BREAKING BAD AND ME: CONFRONTING EVIL

Because I grew up in the relatively innocent 1940s and 50s in America, I knew a lot about good and bad, mostly through “good guys” and “bad guys” from shows on radio or TV.  I wasn’t old enough to know what it was that “bad girls” did that made them “bad.”  Evil was something I heard about. 

The Nazis were evil, I knew, because of their extermination of the Jews, but even though I was Jewish, I had no relatives that I knew of who had been in, or never got out of, the death camps. So the evils of the Nazis were abstract, or at least distant, something that happened in Germany, or Europe, “over there.”

I grew up, until I was 15, in the South – Atlanta, Miami Beach, Richmond, VA – and because my parents were progressives, deeply invested in the civil rights movement, I followed and supported the campaign for civil rights and equal opportunities for all races very closely.  But the Black people I knew best, my back fence neighbors in the suburbs of Richmond, were successful. Their 40 acre farm behind our suburban development, which was one of a cluster of 16 that had come with a mule to a Lambert ancestor about 80 years earlier, had corn fields, pigs and chickens, and even a few acres of deep woods.  For me it was Disney World before Disney had moved beyond Mickey Mouse, a wonderful place. 

They had the first TV set in our neighborhood, and I used to go to their house every Thursday night to watch Wrestling from Hollywood with the Lambert children more or less my age, Benjamin III, Elisabeth, Leonard, Albert and Johnny.  Mr. and Mrs. Lambert were featured in Holiday Magazine as “the caterers” to the FFV, the First Families of Virginia, which meant they hung out with the richest White folks in town, and probably earned more than my social worker dad and nursery school teacher mother.

I knew that it was “bad,” unfair, that I could walk 2 blocks to a brand new elementary school, while they were bused for an hour and a half each way, to a 3 room school house in the woods of Goochland County, and it hurt me, that they had to sit in the back of the Richmond city bus into town.  But I could sit with them, so it didn’t seem that bad.

The Richmond newspapers, which I rarely read beyond the comics and sports pages, were full of “ugliness.”  The afternoon paper, the News-Leader featured regular racist rants from James J. Kilpatrick, who was later to tone himself down to “cute” and “curmudgeonly conservative,” for his 60 Minutes mini-debates with liberal Shana Alexander.  But to me, who left town and region 2 years after my Bar Mitzvah, he seemed merely “stupid,” just another “bad guy.”

The evil he enabled and supported was way off-stage to me, and the existing anachronistic remnants of the Ku Klux Klan neither marched nor burned near my front lawn.

The other example of “bad” behavior in my youth was Sen. Joseph McCarthy and his “anti-Communist” companions.  My family knew several people, more very liberal Democrats than anti-American Communists, although some had flirted with or briefly joined the Party back in the 30s, who were had been driven out of South Florida by JFK’s smarmy pal George Smathers, but they were either far away in Mexico, or settled, to all outward appearances to a 10 year old, happily in Connecticut.  What it might mean to have been tossed from your law practice and have to support your family as a chicken farmer was beyond my understanding.  Like the Lamberts, the Fursts had been treated badly; their situation was unfair, but evil? … Like victims of the Nazis, or as I was just becoming aware, Stalin?  No, not to well-sheltered me. 

As for McCarthy himself, Walt Kelly in my beloved Pogo had already reduced him to a comic character, “Wiley Polecat,” I believe, and soon my hero and lifetime model Edward R. Murrow had him on the run, a visibly pathetic, blustering drunk, too de-clawed to rate as frighteningly “evil.”

I was just past 50 when true evil, cruel, blood-thirsty, gratuitous well beyond selfish self-interest evil, smacked me in the face in Bosnia.  On my first day in-country, I walked through a village called Kozarac, in which the Serb residents had carefully, like the Jews of plague-ridden Egypt, marked their homes to inoculate them against the Angel of Death.  There were two kinds of houses on the silent, farm-field-surrounded streets of Kozarac, immaculate white stucco-walled, red-roofed homes with the red-white-blue tricolor of Serbia stenciled near the front door, and soot-stained, roofless husks, emptied of people, with no markings but a red X.  This was horrible enough for an American who had been blessed never to know warfare on his home grounds, but then I noticed something that put the lie to the label “civil war,” which had been put on the Bosnian conflict.  These were not houses that had been overrun by invading troops against desperate defenders.  There were no entrance wounds, no sign of shells penetrating these houses all but identical to the intact Serb domiciles next door.  Window glass was almost entirely outside.  These were homes which had imploded, with roofs that had collapsed after grenades had been tossed inside and fire had surged up from them.  These buildings were literally defenseless after their inhabitants had fled and had been wantonly destroyed to make sure their Muslim or Croat residents had nothing to come back to.  Evil.

I only cried once in Bosnia, briefly in our car, hours after an aged Jew, a Holocaust survivor who had come to Bosnia on a fact-finding mission with Elie Wiesel, defended the Serbs because “they had always been good to their Jews,” and their victims were Muslims.  There was no point mentioning to him the Serbs’ Catholic Croat victims because during World War 2, 50 years before, the Croats had brought their home-grown Nazis to power, and mass-killed and incarcerated, as well as Serb and Muslim civilians, many Jews.

Aside from that brief moment, I kept a stoic, professional front, reporting factually on concentration camps and death camps (one of “our” witnesses became the first person  called to testify against the first Serb camp guard at the Omarska death camp to be convicted by the Hague War Crimes Tribunal), on drunken snipers wedged into their mountain “nests,” who fired on unarmed civilians, -- men, women and children,-- in  Sarajevo in the valley below.  I was polite and civil interviewing mass murderers like Radovan Karadzic and Slobodan Milosevic, pressing them as I might any other miscreant politician.  But I didn’t cry again even surrounded by the consequences of evil in Bosnia, in Rwanda, in the occupied West Bank.

Then, one day, outside a quiet village in South Sudan, just hours after being serenaded by hungry children about to be given one of their 2 daily meals at a “feeding station” outside the town of Rumbek, I wandered into the remains of a church, which had been bombed about a year before by the Sudanese Air Force.  It, too, was roofless, and whatever broken glass that might have been blown out of its windows had long been picked over, just as any relics of its former religious use had been taken away by some looter or former congregant.  All that was left were a few red-brick walls overgrown with leafy foliage and the sounds of birds and a few wandering cattle.  Evil had again triumphed, ruining a harmless structure, driving to flight innocent people, and nothing was left behind but the sounds of peace and quiet and abandonment.  I cried for 20 minutes, no sobs, just streams of weak, pained tears, running down my face until someone from my team, their video recording of the feeding station, the feeding, the children, and, from the outside, enough of the ruined church to show what it was, called me back to work.  As far as I can remember, I never again cried on the job, not in Kosovo, Iraq, or Afghanistan.

When I was young and a student of literature, I devoured the masterworks of the day, the theatre of the absurd, the theater of cruelty, black humor, dark drama.  I read or watched for pleasure revelations of man’s inhumanity to man, some blessedly stylized, some painfully realistic.

No longer. A few years of witnessing the absurd reality of cruelty, the dark truth of power unlimited by conscience, of the thin membrane that hardly keeps mankind from inhuman acts has altered my aesthetic.

I no longer want to see re-enactments of evil actions.  I can no longer stomach depictions of cruelty.  For me, these can no longer be entertainment, and, frankly, I don’t feel like I need to be enlightened as to people’s capacity to mistreat other people.  Been there.  Seen that.  Like the smart reformed junkie who shuns places where he once scored dope, I hide from my all too susceptible “kindling” of tears.

So, I don’t watch Breaking Bad, which most folks hereabouts think the greatest thing ever to happen to Albuquerque.

‘Querqueans love the show.  They love buying “Blue Rock” sweets from the Candy Lady in Old Town, and Blue Meth bath salts, even taking classes at a local spa on how to “cook” what they rush to tell you are “real bath salts, not the street drug they call ‘bath salts.’”

Yes, some people who work on the show’s local production units, or run bike shops or drive limos which offer “Breaking Bad Tours,” have made a living from this, while others simply revel in ticking off the local landmarks, Lotaburger, the Crossroads Motel, the Octopus Car Wash, where crucial TV scenes have unfolded.  A local brewery proudly offers Walter’s White Lie Pale Ale and Heisenberg’s Dark Ale commemorating the bad and worse sides of Breaking Bad’s central character, and the most heard local cliché is the proud declaration that Albuquerque itself “has become a character in the series.”

No, people here do not delude themselves about the darkness and ugliness of the show.  Like me, they embrace the city’s modest virtues, and accept its social and economic deficits. They say Breaking Bad shows the “grittiness” of the city and that scenes like a young girl dying on screen, choking on her vomit following her overdose virtuously de-glamorize drug abuse.

One philosophy professor from the University of New Mexico told the Albuquerque Journal the series has shown Albuquerque as “a starkly beautiful and hauntingly dangerous backdrop.”  He seems to me to be in denial.  To me, the show uses a very realistic portrait of a poor and unlovely city (surrounded, it is true, by stark beauty and more than its share of criminal, frequently meth-stoked danger), and fills it with the things we love to think we hate to see, but can’t stop watching.  As a local psychotherapist puts it, “People make choices and they spiral down.  It’s the kind of thing that fascinates some of us.”  

An even more detached view comes from another UNM academic, an emeritus professor of psychology, who cites the Classic Roman playwright Terence, “Nothing human is alien to me,” adding, “We are all born psychopaths.   There is something about the dark side that makes us want to go there.”

Not me.  Not voluntarily.

Still, the Breaking Bad production unit gave several bundles of old clothes once used as costumes on the show to 2 charitable thrift shops, which sold them for a few thousand  dollars – Albuquerque is a poor city – which went to support some all too busy homeless shelters.  And this weekend, more props from the show will be auctioned off to benefit Goodwill Industries.  This is part of a genuine two-way street of engagement and affection.  Weekly last season viewing parties draw hundreds of Albuquerque fans each Sunday to a different watering hole for shared excitement, and a recent Breaking Bad marathon at the Immaculate Conception Catholic Church held dozens of folks over for mass after the last show.  My wife joins friends for an at-home viewing every week.

Breaking Bad has meant money and jobs for hundreds of Albuquerque residents.  The town has enjoyed the visiting celebrities, and the celebrities like stars Bryan Cranston and Anna Gunn have enjoyed the town, finding in their temporary residence, favorite restaurants and bars and – like me – the Triple-A Baseball Isotopes.  One lesser actor, Steven Michael Quezada (Steve Gomez in the show), himself a local, used his brief Breaking Bad celebrity to help him win, unopposed, a seat on the city school board.

As the show producers’ billboard wittily said – “Thank you, Albuquerque.  We had great chemistry.”

And Sony Pictures and AMC hope the formula still works, because after Walter and Skyler White, Jesse Pinkman, Hank, Mike, Gus, and Lydia are disposed of, probably cruelly and violently, they plan to start shooting a “prequel,” Better Call Saul, built around Breaking Bad’s every-evil-character’s attorney Saul Goodman.

I wish it and all its Albuquerque fans well.  I won’t be watching.

 

     

SOME MAXIMS FOR 21ST CENTURY WARFARE

 

First, let me confess, I have never served in the military, never fired a gun, never killed anything larger than a mouse (except for one terrible accident when I was about 8 years old when, mischievously tipping a big oil barrel to see what I could spill out of it, I was caught in the act, and in dropping my side of the tilted barrel, caught a curious piglet beneath it. It is one of the worst memories of my life.  So in addition lacking any warrior experience, I am squeamish.

Nevertheless, in a 50+ year career in journalism, I have seen warfare and its consequences (on the streets of New York, Newark, and Kent, Ohio, as well as in the Balkans, Palestine, Iraq, Afghanistan, South Sudan and Rwanda, and have spent a lot of time talking with troops and their commanders.

Not enough to make me an expert, but more than enough to conceive these ideas.

1)    Power Projection Is Over:  Wikipedia says that power projection and force projection are the same thing, and that “soft power” can also be successfully projected.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Power_projection

This is, to me, very confused thinking.

Power projection, once upon a time, meant the ability of a distant state to control other states.  The apex of power projection was the era of colonial empires, when the economies and polities of distant, usually African, Asian, Middle Eastern or Latin American nations, and the daily lives and ultimate fates of their people could be controlled from places like London, Paris, Lisbon, Madrid, Moscow and, yes, Washington.

Force projection is a lesser capability.  It can intimidate, punish, oppress its targets, but it, as we have learned to our sorrow, cannot control them.  One way of looking at force projection is that it is power projection without empire, since force projection does not imply the durability or the continuity of power projection.  For its targets the difference between force projection and power projection is the difference between a sock in the jaw and life in prison.  For its projectors, the limited power of force projection was nicely summed up by American fighters in Vietnam (or Afghanistan): “We control the day; they control the night.”  

Soft power, which eschews brute force, conveys influence, which can have both durability and continuity, but neither controls nor intimidates or oppresses.  The soft power of “rock and roll, blue jeans, Coca Cola,” is impressive, whether you see it as liberating or annoying, but it, even in its state-directed iterations of diplomatic alliance or exclusion or economic sanctions allows it targets to choose their outcomes.   

What power projection controlled was not just territory, but equally important, communication.  The armies of empire had superior firepower, but, more important, they knew, both strategically and tactically, what they were doing.  By and large, their victims did not.  Imperial fleets could move with speed and stealth, outpacing both warnings and preparations.  Once landed, imperial troops could overpower territories and kill or corral their inhabitants and move on, before their next targets knew they were in danger.

And control of communications was a 2-way street.  Not only were power projections‘ victims ignorant of their future, the projectors’ folks back home could be kept completely in the dark about the crimes and brutalities being committed in their names.

Which brings us to maxim #2:

 

2)    There Are No More Secret Wars:  Back when power projection worked, wars were a secret to their victims until it was too late, and they could be kept secret from disapproving citizens of colonial powers until the state decided otherwise, or until the disapproval was of faits accomplish, which are harder to argue against, and much harder to undo.

Now, like God’s sparrows, not a bomb or missile falls unobserved, and news of the damage done can be communicated both locally and globally, instantaneously.  For the would-be projectors of power or force, even their most incurious or controlled news media must now contend with other media voices, with other, likely often opposing, points of view, and with an anarchic world of video-capable mobile phones, cameras, computers and satellite links to tell the world of every death, every burning building.

As the Bradley Manning and Edward Snowden cases make obvious, secret attempts to project power or force can be revealed to the world, not just after the fact, but in the planning or even pre-planning stages.

As I have said before, as long as institutions involve human beings in conceiving or executing their plans, the betrayal of secrecy is not just possible, but predictable.

The cruel depredations of perhaps the world’s last empire, the Soviet bloc, its oppression, corruption and bureaucratic paralysis, were so well known that it was rejected by its own people, and shunned by the rest of the world. 

Now, with all the world witness to our projections of force in Iraq and Afghanistan (and our airborne killings in Pakistan, Yemen and Somalia, and our connections to coupsters in Honduras and Egypt) and the threats of force against Iran regularly made by belligerent blowhards in Congress, there is a widespread sense of, “There, but for the grace, or lack of interest, of the Pentagon and the White House, go I.”

In addition to the projection of power, force or influence, there is their opposite, the projection of repulsive arrogance.  This kind of arrogance and ignorance can only be remedied by my Third Maxim.

 

3)    WHERE YOU CANNOT TELL FRIEND FROM FOE, DO NOT GO:  I was going to propose as my Third Maxim, There Are No More Short Wars, but the exception proves the rule promulgated above.  The US military did conduct short, successful wars in Grenada and Panama in the 1980s.  What made these “incursions” short and successful was not just that they occurred before the globe was digitally interconnected but because in both cases, our troops, and almost all the citizens in both places knew who the “bad guys” were.  In Panama, there were few remaining supporters of the corrupt and criminal regime of Manuel Noriega, while in Grenada, the Stalinist Bernard Coard was almost universally seen as an oppressive, vicious usurper who had overthrown -- and unforgivably, killed -- the perhaps unsteady, but still widely-liked, Socialist Maurice Bishop.  In neither place did American forces face popular or dogged opposition, and we were in and out too fast for particular factions to use us to target their political or personal rivals or enemies.

Would that had been the case in either Iraq or Afghanistan!  In both of those places, we invaded in support of allies, most of whom had been out of their countries for years or decades before we projected our forces.

They told us who our enemies were, when in reality, they were theirs.  Think of Ahmed Chalabi conning ignorant fools like Paul Bremer and his boss, Donald Rumsfeld into disbanding the Iraqi Army, which they defined as “Baathist,” while most Iraqis defined as “ours.”

Then there were the “night raids” launched in Iraq and Afghanistan against people who were fingered by “our friends” for what frequently turned out to be very private beefs. Every household we overturned, every prisoner we took and held, often for years at a time, did indeed become our enemy, for reasons we gave them.

Now, the latest Inspector General’s report from Afghanistan chronicles a waste of billions given to people we knew or later learned were already against us.  And still the dollars spill across the country where they cannot be traced, much less monitored, because it is completely unsafe for Americans to go beyond Kabul.  Because we don’t know who is on which side, and a misjudgment can mean death.  Which leads us to the Fourth Maxim, which is actually the first and foremost rule of warfare in our time.

 

4)     IN TODAY’S WARS, THE VISITING TEAM NEVER WINS:  The former advantages that made Power Projection work, an outsider’s preponderance of firepower and control of communications no longer work.  Defense Secretary Chuck Hagel warns, budget cuts may force him to reduce the US Navy’s aircraft carrier battle groups and the size of Army and Marine forces.  So what?  Those carrier groups are primarily useful for force projection, which is, as I’ve argued, something we should be reducing anyway, and the days of massed troops overrunning opposing hordes on big battlefields is as dead as the harquebus and halberd.  In fact, these days, with remote-controlled, satellite guided munitions, any mass of forces is simply an inviting target.  Enemies will no longer mass against us.  It’s much easier and more effective to pick us off with small groups, carrying portable, often “improvised” (meaning home-made, not put together spur of the moment) weapons.

Massive numbers of soldiers are now chiefly useful for military occupations (as Rumsfeld tragically refused to recognize when he invaded Iraq).  Even the small, mobile forces Rumsfeld championed there served principally to drag us deeper into the briar patch.  Once there, we discovered that occupation is a thankless, often hopeless task, which, one devoutly hopes, we will avoid in the future.

And the thing about occupations, and about power or force projection, is that they are temporary.  Everyone knows that: especially the home team, whether they be our enemy, our friends, or just innocent civilians.  In Afghanistan from the day the war began, the Taliban have been telling the people they live among, or within arms’ reach of, “The foreign forces will leave one day.  We will not.”

It’s not hard to draw the conclusion inherent in that formulation, and Afghans, whether horrified or pleased by that prospective outcome, live every day in its shadow.  That’s why so many of “our friends” prove perfidious.  They want their children to survive.

Everywhere we have projected power since the 1990s, our control of events has disappeared as soon as our troops have left.  In Bosnia and Serbia and Kosovo, in Iraq, Somalia, and soon in Afghanistan, the projection of force leaves only one certainty behind: the rule of force, usually the force we fought to defeat.

The cost in blood and treasure and in America’s international reputation has been catastrophic.  The benefits to ordinary people are very hard to find.    

WAR IS EASY; PEACE, NOT SO MUCH

WAR IS EASY; PEACE NOT SO MUCH.

 

War is all about one thing: force.  Whoever applies force most successfully rules.  Period.  End of story.

Peace is the perfect opposite of war in this: it, too, depends on one thing, the subjugation of force to governance, and, hopefully, rule of law.  Unless and until all of the use of force within a country is brought under the command and control of government, there is no peace.

When, after defeating the government and army of Saddam Houssein, American peacemakers declined to force the Kurdish pesh merga militias to subordinate themselves to the government in Baghdad, they guaranteed and legitimized the resistance of Sunni and Shi’ite Arab militias to state control, not to mention smaller mosque or mafia-based paramilitary units.  What the international forces (i.e. the US) wouldn’t do, the al-Maliki government in Baghdad couldn’t do, and this failure to subdue the many centrifugal armed groups in Iraq is what has turned that once rich and functional country into a ruin.

In Libya, the triumph of a congeries of international and local forces over the government and army of Muammar al-Qaddafi was also followed by no effective regulation of those various heavily-armed local fighting groups by a legitimate central government.  Instead, Tripoli is the isolated capitol of a dysfunctional pseudo-country overwhelmed by internecine blood-letting.

Back in the day, when armed force was a prerogative of the state, peace was relatively easy to obtain.  One side just had to defeat the other and install its own or puppet governance.

Today, defeated governments rarely control all the armed forces within their borders.  In fact, as a government nears defeat, it usually disintegrates into a chaos of superseding loyalties to sectarian or ethnic concepts or to local tribes, clans, imams or mob bosses, each with its own paramilitary force. Under these conditions, the law of war: force wins, rules, and governments obey the gunmen. 

Another good example of what happens when American and international forces declare peace and go home is Bosnia, whose wretched state was well described recently by NYTimes columnist Roger Cohen. 

http://www.nytimes.com/2013/07/19/opinion/global/roger-cohen-enough-of-the-daytonians.html?hp

Oddly, Cohen leaves undescribed the American decisions, enacted through the Dayton Peace Agreement of 1995, which helped make Bosnia the mess it is today.

Peace a la Dayton was declared but not enforced, and so power in Bosnia was allowed to revert to the self-same warrior bands that had plunged the place into mutual murder in the first place. The UN “Peacekeepers” had neither the mandate, the will, nor the resources to subdue, much less disarm the Bosnian Serb, Croat or Bosniak (Muslim) Nationalist militias, many of them made up of underworld strong-arm squads.  Across Bosnia, they retained their wartime control of most of the “entity’s” constituent areas.  All the UN administration achieved was the creation of militia/mafia-controlled nationalist political parties to give the warriors’ absolute power a civil mask.

Mafia control of politics meant corruption-dominated governance, steeped in hyper-nationalism, insuring a fractured, multiply mutually antagonistic citizenry and a duplication, or in Bosnia’s sad case, a triplication of thieving, conniving government jobs.  Bosnian citizens were cowed but not fooled.  They knew what the international peace had brought them, and so did foreign investors, who declined to pay for the inefficiencies and extra costs of Bosnia’s criminarchy, and stayed away.  Today, Bosnia is not so much a failed as a faux-state  Still split into ethnic parts, Bosnia exemplifies the pathologies of its people, mutual hatred and self-loathing.

Peace in name, but with outlaw forces still in considerable control of government, also disfigures Bosnia’s original attackers, the governments of Serbia and Croatia, whose reputations with their own peoples and potential investors are stained by well-documented criminal impunity and administrative corruption.   

The real impetus of Dayton, never admitted and rarely suggested by critics, was the preservation, not of peace, but of the status quo.  The genealogy of American Ambassador Richard Holbrooke’s Dayton deal was out of Metternich by Kissinger, an anachronistic, academic exercise in “balance of power” self-delusion, in which Slobodan Milosevic was to be America’s regent of regional stability.

The rush to conclude a treaty was to head off a humiliating military defeat of Serbian forces by a joint Bosnian-Croatian army, trained and armed with the help of the United States.  As the delegates convened in Ohio, this force was rolling up the Serbs across all of northern Bosnia.  Within weeks, it seemed likely, Milosevic’s military and their Bosnian Serb surrogates would have their backs to the Sava and Drina Rivers, without nothing less than a full withdrawal from Bosnian territory in store.

Holbrooke knew enough about Croatian President Franjo Tudjman and Bosnian President Alija Itzetbegovic to doubt the results of endowing them with a post-war victor’s independent powers.  Better, he thought, to cede regional place to a Milosevic in debt to the US for his political survival.  So Holbrooke bought Milosevic, not as a failed politico turned war criminal, but as a respectable former client of Kissinger Inc. --when he ran Tito's National Bank his personal Kissinger adviser was Laurence Eagleburger -- and as America's "regent" in the Balkan region. He proved exactly as successful as the Shah of Iran had been as our -- actually Kissinger's and his pathetic smudged copy, Brzezinski’s -- regent in the Gulf region.

Somehow, Holbrooke ignored Slobo’s much greater debts to the Serb nationalists and organized crime leaders who had done his bidding in Bosnia.  Once he made “peace” in Dayton, his killers transferred their lusts for blood, plunder and ethnic triumph to Kosovo, and reining them in, just because his partners from Washington were asking him to, just wasn’t in the cards. 

After 10,000 Kosovars had been killed and 800,000 displaced by Milosevic’s security forces and associated “irregulars,” it took almost a year of US and NATO bombing (sometimes of civilian and diplomatic targets) to conclude yet another uneasy “peace” and a brace of new corrupt and mob-compromised oligarchies to the Balkans.

Yes, Serbia, Croatia, Bosnia, Montenegro, Macedonia and Kosovo all have regular elections and civilian governments now, and the beginnings of normal regional relations.  But behind this mask, people who actually live there will tell you, are governments dominated by a few billionaires and a few organized crime gang leaders.

In Afghanistan, our real allies, the people who have staked their families and their futures on the dream of a modern, democratic state shudder as a justifiably impatient Obama rails at an unjustifiably corrupt and inept Karzai and heads for the exit, beyond which lies a false and murderous peace that an international consensus seems to think is “good enough for them.”