Morning Must Reads — The Anti-War Right Re-Emerges

The report on the condition on the newly expanded U.S. mission in Afghanistan is making its way to the president’s desk. But as writers Peter Baker and Dexter Filkins point out, sooner or later, President Obama is going to have to read it and the assessment that the 21,000 additional troops committed to the country are not sufficient to the nation-building job he has set out for them. Estimates for what the eventual ask will be hover around 35,000 more troops for the increasingly violent country.

The president took a bellicose line two weeks ago (calling it a “war of necessity”) and accepted ownership of the war months before that when he increased troop levels and changed the mission, but on Tuesday his spokesman heaped blame on the Bush administration saying that the neglect of past years had caused deeper problems than expected.

That won’t wash with Democrats who have been abandoning the war effort in droves. Most Americans are pessimistic about the war and a majority thing the conflict is not worth fighting, but on both counts, the members of the president’s own party have the strongest feelings. Having 100,000 troops in Afghanistan while missing the mark on key domestic issues could invite an insurrection on the Left.

“An expanded American footprint would also increase Mr. Obama’s entanglement with an Afghan government widely viewed as corrupt and illegitimate. Multiplying allegations of fraud in the Aug. 20 presidential election have left Washington with little hope for a credible partner in the war once the results are final.

The latest tally, with nearly half of the polling stations counted, showed President Hamid Karzai leading with 45.9 percent against 33.3 percent for his main opponent, Abdullah Abdullah, Reuters reported.”

George Will — Time to Get Out of Afghanistan
 

President Obama’s political calculus on Afghanistan depends on keeping the Bush administration’s congressional war coalition together – almost all Republicans and some Democrats – in order to ensure funding.

But Will, the dean of conservative columnists, has taken a strong stand against the more ambitious aims of the Obama administration as impossible to achieve. He favors reducing the American presence to what can be delivered from offshore or nearby bases and aimed at making sure al Qaeda or other terrorists don’t return.

Will is hugely influential with congressional Republicans and if his argument for less, not more, troops takes hold, President Obama could be in an untenable political position.

“‘The U.S. strategy is ‘clear, hold and build.’ Clear? Taliban forces can evaporate and then return, confident that U.S. forces will forever be too few to hold gains. Hence nation-building would be impossible even if we knew how, and even if Afghanistan were not the second-worst place to try: The Brookings Institution ranks Somalia as the only nation with a weaker state.

Military historian Max Hastings says Kabul controls only about a third of the country — ‘control’ is an elastic concept — and ‘ ‘our’ Afghans may prove no more viable than were ‘our’ Vietnamese, the Saigon regime.’ Just 4,000 Marines are contesting control of Helmand province, which is the size of West Virginia. … Afghanistan’s $23 billion gross domestic product is the size of Boise’s. Counterinsurgency doctrine teaches, not very helpfully, that development depends on security, and that security depends on development. Three-quarters of Afghanistan’s poppy production for opium comes from Helmand. In what should be called Operation Sisyphus, U.S. officials are urging farmers to grow other crops. Endive, perhaps?…

Creation of an effective central government? Afghanistan has never had one. U.S. Ambassador Karl Eikenberry hopes for a ‘renewal of trust’ of the Afghan people in the government, but the Economist describes President Hamid Karzai’s government — his vice presidential running mate is a drug trafficker — as so ‘inept, corrupt and predatory’ that people sometimes yearn for restoration of the warlords, ‘who were less venal and less brutal than Mr. Karzai’s lot.’”

Wall Street Journal — Health-Care Anger Has Deeper Roots
 

With members of Congress sweating out their impending returns to Washington, writers Janet Adamy and Jonathan Weisman offer a handy guide for what went so wrong, so fast on health care. A great overview piece that reaches the inexorable conclusion that the president overreached paniced conservatives already worried about rowing government and worried moderates worried about the competency.

Meanwhile, the administration’s pet columnist, David Brooks, issues a dire warning for the president to reject the Left, refuse to support passing health care through the parliamentary trick of budget reconciliation, and return to the centrist nature that Brooks always saw in Obama so much more clearly than the rest of us. “Events,” Brooks says, “have pushed Obama to the Left.” Oh, David.

But back at the ranch, members of Congress are girding themselves for the final battle in which Democrats will be asked to make insanely risky votes in order to protect themselves against the appearance of weakness that leads to eventual defeat.

“August, typically a sleepy month, dealt Democrats a tough hand this year.

Snafus in the federal “cash for clunkers” program — which gave people rebates to trade in gas-guzzling cars for more fuel-efficient new vehicles — highlighted how disorganization can hamper government plans. It was the bloodiest month for U.S. troops so far in the war in Afghanistan. Attorney General Eric Holder poked a potential hornets’ nest by appointing a prosecutor to investigate Central Intelligence Agency interrogators. And White House budget forecasters said they now project $9 trillion of additional federal debt over the next decade, adding $2 trillion to an earlier estimate.

Last year’s election gave Democrats a mandate for big changes that they feel still applies. They won seats by arguing that Republicans had failed to act to keep the housing market and financial system from crumbling.

Washington Post — Study Raises Questions About Cost Savings From Preventive Care

One of the initial articles of faith about health-care reform was that preventative care would save money in the long run thereby making spending $1 trillion or $1.6 trillion now pay for itself later.

Alas, every reputable study has said that while preventative care is better for patients, since it improves the quality of life, it offers no savings. The up front costs and greater longevity cancel out the savings from avoiding extraordinary care later on.

But writer Lori Montgomery has found a University of Chicago study that says that if you only go a little longer – say 25 years – investments in preventative care can be not revenue neutral, but less budget shattering… if you apply it only to young diabetics.
Montgomery found that the congressional delegate from the Virgin Islands would like the CBO to start scoring things on the quarter-century basis, rather than those mean old decades it has always used.

“But CBO Director Douglas W. Elmendorf said the agency already has the authority to look at costs over a longer term, though not in the context of official estimates. He called the new study, which has been reviewed by CBO staff, ‘exactly the sort of research that we use in building our cost estimates. And we will consider these findings in future estimates we do in this area.’

In its own analysis of preventive care, CBO said earlier this month that the cost of making cancer screening, cholesterol management and other services broadly available is likely to far outweigh any savings ultimately generated. The new study looks at a more narrow population — people already diagnosed with diabetes — and projects the cost of providing them with a very specific regimen of frequent checkups and diagnostic tests that has produced predictable results in clinical trials. (Treatment for other forms of disease may vary in their costs.)”

New York Times — Justice Dept. to Recharge Enforcement of Civil Rights
 

Attorney General Eric Holder either thinks that the only way he can help his boss succeed is by making the Obama administration into a liberal crusade or that Obama is a one-term president so he’d better get while the getting is good.

Otherwise, he might go just a bit slower.

Less than a week after loosing the FBI on the CIA to prosecute terrorist mistreatment, Holder was talking to the New York Times about his goal of fanning out 400 civil rights lawyers across the country to probe not just individual violations of civil rights but instances when outcomes suggest that unintentional bias exists – aka the quota police.

Holder told writer Charlie Savage that the expansion isn’t a shift, but a restoration of the department’s original role under the 1957 mandate of the agency.

“Now the changes that Mr. Holder is pushing through have led some conservatives, still stinging from accusations that the Bush appointees ‘politicized’ the unit, to start throwing the same charge back at President Obama’s team.

The agency’s critics cite the downsizing of a voter intimidation case involving the New Black Panther Party, an investigation into whether an Arizona sheriff’s enforcement of immigration laws has discriminated against Hispanics, and the recent blocking of a new rule requiring Georgia voters to prove their citizenship. (Under the Bush administration, the division had signed off on a similar law requiring Georgia voters to furnish photographic identification, rejecting criticism that legitimate minority voters are disproportionately more likely not to have driver’s licenses or passports.)

Among the critics, Hans von Spakovsky, a former key Bush-era official at the division, has accused the Obama team of ‘nakedly political’ maneuvers.”

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