Rory Stewart: How to Save Afghanistan. Stewart wrote a pretty good book, The Places In Between, about walking across Afghanistan from Herat to Kabul in 2002. He later spent a year in the British government in Iraq, wrote a book about that, and returned to Kabul to found a NGO. He provides a succinct list of what the US/NATO/etc. have done right and what's gone wrong, and seems to be personally committed to keep doing his part. But he starts off criticizing both McCain and Obama for their campaign planks to put more troops and money into Afghanistan. He argues for fewer troops and less money, albeit some of each, much more intelligently used. Don't know whether he's right, but he's certainly less wrong than McCain and Obama (let alone Bush, who's escalated bombings to new record levels). Final line is one I do agree with: "We do not have a moral obligation to do what we cannot do." From the beginning, there were two big reasons to reject America's Afghanistan war: one is that we would, by the very nature of who we are and how we think and act, do far more damage than we could ever possibly repair; the other is that in doing so we would make ourselves even worse. We've seen both happen, but we keep falling for the argument that we have to hang in there until we succeed. To some extent Stewart's still making that argument, but at least he's hedging it in the right direction.

Barnett Rubin: Afghan Government Charges on Killing Afghans -- U.S. 47, Terrorists 41. Rubin's another western Afghanistan expert who wants to help but is generally appalled by everything that's happening there. That makes him a particularly good source for information on Afghanistan. This is just one example of his posts at Juan Cole's "Informed Comment: Global Affairs" blog, worth following mostly for Rubin's posts. But it is a good example to follow up on Stewart's assertion that the US is doing more harm than good. And not just by a 47-41 margin: the 41 killed in the terrorist bombing were 41 the US strategy failed to stop.

Meanwhile, Air Force Times reports that the US dropped a record number of bombs on Afghanistan for the first six months of 2008. Also, Obama started his world tour in Afghanistan, where he argued for an additional 7,000 troops, while looking grimacingly at the Pakistani border. One might hope that he'll develop a sense of reality once he actually has to face it, but running for office in the US isn't conducive to that. On the other hand, once he has to face reality one reality he'll have to face is the established biases of the military-security state he'll inherit, and they're still pretty much the same as the ones who pushed/followed Bush into disaster after disaster. Obama may be different, but so was Jimmy Carter in 1976 and John Kennedy in 1960, and they still got swept along with the tide, sometimes catastrophically.

Right now, Obama doesn't seem to be any closer to calling a halt to the War on Terrorism than Carter was to ending the Cold War in 1976 (or to falling the logic of his human rights stance toward a clean break with the Shah of Iran). This despite the fact that the War on Terrorism is a bogus charade, a pretense at doing the impossible, showing the world we're boss when we only have the vaguest clue how our own country is working.