There’s not much reporting on the war in Afghanistan. Since President Obama has vowed to pull out all US combat troops in 2014, many simply regard the war as “over.” Nothing could be further from the truth for the US and NATO soldiers in the country, and certainly not for the civilian population. The end game to wars are, however, very difficult and we have witnessed the emergence of a new phase in the war: attacks on the NATO troops by Afghan soldiers who are ostensibly working together. This breakdown suggests that the war should end more quickly, but it also suggests that the end will hardly be peaceful or stable.
Simon Johnson and Peter Boone, both quite prominent economists, have published an essay which I have seen cited three times today. In short, it rapidly has become the main stream explanation for what is going on in the global economy. It is a very intelligent essay, but we’ll see how long it stands up to scrutiny. It is particularly grim (most of the headlines associated with it contain the word “doomsday”). Some of the analysis is difficult to follow, so you should just skim the article for the central argument.
The situation in the West Bank seems to be deteriorating quite rapidly. The economic supporters of the Palestinian Authority are being less generous toward Fatah (the wing of the Palestinian movement that recognizes the right of Israel to exist) and more generous toward Hamas in the Gaza Strip (and which has yet to recognize the state of Israel). This dynamic is troubling since an economic breakdown in the West Bank would likely lead to violent protests.
For my colleagues in the UMass class, here’s the song I mentioned in the discussion about King Leopold and the Congo. This is Randy Newman’s interpretation of the Bush/Cheney years and the decline of the American empire.
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