Intrepid diplomat, scholar, and writer Rory Stewart has a piece critical of the Obama administration’s new Afghanistan strategy up in the London Review of Books. Stewart argues that “state-building” is meaningless in “a mountainous country, with strong traditions of local self-government and autonomy, significant ethnic differences, but strong shared moral values,” and that the U.S. and its international partners should refocus by decreasing force levels to 20,000 (made up largely of special forces) and increasing development aid and assistance.

Leaving aside Stewart’s tendency toward self-congratulation — he believes those who think like him possess “detailed knowledge of each country’s past, a bold analysis of the causes of development and a rigorous exposition of the differences, for which few have patience” while others apparently are dull, impatient conformists — Stewart’s proposal is fundamentally flawed. Its proposed focus on development runs aground on the problems of security and financial integrity. All the development aid in the world isn’t going to make a whit of difference if development workers are being brazenly killed in the field or can’t make it to project areas. Then there’s corruption –- development aid isn’t going to matter much if corrupt officials line their pockets with it.

Ultimately, these are problems of effective governance -– a concept that Stewart goes out of his way to deride. While there are no doubt problems developing and putting into practice programs that result in effective governance, simply pointing these issues out doesn’t invalidate the diagnosis that ineffective, corrupt, and incompetent governance is at the heart of Afghanistan’s woes. The problem isn’t that good governance and legitimacy are pie-in-the-sky foreign notions as Stewart argues, it’s that there’s so little of either.

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Jeffrey Goldberg gets in on the Human Rights Watch story with one of the most comically obvious attempts by a journalist to arrive at a conclusion that I’ve ever read.

After first assuring us that he is “not one of the people who believes that Human Rights Watch is reflexively anti-Israel,” Goldberg sets out to discover whether Sarah Leah Whitson, director of HRW’s Middle East and North Africa Division, attempted to raise money from potential Saudi donors by highlighting the HRW’s “battles with ‘pro-Israel pressure groups.’” Goldberg exchanged emails with Ken Roth, executive director of Human Rights Watch, who wrote:

We report on Israel. Its supporters fight back with lies and deception. It wasn’t a pitch against the Israel lobby per se. Our standard spiel is to describe our work in the region. Telling the Israel story–part of that pitch–is in part telling about the lies and obfuscation that are inevitably thrown our way.

Goldberg interpreted:

In other words, yes, the director of Human Rights Watch’s Middle East division is attempting to raise funds from Saudis… in part by highlighting her organization’s investigations of Israel, and its war with Israel’s “supporters,” who are liars and deceivers. It appears as if Human Rights Watch, in the pursuit of dollars, has compromised its integrity.

This doesn’t even pass the laugh test. Basically, Goldberg’s view is that even discussing Human Rights Watch’s work on Israel, and the criticism that it receives from right-wing pro-Israel groups, in the presence of Arabs is tantamount to trafficking in hate speech.

Yes, it’s reprehensible, but it’s also typical of Goldberg’s general method on the issue of Israel, which involves presenting himself as a moderate and reasonable judge of various claims and criticisms — he doesn’t really like the settlements, don’t you know! — before invariably delivering bog-standard neoconservative verdicts. He’s usually less clumsy about it, though.

Last Sunday, on a trip to Sacramento, former Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice briefly praised the nation’s history of welcoming immigrants, saying that it’s a tradition that should be preserved:

“Our national myth is the log cabin. That you can come from humble circumstances and do great things. That’s what has brought immigrants to this country for years. We’ve got to keep welcoming these people.”

A few months ago, Rice expressed deep regret about not being able to pass comprehensive immigration reform while her boss, President George W. Bush, was in office:

“We need immigration reform. I don’t care if it’s for the person who crawls across the desert to earn $5 an hour, or for Sergey Brin, who came here from Russia and founded Google. As a country, we can’t have people living in the shadows. It’s just wrong. It’s not only ineffective, it’s wrong.”

Rice’s comments are a much-needed departure from the Bush administration’s generally unwelcoming immigration enforcement tactics that drove undocumented immigrants deeper underground and contributed to the current atmosphere of hate, hostility and ethnic intimidation towards immigrants, Latinos, and other foreign minorities living in the US. While the Bush administration did advocate for comprehensive immigration reform and a pathway to citizenship for the undocumented population, it implemented oppressive immigration enforcement measures to win the public’s support for broader reform. And when the immigration reform bill failed in 2007, the administration’s brutal enforcement tactics continued. In fact, they escalated.

In late 2008, Peter Markowitz, professor of law at the Benjamin Cardozo School of Law at Yeshiva University in New York, explained:

“Something really shifted in the Bush Administration once it realized comprehensive immigration reform was not going to pass on its watch…When they saw the public policy battle was lost, they moved instead to public relations. The strategy now is to shore up the Republican base by demonstrating a big, flashy show of force.”

The Bush administration did a good job of riling up its right wing base, but it didn’t win itself any new votes. Instead, Bush left immigrants and Latinos with a situation in which hate crimes against them are increasing, racial profiling is soaring, and dehumanizing anti-immigrant rhetoric continues to dominate the airwaves. Bush may have won the hearts and minds of right-wingers, but Latino and immigrant voters overwhelmingly turned against the Republican party in the November 2008 elections. And while several members of the GOP are now trying to clean up their party’s rhetoric, ultimately its actions will speak louder than its words.

Reporting that the Israeli government “has decided to take a much more aggressive stance” toward human rights NGOs, the Jerusalem Post quotes Netanyahu spokesman Mark Regev attacking Human Rights Watch for raising raising funds from private Saudi individuals.

Regev told the Post that “A human rights organization raising money in Saudi Arabia is like a women’s rights group asking the Taliban for a donation.”

“If you can fundraise in Saudi Arabia, why not move on to Somalia, Libya and North Korea?” he said. “For an organization that claims to offer moral direction, it appears that Human Rights Watch has seriously lost its moral compass.”

Responding to Regev’s troubling suggestion that citizens of Saudi Arabia should come under suspicion simply by virtue of being Saudis, Sarah Leah Whitson, director of HRW’s Middle East and North Africa Division said that “Certainly not everyone is tainted by the misconduct of their government.”

Meanwhile, a number of journalists received an email from the American Israel Public Affairs Committee this morning containing this Wall Street Journal item attacking HRW for the Saudi trip. Author David Bernstein asserts that Whitson was raising money “from wealthy Saudis by highlighting HRW’s demonization of Israel,” and suggests that “Ms. Whitson found no time to criticize Saudi Arabia’s abysmal human rights record.”

In the WSJ comments section, Whitson responded that “had [Bernstein] asked me, and not just ‘someone who claims to have worked for HRW,’ the only source he ever cites, he would know that we did indeed spend much of the time in serious discussion about Saudi violations, including its troubled justice system and the lack of women’s rights, as well as our work in the region, including Israel.”

Had he checked our website, he’d know that Human Rights Watch in recent years has published more reports and news releases on rights problems in Saudi Arabia than any other human rights organization in the world.

I emailed AIPAC’s Josh Block to ask about AIPAC sending Bernstein’s item out. Block responded via email that “HRW has repeatedly demonstrated its anti-Israel bias, and for an organization that claims to be objective about human rights to go hat in hand to raise money from the Saudi ruling elite, while bragging about and seeking to further its Israel-bashing is deeply revealing of the group’s fundamental hypocrisy and its policy of holding a double standard when it comes to Israel. Human Rights Watch has long ago lost all credibility when it comes to human rights issues in the Middle East.”

A 2005 article in the Jewish Daily Forward noted that “Human Rights Watch has in fact devoted more attention to each of five other nations in the region — Iraq, Sudan, Egypt, Turkey and Iran — than to Israel.”