This is a good piece. To pursue the Yale vs. Harvard question (I am a Columbia grad), I have visited friends at both schools. In the abstract, I would expect Yale to be the better place for questions such as this, if only because it seems more interested in scholarship, while Harvard is more interested in access to power.

It would be interesting to see you expand upon the contrasts between the two schools.

I'm neither a Yale, Harvard or Columbia grad. It's quite impressive to observe all of these elite schools extending their opinionated bull shit into the realms of reality, but "theory" doesn't apply to tribal areas. I've read that Afghan loyalty extends to the end of a valley. Show me a grain crop that sells at a higher price than opium! I, nor millions of other Americans, have any desire to "adopt" a citizenry that is fully adapted to orphan-hood!

"The enemy is among us, at Fort Hood and in the pitiful unreadiness of our young for military service."

I agree with what led up to that professor. There certainly are swamps of despair that need draining at home and I honestly can't get behind social spending in Afghanistan while we got inadequate economic stimulus here at home, with unemployment climbing, foreclosures still on the rise and a health care plan that seems at least inadequate to people's needs.

As for the readiness of our young for military service -- I'd posit they're as ready as they ever were but are perhaps more wary of joining up given the misuses of the military in recent years.

It's really not unreasonable for Americans to ask the government to spend here first. But let's not criticize the young. They're well equipped. This generation is easily as good as any other. Heck, they all are.

The enemy is among us, at Fort Hood and in a generation pitifully unfit for military service.

"... generation pitifully unfit for military service" ??? What the heck does that mean?

http://michaelfury.wordpress.com/2009/05/11/the-gas-must-flow/

The funniest thing is that what Brooks advocates in Afghanistan, empowring communities by allocating budgets through local councils, is one of the "five motors of the revolution" of Hugo Chavez in Venezuela.

Perhaps someone can translate Hugo for David's next column:

Los consejos comunales en el marco constitucional de la democracia participativa y protagónica, son instancias de participación y protagonismo del pueblo, de articulación e integración entre las diversas organizaciones comunitarias, grupos sociales y los ciudadanos y ciudadanas, que permiten al pueblo organizado ejercer directamente la gestión de las políticas públicas y proyectos orientados a responder a las necesidades y aspiraciones de las comunidades en la construcción de una sociedad de equidad y justicia social.

Jim, I think you are probably right about what I take to be your central point about Afghanistan in the Dissent article: that McChrystal appears to be guilty of applying some grandiose, top-down, Big Theory to Afghanistan, with lots of large academical ideas about how to succeed at nation-building and counterinsurgency in general, but with a worrying lack of connection to the contingent realities on the ground in Afghanistan. At least, this seems to be the concern of some skeptical Obama administration officials, who are suggesting through their leaks that they aren't yet seeing how all this wonderful theorizing actually gets us from point A to point B. One wonders if these military wizards even know themselves what point B is.

I think we are also hearing some skepticism from the Biden camp that there is a frustrating lack of focus on priorities among the current crop of military commanders. Are these military pros trying to pull us into a commitment to their extremely expensive project for the Washington-directed overhaul of Afghanistan, a project with very distant and indefinite spatial and temporal horizons, because such a project is really a vital national security priority, or do they just want to prove that they and their soldiers can pull it off?

And you are right to connect this strain of wild-eyed and expansive theorizing with the recent vaulting state-engineering ambitions of neoconservative thinkers, ambitions which have already been demonstrated in the laboratory of reality to be naive failures.

But I wish you would take a more direct route in your writing. The Dissent piece is bogged down with an extended and distracting ad hominem argument against conservative writers, and analogies with past local battles in new York that is more forced than illuminating. And your incessant personal wars with various New York pundits tend, in my view, to reduce the dignity of your writing and turn it into catty village gossip about local Manhattan spats that most Americans don't care about.

Although you are talking here about national security and the wider world, your head seems permanently trapped in the local chattering class New York village, where every issue is reduced to something local, and frequently petty. I understand I may not be the ideal Dissent reader, but I suspect I speak for the vast majority of Americans, some of us who are even well-educated, who also don't read Dissent much. If you are really trying to achieve a broad audience for your views, and contribute to the national debate on Afghanistan in a way that might have an actual impact on national decisions, you need to get yourself out of the neighborhood.

I'm just lovin' what I heard the man say yesterday morning, as broadcast on NPR.

He was defending himself against criticism of his decision making regards the distant war.

But his very particular remark that his critics are simply in the dark, that their not being in a position to decide, i.e. - be really cool and in the know about things - plus his allegation that we do not appreciate "the gravity" of the situation, is REPUGNANT.

It is the sort of response that Nixon and Agnew were so prone to making. This is what gets me so riled up over his (now become) grotesque dispassion. I've become ever more convinced over the past few weeks - that the electorate made a very bad choice in the primaries last year. Hence, the death of JFK brought us LBJ and the swamps of An Loc, which gave us Nixon and Kissinger whose actions gave us the ill-suited Jimmy Carter, who gave us CONTRA-Reagan and the Bush Inc. invasions of Panama, Somalia, Iraq and now we are given unto, must remain quag/quick-sanded in Afghanistan under the rule of this dispassionate academic who is too young, has never had to confront horror, and so, more horror results.

How long is it going to be until Biden draws himself up and lays down the gauntlet, distances himself from this equivocating, very cool operator who is thoroughly out of depth, the much greater, requisite depth that Hillary Clinton could have given us. And just how long will SHE, Condolesa Clinton, remain on board, be an apologist, so many years following the very acute era that drew her and her husband into public service? I know that I contradict myself here - does she still harbor illusions, the way that things are going?

Haven't you enought blood on your hands already, Mr. Obama? Spare us. Please resign and take your very cool schtick back to Cambridge.

Gawd, did I ever get suckered! Forty years after all of the "gravity" which I'd witnessed in Vietnam and have studied intently meanwhile.

One question for ya, Mr. President: about that young man who immolated himself outside the window of Robert McNamara's Pentagon office - I guess that he had no idea of the gravity of the situation all over southeast Asia either, right - Mr. Cool? Your coolness is only a mask for cynicism.

You were six or so years old at the time.

"This means that while the general knows warfare better than the President, the President understands soft power more deeply."

Upon what evidence do you make this entirely unsupported statement? That Obama was a community organizer for a couple of years? Please! Obama demonstrates little understanding of either soft power or the malignant American addiction to military power. He contemplates ruinous escalation of the pointless imperial effort in Afghanistan while simultaneously rattling his saber at the Iranians for not coming to heel fast enough. Soft power indeed! Any such references are mere window dressing.

The time has long past for soft power to do the trick in Afghanistan. The military has done far too much damage. We certainly cannot afford the soft power that would be needed in addition to the completely counterproductive violence of our military. In point of fact, we can't afford any of it! Our weird discussions of what we should be doing to manipulate the destiny of other nations is reminiscent of a King in his high tower planning new battles and conquests not noticing that he no longer can afford the armies he has which makes all his fantasies about what he will do completely absurd. America is now in that position. We are virtually bankrupt yet refuse to call back our imperial armies or cancel the massive tax cuts for the rich. Instead we lavish Wall Street, the Pentagon, the health insurance parasites and big pharma with benefits and lucre all of which must be borrowed from the Chinese. It amazes me how the chattering and governing classes don't get just how bad a shape this country is really in.

To give the COIN methodology its due, there is more to it than exporting a "model of democracy." In the Dissent article, you say:

But removing Saddam and his cadres without nourishing democratic alternatives left us owning something we’d broken. And now history is nudging us back. Hence conservatives’ new urgency not only to win savage battles but also to drain swamps of corruption and despair. But now that their own model of “democracy” has generated such swamps in America, it’s not so clear that national defense or democracy are best served by creating more public jobs in Afghanistan than right here.

Also, the use of COIN in Afghanistan is only one piece of the problem with the Taliban. As Ahmed Rashid

And thus we come to the end of the good news. If the army is now acting responsibly in dealing with the Pakistan Taliban, such is not the case with the Afghan Taliban. Key networks, such as those of Haqqani and Gulbuddin Hekmatyar, are based in North Waziristan, and they launch attacks into Afghanistan. For the past eight years they have never been bothered by the Pakistani army.
Neither have the main Afghan Taliban leaders who live in Quetta in Baluchistan province. From Quetta, the Taliban is able to resupply its forces in Afghanistan with money, ammunition, suicide bombers and materials to make bombs and mines—all under the watchful eye of the ISI. According to intelligence sources, the Taliban leader Mullah Omar is now in a safe house in Karachi because of the fear that the United States may start using drone attacks on Quetta.

Apart from all the arguments about whether any attempt to execute a "regional strategy" is a neocon dream or not, there is another observation in that Rashid article that touches upon the war on poverty meme you brought up:

The regions bordering Afghanistan, including southern Tajikistan, Uzbekistan, Kyrgyzstan and eastern Turkmenistan, are facing pauperization of their populations, the collapse of Soviet-era services like health and education, and growing joblessness. Their regimes remain dictatorial, corrupt, and deny political or economic reforms. Vast numbers of poverty-stricken workers migrate to Russia looking for work.