The Obama administration apparently is conducting a covert war on al Qaeda:

In roughly a dozen countries – from the deserts of North Africa, to the mountains of Pakistan, to former Soviet republics crippled by ethnic and religious strife – the United States has significantly increased military and intelligence operations, pursuing the enemy [al Qaeda] using robotic drones and commando teams, paying contractors to spy and training local operatives to chase terrorists.

Perhaps I’m jaded, but nothing in this article surprised me.

Tzipi Livni, Head of the Opposition Kadima Party in Israel and former Foreign Minister:

Both of [my parents] were in the Irgun. They were freedom fighters…they robbed a train to get the money in order to buy weapons.

Perhaps I am reading this wrong, but it sure sounds like an endorsement of terrorism to me (even the Government of Israel said the Irgun was a terrorist organization – it did, you know, blow up stuff and kill people). Maybe her parents were the good kind of terrorist, while today we only have the bad type.

One problem with the war in Afghanistan is that its getting increasingly difficult to determine who is on what side.

J. Scott Carpenter and Dina Guirguis take the Obama administration to task for not fulfilling most of the promises Obama made in his Cairo speech one year ago, specifically on democracy, economic development, women’s rights, religious freedom, and countering terrorism. While they are correct in the narrow sense that the administration has not made much progress on these issues, I think its perhaps an unfair criticism. The administration is dealing from a host of difficult problems, from Afghanistan to the economic crisis to the largest oil spill in the history of the US. The administration has largely been in reactive mode since it took office, not by choice, but because of a non-stop series of crises. The administration appears to have more fires than fire trucks. Its not as if Obama is sitting around the White House playing solitaire on his computer. I can understand why the administration has made little progress in advancing a lot of its goals and find it difficult to fault them in many of these areas.

Michael Allen at Democracy Digest is less sympathetic.

For a long time, I have thought Obama has a particularly long to-do list. Steve Benen agrees with me:

Since then [April 2009] – in addition to the two wars, economic crises, and global flu pandemic — it’s been hard to keep up the pressing and immediate challenges on the Obama administration’s to-do list. We’ve seen natural disasters (Haiti’s earthquake, Nashville’s flooding, Oklahoma’s tornadoes), man-made disasters (the BP oil spill), default crises (Dubai, Greece, Ireland, Spain, Portugal), foreign policy crises (North Korea, Israel), and attempted terrorist attacks (Abdulmutallab on Christmas, Shahzad in Times Square).

I can only assume that it’s fairly common for President Obama to wake up, receive his morning briefings, and say, “You’ve got to be kidding me.”

Well, nobody made him run for president.

Friday:

Extremists stormed two mosques belonging to a religious minority in the eastern Pakistani city of Lahore on Friday, killing at least 80 people in the worst-ever assault on the country’s Ahmadi community…Pakistan’s Geo TV channel said the Punjab province branch of the Pakistani Taliban had claimed responsibility

The cost of the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq is just about to hit $1,000,000,000,000 ($1 trillion). Al Qaeda spent $200,000 carrying out the 9/11 attacks. This means that for every $1 al Qaeda spent on 9/11, the US has spent $500 million fighting al Qadea, or about $30,000 per US citizen. I can’t think of a reasonable way to justify this expenditure.