We Can’t Make Afghans Accept Karzai Now Eight years. We’ve been in Afghanistan longer than any other war in American history. The party of the president who invaded Afghanistan has been repudiated at the polls. Yet we still haven’t altered the flawed strategy that allowed uneducated tribesmen with outdated weapons to defeat us year after year. We haven’t learned a thing. You can see the myopia in our leaders’ talking points. “Our goal [in Afghanistan] is to disrupt, dismantle, defeat Al Qaeda and its extremist allies,” secretary of state Hillary Clinton told ABC News’ “Nightline.” “But not every Taliban is Al Qaeda. There are people who are Taliban, who are fighting because they get paid to fight. They have no other way of making a living.” So few words. So much stupidity. Where to start? Here: Al Qaeda’s presence in Afghanistan in 2001 was negligible. Al Qaeda was a Pakistani phenomenon. Still is. You’re welcome, have another: Not only is…

It’s 1933 Again. But FDR Lost. NEW YORK—When the economic collapse began a year ago, many Americans took comfort in the historical parallels with the Great Depression. As it had in 1929, the current crisis began under the clueless reign of a Republican, George W. Bush. Universally reviled since his non-response to hurricane Katrina had exposed him and the men around him as both uncaring and incompetent—either one was forgivable, not both—Bush had reacted in the classic cold-blooded Republican form embodied by the president who gave his name to the Hoovervilles. But all was not lost. The Democrats were coming in! Barack “Yes We Can” Obama was running well ahead in the polls. Soon our new FDR would clean up Bush’s mess. In the late fall of 2008 Bush looted the stripped-bare U.S. Treasury one final time. Hundreds of billions of dollars in “bailouts,” this time for the benefit of the banks, insurance companies and automobile manufacturers whose profligate ways…

In Afghanistan, Pull Out Soldiers and Send in Engineers Eight years into the longest war in American history, we’ve learned what doesn’t work in Afghanistan. What will? More troops won’t help. But neither will the prescription now being floated in Washington: maintaining bases of small commando units that could be called upon to wage covert counterinsurgency operations across the border in Pakistan. Now it’s time to fight the war for hearts and minds the way it ought to have been done from the start—instead of hostile troops, Afghanistan needs civil engineers. Stop blowing up wedding parties and start building bridges. Pack away the Predator drones and string up fiberoptic cable. It’s time to give Afghanistan what it needs most, and what Afghans crave: the gift of infrastructure. More than anything else, Afghans need paved roads. The second priority is electricity. Third is telephone service. An Afghanistan possessing these three building blocks of nationhood could modernize its own economy and political…

Why Are Insurers Blocking H1N1 Treatment Prescriptions? I got swine flu. Five days later, I was at death’s door—because my evil insurance company wouldn’t honor my doctor’s prescription. Memo to future revolutionaries: if you require a firing squad for the executives of the Health Insurance Plan (HIP) of New York, I’m handy with a rifle. I wasn’t worried at first. A little sneezing, slightly achy joints. I figured it was my usual bout of fall allergies. There’s usually nothing to do but suffer. But I felt worse each day: achier, more congested, stiffer, headache, fevers. The third night was bad. I went to bed under a pile of comforters, chattering uncontrollably. Then nightsweats. I checked my temperature: 103.7. When your temperature looks like a classic rock station, it’s time to see the doctor. I’ve known my general practitioner for decades. So I pay out-of-pocket to see him even though he’s not on HIP’s list of plan-approved doctors. Hey, what do…

How Many More Must Die for Karzai? “For five years Mr. Karzai was my president,” Ashraf Ghani, an opposition candidate, bemoaned after widespread reports that incumbent Hamid Karzai had used fraud on a massive scale to steal the election. “Now how many Afghans will consider him their president?” Not many. In a country where civil war is the national pastime and five-year-old boys learn how to fire an AK-47, this is not good. But Ghani is asking the wrong question. The real question is, how many Americans will continue to see Karzai as viable–and be willing to continue to pay the price of propping him up? California Senator Diane Feinstein used to support Karzai. “Afghanistan is our beachhead on our war on terror. We cannot lose it, or we lose our war on terror,” she said in 2002. What a difference seven years makes! “I do not believe we can build a democratic state in Afghanistan,” she finally admitted last…

A poll says that 67 percent of Americans don’t understand Obama’s healthcare plan. I’m one of them. It’s not because I don’t pay attention. I’m a news junkie. Could it be that I’m an idiot? If my insurer offered psychiatric coverage I could afford to find out. I’m pretty sure, though, that my friends are smart. I asked my publisher, who runs the oldest publisher of graphic novels in the U.S., whether he understood what Obama’s “public option” was. He didn’t. I asked a teacher, who earned a masters from an Ivy League school. She didn’t either. I asked a bunch of political cartoonists. Neither did they. Obama’s attempt to reform healthcare is all but dead; his polls are dropping. How did Obama turn lemonade into battery acid? Obama PR flack David Alexrod tries to explain that “to make choices is to make some unhappy.” GOP strategist Charles Black counters that the president’s popularity and “good will” doesn’t equate to…

Nazis. Americans are Nazis. We are Nazis. Godwin’s Law be damned–it’s impossible to read the newly-released CIA report on the torture of Muslim prisoners without thinking of the Third Reich. Sadism exists in every culture. A century ago, for example, Western adventurers who visited Tibet reported that the authorities in Lhasa, that supposed capital of pacifism, publicly gouged out criminals’ eyes and yanked out their tongues. But Nazi atrocities were stylistically distinct from, say, the Turkish genocide of the Armenians or the Rwandan massacres of the early 1990s. German war crimes were characterized by methodical precision, the application of “rational” technology to increase efficiency, the veneer of legality and the perversion of medical science. Nazi crimes were also marked by public indifference, which amounted to tacit support. Here and now, only 25 percent of Americans told the latest Pew Research poll that they believe torture is always wrong. “The CIA’s secret interrogation program operated under strict rules, and the rules…

No wonder President Obama won’t stand up for us. He won’t even defend his personal safety! Two weeks ago, a right-wing man protested outside the president’s healthcare meeting in New Hampshire wearing a gun strapped to his leg. Lest we miss his point, he carried a sign that called for the shedding of blood in a new revolution. A week later, a dozen men appeared outside Obama’s appearance in Phoenix brandishing loaded guns. “We will forcefully resist people imposing their will on us through the strength of the majority with a vote,” said one, who carried an AR-15 military-style automatic rifle. You read that right–they threatened to use guns to annul the results of the last election. Cops stood by and watched. The Secret Service did nothing. Strictly speaking, these mooks are allowed to openly carry guns. Which is fine with me. I’m a big fan of the Second Amendment. It is, however, horrifying to watch goons threaten to assassinate…

“What worries me: time and time again,” writes Brendan Skwire in the Philadelphia Weekly about the circuses which are currently passing for Democrats’ town hall meetings on healthcare, “[is that] the needs of the stupid and disingenuous are not only treated as valid concerns, but as the greatest concerns.” Well, yes. This being the United States, one of the most gleefully anti-intellectual nations on earth, stupid people aren’t pathetic dolts to be pitied or perhaps sent to a reeducation camp. They’re the shining example we’re supposed to look up to. Obamacare, whatever it is or was going to be once the President saw fit to share it with the public, is dead. That it would die a dog’s death was predictable, so predictable that I predicted it a couple of months ago. “No one is going to call their Congressman, much less march in the streets, to demand action for a half-measure–or, in this case, a quarter-measure,” I wrote then.…

Obama Still Trying to Define Victory in Afghanistan What if they gave a war and nobody knew why? When the U.S. began bombing Afghanistan in October 2001, America’s war aims were clear: capture or kill Osama bin Laden, overthrow the Taliban government, deny Al Qaeda training camps and a safe haven. Of course, two out of three of these goals were based on lies; both bin Laden and most of Al Qaeda’s camps and personnel were in Pakistan, not Afghanistan. There was also a fourth unmentioned war aim, a lie of omission: lay an oil and gas pipeline from Turkmenistan to Pakistan via Afghanistan.  Still, the Bush Administration deserves credit for articulating clear goals—metrics, in bureaucratese—against which success or failure could be measured. President Obama has rebranded Bush’s Afghan War as his own. Afghanistan, Obama said during the campaign, was the war America should be fighting. And so we are. Obama has dispatched tens of thousands of additional troops to…