I haven’t been able to follow the news much the past few weeks, but I did hear about the leak of classified reports stating the war in Afghanistan is going much worse than the Obama administration has publicly suggested. My first thought was “duh!” My second thought was that the administration might  want to remember that “You can fool some of the people all of the time, and all of the people some of the time, but you can not fool all of the people all of the time.” Just saying.

Bibi and Obama were all smiles and handshakes yesterday, but there is lots of speculation that the tensions between the two administrations remain.

Readers of this blog know that I am not a fan of the war in Afghanistan. That being said, I am not on board with the increasing calls that we leave. It’s not that I think its a good idea to stay or a bad idea to leave. Rather, the answer is I don’t know what would happen and that’s a problem.

Leaving Afghanistan could lead to renewed civil war between the Pasthun (i.e., Taliban) and non-Pasthuns (an Afghan solution for certain, but likely a very bloody one). It could lead to greater meddling by other countries in the region, primarily India, Iran, and Pakistan. Either could be highly destabilizing and most certainly could have consequences for the US (e.g., increasing tension between India and Pakistan). If parts of this sound familiar, they should because some of this  happened the last time the US hastily abandoned Afghanistan after the Soviets left. Perhaps the negative consequences of these scenarios don’t justify pouring more money into the country. I don’t know the answer to these questions and until we get some clarity on them, calls to leave Afghanistan strike me as irresponsible.

Even though DC is quite hot in July, it is not going to seem that way to Netanyahu. The US is Israel’s strongest ally and the country would be far more isolated if the US did not defend it. Continued isolation of Gaza, expanding Jewish suburbs in Jerusalem, and building more settlements in the West Bank seem like pretty pathetic reasons to destroy a close relationship with the US.

What’s missing from this press release? It says nothing about military spending in Afghanistan even though it is about 30 times greater than foreign aid and there is massive corruption involved with it. Lowey’s continued refusal to acknowledge that military spending is a major source of the problem is really unfair to USAID.

Yeah, what she said:

Rep. Nita Lowey (D-NY), chair of the State & Foreign Operations Appropriations Subcommittee, announced that she would cut $4 billion requested for State Department and USAID funding for Afghanistan due to concerns about corruption…While the $4 billion in the fiscal year 2011 budget that Lowey wants to cut is no small amount of money, the 2011 Defense budget includes $138 billion for the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan…It’s taking the easy way out to use the money as a vehicle for criticizing the war, playing on misperceptions about the efficacy of foreign assistance, while not facing any pushback from scary Republicans who will tell them they don’t support our troops.

Whatever you want it to mean.