One interesting thing about the past few decades of world history is that essentially the exact same events can be read as having precisely opposite implications. Here, for example, is Peter Bergen arguing for more forceful American military intervention in Afghanistan:

The implication of Walt’s objection to the ramped-up Obama strategy in Afghanistan is that the U.S. should either do less in Afghanistan, or even just get out altogether. But America has already gone down this road. Twice. In 1989 the U.S. closed its embassy in Kabul and then effectively zeroed out aid to one of the poorest countries in the world; meanwhile Afghanistan was racked by a civil war, which spawned the Taliban who then gave safe haven to al Qaeda.

Then in the winter of 2001 the Bush administration overthrew the Taliban, and because of its aversion to nation-building rebuilt the country on the cheap and quickly got distracted by the war in Iraq. Into the resulting vacuum stepped a resurgent Taliban. This time the movement of religious warriors was much more closely aligned with al Qaeda.

There is, of course, something very arbitrary about starting this clock in 1989. One could just as easily note that in 1980 the United States decided that it would serve our interests to deliberately destabilize Afghanistan by trying to foster a series of links between Saudi financing, Pakistani intelligence, and Afghan religio-nationalist militants and that we’ve spent much of the past ten years coping with the unintended consequences of this activity.

Which I think it’s why it’s worth being above-board about the fact that people really come to this discussion with some pretty strong ideological priors. I think there’s a view of the world out there which looks at the American military as a kind of balloon that ought to expand to fill every vacuum that arises in the world. There’s another view which finds this trend in our recent foreign policy alarming. I’m much more in the latter camp. And I think that what Bergen is really showing here is that we have no practical ability to actually fill these voids on a sustained basis and that, therefore, the practical results of vacuum-filling enterprises are dominated by the unintended consequences.

When last we met Louisiana Governor Bobby Jindal, he was trashing his reputation for intelligence and seriousness about public policy with this nonsensical attack on trains and volcano monitoring as wasteful:

JINDAL: While some of the projects in the bill make sense, their legislation is larded with wasteful spending. It includes $300 million to buy new cars for the government, $8 billion for high-speed rail projects, such as a “magnetic levitation” line from Las Vegas to Disneyland, and $140 million for something called “volcano monitoring.”

Now my colleague Lee Fang observes that Jindal seems to love trains:

The AP reported earlier this month that Gov. Bobby Jindal’s (R-LA) administration is planning to request $300 million dollars from the federal government to develop a high-speed rail between Baton Rouge and New Orleans. The trains, which would run at about 79mph, would be part of a larger Gulf Coast rail plan with top speeds of 110mph. Much of the money, however, comes from the Recovery Act, a stimulus measure Jindal not only opposed, but recently called a failure.

I haven’t looked at this issue in detail, but on the face of it a Baton Rouge to New Orleans line actually does sound to me like a wasteful project. We’re talking about connecting the 46th largest metro area in the country to the 67th largest, which suggests that there are a lot of city pairs that ought to be higher priorities. Compare that to Chicago (number three) and Milwaukee (number 39) or consider that the state of Florida contains four separate metro areas (Miami, Tampa, Orlando, Jacksonville) that are all larger than New Orleans. According to Google, the drive between these cities only takes an hour and a half. You could imagine this working, and of course if the state of Louisiana has some vision for it I wouldn’t want to discourage them, but as a use of federal money this strikes me as pretty low down the list of rail projects I would want to fund.

A bunch of people gather to listen to some dull moralist talk (wikimedia)

Julian Sanchez has a post bemoaning “the depressing rarity with which people actually understand the views of people with different ideologies.” It got me thinking.

My personal feeling, the longer I spend in DC and working in the political domain, is that I get better and better at understanding other people’s ideologies. I also feel that people writing about politics often caricature opponents’ views as part of a rhetorical strategy. But I’ve been back-and-forth on the main issues long enough that I’m pretty sure I could switch this blog’s point of view and do a credible job of offering critiques-from-the-right of the progressive liberal health reform movement and the progressive liberal approach to domestic policy generally. One happy consequence of this is that I find the stubborn persistence of principled disagreement less mystifying than I once did, and have a greater appreciation for what I now think of as a certain irreducibly Kierkegaardian element to ideological commitment that, in turn, helps explain why so many “normal” people have such fuzzy political views.

At the same time, I’ve come to be increasingly baffled by the high degree cynicism and immorality displayed in big-time politics. For example, Senators who genuinely do believe that carbon dioxide emissions are contributing to a global climate crisis seem to think nothing of nevertheless taking actions that endanger the welfare of billions of people on the grounds that acting otherwise would be politically problematic in their state. In other words, they don’t want to do the right thing because their self-interest points them toward doing something bad. But it’s impossible to imagine these same Senators stabbing a homeless person in a dark DC alley to steal his shoes. And what’s more, the entire political class would be (rightly!) shocked and appalled by the specter of a Senator murdering someone for personal gain. Yet it’s actually taken for granted that “my selfish desires dictate that I do x” constitutes a legitimate reason to do the wrong thing on important legislation.

Making it all the odder, the level of self-interest at stake isn’t all that high. Selling the public good down the river to bolster your re-election chances isn’t like stealing a loaf of bread to feed your starving children. The welfare rolls are hardly stocked with the names of former members of congress. Indeed, it’s not even clear that voting “the wrong way” poses particularly serious threats to one’s re-election. But even if it did, one might assume that people who bother to dedicating their lives to securing vast political power did so because they actually wanted to accomplish something and get in the history books, perhaps, as one of the big heroes of their era. Nobody ever writes a biography about the guy who did a good job of reconciling his party’s ideological base with the parochial interests of local businesses and his campaign contributors.

Meanwhile, political argument is actually dominated to an odd degree by fake-technical discussions about how “people think that x but really it’s y” or “a could achieve b if only he did c” with very little attention given to the crucial moral and ethical dimensions of political disputes and political action.

I’ve resolved to try to start following the Afghanistan debate more closely now and asked Spencer Ackerman for some reading recommendations. He gave me:

— Rory Stewart, “The Irresistible Illusion” The London Review of Books.

— Gilles Dorronsoro, “The Taliban’s Winning Strategy in Afghanistan” for the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace.

— Andrew Exum and Nathaniel Fick, “Triage: The Next Twelve Months in Afghanistan and Pakistan”.

— David Kilcullen’s February congressional testimony.

I’ve read the Stewart and am now working on Dorronsoro.

One question I’m looking at somewhat hazily is this. If you read accounts of the Soviet war in Afghanistan in the 1980s, people generally always seem to think that American and Saudi and Pakistani support for the Mujahedeen was an important factor. I don’t see anyone saying “it was all a big waste of time and the same stuff would have happened anyway.” The Taliban has, as best as anyone knows, nothing remotely resembling that level of external support. So why isn’t that making more of a difference? Is our side actually much less effective than the Soviets were when you control for the change in external support?