Huh?

During the Daily Show, there was a Victoria's Secret commercial with music by Joanna Newsom. This...I did not expect.

Walt on Central Asia

Stephen Walt is quickly becoming my new favorite realist:

Our efforts in Central Asia are confounded by two fundamental problems. First, our understanding of Pakistani and Afghan society is limited, which makes it hard to know which groups or leaders to support and makes it virtually certain that any effort we undertake will generate lots of unintended consequences. We were once confident that Hamid Karzai would be a terrific leader, for example, but he's proven to be a disappointment. If we try to engineer his replacement, however, there's no guarantee we will end up with anyone better. Ditto Pakistan, where none of the contenders for power looks particularly promising and where their own ambitions and interests are partly (and maybe substantially) at odds with ours.

Look at this way: We have enough trouble getting reliable, efficient, and corruption-free government here at home (think Rod Blagoevich, Jack Abramoff, or the State Legislature here in Massachusetts, where the past two speakers had to resign in the face of scandals). So what makes us think we can root it out on the other side of the world? For that matter, what is the model of political transformation that we are selling to the world, given our inability to rebuild or restore deteriorating American cities like Detroit, and the serious problems of governance we observe in states like California? And that's in our own country, which we probably understand fairly well. To imagine that we know how to manage the politics of more than 200 million people in Afghanistan and Pakistan -- who are themselves divided into a diverse array of clans, tribes, and sects -- is the very definition of hubris.

Second, our leverage in either society (and especially Pakistan) is limited by our own conviction that "we cannot afford to fail." If we are unwilling to walk away and leave either country to its fate, then President Obama's assurance that "we will not, and cannot, provide a blank check" is meaningless. Former Pakistani President Pervez Musharraf diddled us for years because he knew we were so committed to his success that we would keep pouring in money even when we knew his government was still backing jihadi terrorists instead of cracking down on them. If, like AIG, Pakistan is "too important to fail," then what’s going to be different now?

...

Here we need to take a deep breath, and consider whether the actual threat we face there justifies this level of effort and commitment. In other words, we need some cold-blooded cost-benefit analysis, weighing the actual risks against the likely costs. And the latter includes the opportunity costs (i.e., the things that won't get done because we are busy trying to remake the political landscape for 32 million Afghanis and 178 million Pakistanis).

The whole piece is excellent, and his blog at Foreign Policy, which houses several excellent blogs, has become a daily read.

Central Asian Valhalla

"If we set ourselves the objective of creating some sort of Central Asian Valhalla over there, we will lose," Gates said.

Well, if "Valhalla" means "hall of the dead", I'd say that's exactly what we've created.