made… sorta… though she didn’t before, despite the fact that the state she governs is on the frontline of climate change. And, of course, she’s a classic right-wing, fundamentalist Christian: against abortion — check; against same-sex marriage — check; against stem-cell research — check; favors teaching Creationism in public schools — check.

It’s that last item, her willingness to put Creationism up against the teaching of evolutionary science in the classroom on a he-says-she-says basis, that’s far more revealing of just who our new Republican vice presidential candidate is than we generally assume. It deserves the long, hard look that it hasn’t yet gotten. Most Democrats and progressives tend to think of the teaching of Creationism as a mere sidebar item on their agenda of political don’t-likes, but it’s not. Sarah Palin’s bias towards Creationism is a window into her political soul and a measure of John McCain’s hypocrisy. [continued…]

Steering the McCain campaign, a lot of old Bush hands
By Anne E. Kornblut and Juliet Eilperin, Washington Post, September 22, 2008

When Gov. Sarah Palin flew home to Alaska for the first time since being named the Republican vice presidential nominee, she brought along at least half a dozen new advisers to conduct briefings, stage-manage her first television interview and help her prepare for a critical debate next month.

And virtually every member of the team shared a common credential: years of service to President Bush.

From Mark Wallace, a Bush appointee to the United Nations, to Tucker Eskew, who ran strategic communications for the Bush White House, to Greg Jenkins, who served as the deputy assistant to Bush in his first term and was executive director of the 2004 inauguration, Palin was surrounded on the trip home by operatives deeply rooted in the Bush administration.

The clutch of Bush veterans helping to coach Palin reflects a larger reality about Sen. John McCain’s presidential campaign: Far from being a group of outsiders to the Republican Party power structure, it is now run largely by skilled operatives who learned their crafts in successive Bush campaigns and various jobs across the Bush government over the past eight years. [continued…]

Pakistani Taliban suspected in Marriott Hotel blast
By Mian Ridge, Christian Science Monitor, September 22, 2008

The massive explosion that devastated the Marriott Hotel in Pakistan’s capital, Islamabad, Saturday – killing at least 53 people and wounding hundreds – is being seen as a warning from Islamist militants over the Pakistani government’s cooperation with the United States.

The hotel, which is popular with both diplomats and other foreigners, was struck by at least one truck filled with more than a ton of explosives in one of the country’s worst acts of terrorism. The Czech ambassador and two Americans and about a dozen foreigners were among the dead.

“This was definitely a clear signal that this is no longer a safe place for foreigners, especially Americans,” says Ayesha Siddiqa, an independent security analyst based in the city. “And it’s a message to the Pakistani government: ‘Can you handle us?’ ” [continued…]

Get your class war on
By Thomas Frank, Wall Street Journal, September 17, 2008

There is simply no way to blame this disaster, as Republicans used to do, on labor unions or over-regulation. No, this is the conservatives’ beloved financial system doing what comes naturally. Freed from the intrusive meddling of government, just as generations of supply-siders and entrepreneurial exuberants demanded it be, the American financial establishment has proceeded to cheat and deceive and beggar itself — and us — to the edge of Armageddon. It is as though Wall Street was run by a troupe of historical re-enactors determined to stage all the classic panics of the 19th century.

By the way, this is the same system the Republicans would still apparently like to put in charge of Social Security. The same system that is minting millionaire CEOs, that is holding the line on wages, and that we will be bailing out for years.

On Monday, John McCain blamed the disaster on “greed by some based in Wall Street.” It’s a personal failing of some evil few, in other words, and presumably capitalism will start working again once we squeeze the self-interest out of it. In the weeks to come, maybe Sen. McCain will also take a bold stand against covetousness and sloth.

But the structural changes of the past 28 years that have made all this possible — the waves of deregulation, the takeover of government itself by business interests — these haven’t made too much of an impression on him. In March Mr. McCain actually called for more deregulation in response to the crisis, and at the Republican convention two weeks ago an ebullient Mitt Romney promised that Mr. McCain would take “a weed-whacker to excessive regulation.” [continued…]

Editor’s Comment — Since now’s a good time to trash capitalism and dream about a few judicious regulations that might improve the economy, here’s an idea that sure not to catch on – but I’ll toss it out anyway.

Since it’s widely accepted that a minimum wage serves the common good, why shouldn’t there (at least in publicly-owned companies) be a maximum wage?

Supposedly, placing a cap on how much executives can make would stifle talent. Talent and the desire to become obscenely wealthy apparently go hand-in-hand – or so the argument implicitly seems to go.

But Wall Street seems to have demonstrated otherwise. In fact, greed and the lust for power would seem to be countervailing forces that constrain the expression of talent.

Rewarding greed, feeds greed and greed is inherently short-sighted. On the other hand, talent — well-employed — is its own reward. Sure, it should be well “compensated” (a term that would better only be applied to the millions whose work provides no other reward), but the reward should not be allowed to metastasize into an economic perversion.

The end of American capitalism (as we knew it)
By Willem Buiter, Open Democracy, September 17, 2008

The proximate cause of the demise of AIG as a private firm was its “monoline” activities, its exposure to massive amounts of credit-risk derivatives like CDS, many of them linked to the United States real-estate sector.

The largest insurance supermarket in the world, with a balance sheet in excess of $1 trillion nationalised because it was deemed too big and too globally interconnected to fail! The fear that drove this extraordinary decision is that AIG’s failure would increase counterparty risk – actual and perceived, throughout the financial system of the US and the rest of the world alike – to such an extent that no financial institution would have been willing to extend credit to any other financial institution. Credit to households and non-financial enterprises would have been the next domino to fall – and, voilà!, financial Armageddon.

I cannot judge the likelihood of the disaster scenario, but if there ever was a case for applying the precautionary principle in economic analysis, then this is it. It was also done in the right way, by insisting on controlling public ownership, i.e. nationalisation, of the company. [continued…]

Free market lions on Wall Street are all comrades now
By Matthew Stevens, The Australian, September 18, 2008

It is a measure of the existential nature of the crisis we are witnessing that, over just the past two weeks, that the US government has invested something like more than $US285 billion in what can only be characterised as the nationalisation of three major financial institutions.

On September 7, US taxpayers stumped up $US200 billion to re-float, and take control of, the near-terminal mortgage twins Fannie Mac and Freddie Mac.

Now they have bailed out the world’s biggest insurer.

Suddenly the great advocates of markets unfettered by government intervention are not so convinced by the old theory of moral hazard, that in free markets corporations should be allowed to fail. [continued…]

Europe and Asia see U.S. as no longer practicing what it preaches
By Nelson D. Schwartz, IHT, September 17, 2008

Is the United States no longer the global beacon of unfettered, free-market capitalism?

In extending a last-minute $85 billion lifeline to AIG, the troubled insurer, Washington has not only turned away from decades of rhetoric about the virtues of the free market and the dangers of government intervention, it has also likely undercut future American efforts to promote such policies abroad.

“I fear the government has passed the point of no return,” says Ron Chernow, a leading American financial historian. “We have the irony of a free-market administration doing things that the most liberal Democratic administration would never have been doing in its wildest dreams.” [continued…]

Editor’s Comment — “It’s pure crisis management,” Chernow said. “It’s the Treasury and the Federal Reserve lurching from crisis to crisis without a clear statement on how financial failures will be handled in the future. They’re afraid to articulate such a policy. The safety net they are spreading seems to widen every day with no end in sight.”

There is of course another dimension to the policy vacuum. The POTUS is AWOL – Bush is in his bunker. The ship of state has no one at the helm. Whether his presence or absence best serves the crisis is open to debate, but the idea that this is a moment where presidential leadership is called for seems beyond question.

Wall Street’s unraveling
By Robert J. Samuelson, Washington Post, September 17, 2008

Wall Street as we know it is kaput. It is not just that Merrill Lynch agreed to be purchased by Bank of America or that the legendary investment bank Lehman Brothers filed for bankruptcy or that the insurance giant AIG is floundering. It is not even that these events followed the failure of the investment bank Bear Stearns or the government’s takeover of Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, the largest mortgage lenders. What’s really happened is that Wall Street’s business model has collapsed.

Greed and fear, which routinely govern financial markets, have seeded this global crisis. Just when it will end isn’t clear. What is clear is that its origins lie in the ways that Wall Street — the giant investment houses, brokerage firms, hedge funds and “private equity” firms — has changed since 1980. Its present business model has three basic components. [continued…]

Suspected US missile strike kills 6 in Pakistan
AP, September 17, 2008

A suspected U.S. missile strike killed at least six people Wednesday, hours after the top U.S. military officer told Pakistani leaders that America respected Pakistan’s sovereignty amid a furor over American strikes into Pakistan’s northwest. [continued…]

Washington risking war with Pakistan
By Robert Baer, Time, September 17, 2008

As Wall Street collapsed with a bang, almost no one noticed that we’re on the brink of war with Pakistan. And, unfortunately, that’s not too much of an exaggeration. On Tuesday, the Pakistan’s military ordered its forces along the Afghan border to repulse all future American military incursions into Pakistan. The story has been subsequently downplayed, and the chairman of the joint chiefs of staff, Mike Mullen, flew to Islamabad, Pakistan’s capital, to try to ease tensions. But the fact remains that American forces have and are violating Pakistani sovereignty. [continued…]

Pakistan tribal chiefs warn US on raids
By Bruce Loudon, The Australian, September 17, 2008

Leaders of an estimated 500,000 tribesmen who have so far remained largely neutral over the conflict in Afghanistan warned last night they were poised to support al-Qa’ida and the Taliban unless US forces retreated from their strategy of attacking targets inside Pakistan.

In a major jolt to Washington’s new policy of allowing cross-border raids in defiance of the Government in Islamabad, key tribal elders were reported to have met and warned that they were also prepared to raise an army to fight coalition forces in Afghanistan.

“If America doesn’t stop attacks in the tribal areas, we will prepare a lashkar (army) to attack US forces in Afghanistan,” Pashtun tribal chief Malik Nasrullah Khan was reported as saying in Miranshah, the largest town in North Waziristan, which has been the target of repeated US attacks in the past week. [continued…]

Timidity abroad, feudal ferocity at home
By Shireen M Mazari, The News, September 17, 2008

It would appear that the wimpish political leadership, in the wake of the no-nonsense statements of the army and air chiefs, has finally reconciled to the fact that the nation could not continue to accept the expanding US military intrusions into Pakistan. Of course, Prime Minister Gilani continued to show his timidity in the face of the US by declaring that we could only deal with the US diplomatically, and Zardari has yet to make a comment on the issue, but eventually the Pakistani security forces took action against US forces seeking intrusion into Pakistan and their non-lethal firing sent the proper message to the would-be invaders. Equally comforting was the fact that the Wazir tribesmen actively supported the security forces – showing once again that when the state is in consonance with its people rather than with hostile external players, the people will show their support.

This is just the beginning of a new threat Pakistani is now going to face, given the noises coming out of the US – especially from its aspiring leadership. The Republicans have now got a religious extremist as their vice-presidential candidate so God help the Muslim world if the McCain-Palin ticket is successful. After all, if Palin sees Iraq as “God’s War”, one can rest assured she will see other US invasions in a similar vein. As for Obama, he has been itching to have the US forces enter Pakistan since the time he began his campaign. So for Pakistan specifically, and for the Muslim world in general, the new US administration will offer no respite from the bigotry and extremism that dominates the American polity today.

Therefore, Pakistan has to be prepared to fight a dual terrorist threat – from the militants within our own polity and the state terrorism of the US that is now directly threatening Pakistan. That is why there has to be complete clarity and resoluteness on a rational national policy to combat these threats. [continued…]

Plans for Palin shed some light on ticket
By Matthew E. Berger, National Journal, September 17, 2008

Although she’s been a candidate for the second-highest office in the country for more than two weeks, there is still a lot Americans don’t know about Sarah Palin. But now we have a better sense of what John McCain knows about her, and how he plans to use her in the White House.

Surprising many at a rally in Golden, Colo., on Monday, Palin laid out the role she would play in a McCain administration. “John and I have worked out a plan, what I want to concentrate on and what he would like to kind of tap into me to help with,” she told the crowd. “My mission is going to be energy security and government reform. And — another thing near and dear to my heart — it’s going to be helping families who have special needs and children with special needs.”

Lost in the breaking news of the financial crisis and the aftermath of Hurricane Ike, the announcement made an important implicit statement about how active Palin would be if McCain were to win the White House. [continued…]

GOP group behind negative Obama poll
By Ben Smith, Politico, September 16, 2008

A Republican group is taking responsibility for a poll that has roiled the Jewish community by asking sharply negative questions about Senator Barack Obama.

The Republican Jewish Coalition, which is launching a campaign against Obama on behalf of Senator John McCain, sponsored the poll to “understand why Barack Obama continues to have a problem among Jewish voters,” the group’s executive director, Matt Brooks, told Politico.

The poll asked voters their response to negative statements about Obama, including reported praise for him from a leader of the Palestinian terror group Hamas and a friendship early in his career with a pro-Palestinian university professor. Some Jewish Democrats who received the poll – including a New Republic writer who lives in Michigan – were outraged by the poll, describing it in interviews as “ugly” and disturbing. A group that supports Obama, the Jewish Council for Education and Research even staged a protest outside the Manhattan call center from which the calls originated Tuesday. [continued…]

Another country
By Mark Mellman, New York Times, September 17, 2008

In the mid-1990s, polling that my firm conducted showed that more than 60 percent of voters were more concerned that “the federal government will try to do too much, not do it well and raise taxes.” This year, 60 percent chose the survey’s other option, expressing greater worry that “the federal government will not do enough to help ordinary people deal with the problems they face.” Americans who used to be wary of government involvement are now calling for it.

We have documented a similar, if less drastic, shift in public views of morality. Just three years ago, a majority of those we surveyed said that “there are absolute standards of right and wrong that apply to everyone in almost every situation.” Today, however, respondents by a narrow margin say they believe that “everyone has to decide for themselves what is right and wrong in particular situations.”

Surveys by the Pew Research Center reveal a concomitant change in foreign policy values. Well before 9/11, in the mid-1980s, Americans supported the concept of peace through military strength by a 14-point margin. By 2007, despite the intervening attack on the United States, that margin fell to just two points. [continued…]

Counties with minorities in the majority grow in rural America
By Tim Murphy and Bill Bishop, Daily Yonder, September 17, 2008

A quarter of the people living in rural America make their homes in counties where the majority of the population is made up of racial/ethnic minorities — Hispanic, African American or Native American. And more than half of the rural and exurban population in the United States lives in counties with minority populations that will likely become majorities by mid-century, according to an analysis of recent U.S. Census reports.

Rural America continues to grow more diverse as minorities, particularly Hispanics, have moved out of large urban areas and into smaller cities and rural communities. From July 2006, to July 2007, for example, St. Joseph, Missouri, an hour north of Kansas City, had a 21 percent increase in its Hispanic population. That was the largest increase in the country. [continued…]

How does President Palin sound?
By Willie Brown, San Francisco Chronicle, September 14, 2008

For first time in modern history, a presidential race is actually going to be decided by the vice presidential pick.

Thanks to Sarah Palin, this is no longer a contest between Barack Obama and John McCain – it’s between Brother Barack and Sistah Sarah.

Rock star vs. rock star. Inexperienced vs. inexperienced. Newcomer vs. newcomer. Change vs. change. [continued…]

Editor’s Comment — Willie Brown isn’t profound, but depth isn’t what’s called for here. Instead of being cry-babies who complain about McCain’s lack of integrity, and instead of hysterically endlessly pointing out Palin’s lack of experience (as though we all just got religion and decided that the candidate’s level of experience is the thing), Democrats need to focus on McCain by focusing on Palin. What’s that mean?

Sarah Palin is de facto the top of the Republican ticket. It’s a contest between Palin and Obama. Obama doesn’t need to pull Palin down; he needs to hold her up to the point where McCain has to reclaim his own candidacy.

Indeed, if Obama wants to shake things up some more, he could try this for a game changer:

In acknowledging that McCain’s choice of running mate has so radically shaken up the race, let’s have two additional debates: McCain against Biden and Palin against Obama.

Believe me, that would take guts on Obama’s part because I honestly don’t know how he’d fair.

But the main point is to get voters to earnestly focus on the real choice at hand:

Do we want to see President Obama in the Oval Office or President Palin?

The Sixty-Day War
ByJohn Heilemann, New York Magazine, September 5, 2008

At 37, with a 225-pound frame, a Kojak-bald head, wraparound shades, and a Bluetooth headset invariably jacked into his ear, [Steve] Schmidt cuts an imposing figure. His affect, which alternates between steely, monotonal stoicism and fierce combativeness, is cultivated, designed to be intimidating. His cardinal professional virtues are relentlessness, focus, and a capacity for nearly infinite repetition. The GOP consultant Alex Castellanos says Schmidt is more purely pragmatic than Rove, less ideological, and hence even more lethal—“the perfect political killing machine.” His former boss accordingly nicknamed him The Bullet. His current one ritually refers to him as Sergeant Schmidt.

The bond between Schmidt and McCain was formed a year ago, in the wake of the near immolation of the McCain campaign in a bonfire of chaos, indiscipline, and mismanagement. Schmidt and his family lived in California, where he’d helped engineer Arnold Schwarzenegger’s landslide reelection in 2006. Even as McCain’s campaign faltered, he stuck loyally by his side. “He earned his stripes in the foxhole,” recalls McCain’s former media adviser Mark McKinnon. “He talked to McCain when no one was returning his phone calls.”

But it wasn’t until June that Schmidt assumed near-total control over McCain-land, after confronting the candidate over what he perceived as an incipient crisis similar to the one in 2007. The lack of focus. The internecine strife. The sloppy, listing message. Schmidt informed McCain bluntly that if he didn’t make significant changes in his operation, he was going to lose. [continued…]

The Palin-whatshisname ticket
By Frank Rich, New York Times, September 14, 2008

Karl Rove for once gave the Democrats a real tip rather than a bum steer when he wrote last week that if Obama wants to win, “he needs to remember he’s running against John McCain for president,” not Palin for vice president. Obama should keep stepping up the blitz on McCain’s flip-flops, confusion, ignorance and blurriness on major issues (from education to an exit date from Iraq), rather than her gaffes and résumé. If he focuses voters on the 2008 McCain, the Palin question will take care of itself.

Obama’s one break last week was the McCain camp’s indication that it’s likely to minimize its candidate’s solo appearances by joining him at the hip with Palin. There’s a political price to be paid for this blatant admission that he needs her to draw crowds. McCain’s conspicuous subservience to his younger running mate’s hard-right ideology and his dependence on her electioneering energy raise the question of who has the power in this relationship and who is in charge. A strong and independent woman or the older ward who would be bobbing in a golf cart without her? The more voters see that McCain will be the figurehead for a Palin presidency, the more they are likely to demand stepped-up vetting of the rigidly scripted heir apparent. [continued…]

With White House push, U.S. arms sales jump
By Eric Lipton, New York Times, September 14, 2008

The Bush administration is pushing through a broad array of foreign weapons deals as it seeks to rearm Iraq and Afghanistan, contain North Korea and Iran, and solidify ties with onetime Russian allies.

From tanks, helicopters and fighter jets to missiles, remotely piloted aircraft and even warships, the Department of Defense has agreed so far this fiscal year to sell or transfer more than $32 billion in weapons and other military equipment to foreign governments, compared with $12 billion in 2005.

The trend, which started in 2006, is most pronounced in the Middle East, but it reaches into northern Africa, Asia, Latin America, Europe and even Canada, through dozens of deals that senior Bush administration officials say they are confident will both tighten military alliances and combat terrorism.

“This is not about being gunrunners,” said Bruce S. Lemkin, the Air Force deputy under secretary who is helping to coordinate many of the biggest sales. “This is about building a more secure world.”

The surging American arms sales reflect the foreign policy tides, including the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan and the broader campaign against international terrorism, that have dominated the Bush administration. Deliveries on orders now being placed will continue for several years, perhaps as one of President Bush’s most lasting legacies. [continued…]

Shadow of Guantanamo follows freed inmates back to their homes
By Jason Burke, The Observer, September 14, 2008

They call them the Bandi Guantánamo, the Guantánamo returnees, and their welcome home is far from warm. All across Afghanistan in recent months, scores of men have been coming back from a long journey halfway around the world. About 100 have been released from Guantánamo Bay by United States authorities in the last 12 months as Washington, under mounting pressure from governments around the world, attempts to moderate the damage done to America’s image by the Cuba-based detention centre. A third are Afghan and more are due to return in the coming weeks.

After more than five years in detention thousands of miles away, often traumatised, often angry, or just broken and poor, the Bandi Guantánamo try to build new lives, with limited success. Most claim innocence. Others are unashamed of their acts of violence. Interviewed in Kabul last month, Mohammed Umr described how he had trained in terrorist techniques, met Osama bin Laden and fought at the battle of Tora Bora in 2001. Released 10 weeks ago, he spoke of how angry the presence of his former jailers in his homeland made him. ‘If they have come here to help us, why do they kill civilians and why can’t they even provide electricity to Kabul seven years after invading?’, asked the 30-year-old former footballer, arrested in Pakistan during the closing days of the war of 2001. [continued…]

Iraq: Violence is down – but not because of America’s ‘surge’
By Patrick Cockburn, The Independent, September 14, 2008

The perception in the US that the tide has turned in Iraq is in part because of a change in the attitude of the foreign, largely American, media. The war in Iraq has now been going on for five years, longer than the First World War, and the world is bored with it. US television networks maintain expensive bureaux in Baghdad, but little of what they produce gets on the air. When it does, viewers turn off. US newspaper bureaux are being cut in size. The result of all this is that the American voter hears less of violence in Iraq and can suppose that America’s military adventure there is finally coming good.

An important reason for this optimism is the fall in the number of American soldiers killed. (The 30,000 US soldiers wounded in Iraq are seldom mentioned.) This has happened because the war that was being waged against the American occupation by the Sunni community, the 20 per cent of Iraqis who were in control under Saddam Hussein, has largely ended. It did so because the Sunni were being defeated, not so much by the US army as by the Shia government and the Shia militias.

Sunni insurgent leaders who were nationalists or Baathists realised that they had too many enemies. Not only was al-Qa’ida trying to take over from traditional tribal leaders, it was also killing Sunni who took minor jobs with the government. The Awakening, or al-Sahwa, movement of Sunni fighters was first formed in Anbar province at the end of 2006, but it was allied to the US, not the Iraqi government. This is why, despite pressure from General Petraeus, the government is so determined not to give the 99,000 al-Sahwa members significant jobs in the security forces when it takes control of – and supposedly begins to pay – these Sunni militiamen from 1 October. The Shia government may be prepared to accommodate the Sunni, but not at the cost of diluting Shia dominance.

If McCain wins the presidential election in November, his lack of understanding of what is happening in Iraq could ignite a fresh conflict. In so far as the surge has achieved military success, it is because it implicitly recognises America’s political defeat in Iraq. Whatever the reason for President George Bush’s decision to invade Iraq and overthrow Saddam Hussein in 2003, it was not to place the Shia Islamic parties in power and increase the influence of Iran in the country; yet that is exactly what has happened. [continued…]

Tiptoeing through the mud
By E. J. Dionne Jr., Washington Post, September 12, 2008

[Obama’s] task is to remind Americans that the stakes in this election are far higher than the matter of who said what and when about Palin. He isn’t doing that.

Yes, Democrats are a gloomy lot, inclined to see catastrophe around every corner and the other side as tougher, meaner and more manipulative. Imbibing this potion of false pride about Democratic virtue mixed with paranoia about the Republicans’ dark genius only leads to defeat followed by glorious disillusionment.

Nonetheless, it’s clear that Obama has lost control of this campaign. And he will not seize back the initiative with the sometimes halting, conversational and sadly reluctant sound bites he has been producing. The excitement Obama created at the beginning of the year has vanished, perhaps because his campaign (and, yes, many columnists) bought into the McCain campaign’s demonization of the big rallies. Absurdly, McCain is now contesting the terrain of change — and doing so at celebrity rallies of his own.

Editor’s Comment — The reason Obama has lost control of this campaign is that he’s succumbed to his fear of losing. The last time he showed a flash of boldness was when he responded to the Jeremiah Wright fiasco by giving his speech on race. Ever since then, it’s been caution all the way.

When McCain looked like he was destined for irrelevance he took a risk and picked Palin. His gamble paid off. Now it’s time for Obama to show he’s not being crippled by fear.

First off, he should rebuke his own supporters for treating Sarah Palin as though she’s a threat to the universe. 50% of the attention she’s getting is driven by the hysteria of those who’ve become obsessed about stirring a pot of scorn, venom, and fear, that merely serves to elevate her importance.

Next, Obama needs to dump the word “change”. It was flimsy to start with; now it’s an albatros around his neck. It’s time to focus on fear — as in shining a glaring light on well-founded fears that the Republicans want to play down — and to turn the Obama rhetorical flair into some fire and brimstone passion.

Is America a nation of frogs that’s going to let itself get boiled alive, or can we look at the economic carnage of the last decade and decide that there’s no time left if we want to avert a disaster?

Instead of whining about the tone of the campaign and its lack of substance — a response that merely reinforces the image of Democrats as cry-babies — Obama needs to take command and show that when it comes to change he’s not afraid of changing his own campaign.

Obama’s woes have nothing to do with ‘lipstick’
By Howard Fineman, MSNBC, September 10, 2008

… if I were an Obama partisan I would be worried that his mistakes have a common thread – pride.

Obama seems to want to do things on his own, and on his own terms. It’s understandable. Obama has his own crowd – from Chicago, from Harvard, and from a new cadre of wealthy, Ivy-educated movers and shakers.

“He’s an arrogant S.O.B.,” one of the latter told me today. “He wants to do it his way, and his way alone.” But politics doesn’t work that way. And has Obama should know, or is about to find out, that everyone needs a little help.

Bill Clinton’s advice to Barack Obama
By John F Harris, Politico, September 12, 2008

There they were in Harlem Thursday, the 42nd president and the Democrat who hopes to be the 44th, for a two-hour lunch hour chat at Bill Clinton’s office.

It is not at all clear that Barack Obama particularly wants Clinton’s advice about how to win the presidency—after all, he kept the former president at a cool distance, with just occasional phone calls, for months—but many Democrats believe it is increasingly clear that he could use it.

Bush said to give orders allowing raids in Pakistan
By Eric Schmitt and Mark Mazzetti, New York Times, September 10, 2008

President Bush secretly approved orders in July that for the first time allow American Special Operations forces to carry out ground assaults inside Pakistan without the prior approval of the Pakistani government, according to senior American officials.

The classified orders signal a watershed for the Bush administration after nearly seven years of trying to work with Pakistan to combat the Taliban and Al Qaeda, and after months of high-level stalemate about how to challenge the militants’ increasingly secure base in Pakistan’s tribal areas.

American officials say that they will notify Pakistan when they conduct limited ground attacks like the Special Operations raid last Wednesday in a Pakistani village near the Afghanistan border, but that they will not ask for its permission.

Iraq, U.S.-funded militia at loggerheads
By Saif Rasheed and Tina Susman, Los Angeles Times, September 12, 2008

A meeting Thursday aimed at sowing faith between Iraq’s government and leaders of U.S.-funded paramilitary forces instead highlighted distrust between the sides, three weeks before Iraq takes control of the armed groups.

Leaders of the so-called Sons of Iraq disputed Iraqi plans to absorb only 20% of the fighters into the Iraqi military and police, and they expressed doubts that their members would be protected when the U.S. military turned over responsibility for the units to Iraqi officials.

Does killing Afghan civilians keep us safe?
By Peter Bergen and Katherine Tiedemann, Los Angeles Times, September 12, 2008

This week, as we remember the nearly 3,000 American citizens who died in the rubble of the World Trade Center and the Pentagon or in a remote field in Pennsylvania on Sept. 11, 2001, we also should think about the civilians who are still dying in Afghanistan.

Consider, for instance, the recent American airstrikes on Azizabad, a village in western Afghanistan, on Aug. 22. The United Nations, Afghan government officials and independent witnesses all say that the United States killed about 90 civilians in these strikes, most of them women and children. Cellphone videos of the scene show motionless children lying under checkered shawls and veiled women shrieking alongside them.

According to a report by Carlotta Gall of the New York Times, dozens of freshly dug graves are scattered in the village’s cemeteries, some so small they could fit only children. The U.S. initially said that many fewer civilians had died, but it has now promised a thorough investigation.

It’s a grisly story but hardly an isolated one. The month before the Azizabad incident, Afghan officials say that American airstrikes near Kabul killed 27 civilians at a wedding party — including the bride. In another incident, on March 4, 2007, nine civilians died when their mud home north of Kabul was hit by two 2,000-pound bombs dropped by U.S. aircraft. American officials said they were aiming for two insurgents seen entering the house after firing a rocket at a U.S. military outpost, according to Human Rights Watch.

An anatomy of collateral damage in the Bush era
By Tom Engelhardt, TomDispatch, September 11, 2008

In a little noted passage in her bestselling book, The Dark Side, Jane Mayer offers us a vision, just post-9/11, of the value of one. In October 2001, shaken by a nerve-gas false alarm at the White House, Vice President Dick Cheney, reports Mayer, went underground. He literally embunkered himself in “a secure, undisclosed location,” which she describes as “one of several Cold War-era nuclear-hardened subterranean bunkers built during the Truman and Eisenhower administrations, the nearest of which were located hundreds of feet below bedrock…” That bunker would be dubbed, perhaps only half-sardonically, “the Commander in Chief’s Suite.”

Oh, and in that period, if Cheney had to be in transit, “he was chauffeured in an armored motorcade that varied its route to foil possible attackers.” In the backseat of his car (just in case), adds Mayer, “rested a duffel bag stocked with a gas mask and a biochemical survival suit.” And lest danger rear its head, “rarely did he travel without a medical doctor in tow.”

When it came to leadership in troubled times, this wasn’t exactly a profile in courage. Perhaps it was closer to a profile in paranoia, or simply in fear, but whatever else it might have been, it was also a strange kind of statement of self-worth. Has any wartime president — forget the vice-president — including Abraham Lincoln when southern armies might have marched on Washington, or Franklin D. Roosevelt at the height of World War II, ever been so bizarrely overprotected in the nation’s capital? Has any administration ever placed such value on the preservation of the life of a single official?

Sarah Palin’s myth of America
By Joe Klein, Time, September 10, 2008

Sarah Palin has arrived in our midst with the force of a rocket-propelled grenade. She has boosted John McCain’s candidacy and overwhelmed the presidential process in a way that no vice-presidential pick has since Thomas Eagleton did the precise opposite — sinking his sponsor, George McGovern, in 1972. Obviously, something beyond politics is happening here. We don’t really know Palin as a politician yet, whether she is wise or foolhardy, substantive or empty. Our fascination with her — and it is a nonpartisan phenomenon — is driven by something more primal. The Palin surge illuminates the mythic power of the Republican Party’s message since the advent of Ronald Reagan.

To start with the obvious, she’s attractive. Her husband (“And two decades and five children later, he’s still my guy…”) is a hunk. They have a gorgeous family, made more touching and credible by the challenges their children face. Her voice is more distinctive than her looks: that flat, northern twang that screams, I’m just like you! Actually, the real message is: I’m just like you want to be, a brilliantly spectacular…average American. The Palins win elections and snowmobile races in a state that represents the last, lingering hint of that most basic Huckleberry Finn fantasy — lighting out for the territories. She quoted Westbrook Pegler, the F.D.R.-era conservative columnist, in her acceptance speech: “We grow good people in our small towns…” And then added, “I grew up with those people. They’re the ones who do some of the hardest work in America, who grow our food and run our factories and fight our wars. They love their country in good times and bad, and they’re always proud of America.”

Editor’s Comment — Those of us who initially scoffed at McCain’s VP choice might eventually be vindicated, but right now it looks like we were dead wrong. Indeed, the near hysterical reaction against Sarah Palin may well be doing more to reinforce than undermine her political strength.

This looks like a classic case of underestimating the opposition. There are two ways of responding to the mistake: work hard to prove that it wasn’t a mistake, or try to see what can be learned.

Joe Klein, from his perch in Manhattan, wants us to see this as yet another case in which the Republicans are succeeding in hoodwinking average Americans, yet in pressing his argument he pedals a few myths of his own.

We haven’t been a nation of small towns for nearly a century. It is the suburbanites and city dwellers who do the fighting and hourly-wage work now, and the corporations who grow our food.

Well, when it comes to dying in Iraq, researchers have run the numbers and Klein is dead wrong. Tom Engelhardt quoted demographer William O’Hare from the University of New Hampshire whose study [PDF] quantified the disproportionately high mortality of rural soldiers sent to Iraq:

We know that soldiers from rural America are dying at higher rates than those from urban America, strikingly higher, 60% higher. We know, from other research, that the rural young join the military at higher rates than those from metropolitan areas. The dearth of opportunity in rural areas simply leaves more young people there with fewer alternatives to the military.

America might no longer be a nation of small towns but even now, a quarter of Americans live in the rural America that Klein seems to think is a thing of the past. And even if the small towns have dwindled in size, the small-town mentality is clearly alive and well.

The McCain campaign has made huge strides in closing the so-called enthusiasm gap — but it’s not just because of Sarah Palin. Obama’s genuflections to the establishment had already helped make the gap much narrower to cross. The challenge Obama now faces is in crossing the ordinariness gap.

Doing this doesn’t demand finding his own icon of average America. (With hindsight, Jim Webb looks like he would have been a much more effective running mate than either Biden or Clinton because, unlike them, he melded working class roots with the appearance of being a Washington outsider. Moreover, he would have done far more to make Obama look bold rather than cautious.) But Obama and the campaign desperately need to find ways of showing that they understand an America that now feels it is looked down upon.

The way to respond to the Palin challenge is not to focus on what’s wrong with her; it’s to show that you respect the source of her appeal. The white working-class America that is weary of Obama might be better served by a Democratic administration, but what it wants first of all is respect.

Speak your piece: Sarah Palin and frog bait
By Julie Ardery, Daily Yonder, September 9, 2008

The biggest catch I ever saw was a 15-pound catfish. Cousin Boojer Tweedy of Knickerbocker, Texas, pulled it out of the creek one summer about midnight. “Any fish’ll bite if you got good bait….” This lunker took a live frog.

Which brings us to Sarah Palin. Just as Barack Obama seemed to have worked off his April blunder about helpless rural Americans who “cling” to guns and religion, the Alaska governor leaps into the campaign.

“I was just your average hockey mom, and signed up for the PTA” Palin told the Republican convention, “because I wanted to make my kids’ public education better. When I ran for city council, I didn’t need focus groups and voter profiles because I knew those voters, and knew their families, too. Before I became governor of the great state of Alaska, I was mayor of my hometown.
And since our opponents in this presidential election seem to look down on that experience, let me explain to them what the job involves….”

Wooee, the Democratic catfish are hungry! …

From the bleacher seats here at Daily Yonder, Palin’s small-town swagger and the wrath it’s incurred have been fascinating to watch (as seeing a catfish skinned alive can be). James Joyner of outside the beltway admits he’s “rather baffled that the ‘small town mayor’ meme is catching on so readily.” I’m not. Palin’s rural upbringing and experience as mayor of Wasilla, Alaska, have inspired something rare: a chance to look inside the many public prejudices – reverential and damning, both — about rural America.

For that’s really what Palin’s candidacy offers: live bait. It’s a way for some to suck on their fantasy of rural goodness, and for others to gnaw their rural bigotry down to the bone.

Obama can’t win against Palin
By Karl Rove, Wall Street Journal, September 11, 2008

Of all the advantages Gov. Sarah Palin has brought to the GOP ticket, the most important may be that she has gotten into Barack Obama’s head. How else to explain Sen. Obama’s decision to go one-on-one against “Sarah Barracuda,” captain of the Wasilla High state basketball champs?

It’s a matchup he’ll lose. If Mr. Obama wants to win, he needs to remember he’s running against John McCain for president, not Mrs. Palin for vice president.

Editor’s Comment — The Obama campaign shouldn’t have to hear this from Karl Rove to know it’s true. But here’s an idea for a gutsy ad that would toss the Palin appeal back in McCain’s face. Here’s a first draft as I make this up on the fly:

Does John McCain need to start watching his back?

Until just a few days ago he was having trouble pulling out a crowd.

Now the crowds are roaring, but they’re not shouting his name — (audio clip: “Sarah, Sarah, Sarah…”).

Are John McCain’s newly enthusiastic supporters dreaming about seeing him enter the oval office or are dreaming about his replacement?

Big Bang machine starts. World doesn’t end.
By Paul Woodward, The National, September 11, 2008

As the biggest scientific experiment in history got started on Wednesday morning, Andy McSmith in The Independent wrote: “It was Oscar Wilde who declared that ‘all art is useless’ – which was not a condemnation, but a proclamation. If you want to create something of beauty, he meant, do not be distracted by people who ask what it is for. On that basis, whatever emerges from the £4.4bn experiment that begins today in the vast complex built at the Cern – The European Organisation for Nuclear Research – laboratory near Geneva, where infinitesimally small particles travelling at mind-boggling speeds will crash together with so much force that they almost replicate the Big Bang, could be called the most expensive work of art in human history.

“Mathematicians and physicists have a sense of the aesthetic, as surely as poets and dramatists. In Einstein’s theory of relativity or Kepler’s laws of planetary motion, they see works of great simplicity and beauty. What they long for now is a simple and beautiful ‘theory of everything’ that will explain the whole of physics, from the movement of galaxies to the behaviour of subatomic particles, because there is a hole in theoretical physics which causes more distress to the 6,500 scientists working on Cern’s Large Hadron Collider (LHC) than the scary speculation about the black hole that some people think will swallow up earth if their experiment goes wrong.”

Drop in violence in Iraq attributed to secret assassination programme
By Paul Woodward, The National, September 10, 2008

“The dramatic drop in violence in Iraq is due in large part to a secret programme the US military has used to kill terrorists, according to a new book by Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist Bob Woodward,” CNN reported.

“The programme – which Woodward compares to the World War II era Manhattan Project that developed the atomic bomb – must remain secret for now or it would ‘get people killed,’ Woodward said Monday on CNN’s Larry King Live.

” ‘It is a wonderful example of American ingenuity solving a problem in war, as we often have,’ Woodward said.

All counterinsurgency is local
By Thomas H. Johnson and M. Chris Mason, The Atlantic, October, 2008

June was the deadliest month for the U.S. military in Afghanistan since the invasion in October 2001. July became the second straight month in which casualties exceeded those in Iraq, where four times as many U.S. troops are on the ground. More Americans have been killed in Afghanistan since the invasion began than in the first nine years of the Vietnam War, from 1956 to 1964.

As in Vietnam, the U.S. has never lost a tactical engagement in Afghanistan, and this tactical success is still often conflated with strategic progress. Yet the Taliban insurgency grows more intense and gains more popular traction each year. More and more, the American effort in Afghanistan resembles the Vietnam War—with its emphasis on body counts and air strikes, its cross-border sanctuaries, and its daily tactical victories that never affected the slow and eventually decisive erosion of rural support for the counterinsurgency.

As the Russian ambassador to Afghanistan, Zamir Kabulov, noted in a blunt interview with the BBC in May, the current military engagement is also beginning to look like the Soviets’ decade-long Afghan adventure, which ended ignominiously in 1989. That intervention, like the current one, was based on a strategy of administering and securing Afghanistan from urban centers such as Kabul and the provincial capitals. The Soviets held all the provincial capitals, just as we do, and sought to exert influence from there. The mujahideen stoked insurgency in the rural areas of the Pashtun south and east, just as the Taliban do now.

The Petraeus doctrine
By Andrew J. Bacevich, The Atlantic, October, 2008

For a military accustomed to quick, easy victories, the trials and tribulations of the Iraq War have come as a rude awakening. To its credit, the officer corps has responded not with excuses but with introspection. One result, especially evident within the U.S. Army, has been the beginning of a Great Debate of sorts.

Anyone who cares about the Army’s health should take considerable encouragement from this intellectual ferment. Yet anyone who cares about future U.S. national-security strategy should view the debate with considerable concern: it threatens to encroach upon matters that civilian policy makers, not soldiers, should decide.

What makes this debate noteworthy is not only its substance, but its character—the who and the how.

Right at the edge
By Dexter Filkins, New York Times, September 7, 2008

Late in the afternoon of June 10, during a firefight with Taliban militants along the Afghan-Pakistani border, American soldiers called in airstrikes to beat back the attack. The firefight was taking place right on the border itself, known in military jargon as the “zero line.” Afghanistan was on one side, and the remote Pakistani region known as the Federally Administered Tribal Areas, or FATA, was on the other. The stretch of border was guarded by three Pakistani military posts.

The American bombers did the job, and then some. By the time the fighting ended, the Taliban militants had slipped away, the American unit was safe and 11 Pakistani border guards lay dead. The airstrikes on the Pakistani positions sparked a diplomatic row between the two allies: Pakistan called the incident “unprovoked and cowardly”; American officials regretted what they called a tragic mistake. But even after a joint inquiry by the United States, Pakistan and Afghanistan, it remained unclear why American soldiers had reached the point of calling in airstrikes on soldiers from Pakistan, a critical ally in the war in Afghanistan and the campaign against terrorism.

The mystery, at least part of it, was solved in July by four residents of Suran Dara, a Pakistani village a few hundred yards from the site of the fight. According to two of these villagers, whom I interviewed together with a local reporter, the Americans started calling in airstrikes on the Pakistanis after the latter started shooting at the Americans.

Reduced dominance is predicted for U.S.
By Joby Warrick and Walter Pincus, Washington Post, September 10, 2008

An intelligence forecast being prepared for the next president on future global risks envisions a steady decline in U.S. dominance in the coming decades, as the world is reshaped by globalization, battered by climate change, and destabilized by regional upheavals over shortages of food, water and energy.

The report, previewed in a speech by Thomas Fingar, the U.S. intelligence community’s top analyst, also concludes that the one key area of continued U.S. superiority — military power — will “be the least significant” asset in the increasingly competitive world of the future, because “nobody is going to attack us with massive conventional force.”

Fingar’s remarks last week were based on a partially completed “Global Trends 2025” report that assesses how international events could affect the United States in the next 15 to 17 years. Speaking at a conference of intelligence professionals in Orlando, Fingar gave an overview of key findings that he said will be presented to the next occupant of the White House early in the new year.

In hunt for bin Laden, a new approach
By Craig Whitlock, Washington Post, September 10, 2008

Frustrated by repeated dead ends in the search for Osama bin Laden, U.S. and Pakistani officials said they are questioning long-held assumptions about their strategy and are shifting tactics to intensify the use of the unmanned but lethal Predator drone spy plane in the mountains of western Pakistan.

The number of Hellfire missile attacks by Predators in Pakistan has more than tripled, with 11 strikes reported by Pakistani officials this year, compared with three in 2007. The attacks are part of a renewed effort to cripple al-Qaeda’s central command that began early last year and has picked up speed as President Bush’s term in office winds down, according to U.S. and Pakistani officials involved in the operations.

There has been no confirmed trace of bin Laden since he narrowly escaped from the CIA and the U.S. military after the battle near Tora Bora, Afghanistan, in December 2001, according to U.S., Pakistani and European officials. They said they are now concentrating on a short list of other al-Qaeda leaders who have been sighted more recently, in hopes that their footprints could lead to bin Laden.

Secrets of the Taliban’s success
By Syed Saleem Shahzad, Asia Times, September 11, 2008

Kandahar has traditionally been the city of Afghan royalty, warlords and the center of resistance movements against the British and Russia. It was also the spiritual heartland of the student militia, the Taliban, that emerged in the 1990s to combat the vicious civil war that was tearing the country apart.

The Taliban took over Kabul in 1996 and opened the country to al-Qaeda’s training camps, while Osama bin Laden settled in Kandahar. After the September 11, 2001, attacks on the United States and the US-led invasion of Afghanistan a few months later, the Taliban agreed to lose their government but, in the tradition of the Afghan code of honor of Pashtunwali, they refused to hand over their most wanted guests to the Americans.

Seven years after 9/11, the resurgent Taliban movement is exclusively led by Kandahari clans, which still boast of their sacrifices for the Islamic brotherhood in the name of Pashtunwali, but they maintain that the Taliban have never harbored – and never will – an aggressive agenda towards the world community.

Obama to Palin: ‘Don’t mock the Constitution’
By Peter Slevin, Washington Post, September 8, 2008

Sen. Barack Obama delivered an impassioned defense of the Constitution and the rights of terrorism suspects tonight, striking back at one of the biggest applause lines in Republican vice presidential nominee Sarah Palin’s speech to the GOP convention.

It was in St. Paul last week that Palin drew raucous cheers when she delivered this put-down of Obama: “Al-Qaeda terrorists still plot to inflict catastrophic harm on America and he’s worried that someone won’t read them their rights.”

Obama had a few problems with that.

“First of all, you don’t even get to read them their rights until you catch ’em,” Obama said here, drawing laughs from 1,500 supporters in a high school gymnasium. “They should spend more time trying to catch Osama bin Laden and we can worry about the next steps later.”

If the plotters of the Sept. 11 attacks are in the government’s sights, Obama went on, they should be targeted and killed.

“My position has always been clear: If you’ve got a terrorist, take him out,” Obama said. “Anybody who was involved in 9/11, take ’em out.”

But Obama, who taught constitutional law at the University of Chicago for more than a decade, said captured suspects deserve to file writs of habeus corpus.

Calling it “the foundation of Anglo-American law,” he said the principle “says very simply: If the government grabs you, then you have the right to at least ask, ‘Why was I grabbed?’ And say, ‘Maybe you’ve got the wrong person.'”

Editor’s Comment — This is a contest to decide who on January 20, 2009, gets to pledge that he will “preserve, protect and defend the Constitution of the United States.”

For the last seven years the Republicans (with an unconscionable degree of acquiescence on the part of Democrats) have been chipping away at the foundations of American democracy. It’s time for Obama — empowered with his experience as a constitutional scholar — to run with this theme. Defending the constitution is the most solemn pledge that a president makes. Political consultants might say that this is too high-minded to have popular appeal, but however ignorant much of the electorate might be, the idea that America and its constitution are indivisible, resonates even among those who can’t explain what that means.

America can’t afford to have another president who’s soft on the Constitution.

What’s the difference between Palin and Muslim fundamentalists? Lipstick
By Juan Cole, Salon, September 9, 2008

John McCain announced that he was running for president to confront the “transcendent challenge” of the 21st century, “radical Islamic extremism,” contrasting it with “stability, tolerance and democracy.” But the values of his handpicked running mate, Sarah Palin, more resemble those of Muslim fundamentalists than they do those of the Founding Fathers. On censorship, the teaching of creationism in schools, reproductive rights, attributing government policy to God’s will and climate change, Palin agrees with Hamas and Saudi Arabia rather than supporting tolerance and democratic precepts. What is the difference between Palin and a Muslim fundamentalist? Lipstick.

McCain pledged to work for peace based on “the transformative ideals on which we were founded.” Tolerance and democracy require freedom of speech and the press, but while mayor of Wasilla, Alaska, Palin inquired of the local librarian how to go about banning books that some of her constituents thought contained inappropriate language. She tried to fire the librarian for defying her. Book banning is common to fundamentalisms around the world, and the mind-set Palin displayed did not differ from that of the Hamas minister of education in the Palestinian government who banned a book of Palestinian folk tales for its sexually explicit language. In contrast, Thomas Jefferson wrote, “Our liberty cannot be guarded but by the freedom of the press, nor that be limited without danger of losing it.”

On Nov. 4, Remember 9/11
By Jeffrey Goldberg, New York Times, September 9, 2008

The next president must do one thing, and one thing only, if he is to be judged a success: He must prevent Al Qaeda, or a Qaeda imitator, from gaining control of a nuclear device and detonating it in America. Everything else — Fannie Mae, health care reform, energy independence, the budget shortfall in Wasilla, Alaska — is commentary. The nuclear destruction of Lower Manhattan, or downtown Washington, would cause the deaths of thousands, or hundreds of thousands; a catastrophic depression; the reversal of globalization; a permanent climate of fear in the West; and the comprehensive repudiation of America’s culture of civil liberties.

Editor’s Comment — When Jeffrey Goldberg, or anyone else, gravely pronounces that preventing a nuclear attack on America is a supreme responsibility for the next president, it’s hard to dispute — but I will.

Why?

Would the global significance of a terrorist nuclear attack be any less if the target was Paris, or Istanbul, or Tel Aviv, or New Delhi?

America could take no comfort if it happens not to be the target and the fact that the attack could (and in fact is more likely) to occur elsewhere merely underlines that a global threat of this kind demands an international response. In this — as in confronting global warming — success or failure hinges on the ability to develop and sustain international cooperation. “United we stand” has to be more than a patriotic rallying cry; it has to be a recognition and expression of collective interests.

9/11 rumors that become conventional wisdom
By Michael Slackman, New York Times, September 9, 2008

Seven years later, it remains conventional wisdom here that Osama bin Laden and Al Qaeda could not have been solely responsible for the attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, and that the United States and Israel had to have been involved in their planning, if not their execution, too.

This is not the conclusion of a scientific survey, but it is what routinely comes up in conversations around the region — in a shopping mall in Dubai, in a park in Algiers, in a cafe in Riyadh and all over Cairo.

“Look, I don’t believe what your governments and press say. It just can’t be true,” said Ahmed Issab, 26, a Syrian engineer who lives and works in the United Arab Emirates. “Why would they tell the truth? I think the U.S. organized this so that they had an excuse to invade Iraq for the oil.”

It is easy for Americans to dismiss such thinking as bizarre. But that would miss a point that people in this part of the world think Western leaders, especially in Washington, need to understand: That such ideas persist represents the first failure in the fight against terrorism — the inability to convince people here that the United States is, indeed, waging a campaign against terrorism, not a crusade against Muslims.

Pulling the curtain on Palin
By E. J. Dionne Jr., Washington Post, September 9, 2008

John McCain’s campaign acknowledged this weekend that Sarah Palin is unprepared to be vice president or president of the United States.

Of course, McCain’s people said no such thing. But their actions told you all you needed to know.

McCain, Barack Obama and Joe Biden all subjected themselves to tough questioning on the regular Sunday news programs. Palin was the only no-show. And it’s not just the Sunday interviews. She has not opened herself to any serious questioning since McCain picked her to be next in line for the presidency.

Record contradicts Palin’s ‘bridge’ claims
By Elizabeth Holmes and Laura Meckler, Wall Street Journal, September 9, 2008

The Bridge to Nowhere argument isn’t going much of anywhere.

Despite significant evidence to the contrary, the McCain campaign continues to assert that Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin told the federal government “thanks but no thanks” to the now-famous bridge to an island in her home state.

The McCain campaign released a television advertisement Monday morning titled “Original Mavericks.” The narrator of the 30-second spot boasts about the pair: “He fights pork-barrel spending. She stopped the Bridge to Nowhere.”

Gov. Palin, who John McCain named as his running mate less than two weeks ago, quickly adopted a stump line bragging about her opposition to the pork-barrel project Sen. McCain routinely decries.

But Gov. Palin’s claim comes with a serious caveat. She endorsed the multimillion dollar project during her gubernatorial race in 2006. And while she did take part in stopping the project after it became a national scandal, she did not return the federal money. She just allocated it elsewhere.

Palin billed state for nights spent at home
By James V. Grimaldi and Karl Vick, Washington Post, September 9, 2008

Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin has billed taxpayers for 312 nights spent in her own home during her first 19 months in office, charging a “per diem” allowance intended to cover meals and incidental expenses while traveling on state business.

The governor also has charged the state for travel expenses to take her children on official out-of-town missions. And her husband, Todd, has billed the state for expenses and a daily allowance for trips he makes on official business for his wife.

Palin, who earns $125,000 a year, claimed and received $16,951 as her allowance, which officials say was permitted because her official “duty station” is Juneau, according to an analysis of her travel documents by The Washington Post.

Olmert indicted as deputy is accused of war crimes
By Donald Macintyre, The Independent, September 8, 2008

The Israeli Attorney General has been urged to launch a criminal investigation into whether Shaul Mofaz, a leading prime ministerial candidate, ordered “war crimes” to be committed when he was the military’s chief of staff.

A leading Israeli law professor has written to justice officials, calling for the investigation into claims – highlighted by The Independent last month – that during a briefing to army officers in May 2001, after the start of the second Palestinian uprising, Mr Mofaz ordered a daily “quota” of Palestinian deaths.

Last night, Israeli police recommended to prosecutors that the Prime Minister, Ehud Olmert, be indicted in a corruption investigation. With Mr Olmert committed to resigning after his Kadima party holds a leadership vote a week today, the recommendation will have no immediate impact on his tenure and does not guarantee an indictment by the Attorney General.

U.S. rules out unilateral steps against Russia
By Thom Shanker and Steven Lee Myers, New York Times, September 9, 2008

The Bush administration, after considerable internal debate, has decided not to take direct punitive action against Russia for its conflict with Georgia, concluding that it has little leverage if it acts unilaterally and that it would be better off pressing for a chorus of international criticism to be led by Europe.

In recent interviews, senior administration officials said the White House had concluded that American punishments like economic sanctions or blocking Russia from world trade groups would only backfire, deepening Russia’s intransigence and allowing the Kremlin to narrow the regional and global implications of its invasion of Georgia to an old-fashioned Washington-Moscow dispute.

Even as they vowed to work with allies, administration officials conceded that they wished the European Union had been willing to take firmer action than issuing tepid statements criticizing Russia’s conduct. But the officials said the benefits of remaining part of a united front made it prudent for the United States to accept the softer approach advocated by Italy and Germany, among other allies.

Caution over confrontation
By David Ignatius, Washington Post, September 10, 2008

In the month since the Russian invasion of Georgia, the Bush administration has crafted a policy that should please some liberal critics and upset conservative hard-liners — a low-key approach that tries to help the Georgians recover without backing Russia further into a corner.

The Georgia strategy is premised on working jointly with European allies, and on avoiding the sort of unilateral U.S. military threats that would scare them off. It is also tempered by the administration’s earlier mistakes in dealing with mercurial Georgian President Mikheil Saakashvili, which set the stage for his unwise Aug. 8 attack on South Ossetia that provoked the punishing Russian reaction.

It’s a policy, in short, that distills some of the foreign-policy lessons learned at the shank end of the Bush presidency. And its contours, interestingly enough, arguably are closer to the thrust of Barack Obama’s initial, cautious reaction to the Georgia crisis than to the more confrontational approach of John McCain.

U.S. and Iraqi officials try to reassure citizen patrols about transfer
By Erica Goode and Mudhafar al-Husaini, New York Times, September 9, 2008

Gathered in the domed hall of a palace built by Saddam Hussein, Awakening Council leaders in the Adhamiya neighborhood met with Iraqi and American military officers on Monday to learn what the future holds for them once the Sunni-dominated citizen patrols begin reporting to the Iraqi government on Oct. 1.

About 75 leaders and rank-and-file members from the western side of the neighborhood listened and murmured as Brig. Gen. Tarek Abdul Hameed explained what would happen when responsibility for paying and directing 54,000 Awakening patrol members in and around Baghdad was transferred from the Americans to the Iraqi government.

The meeting, the Iraqi and American officers said, was called in part to quash rumors that there would be mass arrests of Awakening members and that American forces would no longer be involved with the patrols.

Obama takes first direct shot at Palin
By Charles Babbington, AP, September 6, 2008

Barack Obama made his first direct criticism of Republican vice presidential nominee Sarah Palin on Saturday, saying she pretends to oppose spending earmarks when she actually has embraced them.

Speaking to 800 people at the Wabash Valley Fairgrounds in Terre Haute, Ind., the Democratic presidential nominee ridiculed John McCain and his running mate, the Alaska governor, for describing themselves as agents of change at this week’s GOP convention.

“Don’t be fooled,” Obama told the crowd surrounding him in a large barn. “John McCain’s party, with the help of John McCain, has been in charge” for nearly eight years.

“I know the governor of Alaska has been saying she’s change, and that’s great,” Obama said. “She’s a skillful politician. But, you know, when you’ve been taking all these earmarks when it’s convenient, and then suddenly you’re the champion anti-earmark person, that’s not change. Come on! I mean, words mean something, you can’t just make stuff up.”

Palin and McCain’s shotgun marriage
By Frank Rich, New York Times, September 7, 2008

Given the actuarial odds that could make Palin our 45th president, it would be helpful to know who this mystery woman actually is. Meanwhile, two eternal axioms of our politics remain in place. Americans vote for the top of the ticket, not the bottom. And in judging the top of the ticket, voters look first at the candidates’ maiden executive decision, their selection of running mates. Whatever we do and don’t know about Palin’s character at this point, there is no ambiguity in what her ascent tells us about McCain’s character and potential presidency.

He wanted to choose the pro-abortion-rights Joe Lieberman as his vice president. If he were still a true maverick, he would have done so. But instead he chose partisanship and politics over country. “God only made one John McCain, and he is his own man,” said the shafted Lieberman in his own tedious convention speech last week. What a pathetic dupe. McCain is now the man of James Dobson and Tony Perkins. The “no surrender” warrior surrendered to the agents of intolerance not just by dumping his pal for Palin but by moving so far to the right on abortion that even Cindy McCain seemed unaware of his radical shift when being interviewed by Katie Couric last week.

That ideological sellout, unfortunately, was not the worst leadership trait the last-minute vice presidential pick revealed about McCain. His speed-dating of Palin reaffirmed a more dangerous personality tic that has dogged his entire career. His decision-making process is impetuous and, in its Bush-like preference for gut instinct over facts, potentially reckless.

McCain-Palin becoming Palin-McCain?
AP, September 6, 2008

The banners, buttons and signs say McCain-Palin, but the crowds say something else.

“Sa-rah! Pa-lin!” came the chant at a Colorado Springs rally on Saturday moments before Republican nominee John McCain took the stage with Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin, a woman who was virtually unknown to the nation just a week earlier. The day before, thousands screamed “Sa-rah! Sa-rah! Sa-rah!” at an amphitheater outside Detroit.

“Real change with a real woman,” read one sign at a Wisconsin rally. “Hurricane Sarah leaves liberals spinning,” cried another.

Editor’s Comment — If the McCain campaign thought it had closed the “enthusiasm gap”, it’s also ironically opened it up: the more adulation Palin gets, the less of a leader McCain looks. Come November, no one’s going to the voting booth to elect a vice president.

Palin’s true north
By Timothy Egan, New York Times, September 4, 2008

Long before the slogan known to 48-hour libertines — What happens in Vegas, stays in Vegas – became commonplace, I heard a variant of that in Alaska, and not just at closing time in fishermen’s bars.

Distance breeds isolation, and in Alaska that often means an arm’s-length code of personal privacy. The state is full of people who have left behind marriages, debts and places that simply weren’t big enough to contain their personalities.

As she showed Wednesday night with her acceptance speech, Gov. Sarah Palin fits the mold of a certain kind of Alaskan – “take it from a gal who knows,” as she said. The state has a unique political ecosystem, as quirky, odd and compelling as the big land itself.

But it is John McCain’s biggest gamble to hope that there is enough of Palin’s Last Frontier in the rest of the country to carry his ticket to the next frontier.

Watching ‘Friends’ in Gaza: a culture clash
By Michael Kimmelman, New York Times, September 7, 2008

In a dingy storefront on a noisy block in the middle of Gaza City, metal shelves bulge with dusty audiotapes extolling Hamas, Fatah and Islamic Jihad. Alongside them, a pouty Jennifer Lopez beckons from the cover of a CD. DVDs are also on offer, of not-yet-officially-released movies like “Wanted,” “Hancock” and “You Don’t Mess With the Zohan,” the Adam Sandler comedy about a Mossad agent turned hairdresser in a New York City salon run by a Palestinian woman.

Amer Kihail, 32, a slender man with an elastic, hangdog face, runs the store, called New Sound. Do Gazans living under Hamas buy much Western music or many Western movies? Mr. Kihail looked baffled, and maybe even a little annoyed, by the question.

“Of course,” he said.

Ruled by Hamas, penned in by Israel, grappling with daily shortages of food and supplies, Gazans need an escape. Culture turns out to be not just an afterthought but, many say, essential to surviving here. Especially for young Gazans, what’s on satellite television and the Internet, on tapes and compact discs, is a window to the world beyond the armored checkpoints, and a link to Arab society elsewhere and, crucially, to the West.

And in what is clearly an emerging struggle within Hamas between political pragmatists, trying to consolidate their new authority, and extremists who have begun pressing a more fundamentalist agenda, culture is a central battleground for control of Gaza. A release from confinement and hardship, even mundane television becomes freighted in this context.

Editor’s Comment — Here’s the key quote: “… you cannot joke with Hamas.”

Puritans, ideologues and extremists all share the same blind spot: the inability to experience delight in ambiguity.

In this failing is contained the most profound constraint on human freedom: the failure to recognize that the world is bigger and richer than the representations through which we attempt to understand it.

Russia’s role in the Iran crisis
By Ray Takeyh and Nikolas Gvosdev, Boston Globe, September 6, 2008

It is one of the rites of passage of the fall – every September, the Bush administration returns to the United Nation for another sanctions resolution against Iran. However, this time there is much consternation in Washington that Russia’s invasion of Georgia – and the subsequent chill that has descended on relations between Russia and the West – has ended any possibility of cooperation between the United States and Russia in dealing with Iran’s nuclear imbroglio. Such fears are overblown.

Russia’s assault on Georgia may produce no measurable change of its Iran policy. Indeed, President Dmitry Medvedev of Russia made it clear that, despite the harsh rhetoric that has been exchanged between Moscow and Washington, Russia continues to support efforts to prevent Iran from obtaining nuclear weapons.

The primary reason for the continuity is that both Iran and Russia are essentially satisfied with existing US-European policy of applying incremental and largely symbolic UN sanctions on Tehran. Moscow feels that as long as the diplomatic process remains in play, America is in no position to launch a military strike that could destabilize the Middle East. At the same time, the theocratic regime has increasingly adjusted to a sanctions policy whose impact is negated by increasing oil prices.

Although Tehran would be grateful for a Russian veto of any future sanctions resolutions, it does seem content with a Russian policy that waters down UN mandates while deepening its commercial ties with Iran. On the one hand, Moscow has supported three previous Security Council injunctions against Iran, yet it has also signed lucrative trade deals and expanded its diplomatic representation in Iran. The incongruity of today’s situation is that Russia rebukes Iran for its nuclear infractions while providing technical assistance to the Bushehr plant, which is a critical component of Iran’s atomic industry.

Shimon Peres warns Israel’s hawks over Iran strike
By Uzi Mahnaimi, The Sunday Times, September 7, 2008

Israel’s president, Shimon Peres, has warned the prime minister that a military attack on Iran’s nuclear facilities could provoke a broader conflict.

Peres is the first senior politician to advise Ehud Olmert against such an attack at a time of growing tension when other leading figures are threatening airstrikes unless Tehran halts its nuclear programme.

The Israeli air force has rehearsed an operation to destroy sites connected with the project.

“The military way will not solve the problem,” said Peres, the 85-year-old founder of the Jewish state’s nuclear programme, in an interview with The Sunday Times.

China calls for peaceful resolution of nuclear standoff
By Edward Wong, New York Times, September 7, 2008

President Hu Jintao of China urged other nations on Saturday to negotiate a resolution to Iran’s nuclear issue during a meeting with Iran’s president, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, making clear again that China disapproves of any move by Western countries to attack Iran with military force.

Mr. Hu met with Mr. Ahmadinejad on Saturday in the Great Hall of the People here after Mr. Ahmadinejad flew into Beijing to attend the opening ceremony of the Paralympic Games, which began in the evening.

“At present, the Iran nuclear issue is faced with a rare opportunity for the resumption of talks, and we hope all parties concerned could seize the opportunity and show flexibility to push for a peaceful settlement of the issue,” Mr. Hu said in the meeting, Xinhua, the state news agency, reported.

Maliki drops the mask
By Jonathan Steele, The Guardian, September 5, 2008

What’s up with Nouri al-Maliki? As security anxieties subside in this slowly calming city, political speculation has rarely been so intense. First, it was Maliki’s demand that all US troops leave Iraq by the end of 2011. Then came signs that his government wants to undermine the Sunni tribal militias, known as the Awakening councils, on whom the Americans have relied to defeat al-Qaida in Iraq. Now there are moves to take on the powerful Kurdish peshmerga troops and push them out of disputed areas in the strategic central province of Diyala.

Why is the prime minister doing this? Is “the puppet breaking his strings”, as one Arab newspaper put it? Or is the more appropriate metaphor “dropping the mask”? Those who knew Maliki in exile in Syria during Saddam Hussein’s time now recall that he opposed the US-led invasion. His Daawa party did not attend the eve-of-invasion conference of US- and UK-supported exiles in London, and he opposed the party’s decision six months later to join the hand-picked “governing council” set up by the first occupation overlord, Paul Bremer.

Maliki’s new line has discomforted the Americans. Some officials put on a brave face, saying it is a sign of Iraqi confidence in their own sovereignty, a development that, of course, they support as proof that the Bush administration’s strategy of rebuilding a proud country is succeeding. Others say it reflects overconfidence, even hubris, as Iraq is a long way from being able to survive without US military protection.

Zero hour for Zardari
By Simon Tisdall, The Guardian, September 4, 2008

Zardari does not immediately stand out as the person best equipped to tackle Pakistan’s myriad problems. Yet because he is expected to renege on a promise to curb the sweeping authority accumulated by Musharraf, he is set to become the country’s most powerful civilian president ever. Some see this as a high price to pay for democracy.

“Some people call Pakistan a rogue state. Now it’s going to be a rogue’s state,” said a former senior government official. “Zardari will have the power to appoint a prime minister, dissolve parliament and appoint the chief of the armed forces. He will be in charge of the nuclear command authority, which oversees Pakistan’s nuclear weapons arsenal. His style of leadership combines arrogance with ignorance and cronyism. He has no real party platform. What we are looking at is the rise of a civilian dictator.”

So harsh a verdict, delivered before Zardari takes office, may be a trifle premature. Less impassioned observers say two factors are key to whether he will be an effective leader. One is the attitude of the US. On pragmatic grounds but also because of its ideological commitment to supporting democracy, Washington has taken a back seat so far as the political process unfolds. For his part Zardari pledged this week to maintain the US alliance and help prosecute the “war on terror”. But his reliability is questioned.

Hamid Karzai blames Britain for Taliban resurgence
By Dean Nelson, The Sunday Times, September 7, 2008

The president of Afghanistan, Hamid Karzai, has blamed Britain for the resurgence of the Taliban and its growing activity in large tracts of the country.

His remarks, made to Afghan MPs, follow a clash with Gordon Brown over the Kabul regime’s links with warlords and drugs barons.

Karzai claims Brown has threatened to withdraw British troops from Helmand province, where 31 of them have died this year, if the president reinstates two provincial governors sacked for alleged dealings in the heroin trade.

One of them is Sher Mohammed Akhundzada, the former governor of Helmand, who was forced out under British pressure two years ago after nine tons of opium and heroin were discovered in his basement. Karzai’s plan to reinstate the governors has alarmed western diplomats in Kabul and dismayed British officials.

A leader beyond denial, as war plans flounder
By Michiko Kakutani, New York Times, September 7, 2008

In this fourth volume of his quartet of books on the Bush White House, Bob Woodward reaches a damning conclusion about the presidency of George W. Bush. “A president must be able to get a clear-eyed, unbiased assessment of the war,” he writes. “The president must lead. For years, time and again, President Bush has displayed impatience, bravado and unsettling personal certainty about his decisions. The result has too often been impulsiveness and carelessness and, perhaps most troubling, a delayed reaction to realities and advice that run counter to his gut.”

“After ordering the invasion,” Mr. Woodward goes on, “the president spent three years in denial and then delegated a strategy review to his national security adviser. Bush was intolerant of confrontations and in-depth debate. There was no deadline, no hurry. The president was engaged in the war rhetorically but maintained an odd detachment from its management. He never got a full handle on it, and over these years of war, too often he failed to lead.”

In this respect, Mr. Woodward’s portrait of Mr. Bush in “The War Within” — a book Stephen J. Hadley, the national security adviser, has called incomplete and misleading — amplifies the one he drew in his last book, “State of Denial” (2006), in which the president emerged as a passive, stubborn and intellectually incurious leader, given to an almost religious certainty about his decision making and inclined to make instinctive gut calls. It stands in striking contrast to the laudatory portrait in the first book in this series, “Bush at War” (2002), which depicted the president in Rovian terms as a strong, resolute, even visionary leader.

Doubt, distrust, delay
By Bob Woodward, Washington Post, September 7, 2008

During the summer of 2006, from her office adjacent to the White House, deputy national security adviser Meghan O’Sullivan sent President Bush a daily top secret report cataloging the escalating bloodshed and chaos in Iraq. “Violence has acquired a momentum of its own and is now self-sustaining,” she wrote July 20, quoting from an intelligence assessment.

Her dire evaluation contradicted the upbeat assurances that President Bush was hearing from Gen. George W. Casey Jr., the U.S. commander in Iraq. Casey and Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld were pushing to draw down American forces and speed the transfer of responsibility to the Iraqis. Despite months of skyrocketing violence, Casey insisted that within a year, Iraq would be mostly stable, with the bulk of American combat troops headed home.

Publicly, the president claimed the United States was winning the war, and he expressed unwavering faith in Casey, saying, “It’s his judgment that I rely upon.” Privately, he was losing confidence in the drawdown strategy. He questioned O’Sullivan that summer with increasing urgency: “What are you hearing from people in Baghdad? What are people’s daily lives like?”

“It’s hell, Mr. President,” she answered, determined not to mislead or lie to him.

‘Noise of terrorism’
By Allison Hoffman, Jerusalem Post, September 7, 2008

A Pakistani neuroscientist and mother of three suspected of being a “fixer” for al-Qaida, moving money to support terrorist operations, has been charged with assault and attempted murder in federal court in Manhattan.

Aafia Siddiqui, 36, holds a bachelor’s degree from MIT and a doctorate from Brandeis University.

Siddiqui’s lawyers and human rights groups claim Siddiqui was abducted by intelligence agents and tortured at secret interrogation facilities for five years, until she became a cause celebre in Pakistan and authorities engineered her sudden reappearance with her eldest son, an 11-year-old, in Afghanistan this summer. It is thought she may have been held at the Bagram Theater Internment Facility, an American detention facility located at Bagram Air Base in Afghanistan.

According to the indictment, Siddiqui appeared in Ghazni on July 17 carrying a bag packed with chemicals and notes about a “mass casualty attack” involving the Empire State Building or other US landmarks. The following day, she allegedly grabbed an M-4 rifle from a US Army officer and fired it, while stating “her intent and desire to kill Americans.”

She had vanished with her children in March 2003, while the FBI sought her for questioning about suspected ties to al-Qaida and the September 11, 2001, terrorist attacks.

She is not accused of any terrorist crimes, though prosecutors say the investigation is ongoing.

“There’s all the noise of terrorism, but it’s not in the charges,” said Joanne Mariner, an attorney with Human Rights Watch in New York who has followed the case.

Legal experts say if her lawyers are right, Siddiqui, already unique for being the only woman suspected of high-level al-Qaida involvement, would be the first person to face prosecution in a US criminal court after being held in secret intelligence custody.