ThinkProgress Logo

Security

Afghan Defense Minister: ‘Major Increase’ In Foreign Fighters To Afghanistan

By Matt Duss on Oct 15, 2008 at 5:50 pm

wardak2.JPGThe New York Times’ John Burns reports on a statement by the Afghan Defense Minister that weakening of Al Qaeda in Iraq has resulted in “growing numbers of well-trained “foreign fighters” [going] to join the insurgency in Afghanistan instead.”

[Gen. Abdul Rahim Wardak said] that the increased flow of insurgents from outside Afghanistan had contributed to the heightened intensity of the fighting here this year, which he described as the “worst” since the American-led forces toppled the Taliban government in 2001. American commanders have said that overall violence here has increased by 30 percent in the past year and have called for more troops.

The defense minister said that “the success of coalition forces in Iraq” had combined with developments in countries neighboring Afghanistan to cause “a major increase in the number of foreign fighters” coming to Afghanistan.

“There is no doubt that they are better equipped than before,” he said. “They are well trained, more sophisticated, and their coordination is much better.”

Back in February 2007, in testimony to the House Committee on Foreign Affairs, journalist Peter Bergen described how tactics used by Al Qaeda in Iraq had migrated to Afghanistan:

Suicide attacks, improvised explosive devices, and beheadings of hostages—all techniques al Qaeda perfected in Iraq—are being employed by the Taliban to strengthen their influence in the southern and eastern parts of Afghanistan. Hekmat Karzai, an Afghan national security expert, points out that suicide bombings were virtually unknown in Afghanistan until 2005, when there were 21 attacks. According to the U.S. military there were 139 such attacks in 2006. This exponentially rising number of suicide attacks is mirrored by other grim statistics—IED attacks in Afghanistan more than doubled from 783 in 2005 to 1,677 in 2006, and the number of “direct” attacks by insurgents using weapons against international forces tripled from 1,558 to 4,542 during the same time period. [...]

Luckily, for the moment, the suicide attackers in Afghanistan have not been nearly as deadly as those in Iraq. As one U.S. military official explained, almost all of the Taliban’s suicide bombers are “Pashtun country guys from Pakistan,” with little effective training.

According to Gen. Wardak, that moment seems now to have passed. Shockingly, it turns out that invading Iraq and transforming it into an open source laboratory for terrorism was not an effective anti-terrorism strategy.

For more on the growing crisis in Afghanistan, see last Friday’s Progress Report.

For more on the Iraq war’s disastrous consequences for the “war on terror,” see these previous posts.

Yglesias

Things That Don’t Count

By Matthew Yglesias on Oct 15, 2008 at 5:34 pm

A.L. Bardach takes a look ties between John McCain and his key allies and anti-Castro terrorists and murderers. But of course it’s well-known that these guys don’t count as terrorists any more than defense spending counts as spending. Surely we’re all familiar with the basic rules of American politics, right?

Politics

Fox News headline: ‘Hip-hop dancing Colin Powell fuels speculation he’ll endorse Obama.’

By Matt Corley on Oct 15, 2008 at 5:10 pm

powelldance.jpgIn London yesterday, former Secretary of State Colin Powell “performed an impromptu hip-hop dance alongside well-known rap stars” following a speech at the “Africa Rising” festival. In an article on its website today, Fox News claims that Powell’s dance moves were “fueling speculation that he’s gearing up to do the Obama Two-Step” with an “imminent endorsement”:

Colin Powell has his dancing shoes on, fueling speculation that he’s gearing up to do the Obama Two-Step.

The normally staid former U.S. secretary of state and chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff performed an impromptu hip-hop dance alongside well-known rap stars Tuesday following a speech at a festival in London celebrating African-American music and fashion.

His address at the “Africa Rising” celebration inside London’s Royal Albert Hall fueled speculation that an endorsement of Barack Obama is imminent.

Noting that “Fox provides absolutely no evidence that Powell ‘fueled’ anything,” Spencer Ackerman writes that the article “relies on absolutely nothing but race to justify the speculation.” “I don’t really know what you’re supposed to say about this crap except that it’s racist,” said Ackerman.

Yglesias

Everybody Counts

By Matthew Yglesias on Oct 15, 2008 at 5:09 pm

Matt Bai writes about Barack Obama’s attempts “to persuade working-class and rural white guys that he is not the elitist, alien figure they may be inclined to think he is.”

There’s nothing wrong with looking at that subject, of course. But it’s curious to me that the press often seems to act as if working-class (defined as lacking college degrees) white men get triple votes or something. Slice the population up according to white and non-white. According to male and female. And according to college and non-college. Well, white people are more conservative than non-white people. And male people are more conservative than female people. And college graduates are less conservative than those who lack college degrees. Thus, when you look at white men who haven’t graduated from college, you’re looking at an extremely conservative group of people relative to the population at large. When you add on additional adjectives like “gun-toting” and/or “churchgoing” you’re looking at an even more conservative subset of the population. At the end of the day, it’s inevitable that a Democrat is going to lose this demographic.

Now margins matter, of course. Losing white working class men by 25 points isn’t the same as losing them by 20 points. But margins count for other groups. Getting 95 percent of the black vote is better than getting 85 percent of the black vote. Winning white women by four points is better than losing white women by two points.

Yglesias

Bubbles

By Matthew Yglesias on Oct 15, 2008 at 4:23 pm

soap_bubble_1.jpg

Mark Thoma says:

If we didn’t identify one of the largest bubbles in memory, and for the most part people didn’t, I’m not confident we will be able to come to any kind of consensus about “ordinary” sized bubbles before it’s too late.

I have no objection to the policy idea he’s putting forward, but I’m not so sure it’s true that “for the most part” people didn’t recognize a housing bubble once it had been under way for a while. Part of the weirdness of the housing bubble was that even if you believed there was a bubble, there was relatively little you could do about it. You can’t “short” housing in any easy way. And doing something like selling your house, and moving your family into a rental with the expectation of buying back into the market after the bubble pops involves huge transaction and search costs. Looking for a new place to live is a pain-in-the-ass and moving is both annoying and expensive. It’s much easier for a person who thinks real estate prices will rise to become a speculative buyer than it is for someone who thinks real estate prices will fall to become a speculative seller. It seems to me that that mismatch was one of the driving forces behind the real estate bubble.

Climate Progress

Q: Is a global economic slowdown good for the climate, as Nobelist Paul Crutzen says?

By Joe Romm on Oct 15, 2008 at 4:21 pm

A: Of course not. Only efforts to sharply cut CO2 emissions starting immediately would be good for the climate.

If proof were ever needed that winning a Nobel Prize does not make you a genius on every subject, consider what atmospheric scientist Paul Crutzen told Reuters:

It’s a cruel thing to say … but if we are looking at a slowdown in the economy, there will be less fossil fuels burning, so for the climate it could be an advantage… We could have a much slower increase of CO2 emissions in the atmosphere … people will start saving (on energy use).

monkeybutt.jpgYes, and monkeys could fly out of my butt, which, as an aside, is probably the only thing I could do that might garner a Nobel prize or at least a mention in the Guinness Book of World Records. But (butt?) I digress.

If carbon dioxide emissions stopped growing forever, concentrations would still keep rising forever, and the climate would be destroyed. In fact, the recent rate of growth of emissions has been faster than even the most pessimistic IPCC model had projected (see “Global carbon emissions jumped 3% in 2007“). If that rate of growth were cut in half, we would still have our foot on the accelerator headed toward the cliff (see “For peat’s sake: A point of no return as alarming as the tundra feedback“).

Crutzen knows better. He signed the Must Read Bali Climate Declaration by Scientists, which acknowledged that to avoid catastrophic impacts “global emissions must peak and decline in the next 10 to 15 years.” A global economic slowdown doesn’t increase the chances of that happening. Quite the reverse.

Lots of people who apparently never believed in serious climate action have been taking the opportunity of the slowdown to say we must back off intelligent emissions controls:

In an interview with The Associated Press, Rep. Rick Boucher, D-Va., said that in light of the economic downturn, a bill that would give polluters permits free of charge would be preferable.

And he’s a Democrat. Sadly, he doesn’t seem to know better. Even his own inadequate climate bill doesn’t began restricting emissions for 5 years, and given its absurdly generous rip-offset provisions, it doesn’t actually lower emissions from current levels for two decades (see “Dingell and Boucher draft climate bill: Likely no CO2 cut until near 2030“). Why should the current economic slowdown change what we do several years from now? Even sadder are these comments:

Sen. John Warner, R-Va., a lead sponsor of a Senate bill to curb greenhouse gases that failed this year, acknowledged that the economy could delay when reductions in carbon dioxide would start.

Has he even read his own bill? It too doesn’t kick in at all for five years, and it too wouldn’t actually start reducing CO2 emissions below current levels for two decades (see “Boxer-Lieberman-Warner bill update: Probably no U.S. CO2 emissions cut until after 2025“).

You would expect such doubletalk from congressional opponents of climate action — and you wouldn’t be disappointed:

Read more

Politics

McCain Flack On Transition Chief Lobbying For Saddam: ‘We’ve Had No Associations With Any Lobbyists’

By Satyam Khanna on Oct 15, 2008 at 4:21 pm

Yesterday, Murray Waas revealed that the head of Sen. John McCain’s transition team, power lobbyist William Timmons, was involved in a lobbying effort on behalf of Saddam Hussein in the early 1990s “to ease international sanctions against his regime.”

Today, MSNBC’s David Schuster asked McCain spokesperson Ben Porritt about the revelations. Porrit claimed that the campaign has had no associations with lobbyists, quickly changing the subject to Bill Ayers:

I’m actually not too familiar with his history, but what I do know is that throughout our campaign, we’ve talked about this a lot, we’ve had no associations with any lobbyists on our campaign, and I think there’s questionable associations with Barack Obama that needs to be addressed before we even get into talking about the transition:

“You have no associations with Charlie Black?” asked Schuster incredulously. “I mean, he’s a lobbyist.” Watch it:

Timmons is the chairman emeritus of Timmons and Company, an influential lobbying firm in Washington. In addition to helping Saddam avoid sanctions and trying to profit off Iraqi oil, Timmons has also lobbied for Fannie Mae, Freddie Mac, and the American Petroleum Institute. Time Magazine called Timmons “a Washington institution.”

It is absurd to claim McCain has “had no associations with any lobbyists.” He has at least 164 former lobbyists running his campaign, fundraising, and setting his policy agenda — including Charlie Black, Rick Davis, and Randy Scheunemann.

Economy

Holtz-Eakin: ‘You Can’t Cut Taxes For 95%’ Of People, But McCain Cuts Taxes For ‘Everybody’

By Pat Garofalo on Oct 15, 2008 at 4:20 pm

During an interview on CNBC today, Douglas Holtz-Eakin, an economic adviser to Sen. John McCain (R-AZ), asserted that “you can’t cut taxes for 95 percent of the American people, if just under 50 percent aren’t paying taxes.” However, minutes later, he claimed that McCain would cut taxes for “everybody.” Watch it:

By Holtz-Eakin’s own standard, a cut for “everybody” should be impossible. But by claiming 50 percent of Americans “aren’t paying taxes,” Holtz-Eakin is simply furthering the McCain campaign’s false story of low-income Americans not paying taxes.

While the bottom one-third of Americans do not pay federal income taxes, as Brian Levine noted earlier “they do pay federal payroll and excise taxes, as well as state and local taxes.” Simply having no federal income tax liability does not give someone a tax-free existence.

Furthermore, McCain does not cut taxes for “everybody.” In fact, over 100 million middle class households do not benefit from his tax plan. Meanwhile, this weekend McCain unveiled a new tax proposal – temporarily cutting the capital gains tax from 15 percent to 7.5 percent – that gives two-thirds of its benefit to millionaires and gives “on average, nothing” to people making less than $50,000 a year.

Holtz-Eakin’s two statements only make sense if he thinks “everybody” actually means “the wealthiest Americans.”

Yglesias

Keeping an Eye

By Matthew Yglesias on Oct 15, 2008 at 3:52 pm

It seems that Sarah Palin hasn’t been doing such a great job of making sure the Russians don’t “rear their head” unduly:

The campaign of vice presidential candidate Sarah Palin said the Alaska governor was unaware of a visit by Russian oil officials to Anchorage on Monday.

Eight high-level officials from Gazprom, Russia’s state-controlled oil conglomerate, traveled to Anchorage earlier this week to meet with the Alaska Department of Natural Resources and the chief executive of ConocoPhillips to discuss energy projects and the possibility of expanding into new markets.

Curious.

Older

Newer

Switch to Mobile
ThinkProgress Signup Overlay Skip and Continue to ThinkProgress Skip and Continue to ThinkProgress

Sign Up