Of course, when you see a spectacular terrorist attack in India, it’s natural for some eyes to start looking across the border to Pakistan, and then one starts to worry that the subcontinent’s cold war might turn hot:

Counterterrorism officials and experts said the scale, sophistication and targets involved in the Mumbai attacks were markedly different from previous terrorist plots in India and suggested the gunmen had received training from outside the country. But they cautioned it was too soon to tell who may have masterminded the operation, despite an assertion from a previously unknown Islamist radical group.

Officials in India, Europe and the United States said likely culprits included Islamist networks based in Pakistan that have received support in the past from Pakistan’s intelligence agencies. [...]

“This is a new, horrific milestone in the global jihad,” said Bruce Riedel, a former South Asia analyst for the CIA and National Security Council and author of the book, “The Search for Al Qaeda.” “No indigenous Indian group has this level of capability. The goal is to damage the symbol of India’s economic renaissance, undermine investor confidence and provoke an India-Pakistani crisis.”

A lot of basically sensible people, including folks like these and these who may well find themselves with positions in the Obama administration, have suggested that maybe we don’t want to throw the alleged baby of preventive war out with the bathwater of Bushism. I always think people thinking along these lines need to keep in mind that the United States isn’t the only country on the planet. I don’t think we want a world in which India claims to have a U.S.-endorsed right to launch preventive military strikes on Pakistan, or a world in which Pakistani policymaking is dominated by fear of a potentially imminent preventive Indian military attack.

My colleague Pat Garofalo at the Wonk Room writes about some new wage and inequality data:

The ILO found that between 1995 and 2007, real wage growth in the United States was essentially 0 percent, and in 2009 wages will “decline by 0.5 percent in industrial countries and grow by no more than 1.1 per cent globally.” The Center for American Progress Action Fund has found that weekly wages were actually 0.3 percent lower in June 2008 than they were in March 2001.

This stagnation — which occurred at the same time that CEO pay steadily increased — has led to severe income inequality. The ILO found that the U.S. is one of the countries in which “the gap between top and bottom wages has increased most rapidly.” Indeed, the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) reported recently that “in the United States, the richest 10 percent earn an average of US$93,000 — the highest level in the OECD. The poorest 10 percent earn an average of US$5,800 — about 20 percent lower than the OECD average.”

Needless to say, conservatives’ big idea about how to turn this around is to (a) pretend it’s not happening, (b) cut the capital gains tax rate so the rich can get richer, and (c) struggle mightily to block the Emloyee Free Choice Act lest we slip back into the dystopian universe in which unionization rates were higher and the fruits of economic growth were more broadly shared.

SOFA and security pact pass Iraqi parliament — US forces will leave by 2011 and the only sense in which it isn’t a fixed timetable is that they might leave sooner. Days ago I read something relevant that I strongly disagreed with on the Abu Muqawama counterinsurgency blog:

Regardless, at no point were either Sen. McCain or Sen. Obama key players in future U.S. policy in Iraq. In fact, either of them was going to inherit a course — negotiated by the Iraqis and U.S. policy-makers in Baghdad — that might or might not have looked anything like what they wanted to do. It was Sen. Obama’s good luck that his vision of a future U.S. presence in Iraq looked a lot like the vision of the Iraqis.

It’s not luck that liberals’ vision of a future U.S. presence in Iraq was closer to Iraqis’ vision than was the vision of America’s neo-imperalist camp. Rather, liberals’ take on the matter has always been informed by both awareness of actual Iraqi public opinion (which has been hostile to the American presence since at least 2004) and to the folly of empire more broadly. It’s not a coincidence that when you look at the annals of counterinsurgency “success” stories — Kenya, Malaya, etc. — the success looks pretty equivocal and the occupying power winds up leaving in the end.

Had out policy not been dominated by foolish dreams of a US-dominated Iraq, we could have extricated ourselves with honor and dignity over the course of 2005 — declaring victory at the formation of the post-Saddam Iraqi government. Instead, we pursued a bloody and costly alternative course for years before, eventually, even the war’s keenest proponents came to recognize the realities of of the situation.

One of these kind of obvious-but-important points brought to mind by yesterday’s atrocities in India is that when you’re thinking about US policy in Afghanistan and Pakistan it’s important to recognize that unlike the other players on that chess board, we live in the Western Hemisphere. The ISI, the Indians, the Taliban, Hamid Karzai, various warlords, Lashkar-i-Taibar, and all the rest live right over there. None of them have the option of packing up and leaving, none of them can afford to lose, and when they balance priorities their concerns in that region are always going to outweigh other kinds of concerns elsewhere.

Part of what that means is that none of these actors can really ever afford to make whatever it is we want from them their top concern. They need to worry more about each other than they ever need to worry about us.

To be fair to the border fence concept, a big expensive pointless construction project in the Southwest is a not-terrible economic stimulus. Not a great idea by any means, but it’d work better than the new GOP solution-for-everything of cutting the capital gains tax rate. Of course amidst a downturn, illegal immigration will decline no matter what we do. So President-Elect Obama would do well to label some random thing or other he likes as a border security measure and then claim success. On the merits, though, the more people who move to the United States the more quickly we can soak up the supply overhang of housing stock.

Needless to say, holiday weekend blogging won’t be at its highest-ever volume, especially since there probably won’t be much news, but There Will Be Content.