In multiple news venues, including NPR, Reuters, and the New York Times, Karzai’s visit is presented as an attempt at a much-needed “mending.” The mending is needed, because Karzai has been making “anti-Western” statements, including his stupidly misrepresented joke that he might join the Taliban, which has tried to assassinate him. Another outrage has been Karzai’s repeated denunciations of military operations that cause civilian casualties.

Some additional context is important. First, insurgent groups have presented an outline for peace talks, although the Taliban has distanced itself from that proposal. The second, and much more important piece of context is that a majority of Afghans, including a majority of women, support negotiation with the Taliban. Relevant polling data can be downloaded here. Support for negotiation with the Taliban has been standardly described as a debate between the Obama administration and Karzai himself, when in fact the former opposes the majority opinion in Afghanistan. Interestingly, widespread Afghan endorsement of negotiation is not an endorsement of the Taliban itself, as a majority have favored the removal of the Taliban, consider the insurgents the greatest security risk, and so on. A thorough discussion of this issue is here, and an annoying but accurate polemic in defense of Afghan democracy is here.

Stephen Biddle of the Washington Post has different ideas about democratic processes, suggesting that the U.S. provide the right “incentive” structure in Afghanistan. Biddle is not subtle in his suggestion that the Obama administration should leverage its aid and support to force Karzai to violate the will of the people who elected him. Such an anti-democratic approach is unlikely to benefit Afghans, even if it provides opportunity for tough political posturing by Obama. Removal of military support would clearly favor the very insurgents U.S. policy hopes to thwart, and removal of humanitarian support would constitute fostering starvation, disease, etc., in order to force U.S. policy preference down the throats of unwilling Afghans. Biddle laments that if Karzai were more “effective,” such an approach would not be necessary. There are plenty of political structures where such “effectiveness” could be achieved, none of them democratic.

Each specific scandal evokes the typical response, that the event is either just unfortunate or is not the result of systematic policy. Note also that the stated motivation for decreasing civilian casualties is that we must win the “hearts and minds” of the Afghan people. Wrongness, humanitarian standards, etc., are apparently not among the available justifications. But enough “idealistic slogans,” to borrow an old phrase.

The two cases prominently displayed in the news this week are the Wikileaks video depicting the attack on a group of men and children, two of them Iraqi reporters for Reuters, and the killing and subsequent cover-up in an especially visceral case involving two pregnant Afghan mothers, with 16 children between them.

The Iraq case: The NYT At War blog has a handy post collecting some comments by informed military bloggers about the Wikileaks case. I can discern at least three distinct issues arising from this event: (1) morally evil attitudes among soldiers (“Well it’s their fault for bringing their kids into a battle,” “Oh, yeah, look at those dead bastards,” etc.), (2) the nature and application of rules of engagement, and (3) implications for what goes on in the war generally.

I take it that (1) is more pervasive than we imagine, but I can’t think of any general way to de-incentivize the military for lovers of violence. It seems to me that there’s somewhat of a consensus on (2), that the soldiers can’t be plausibly faulted in terms of the rules of engagement. For one thing, as the video testifies, they requested and received authorization to engage. However, one question arises: if it is perfectly legitimate for soldiers to engage unidentified individuals who are neither firing upon them nor engaging in combat otherwise, what isn’t permitted? Much has been made of the proximity of a hostile engagement to this particular event, but I don’t understand the moral or legal relevance of this. I find (3) the most interesting. Given that Reuters was unable to acquire the video footage from the military, how many other cases are there of this sort? I don’t know of any place where such cases are gathered.

The Afghanistan case: I agree with Harry Shearer that this story is incomparably worse, despite its telling relative lack of attention. This story is more worrying (to me at least) for a few reasons. First, the details themselves are shocking and visceral in a way that the Iraqi details are not. Second, there appears to have been a fairly substantial cover-up, involving even a false story published by NATO. Third, as Shearer points out, this one wasn’t caught on video. I wonder, could it be that the military behaves better when the tape is rolling?

However I’m not sure that Shearer’s interpretation of the media attention is quite right. He suggests that the Iraq case is more prominently in the media because there is video. While that fact, plus the ancillary novelty of Wikileaks for new media, surely plays a role in attracting sensationalist journalists, I think there’s a deeper reason. The Afghan case comes in the midst of a public scuffle between the Obama administration and Hamid Karzai. Astute observers will recall that Karzai’s original sin, before becoming the problematically corrupt friend of the U.S., was his public outrage over civilian casualties. So the Afghan case is unacceptable for American ideology for two reasons: (1) The perpetrators can’t be plausibly defended on grounds of rules of engagement and (2) publicity of this event would add too much legitimacy to Karzai’s “anti-Western” statements. There is a third unsavory fact for journalists, which is that if the Afghan case were pursued, the (legitimate) demonization of several American soldiers would be inevitable. And that sort of attention, of course, is reserved for the bad guys.

Kristof says that

[Y]ou’d think we might be more sensitive to nationalism abroad. Yet the most systematic foreign-policy mistake we Americans have made in the post-World War II period has been to underestimate its potency, from Vietnam to Latin America.

It is unclear why Kristof thinks policymakers have “underestimated” the potency of nationalism abroad. The documentary record is replete with concerns from policymakers about nationalism abroad, since it is so often the greatest obstacle to intervention. As President Eisenhower acknowledged, support for nationalist leader Ho Chi Minh in Vietnam was overwhelming, hardly underestimated.

Indeed it seems that U.S. foreign policy has quite accurately understood the nature and strength of nationalist sentiment. That’s why it’s important to have a “strong man” in power in various places, as Saddam Hussein was for many years, under American supervision. That’s why it’s important to undermine democratic governments, in Chile and Guatemala, and to isolate upstart countries like Cuba when overthrow fails. These efforts in general have been quite successful, precisely because the dangerous threat of people wanting to control their own countries is well-understood; it is not underestimated, let alone systematically underestimated.

Kristof says:

When Pakistani troops enter Pashtun areas, the result has sometimes been a backlash that helps extremists. If Pashtuns react that way to Punjabis, why do we think they will react better to Texans?

Kristof seems to think, without evidence, that American policymakers operate under the delusional assumption that Pashtuns are elated when American troops enter their territory. To me it is outlandish to think policymakers are under these fantastical delusions.

Kristof warns that “a heavier military footprint almost inevitably leads to more casualties, irritation and recruitment for the Taliban.” This sort of thing is well-known. The National Intelligence Estimate has said, since the onset of the War on Terror, that our engagements inflame our enemies against us, as is widely known. In fact, policymakers are so aware of this particular issue (civilian casualties) that in the past year there has been (it seems to me) an unprecedented amount of attention given the topic by public officials. One wonders who Kristof thinks he is correcting.

In any case, Kristof has his own strategy.

My suggestion is that we scale back our aims, for Afghanistan is not going to be a shining democracy any time soon. We should keep our existing troops to protect the cities (but not the countryside), while ramping up the training of the Afghan Army — and helping it absorb more Pashtuns to increase its legitimacy in the south. We should negotiate to peel off some Taliban commanders and draw them over to our side, while following the old Afghan tradition of “leasing” those tribal leaders whose loyalties are for rent. More aid projects, with local tribal protection, would help, as would job creation by cutting tariffs on Pakistani and Afghan exports.

Kristof thinks one of our aim is to make Afghanistan a “shining democracy.” I wonder what his evidence is for this, and whether or not it consists solely of public statements of good intentions.

It is hard to see what Kristof’s goals are in Afghanistan. In his article, he seems concerned about two things, expressed as reasons to not withdraw completely. (1) Not signaling “American weakness” and (2) not destabilizing Pakistan. The first goal is either evil (mafia-style establishment of credibility) or factually off-base (no one doubts our ability to destroy a countryside) or distastefully colonial-minded (after all, why is it important that we project American strength around the world?). The second goal will be quite interesting to Afghans, who might want to be something other than a third wheel, subjected to the torments of Kristof’s favorite warlords.

Here is a series of concise criticisms of the in-vogue thinking about U.S. intervention in Afghanistan.

This article is amusing because it applies Forbes’ criteria for judging the economic policies of a president to President Bush.

Recently released interviews with some Soviets show incompatibility between Cold War propaganda and reality. I wonder why the people at the Archive conclude there was an “intelligence failure.” Why not suppose, more plausibly, that American foreign policy needed justification? No one knows better than the people at the Archive that this wouldn’t be without precedent.

Random thoughts: There are a few popular interpretations and reactions to recent events. One is that Karzai just politically needs to take anti-U.S. postures in order to gain favor in Afghanistan, and he’s not serious. Another is that he is actually not a simple proxy of the U.S. administration and is genuinely responding to Afghan concerns, which are real and easily available (e.g. see page 5 of this, especially the results relating to civilian casualties, a “key irritant”). One interesting media phenomenon is that Karzai seems to have magically become more corrupt as his condemnations of the U.S. become more intense and frequent. This is a disturbing trend in relations with American-installed governments. As they become less agreeable to U.S. policies, they acquire all sorts of additional sins, like internal corruption (after all, what aside from corruption could make someone dislike U.S. policy?). I’m not suggesting Karzai was not corrupt from the beginning, but it’s interesting to note when it starts mattering. It’s also interesting to note the legions of allied countries where corruption is evidently not a concern.

Go ahead, watch an Al Jazeera piece on the recent air strike: