Spencer Ackerman says:

I’m not saying I know this would happen. I don’t know that it would. Much depends on the circumstances under which the Taliban returns to power. (A power-sharing deal; an element of reconciliation; outright victory; etc.) These are questions that need to be studied, not off-the-shelf answers just out of reach of the debate. There are good questions being asked of what “safe haven” really entails, and to the pot let’s add the concept of strategic depth.

One might add that the phrase “Taliban returns to power” is not entirely clear on its own terms. In what sense was the Taliban “in power” in the past? Did they have secure, stable control over the entirety of Afghan territory? Well, no, they didn’t. Just like Hamid Karzai’s government today they exercised effective control over a bunch of Afghanistan, plus armed groups trying to overthrow them controlled a bunch of territory, plus there was some anarchy and battlegrounds and such. The Taliban being “in power” meant they controlled the bulk of Afghanistan and they controlled Taliban.

But bracketing for a moment the issue of how much the existence of a “safe haven” mattered to 9/11, it’s not clear that the “safe haven” issue had all that much to do with the “in power” issue. You don’t need Kabul to be able to provide a safe haven. Nor do you need the majority of Afghanistan. Afghanistan’s almost as big as Texas; you could presumably fit a safe haven into a rather small fraction of the country.

Given that Afghanistan is big, Afghanistan is ethnically diverse, Afghanistan lacks a proper road network, Afghanistan contains multiple armed groups capable of acting independently, Afghanistan lacks a tradition of effective central government, and Afghanistan has been in various configurations of civil war for almost thirty years, I think it’s crucial to always remember that there are a wide range of possible scenarios between “Karzai has effective control over all of Afghanistan” and “the Taliban has effective control over all of Afghanistan.”

Ireland gave the EU the “yes” vote it was looking for on the Lisbon treaty.

The European suprantional experiment is really fascinating. Europeans seem constantly in a state of low-level disgruntlement with the whole thing, but it’s really the most amazingly ambitious and successful liberal project of our time. And grumbling aside, basically nobody wants to get rid of it. Sixty years ago, I don’t think anyone would have believed it would be possible.

Maybe it’s just because I’m a blogger, but I’m a little bit surprised by the premium that’s placed in some quarters on the idea of face to face meetings between the President of the United States and General Stanley McChrystal as the President evaluates McChrystal’s proposals for Afghanistan. And even more puzzled by the premium placed ont he idea of telephone conversations between the two men.

Personally, I feel very well-informed about McChrystal’s views of the situation based on having read his 66 page report. That’s a healthy number of pages. What would make me feel better informed would be not so much a chat with General McChrystal as access to the classified version of the written document. But this, presumably, Obama has seen.

My experience—and this is definitely why I never would have made it as a real reporter—is that actually talking to people about things is an extremely misleading way of acquiring information. You wind up getting unduly swayed by the fact that some people are more charismatic than others. What would worry me would not be the prospect of a president who doesn’t spend lots of time talking to military commanders a couple of rungs below him in the chain of command, but the prospect of a president who lacked the patience to read written reports from people in which they set out their views in the most considered way possible. President Bush, reportedly, would barely read anything. And I think it’s no coincidence that he was a terrible president!

What I’d be interesting in knowing about Obama’s decision-making isn’t who he’s talking to but what, if anything, he’s reading. There’s a lot of reluctance in our society to admit it (written words are plentiful but face time is scarce, so pretending face time is more valuable than reading time enhances the prestige of those with access to it) but human beings can process information more quickly and efficiently by reading than by listening to people talk.

Jeffrey Gettleman has a great piece in the NYT about the strange story of Mohammed Aden, who left Somalia for the United States when he was 22, went to college, and was living with his wife and kids in the suburbs of Minneapolis before he went back home to become the leader of a clan group that’s created an island of relative peace and stability around Adado, Somalia.

One leading alternative to an ambitious counterinsurgency strategy for Afghanistan is some kind of more modest counterterrorism approach. Spencer Ackerman notes that one of Pakistan’s stated reasons for a new land offensive into Waziristan is that they say they’re running out of useful intelligence for airstrikes. This, to my view, definitely illustrates the shortcomings of a more modest approach—you’d have to actually be settling for more modest results.

Then again there’s a case to be made that this would make sense. Waziristan is inside Pakistan so you can see why the Pakistani government would have to have a maximalist take on anti-Pakistani radical groups operating there. Southern Afghanistan just doesn’t stand in the same relationship to the United States that Waziristan stands in relation to Pakistan. We can probably get away with accepting less than total victory there. At the same time, also unlike Pakistan, we’re an extremely wealthy country with tons of resources. So we can probably afford to engage in a more intensive effort in Afghanistan than the situation really warrants.

And the more I think about it, the more I think the crux of the matter with Afghanistan policy is that we’re actually operating well within our own margin of error. I wouldn’t want to say that it makes no difference whether Obama ultimately sides with McChrystal or with Biden, but the fact of the matter is that either approach is perfectly consistent with the country continuing to be secure and prosperous.

To perhaps make the point from yesterday’s Health Care in 1500 post a bit less obliquely, medicine is a complicated technical subject. And both historically and presently, just jiggering with different ways of paying for medicine hasn’t sufficed to wring ineffective or even counterproductive treatment methods out of the system. People who are ailing want to be cured, of course, but in a first-order sense they also just want treatment in a way that can surpass anyone’s knowledge of whether treatment would be useful. And doctors, too, are in the business of prescribing treatments and have been in that business since long before they had any effective treatments whatsoever to dispense.

Thus insofar as we want to make the allocation of health care resources not just fairer, but actually better we need to do comparative effectiveness research and try to figure out what will actually help people:

With the volume of new medical devices, drugs, and other treatments coming into the U.S. health care system, sorting through the details of each product can be a cumbersome task. Health care providers obviously want to choose the best remedy for their patients based on evidence, not anecdotes or (potentially worse) solely on information received from companies trying to promote their product. Thus, comparative effectiveness research will fill a massive information gap that has left health professionals and patients without the proper evidence to assess which treatments work best for a given condition. [...]

What’s more, a better understanding of which medical treatments work and which don’t could save money. It’s estimated that one-third of procedures and treatments administered in the United States have no proven benefit and account for up to $700 billion annually in current spending. Moreover, some of these treatments can have harmful side effects, produce worse health outcomes, and then, as a result, add to the soaring costs of medical care.

Now whether this will save money or not in a budgetary sense over the long run is a question for CBO analysts and such. I don’t think it really matters. The point is that spending $700 billion a year on ineffective and counterproductive treatments is a terrible idea and wringing that spending out of the system is a great idea. Whether that $700 billion ends up getting “saved” and recycled into something else (preschool, bigger televisions, whatever) or ends up being repurposed into $700 billion in additional useful health care spending, we win either way. The point is just that a really fair and efficient way of delivering witchcraft to people isn’t so wonderful and we need to also focus on figuring out how to help people and not just “treat” them.