Summit

Today's summit with the leaders of Pakistan and Afghanistan opens against the backdrop of precarious situations in both countries. The Taliban and Al-Qaeda have made significant gains in Pakistan by offering two staples of insurgencies since time immemorial: Land reform and education. The approach to land reform is brutal but effective. In the Swat province,

accounts from those who have fled now make clear that the Taliban seized control by pushing out about four dozen landlords who held the most power.

To do so, the militants organized peasants into armed gangs that became their shock troops, the residents, government officials and analysts said...

Each time the landlords fled, their tenants were rewarded. They were encouraged to cut down the orchard trees and sell the wood for their own profit, the former residents said. Or they were told to pay the rent to the Taliban instead of their now absentee bosses...

The education offered in Al-Qaeda madrasas amounts to little more than memorizing the Koran and teaching reactionary interpretations of Islam such as the one banning conversation between men and women. The madrasas estatablish a climate in which students can be easily radicalized, and they have no trouble drawing pupils because of Pakistan's traditional disinterest in public education.

President Obama plans to pressure Pakistan to take more aggressive steps in opposing the Taliban and Al-Qaeda. He may make future aid to Pakistan conditional, which Pakistan opposes and Congress may require...

As far as Afghanistan goes, the Administration is distancing itself from President Hamid Karzai in the belief that successful policy there must recognize decentralization of control...

Apropos of yesterday's post, Leslie Savan of The Nation explores the appeal of the Republican Party to its diehards. Savan concludes that a combination of racial fear and a commitment to what the diehards view as a noble Lost Cause keeps the engine running, if mostly in reverse:

At some point the vaunted Republican noise machine stopped being about winning elections and became instead a feckless attempt at mass justification, popping out one lame excuse after another for the party's failures. And it was a short leap from there to simply hitting rewind on the rightwing's longtime romance with a Lost Cause. Like Southerners still waving the stars'n'bars 150 years after Appomattox, or Col. Custer blithely riding up that coulee into an overwhelming force of Sioux and Cheyenne warriors, today's Repub diehards will go to their graves muttering about the fascist-socialist-gun-snatching tyranny of Barack Osama, convincing themselves sotto voce that, by fighting for a lower tax-rate for the extremely wealthy, they're the true descendants of the American Revolution...

Time to get a bigger nest (yet another marvelous egret photo at New Orleans Daily Snap)...

Our Lady of Good Counsel...

Jerry Crasnick explains the importance of plate discipline (as in baseball, not dieting)...

The Republican Women of Clifton, VA sure are a bunch of classy dames...

The Weekend That Was...

What a rotten weekend (and continuing) for John McCain. After months of being sniped at not spending enough time in Iraq and Afghanistan, Obama's Middle East tour has so far been a complete success. Starting with the successful meeting with Afghanistan's leaders, Obama shot hoops for the troops in Kuwait, even draining a three-pointer. Better yet, Iraq's Prime Minister Maliki all but endorsed the Obama plan for a 16-month withdrawal from Iraq. Despite attempt to spin Maliki's remarks as being misquoted or taken out of context, the New York Times confirmed them here...

Both the White House and McCain are in a dither over the Maliki Pivot. McCain insists that "conditions on the ground" ought to drive decision-making in Iraq, but it seems to me that that is exactly what is happening. After all, aren't Iraqi politics part of "conditions on the ground"? Don't they get a say in whether and how long foreign troops occupy their soil. (Oh, wait a minute...I guess not. ) The whole problem in Iraq from the get-go has been the Administration's ironclad conviction that they can impose a military solution on a political problem. And now, McCain offers more of the same. Plus, there are also "conditions on the ground" in the United States, whose people simply don't support the war. McCain claims that the surge has "worked." Fine. Let's declare victory and get out...

The Los Angeles Times uncritically reports that "As Sen. Barack Obama headed to Iraq for his first visit as a presidential candidate, his plan for bringing the war to a swift conclusion was triggering a political furor abroad and at home, with a U.S. military leader declaring Sunday that setting a hard deadline for withdrawing troops is risky." No one explains how setting no deadline has been been a redoubt of stability...

South Texas prepares for Hurricane Dolly. South Texas may not mean much to most, but there are those of us who have a great deal of affection for a place of which my brother once said "if it has thistles or thorns, it grows in South Texas." It's hot, it's flat, and it makes you grow up appreciating the niceties of the shade of a mesquite tree. For better or worse, it's as much Mexico as the United States. But it has its stories and its history like any other place, and the people who live there are attached to it. So remember: Whatever havoc (and hopefully, it won't be much) Dolly wreaks, it's not the fault of the people who live there. Did you hear that, Ann Coulter, Sean Hannity, Bill O'Reilly, and Rush Limbaugh? Luckily, South Texas doesn't depend on the promises of the Army Corps Of Engineers...

Many thanks to Foxessa for passing along this fascinating analysis of Yeats' "Sailing To Byzantium," the poem that begin with "That is no country for old men." In an accessible and enlightening way, the 10-minute video explores such seeming minutiae as Yeats' struggle to find exactly the right word with which to begin "Byzantium" (he also considered "Here" and "There") while showing how the poem conveys Yeats' grappling with encroaching old age. Watch this video, and you'll understand why the poet's choice of a single word isn't a matter of minutiae, but an artistic dilemma that can impact the meaning and direction of a work...

Ya know, I was sayin' to my wife just the other day that what this country needs is more young people defending the status quo. So my heart just breaks for these kids. It really does.