Afghanistan

It's probably a good thing that I'm not the President, because I don't have a clue about what we ought to do in Afghanistan. It's one of those situations where I think that we really ought to summon the adults, and let them fix it. My ideas tend to be either a) build a huge freakin' wall around the place, and have only one door in the wall, which we don't open, ever. (The door is actually just painted on the wall -- who would know?), or b) bomb the whole place until it's completely level, like Kansas, then roll in the graders and the painters and make it a parking lot for whatever country is right next door. I recognize that neither of those is a particularly good option.

I heard someone say the other day that Afghanistan is really good at uniting against invaders (ie, anyone who isn't from there), and really bad at uniting for the common good in the absence of that external threat. Somehow, they need to see their homegrown evils as an external threat. They need to be able to fight it without taking that as an opportunity to fight each other -- to avenge the theft of a cow two thousand years ago. For such a tribal, insular society, I don't see how they can do that. I don't even see how they can bring themselves to want to do that. Think global? I doubt they even think 'this five kilometer area'. Life's too tough for that. Let the others worry about it.

I don't know how you get them to care so much that they'll rise up against their native thugs. I'd like to believe that the option of speaking to people openly, treating them fairly and honestly, will bring them to your side, but that doesn't seem to be the way that the world works. Even though Barack's approach in the campaign of treating people fairly and honestly worked for him then, I don't think it'd work here, mostly because in the US, people won't come and kill you and your whole family if they disagree with your political leaning, and in Afghanistan, they will. On the other hand, the idea of just rolling in there with tens of thousands of soldiers won't work, I think, for proof of which we can just ask the Russians. But walking away and letting the festering cesspool get worse -- well, if it just affected their country, I could live with it (I know, not morally defensible, but I'm not talking morals). It wouldn't just affect their country, though. Sooner or later, it'd affect us, and when it did, the effort to wipe out the contagion would make Bush's ideas about that look relatively Carterish. So I think we need to be involved, and we need to make a sustained effort. But, the way we are, we need to see payback, we need to see that it's working, and fast. I doubt that would easily happen.

Sorry, Barack. This one, I can't help you with.