Corrections

The last sentence of my last post looks just a day later to be pretty off the mark. After reviewing a bunch of posts on Steve Coll's blog, it appears that McChrystal's counterinsurgency strategy is to create outposts of government control around major cities, "ink blots." In order to police the country, one would need at least 500-600,000 more troops. Needless to say, we cannot afford that.

Yesterday, I was reading Juan Cole's Engaging the Muslim World. Cole is a professor of history at Michigan and was often interviewed during the Iranian protests. This is a wonderful counterpoint to much of the Muslim-bashing that goes on here. He makes the point that it is unlikely that a foreign military force could repress the rebellious Pashtun tribes in the south anyway. And many of the tribal regions do not want a strong central government ruling them. He also points out that our attempts to eradicate opium production robs many in the poorer regions of their means of livelihood. One in seven Pashtun farmers in the Helmand region who saw their poppy crops destroyed reported that they had to sell one of their children as a result. He also points out that a massive number of foreign troops in the area may just make it a magnet for radical Islamists. However, his bottom line is that what Afghans need is international aid and an intensive strengthening of good governance, i.e. Karzai needs to get rid of corrupt officials in areas of government control.

He also has an interesting chapter countering what he calls the Wahhabi myth, to which I may be susceptible. While private funds were given to madrasses in Pakistan who preach violence, the government of Saudi Arabia has been an ally. He also has some very important things to say about our attitudes about other Arab countries, including Pakistan, that are not based on facts. One is that Pashtuns were not primarily radicalized by these madrasses and that Pakistanis have overwhelmingly voted against Islamist parties. There are also a lot of good points about how the Bush administration made things worse in this part of the world. Arabs have good reasons to feel anxiety about U.S. presence, given our history of military intervention and the fact that they sit on most of the world's readily available oil as well as huge deposits of natural gas. But all that is for another day. I need to think about something else for awhile.

I started reading This Time is Different by Kenneth Rogoff and Carmen Reinhart and How Markets Fail by John Cassidy. The first is a study of financial failures over the last 800 years. The beginning was very good, but I may skip to the last part about our current situation. One has to ask the question of whether we can keep incurring more debt as a government. Cassidy's book looks to be more about the ideas that have led us into this situation. But there is never near enough time or energy to read everything that is interesting. It is instructive, however, to see how my views can change from one day to the next. I don't see how so many people can express the amount of certainty they seem to have about their opinions. I guess it causes too much anxiety for them to appreciate how little they really know.