The Jenga Election

Pick your perilous metaphor for Barack Obama's re-election chances: A house of cards. A Sword of Damocles. A game of Jenga. The point is the same: the nation's economic growth numbers still seem precariously balanced between just enough for him to win and, perhaps, just too little. And we don't--can't--know which way it's going to fall. Especially when an ill wind from Europe (Greece? Ireland? Spain?) could easily be enough, by itself, to topple the whole delicate structure of his campaign.

With the nation grinding out a historically slow recovery, some political scientists have been suggesting that the economic trend line (upward or downwards) matters more than the absolute numbers of jobless and so forth. Setting aside the electoral college calculus, if the trend is up through election day, Obama wins. If down, Romney.

The problem is, even those trends are hard to see. The new first-quarter GDP estimates from the Bureau of Labor Statistics today add only more confusion, dashing hopes that the recovery is picking up. Don't be surprised if tomorrow's jobless figures do the same. Instead,  the government revised its previous GDP growth estimate from 2.2 percent down to 1.9 percent. That may well be below the level sufficient to further reduce the unemployment rate, currently at 8.1 percent.

Typically this level is said to be about 3 percent GDP growth, if population growth and productivity increases are each at about 1 percent. With productivity down in the last year, and more people dropping out of the workforce in despair, the jobless rate has been dropping bit by bit, even with slow GDP growth. But it remains stuck above eight percent--where it's been for the past 40 months, a record length of time (surpassing the early '80s recession mark of 27 months).

"I think if the jobless number drops below eight percent Obama is in good shape,"  says Harry Holzer of Georgetown University, the former chief economist at the Labor Department. "It's an in-between election. The economy is neither booming nor crashing. The die is going to be cast over the next four months," in terms of jobless trends.

Truth is -- to switch metaphors--this election is starting to feel more like a super-close sports contest than anything else. On any given Tuesday, either Obama or Romney could be the victor.  Like last night's Heat-Celtics game: If only Rajon Rondo had gotten that foul call in overtime, Boston might have eked it out!

Will Obama -- who was no doubt watching that game -- get the sort of break that Rondo didn't? He'll need, at the least, a good call from the officials at the Labor Department.

Barack Obama, Vampire (er, terrorist) Hunter

In a powerful one-two punch, The New York Times and Newsweek have just come out with extensively reported articles demonstrating how personally and deeply involved Obama is with killing terrorists--a lot of terrorists. Even to the point of occasionally taking out innocents. (Both stories are very detailed followups to an article National Journal/Atlantic published a year ago.)

The question is, now that the image of Obama-as-hard-power-president seems to be settling in as conventional wisdom, how will that play at the polls? Recent results, for example the NYT/CBS poll in April, suggest that Obama and Romney are evenly matched when it comes to commander-in-chief credentials. That's actually pretty good for a Democrat, indicating that at worst Obama may have successfully neutralized what has traditionally been a GOP strong point.

Expect a lot more of this hard-power-sell from Obamaland in the months ahead. As we reported some months ago, the Obama camp is gearing up to present the president as the toughest Dem on national security since JFK -- throwing off, at long last, the Vietnam albatross that has weighed the party down since LBJ split the Dems over that unpopular war and Ronald Reagan took up the banner of strong-on-defense. No surprise: both the NYT and Newsweek pieces (the latter is excerpted from a book) indicate that the administration was quite cooperative on the reporting.

What both pieces are missing, however, is a strong sense of the dysfunctionality that also haunts the administration on foreign policy. Obama is keen to run his own foreign policy out of the White House, but unlike, say, Richard Nixon, he has no Kissinger around him, no grand visionary to conceive of and oversee a larger vision (Hillary Clinton is considered mainly an executor of policy and public diplomat). Instead his palace guard consists largely of political aides at his side since his 2008 campaign. The result is while Obama can oversee a tough counterterror strategy, he is lagging in articulating a larger diplomatic strategy in which to embed it, especially in Pakistan and South-Central Asia. 

The commander-in-chief edge probably won't be a decisive issue, but in a too-close-to-call contest it could make a crucial difference come November, especially if there's an "October surprise" of some kind on the terror front that plays to the president's advantage.

Could Holbrooke Have Kept Pakistan From Becoming A Terror State?

Pakistani Prime Minister Yusuf Raza Gilani meets with U.S. special envoy Richard Holbrooke in 2010. (Reuters)

Richard Holbrooke, the late diplomat, would never have let relations between the United States and Pakistan decline to this level, his widow, Kati Marton, said on Friday. "The day after [Osama] bin Laden was killed, Richard would have been on a plane to Pakistan, and he would not have come home until the relationship was mended," Marton, an author and journalist, told me for an article in National Journal. "We never went for a walk in Central Park without calls coming in from Pakistan."

"He knew not only the ISI [Pakistani intelligence] folks, but the generals and all the politicians and dissidents. He crawled into tents in refugee camps," Marton said. "He wouldn't have allowed [this] to happen."

Marton was referring to the freeze in U.S.-Pakistan relations that began after the Obama administration's raid on bin Laden's compound in Abbottabad a year ago -- tensions that may now pose the single biggest obstacle to ending America's longest war. Nominally a U.S. ally, Pakistan has stepped up its support of violent extremists intent on attacking U.S. and NATO soldiers in Afghanistan and undermining stability there. But according to critics in the United States, Europe, and Pakistan, the issue is still being largely shunted aside by Washington out of fear, inertia, and a lack of a strategic vision on the part of the U.S. and NATO.

"It is a failure of diplomacy of the highest order, where we have had the lives of our people at stake," Zalmay Khalilzad, the former U.S. ambassador to Afghanistan and the United Nations, told NJ for the cover story in this week's issue, "Paralyzed by Pakistan." In order to keep the Pakistanis even marginally cooperative, Khalilzad said, "I think frankly we have been too cautious and willing to pay too high a price." 

Before he was forced out of office last year, Pakistan's ambassador to the U.S., Husain Haqqani--who worked closely with Holbrooke--urged U.S. officials to adopt a "holistic" approach to the region that would help wean Pakistan from its military support of Islamists. It never happened. And today, rather than coming up with a new overarching strategic policy for Pakistan and the region that is commensurate with the deep commitments that President Obama and NATO have now made, Washington and other capitals continue to watch, helplessly, as a middle-sized developing country defies a superpower and the NATO alliance with virtual impunity.

"The Americans are completely paralyzed by this situation," said one European diplomat, speaking on condition of anonymity. A senior NATO official also laid the problem on the Americans. "It's quite difficult at times to find a single U.S. policy on Pakistan, much less coordination with others."

White House officials, responding to Marton’s comments, said Friday that the U.S.-Pakistan relationship is mainly poor because of “a series of events that were impossible to foresee but had nothing to do with our policy,” as one senior administration official put it. The incidents began with the diplomatic furor over a CIA contractor who killed two Pakistanis in early 2011 and culminated in the accidental NATO strikes that accidentally killed 24 Pakistani troops last November. That had nothing to do with “poor diplomacy,” the official said.

The administration's paralysis has been evident in an intense, months- long debate over whether to issue an apology to Pakistan over the errant NATO strikes that killed at least 24 Pakistani soldiers last fall, even though several months have passed since the completion of an official Pentagon investigation that partially blamed mistakes made by U.S. forces for the incident, U.S. officials said. The State Department resurrected the idea earlier this year after repudiating the U.S. ambassador to Pakistan, Cameron Munter, early on when he pressed for an immediate apology following the incident last November. But Obama, facing charges of appeasement from Mitt Romney, has hesitated.

Marton said that by the end of the summer of 2010, Holbrooke, before he died suddenly that December at the age of 69, had begun to grow confident that he could deliver a strategic vision for the region that would address the fundamental issues in the U.S.-Pakistan relationship. "I think it was in August, when I caught him with a faraway look, the kind he had when he was working on something in his head. I said, 'Richard what are you thinking about?' He said, 'I think I've got it. I think I can see how all the pieces can fit together.' It looked like he was working a Rubik's cube in his head.... The thing that keeps me awake some nights is that I'm not at all sure he had that conversation with the president."

It's not clear that would have made a difference, however. Widely acclaimed as one of America's most masterful diplomats, having orchestrated the 1995 Dayton peace accord, Holbrooke was intensely frustrated by White House interference, according to observers inside and outside the administration. After being named Obama's special representative for Afghanistan and Pakistan in 2009, Holbrooke was said to have been curtailed by then-National Security Adviser James Jones and a coterie of close aides around Obama. This was especially true when Holbrooke sought to tackle the larger regional issues, in particular the tense relationship between India and Pakistan, which the Pakistani military and ISI use to justify their support of Islamist radicals. The White House denied his request to make India and specifically Kashmir part of his portfolio, although that disputed province, situated between Pakistan and India, has given birth to numerous Pakistan-supported jihadist groups. Nor did Holbrooke get support from the White House when he sought to confront Afghan President Hamid Karzai over corruption, critics say.

After Holbrooke died suddenly, he was replaced by career diplomat Marc Grossman, who is widely considered ineffective and has only provoked back-biting from the State Department's South and Central Asian bureau, where the assistant secretary, Robert Blake, has been largely cut out. "It's all Holbrooke's broken china," says one official. The two leading figures in U.S. policy in the region, Ryan Crocker, the ambassador to Afghanistan, and Gen. John Allen, are already making plans to leave (in Crocker's case, back to retirement, while Allen is expected to be named NATO commander in Europe). Ambassador Munter, described as increasingly agitated over the failure of U.S. policy, has been reassigned.

While Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton is sometimes praised for her approach to the region, having recently proposed a "New Silk Road" to induce Pakistan and other countries to work with Afghanistan, she too is seen as someone who has been largely cut out of policymaking by the White House.

In the meantime, U.S. officials have begun to bluntly acknowledge, as never before, that Pakistan's senior military and intelligence apparatus are supporting and funding the same jihadists who are killing U.S. and NATO soldiers--not just Americans, but also British, French, Italians, and Canadians--and endangering the United States' 10-year, vastly expensive response to 9/11, placing the outcome of America's longest war in danger. Even the U.S. Embassy in Kabul -"which is American soil," U.S. ambassador to Afghanistan Ryan Crocker angrily noted in an interview -- was twice attacked by "Pakistan-based insurgents."

Last September, outgoing Joint Chiefs Chairman Mike Mullen called the terrorist Haqqani network in Pakistan's tribal regions, the suspected culprit behind the Kabul embassy attack, a "veritable arm" of Pakistan's ISI or intelligence service. Mullen, now retired, is said to be working on a book that will defend Holbrooke's diplomatic efforts and criticize the Obama administration.

In recent days, Pakistan's decision to imprison a doctor who helped the United States confirm bin Laden's whereabouts has only highlighted the diplomatic issue.

U.S. and NATO officials remain hesitant about offending Islamabad because of a bedrock fear that, if Pakistan becomes destabilized, its nuclear arsenal could fall into the wrong hands. That caution ruled at the recent NATO summit in Chicago, where all the talk was simply about getting the Pakistanis to permit NATO the use of its overland routes in order to expedite the pullout.

Despite the rampant anti-Americanism in Pakistan, Khalilzad and other critics suggest that one alternative is to issue a "demarche" of the kind the Pakistanis have not been given since right after 9/11, when then-President Pervez Musharraf was delivered a stark choice: Support the war against the Taliban totally, or you're through. Now Pakistan should be confronted with a clear and harsh update of that choice: confront the international community and be turned into a sanctioned pariah, like Iran, in which case the country will lose ground economically and militarily to its arch-rival India. Or, embrace fully anti-Taliban measures and be rewarded with more economic assistance, such as Clinton's New Silk Road, which seeks to turn the region into a commercial hub once again.

"We have to be willing to escalate the pressure, which in my view has to include Pakistan's very difficult economic circumstances," says Khalilzad. "Today I think the Pakistanis can cover only about 10 weeks of imports. We also need to move diplomatically by engaging some key countries they rely on, like China and Saudi Arabia."

Until he died, Marton says, Holbrooke was trying to get the administration to see the larger picture. "He was pushing reconciliation with the Taliban when no one wanted to hear about it," she said. "He knew that ultimately they would have to come to him to negotiate." But now negotiations are going nowhere.

Who's the most powerful man in the world this minute? Alexis Tsipras.

There must be moments at 3 a.m. when Barack Obama lies awake in the White House, not because some new national-security crisis has erupted per Hillary's poke at him in the 2008 primaries (he's actually handled those pretty well, thanks in part to the Navy SEALs), but because he's wondering: Why me? Oh why Lord? I mean, it wasn't enough that I inherited a historically large economic crisis at home, and two long and wasting wars abroad.

Did the frigging eurozone really need to fall apart on my watch too? And five months before the election?

It's not that he hasn't tried to deal with that too. The biggest agenda item at last weekend's G8 summit was the unannounced one, when Obama, joined by a new ally, French President Francois Hollande, energetically sought to persuade German Chancellor Angela Merkel to moderate her ruinous austerity policies. Judging from the outcome, he made no headway. At a meeting in Brussels on Wednesday, Merkel and Hollande--the two leading figures in the eurozone--demonstrated, once again, that they share a relationship on this issue that is approximately as close as Mars and Venus.

And so now, for the third time in as many years, a spring crisis in the eurozone--the worst one yet--could determine the fate of the frail U.S. economy, and Barack Obama's future. In an outcome that is already beyond bizarre, the electoral prospects of the most powerful man in the world could now lie with a 37-year-old radical Greek leftist, Alexis Tsipras, a favorite in the June 17 Greek election, who is engaged in a titanic game of chicken with Merkel over the austerity measures being forced on Greece. If you don't relent, Tsipras is saying, Greece is gone, and with it could go the eurozone. Oh, and the world economy.

All President Obama can do is watch the show. And try to get some sleep.

Obama and Dimon, Romney and Bain: Let's Call the Whole Thing Off

The inconvenient but embarrassing fact that undercut the Obama camp's ad assault on Romney's time at Bain Capital--the GOP candidate was no longer at Bain when it shuttered the steel plant featured in the ad, but an Obama fundraiser was--only pointed up how futile a line of attack this probably is.


In this election, no one's really going to win the game of who's tougher on Wall Street.


Truth be told, Obama can't claim to be in much of a position of moral authority on this issue, as the story that broke this week about his former "favorite banker," Jamie Dimon of JPMorgan Chase, showed. Obama has always blown hot-and-cold about Wall Street--even waiting until the last minute to embrace the "Volcker Rule." And after Dimon admitted that JPMorgan had taken a giant loss on a risky trading position, the president went out of his way to express his respect for Dimon, telling The View:  "JPMorgan is one of the best-managed banks there is. Jamie Dimon, the head of it, is one of the smartest bankers we got and they still lost $2 billion and counting."


No, as I write in an article in this week's National Journal, "The Humbling," the only good that may come out of all this back-and-forth is that it will remind politicians and policy-makers in Washington that, while they weren't watching, the Wall Street lobby has been relentless in poking ripping giant loopholes in financial reform.


Maybe now they'll wake up.  

As Sen. Jeff Merkley, D-Ore., co-author of the Volcker Rule, told me for that story: "For two years Wall Street has had hundreds of lawyers working full time to get the body of regulators to expand every possible loophole. ... People don't understand that the Volcker rule is the closest thing we have to Glass-Steagall," the Depression-era law that separated risk-taking investment banks from commercial banks, Merkley said. "It is a firewall between hedge funds and traditional banking. It stops banks from using deposits that are federally insured or cheaper money from the Fed Discount Window and then gambling with it."

This is not an issue that's going to deliver good political returns for either the Democrat or the Republican (who has vowed to repeal Dodd-Frank). Which makes it all the more sad that the issue is such an important one. 

Obama at Camp David: the Commander in Chief Strategy, Cont.

The White House supplies "the single greatest home court advantage in the modern world," says a character in Aaron Sorkin's witty 1995 film "The American President." Camp David is a pretty close second. And when President Obama hosts the G8 summiteers there this weekend, he'll not only be giving a back-to-the-future flavor to that hoary gathering--making it relevant again for the first time in years--but also looking very, very presidential.

Want a photo of Barack Obama at Camp David for your refrigerator? Stand by. The White House will be supplying plenty of 'em between now and November.

That's not to say that the decision to shift this year's G8 to Camp David wasn't at least partly driven by sound policy reasons. More so than at any time, perhaps, since the currency battles of the 1980s, this year's G8 summit is a place where critical decisions could be made, mainly over the future of the eurozone. With Greece possibly on the verge of being forced out, and the euro's fate once again hanging in the balance--along with the health of the American economy-- Obama and new French President Francois Hollande will seek to double-team German Chancellor Angela Merkel, pressuring her to repudiate her austerity policy. That topic won't be on the formal agenda, but the negotiations are likely to be almost as intense as the ones Jimmy Carter had with Menachem Begin and Anwar Sadat in 1978.

In addition, several of the G8 summiteers, the U.S., Germany, France and Italy, supply the core of the NATO effort in Afghanistan. So their discussions at Camp David may well be more important than anything that is decided at the May 20-21 NATO summit in Chicago.

Beyond that, with G20 debates on economic coordination too often dissolving into confusion in recent years -- and an image of weak U.S. leadership -- the Obama administration may seek to use the Camp David meeting as a chance to reassert the usefulness of the G8, and with it, the prestige of America's place in it as first among equals. The G8 meetings (then it was a group of six) began, after all, nearly forty years ago as an informal meeting in the White House library, so in some respects this year's event is a return home.

While the meetings were once considered important, in recent decades they have disintegrated into photo ops capped by meaningless declarations covering everything but the fate of the leaders' kitchen sinks. We'll likely get one of those this time as well. But don't be fooled: There's big stuff happening at Camp David this weekend, policy-wise. And the Obama campaign will try to make the most of it, politics wise.

Dimon Clay Feet Edition: Can We Have A Real Debate About Wall Street?

Since the revelation of the giant trading loss at JPMorgan Chase, most of the discussion has focused on whether Dodd-Frank and the Volcker Rule might have made a difference. That's an important and necessary debate to have, but it still  misses the larger point: Jamie Dimon was the last man standing on Wall Street—the only senior exec left, the maestro of risk management, who could reasonably claim to have adequate command over what his giant bank was doing. Now Dimon too has been steamrollered by the facts. Wall Street CEOs have been shown, again and again, to be incapable of self-regulation. Yes,  JPMorgan handily survived this $2 billion loss, but only because the economic environment was more stable than it was in 2008.

So what the episode really brings into stark relief is two points:
1.) An even bigger problem than Too-Big-to-Fail  is Too Big to Understand. WE CAN'T KEEP UP WITH WHAT THE BANKS ARE DOING, FOLKS. Even they can't -- even the smartest of them, like arrogant old Jamie. The beauty of something like Glass-Steagall was that it solved that problem by ensuring that no matter how arcane trading got, the STRUCTURAL separation of risk-taking investment banks from federally insured commercial banking would do the job of protecting the system. Regulators, even in the best of times, are always going to be outpaced by the complexity and speed of markets. That's what's all but gone now, despite loophole-riddled Volcker Rule.

And 2.) As I wrote at length in Capital Offense, Wall Street and its lobbyists in Washington continue to pretend that finance works like other markets in goods and services. It doesn’t and never can.  In 1983, a young Stanford economist named Ben Bernanke published the first of a series of papers on the causes of the Great Depression. The financial system, Bernanke said, was not unlike the nation’s electrical grid. One malfunctioning transformer can bring down the whole system. (And, in fact, the deregulation of the electricity market later proved disastrous in states like California.) Bernanke showed that it was a broad-based collapse of the banking system that turned the postcrash downturn into the Great Depression. “I’ve never had a laissez-faire view of the financial markets,” Bernanke told me much later.  “Because they’re prone to failure.” Even Milton Friedman, at one point, praised the idea of depository insurance. It was a lesson that William Seidman, the head of the Resolution Trust Corporation that unwound the savings and loan crisis, later noted began with Adam Smith: “Banking is different. . . . Financial systems are not and probably never will be totally free-market systems.”

The work of Joe Stiglitz and others shows that market efficiency is undermined by imperfect information, and there is no market more governed by information than finance. Information is, in fact, the main “good” or “service” that financial markets purvey. As Yves Smith has pointed out in her book Econned, supply and demand don't even work the same way in finance. In normal macroeconomics, higher prices usually lead to reduced demand. In finance, higher asset prices usually lead to more lending, which in turn leads to more asset purchases. Before you know it, you have a mania and a bubble. Conversely, falling asset prices and credit contractions reinforce each other in a downward spiral. In other words, in financial markets there is no tendency toward equilibrium either on the way up or down. 

Finance is, by its nature, a dangerous beast. One that can't be domesticated and so must be caged.  

Some of the most brilliant and prescient work in this area was done by Hyman Minsky, an obscure economist at the University of California at Berkeley and Washington University who did more than anyone to flesh out Keynes’s vaguely stated skepticism about financial markets. Minsky’s “Financial Instability Hypothesis” held that success in financial markets always breeds its own instability. The longer a boom lasts, the less market players consider failure a possibility; as a result, careful borrowing, lending, and investment inevitably give way to recklessness and speculative euphoria. Margins and capital cushions come to be seen as unnecessary. At a certain watershed, or “Minsky moment,” as it came to be called, the foreordained collapse begins. The most speculative bets crash, loans are called in, asset values plunge, and the downward spiral feeds on itself.

Yet amid the free-market triumphalism of the post–Cold War era, all this hard-won wisdom about finance was forgotten or ignored. (An assessment of Minsky in 1997, a year after he died, concluded that his “work has not had a major influence in the macroeconomic discussions of the last thirty years.) It continued to be ignored even after the worst financial catastrophe since the Great Depression. 

And despite the latest proof of Wall Street's tendency to run amok on its own, the debate over regulation is still led by champions of revanchism like Jamie Dimon (and Mitt Romney). This is still the thinking that dominates Washington today. Can we have, at long last, a real debate about the recurring crisis generator that is Wall Street?

Your Blogger's Final Word: Don't Abandon the Afghans...

We're pulling out, and the Afghans are still killing each other in great numbers. Witness the assassination on Sunday of Arsala Rahmani, a former Taliban minister who had joined Hamid Karzai's High Peace Council. But based on the observations made during my eight-day visit to Afghanistan last week, I think that killing was more likely a sign of desperation on the part of the Taliban than it was a sign of worsening chaos. Here's my take:

KABUL, Afghanistan--Mohammad Masoom Stanekzai limped into the room on a cane and sat down with a smile. We inquired about his health. "I am under repair," he said. "It will never be the way it used to be." Stanekzai, the Cambridge University-educated head of the Afghanistan Peace and Reconciliation Program, was in this same room last September, in the sprawling home of  former Afghan President Burhanuddin Rabbani, when a Taliban pretending to be interested in peace talks arrived. The Taliban had a bomb concealed in his turban and promptly blew himself up. Rabbani, the head of the government's peace talk efforts, was killed. Stanekzai was badly wounded.

On Thursday, in a meeting with visiting reporters, Stanekzai sat across from Rabbani's eldest son, Salahuddin, an earnest, English-speaking young man like so many of the elite young men here--more than two-thirds of Afghanistan's population is under 25--whom President Hamid Karzai appointed last month to succeed his father as chairman of the 70-member High Peace Council. The appointment was a message to everyone, but especially to the Taliban: We're not stopping. You can't kill us before we kill the worst of you and reconcile the rest to coming home. We will outlast you.

Afghanistan, like Masoom Stanekzai, may never be fully repaired. But if you were inclined to bet money on the fate of nations, the sounder gamble would probably be on men like Stanekzai and young Rabbani, who is 41 and holds a master's degree from Columbia University. True, Afghanistan is going to be a bloody mess for a long time, maybe decades. But what cynics fail to understand is that it is usually only when backward countries are completely abandoned by the international community that the bad guys win. And it is now clear beyond any reasonable doubt that whoever is elected U.S. president in November, Barack Obama or Mitt Romney, the U.S. and international community are going to remain here in a fairly robust way, if not with a large-scale troop presence.

As a result, the mood is "shifting," Stanekzai says hopefully. The psychology has changed in recent weeks with the news of U.S. and Western commitments: first, with Obama's announcement of a 10-year strategic partnership agreement running to 2024; then, in two weeks, with the NATO summit in Chicago that is expected to elicit money for long-term funding of Afghan security forces; and, finally, with the Tokyo conference on economic development plans scheduled for July, when Afghanistan will present its "strategic vision," according to Finance Minister Omar Zakhilwal.

Nothing tells that story of hope better than the real-estate market here, notes Nader Nadery, Afghanistan's feisty human-rights commissioner. When Obama frightened Afghans with his announcement that American soldiers would be coming home by 2014, housing prices plummeted, from $200,000 for 100 square meters to $80,000. People and money were fleeing. But in the four days after Obama's speech in Kabul last week announcing the strategic partnership, "prices jumped back up to $120,000," Nadery said.

Only this week, 10 more Taliban surrendered in northern Kunduz province, saying they wanted to come home. About 4,000 have formally done so nationwide, although most are in the north and west, where they and their families are not likely to be as threatened by Taliban retaliation. Although he was nearly killed by a fanatic, Stanekzai says he still hopes the Taliban leadership will see reason.

Many young Afghans fear and mistrust this reconciliation process; they fear that even if the Taliban agree to lay down their arms, they will undermine the government politically. Above all, the Afghans are terrified of abandonment by the U.S., which happened twice with horrific results. It occurred first in 1989, when President George H.W. Bush turned his back after the mujahadeen forced a Soviet withdrawal, leading to the rise of the Taliban; and then again in 2002, when Bush's son, George W., turned his attention and resources to Iraq while the Taliban quietly regrouped. (Even though the younger Bush had declared, in a speech in October 2001 after attacking Afghanistan, that the United States "should learn a lesson from the previous engagement ... that we should not just simply leave after a military objective has been achieved.")

Abandonment is a national trauma here, like Hiroshima to the Japanese or 9/11 to us. Today, once again, Afghans know their nation is in a desperate race with America's patience: A recent AP poll, released Wednesday, shows levels of support for the war in Afghanistan now on par with Vietnam in the 1970s, with only 27 percent of Americans in favor of continuing it and 66 percent opposing. Back in Washington the debate is all about "Afghan good enough," CIA Director David Petraeus's tart phrase for minimal expectations. The threshold of "success" is now so low now that anything less than another Taliban takeover will be fine with most American policymakers.

The Afghans I spoke to understand all this; they meticulously track every step of the debate in Washington. At dinner on my final night in Kabul, Nadery noted to me, very worried, "Obama has dropped the words 'democracy' and 'human rights' entirely when he talks about Afghanistan." I told him he was probably right: It's because U.S. policymakers, the president included, still are not terribly keen to nation-build; they just want an honorable way out. He said, "You know, whatever is said in Washington is automatically translated into policy here in Kabul." In other words, the moment Obama stops talking about human rights, all the warlords and other bad guys start thinking they can get away with more mischief, and the good Afghans duck into a crouch because they fear they've lost their only protector. "I think the 2014 withdrawal is premature," Safia Siddiqi, a former member of parliament, said on Thursday, echoing what others say.   

But what is being pledged now may be just enough. As we've learned so many times over the decades, the permanent presence of the international community can fundamentally alter the equation; it can overturn the iron law of history that seems to doom backward countries like Afghanistan to ever-more war and repression. We saw it in Bosnia, when everyone expected the 1995 Dayton Accord to fall apart and the ethnic killing to resume (it didn't, because NATO stayed); we saw it in Kosovo, which gained its independence under NATO monitoring; we saw it in the ultimate impact that the 1975 Helsinki Final Act had in undermining the illegitimate Communist regimes in the Soviet bloc. In the end, Moscow's reluctant agreement to sign onto vague promises of "human rights and fundamental freedoms" inspired "Helsinki monitoring groups" in East-bloc countries. Those in turn helped to engender the dissident movements that blossomed in the 1980s and eventually shattered the Soviet empire. 

Yet there is also some evidence that a few senior U.S. officials understand this finally, and will continue to pressure Karzai's government to make human rights and democracy a contingency for aid. "Hillary Clinton gets it," one International Security Assistance Force official told me. "Watch what she does at the NATO summit."

We will be watching. So will Salahuddin Rabbani. So will Massom Stanekzai, cane in hand.

'Run!' A Day on the Front Lines of the Counterinsurgency in Afghanistan

ZANA KHAN, Afghanistan—Within 30 minutes after the shura—or community meeting—ended in this village in eastern Ghazni province on Wednesday, we came under mortar fire from the Taliban.

“We have contact!” shouted the Polish International Security Assistance Force (ISAF) commander who was escorting us to the helicopter. “Run!”

Run we did, huffing and puffing under helmets and heavy body armor, a group of over-aged pretend soldiers—actually, just reporters-- trying to understand a war that barely seems to exist most of the time. Until all of a sudden it does, rocketing in from nowhere.

Zana Khan is a fault line in the decade-long conflict in Afghanistan—one of those dusty, primeval villages where all the money and U.S.-backed power of the New Afghanistan contends daily with the insidious forces of the old unreconstructed Afghanistan, a region defined by ignorance and terror.

“It’s routine,” explained Krzysztof Wojcik, a retired Polish Special Forces major, as we sat inside an armored medevac vehicle listening to the “Whump!” of mortars from high in the mountains and the crackling of return fire from the Polish 30-millimeter guns and Afghan National Army machine guns. “They [the Taliban]’ knew about the shura. They knew when it ended,” said Wojcik. “They waited for the people to leave and the helicopters to come, because they knew there would be VIPs.”

The Taliban’s chief VIP target appeared to be Musa Khan, the governor of Ghazni, who took off just ahead of us in a Polish Hind helicopter—an upgraded version of the Soviet choppers used against the mujahadeen in the ‘80s. The shura, a traditional gathering of male elders and leading citizens, was Khan’s idea. Through speeches, gifts and new schoolbooks, Khan was trying to make the case to the barely literate people of this tiny mountain village in the Taliban-infected Southeast of Afghanistan that his way, the way of the New Afghanistan—the way of the international community, America and NATO—was vastly better and more prosperous than the way of the Taliban, who have kept a NATO-funded new school from opening for three years.

And he’s very impressive, Khan is. Black-bearded and black-turbaned, he is eloquent and learned in the Koran, and he has a deep, sonorous voice that puts you in mind of, say, Anthony Quinn in Lawrence of Arabia. As some 250 townspeople, their faces a deep reddish-tan from years of exposure, sat squinting quizzically in the sun, Khan delivered “my message to the Taliban,” saying he and his government were every bit as religious as the Islamist radicals, observing “all the pillars of Islam,” and that he delivered justice every bit as well (Khan made a big deal of his chief judge sentencing two murderers to hang the day before).

Khan also bravely countered the Taliban line that he and the national government of President Hamid Karzai were merely stooges of America and the West. “The Taliban are fond of saying that our plans are made up by foreigners, but the clothes you are wearing are also made by foreigners. The Toyotas you are driving, these are also made by foreigners,” he said. “The Taliban are keeping you from the good life and the international community, from sending your children to school, from paving your roads.”

It all sounded hopeful, and many villagers applauded and walked away happily down the stony path to their mud-walled homes carrying thick gray woolen blankets and donated new plastic sandals as gifts. “I think it went very well,” Khan remarked to me afterward. “The first shura we had only four people.” Other villagers praised the newly strengthened Afghan police and army, saying the Taliban was less brazen and weaker than a few years ago, before President Obama’s “surge” began.

But the mortar attack at the end was an abrupt reminder of what a number of Afghans attending the shura told me and a visiting group of reporters privately. “Two hours after you leave, they will be back," said Mohammad, a 32-year-old farmer. “They will burn those gifts.”

Indeed, what looked like a simple village gathering on the surface was actually the product of a sophisticated ISAF-led clear-and-hold operation involving not just Polish troops but, very quietly, U.S. Special Forces as well, who had come into Zana Khan several days before the shura to round up any suspects. “I think when we leave it’s going to fall apart,” said “Moose,” a U.S. Special Forces soldier who said he and his team had rounded up nine suspects with alleged bomb parts or fragments in their houses. He was referring not just to Zana Khan but to Afghanistan. “Their special forces are good, really good, but the regular army’s kind of lazy. I think it’s going under.”

It’s easy to be as cynical as Moose. If U.S. and international forces can’t suppress the Taliban in this part of the country now, while still operating near the height of the Obama ”surge”—which is ending as of this September—what’s going to happen when we all leave at the end of 2014? Already ISAF has written off Ghazni’s southern-most district, right on the Pakistan border, as hopelessly under Taliban control.

And yet there are other strong signs that this is not going to be 1992-96, when the Taliban gradually and brutally took control of an abandoned Afghanistan. The new Afghan army and police are expected to get at least $4 billion a year in ISAF funds—most of it from Washington—indefinite training and help from U.S. special operations, and by most accounts the Afghans are increasingly competent. The U.S. drone strike program will continue indefinitely into the future, albeit likely under the CIA rather than the Pentagon, ensuring that the Mullah Omars of the future will not be eager to show their faces in downtown Kabul.

Areas like the eastern section of Afghanistan are unlikely to achieve complete peace. Funded by Pakistan’s intelligence agency just across the border, and possibly by sympathetic Islamists in the Arab world, the Taliban have a constant source of replenishment, like a toxic natural spring. But there is reason to think the Taliban can be contained at least to this troubled corner of Afghanistan. And that is the case the U.S. is making to its NATO allies at the forthcoming summit in Chicago—we need to be here for decades in some fashion, not just for a couple of more years.

“It’s a never ending story,” said our Polish escort, as we waited out the mortar battle. Earlier in the day, in a round of interviews at the village, we had asked: Are the Taliban weaker, or just as strong? The answer was mixed. Yet it was also true that the mortar rounds missed their targets—the governor, and possibly us--by hundreds of meters. “They are scared; they don’t come close” enough to be accurate, Wojcik said.

Gen. Daoud Shah Wafadar, the Afghan army commander in Ghazni province—who also spoke at the shura—told our visiting group of reporters that the Taliban were no longer a match for his forces. “The enemy is not capable of fighting with us face to face. The only thing they can do is threaten the people.”

That may be true, but at least in this recalcitrant portion of Afghanistan, it is a tactic that the Taliban still do very well—and there is little sign as yet that they can be forced to stop.

Your humble blogger goes to Afghanistan...

I'm taking a holiday from the rough-and-tumble world of Washington to spend a week in the relative peace and stability of Afghanistan. (That's me interviewing Gen. John Allen, commander of the International Security Forces, on Monday.) Here are some thoughts:

Meet Afghanistan’s Greatest Hope: “The Re-integree”

No, “re-integree” is not really a word in English, but among the U.S.  and NATO officials who are trying to wrench Afghanistan into something like a manageable shape before they leave, it’s become a critical one. A relatively new program to reintegrate Afghan Taliban and other insurgents into society may, in fact, be one of the most hopeful routes to a successful –or at least less than disastrous-- U.S. withdrawal in 2014. Despite all the headlines about getting high-level Taliban to the peace table in Qatar (where the Taliban have gingerly set up an office but are balking at serious negotiations), a much better prospect for neutralizing the insurgents  may lie with village-level efforts at inducing low-ranking fighters and commanders to surrender arms and rejoin their communities.

The strategy, in other words, is to hollow out the Taliban army even as its top commanders enjoy relative security across the border in the tribal regions of Pakistan. Given the recalcitrance of the Pakistanis in rolling up what they consider their Islamist allies, that may be the only way, senior U.S. and NATO officials suggest. “We’re leveraging it,” Gen. John Allen, commander of all international security forces in Afghanistan, said in an interview with visiting reporters on Monday at his southern regional command in Uruzgan. Ryan Crocker, America’s ambassador to Afghanistan, also likes this approach. “If we have a [Taliban] command that no longer has an army to command, that works for me,” he said in a separate interview.

Hence ISAF’s tongue-tying neologism: the “re-integree.” According to a senior U.S. advisor to Mohammad Stanekzai, head of the “Afghanistan Peace and Reconciliation Program (APRP),” one measure of success of the U.S. “counterinsurgency” strategy  is that, since the first “re-integree” came over in October 2010, some 4,200 to 4,300 insurgents have returned to their villages and towns in the last year and a half. (Another 600 are now being “vetted,” he says)  Under the APRP, these former fighters give up their “heavy arms,” sign an oath renouncing violence and abiding by Afghan constitution and get three months of $120 a month payments, and are consigned to the wrath of their village elders if they relapse. An added inducement is that communities can only qualify for small grants from the national government if they show they have some re-integrees. 

And yet, admits the advisor, “we’re not at the point where 4,000 is statistically significant.”  That’s because most of the fighters who surrender arms are in the areas with the least diehard jihadists in the non-Pashtun North and West, like Badghis and Herat. (Badghis, in Regional Command West, has by far the largest proportion of re-integrees, some 12-to-1,300 or one third of the total). “The problem with the south and east is you’re much closer to the heart of the insurgency, they’re much more hard-core, and there are more concerns about retribution,” the advisor says. As yet, no more than a thousand have come out of the south and east. 

Gen. Allen and Amb. Crocker say they place a lot of hope in anecdotal evidence that, slowly, even some of the more zealous, Pakistan-supported Taliban in the south and east are realizing that, in fact, the U.S. and NATO are never going to depart entirely. 

They say the ten-year strategic partnership that President Obama announced just last week will have a tremendous psychological impact, as will similar commitments expected at the NATO summit in Chicago in two weeks. “There’s going to be an international military presence here in Afghanistan for a long time, a long time after 2014,” Allen said.  “While the Taliban for the purposes of recruiting and to maintain the coherence in their units may well desire to say that we’ll just wait you out, I think the reality is that every day they wait is a day they’re at greater disadvantage, frankly,” Allen said. Crocker indicated that, based on what he’s heard, the “informal” reintegration of Taliban in the south is also picking up. “Taliban fighters just want out of this,” said Crocker . “In Helmand the governor thinks there’ s quite a bit of that going on. They make contact with their home village … and just schlep on home at night.”

Returning Taliban sometimes cite the newly empowered Afghan security forces, saying they signed up to fight foreigners, not other Afghans, both NATO and Afghan officials say.

Still, one of the more disturbing revelations here is that ISAF officials don’t seem to have a good feel for the total number of insurgents out there—it could be “as low as 20,000 to a s high as 45,000,” one of Allen’s staffers said.  Allen himself, in the interview, dismissed the higher number but added:  “Nobody knows for sure. …  I think most estimates would put it between thirty and thirty-five [thousand]. Some large number of them are in Pakistan. And the term ‘enemy’ has many different meanings here. A significant number of what might be considered enemy are in a support role, they’re not fighters necessarily.  And frankly some of what masquerades as enemy  are really criminal networks….So it’s never been more than an estimate.”

On such estimates may ride the success or failure of the decade-long U.S. effort in Afghanistan.

How A Chinese Dissident Could Derail Obama

It can blow at any seam, as Tom Wolfe famously wrote in The Right Stuff. The embarrassing fallout from Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton’s handling of Chen Guangcheng, the blind Chinese dissident who is now accusing U.S. officials of betrayal, threatens to undermine President Obama’s carefully managed strategy of presenting himself in the campaign as a tough and trustworthy “commander in chief.”

Presumptive Republican nominee Mitt Romney has not spoken out yet on the latest developments in the dispute, but in a statement on Sunday, he said that “any serious U.S. policy toward China must confront the facts of the Chinese government’s denial of political liberties, its one-child policy and other violation of human rights.”

At a news conference on Monday, Obama sidestepped the issue, saying vaguely, “What I would like to emphasize is that every time we meet with China, the issue of human rights comes up.”

The rapidly unfolding events in China, which come as Clinton and Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner are in Beijing for high-stakes negotiations, blindsided the Obama administration while it was hard at work portraying the president as a strong leader in the opening weeks of what has quickly become a general-election campaign. Obama just returned from a dramatic speech in Kabul, Afghanistan, in which he reminded the public, yet again, that he took down Osama bin Laden a year ago and declared boldly that the end of al-Qaida “is within reach.” Last week, in a campaign speech, Vice President Joe Biden touted Obama’s record on human rights, saying that “the president shut down secret prisons overseas, banned torture, and in doing so demonstrated that we don’t have to choose between protecting our country and living our values.”

The Chen imbroglio, however, goes to the heart of the values question—as well as one of the most-contentious and least-resolved issues in the U.S.-China relationship. Clinton has sought to deftly navigate that issue by, on one hand, emphasizing the larger strategic links between the countries over human rights but on the other delivering powerful messages on Internet freedom to a Chinese regime that has cracked down ruthlessly on it. 

Until now she has been fairly successful. But Clinton’s top aides were caught by surprise after negotiating what they thought was a middle way out for Chen, the blind human-rights lawyer who had daringly escaped house arrest in his native Shandong province and found his way to the U.S. Embassy in Beijing. Initially, they managed to get Chen to a hospital to treat injuries he suffered during his escape, and to secure assurances from Chinese officials that he would be treated well while remaining in China, because he wasn’t seeking asylum. But in recent hours, Chen has indicated in a slew of interviews with Western reporters that he was coerced and fears for the life and health of his family, and that he wants to go to the U.S.

There are no easy solutions. The Chinese government will not want to set a dangerous precedent by giving Chen asylum, one that could call into question its entire “mixed” regime of market freedoms combined with human-rights repression. The Obama administration, meanwhile, faces a torrent of criticism if it merely consigns Chen’s fate to the Chinese.

It can blow at any seam.