Tuesday, December 22, 2009

Heads I Win, Tails You Lose

For one of the few times in my life, I find myself at a loss for words. Which, really, is kind of a scary concept for one so thoroughly Irish as I am; you know, that whole thing about Irishmen being blessed with the gift of gab and all. On the other hand, while some might view a mick being confounded on what to say as a tragedy, others might view it as a blessing.

Actually, it's not so much that I don't know what to say as it is that whatever I do say is not only not going to be appreciated, it's going to fall on deaf ears. Ah, but I've neglected to tell just what it is that gives rise to this line of thought.

Today is December 22, the "last" day, so to speak. The last day of what? Why, the last day on which my friend's ponzi scheme she's involved in was supposed to pay out, of course. You see, the individual running this little ploy very solemnly promised that everyone would be "paid out" between the 18th and 22nd of this month. Insert pained sigh here.

Naturally, as I had predicted before, no one actually got "paid" except the - and I'm being gentle here - douchebag at the top of this particular pyramid. Which, of course, is how pyramid schemes work. The immoral prey upon the gullible, and there isn't a whole lot that anybody can do about that.

I'm not sure how much money my friend threw away on this particular gambit, nor do I really care. For her "investment," she was convinced that she was going to make $100,000.00 for herself, $48,000.00 for her husband, and $12,500.00 for me. Yes, that's right, she bought into three "slots" in this scheme.

Oh, those dreams of internet wealth. To her, this wasn't a ponzi scheme doomed to see her taken to the cleaners, but an "investment opportunity." That's right folks, your $5,000.00 today could be $300,000.00 in only three months, and you don't have to do anything other than try and convince some other poor saps to fork over their cash.

Come on, I can't be the only one who sees something wrong with this. Really, it's the oldest trick in the book, the old something for (relatively) nothing scam. I still have trouble believing that people are really that gullible, even though I am living with proof of that assertion. On the one hand, I can't talk this person out of such things, and on the other, I can't shoot the people responsible. Frustrating, to say the least.

The thing is, even though I am not the one who participated in this scheme - I didn't hand over any money - I am not unaffected by the fallout. Over the past year, I've given my friend over $10,000.00 - cash I really could not afford to part with - in order to pay off her Federal income tax debt and delinquent property taxes. And why did she and her husband not have the money to take care of those debts? Because she threw it away, and keeps on throwing it away, on these asinine internet schemes that a six-year-old would know are scams.

Now, I know I'm never going to see that money again. Ten grand may not be much in the big picture, but it was all I had, almost my entire savings. Nor is it like I can make it up; I can't work, and Disability barely pays for all the medications I have to take for my various illnesses. Which is what really pisses me off: that someone would call upon the bonds of friendship to take from someone who really can't afford to give, because they can't control themselves when it comes to money. It really makes me long for the days when I had a gun and a uniform that said it was legal . . .

But what can you do with an addict? Drugs, alcohol, gambling, ponzi schemes . . . an addiction is an addiction. Tomorrow, she's going to get on the computer and find some other get-rich-quick scheme. Just more proof of my assertion that a fool and your money will soon be partners. Hell, she's still waiting for her big "investment" in Iraqi dinar to pay off. The fact that the dinar is worthless and some schmuck in Baghdad who needed a hard currency now has hers is, of course, immaterial. The e-mail said she would get rich by buying the currency, so it must be so.

Which begs the question of just how many times someone needs a rock to fall on their head before they start getting the idea that not all is as it is promised, but . . . See the earlier point about addictions. Now, I've been around the block enough times to know that if someone really wants to ride the express elevator to hell, I'm not going to get in their way. I just really resent it, though, when they want to take the rest of us along for the ride.

So, what can I say? "I told you so" is right up there; short, to the point, but somehow so crude. "Just what did you think would happen?" is also a contender, except that it verges on being a rhetorical question. I mean, I already know what she expected to happen, regardless of the fact that a blind man could see it wouldn't. Therein lies the conundrum: there just isn't really anything I can say, and certainly nothing that is going to make any impact. But I do wonder what is going to happen the next time she finds she doesn't have the money to pay things like taxes, because she's thrown it all away on these bogus schemes. Because the next time, there won't be anyone to bail her out.

Wednesday, December 9, 2009

A Nice Dinner Might Have Helped . . .

Oh, the indignities just continue to pile up, one after another. I never used to believe in reincarnation, but now I do. And I am convinved that, in my last life, I was a Brooklyn cab driver, and am being punished for that in this life.

If you don't know why I am picking on cab drivers from Brooklyn, specifically, or New York City, in general, then you need to get out more.

Anyway, last night I showed up at the medical arts building for the long-awaited "sleep study" that my doctors wanted me to take. In the middle of a blizzard. Where the local authorities were doing the kind of street plowing that got Mayor Bilandic fired in Chicago back in 1978. After getting caught behind an 18-wheeler that had gotten stuck in the middle of the road - and no, don't ask me how something that big and that heavy can get stuck in two inches of snow. Maybe after you add in the other five inches that fell while I was not sleeping in the sleep centre, but I digress.

Now, if you've never had to undergo one of these "sleep studies" - an exercise in a self-fulfilling prophecy designed to tell you that you suffer from sleep apnea - then you have missed out on a truly joyful experience. Really. It's a lot like spending a night in a budget motel, onl without any of the amenities.

Okay, first of all, they make you go in the back door of the building, presumably because they tell you to show up at 8:30 PM, and the main entrance is closed. Or, perhaps, it's because they just make the Irish use the back door - some people are just funny that way.

Actually, the room they put you in is fairly nice - if, of course, you can ignore all the chain-saw snoring emanating from the other rooms. There's a nice leather chair, a queen-size bed, a nice armoire to stash your belongings in, and a 50-inch flat-panel LCD TV mounted on the wall, complete with satellite access and, erm, the porn channels. Quite aside from the, ah, adult selections available, such a nice TV set does seem to be a bit of a waste, since you're not actually given an opportunity to watch anything. You are, after all, there to sleep.

Oh, yeah, I forgot about the ceiling-mounted IR camera, so the nurses can watch you. Note to self: don't pick your nose or play with yourself.

So, after you change into whatever it is you like to sleep in - and for God's sake, let's hope that camera is off while you're changing - the nurse comes in to hook you up to what you can only presume are some very expensive machines. And, yes, while we're at it, I did toy with the idea of telling them that I slept in the nude, but I actually don't advise doing that. You never can tell what might show up on YouTube.

They get the ball rolling, so to speak, with something that felt very much like a phrenological exam (oh, go look it up). The nurse had me sit in a chair, and then she broke out a tape measure and started measuring my head. She said it was so she would know where to put the EEG leads, but I would have thought they'd have a standardized chart for that. Oh, well. Then, she started drawing dots and lines all over my skull and forehead with a red magic marker. Again, she said, so she would know where to place the leads, but it did kind of feel like she was just playing tic-tac-toe, though I could just be reading things into it.

Then came the goop. Like she dumped an industrial-sized jar of K-Y Jelly on my head. A nice, big, heaping dollop for every lead. And by "dollop," I mean that when she was done, I looked like the victim of a bukkake party. Once again, if you don't know what a bukkake party is, you need to get out more. All I know is that two showers later, I've still got this gunk in my hair.

Once she got done spewing my head, the Great Electrode Placement occurred. This was really fun, because it took about ten minutes to get all the leads placed - head, chest, back, arms and legs. During this process, I somehow felt compelled to ask if the Governor had called yet to commute my sentence. All of these leads, of course, are connected to a set of machines on a night table so, after you're wired, if you have to do something like, oh, go to the bathroom, they have to come in and disconnect you and plug you into a box you can walk around with. Trust me, not a process for those of you who are weak of bladder . . .

When they've finally gotten you all hooked up, it's time for bed. The mattress, of course, is like a slab of cement. Sleep-number, my ass. What I discovered is that you can pick up the controller for the mattress, pick the firmness number you want, and all the bed does is, well, fart. And the mattress remains just as firm as ever. Look, I set the damned thing all the way down to 50, and it was still like lying on a slab of concrete, no matter how many times I made the mattress fart.

Oh, by the way, that's something else you probably don't want to do. They are listening to you, remember.

Then there are the pillows, which are so good it's like sleeping with no pillows at all. I had two of them, and those suckers must have compressed completely flat as soon as my head hit them. Or, perhaps, with all the petroleum jelly on my head, I just kept slipping off them. I suppose that's a possibility, too. All I know for sure is that I haven't seen that much grease on a pillow case since I was a teenager. Ah, memories . . . The good news is that once you are finally all settled in bed, the nurse tucks you in, which no one has done for me since I was about six.

Note to Centegra Health Systems, Inc.: if you actually wanted me to sleep, you shouldn't have given me a cute nurse with large breasts who was willing to crawl into bed with me.

Not that I actually did much sleeping, but at one point it seems that one of the leads came off my back, and I was rather pleasantly awakened - or unpleasantly, depending on personal preference or embarrassment factor - to my nurse crawling under the covers and looking for it. When she asked if there was anything else I could think of to ask for, I was truly at a loss for words. Okay, maybe not so much as at a loss for words, but the classic problem of which voice to listen to, the angel on my right shoulder or the devil on my left. But I did periodically make sure to knock a lead loose here and there . . .

But as I said, at least for me, there really wasn't a whole lot of sleeping involved in this "sleep study." Look, I got there at 8:30 PM and, by the time all the preliminaries were over and they made me look like an x-rated movie actor ready for execution, it was 11:30 PM. By the time I was stretched out on the flatulent cement slab, it was midnight and I still wasn't tired. So, they gave me a sleeping pill . . . which didn't work. Which kind of defeats the point of a sleeping pill, but what do I know? Between midnight and about 4:00 AM, all I did was kind of drift in and out of a sort of half-sleep. You know, that really restful kind where you sleep for a couple of minutes before waking up, all the time aware of everything that's going on around you. Rinse and repeat as often as necessary.

Finally, at about four in the morning, I finally fell into what you can properly classify as "sleep." The problem being that they wake you up at 5:00 AM and kick you out. Surprise! The. Most. Miserable. Night. Ever. And then, on basically one hour's sleep, I got to drive home in the same freaking blizzard that had plagued me the night before. Note to Chevy: the HHR is really not designed to be driven in the snow.

And you know what? I'm going to get to do this all over again, because according to the nurse, I have severe sleep apnea. Which means that they're going to make me do another "sleep study" so they can either fit me with one of those funky masks they use to treat apnea at home, or decide if maybe I should have the "corrective" surgery. Of course, my failure to sleep adequately could have nothing to do with the rock-hard mattress or, perhaps, that same nurse causing random erections by getting into bed with me, but that just shows my failure to understand the problem. I mean, I'm not the one who spent four years in medical school and three years in residency so I could watch tapes of people sleeping, right?

Really, now, the only thing I learned from this experience is that I really want a 50-inch flat-panel LCD TV, and a bed that doesn't fart . . .

Thursday, December 3, 2009

A Life More Ordinary

This must be what Custer felt like towards the very end, as he stood on that hilltop at the Little Big Horn, looking around and realizing that there was no help coming. That sinking feeling of knowing that everything was drawing inexorably to an end, that awesome loneliness of knowing that there were no more choices to be made, no way to retrieve the situation or to redeem himself. Surely a situation to try even those with the strongest of faith.

When I look back, I'm not sure what it is that I see. Meaning seems to merge into futility until the identity of each is lost as they merge into something else, something I just can't really come to grips with. Perhaps I am just to close to the events in question, or perhaps I am just unwilling to admit to what is right there in front of me, that there is, in the end, no meaning and everything is just a lesson in futility.

For fifteen years, I ran a group home for a social services agency that put such an emphasis on living up to those goals that they fired me when I had a heart attack. The ugly truth of that place was that the people running it were far more interested in preserving their own positions than they were in anything so mundane as actually taking care of the kids they were in charge of. Ostensibly a 501(c) organization, the administration was always after those of us who were actually running the day-to-day operations to find ways to save money and keep expenses down. Now, while that may make sense for a company that's supposed to turn a profit, it really doesn't make a whole lot of sense for a company that is a non-profit organization. As an example, every time money was tight, the push was to cut back on what was being spent on the kids living in the group homes, including the clothing budget and what was being spent to feed them; at the same time, the senior administration gave themselves a 22% pay raise. And those of us who would be considered the "middle-managers," when we pointed out that perhaps the priorities were a little misguided, well, we were labelled the "trouble-makers."

Kids and adolescents living in group homes can be quite a creative bunch. In my time as a unit supervisor, I was confronted not only by children wielding knives, but by just about anything else you can think of that can be used as a weapon. Chairs were always fun, as several of my broken ribs can attest to, as were things like pool balls stuffed into socks.

One afternoon, I walked into the house I supervised to find that one of the 18-year-old residents had discovered a roofing shovel somewhere, and was using it to threaten the other residents and the staff. When I came in, as a matter of fact, one of my staff was in the dining room, wrestling with this kid and trying to get that shovel away from him. I just walked past those two, made sure that everyone else got out of the house, then went into my office and called the police. That kid followed me, all the time swinging the shovel around and, while I was speaking to the 911 operator, pulled the phone cord out of the wall. I'm not entirely sure what he was thinking, if he believed that by disconnecting the phone the cops wouldn't know where to go, but I have been around long enough to know that when a 911 operator is told that an armed assault is going on, they tend to get a bit concerned when the call is suddenly cut off.

I obviously don't know what that operator said when she put the call out, but she must have made it sound like everybody in the house was being murdered. Frankly, when that kid yanked the phone cord out of the wall, I just left. No point in sticking around and winding up as a blood splash on the wall, right? But before I had taken two steps out the front door, it was like I was suddenly in The Blues Brothers. Every squad car on the west side of town that day must have responded to that call; I counted at least ten by the time I was done, all with lights and sirens. I remember two of them charging right across the curb and across the front lawn while a third pulled a violent u-turn in front of the house, as well as the ones that screamed up the driveway and the ones that came in through the back drive. Needless to say, after the police were done, we never saw that kid again . . .

I remember the day I got crunched in a restraint, where one of my more unreasonable kids decided to lose his mind and come after me with a chair. It didn't hurt nearly as much when he broke one of my ribs with that chair as it did when two of my staff tackled the kid, with me unfortunately still on the bottom of that particular pile. By the time they managed to extricate me from that scrum, I was having trouble breathing and couldn't move my left arm. Still, being the guy in charge, I somehow felt the need to help my remaining staff keep control over the house while that particular situation was resolved, despite the other kids pleading with me to go to the hospital.

By the time I finally did go, that kid was calm again and the other kids, having had no interest in involving themselves in his malfunction, had gone back to more important things to them, like watching TV. And the punchline to this particular story is that, while I was in the Emergency Room listening to the doctor tell me something I already knew - namely, that I had a broken rib - my boss called me to say that I was in trouble because I hadn't asked for her permission to go to the hospital. I've often wondered what the people in charge of enforcing the Worker's Compensation laws would have had to say about that, had I bothered to inform them . . .

Before I went to work for that agency, I spent five years or so as an indpendent contractor to the Illinois Department of Children and Family Services, meeting and greeting every schizo in the fifty wards of Chicago. I spent part of that magical, mystery tour doing psych evals and profiles of DCFS clients, and part of it investigating charges of abuse and neglect. If I wasn't a cynic before I did those things, I certainly was after.

I could tell you about the eleven-year-old girl who was in a group home in the city that I profiled, who tried to seduce me during the interview. She was, shall we say, a well-developed child which, I came to find out, was one of the results of sexual abuse. It seems that that tends to stimulate the hormones in charge of sexual development. Anyway, it turned out that, as she coyly unbuttoned the top few buttons of her blouse, that her main ambition in life was to be a Playboy playmate and have lots of sex . . . In order to finish that interview, I had to call in one of that agencey's child care workers and have her sit in as a witness.

God, are you out there?

I could tell you about the sixteen-year-old girl I profiled, who was six months pregnant and refused to acknowledge that little fact. She had all the affect of a rock, and the reason I was testing her was because she had taken a five inch bite out of her mother's shoulder. By the time I was done with the interview, my skin was literally crawling, and I knew with the certainty of the tomb that if she were allowed to give birth and keep her child, that child was as good as dead. And there wasn't a damned thing I could do about it.

God, are you listening?

Or I could tell you about the parents I interviewed, who had beaten one of their toddlers to death with a baseball bat. They had completed their court-ordered parenting classes and the judge, it seemed, was considering returning their other children to them. You know, the ones who had been starved, used as ashtrays, beaten with extension cords, all those normal things that parents do. All of the screening I did on them pointed to the fact that they had learned nothing from all the court-ordered intervention, but what do I know?

God, are you there?

One day, I walked into an apartment in the Robert Taylor Homes, your basic urban demilitarized zone, to inestigate a charge of possible abuse. The place, I must say, was kept very neat, and came complete with hot- and cold-running roaches. The father was an assistant chef at a very well-known Chicago restaurant, favourite of yuppies everywhere, and the mother was a very pleasant woman who apparently collected Government money for having children. It was an exceptionally beautiful day, with brilliant sunlight pouring through the windows . . . and there, lying curled up in a frying pan on the stove, was the infant who had been the cause of the abuse charge. I never even conducted the interview. There was no reason to. I turned right around, left, and called the police.

God, do you even care?

I look back, and I can't help wondering what it was all for. All I can see is the blood and the wreckage and the tears, a trail of small horrors that merge into a kind of meta-tragedy that has no beginning and no end. There was a time in my life when I would receive letters from former clients of mine, all of them reducable to the same, depressing message: if I had only listened to you, things would be different. A few, here and there, who actually did make it, the one who found a foster family he fit in with, and who later on became a police officer. The girl who went on to join the National Guard, and leveraged that into going to college. But balanced against all the others who just continued to spiral on down into the darkness . . .

What was it all for? All the time and effort, and the dismal banality of it all just rolls right along without interruption. Perhaps that is just the greatest practical joke of all, the illusion that we can make a difference, that we can change things. For in the end, there is only what there is.

Tuesday, December 1, 2009

More Change We Can Believe In

The President addressed the nation this evening, unveiling his new "plan" for prosecuting the war in Afghanistan. I didn't bother to watch, because I already knew what he was going to say, which was, basically, nothing. Just another case of meet the new boss, same as the old boss. And when I went and checked on what the President had to say, my heart kind of sank, even though it shouldn't have, as I knew better.

First of all, an additional thirty thousand troops is not going to significantly impact events on the ground in Afghanistan. Look, that sounds like a big number, but it is also a deceiving one. The question that should really be asked is just how many of those troops are going to be trigger-pullers? Given the typical tooth-to-tail ratio in the U.S. military - that is, the actual number of soldiers who do the fighting versus the number of soldiers who support the shooters - I'm betting that of that thirty thousand, less than five thousand will actually be putting steel on target.

If you think of Afghanistan as a house on fire, then sending in thirty thousand troops is a lot like trying to fight that fire with a garden hose. Minimal as it may be, those troops will have an impact at the tactical level, but none at all on the strategic level, and that is what we should be concerned with. It takes an enormous effort to project a force that far, and into a place as primitive as Afghanistan; for every shooter we send in, there are another three or four soldiers that have to follow him in order to provide logistical support. After all, a soldier on the sharp end is kind of useless if he doesn't have the "beans, bullets and bandages" to do his job.

To a large extent, the problems of Afghanistan don't exist within that country, but are a product of people and forces outside of the country. Iran, for example, is an irritant, but a minor one in the grand scheme of things. Yes, to make us uncomfortable, they will continue to ship weapons and "trainers" into Afghanistan, but Teheran lacks both the traction and the audience to ever be anything more than a bit player. Pakistan, on the other hand, is a different story entirely.

If we were capable of thinking in anything other than sound bites and could remember our history, we would recall that the Taliban, as an organized political force, was largely a creation of the Pakistani ISI - their military intelligence service - following the Soviet withdrawal in 1988. Pakistan had always had an interest in controlling events within Afghanistan; considering their "real" enemy to be India, they have always wanted a "stable" government in Kabul - or, at least, as stable as any Afghan government can be, but more on that in a bit - and one that they could control. And make no mistake about this, the Pakistani ISI bankrolled the Taliban, and to an extent far larger than anyone wants to admit, still does. Always remember the basic fact that he who controls the purse strings controls everything.

The real area of concern in the region is the so-called "tribal" areas that span the Afghan-Pakistan border. The various tribes that inhabit that zone are, for all intents and purposes, autonomous from any central authority. The central government is largely irrelevant to them, and within their respective tribal zones, they police and regulate themselves. That area has long been known to be a breeding ground of fundamentalism, and a major problem has been that the Pashtun tribe - the majority tribe within Afghanistan and the tribe from which the Taliban sprung - crosses over into Pakistan.

We've known since the beginning of our war in Afghanistan that the Afghan-Pakistan border has been exceedingly porous, and that the tribal lands on the Pakistani side of the border have functioned in the same manner as Cambodia and Laos in the Vietnam War, a safe haven in which the Taliban can regroup, train and resupply. Aside from maintaining a loose watch over the border from a handful of isolated garrisons, Pakistani authorities don't even try to enter the tribal zones, much less administer them. Itself a fairly radicalized institution, the only agency that does, in fact, have any traction in that area is, unsurprisingly, the ISI.

The moral of this lesson is that if you truly want to "stabilize" the situation inside Afghanistan - which is something of an impossible task to begin with, but we'll get to that - then you must first have the ability to seal off the border with Pakistan, cutting off the hostile forces from their safe havens on the other side of that line. Just given the terrain in that region, thirty thousand troops aren't going to be enough to do that. Look at it this way: one hundred and fifty thousand troops in Iraq weren't enough to seal that country's borders and prevent the flow of fighters from Syria, Jordan, Saudi Arabia and other countries and, by comparison, Iraq is a sandbox with infrastructure. All-weather paved roads, electricity and basic utilities are all few and far between inside Afghanistan.

Second of all, the President's so-called "new strategy" depends, in his own words, on "cooperating with those institutions in Afghanistan that are fighting corruption" and strengthening the central government in Kabul, as well as the government's security forces. In other words, we are to continue engaging in efforts directed towards "nation building."

There are, unfortunately, a couple of problems with that goal. The first being that, aside from Germany and Japan following the Second World War, there has never been a successful case of "nation building." Further, one could argue that we only succeeded with Germany and Japan because we first basically reduced those countries to rubble and eliminated their ability to resist us. Folks, those two countries were at our whim after 1945, and we occupied them for almost sixty years. In other words, they had no choice but to act as we dictated. That is hardly the case with Afghanistan.

Now, fighting corruption is a noble idea, but one that is ultimately doomed to failure and which betrays our fundamental misunderstanding of the culture in that region of the world. Indeed, in many areas of our unhappy globe. In what we like to call the industrialized, or First, world, corruption is a phenomenon in which someone decides to play the system in order for personal gain. In the way in which our institutions are set up, corruption is the exception and not the rule. But because we are raised in a society where we view that phenomenon as an aberration, we tend to believe that everyone, everywhere, holds that same view. And they do not.

Afghanistan, Pakistan and much of sub-Saharan Africa are tribal societies, where an individual's primary loyalty are toward clan and tribe, and not to something as vague and distant as nation and government. Corruption is endemic to those societies precisely because of their tribal nature. Poitical power and jobs are not meted out due to ability, but rather due to who is related to who. At one point or another, every society that has ever existed has operated on that basis and, while some have "evolved" to a point where that kind of activity is frowned upon, most have not. Corruption, as we term it, in a tribalized society is a cultural phenomenon, not a political or legal one. Rather than compete with someone outside of the tribe for a job based on merit or ability, it is far easier - and certainly more profitable for the tribe - to keep such things "in the family" as it were, especially if there are few jobs to begin with. Furthermore, in a society where opportunities are limited to begin with, it is also far easier to pick up a gun and protect what the tribe already has than it is to go and dig ditches for a living. And in a society where the warrior figure is venerated as an ideal, such as in Afghanistan, it is also certainly more prestigious than digging a ditch.

Nation building, as a concept, is further doomed in a place like Afghanistan because there is really nothing there on which to base those efforts. The very concept of a "Nation-State," as we understand the concept, is very much a product of liberal Western thought dating back to Classical Greece. In much of the world, what we call "nations" are really nothing more than the product of a few European colonial powers arbitrarily drawing lines on a map. In much of sub-Saharan Africa and southwest Asia, "nations" are really nothing more than collections of tribes who shouldn't be living together and who have no real interest in doing so. The former nation of Yugoslavia is a great example of that. As long as the strong man lived and was in charge, so did the pantomine of a functioning state. But as soon as Tito was gone, that state fractured along its ethnic - or tribal, if you prefer - lines and descended into blood conflicts. That same phenomenon is always present in African countries that periodically convulse in an orgy of genocide; those countries always fracture along tribal lines.

Afghanistan has never existed as a nation, at least as we understand that term. There has never been a strong, central government that exercised sovereignty over the country, even when there was a king who sat on a throne in Kabul. The closest Afghanistan ever came to being a nation as we understand it was when the Communists were in control, and we all know how that one turned out. The brutal truth of the matter is that Afghanistan has always consisted of a relatively weak central government in Kabul, who's control was pretty much limited to that city and the areas immediately surrounding it. The real political power in Afghanistan has always been wielded by the tribal leaders controlling the provinces, and "national" government was always characterized by the weak central government bribing the Provincial leaders when they could, and by playing them off against each other when necessary. It has been that way since before Ghengis Khan and the Golden Horde overran Afghanistan, and even the Mongols didn't try to bring the Provincial Warlords under control. And it isn't like the Great Khan is exactly known for his gentle diplomacy.

Finally, the President promised in his speech that we would begin withdrawing from Afghanistan by the summer of 2011. The problem with that is by doing so, he told the Taliban that all they have to do is hang on for eighteen more months, and then they'll win. Again, we betray our fundamental misunderstanding of why things are happening over there. The Taliban is very much a product of Pashtun society and, for as long as the Pashtuns exist, there will always be a constituency for them. The Taliban was a cultural phenomenon among that tribe long before the Pakistani ISI turned it into a political force, and it is the height of folly to believe that can be changed. Victory, such as it is, will never be defined in terms of defeating the Taliban and eliminating them as a force within Pashtun or Afghan society. Unless you are prepared to eliminate the Pashtun entirely, that is an impossibility. Rather, victory will be defined by somehow convincing the Pashtun themselves to marginalize the Taliban as a cultural, religious and political force, and that, too, may prove to be an impossibility. Success then lies in convincing the various tribes in Afghanistan to cooperate with each other, which inevitably leads us back to the model of patronage, bribes and, yes, coercion in getting the provincial leaders to cooperate with whoever controls Kabul.

The real problem with our approach to Afghanistan - and any other global "hot spot" you care to mention - is that there aren't any real strategists left in Washington, and probably haven't been any there since George Kennan sent his long telegram. Nobody in Washington seems able to think beyond the next election cycle, and make no mistake about this. Even though he used the word tonight, the President wasn't talking about strategy, or even the Operational art; he was talking about a tactical response to a strategic problem. Strategy involves thinking about the second, third and fourth-order effects of the things you do, and beyond. Yet the people involved in developing our so-called strategies seem to give up after considering the second-order effects in passing. To be brutally honest, the President's "strategy" in Afghanistan is not only going to fail, it is going to fail dismally. And, for so long as we continue to focus on tactical responses and call that strategy, anything we try to do is going to fail.