The Taliban Trust Fund and the Infinite Af-Pak War
At a major conference in London today, Afghan president Hamid Karzai rolled out his much anticipated Taliban “reintegration” or buyout plan, an initiative for which Afghanistan’s allies have pledged $500 million to pay mid- or lower level fighters to stop fighting and reintegrate into Afghan society. The money could include resettling former Taliban fighters and landing them jobs, but excludes fighters with ties to al-Qaeda or other terrorist networks for inclusion... Read More
Has Obama Won in Iraq?
Flickr/ The U.S. Army (Creative Commons) On a day when there’s nothing but dismal, depressing news on the Obama front, Juan Cole credits the president for what Cole deems his first major foreign policy success: the US drawdown in Iraq. While he acknowledges the presence of US bases there (which will likely never leave), Cole credits Obama for his adherence to a strict timetable for withdrawing American troops from Iraq’s cities despite his generals’ opposition,... Read More
A Crash Course on the Financial Meltdown — Pecora Part II Begins
Cross-posted from MotherJones.com. The 10 members of the Financial Crisis Inquiry Commission, the modern heir to the famous Pecora Commission convened in the wake of Wall Street’s 1929 crash, kicked off a marathon set of hearings on Wednesday and Thursday by grilling some of Wall Street’s most powerful executives, the regulators supposedly tasked with reining them in, and outside experts who watched the collapse. What they heard amounted to something of a crash course... Read More
Michigan’s Brain Drain Continues…
Via The New York Times: Maine, Michigan, North Dakota and Vermont had net losses of about one in 10 of their young people from 2000 to 2009, as the populations of Northeastern and Midwestern states continued to age faster than those in the Sun Belt, according to new Census Bureau data. Since 2000, half the states registered a decline in the number of people younger than 18. Michigan’s under-18 population declined by nearly 246,000, or 9.5 percent, surpassed in raw numbers only... Read More
Has Teach for America Solved the Teacher Conundrum?
Cross-posted with MotherJones.com The Atlantic has a story in its January/February issue promisingly titled “What Makes a Great Teacher?” What indeed? As someone who follows education reform closely and occasionally writes about it, I clicked through to the article, eager to see what the writer, Amanda Ripley, had to say on one of the most puzzling, beguiling, confounding questions in all of education. What I found was far from inspiring or groundbreaking, and to be... Read More
Blind Ben and the Fed
Cross-posted with MotherJones.com In his column today, the New York Times’ David Leonhardt takes to task the Federal Reserve and its chairman, Ben Bernanke, for not acknowledging that they inexplicably missed the housing bubble, and questions the Fed’s ability to spot future bubbles. In the wake of Bernanke’s speech this weekend in which he deflected blame for the crisis and instead pointed to lax regulation as the culprit, Leonhardt rightly notes, as many others... Read More
The Curse of Cape Wind
Cross-posted with MotherJones.com Cape Wind, the proposed 24-square-mile wind farm off Cape Cod, just can’t catch a break. Fiercely opposed by the late Sen. Ted Kennedy and his family, who didn’t want rows of spinning turbines sullying their view of Nantucket Sound (they claimed the turbines would cause environmental problems), and getting no help from an otherwise green-tilting Sen. John Kerry (D-Mass.), the alternative energy project now has a new opponent: the Mashpee... Read More
What Afghan Citizens Really Think
Cross-posted with MotherJones.com Flick/rybolov (Creative Commons) In the Western media, the views of Afghanistan’s political leaders and news of their latest political debacles—President Hamid Karzai’s standoff with the Parliament over his 24 cabinet nominations the most recent example—tend to dominate over all else; few and far between are the perspectives of those at the opposite end of the power structure, the Afghan citizens. Which is why the Kabul-based... Read More
