Quickthink

The recent election again of Mr. Putin to the Russian presidency temporarily put an end to speculation that his era was over.  Over? Not according to legal formalities. But something is over. And that is any illusion that Mr. Putin should be president. He is there because he has the power to remain there. Masha Gessen has a new book out about Mr. Putin (unfriendly) and she has this to say in a NYT interview about his regime.

The Putin regime, like all such regimes, is a pyramid. And what the protests are doing is dismantling the bottom rungs of this pyramid. It happens when journalists on state-controlled TV sneak in accurate and sympathetic coverage of the protests. Or when the editor-in-chief of the Yaroslavl state television station writes an open letter to his boss, saying, “I am taking sick leave until after the election because the election is making me sick.” Or when officials from local election commissions in Samara and St. Petersburg come forward and tell the stories of their own parts in the vote-rigging in the December parliamentary election.

Soon — quite soon, I think — too many bricks will have come out of the bottom of the pyramid, and the whole edifice will collapse. This is not dissimilar to the way the Soviet Union ended, and the feeling in Moscow these days is reminiscent of that time. There is hope and there is fear, and the hope wanes occasionally but ultimately prevails.

Let us see how this plays out.

I started getting nervous about Afghanistan when the media stopped reporting on it. In the good old days, we got real news. There were new strategies and fighting with real people involved. But these stories petered out. And we got only reports of Karzai flipping out and the occasional drone strikes in Pakistan. Then came the Koran burnings. And this last weekend news of a US serviceman stalking and killing 16 Afghan civilians including women and children.

And what is next? That is the point. There is no next. Not in any positive sense. The old hope that the US could hold off the insurgency and rebuild Afghanistan into a modern or almost modern or at least pro-western ally is dead. The question is now how long it will take to negotiate our way out of there. As the US did in Iraq.  I am afraid that this camel has a broken back.

My point in writing this is not to express some deep expertise about Afghanistan itself. I don’t have it. But I do have some expertise in decision-making.  This is the somewhat mysterious process by which we build coherence into our life stories. And when it comes to Afghanistan, we encounter a slow motion train wreck of poor decisions. It started well before Bill Clinton lobbed a few cruise missiles into terrorist training camps and declared victory. But the time has come to face up to an unpleasant fact. The underlying model we are using to make our decisions never worked. It is time to take a closer look at the model.

I am reminded of the story of the British in India just after the great rebellion. Simon Schama tells it rather well. While the rebellion did not end British engagement in India, it did put an end to the illusion that the British were there doing good work. Things were more complex and that complexity had to be respected.

FOLLOW -  BTW, this does not mean accepting a taliban victory or the return of al qaeda to Kabul.  It is well within the capabilities of the US and its allies to prevent this even as the west reduces its force levels.  The camel with the broken back is our idealistic mission to partner with Afghans to re-shape their country into something that we think is better.