But things may not necessarily follow that simple script. There is certainly resistance in Germany, for example, to the idea of sending any more of its soldiers to Afghanistan, or even to allow a redeployment of the ones that are already there to areas of the country where they could be more useful in suppressing the Taliban (and so where, by definition, they would be more exposed to actually taking casualties). As for the Danes, they do already have around 550 troops operating in the more-dangerous south part of the country and have suffered 22 killed-in-action since the Danish military’s initial deployment to Afghanistan in 2002. And now we encounter on the pages of Denmark’s leading commentary newspaper, Information, probably the Obama administration’s worst nightmare in this regard: an opinion-piece from a leading Danish writer asking “Why are we in Afghanistan?”

The author, Carsten Jensen, is prize-winning novelist and columnist who has also travelled to Afghanistan four times already. In the early paragraphs of his piece, though, you almost have a sense of witnessing him undermining his own argument (which is against a Danish presence in Afghanistan, of course) by seemingly basing it on pacifism – a principle important in his country but probably not much of anywhere else. For did you know that it has been almost 145 years since the Danes have found themselves in a shooting-war? Yes, they managed to skip both World Wars (although they were occupied for much of the Second; you really can’t characterize the defense they offered to the Germans as very military), so the last violence they were involved in had to do with Prussian and Austrian soldiers invading in 1864 the provinces of Schleswig and Holstein on the European mainland, south of Jutland, to seize them permanently. Back in these contemporary times, Jensen reports that a number of books and articles have come out that recount and even celebrate the military exploits of the Danish contingent in Afghanistan, with even a “triumphalist” tone. And so he asks – ironically, one presumes – “The Danish are in the process of finding themselves again [i.e. rediscovering their Inner Viking]. Or are we?”

Again, all this alarm over being at war once again after 145 years may be faintly amusing, but it is likely not to strike much of a chord with any reader lacking the appropriate Danish sensibilities. (Although I grant that, since the piece of course is in Danish, it’s hard to imagine anyone without those sensibilities ever actually reading it.) But Jensen’s argument gets better, of course, much better in fact, as he goes on to voice some fundamental questions about involvement in that part of the world which one hopes would already have been posed and answered long before, but which one suspects in fact never were. Like the title question, for example: Why are we there? “To help out,” is the answer Jensen supposes the majority of the Danish electorate would give. But no:

At most that bare-minimum help, which is mostly of a cosmetic nature, serves the goal of creating temporary good-will in the local population in Helmand [where the Danish are stationed] so that they shoot a bit less frequently at the Danish troops. Any real help towards the rebuilding of society, that has been devastated after 30 years of war, is not up for discussion. . . . Civil society has not been rebuilt. The institutions that should give the Afghan government authority and the population confidence have never been created.

Indeed, as regards that Afghan government Jensen reminds us of an important point: there may be a (please forgive the expression) notional national Afghan government sitting in Kabul, headed by President Hamid Karzai, but the fundamental reality of what happened with the late-2001 American intervention there was that the various warlords holding real power in different parts of the country, having been deposed by the Taliban, were restored to their positions, so that that is in fact the country’s governing power-structure to this day. Now, does anyone really think, for example, that the West’s involvement in Afghanistan has achieved greater rights for the women there? Perhaps in the Potemkin-reality in and around the supposed capital Kabul; but certainly not in most of the country, as the warlords in charge there are not interested in such things. (Nor are, of course, the Taliban who themselves control ever-more territory.) Indeed, quite apart from women’s rights, Jensen quotes from one of those very same articles depicting the Danish soldiers’ military activities in Helmand province about the rampant pedophilia – yes, the sexual abuse of children – they noticed in the local culture, and you can bet that the warlords have little interest in doing anything about that either.

Against this background, Barack Obama’s notion of transferring to Afghanistan from Iraq the idea of a “surge” and the troops that embody it is simplistic nonsense. It represents a naive reliance on boots-on-the-ground and the additional military firepower they embody to finally achieve some “success” there, when the experience of the Soviets – with many more boots and firepower in place during their time there – shows clearly that succeeding in Afghanistan is not about that. Besides, Jensen provocatively points out, what makes you think that even the “surge” in Iraq was a success?

If you mean that elections in which everyone uniformly votes according to their ethnic or religious allegiance instead of voting based on a bundle of economic and political interests can be the cornerstone of a democracy, then yes, Iraq is a success.

If you mean that the most effective way to combat religious militias is to put the warriors into police uniforms and thereby give state sanction to terror, then yes, Iraq is truly also a success.

If you mean that the best way to make a lasting peace is to pay 90,000 armed Sunni rebels $300 per month to not shoot at the soldiers from the American occupation-army, then yes, I’ll give in once more: Irak is unquestionably a success.

So there! But back to Afghanistan: Amazingly, more than seven years after the first American intervention there in the wake of the 9/11 attacks, it is nonetheless quite possible that we of the West still have not fundamentally thought through just what it is we’re doing there, what we want, what victory would look like, whether that “victory” is at all attainable with the resources we are willing to devote. Or as Jensen puts it: “In Afghanistan we have merely overloaded outselves militarily, but also morally through our high-blown rhetoric. We have created the image of an obligation that we neither can nor want to live up to, so that hypocrisy has therefore become our only way out.” Sound a bit like the American experience in Vietnam? Let’s not make the same mistake then, says Jensen: stop the hypocrisy and just get out.

                          

(By the way, Kleine-Brockhoff’s name translates into something like “small crumb-court”! Was that the name he was assigned as a child, and then no one bothered to update it – e.g. to “big crumb-court,” or maybe just “crumb-court” – when he got older?)

First John McCain: His campaign narrative would have you believe that he is the calm, wise statesman from Arizona. But his behavior over the past week as the financial crisis has unfolded, in Kleine-Brockhoff’s eyes, has shown him as anything but:

On Monday he claims that the economy is strong and the fundamentals good. On Tuesday he opines that the fundamentals are in order, but the economy is in crisis. He proposes a bi-partisan commission to get to the bottom of the crisis, but then never mentions this commission again. He turns against the support-action for the insurance-giant AIG. When the federal government unveils an aid-action for AIG, he turns prudent and allows that it was inevitable. . . . On Thursday he demands that the chief of the financial market controllers [i.e. of the SEC], Christopher Cox, be fired, a man that he had never criticized before and whom he as president could not fire at all. Shortly thereafter he calls Cox a “good man” and mentions his demand for his resignation no more. When the Bush administration on Friday makes known its support-plan for the entire financial market, McCain praises it. He himself on the same day new proposed laws to regulate the finance markets, although he has been known nationwide for decades as a deregulator. On Sunday the next salvo: Now he criticizes the government’s rescue plan. For this Newsweek names McCain “Uncle Ziggy,” [or in German] Onkel Zick-Zack.

But maybe it is just the pressure of economic crisis that has temporarily fried his brain? No, says Kleine-Brockhoff, it seems all of a piece with McCain’s previous behavior and policies: the approval for the build-up of troops in Iraq [here he must be referring to that famous "surge"], and also his selection of Sarah Palin as his running mate, what Kleine-Brockhoff terms a choice-of-highest-risk (Höchstrisikoauswahl), made after McCain had had almost half a year to consider it. Not to mention his behavior during the Georgia crisis of early August – centuries ago, it seems – when Kleine-Brockhoff recalls that he was all-too-quick to figure out who was to blame for it and to declare “We are all Georgians.” In Kleine-Brockhoff’s eyes, there is certainty only about one thing that John McCain offers to American voters: uncertainty. He calls him a “jerk-politician” (Ruck-Politiker), but don’t get all up-in-arms, you McCain supporters: the “jerk” he means here is not the word meaning, roughly, “twit,” but rather meaning “sudden movement.”

Barack Obama’s behavior in the harsh light of the ongoing crisis comes off little better, but in the other direction: he is, in Kleine-Brockhoff’s estimation, “careful to the point of tedium.” Again, this might be surprising, as he is supposed to be the big harbinger of “Change,” and therefore you would think that all the financial turmoil – as Kleine-Brockhoff puts it, “America looking like a bankrupt banana-republic” – would be to his advantage. If it is, he surely has not seized it. No attacks on the other side; declining to issue comments on the administration’s rescue plan. “He behaved as if he were already President,” Kleine-Brockhoff writes – maybe that’s not such a bad thing, yet he instead cites and agrees with the assessment of Obama by Christopher Hitchens in a recent article in Slate, that he is being “vapid and hesitant and gutless.”

                          

No, far better to seek a judgment on the current state of Iraq from experts with a higher quotient of objectivity. One long-standing authority is Juan Cole, professor at the University of Michigan and both Arabic- and Farsi-speaker, mainly through his weblog Informed Comment. He recently offered his own summing-up of where we are now: “The level of violence at this moment in Iraq is similar to what prevailed on average during one of the 20th century’s worst ethnic civil wars [the Lebanese Civil War of 1975-1990]! It is still higher than the casualty rates in Sri Lanka and Kashmir, two of the worst ongoing conflicts in the world.” On the other hand, New York Times correspondent Dexter Filkins has to know something about conditions in Iraq, from where he reported from 2004 to 2006. (He also has a book coming out soon about that, The Forever War.) In a recent e-mail interview (The Progress in Iraq is Remarkable) he asserts that much of the improvement of conditions in Iraq is “astonishing,” that “parts of [the country] are difficult for me recognize,” although “the calm is very fragile.”

A large part of the basis for optimism is the hand-over last Monday of responsibility for the security of Anbar province to the Iraqi government, which Filkins himself reported on for the NYT. This is also covered by Rainer Hermann of the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung (From sanctuary for terrorists to model province), who adds some telling details. Fallujah, Ramadi: these cities infamous for the spilling of the blood of both natives and American soldiers are Anbar’s main urban centers, and that province’s transformation within a mere two years or so into a region where responsibility for policing and fighting anti-government militants can be turned over to the Iraqi forces themselves does seem miraculous. This was after all the pro-Saddam Sunni stronghold where those who bothered to turn out to vote in October of 2005 on the proposed Iraqi constitution rejected it by 97%, where al-Qaeda in Iraq the next summer proclaimed a “caliphate state.” But then these Muslim fundamentalists, most of whom were from outside Iraq, tried to go too far. Not only did they insist on attacking native Iraqis who they felt were collaborating with the Americans and government authorities, but they also tried to seal their new authority within the native society by marrying the daughters of the various tribal chiefs. It was this, Hermann claims, that started those chiefs’ disenchantment with them.

(He also cites as another disenchanting factor for Anbar natives the supposed material and financial support that al-Qaeda in Iraq was supposedly enjoying from Iran. This unfortunately becomes a blow to the plausibility of Hermann’s very understanding of fundamental Iraqi conditions; if al-Qaeda militants were happy to assassinate local Sunni “collaborators” in Anbar, they were all-the-more bloodthirsty against Shias of any form, whom they considered Islamic heretics. Iranian support of any kind either to the militantly-Sunni al-Qaeda in Iraq or to any native Sunni Iraqi factions not only makes no sense, but in fact has become a handy rule-of-thumb for gauging credible knowledge of Iraqi conditions: those who assert that it is a fact – as both the Bush administration and the McCain campaign have – can safely be viewed as either not knowing what they are talking about and/or lying for various ulterior reasons.)

Sandstorm Delay

As a result of this conclusion by Anbar’s native chiefs that al-Qaeda in Iraq had turned into a cancer that had to be excised, they turned to the Americans in the late summer of 2006, in a successful process that brought the “Awakening Councils” and the “Sons of Iraq” on the American payroll (and which had nothing to do with the “surge” per se), which Filkins describes as well as any in his NYT report and The Atlantic interview. However, Hermann is readier to spot the storm clouds gathering on this sunny picture. The Maliki government is now starting to renege on what had been its promise to incorporate the forces of these “Awakening Councils” into the official Iraqi police and armed forces. That hand-over ceremony itself that occurred last Monday was originally supposed to happen last June 28; it had to be postponed twice, Hermann writes, due to “a sandstorm and internal disputes among the Sunnis.” That is not a particularly auspicious start.

Then there is the article in Die Zeit written by that newspaper’s editor and publisher, Josef Joffe (Is Bush winning in Iraq?). Its lede: “What seemed hardly thinkable, seems to be coming true: Calm is returning to Iraq.” Joffe also treats the vast improvement in the security situation in Anbar province, telling the same story of the disillusionment of the tribal chiefs there with al-Qaeda and the resulting cooperation with the Americans. But he uses that mainly as a jumping-off point for the improvement in conditions that supposedly has spread to the rest of the country as well. In particular, “normality” has allegedly also returned to Basra, Iraq’s second-largest city and its port, after Iraqi President al-Maliki last March sent his troops in to beat down the Shiite militias that held sway there (including Muqtada al-Sadr’s militia, which had been running wild there since British forces had withdrawn from within Basra to the local airport from last December). At the time all outside observers scoffed, finding it hard to believe that the Iraqi troops had it within them to clear out these militias – and they turned out to be right, since it was only support from American special forces troops and air support that enabled them to prevail.

Iraq Through Rose-Tinted Glasses

However it came about, however, according to Joffe Basra is now pacified, and “regional elections are supposed to follow.” He doesn’t mention how the enabling legislation for those elections has not been able to pass the Iraqi legislature; nor how a crisis seems to be coming to a head over the question of whether the oil-rich Kirkuk region in the north of the country will be formally incorporated into Kurdistan; nor how the government’s intentions towards those “Awakening Councils” in Anbar province seems to be to suppress them, and even arrest their members as Sunni political actors destined to become hostile sooner or later against the Shiite-dominated national government.

There is none of that, so that maybe Josef Joffe’s following of conditions in Iraq is not as close (or perhaps is rather more “rose-tinted”) than it should be. Whatever that case may be, it is nonetheless remarkable for such an “establishment” German commentator to be willing to write, as he does at the end of his piece, “[p]erhaps History will one day treat mercifully this president who is now in such ill-repute” – the comment coming as it does from the citizen of a country which opposed the Iraq War from the start, and in which George W. Bush is so unpopular that he had to be accommodated by Chancellor Angela Merkel during his European “farewell tour” of last June in a castle in the Thuringian countryside, i.e. not near any centers of population where the demonstrators would have come out in force.