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Apart from color, demeanor, and facility with the English language, the substantive differences between our current President and his immediate predecessor seem fairly insubstantial.
An Associated Press article in today’s newspapers reports that General David Petraeus, appearing this morning on NBC’s Meet the Press program, described Afghanistan as a “tough and enduring fight that would require its ‘character and its size being scaled down over the years.’” That sounds as if we can expect our troops to remain in Afghanistan in strength well beyond the end-2011 deadline announced earlier by President Obama. General Petraeus also said that if the U.S. loses, there would “likely be a bloody civil war followed by a takeover by extremists. If the U.S. succeeds and Afghanistan stabilizes, the country could become the region’s new “Silk Road” with the potential to extract trillions of dollars worth of minerals.”
The General does not speak for the President, but Petraeus, as savvy a political operator as ever wore an Army uniform, is not about to repeat Stanley McChrystal’s mistake which, minus the frat boy banter, consisted of publicly disagreeing with the President. If he said this on a network TV broadcast, it is likely that the President agrees with his assessment, and may even have approved his remarks as a sort of trial balloon for the bad news he (the President) will ultimately have to break to the American people. [click to continue…]
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For years the news media have been full of shocking reports on the abuse of women, largely though not exclusively, in Muslim countries. Sentences of flogging and death by stoning for accused adulteresses in Nigeria and Iran, and forced marriage, the burqa and the niqab, female genital mutilation, flogging and prison sentences for “immodest” attire, and “honor” killings, not just in Somalia and Afghanistan, but also in the suburbs of Paris and Birmingham. It’s a pretty grim picture.
But now comes a new report from the Economist Intelligence Unit, the research arm of The Economist magazine, which has devised a new index that ranks economic opportunity for women in 113 countries. [click to continue…]
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You don’t get to be a four-star general in the U.S. Army by being undisciplined. Men who attain this rank – and so far they have all been men – tend to be hyper-smart, educated, focused, dedicated, and driven. Ability counts, but so does the political savvy needed to climb the greasy pole of the military bureaucracy. By all accounts, Stanley McChrystal exemplifies the breed. So what was he thinking when he allowed a Rolling Stone reporter unfettered on-the-record access to his inner circle, a decision that led directly to his dismissal? [click to continue…]
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Jurek Martin, writing in today’s Financial Times about the parallels between America’s deepening military commitment to Afghanistan and LBJ’s escalation of the Vietnam War nearly 45 years ago, says “Hillary Clinton, as secretary of state, is known not to want to leave Afghan women to the stone-age mercies of the Taliban again.”
This is terribly unfair to the Stone Age.
Life for Stone Age women was probably no picnic, but it may have been no worse than men’s lives of the time. Anthropologist Jared Diamond cites archaeological evidence that the introduction of agriculture, in addition to spreading disease and lowering life expectancy for both sexes, increased inequality between the sexes, sharpening the sexual division of labor and forcing women into almost constant pregnancy to produce more hands to till the fields. Women in many agricultural societies were, and – you can see this in many parts of Africa and Asia today – still are made beasts of burden, forced to carry heavy loads of water , firewood, and grain. Other evidence suggests that women of the Upper Paleolithic period enjoyed substantial sexual freedom, while artistic objects and funeral sites also indicate that women were held in high esteem, especially in religion, in which many shamans were women and fertility goddess cults abounded.
None of this can be proven, of course, but on all evidence your average burqa-clad Afghan woman would be far better off trading 21st century Kandahar for life as a member of a Stone Age band of hunter-gatherers.
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“In taking realms and administering kingdoms, although some things appear rational on the surface, one has to consider a hundred thousand things behind every act.” Babur, the founder of India’s Mughal Empire, wrote this in his epic autobiography, The Baburnama, some 600 years ago. It is worth paying attention to what Babur had to say. His armies took Kabul in 1504 and quickly conquered the rest of the country from Herat to Kandahar, and held onto the territory until 1540, ten years after his death. That is 25 years longer than the Russians and 30 years more than the British, who managed to hold on for only four years in the 1830s and another two years from 1878 to 1880. Babur, who pined for Kabul during his entire stay in India, did not return until nine years after his death, when he was put to rest in the Bagh-e-Babur garden with the Persian inscription on his tomb: If there is a paradise on earth, it is this, it is this, it is this! Kabul no doubt was different back in those days. [click to continue…]
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