Alex Kingsburg interviews Andrew Bacevich: How America Is Squandering Its Wealth and Power. Andrew Bacevich is getting a lot of press for his new book, The Limits of Power: The End of American Excpetionalism, and it looks like it's turned into a surprise bestseller. When I looked last night, it was #6 on Amazon's bestseller list, but it was also out of stock, with more copies promised for delivery Sept. 6. One thing that I think is driving these sales is that with his conservative credibity intact, he's willing and able to slam both McCain and Obama for continuing the mindset that got us into this mess. Most of the interviews I've seen or read he's pretty even-handed about this, which is unfair in the sense that McCain's way off the scale, but it does say something that hardly anyone -- with a major league soapbox, anyway -- is willing to say, which is that Afghanistan has gone as bad as Iraq and isn't any more amenable to fixing with our imperial war machine. I'm not sure how far he goes with this -- his attachment to the military gets him arguing that we don't have enough soldiers to deal with such problems, not that no number of soldiers would make a difference because the way US soldiers train and operate is itself dysfunctional. But it's good to remind Obama that the bad-Iraq/good-Afghanistan war isn't a clean or valid analysis. (Given that Kerry, in particular, argued the same thing in 2004 doesn't give it much of a track record, either.)

Sample quote:

Now we're seven years into a war that our country supposedly supports and yet we are running out of soldiers. Why is that? The nation refuses to correct our domestic dysfunction on energy, consumption, entitlements, and endless credit. Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld said something like, "We need to change the way we live, which is unacceptable, or we can change the way they live." That reflects a very familiar strand of thought in American foreign policy back to the Native Americans, which says that "they" will always have to change to accommodate our way of living.

Note that his laundry list of dysfunctions doesn't include the US military itself. One problem with blaming all this stuff on domestic consumption is that it implicitly assumes that there is a rational economic case for imperial domination: that fighting is necessary to sustain out standard of living. Bacevich argues something else: that our standard of living's not worth the fight, and he's not wrong in that regard. Someone like Joseph Stiglitz should take a look at the overall balance sheet for our military empire abroad. I think there's very little that would show up on the top line.

Simon Jenkins: In Europe, as in Asia, Nato leaves a trail of catastrophe. Glad someone said this:

Nato is useless. It has failed to bring stability to Afghanistan, as it failed to bring it to Serbia. It just breaks crockery. Nato has proved a rotten fighting force, which in Kabul is on the brink of being sidelined by exasperated Americans. Nor is it any better at diplomacy: witness its hamfisted handling of east Europe.

Helena Cobban: NATO's Supply Lines in Afghanistan. Pop quiz: how does NATO deliver basic supplies like gasoline to the troops in Afghanistan? They can airlift them, but most things are a lot cheaper by ground transport, if you have a safe route. For Afghanistan, that means: 1) Pakistan; 2) Iran; 3) Russia and Uzbekistan. Given that (1) is problematical and (2) is out of the question, this doesn't seem like a good time to burn your bridges on (3) over a tin-pot dictator in the Caucasus. Pakistan isn't just a matter of iffy politics in the post-Musharraf era. All the Pakistan routes run through Taliban strongholds:

Peter Marton of the [My] State Failure Blog gave some important background as to why NATO felt the need to reach out to Russia for the supply line agreement back in March. Basically, the Taliban had just torched a convoy of 100 ISAF-bound fuel tankers as they waited at the border-crossing between Pakistan and Afghanistan. Between 40 and 50 of the tankers were reported destroyed and several people killed.

In another post, Cobban points out:

NATO succeeded precisely because it succeeded at deterring. It didn't succeed at fighting, because thanks to the success of the deterrence it never had to fight.

Of course, deterrence works best against foes who didn't intend to attack you in the first place, which turns out to be a better explanation of NATO's success.

A third post (actually, the first in sequence) goes deeper into why NATO has no practical reason to exist any more.

Helena Cobban: The Outlook on a Triple-Superpower World. And this is Cobban's summary of the no-longer-unipolar world. This all ties back to Bacevich's book, which while presumably focused on the decline of US power is fortunately less specific. One thing we've found more and more over the past few decades is that power in itself doesn't get you very far.