The new approach to fighting the Taliban calls for building up local Afghan forces – militias and tribal levies. While this is a welcome departure from the neglect and reliance on massive firepower of past years, the approach will face many obstacles.

Local forces, from the Soviet occupation to the present, have not worked well with the Afghan national army. Preferring to remain in their districts, many Afghans choose service in local militaries, presenting personnel problems for the army. Militias are resented for draining military resources better allocated, in the army’s view, to them. Attempts over the years to amalgamate militias and army have met with failure.

We may never know the true vote count in the recent elections and it’s almost irrelevant now. Debate has ended, sides have been drawn, and a test of power, not votes, is underway. Over the last two days, in the face of serious yet restrained repression, street demonstrations are weakening. Relying largely on students and other young people, the opposition has only limited political potential. Maintaining support from military/paramilitary organizations and from important demographic groups, hardline clerics are still in control.

The opposition has not been successful in mobilizing broad support – nothing on the order of what ousted the shah in 1979. Middle-class participation today is in evidence, though limited in numbers and enthusiasm. The urban poor were important in the driving out the shah, but today they are more sympathetic to traditionalist appeals by Ahmadinejad and the clerics. For a decade or more before 1979, the urban poor had found affinities and social support in Islamic study circles, which led them into the massive street demonstrations that ushered in Khomeini’s return. In recent years Ahmadinejad has played to them with flamboyant speeches and generous expenditures – as he did with rural dwellers, who in any event are far from the centers of recent political action in Tehran, Isfahan, Shiraz, and other cities.

Iran has a perplexing form of government. There are elections – contested ones with candid debate, as this year’s campaign showed – which allow the public to register its views. On the other hand, candidates can be excluded from the ballot and the president’s actions are circumscribed. Above the ballot and the presidency loom a Guardian Council and Supreme Leader. Neither name betokens commitment to democracy and many people feel last Friday’s election was fixed.

The 2009 election had several candidates but only two, the reformer Mir-Hossein Mousavi and the conservative Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, were seen as having any chance of winning. The results show Ahmadinejad trouncing Mousavi, 63% to 34%, and this has led to charges of fraud in and out of Iran. Polling data are invoked that showed Mousavi ahead, sometimes by a wide margin, though sometimes by a nose. But many polls showed Ahmadinejad with a wide lead.

Three demographic groups contend in the political system and on the cultural landscape. The generation that came of age during World War Two, now in its late years, controlled the presidency and much of public life, from John F. Kennedy’s election in 1960 until George Bush, Sr’s defeat in 1992 – a thirty-two year run. The baby boomers, thus far, have enjoyed a much shorter period – only sixteen years, from Bill Clinton’s election in 1992 until Barack Obama’s last year.

Despite their numbers and a cultural hegemony that would have put off Antonio Gramsci, the baby boomers are beginning to be pushed aside. They are not as geriatric as the WW2 generation – after all, they eat low-carb foods and work out occasionally – but they command much less respect. Obama (b. 1961, after the baby boom according to most demographers) outclassed a handful of boomers in the primaries and in the election overwhelmed the seventy-two-year-old John McCain, who was neither WW2 nor baby boomer but who might better fall in the latter category owing to his service in Southeast Asia.

In February the government of Pakistan and the Pakistani Taliban (TTP) came to an agreement whereby the government accepted the latter’s imposition of Islamic law in parts of the North-West Frontier Province (NWFP) in exchange for a ceasefire. Few thought the agreement would last long and indeed it soon fell apart – because of government support for US Predator strikes, according to TTP leader Baitullah Mehsud. This raises new questions about the future of Pakistan and US/NATO operations in Afghanistan.

On announcing the end of the agreement, Mehsud sent his bands south, toward the political and military centers of Islamabad and Rawalpindi. In so doing, he let passion override strategy and badly damaged the TTP cause. Their thrust into the Punjab heartland accomplished what has only rarely and ephemerally happened in Pakistan: agreement between civilian and military leadership. The rancorous politicians and generals saw the sortie as a challenge to the existence of Pakistan, and struck back.

American politics is like a book. Usually our players are too plodding to give us a taut political thriller. We’ve had a cheap western and a charlatan romance in recent times. Our intelligence personnel are too witless for a decent espionage story. But foreshadowing there is and I think I’ve seen some lately in the fantasy novel of the American fiscal system that we all began a few decades ago.

The administration’s stimulus package is pumping huge amounts of money into the economy in the hope of countering the economic decline that began last year. While the stimulus is likely to have the desired counter-cyclical effect, the amount of borrowing it requires is likely to present serious problems in a year or so as the debt both parties have racked up over the decades reaches crisis levels. The amount of money in the federal budget dedicated to paying off the debt will soar and creditors will think twice about further lending. They might even put the book down.

A spate of bombings in Iraq has given rise in recent weeks to asking how long US troops must remain in the country. Al Qaeda was thought to be all but eliminated from the Sunni Arab provinces and barely holding on to redoubts in the northern Kurdish provinces. But al Qaeda’s recent bombing campaign has caused some to ask if the US will be able withdraw from Iraq by the end of 2011. That’s the wrong question.

Many forces are pressing for the US to remain in Iraq for the foreseeable future. Kurdish and Sunni Arab minorities, fearful of the Shi’a majority, want protectors and may be able to revise the withdrawal timetable established in last year’s Status of Forces Agreement. Israel and Saudi Arabia see eye to eye on few things but fear of Iran (and perhaps an inordinate fear) is one such thing. Both will use their considerable influence in Washington to keep US troops there as a buffer against Shi’a expansion. The US military, having adopted a “see it through” ideology in the wake of Vietnam (distant though that memory now is), also wants to maintain a presence in Iraq until a stable government is established, though no one can say just when that will be.

Since counterinsurgency was first bandied about in US bureaus and agencies in the early sixties, the idea has been associated with western ideas of economic development and modernization – dissolving a backward traditional society and building a vigorous modern one. In the mind of many American policy makers, it is their nation’s mission in the world to help this process along, inevitable though they believe it to be.

Western and Afghani bureaus must abandon this idea, as sweeping change will be opposed in tribal areas and elsewhere too. In the late seventies the Afghan government embarked on a reform program of redistributing land, bringing education to the villages, and increasing the state’s presence throughout the country to carry through reform – a program that will not strike many outsiders as problematic, resonant as it is with American aid plans dating back to the sixties. The reforms led to opposition and later to open revolt in almost every quarter of the country, which in turn triggered the Soviet intervention and an agonizing war.

Insurgent commander Gulbaddin Hekmatyar has been part of critical events in Afghanistan for over thirty years. In recent months he is said to have been in contact with the Afghan government and US officials, who are courting him as part of efforts to win over insurgent leaders and break up the Taliban’s coalition, which has expanded its presence in southern and eastern Afghanistan in recent years.

Hekmatyar was an engineering student at Kabul University in the seventies and became active in Islamist circles that were flourishing alongside communist ones. Since then he has served as a mujahadin commander, head of a political party (Hizb-i Islami Gulbuddin), ally of American and Pakistani intelligence, two-time prime minister after the ouster of the communist party in 1992, foe of the Taliban government, ex-patriate leader in Iran, and now ally of the Taliban.

Brace yourself when you hear politicians or partisans talk about budget deficits and the national debt. It means you’re about to hear nonsense, hokum, party line, party lying, lying through statistics, or dire prediction of the apocalypse. Dire predictions of the apocalypse might be true but they usually have heaping helpings of the other debris and dissembling. The most annoying and patently false thing said about deficits (the amount the government spends beyond its annual revenue) and the debt (the total of previous unpaid deficits) is that they are the fault of one political party. The responsibility is so manifestly the fault of both the GOP and Democrats that the term “bipartisan effort” should cause you to flinch or reach for your wallet.

Large-scale government spending, along the lines prescribed by Keynes during the Great Depression, is needed today, and desperately so. With consumer spending and private investment stalled, a large government injection into the economy is the only way to avoid a deeper and longer recession or depression. But it will have serious consequences that will only be apparent in about a year. Consequences are not being seriously thought through now, as the administration and the public concentrate understandably on averting imminent disaster.

Inflation
The administration’s stimulus package will borrow an enormous amount of money and inject it into the economy. Simultaneously (though not really part of the stimulus package), the Federal Reserve Board will expand the money supply. Ordinarily, these actions cause inflationary pressure as too many dollars chase too few goods and services. But we are not in ordinary times and inflationary pressures will be held down by weak consumer demand and weak commodity prices. Nonetheless, inflationary pressures will develop as the economy comes back, possibly by early 2010. The stimulus package is immense – and inflationary pressure next year might also be immense.

Events of the thirties are much discussed today as we look back on the period for insight on present-day problems. Both parties today grab “facts” out of the past like breathless contestants on a ruthless game show, eager to go on for the grand prize. As someone from that period used to say, let’s look at the record.

FDR ran for president on a platform of balancing the budget. Yes, balancing the budget. FDR claimed his opponent, Herbert Hoover, was squandering money at a time when belt-tightening was called for.

I accuse the present Administration of being the greatest spending Administration in peace times in all our history. It is an Administration that has piled bureau on bureau, commission on commission, and has failed to anticipate the dire needs and the reduced earning power of the people. (FDR: Sioux City, Iowa, September 1932)

There’s a lot of praise, outrage, hopes for a new age, warnings of impending fascism, and what have you about the administration’s stimulus package. Not much debate, mind you. That would involve finding people who know something about the subject. Well no, it really wouldn’t; it just calls for a TV show and two or more bloviators. Having established a low bar, I will propound my views on the economy. My thumbs are inside the lapels of my tweed sports jacket (with leather elbow patches), and my reading glasses rest casually at the bottom of my nose.

The stimulus package at least has some economic thinking behind it, which is more than we can say about most policy. The economy, my University of Chicago-trained professor taught me a while back, comprises four parts. (Or was it three? No, Gaul was divided into three parts.) So, all the economy comprises four parts.

Two remarkable events took place in recent days involving the war against the Taliban, the Pakistani Taliban, and al Qaeda. Neither event augurs well for US/NATO efforts in Afghanistan, though important opportunities may arise. In any case, recent events signal a new phase in the war in Afghanistan.

First, the Pakistani government negotiated a pact with the Pakistani Taliban in the Swat Valley of the country’s turbulent and increasingly independent North-West Frontier Province. The agreement allows for the imposition of Islamic Law in the region, which the Pakistani Taliban had been imposing on its own through threats and violence. Second, on the heels of the Swat agreement came the announcement that a few previously antagonistic Islamist groups had put aside differences, forged an alliance – the Council of United Holy Warriors – and proclaimed common cause with and allegiance to Mullah Omar, the leader of the Afghan Taliban.

I remember MAD Magazine more and more fondly these days.  It wasn’t just a funny magazine for kids.  It tried to teach us something about modern America and to instill critical ways of thinking about the not-so brave new world we were growing up in.  If cultivated, those ways of thinking served us well, especially over the last decade or two . . . or three. . . .

MAD was brought to the American public by Bill Gaines, a quirky chap who did a few years in the army during World War Two before launching a publishing business in the prosperous, self-congratulatory aftermath that made modern America.  Gaines cautioned us kids that we were in a golden era of hucksterism and jingoism.  We didn’t know what those words meant, but we got it nonetheless.  He was like an eccentric uncle who told us what our parents would not: that things around us weren’t what they claimed to be.  As someone later put it, “Look out, kid.  They keep it all hid.”  MAD knew what it was, where it was hid, and who hid it.  I’ll bet little Bobby Zimmerman read MAD up there in Hibbing, Minnesota.  

Russian geopolitical moves over the last year have been wide-ranging, ominous, and seemingly unconnected. They are often interpreted as evidence of the resurgence of Great Russian chauvinism, which had been dormant since the decline and fall of communism. Many analysts see Russia as bent on reacquiring its empire, and at least suspect a new Cold War is in the offing. But an alternate, less malevolent interpretation might be considered, especially when Russia’s numerous cooperative measures are taken into account, as they often aren’t. Russia likely has a more limited goal: countering the spread of NATO into Eastern Europe.

The 2001 attacks on New York and Washington by a group in the Pakistani military and intelligence network and the ensuing events revealed how poorly they played the region’s famous geopolitical game, which has never had a long-term winner. In late 2001 the Northern Alliance, aided by US air power, rolled up Taliban and al Qaeda positions and seized Mazar-e-Sharif, Kabul, and Kandahar. The ISI’s clients were trapped in distant redoubts and on the verge of annihilation. The ISI claimed to support the US but rescued the Taliban and al Qaeda forces, and airlifted them into Pakistan – Operation Evil Airlift, as an aghast but helpless US special forces witness called it.

The Soviet-Afghan War of the 1980s was a boon for the Pakistani army and its intelligence services (ISI). They emerged from the war with large amounts of US money and equipment and with institutional prestige infused with victory, which reinforced the conviction that they alone knew best how to lead the country. This sense of national mission had theretofore not been weak but it had been based in part on an uncertain foundation: an hysterical reaction to, and the need to deny, the incompetence it had exhibited in wars with India, one of which, in 1971, had led to the loss of East Pakistan and resulted in a national trauma that shapes national thought to this day.

Pakistan might collapse. It faces regional insurgencies, political failures, rising Islamism (in the public and army alike), and reprisals from India over the Mumbai attacks. The trouble in the US’s principal though duplicitous partner in the war on terror is all the more worrisome because it has nuclear weapons. A great deal of Pakistan’s trouble is the fault of its military, which has thwarted political development, supported terrorism, and encouraged Islamism. US foreign policy has played a supporting role as well.

From its inception in 1947, Pakistan was predisposed to military rule. The British colonial army of the subcontinent was drawn predominantly from the Punjab, a region that became part of Pakistan upon independence. From that point on, the Pakistani army was more unified and capable of concerted action than were the political parties. Seeing itself as embodying the nation far more than they did, the army would push aside civilian governments and assume the reins of power when it saw fit. There’s no edifying morality play here. Pakistan’s political parties are corrupt, oligarchic patronage networks that bear considerable blame as well for the bleak situation today.

George Bush, Jr leaves office today, perhaps marking the end of the baby-boomers tenure in the White House. Polling data indicate – confirm, really – almost unsurpassed discontent with his two-term presidency. Barring the unfolding of democracy and westernization in the Middle East (possible, but improbable), future judgments will not be favorable. However, a perspective granted by a decade or two might be somewhat broader in scope though no less dim than the one forming now.

Bush the Younger will likely be remembered for presiding over the country while shortsighted management and large-scale flimflammery pervaded Wall Street, the financial sector, real estate and elsewhere, and while the economy marched toward then leapt into the abyss. A considerable amount of blame will attach to Bush, but poor management and flimflammery predate January 2001 by quite some time – as does idolatrous faith in free trade and in a service-sector economy. Only highly partisan historians will ascribe great blame for the economy to Bush, but there’s no shortage of them.

The US will soon double the number of its troops in Afghanistan from about thirty thousand to sixty thousand, and several other NATO countries will also up their troop levels. The move comes with little surprise and considerable bipartisan support, but with little public discussion of the aims and likely outcomes. Evocative as the move is with similar events in Iraq that are generally (though perhaps uncritically) credited with bringing stability there, it is hoped that a similar outcome will come about in Afghanistan, where the situation has deteriorated badly while US attention has been focused on Iraq and Iran.

At the end of December we look ahead to the new year and try to see what it might bring. Assessments and soothsaying and wild guesses are typically upbeat – a reflection of the holiday festiveness or maybe just too much Jameson in the egg nog. It’s difficult to look ahead to 2009 with much optimism. The recession we are entering will likely deepen and stagnate. Look at the bankruptcies, failures, and foreclosures – all at the beginning. The global picture isn’t so good either. We have a world economy and we will have a world recession. This has been the case since the Europeans set sail centuries ago to trade with and plunder the far reaches of the world, but it’s even more true today. Okay, here’s a little optimism: things might be a lot worse abroad than they will be here.

For a week Perry and I had sworn we weren’t going to the show. It was dawn in the bunker overlooking rows of razor wire, trip flares, and land mines. Perry flicked on the radio already set on the only American station – AFVN, “the voice of the American fighting man,” which crackled in over the hilly terrain that grew into mountains as one neared Cambodia. Freddie Hart was singing “Easy Lovin’,” a country song with a catchy pedal steel lick. We trudged away from the post with the rest of the guys and left it to the local militia for the daylight watch.

We were not going down to Tan Son Nhut to see the Bob Hope show. No way. It would be hokey – part of the old and we thought dying America we had become alienated from and maybe even hostile to. Our tours were a little more than half over, and the recent education had rendered American traditions into stale and distant absurdities. Who better represented those mummeries than Bob Hope. At least that’s what Perry and I thought then.

The scandal involving Illinois governor Rod Blagojevich leaves us with an inescapable and valuable lesson – one that can be carried from political life into personal life. The lesson is not that we cannot trust politicians from Chicago or Crook County. That is well known and I would not waste readers’ time trafficking in the obvious. The lesson is this:

Don’t. . . .

You’ll be sorry. . . .

You’ve been warned.

Why is this so? Well, such hairstyling betokens vanity as surely as smoke does fire, as surely as the Washington Redskins’ management does lousy personnel decisions. Men with neatly-coiffed hair are as concerned with themselves as were Habsburg monarchs, and as concerned with others as Habsburg monarchs were with the chattel who toiled on imperial estates. MNHs are also marketers – of ideals, values, and selves. Those things matter little to them; they fix only on the sales pitch, guile, stump speech, and the deal. Everything’s for sale, except their favorite mirrors and styling gels. MNH’s are always on the make, too. A babe on the arm helps the vanity and smoothes out the deal. And the deal is often a con.

In the next year or so, a hard fact will confront us. The declining income of the middle class will mire the country in a deep, protracted recession. Too many middle-class jobs have disappeared through the exportation of manufacturing and through numerous mergers, and neither monetary policy nor fiscal policy will get us out. We will need policies that break with present-day economic thinking.

One policy would be setting up tariffs, preferably with stipulated reductions over time, that will help US businesses recover or start up. Such policies will come up against formidable ideological opposition. But even a glimpse into economic history will reveal that the GOP – today’s priesthood of free trade – was offering gracious benediction to protective barriers in the nineteenth century and incanting solemn anathemas upon the free-trade Democrats. This should inform us that we are not dealing with timeless truths, only transient business conditions and attendant ideologies. Another objection from the priesthood is that tariffs worsened the Depression as countries retaliated with their own tariffs. Perhaps so, but today the US is practicing what has been mordantly called “unilateral free trade,” while our trading partners all but prohibit the import of many US goods, especially agricultural ones. Accordingly, free trade has been lucrative to some, but a disastrous to working- and middle-class Americans.