The Mound of Sound

I’m not going to vouch for claims made by American commanders in Iraq. There have been so many promises, so many arguments, assurances and assertions from the succession of these types and so few of them have come to pass. However there was one yesterday from the current commander in theatre, General George Casey, that deserves to be considered. Despite evidence of the ongoing insurgency, growing civil war and instability of the Iraqi government, General Casey pronounced yesterday that American forces might be able to be out of Iraq within a year. Really? What are we to read into Casey’s claims?

American forces have been in Iraq for three years and victory continues to stay out of their reach. General Casey points to a supposed drop in the number of deaths in Baghdad due to suicide bombers following redeployment of American forces into the capital as clear evidence of success. I’ll tell you who doesn’t believe that, General Casey.

General Casey knows that fighting an insurgency with a conventional military force is like herding cats. He also knows that conventional military forces have an awful track record in defeating insurgencies. The terrorists that the U.S. forces are grappling with are really mostly insurgents. Suicide bombers are terrorists, sure. They aren’t the insurgency, that’s home grown. Insurgents are in it for the long run. Against their conventional enemy the insurgents can’t hope to match them in numbers, certainly not in firepower, or in mobility, artillery or air support. Insurgents have to take maximum advantage of what they do have going for them and their greatest edge comes from holding the initiative. Because the insurgents are locals, they can vanish into the civilian population. That allows them to decide when and where they will offer combat and when they will refuse combat and disappear. Every now and then the other side gets lucky or gets a useful tip and tracks down some of the insurgents but delivering an outright defeat to them is as challenging as alchemy. So General Casey knows that throwing out body counts as evidence of victory over the insurgents is essentially meaningless.

What then are we to make of Casey’s claim that American troops might be out of Iraq within a year? This is when it can be really useful to cast around for other snippets of information that may shed a bit of light.

Start with the “Guns or Butter” dilemma that seems to be catching up with the Bush administration. This refers to the choice all leaders must make between spending their treasury on civil programmes or on the military. Since he became president, Shrub has been trying to play this both ways. He wants his guns and he wants his butter in the form of tax cuts. No other wartime president has ever cut taxes in the midst of conflict. Iraq has become a great hole into which the U.S. treasury is hemorrhaging. Meanwhile, the military is getting squeezed.

Michael Hirsh, in an article in the online version of Newsweek, reports that three years of sand and heat have worn out a lot of the American army’s tanks and humvees and other vehicles. Now the military is having to resort to cannibalizing the vehicles remaining stateside to furnish spares to keep the stuff in Iraq operating. It’s pretty obvious this sort of thing is a band aid solution at best. Meanwhile, some of the troops now being sent to Iraq are on their third tours there. Their level of mission fatigue is growing. At the same time, Pentagon officials are beginning to worry about the vaunted “Green Zone”, the fortification behind which the American command and the wobbly Iraqi government shelter from the insurgency,and whether it can hold. It’s said that some are now calling it the “Yellow Zone.”

There is one thing, perhaps only one, you can count on from Incurious George: he won’t rescind his tax cuts. That means he won’t open the money taps for the treasury. That also means he will have to fund this enormously costly adventure on debt. That little obligation will be left to future generations to repay. Patriotism or lunacy?

Times may be getting tougher for the American military in Iraq but they still have a few good fights left in them. The question is how best to use that remaining capability? Do you deplete it in Iraq which may already be a lost cause? Do you use it elsewhere?

Washington’s focus on Iran has increased mightily over the past few months. It is widely reported that Bush wants his presidential legacy to be the defanging of Iran through the destruction of that country’s nuclear programme and the toppling of its theocratic rulers. The spin mills are going flat out. The intelligence is being fixed and spoonfed to Congress and the American people. The juggernaut is picking up speed.

At first, Don Rumsfeld wanted to eliminate Iran’s nuclear capability by strategic bombing. He even mused about using mini-nuclear bombs to take out underground facilities. The trouble is that the pentagon just doesn’t have enough intelligence as to what Iran has and where to pull that off. The alternative is to use America’s awesome air power to support a land intervention.

One of the strongest arguments about attacking Iran has been the peril that could be faced by U.S. forces in Iraq from a popular uprising against them. One way to safeguard American forces from that threat would be for them not to be in Iraq but, perhaps, in Iran. Using the already deployed troops and equipment against neighbouring Iran makes a lot more sense than raising a fresh force in the U.S. and then shipping the troops and vehicles over. Besides, Bush is nearing his 2-year countdown. He doesn’t have enough time remaining in his presidency to start this all over from scratch. There is also the very real risk of Congress falling to the Democrats this November and seeing his plans thwarted from Capital Hill.

If Bush really does want to build his legacy on Iran, he doesn’t have time to lose. Wars don’t just start overnight, unannounced. That nonsense pretty much ended with Pearl Harbour. There are plenty of signs that war is coming. One of these is the insertion of special forces teams into the intended battlefield to collect intelligence, establish contact with dissidents and identify targets. It’s a poorly held secret that U.S. special forces teams, possibly British also, have been roaming around Iran for several months already.

The U.S. President has put himself inside a reality bubble from which he can spin some pretty wild fantasies. One of them is the belief that an attack on Iran will trigger a popular uprising by local, pro-democracy dissidents. Unfortunately that too seems to be a fantasy. Dissidents who have spoken out have made clear that they are Iranians first and any foreign intervention will only drive them back into the arms of the government to resist the invaders. That doesn’t mean that Little Georgie will accept this reality.

My guess is that Bush doesn’t know which route to go but he wants to keep the military option very much open. He’s going to do the Security Council theatre again but he’s already shown that he’s not willing to be constrained by international law.

Iran presents Bush with a number of bad options and no good options. He has pretty much squandered his political capital as far as the Middle East is concerned and the Israeli debacle in Lebanon has undercut his military influence also. America’s best option is to negotiate with Iran and yet Bush’s many blunders have undermined his bargaining power and just when he needs it most.

Bush may view attacking Iran as the only route to saving Israel from nuclear attack. He certainly believes that he is the only one with the courage to take on Iran and that whoever succeeds him won’t be willing to do it. Iraq has proven to be an utter shambles and Shrub doesn’t want that to be his legacy. To avoid that shame, he’ll have to pull a rabbit out of his hat and Iran is probably the only bunny on his radar.

We still can’t tell where George is going to go with this but we can focus on his options and look for the little signs that give all away. I’m guessing but I think we’ll know within the next few months pretty much how this is going to play out. To use the American’s own scale, I’d put us at Condition Orange – Elevated right now.

By the way, keep an eye on Britain’s force redeployment from last week. Where did they go when they abandoned their base in Amara? Down into the oil fields and Iranian border areas of Maysan province. It could all be coincidence but it’s worth watching.

Remember the Great London Bombing Scare, the dastardly al-Qaeda plot, no liquids in carry-on bags, full cavity body searches? Well, according to a Brit named Craig Murray, we might have just been punk’d.

A word about Craig Murray (of www.craigmurray.co.uk). Craig had been relatively obscure until he shot his big mouth off about torture. At the time, Murray was Britain’s ambassador to Uzbekistan which was then a ‘partner’ in America’s War Without End on Terror. Murray was given his cards (in England, that’s a way of saying ‘you’re fired’) because he refused to remain mum about Uzbekistan President Karimov’s fascination with torture.

Lip off to Karimov and that means you’re an Islamic terrorist and then you’re really in hot water. No, I mean it – hot water. Karimov has a reputation of waging the War Without End on Terror by immersing his opponents in boiling water. That’s right, he pops them in the cauldron just like lobsters. Anyway, at the time of Murray’s outspokeness, Uzbekistan was considered America’s unsinkable aircraft carrier in the region and Rumsfeld was pumping hundreds of millions of dollars into their army. Murray just had to go.

Craig Murray is still mouthing off which you’ll see if you go to his website. He’s even really skeptical about the Great London Bomb Plot. He thinks the whole thing was stage-managed to help prop up the increasingly unpopular Blair and Bush administrations. Among his contentions:

– “None ofthe alleged terrorists had made a bomb. None had bought a plane ticket. Many did not even have passports which, given the efficiency of the UK Passport Agency, would mean they couldn’t be a plane bomber for quite some time.

– “In the absnece of bombs and airline tickets and, in many cases, passports, it could be difficult to convince a jury beyond reasonable doubt that these individuals intended to go through with suicide bombings, despite whatever rash stuff they may have bragged about in internet chat rooms.

– “Many of those arrested had been under surveillance for over a year – like thousands of other British Muslims. Nothing from that surveillance had indicated the need for early arrests.”

Murray criticizes the dodgy ‘intelligence’ obtained by Pakistani interrogators known for their ability to make “people sing like canaries. As I witnessed in Uzbekistank you can get the most extraordinary information this way. Trouble is it always tends to give the interrogators all they might want, and more, in a desperate effort to stop or avert torture. What it doesn’t give is the truth.”

Time hasn’t dimmed Murray’s skepticism: “Still, after eight days of detention, nobody has been charged with any crime. For there to be no clear evdience yet on something that was ‘imminent’ and ‘Mass murder on an unbelievable scale’ is, to say the least, rather peculiar.”

Here’s something else that really smells about the London Bombing Plot. Until this dastardly plot was thwarted, you and I and everyone else, could take liquids aboard aircraft in our carry-on luggage. Our airlines weren’t concerned, our security services weren’t concerned. No problem.

What doesn’t make any sense is why all those who are supposed to protect us were so complacent. In 1995, that’s right eleven years ago, al-Qaeda hatched a plot in the Philippines to use these same liquid explosives to make bombs to be brought aboard U.S. bound airliners in carry-on luggage. The volatile liquids were to be disguised in contact eye lens solution bottles. Twelve airliners were to be attacked. The whole thing fell apart when fire broke out in the plotters’ apartment base. They fled but they left behind a laptop that survived the fire and it contained all the details of the scheme.

That was 1995. Why then, especially after the attacks of September 11, 2001, was nothing, absolutely nothing, done to close off this known threat to the travelling public? Am I the only one who finds it curious that our media aren’t asking that obvious question?

By the way, you can confirm the details of the 1995 plot by a quick Google search. Just type in “1995 Manilla al-Qaeda bomb plot” or reasonable facsimile. Or just go to www.airliners.net or any of the many other credible sites with all the details on this. This isn’t the stuff of conspiracy nuts but and yet nobody is asking the question.

There was an item in today’s news out of Venezuela where Chavez claims the U.S. government is channelling millions to fund opposition movements. Turns out he’s right. USAID (sure, that’s a bit of an oxymoron but let’s not go there right now) has a branch called the Office of Transition Initiatives. Now it just happens that the OTI sends its millions to countries the U.S. doesn’t much like, countries such as Cuba and Venezuela.

I e-mailed USAID to find out what they were doing to fund pro-democracy movements in places such as Saudi Arabia and Egypt. Within a very short time I had a reply, sort of. They really dodged the bullet on Saudi Arabia and Egypt, but did enlighten me as to their Agency’s ‘Four Goals’:

– Strengthening the Rule of Law and Respect for Human Rights
– Promoting More Genuine and Competitive Elections & Political Processes
– Increased Development of a Politically Active Civil Society
– More Transparent and Accountable Governance

noting (wryly?) that, “progress in all four areas is necessary to achieve sustainable democracy.”

This is all too Orwellian for me. Whatever happened to “Physician, heal thyself”?

The favourite games of airlines these days are shedding employees and gutting their pension plans. According to The Smoking Gun (www.thesmokinggun.com) Northwest Airlines has taken the art of showing employees the door to a new level. Northwest’s latest layoffs were given a booklet containing 101 tips on how to save money. Included were gems such as, “don’t be shy about pulling something you like out of the trash.” For more gutbusting laughs, you can read all 101 tips at the Smoking Gun website.

It seems inevitable that each generation makes many choices that bear directly on the generation that follows. The First World War was spawned by the rival empires that started the whole business in motion decades earlier. Second World War – another generation drawn into mass destruction due to the unsettled business left by their parents. Cold War – several subsequent generations saddled with the result of the unresolved issues of their parents’ war. Now we’ve got the War Without End (WWE), the Global War on Terror, and nobody can tell where that is going to wind up.

Today our world is making massive, breathtaking strides. We have vastly extended lifespans from just a few generations earlier. We have been blessed with great innovations and conveniences. We know that, as surely as dawn follows night, tomorrow there’ll be even more but at what price?

It’s barely taken two generations for us to forget how to make our own food. If the grocery store shelves fall bare, we starve. Don’t delude yourself about that. Imagine what would happen if the gas pumps went dry tomorrow? What if there was a great, electro magnetic pulse (EMP) and all the computers went down for hundreds, possibly thousands of miles? Hospitals wouldn’t function, transportation would come to a sudden halt, communications would be completely disrupted, you wouldn’t have electricity in your house and your food would spoil.

This may sound apocalyptic, the stuff of science fiction novels, but it’s not. It is part of our everyday reality. Mankind has not adapted socially to the advances and changes in our technology and this whole process continues to speed up. All of us need to start paying attention, really paying attention to how our world is being transformed. We may be able to get through this relatively unscathed but the decisions we take or avoid taking may shape the future for our grandchildren and may even determine their fate.

There needs to be a full and informed debate on the role science plays in our society and how we want it to serve us in the future. We need to examine the privatization of science and the merits of open scientific research in the public sector. We need to start paying attention to the genuine dangers of uncontrolled scientific development and how we can regulate and monitor the genies that are already out of their bottles. We need to realize that, if we don’t get a handle on these issues, we risk going back to something resembling the dark ages, the rejection of enlightenment and forfeiture of liberal democracy.

I know this is a real bummer but we need to take a look at some of the issues that may, not necessarily will, arise in the coming decades. Some of these dangers are actually quite remote, others are already building. The best catalogue of these things I have read has been written by Sir Martin Rees. Rees is a Cosmologist and, no, that doesn’t mean he does makeup and nails. A cosmologist is an astronomer who studies the universe in its entirety and, by extension, man’s place in it. No, these people aren’t kooks, they’re real scientists. Sir Martin Rees is Royal Society Professor at Cambridge, a Fellow of King’s College, and England’s Astronomer Royal. Put another way, this guy is really bright.

In his book, Our Final Hour, Perseus Book Group, 2003, Rees explores a variety of potential dangers that man ignores at his peril. Terrorism is an obvious starting point. We’re already living with the proliferation of nuclear weapons. How long before they’re used and what do we need to do to actually minimize that risk? The more likely danger of bioterrorism and controlling the spread of this knowledge and the possession and trade in pathogens.

A very interesting part of Rees discussion focuses on the privatization of science and the decline of government-funded, “pure” research. Government has all too gladly offloaded scientific research to the private sector. The dimensions of this run pretty deep. For example, corporate research is usually product oriented, profit driven and extremely secretive. What happens to a scientific breakthrough that could be of immense benefit to society in many areas beyond the corporation’s focus? Is it good enough to let corporations keep this knowledge buried? Should they be placed under some obligation of disclosure?

Another aspect of this is that scientific research can sometimes lead to some horrible mistakes such as “bio-error” (as distinguished from bioterror). There’s an awful lot of genetic work going on today. What if some private lab’s research reaches the point of recklessness and somehow escapes? It has happened. We need to ensure that we devise controls to keep it from happening again.

Are we doing enough to maintain ourselves as masters of our own technology? Consumer-driven technology has already long passed the stage of convenience into the reality of dependence. The very food that sustains us travels hundreds, sometimes thousands of miles to reach our grocery stores. If that transportation link becomes severed, how much food is available locally to sustain your community? The answer is obvious: not nearly enough.

Has personal privacy become a quaint notion from the past? It wasn’t all that long ago that people treasured their privacy and became quite upset if it was violated. Then we began adopting technologies such as credit cards and computers and, gradually, our daily life from what we eat to what we buy to our medical records was fed into a giant data stream. Surveillance has spread rapidly through our cities and towns. Closed circuit cameras keep a constant vigil on our streets and in buildings. With modern face recognition software it will soon be possible to put your name to your picture as you transit through the camera’s eye. Then that too will go into the data stream. Just how much of you do you want someone knowing and who do you want to have that knowledge? How can it be used to help you and how can it be used against you? Should our government or the courts control access to this powerful pool of personal information?

Can democracy adapt and survive the technological, scientific and social changes the future will bring? If so, how will it and how will we have to adapt to ensure that democracy still serves our interests as individuals as well as members of societies and a community of nations?

We need to have these discussions and debates now and we need to have the broadest possible participation in them. We need to start getting you and everyone like us involved, at least to the point where they can make an informed decision of whether they want to participate. So many questions but one thing is sure. If we don’t discuss these things soon, if we choose not to make these decisions, sooner or later something will happen that will lead to them being made for us. If you doubt that, take a look at America’s Patriot Act.

Dear Stevie:

Maybe you should stop singing the praises of your buddy Bush for a little while, at least until this blows over. There’s some news just out that suggests the U.S. isn’t really the super nation as you would have Canadians believe. Seems it’s actually pretty second rate.

The latest Luxemburg Income Study shows that, when it comes to poverty levels, America is the worst of the 16-wealthiest nations. The U.S. scores that honour for child poverty levels also. Hmmm.

Remember when you told those American right-wing wackos that, “Canada is a Northern European welfare state in the worst sense of the term, and very proud of it”? Guess what country had the lowest overall poverty rate? You’re not going to like this – it was Finland.

The United States is still very much Number One – on defense spending. Maybe you can make something out of that.

The United States also spends more, per capita, for health care than any other nation. Trouble is, fully 16 per cent of Americans have no health insurance whatever. Plenty more have only partial insurance. America remains Number One for bankrutpcies triggered by medical expenses. Americans are well down the list (behind all those Northern European welfare states) on longevity and dead last on infant mortality. Where does all that funding go? Oh yeah, to the H.M.O.s that administer the ‘for profit’ industry. Oh dear, better drop that one.

As for productivity, the Holy Grail of Wild West conservatism, America was only fifth out of sixteen even though it holds Number One spot for most weeks of work. Guess who came first? Why it was those horrible, Surrender Monkeys, the French.

So maybe this would be a good time to turn to other issues, why not crime? Lets scare the hell out of the people and maybe this will all go away.

Ah Steve, it’s me again.

You should know that the word is getting out. The old scam isn’t working any more. All those NASCAR dads are beginning to realize they’ve been getting the shaft. Some think our own people are starting to see through all this.

These last five years have been great in the U.S., at least if you were already rich. These years have been dandy, what the investment bank UBS (Union Bank of Switzerland) has called “the golden era of profitability.” Gross domestic product and productivity have shot up. The rich just keep getting richer.

The not-so-rich? Well, they haven’t done so well. Actually, despite the pace at which the economy has grown, the median hourly wage for Americans has fallen by 2 per cent since 2003. But look at the bright side, wages and salaries now make up the lowest share of America’s gross domestic product since they started keeping records in 1947.

Keeping the plebs quiet has been an endless struggle since the dawn of civilization. Roman emperors had to stage gigantic gladitorial bloodbaths in the forum to distract their people. Bush got by for years by kicking Muslim ass. Oh for those good old days. Now, of course, those Muslims are really kicking back, the American people are getting tired of it and the neo-cons don’t have anything else to keep their minds off how much poorer they’re getting in the Land of Prosperity.

The little people in America are getting tired of being left out and they’re feeling the squeeze. According to the Economic Policy Institute (www.epi.org/content.cfm/pm110):

– indebtedness of the average American household has increased 42 per cent over the past five years.
-level of debt as a percentage of after-tax income has never been higher, more than twice what it was 30-years ago.
-personal savings rate is at a negative, the first time since the Great Depression.
-family health costs have risen between 43-45 per cent from 2000 to 2003.
-employers are cutting back on health insurance coverage. The percent of people with employer-funded health insurance fell last year for the fourth consecutive year.

Sounds like all the fixins’ for a revolution, eh Stevie? Maybe it’s time not to praise Caesar but to bury him.

The New York Times ran an editorial this morning lamenting the rise of pessimism in the U.S. as essentially un-American. The article noted that Americans were really optimistic when their forces invaded Iraq, believing that this heralded a new and better day for the Middle East and the world. That optimism was transformed into abject pessimism by the fiasco of Iraq and the devastation of Hurricane Katrina.

To me, pessimism is a surrender to helplessness. We’re doomed, why bother? I think there’s a fine but very important line that separates pessimism from realism. Realism is an acknowledgment that there are problems, plenty of them, but problems to be confronted and remedied.

The writings on this blog can seem awfully pessimistic. They may be gloomy, angry, worried but from the reality of me writing them and you reading them, there is just that little bit of impetus for change – and the belief that we can change these things lies in the beating heart of true optimism.

It’s been a long time coming. For years the far right has been fanning the flames of privatization from education to health care and beyond. They point to bureaucratic bungling and inefficiency to make their case for smaller, less-capable government.

Charter schools are institutions that have broken free of the usual, public school board system. They operate autonomously, typically with per-capita government funding. The idea is that, freed of the bureaucratic shackles of the public school system, charter schools will produce a higher standard of education.

It all sounds good in theory, especially if you have that ideological bent, but it has sure fallen short in practice. A U.S. federal study has found that charter school students generally score significantly worse in both reading and math than their public school counterparts. The concept of charter schools is that they are to be measured by performance and they must outperform the public schools. Hmm, what now? This is a red meat issue for the far right so don’t expect much reaction.

The Gun and the Olive Branch, David Hirst, Nation Books, 3rd edition, 2003.

Imagine peace in the Middle East, an end to the Arab-Israeli conflicts. Now that you’ve imagined it, you can forget the whole idea. To reach any peaceful resolution we would first have to sweep aside the blinding fog of myth and deception that has so powerfully been used to warp our views and understanding of this dilemma that threatens all of us.

How many of us know that the roots of this violence began in the 1880’s with a Rabbi in France? Would you be surprised to learn that, from the outset, the Zionist movement fully intended to use violence to drive the Palestinians from the new Jewish homeland? That’s right, ethnic cleansing. Can you believe that all of us, especially in North America, have been given a highly deceptive account of these conflicts that villifies the Arabs and almost completely buries anything that reveals Israeli aggression and persecution of the Palestinians?

I am not a holocaust denier. I am not an anti-semite. I deeply resent those who use these slurs to intimidate others who are justifiably critical of the state of Israel and its deplorable treatment of the Palestinian people.

Like so many of us in the West, I was solidly pro-Israel in the years following the 1967 war. I began to have doubts when I met a Canadian army officer who had just returned from peacekeeping duties on the Gaza Strip. He told me we were being brainwashed by our media about the reality of this conflict and that the great majority of the ceasefire violations they dealt with were the doing of Israel, not the Arabs.

The Palestinian subjugation lies at the very heart of Islamic terrorism and continues to unite Muslims, Shia and Sunni, as perhaps no other issue can. If America genuinely wants to wage war on terrorism, this is the only place that war can be fought and won. Washington alone has the necessary influence to compel Israel to end this persecution and thereby undermine the terrorist cause. That, of course, is not going to happen.

America props up the myth of Israel as victim. The role and power of Christian fundamentalism, of itself, is sufficient to keep Washington on this delusional course. These powerful religious nutbars (yes, I called them dangerous lunatics) firmly believe that biblical prophesy requires Israel to conquer all of Palestine as a precondition to the Second Coming and the utter fantasy that they refer to as The Rapture. So long as these key players remain devotedly delusional this dark farce can’t and won’t be stopped.

I’m not going to take you through the roughly 600-pages of The Gun and the Olive Branch. I will, however, present a sampling of the reviews:

Hamid Karzai is a curious fellow. Resplendent in his elegant robes and armed with an engaging and sophisticated manner, he is Washington’s handpicked guy who became President of troubled Afghanistan albeit not without a lot of American influence. Mr. Karzai’s job has never been easy. He may have taken on one of the most challenging presidencies in the history of democracy. Unfortunately, the job may be too much for him.

Shortly after the 11 September, 2001 atrocities, the United States helped in toppling the existing Taliban government. Washington chose, perhaps understandably, to depict this as a great American feat of arms but the victory was really very little to boast about. The Taliban and the rebel, Northern Alliance had been at each others’ throats for years. They had fought to the point of exhaustion with each side content to dig trenches and fire a few volleys of artillery at each other in a very static war. Rolling up the Taliban was, in these circumstances, pushing on an open door. So rapidly did the Taliban collapse that Washington tried, albeit unsuccessfully, to slow the rebel advance on Kabul and Kandahar. In the wake of all the confusion and disarray the Taliban crept away to the traditional heartland of Afghan insurgency, the border region adjoining Pakistan.

The U.S., however, lost sight of the goal of destroying al-Qaeda. It had the terrorist mob in disarray and their leaders, including bin Laden, run to ground in the mountains of Tora Bora. But the White House lost sight of the real target and turned its attention instead on Baghdad and the rest is history. The Taliban retreated, regrouped, rearmed and returned to the fight, currently being waged against various NATO forces including Canada. al-Qaeda, by contrast, was even more flexible. It responded with disturbing efficiency to the situation and morphed itself into a much more decentralized organization spread out even more widely throughout the world. It no longer depends on central command. Some even believe bin Laden is in a form of semi-retirement, no longer at the helm.

By turning its attention and resources toward Iraq, America undercut their man Karzai. For some time he was derisively called the Mayor of Kabul, mocking his lack of authority beyond the capital city limits. In the provinces, control was held by the warlords in conjunction with the drug lords and, increasingly, by a resurgent Taliban. All of these forces combined to render Karzai’s administration largely impotent. President Karzai had no choice but to cede powers to some pretty nasty types from the warlords and criminal ranks.

The dream of a secure, secular and democratic Afghanistan was shattered with the loss of American resolve. Karzai’s government came to be beholden to the warlords and drug lords as his situation became more untenable. The justice system, indeed much of the national government, came to be seen as corrupt. The opium trade, suppressed rather ruthlessly by the previous Taliban government, flourished again. Afghanistan remains a failed state, only with different management.

One more or less dodgy election does not a democracy make and that holds true certainly for Afghanistan. Even if we could wipe out the Taliban, disarm the warlords and send the drug barons scurrying for cover, Karzai needs to hold up his end or there’s really nothing left worth saving.