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9111. jexster - 8/14/2008 3:30:02 PM Medvedev: I wipe my ass with Georgian territorial integrity 9112. jexster - 8/14/2008 3:32:13 PM 
9113. jexster - 8/14/2008 5:53:46 PM 9110
God Damn Mongorians
9114. alistairconnor - 8/14/2008 6:26:18 PM I wonder what our former Afghanistan guru, pseudoerasmus, thinks about the situation?
Oddly enough, Wonk, he thinks it's gone extraordinarily well. He is now in favour of the intervention, having opposed it originally. 9115. wonkers2 - 8/14/2008 7:54:01 PM As a result of 9-11, few people here in the U.S. question the wisdom of our efforts to democratize/civilize Afghanistan, but our efforts are beginning to look like a mistake to me or at least not in our interest to send a bunch more troops there as Obama and McCain are proposing to do. It's a very tough place that has brought about the downfall of other countries.
Where is pseudoerasmus hanging out these days? 9116. marjoribanks - 8/16/2008 8:16:30 AM Well, with Afghanistan as with other geopolitical matters, it really depends on your perspective. From the American and allied Western point of view, I would not say the ongoing post-9/11 campaign has gone very well. It has been extremely costly, has provided a rallying point for the extremists, and has made the country just safe enough for business that it is now set for world-record harvests of opium in the coming years. More troops, etc, will not particularly help. Plus, I suspect that the US military is angling towards an envisioned day when the US tries to pacify the NWFP and Baluchistan from bases in Afghanistan, which will be another grand historical error on an epic scale.
Then, from the point of view of Pakistan, this whole campaign has been a total disaster which has massively degraded the country's reach and influence in the region. From Iran's point of view, it is a mixed bag. From India's, it has been a great thing.
Putting aside all of that, I might be inclined to agree with Pseuder (if AC has his position right) if he is talking about the Afghans themselves, who have some degree of engagement with the outside world after a very long time. They now enjoy receiving quite vast international aid - much of which is coming in the form of vital infrastructure - and society in the larger towns and cities is being forcibly cracked open, almost at gunpoint, so that some human development advances are undeniably taking place, and it is possible for hundreds of thousands of refugees to return.
9117. marjoribanks - 8/16/2008 8:25:04 AM Wonk, please remember that if (I regret to admit that I think it is more a case of when) the next large-scale terrorist attack takes place in the West, that it is almost inevitable that the fingerprints will lead straight back to Afghanistan or possibly the NWFP or Baluchistan in Pak. Please reckon with your own thoughts and sentiments in such an instance.
Isn't it better to engage, however ham-fistedly and expensively, rather than abandon? Are there no lessons learned from the last time the US washed its hands, and walked away from Afghanistan after helpfully setting it awash in dollar bills and high-end armaments?
9118. marjoribanks - 8/16/2008 8:48:35 AM Now, as for the Georgia situation, leaving aside moral and other related compulsions, the swift Russian movements have been rather brilliant, decisive geopolitical hardball from Putin. In the short and medium term he is a big winner, with only the possibility of an eventual cost in the long term.
Biggest loser, besides the largely symbolic whack to American hegemonistic posturing, is the international legal and diplomatic framework. Now mere paper, and shredded at that, we could well be in another era of big fish relentlessly eating little fish for a good long while. China, India, Iran and Turkey, even Brazil, it's going to be regional powers calling the regional shots, with functional carte blanche to operate with impunity. 9119. marjoribanks - 8/16/2008 9:01:44 AM Wombat,
A few days ago, you asked (me) in the Politics thread:
"You don't Obama would be more likely to back away from Pakistan--given their equivocation toward US interests and the infiltration/institutionalization of radical Islam in the upper reaches of their intelligence and military organizations--all to India's advantage?"
The Pakistan issue is only one part of the Indian relationship with the US, which now includes a robust and diverse economic equation. There is no doubt that Obama will be worse than Bush in the context of the economic equation, for the simple reason that it is impossible to be better, leave alone the nativist noises he has already made on issues such as outsourcing.
But on Pakistan, I see Obama positioning a much, much closer relationship with whatever regime coalesces in Pakistan than anything Bush engineered. We see in retrospect that the Bushites basically repeated the same historical error that the Americans have blundered into again and again in Pakistan, they gave Musharraf (huge) money and armaments, and let him handle everything because he promised him everything. The Americans were played like a fiddle by Musharraf, just as they have been played as chumps for a solid thirty years and counting now - he got what he wanted in full, and the US got a slow trickle of what they wanted, enough to keep the cash flowing, and the tacit blessings for dictatorship intact.
Obama will be more hands on than previous Presidents, but I believe that this is even more problematic. From the American point of view, it is a tough tough call to become the nanny state and guarantor for a country like Pakistan, but that seems to be the way things are going.
And, naturally, a massive American engagement with Pakistan is not in India's interest. 9120. marjoribanks - 8/16/2008 9:07:53 AM BTW, Wombat, some time ago I reviewed 'Deception: Pakistan, the United States, and the Secret Trade in Nuclear Weapons'
by Adrian Levy and Catherine Scott-Clark, a stomach-churning book that laid bare a lot of the inside story of the US-Pakistani relationship over the past 30 years.
I highly recommend that you read this book, and would like to hear back from you if you do get your hands on it. 9121. alistairconnor - 8/16/2008 11:32:54 AM And, naturally, a massive American engagement with Pakistan is not in India's interest.
I really wonder about that. I hardly think it's a zero-sum game, where anything which is good for Pakistan is bad for India and vice-versa. On the contary, I think that if an intelligent US engagement with Pakistan can stabilise and strengthen its institutions and democracy, then that's got to be good for India. (obviously, current US policy has done the opposite, because they played the strongman against the institutions, and lost.)
So, what about Kashmir? It's looking grim, being used as a domestic political football by both sides. It looks to me like the confused political situation on both sides of the border has resulted in bellicose nationalism emerging as a unifying force, a lowest common denominator.
Or am I reading the wrong sources? 9122. alistairconnor - 8/16/2008 11:43:34 AM Georgia :
Biggest loser, besides the largely symbolic whack to American hegemonistic posturing, is the international legal and diplomatic framework.
Well, that's tit for tat. I was highly amused to see Ms Rice lecturing Putin about how this is not the way international affairs are conducted in the 21st century... On the contrary! First Iraq, then Kosovo. I think that was the real trigger for Putin : seeing Serbia dismembered, its sovereignty trampled by the recognition of Kosovar independence. He had very bluntly warned that this would be intolerable to Russia. Now perhaps he will be taken seriously.
There will be no particular cost to Russia in the medium term. In fact, Russia has re-emerged as a great power sooner than expected.
It is to be hoped that US re-engagement in multilateral institutions can prevent the future anarchy you project, Marj. It may be too late, the damage is pretty deep (almost unnoticed, the disastrous failure of the WTO Doha round, after seven years of negotiations, is a fitting legacy for GWB). 9123. marjoribanks - 8/16/2008 12:03:46 PM AC,
Please read the book I cited in 9120. In light of its reportage, I'd call the odds quite impossible for "an intelligent US engagement with Pakistan." I mean, what kind of change are you expecting, even if Obama wins? Personally, I can't be that wild-eyed.
As for Kashmir, broadly, it's only one (though important) part of the Indo-Pak relationship, which is now inevitably set towards increasing openness and trade. I doubt anything is going to change that. 9124. marjoribanks - 8/16/2008 12:13:02 PM It is to be hoped that US re-engagement in multilateral institutions can prevent the future anarchy you project
The international order is pretty broken, AC. Even if an Obama administration brings new heft to the UN, the other powers - and now we talk about other powers - are not very enamoured by that highly dated early-20th century construct. And with the US, the sole military superpower, exhausted and bleeding and likely to remain so for a long time, it's a bit of a dangerous and unknown territory we're entering here. 9125. alistairconnor - 8/16/2008 12:27:54 PM Well, in a multipolar world, international institutions are useful to everybody. The Bush (rather, Rumsfeld) doctrine of deliberately breaking them, on the grounds that US interests are better served by direct bilateral relations, and build-em-up and knock-em-down ad-hoc coalitions, is a historical aberration. I think there is a lot of pent-up desire and anticipation for a return to an improved status quo. The Rumsfeld model having been so thoroughly discredited. We shall see.
(For example : Sakashvili, who clearly believed in the Rumsfeld model, expected aid from his big ally... too bad : that coalition has already been knocked down, it seems.) 9126. wonkers2 - 8/16/2008 3:46:05 PM Marjoribanks, how much money and how many lives is it worth to spend to avoid a terror attack or a few terror attacks. The biggest terror attack to date was 9-11 where 3,000 were killed--that was one of our excuses for invading Iraq as well as Afghanistan where upwards of 100,000 have died and countless billions spent. Terror attacks are unfortunate and a great nuisance, much like airlier crashes, but not a vital threat unless nuclear weapons are involved. Moreover, I'm not sure that the blunt weapon of military invasion is the most effective method of eliminating or reducing terrorism.
As soon as we start using the phrase "war on" something, an important part of our brain shuts down and we focus on narrow, military solutions that tend to bring their own costs and problems, greater than the problem they are intended to solve. The U.S. has quite a history of using our military in misguided efforts to solve alleged problems. I commend to your attention "War Made Easy" by David Solomon and the movie by the same name. 9127. wonkers2 - 8/16/2008 3:48:22 PM War Made Easy by Norman Solomon [Norman Solomon, not David] 9128. jexster - 8/16/2008 5:52:23 PM Chasing the Dragon
Rob Riggle, The Daily Show 9129. TheWizardOfWhimsy - 8/18/2008 5:09:44 AM 
9130. alistairconnor - 8/18/2008 11:06:51 AM Musharraf to resign, flee Pakistan
Wow. On the surface, it's a triumph of democracy and republican institutions. In practice, can they hold it together?
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