Too Much Happy Talk

Trying, I guess, to put a brave face on the conflict in Afghanistan, top Democrats claim we're winning!

Five members of the Senate's new majority used Memorial Day to give an upbeat report from a congressional delegation trip to Afghanistan, telling reporters that the Obama administration's new U.S. strategy is working in the war-scarred country.

Democratic Sens. Tom Carper (Del.), Jeanne Shaheen (N.H.), Kay Hagan (N.C.), Mark Begich (Alaska) and Mark Udall (Colo.) spoke by conference call from an undisclosed stop in Asia -- Carper, the most senior senator on the trip, said they were prevented from announcing their exact location -- and gave a consistently upbeat report on the U.S. strategy in Afghanistan that began with 17,000 new troops sent there by President Barack Obama this winter [...]

Carper, noting that the seeds of the Sept. 11, 2001 terrorist attacks were sown by the Taliban in Afghanistan, said America “took our eye off the ball” by instead invading Iraq, diverting energy and resources and in doing so “let the people of Afghanistan down.” He said the U.S. must stick to a comprehensive strategy that pays attention to Afghanistan’s civilian population and government, not just the military, and to reach out to other segments of the country as well, such as convincing farmers to grow crops such as vegetables instead of opium.

I don't even think all of the troops have even arrived in Afghanistan yet, nor have all the elements of the strategy been implemented. There's optimism and there's blind optimism. Even that infusion of troops cannot possibly cover the entire country or protect all Afghans from the ravages of the Taliban. And while I agree with many elements of the larger strategy from the White House on Afghanistan, the fact that the latest tactic is to flood the area with drugs to lower the price and make growing wheat or pomegranates more profitable sounds like the ultimate in unintended consequences. First, stopping the flow of drugs in a giant country with porous borders where PEOPLE cannot be stopped from crossing is completely suspect. Second, why exactly would flooding a country with drugs ever be seen as a positive step?

This really worries me. The strategy appears less comprehensive and more ad hoc. And the happy talk from politicians just offers reminders of lost wars gone by. Anyone else getting that sinking feeling?

The Cognitive Dissonance, It Burns

Here are just three unrelated, and yet somehow related, stories, that make me wonder how any Republican can keep all these ideas in their head without it exploding.

• The fiscally responsible House GOP, always railing against how President Obama is spending "the people's money," is funding their re-branding effort with taxpayer dollars by using Eric Cantor's House account.

• Bill O'Reilly, who has made a cottage industry out of ambushing liberals by directing reporters to accost them on the street, actually recorded a video where he decries the loss of privacy from public figures. Really.



• And in the most insane example, Rush Limbaugh tries to explain the "quest for power" by a group other than him, in this case the Democratic Party, by referring to his own drug addiction, assuming of course that every single person in the party has exactly the same obsessions as, well, him.



I really don't even know what to say about that one.

To Fight AIDS, Decriminalize Drugs

I thought this was a really interesting story from the Guardian (UK):

The use of illicit drugs must be decriminalised if efforts to halt the spread of Aids are to succeed, one of the world's leading independent authorities on the disease has warned.

In an unprecedented attack on global drugs policy, Michele Kazatchkine, head of the influential Global Fund to Fight Aids, Tuberculosis and Malaria, has told the Observer that, without a radical overhaul of laws that lead to hundreds of thousands of drug users being imprisoned or denied access to safe treatment, the millions of pounds spent on fighting HIV and Aids will be wasted.

Kazatchkine will use his keynote speech at the 20th International Harm Reduction Association conference tomorrow in Bangkok to expose the failures of policies which treat addiction as a crime. He will accuse governments of using what he calls "repressive" measures that deny addicts human rights rather than putting public health needs first.

He will argue that governments should fully commit to the widespread provision of harm reduction strategies aimed at intravenous drug users, such as free needle exchanges and providing substitutes to illicit drugs, such as methadone.

"A repressive way of dealing with drug users is a way of facilitating the spread of the [HIV/Aids] epidemic," Kazatchkine said. "If you know you will be arrested, you will not go for treatment. I say drug use cannot be criminalised. I'm talking about criminalising trafficking but not users. From a scientific perspective, I cannot understand the repressive policy perspective."

The medical component to decriminalization has not to my knowledge been explored. Just think of the ramifications. A more unhealthy society means a society that spends more and more on health care, to say nothing of the cost of imprisoning nonviolent drug offenders and not rehabilitating them so they can turn into productive members of society. Or the opportunity cost for law enforcement, who could be fighting other crimes. The argument that drug prosecutions reflect unequal treatment for African-Americans has started to take root, reflected in the subtle shift in the racial profiles of drug-crime prisoners. But these are new arguments, and just as effective, if not more so.

I hope somebody forwards this keynote speech to Jim Webb.

Stirrings Of Prison Reform

Look at that, a leading Democrats offers a bill on the otherwise unspeakable subject of prison reform, and contrary to popular expectation he is not forced to resign in disgrace!

Jim Webb stepped firmly on a political third rail last week when he introduced a bill to examine sweeping reforms to the criminal justice system. Yet he emerged unscathed, a sign to a political world frightened by crime and drug issues that the bar might not be electrified any more.

"After two [Joint Economic Committee] hearings and my symposium at George Mason Law Center, people from across the political and philosophical spectrum began to contact my staff," Webb told the Huffington Post. "I heard from Justice Kennedy of the Supreme Court, from prosecutors, judges, defense lawyers, former offenders, people in prison, and police on the street. All of them have told me that our system needs to be fixed, and that we need a holistic plan of how to solve it."

Webb's reform is backed by a coalition of liberals, conservatives and libertarians that couldn't have existed even a few years ago.

Webb's bill calls for the creation of a bipartisan commission to study the issue for 18 months and come back with concrete legislative recommendations.

Liberals, who for decades were labeled "soft on crime" by conservatives, crept out to embrace Webb's proposal. The bill was cosponsored by the entire Senate Democratic leadership and enthusiastically welcomed by prominent liberal bloggers. The blogosphere, dominated by younger activists, has been particularly open to calls for drug and criminal justice policy reform.

Support for the proposal has come in from the right, too. The Lynchburg News and Advance a conservative paper that publishes in the hometown of Jerry Falwell's Liberty University, weighed in favorably.

"America's prisons -- both federal and state -- are overflowing with prisoners. The United States has about 5 percent of the world's population; we have about 25 percent of the world's known prison population, Webb estimates," offered the editorial board. "Something, somewhere is seriously wrong."

It was jarring to see Webb's advocacy of major prison reform in my Sunday copy of PARADE Magazine, where Webb has published before. Yet he has unyielding and, as Glennzilla says, deeply courageous for tackling this issue which is such a blight on our national character. Something is seriously wrong with the broken prison system in California, as I've documented extensively. Decades of failure to lead, adherence to the "tough on crime" label and willingness to lock up non-violent offenders has led to some of the worst outcomes in the nation.

Most interesting about Webb's proposal is that he connected the prison crisis to our absolutely failed drug policy. After 30 years of interdiction and mass arrest, drug production is up and consumption is up, and the objectives of the so-called "war on drugs" have yet to be achieved in any substantive way. You cannot talk about prison reform without ending the characterization of drug addiction as a crime instead of a medical dependency requiring treatment.

I am hopeful that Webb has the desire to keep pushing this forward; obviously it will take years if not decades to get a sane prison policy in this country. But the need is so great.

The Slow Winding Down Of The Drug War

When the Administration announced an end to medical marijuana raids by the DEA, they abruptly took back the statement a few hours later. There was a bit of confusion about the new policy. Eric Holder put an end to that.

Attorney General Eric Holder signaled a change on medical marijuana policy Wednesday, saying federal agents will target marijuana distributors only when they violate both federal and state law.

That would be a departure from the policy of the Bush administration, which targeted medical marijuana dispensaries in California even if they complied with that state's law.

"The policy is to go after those people who violate both federal and state law," Holder said in a question-and-answer session with reporters at the Justice Department.

Good. There is little justification to waste Justice Department resources harassing Californians and Americans in 12 other states engaging in perfectly legal activity. Holder must follow the law but he also has discretion in setting priorities, and it's good to see him recognize that arresting local businessmen and their patients makes no sense. There remain questions about outstanding medical marijuana federal court cases with over two dozen dispensaries, and hopefully the solution will be to drop the charges.

In a related story, Maxine Waters wants to end mandatory minimum sentencing for federal drug offenses, and the bill has 15 co-sponsors. The Bureau of Prisons budget has increased 25-fold since mandatory minimums were introduced. Small drug cases belong in state courts, where offenders could be given treatment instead of jail. Furthermore, these kind of drug cases disproportionately impact minority communities.

H.R. 1466, the Major Drug Trafficking Prosecution Act of 2009, seeks to repeal mandatory minimum sentences for drug offenders and to give courts the ability to determine sentences based on all the facts, not just drug weight. It would also refocus federal resources on major drug traffickers instead of low-level offenders. There is currently no companion bill in the Senate.

Sen. Boxer, your office phone is ringing.

Khat Scratch Fever

Ever since it kept cropping up in the Paul Theroux travel books I was reading, I have been fascinated with khat (pronounced "jat"), a narcotic leaf that is a social drug used in the Horn of Africa, typically chewed. Africans see it as normal a substance as coffee, but in this country it is illegal, and the influx of Somali and Ethiopian immigrants has led to smuggling and mass arrests.

In the last few years, San Diego, which has a large Somali population, has seen an almost eight-fold increase in khat seizures. Nationally, the amount of khat seized annually at the country's ports of entry has grown from 14 metric tons to 55 in about the last decade.

Most recently, California joined 27 other states and the federal government in banning the most potent substance in khat, and the District of Columbia is proposing to do the same.

"It is a very touchy subject. Some people see it like a drug; some people see it like coffee," said Abdulaziz Kamus, president of the African Resource Center in Washington, D.C. "You have to understand our background and understand the significance of it in our community."

The story is kind of a lesson in how different cultures can see the same green leaves as either a morning pick-me-up or the scourge of the universe. We have plenty of accepted drugs in our culture with terrible side effects, drugs that can ruin lives, but which simply have better PR machines behind them. And we have plenty of drugs which are banned, where the side effects are far less clearly negative, and which even have some medicinal qualities. The war on some kinds of drugs is not just the wrong way to go about treating addictions; it clearly chooses winners and losers for somewhat obscure reasons.

The Strangling Tourniquet

We're starting to see some consideration put to the planned escalation in Afghanistan, and a lot of people are finally getting around to asking the "why" instead of accepting that Obama will fulfill a campaign promise by sending 20-30,000 more troops into that hostile environment and a rapidly deteriorating occupation. The first person asking why is, interestingly enough, Afghan President Hamid Karzai:

President Hamid Karzai pressed America's top military leader Monday on the U.S. strategy in Afghanistan and preparations to pour up to 30,000 more forces into the country, reflecting Karzai's concerns over civilian casualties and operations in villages. Karzai asked Adm. Mike Mullen, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, what kinds of operations the newly deployed troops would carry out and told him that the Afghan government should be consulted about those missions.

The Afghan president, stinging from a series of civilian casualties in U.S. military operations in recent years, said he doubts that sending more American forces into Afghan villages will tamp down the insurgency, and he has questioned a U.S. plan to deploy 3,500 U.S. forces in two provinces on Kabul's doorstep next month.

Karzai told Mullen that U.S. troops must take more care during operations in Afghan villages and stop searching Afghan homes. He asked the chairman to investigate allegations that U.S. forces killed three civilians in a raid last week in Khost province, a reflection of increasing concern about civilian casualties. The U.S. says three militants were killed.

This is the central problem. A larger footprint for occupiers will do nothing for security and is likely to turn the population further against an effort they are after seven years beginning to resent. Karzai acknowledges a possible need for border protection, but troops in major Afghan cities and villages is counterproductive.

Indeed any option in Afghanistan is fraught with pitfalls right now. A surge of troops would have made sense when the population was still behind the effort and the Taliban wasn't reconstituted as an insurgency force. Now the Taliban pretty much controls the countryside and the amount of troops needed to perform a counterinsurgency campaign cannot be brought into the country without much resentment and hatred.

“We may have missed the golden moment there,” said Lawrence Korb, a former Pentagon official who has long advocated an increased U.S. focus on Afghanistan.

The tension between the short-run need for more muscle to thwart the Taliban and the long-term trap of becoming the latest in a long line of foreign intruders bogged down in Afghanistan forms the core of the dilemma confronting Obama.

There are efforts underway to recruit local tribal militias to bolster the paltry amount of native security forces in a kind of "Afghan awakening," but they are likely to have little or no control from the central government, not historically a factor in the country, and more likely to rule over their own areas and increase bloodshed among ethnic rivals.

“There will be fighting between Pashtuns and non-Pashtuns,” said Salih Mohammad Registani, a member of the Afghan Parliament and an ethnic Tajik. Mr. Registani raised the specter of the Arbaki, a Pashtun-dominated militia turned loose on other Afghans early in the 20th century.

“A civil war will start very soon,” he said.

NATO forces would like to stem the poppy trade that is funding the insurgency and encourage alternative crop development, but many member nations are wary of involving themselves in counter-narcotics actions.

NATO officials in Brussels declined to list the nations that have opposed widening the alliance mandate to include attacks on drug networks, and no nation has volunteered that it has legal objections.

But a number of NATO members have in broad terms described their reluctance publicly, including Germany, Italy, Poland and Spain. Their leaders have cited domestic policies that make counternarcotics a law enforcement matter — not a job for their militaries — and expressed concern that domestic lawsuits could be filed if their soldiers carried out attacks to kill noncombatants, even if the victims were involved in the drug industry in Afghanistan.

There are discussions about splitting off Taliban elements and causing a rift in the insurgency through negotiations and entry into the government, but there's absolutely no sign that any Taliban fighter would be amenable to it.

Overall, everyone knows that a major strategic shift is needed, but there's simply no evidence that any of these shifts would produce something resembling success, or any indication that anyone knows what "success" means. In fact, "success" is most likely defined as "an end to total failure."

"Right now there is a sense you need to apply a tourniquet of some kind," said a senior Defense official who spoke on condition of anonymity when discussing contacts with the transition team. "You need to control bleeding at the site of the wound, you need to stabilize, and you need to see what you need to do next."

After a record number of U.S. deaths in Afghanistan this year, national security officials consider it crucial for the new administration to act soon after taking office. The senior Defense official said Obama would have a limited time period to announce a new strategy for Afghanistan and build up the troop strength.

"Over time, it will be harder to put more stuff in," the official said. "You have a window where you can do dramatic things. But the opportunity to do dramatic things reduces over time."

But what are those "dramatic things" and how will they produce improvements in both American security and the lives of the Afghan people? If the goal is now to tread water and not fail so badly I can't see how staying makes sense. Tourniquets can be refashioned into nooses, after all. The plans for Afghanistan 2.0 are all based on such wishful thinking, and suffused with so many potential drawbacks, that it almost looks like they are designed to do nothing but draw our military further into an intractable conflict. There are regional diplomatic solutions that make sense at providing space for a withdrawal without leaving behind any group that can project power beyond their borders. That does not have to include thousands more troops of dubious effectiveness.

I don't look kindly on suggestions that we "must do something dramatic" in cases like this, on the grounds that something dramatic always and forever works to our benefit. I agree with Spencer Ackerman on this one - we need to at least pretend to think about the interests of the Afghans at some point.

What I did see was an overwhelming desire for security among the population. Lots of people said something to me that boiled down to, “When the Taliban were in power, the roads were safe, food was cheap and gas is cheap. Now the Americans are here and none of that is true.” The major factor that made the tribal revolt in Anbar work was that the population, including the extremists, understood that Al Qaeda offered them a bleaker future than even the occupation. Nothing like that exists in Afghanistan — or, at least, there is an alarming lack of evidence for that crucial proposition.

People need to take a very deep breath. To judge by the available evidence, the Afghan population wants security. It does not want more militias. The Afghan Senate has actually rejected this proposal explicitly. Is there any actual appetite among Afghans for a Sons-of-Afghanistan program? Or is this a case of hubristic Americans coming into Afghanistan and imposing a template from Iraq upon an overwhelmingly different country and overwhelmingly different set of conditions? You can tell what I suspect from the way I framed the question.

My fear is that we aren't looking at the concerns of Afghanistan policy through the lens of "is this policy good or bad" rather than "does this make us look like we are responding to the problem." That way lies disaster.

Best Little Whorehouse In Denver

Charlie Savage advances the ball on this story of debauchery at the Minerals Management Service in the Department of the Interior. If we weren't talking about billions of wasted dollars it'd actually be funny.

As Congress prepares to debate expansion of drilling in taxpayer-owned coastal waters, the Interior Department agency that collects oil and gas royalties has been caught up in a wide-ranging ethics scandal — including allegations of financial self-dealing, accepting gifts from energy companies, cocaine use and sexual misconduct [...]

The investigations are the latest installment in a series of scathing inquiries into the program’s management and competence in recent years. While previous reports have focused on problems the agency had in collecting millions of dollars owed to the Treasury, and hinted at personal misconduct, the new reports go far beyond any previous study in revealing serious concerns with the integrity and behavior of the agency’s officials.

In one of the new reports, investigators concluded that Ms. Denett worked with two aides to steer a lucrative consulting contract to one of the aides after he retired, violating competitive procurement rules.

Two other reports focus on “a culture of substance abuse and promiscuity” in the service’s royalty-in-kind program. That part of the agency collects about $4 billion a year in oil and gas rather than cash royalties.

It's really an eye-opening report. The graft here is widespread, and these aren't rinky-dink companies engaging in this - Chevron and Shell are implicated.

Showing that impeccable timing that always seems to characterize Congressional Democrats, they today released their offshore drilling plan, which is tone deaf in so many ways:

• The price of oil has dropped 30% from its height, and the price of gas nearly 20%, without one drop of new oil being drilled, entirely due to lower demand and increasing transit ridership. Such conservation not only works, it works at a level that the pathetic amounts of coastal drilling never can.

• The federal agency that would be tasked with approving and managing all these new oil leases is having coke orgies with Big Oil.

Bill Nelson, at least, has stepped up and said that there should be no new drilling as a cause of this.

But of course, such a maneuver would mean that logic is taking over in the government.

This Is My Favorite Week Ever

In the comments of my last post at Hullabaloo, Jemand von Niemand ran through some of the week's highlights.

On May 15th, the Senate cast a near-unanimous vote to reverse the Federal Communication Commission's December 2007 decision to let media companies own both a major TV or radio station and a major daily newspaper in the same city. (freepress.net)

On May 16th... Bush used a private visit to King Abdullah’s ranch here Friday to make a second attempt to persuade the Saudi government to increase oil production and was rebuffed yet again. (NYT)

The California Supreme Court struck down the state's ban on same-sex marriage on May 15th ... invalidat[ing] virtually any law that discriminates on the basis of sexual orientation. (LA Times)

On May 14th, about 100 House Republicans refused to vote for more war funding, voting 'present'... Democrats were able to increase their 'no' vote number on funding from 141 to 149; the bill failed...

Finally the GI bill passed with overwhelming margin of 256 votes in the House, including 32 Republicans... This might actually be the most remarkable piece of the votes today; conservative Democrats agreeing to raise taxes on the wealthy to pay for educational benefits for veterans. (Matt Stoller)

On May 16th, Hans von Spakovsky, a former Justice Department official who never had Democratic support to win confirmation, withdrew his nomination on Friday. Bush "reluctantly accepted" von Spakovsky's request, the White House said. (sfgate.com)

Hell of a week, huh, Bootsie? And there are thirty more to come.

Not even a mention of Travis Childers' win in a Mississippi House seat that has caused Republicans to despair of a landslide loss in the fall.

Representative Tom Davis, Republican of Virginia and former leader of his party’s Congressional campaign committee, issued a dire warning that the Republican Party had been severely damaged, in no small part because of its identification with President Bush. Mr. Davis said that, unless Republican candidates changed course, they could lose 20 seats in the House and 6 in the Senate.

“They are canaries in the coal mine, warning of far greater losses in the fall, if steps are not taken to remedy the current climate,” Mr. Davis said in a memorandum. “The political atmosphere facing House Republicans this November is the worst since Watergate and is far more toxic than it was in 2006.”

And let me give you another one to add to the list. Remember that Missouri voter ID scheme that Digby wrote about earlier in the week? Turns out the State Senate refused to consider it.

In a victory for all voters, Missouri lawmakers ended this year’s legislative session without a final vote on legislation that could have prevented up to 240,000 Missourians from voting. The proposed change would have altered Missouri’s constitution, allowing for strict citizenship and government-issued photo ID requirements that would make Missouri one of the toughest states in the country for eligible, law-abiding citizens to register to vote or cast a ballot.

“I am relieved that I will be able to vote this fall,” said Lillie Lewis, a St. Louis city resident, “I’ve been voting in every election since I can remember, but if I needed my birth certificate, that would be the end of that. I hope this is the last we hear of this nonsense.” Lillie Lewis was born in Mississippi, but the state sent her a letter stating they have no record of her birth.

Birdell Owen, a Missouri resident who was displaced by hurricane Katrina, also voiced her relief. “I should be able to participate in my democracy,” she said, “even if Louisiana can’t get me a copy of my birth certificate. I’m glad Missouri politicians had the sense to protect my right to vote.”

Oh, and Series of Tubes Ted Stevens might lose his Senate seat after 50-odd years.

We're seeing an entire political party's collapse happen before our eyes, and in many of these cases a strong citizen-led movement, aided by leadership in the political sphere, has been decisive. There are two things at work here. One, you have a conservative movement that has been horrible for the country and created all these terrible policies which have made us less safe, less economically secure, and weakened in the eyes of the world. And you have a vibrant progressive movement that has been able to broadcast these failures widely. Consider what we've learned in the last month or so:

• The Defense Department embedded "military analysts" as propaganda engines inside US media with the full knowledge of the White House, mainlining the Pentagon message directly to the public with the imprimatur of independent media voices.

• The politicized show trials scheduled to crop up at Guantanamo during the fall election have been delayed because of the amount of perversions of justice employed by interrogators. The top DoD adviser to military commissions has been barred from participating in them because of evidence of bias, and one detainee had his charges dropped because torture was used (authorized by the Secretary of Defense), making the testimony inadmissable. Meanwhile the US is planning a huge new prison in Afghanistan, suggesting that indefinite detentions of masses of prisoners will continue.

• Domestic spying in the United States has spiked at a time when actual terrorism prosecutions have decreased, a massive violation of citizen privacy with no material benefit in stopping crime.

• The US government routinely injects psychotropic drugs into detainees to keep them sedated during deportation flights. , in violation of international human rights standards.

• An official at the VA told his staffers to stop diagnosing returning soldiers with PTSD, in an attempt to lower the costs of permanent disability payments. Many leaders in Washington, including Sen. Obama, are demanding an investigation.

The Republicans are wasting away because of more than just bad branding. It's because over the last eight years they've taken the country we know and done something terrible to it. And despite media blackouts and whitewashes, Americans intuitively know this, and are reaching to alternative media sources to discover more. The historically high wrong-track numbers have a basis in economic struggles, but I believe just as much in this loss of faith in what we've become as a country in the Age of Bush. And no amount of cajoling or re-branding is going to lure people back to the GOP. Not this year. Not after all this.

It's going to take years to repair the damage, and the Republicans will be all too happy to sabotage those efforts as the opposition and pin the blame on their opponents. It's what they do. For now, however, it's time to bask in the glow of the demise of the Republican Party, and work very hard to restore America's trust in their government and the ability to move forward.

Afghanistan Sets Record High For Record Highs

You could literally have written this article any year since the invasion of Afghanistan.

Opium poppy production in Afghanistan reached another record high last year and Kabul must do more to stop it, a US State Department report says.

The report says that the poppy cultivation helps Taleban insurgents obtain money and weapons.

The drug trade hinders progress towards economic stability and democracy, the report adds.

Afghan poppy production doubled in 2002. The crop set a record high in 2004. And in 2006. And in 2007.

This is what you get when you have a weak and ineffectual central government that only controls 30 percent of the country. Afghanistan is a narco-state. And additionally it's a frightening place to live for women. I remember when they pulled Laura Bush out to deliver these somber speeches about women's rights abuses under the Taliban and how we had a moral duty to act. What's she thinking now?

Grinding poverty and the escalating war is driving an increasing number of Afghan families to sell their daughters into forced marriages.

Girls as young as six are being married into a life of slavery and rape, often by multiple members of their new relatives. Banned from seeing their own parents or siblings, they are also prohibited from going to school. With little recognition of the illegality of the situation or any effective recourse, many of the victims are driven to self-immolation – burning themselves to death – or severe self-harm.

Six years after the US and Britain "freed" Afghan women from the oppressive Taliban regime, a new report proves that life is just as bad for most, and worse in some cases.

NATO is trying to gain a foothold in the tribal and Taliban-held areas. Women's rights is the furthest thing from their minds. 87 percent of women in Afghanistan have experienced domestic and gender-based violence. 60 percent are pushed into forced marriages. Illiteracy is at 88 percent. One out of every nine women die during childbirth.

This, mind you, is the WELL-MANAGED war. An opium factory where women have next to no rights and the Taliban has almost as much control as the government we installed.

UPDATE: Good news, the US and NATO have re-affirmed their commitment to Afghanistan! Now we can expect the same craptastic results that we've seen since October 2001!

Look At That, A Sentencing Commission That Works

An amazing thing happened this week. The Supreme Court, by a 7-2 margin, ruled that federal judges have the leeway to reduce sentences for possession of crack cocaine relative to powder. The disparity in sentencing, which has significant racial overtones, has long been unconscionably unfair. And get this: the US Sentencing Commission unanimously decided to make the guidelines retroactive which could result in thousands of convicts who were unfairly sentenced to be released.

See, there's a national sentencing commission that reviews information and makes recommendations based on logic and common sense, taking the hot-button issue of sentencing out of the political sphere. Yet here in California, we have been stymied at any effort to create such a sentencing commission, and all sentencing legislation moves in the direction of being more punitive rather than less. This is how our jails have become clogged with so many nonviolent offenders, who in the overcrowded environment without proper treatment and rehabilitation often return to jail more violent than when they got there in the first place. The executive branch of this state knows this, yet they refuse to reveal their documents and communications that would confirm it.

States have the ability to break free from the "tough on crime" box and actually change the tilt in favor of jailing more and more citizens for longer and longer periods. Heck, in New Jersey this week they voted to ban the death penalty. But the only way to see any early prison releases in California is when the state miscalculates their sentences.

Up to 33,000 prisoners in California may be entitled to release earlier than scheduled because the state has miscalculated their sentences, corrections officials said Wednesday.

For nearly two years, the overburdened state prison agency has failed to recalculate the sentences of those inmates despite a series of court rulings, including one by the California Supreme Court. The judges said the state applied the wrong formula when crediting certain inmates for good behavior behind bars.

Some inmates released in recent months almost certainly stayed longer in prison than they should have, said corrections officials, employees and advocates for prisoners. Some currently in prison most likely should be free, they said. But many whose sentences are too long are not scheduled to be released for months or years.

The inmates in question -- 19% of the state prison population -- are serving consecutive sentences for violent and nonviolent offenses. The sentencing errors range from a few days to several years.

Corrections officials say they have been unable to calculate the sentences properly because of staffing shortages and outdated computer systems that force analysts to do the complex work by hand.

This directly results from the overcrowding crisis. An overburdened corrections industry cannot keep up with the processing given the meager resources they have. This ends up costing the state more - approximately $26 million annually - than what it would cost to put the proper resources in place, particularly if you factor in the possibility of lawsuits from inmates, as we are now seeing in other respects.

Fixing miscalculations is a step. But until you have the courage and fortitude to address the root causes and meet the same responsibilities that even the federal government has decided to meet, nothing will change.

P.S. There are pending mandatory minimum sentencing bills in the federal government, which would fix the crack/powder sentencing disparity even further. It won't surprise you at all that the version of the bill that Dianne Feinstein supports is completely insufficient to deal with the problem.

Shaheen Steps Down

I'm glad the Clinton campaign dealt with this so quickly and got rid of the guy who intimated that Barack Obama's drug use would be a problem in the campaign. But the damage is already done, isn't it? It's "out there."

It was maybe the most unfortunate moment of this campaign, and if Sen. Clinton does lose Iowa I think it'll be decisive.

Digging In The Dirt

Bill Shaheen, who by the way is the husband of the DSCC's preferred candidate for Senate in New Hampshire (and this is all the more reason to support Jay Buckey over Jeanne Shaheen), just playedsome dirty pool on behalf of Hillary Clinton.

Billy Shaheen contrasted Obama's openness about his past drug use -- which Obama mentioned again at a recent campaign appearance in New Hampshire -- with the approach taken by George W. Bush in 1999 and 2000, when he ruled out questions about his behavior when he was "young and irresponsible."

Shaheen said Obama's candor on the subject would "open the door" to further questions. "It'll be, 'When was the last time? Did you ever give drugs to anyone? Did you sell them to anyone?'" Shaheen said. "There are so many openings for Republican dirty tricks. It's hard to overcome."

And opening for Democratic dirty tricks, it appears.

Look, Obama's been candid about his prior drug use since before he was a Senate candidate. We have a President right now who is a reformed drug and alcohol abuser, and America has shrugged their shoulders. The President BEFORE that, who happens to be somebody's husband, admitted to smoking pot (but he didn't inhale...). Clinton's base in Iowa is older, and maybe they're playing on images of young druggies to scare people into voting against Obama. That's disgusting.

I think that the Clinton campaign is freaking out because the dynamic of the race is clear. If Obama wins Iowa, he sweeps the early states. Same with Clinton. If Edwards manages to win Iowa, it's a crapshoot, and Clinton probably has the upper hand. The Clinton directive is to stop Obama in Iowa, otherwise their inevitability argument is dead and buried. So they'll go as low as they can to do it, trying to deny students the franchise in the state, and now bringing up the spectre of Obama selling drugs. It's beneath any Democrat, and it's an implicit racial appeal besides. This is an outrage.

Authoritarian Narcissist

I don't think that Giuliani's sudden love for the Red Sox controversy is going to go away; he probably just lost New York and maybe New Jersey if he makes the general election, and New Hampshire Red Sox fans really don't want some Yankee fan's support.

But that's about the least important piece of news on Rudy there is. What people are slowly coming to understand is that he's surrounded himself with the most crazed bunch of lunatics he could possibly find to set his Middle East policy.

Mr. Giuliani’s team includes Norman Podhoretz, a prominent neoconservative who advocates bombing Iran “as soon as it is logistically possible”; Daniel Pipes, the director of the Middle East Forum, who has called for profiling Muslims at airports and scrutinizing American Muslims in law enforcement, the military and the diplomatic corps; and Michael Rubin, a scholar at the American Enterprise Institute who has written in favor of revoking the United States’ ban on assassination.

The campaign says that the foreign policy team, which also includes scholars and experts with different policy approaches, is meant to give Mr. Giuliani a variety of perspectives.

Yes, all the way from "Bomb Iran" to "BOOOOOOMMMMMBBBBB Iran!"

We're finally starting to see some real scrutiny of the rogue's gallery with whom Giuliani has associated. Norman Podhoretz prays for an attack on Iran daily, and while the advisors aren't running for President, there appears to be little difference between Rudy's views and theirs. (Not to mention that Rudy has the heroin kingpin vote all locked up, and they openly talk about how he made deals with "guys like me.")

And we know how this will play out: imperial adventures, more massive military projection throughout the world, unilateralism, more contempt for allies, and more moral relativism on fundamental principles of civilized societies, allowing for the worst kinds of abuses as long as he maintains power.

“I wanted to ask you two questions,’’ she said. “One, do you think waterboarding is torture? And two, do you think the president can order something like waterboarding even though it’s against U.S. and international law?’’

Mr. Giuliani responded: “Okay. First of all, I don’t believe the attorney general designate in any way was unclear on torture. I think Democrats said that; I don’t think he was.’’

Ms. Gustitus said: “He said he didn’t know if waterboarding is torture.”

Mr. Giuliani said: “Well, I’m not sure it is either. I’m not sure it is either. It depends on how it’s done. It depends on the circumstances. It depends on who does it. I think the way it’s been defined in the media, it shouldn’t be done. The way in which they have described it, particularly in the liberal media. So I would say, if that’s the description of it, then I can agree, that it shouldn’t be done. But I have to see what the real description of it is. Because I’ve learned something being in public life as long as I have. And I hate to shock anybody with this, but the newspapers don’t always describe it accurately.”

That's just transparently false. The technique of waterboarding as used by the Khmer Rouge and other totalitarian societies is extremely clear. You can talk about "fine lines" and determining what "aggressive questioning" is and joke about how sleep deprivation doesn't fall into a banned category, but it's all fully untrue. There are very specific statutes regarding torture, human rights courts around the world have included both torture and abnormal sleep deprivation, and Giuliani is simply trying to change the definition.

Rudy Giuliani is an authoritarian narcissist, the worst combination of Bush/Cheney contempt for dissent or any countervailing power, combined with absolutely no conscience that would check himself personally. He would be, as many have put it, George Bush on steroids.

Wake Me Up When It Happens

This article makes it sound like "Ooh, Condi's ever so close to cutting off Blackwater, just one more screw-up and they're out the door!" but I wouldn't be so sure. First of all, this is just a review. And after all, the federal government just gave a multibillion dollar "narcoterrorism" contract to Blackwater, just yesterday. Doesn't sound like a relationship on the outs.

(However, it could be that other areas of the government are compensating for Blackwater's eventual loss in Iraq.)

By the way, notice the mission creep there. The war on drugs now equals the war on terror! Fabulous! Now all the great strides we've made in BOTH those wars can be combined!

Today On America's Least Brilliant Idea

So the plan now in Afghanistan is to win the war through angering the civilians?

It is seriously being proposed that the way to win the war in Afghanistan is to ... spray herbicide on the crops of Afghan farmers. I'd say that this is the kind of project that historians, with the perspective of a century, could say "Hey, that was really counter-productive and stupid." The problem is that reasonable people, with the perspective of eight seconds, can now say "Hey, this is really counter-productive and stupid."

There may be a way to stop the Taliban and anti-government forces from profiting off of the opium trade so much, but it's not like the fields have little flags on them saying "Taliban". There's no way to know. And in the absence of any alternative agricultural product, I don't see how you can deny the farmers their livelihood. Opium does not only make heroin, it makes medicine. It is far from an illegal crop. And in addition, farmers plant FOOD next to the poppy fields. Are we seriously planning to starve the population?

If the government came up with a scheme to subsidize the growing of alternative crops, maybe there's an opportunity here. In fact, the Bush Administration is pushing that idea publicly. But mass spraying is insanity.

UPDATE: It should be noted that boneheaded ideas like this, as well as mission-creeping the war on terror into the war on drugs, is part of the reason why we are losing ground.

Six years after the September 11 attacks in the United States, the "war on terror" is failing and instead fueling an increase in support for extremist Islamist movements, a British think-tank said on Monday.

A report by the Oxford Research Group (ORG) said a "fundamental re-think is required" if the global terrorist network is to be rendered ineffective.

"If the al Qaeda movement is to be countered, then the roots of its support must be understood and systematically undercut," said Paul Rogers, the report's author and professor of global peace studies at Bradford University in northern England.

Six years later, we've yet to even begin to understand.

UPDATE II: Great catch by Matthew Yglesias. All of our previous ambassadors to Afghanistan were Near East specialists with contacts throughout the Muslim world. But:

Now, though, our man in Kabul is William Wood someone who, though certainly qualified to be an ambassador, has no experience or expertise in the region. Instead, our top political official in the key battleground against al-Qaeda's main qualification seems to be that his previous post was as ambassador to Colombia. Implicitly, then, the decision is being made to view Afghanistan primarily as a drug control problem rather than as a Taliban-and-al-Qaeda problem. That's just crazy.

Winning The War On Drugs

Our efforts in Afghanistan are putting Colombia out of business! Rejoice!

Afghanistan's Helmand province, heartland of Taliban guerrillas fighting NATO forces, is about to become the world's largest drug supplier, the United Nations said on Tuesday.

Helmand, a province in the south of Afghanistan, cultivated more drugs than entire countries such as Myanmar, Morocco or even Colombia, the Vienna-based U.N. Office on Drugs and Crimes (UNODC) said in its 2007 World Drug Report.

"Helmand province, severely threatened by insurgency, is becoming the world's biggest drug supplier. In Afghanistan, opium is a security issue more than a drug issue," UNODC Director Antonio Marias Costa said in the report's preface.

There's not going to be any money left in the drug supply trade for countries like Colombia. They'll naturally have to move to other crops!

This is one instance where the drug czar and the war czar must have gotten together to make this happen.

Seriously, this is what happens in the desperation of war zones, and it shows that Afghanistan is growing ever worse, six years after the invasion.

Team Giuliani

The state treasurer of South Carolina, a Republican, has a side gig.

South Carolina Treasurer Thomas Ravenel, a former real estate developer who became a rising political star after his election last year, was indicted Tuesday on federal cocaine charges.

The millionaire is accused of buying less than 500 grams of the drug to share with other people in late 2005, U.S. Attorney Reggie Lloyd said. Ravenel, 44, is charged with distribution of cocaine, which carries a maximum sentence of 20 years in prison.

(OK, maybe he doesn't make a LIVING selling coke, but that's the charge, so I'm running with it.)

And remember, the Bush Administration wants those mandatory minimum sentencing laws, so he'll be serving time.

The very last line of the story is this oh-by-the-way nugget:

Thomas Ravenel is also the state chairman for former New York Mayor Rudy Giuliani's presidential campaign.

So Giuliani has one former business partner who's about to be indicted for wiretap fraud and tax evasion, and now a state chair who's a coke dealer. Good judgment. Are Jimmy Conway and Paul Cicero and Tommy DeVito senior staffers as well?

Headline of the Year

Stones star denies snorting ashes

Mainly because Keith Richards HAS TO DENY snorting his father's ashes with coke.

As a stand-up I used to know once said, "Keith Richards did drugs so you don't have you."

P.S. On a somewhat related musical note, I'm completely obsessed with Hype Machine and may stop blogging in favor of downloading mp3s. Yeah, I'm late to the party, I know.