Peter Bergen urges the West to go all-in in Afghanistan:

Afghanistan will not be Obama’s Vietnam, nor will it be his Iraq. Rather, the renewed and better resourced American effort in Afghanistan will, in time, produce a relatively stable and prosperous Central Asian state...

I respect Bergen's experience, but in this case I think he's bending over backwards too hard to try and justify the expansion of Western commitment in Afghanistan because he really, really wants it to succeed (in part, I suspect, in order to allow a success-vs-failure/compare-and-contrast option for those who were vehemently against the Iraq effort and still view it as an ongoing catastrophe). To his credit he doesn't just ignore the skeptics points, but I think he's being way too optimistic the other way, though. I've written before about how Afghanistan is a more daunting task than Iraq because of its logistical challenges, something Bergen doesn't tackle. Also, while he's correct that the Taliban have always been a small force, historically the real domino that shifts who controls the country are the tribal and regional warlords. The Taliban didn't win control of Afghanistan until guys like Dostum shifted to what they perceived as the "winning side," and the Coalition and Northern Alliance couldn't have won against the Taliban if the warlords hadn't changed sides again once they saw staying with the Taliban as a worse option. The prevalence of the local warlords is also the reason the Coalition has had problems ramping up the Afghan armed forces, the best of Afghan fighters are more likely to be working for a warlord than the military, and the central government just isn't strong enough to make leaving the warlords a more lucrative opportunity than staying.

Frankly, his essay sounds eerily similar to some of the more rosy essays on how Iraq was going to become a beacon of democracy to the Middle East. Bergen doesn't go that far, but I think his prediction of a stable and prosperous Afghanistan anytime soon isn't reasonable, either.

Interesting & insightful discussion between Robert Kaplan and Michael Totten over at MJT's blog. RTWT.

Megan McArdle over at atlantic.com has a good writeup on whether budget deficits matter or not, and how each political side uses them for their own goals (which usually flip around depending on whether the party in question is in power or not). RTWT.

"Pride goeth before destruction, and an haughty spirit before a fall." - Proverbs 16:18



40 More Years: How the Democrats Will Rule the Next Generation by James Carville (2009)


Painting the Map Red: The Fight to Create a Permanent Republican Majority by Hugh Hewitt (2004)

Permanent Democratic Majority: New Study Says Yes!

Now, where have we heard this before? Ah, yes: from the GOP in 2006...

As I wrote here, I can easily see the Democratic party taking the opportunity to go down the path the CA Democrats took of purging the party of their moderates once they don't have any legitimate challengers for power. Indeed, the party loyalists are already setting up litmus tests for their candidates to jump through.

Well, this by Jim Jubak was sufficiently depressing, going into some of the questions the public might be asking of Congress if the latter hadn't successfully distracted everyone by howling about the AIG bonuses.

Also, good point by XKCD here.

Jim Jubak writes that Obama's $500,000 cap on executive pay for corporations taking federal TARP money sounds good, but upon close examination of the actual terms, finds is it'll be fairly easy to for executives to circumnavigate around and still get huge bonuses while taking taxpayer bailouts.

Tom just noticed that when Obama sleeps, the world gets cold and dark, but when he awakens, the sun returns!

Perhaps he is...the One Spoken Of in The Writings?

/sarcasm

My Political Views
I am a center-right social moderate
Right: 2.92, Authoritarian: 0.11

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My Foreign Policy Views
Score: 4.88

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My Culture War Stance
Score: 2.48

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For future reference: on Inauguration Day 2009, President Obama's favorability rating is 78%-79%. Bush's final approval rating was 31%-32%, after entering in 2000 with a rating around 50% and reaching ~85% right after 9-11.

As I said in another thread elsewhere, I see part of Obama's popularity being his supporters viewing him as a tabula rasa who everyone has projected their particular hopes and expectations onto. It'll be very interesting to see how long he can go as POTUS before the honeymoon is over and the relief over Bush being out of office stops carrying the weight it does now. Perhaps I'm wrong and the electorate's expectations are reasonable, in which case his approval ratings should still be in the 60%-65% range a couple of years from now. Time will tell.

"The feeling is definitely there. It's a new morning in America: fresh, vital. The old cynicism is gone. We have faith in our leaders. We're optimistic as to what becomes of it all. It really boils down to our ability to accept. We don't need pessimism. There are no limits. We must look to the strength of our nation, our ideals, a vision. We don't want to just survive; we want to succeed." - from John Carpenter's They Live

...which is probably why a lot of the rhetoric swirling around the Inauguration this week is giving me a "wait, haven't we heard this all before?" feeling. Meet the new boss, same as the old boss...

I consider the prospect of a collapse of the Mexican government under pressure from the drug cartels the #1 security threat facing the U.S., mainly because of proximity. Islamist ambitions in Pakistan and in other areas are a long-term danger, but the more I've been reading about how bad things have been getting in Mexico, to the point of the cartels reaching across the border to do hits in Phoenix, it should be a major worry for the incoming Administration. Think of it as the possibility of Somalia or Haiti on the southern border.

In addition to the cartels, a Mexican collapse would also give MS-13 a free hand there, which would probably result in a major expansion of their operations here. That would be a very, very bad thing. There's also some early evidence that the deteriorating conditions in Mexico have been affecting migration patterns, and not in a good way: instead of migrating for jobs - which are less available because of the recession - it is possible that Mexicans are not migrating back home due to security concerns.

Worth keeping an eye on.

But really, since its a once-in-a-lifetime event,and that's priceless, $20,000 is a bargain!

/sarcasm

(We're planning to stay as far away from DC during the inauguration as possible, and not mainly for political reasons.)

Stratfor scores again, this time The Death of Deep Throat and the Crisis of Journalism. It provides deep background on the Watergate scandal that I haven't read before, specifically on what was motivating "Deep Throat" (Mark Felt) to turn on Nixon, and the larger ramifications of his identity for journalism today:

And now we come to the major point. For Felt to have been able to guide and control the young reporters’ investigation, he needed to know a great deal of what the White House had done, going back quite far. He could not possibly have known all this simply through his personal investigations. His knowledge covered too many people, too many operations, and too much money in too many places simply to have been the product of one of his side hobbies. The only way Felt could have the knowledge he did was if the FBI had been systematically spying on the White House, on the Committee to Re-elect the President and on all of the other elements involved in Watergate. Felt was not simply feeding information to Woodward and Bernstein; he was using the intelligence product emanating from a section of the FBI to shape The Washington Post’s coverage...
Woodward and Bernstein might have been young and naive, but Bradlee was an old Washington hand who knew exactly who Felt was, knew the FBI playbook and understood that Felt could not have played the role he did without a focused FBI operation against the president. Bradlee knew perfectly well that Woodward and Bernstein were not breaking the story, but were having it spoon-fed to them by a master. He knew that the president of the United States, guilty or not, was being destroyed by Hoover’s jilted heir.
This was enormously important news. The Washington Post decided not to report it. The story of Deep Throat was well-known, but what lurked behind the identity of Deep Throat was not. This was not a lone whistle-blower being protected by a courageous news organization; rather, it was a news organization being used by the FBI against the president, and a news organization that knew perfectly well that it was being used against the president. Protecting Deep Throat concealed not only an individual, but also the story of the FBI’s role in destroying Nixon...The Washington Post created a morality play about an out-of-control government brought to heel by two young, enterprising journalists and a courageous newspaper. That simply wasn’t what happened. Instead, it was about the FBI using The Washington Post to leak information to destroy the president, and The Washington Post willingly serving as the conduit for that information while withholding an essential dimension of the story by concealing Deep Throat’s identity.

RTWT

Via Donna, funny photo essay on Bill Clinton's plans for the Obama White House