Barack Obama has been president for just under 10 months but he’s added two trillion to the national debt and will double it by the end of the decade.  CBS’ Mark Knoller:

This latest milestone in the ever-rising journey of the National Debt comes less than eight months after it hit $11 trillion for the first time. The latest high-point is not unexpected, considering the federal deficit for the just-ended 2009 fiscal year hit an all-time high at $1.42-trillion – more than triple the previous year’s record high.

Much of the increase in the deficit and debt is attributed to government spending outpacing revenue – both exacerbated by the recession and the government response to it – including hundreds of billions in bailouts and stimulus spending and tax cuts along with decreased tax revenues due to rising unemployment.

[...]

The National Debt has increased about $1.6 trillion on Mr. Obama’s watch, though less than $4.9 trillion run up during the presidency of George W. Bush.

But the White House budget review issued in August projects that by the end of the current fiscal year on Sept 30th, the National Debt could top $14 trillion.  It gets worse. The same document projects that by the end of the decade, the National Debt will hit $24.5 trillion — exceeding the Gross Domestic Product projected for 2019 of $22.8 trillion.

According to the Treasury Department, the debt stood at $5.727 trillion on January 19, 2001, Bill Clinton’s last day in office, and $10.627 trillion when Bush left office eight years later.  That’s $612.5 billion (or $0.6125 trillion) a year, during which we fought two major wars, had the 9/11 attacks, and at least two major bailouts to deal with a global financial crisis.

We’re thus far averaging $1.92 trillion a year under Obama, or a factor of 3.146 more.   And the government is projecting that we’ll continue spending at this crisis rate for the next decade, more than doubling the current record level?

That ain’t good.

Presumably, we’d have had another major bailout had Bush stayed in office for a third term (were that Constitutionally or politically possible) or had John McCain been elected.  So spending and thus the debt would have escalated substantially regardless.  But we likely wouldn’t be talking about adding a massive health care payment on top of the pile.

Daniel Larison is a bit too charitable here in assessing Mike Huckabee’s finish in last year’s presidential primaries:

While Huckabee was officially the second-biggest vote-getter in the primaries last year, he achieved this mostly through perseverance and concentrated support from evangelical voters. Had Romney continued to compete and waste his money on what would still have been a losing bid, it is not certain that Huckabee could have managed his second place finish.

In fact, the 2008 Republican race wasn’t even a contest.  Mitt Romney quit the race during CPAC on February 7 and pledged his delegates to McCain.   Rudy Giuliani had failed to make his push in Florida — coming in way behind Romney, who finished second.  The race was over.

Except that, technically, it wasn’t.  Huckabee stayed in the race, along with Ron Paul, despite no chance of beating John McCain for the nomination.  As a result, they padded their totals as everyone not happy with McCain as the nominee had to vote for one of them.  And, really, since Paul was a fringe candidate, that meant Huckabee.

The results, per CNN, are at right.

The fact of the matter was that Huckabee, a virtual unknown at the beginning of the contest, was mostly a stalking horse.  Huckabee finally withdrew on March 5, once McCain mathematically sewed up the race on his own — that is, not counting Romney’s delegates.   As I wrote at the time:

But let’s not get carried away, either. He’s a personable fellow who went a long way with very little money, a weak organization, and zero Establishment support. But there was no time in this race when it was plausible that he’d be the nominee. He won Iowa as the “anybody but Mitt Romney” candidate in a contest McCain, Giuliani, and others skipped. He didn’t win again until garbage time, when he was running as “the conservative alternative” to a man who had all but sewn up the nomination.

Huckabee will not win the nomination in 2012. Or 2016. Or 2020. He’d easily win a Senate seat from Arkansas if he changes his mind. But he’s not going to be elected president.

I  stand by that assessment.

Michael Goldfarb wrote a piece for the Weekly Standard blog with the provocative title “Rent-a-General Jim Jones,” arguing that the man who spent four decades serving his country as an officer in the Marine Corps, rising to Commandant and then Supreme Allied Commander, is a partisan stooge for the Obama administration.

Bruce Bartlett explains why he’s not a Republican anymore using a time-honored refrain:  He didn’t leave his party; his party left him.  While he now considers himself an “independent,” he’s more than non-partisan; he’s “anti-Republican.”  Why?

I still consider myself to be a Reaganite. But I don’t see any others anywhere in the GOP these days, which is why I consider myself to be an independent. Mindless partisanship has replaced principled conservatism. What passes for principle in the party these days is “what can we do to screw the Democrats today.”

[...]

I think the Republican Party is in the same boat the Democrats were in in the early eighties — dominated by extremists unable to see how badly their party was alienating moderates and independents. The party’s adults formed the Democratic Leadership Council to push the party back to the center and it was very successful. But there is no group like that for Republicans. That has left lunatics like Glenn Beck as the party’s de facto leaders. As long as that remains the case, I want nothing to do with the GOP.

It’s true that moderates have largely been driven from the leadership ranks of the Republican Party.  But they’ve also been driven from the leadership ranks of the Democratic Party. The combination of gerrymandered districts and the permanent campaign have incentivized polarization.

Still, John McCain, the GOP nominee in last November’s election, was from the moderate wing of the party, beating out a slew of more ideologically pure contenders. George W. Bush, the standard-bearer in 2000 and 2004, ran as a “compassionate conservative.”  Mushy moderate Mitt Romney is the most probable nominee for 2012.

The idea that Glenn Beck is somehow the leader of the party is absurd. Given that the United States lacks a shadow government, the out-of-power party has no obvious leader.   Who was the leader of the Democrats after John Kerry lost in 2004?  Certainly, it wasn’t Barack Obama, who was a mere state senator and U.S. Senator-elect.

Also rather silly:

I see no way a Republican can retake the White House for the foreseeable future. Both CBO and OMB are predicting better than 4% real growth in 2011 and 2012. If those numbers are even remotely correct Obama will have it in the bag.

So, the “foreseeable future” is the same as “in the next election”? Yes, barring serious scandal, Obama is likely to be re-elected if the economy is good.  Incumbent presidents always win re-election when the economy is good! Indeed, their party tends to hold power even if the incumbent can’t run again.  At worst, they lose in close and controversial contests as in 1960 and 2000. But that doesn’t tell us anything about the state of the opposition party.  Voters simply prefer to keep the current team on when things are going well and to change horses when they aren’t.

Also, Republicans have to find a way to win some minority votes because it is not viable as a whites-only party in presidential elections. That’s why I wrote my Wrong on Race book, which no one read.

Well, why would anyone bother to read a book whose take-away is a sentence?  And an obvious one at that?

But it’s really a truism, isn’t it?  As non-whites increase their share of the electorate, naturally a successful candidate will need to appeal to non-whites.  But, guess what?  Successful candidates do.  Bush won 46 percent of the Hispanic vote in 2004.   McCain did far less well among Hispanics.  Then again, he did far less well among whites.

Amidst the blogospheric solidarity for the Iranian protestors, it’s worth pointing to news that has been overshadowed by those events: The UN and OSCE monitors are leaving Georgia.

Despite declarations that “we’re all Georgians now,” the fact of the matter has been from the beginning that neither the United States nor Western Europe had any appetite to go toe-to-toe with the Russians over the fate of two disputed provinces.  That remained true even once Russian troops moved into “Georgia proper.”

The man who famously made the above pledge, Senator John McCain, made some similarly bold statements about Iran in a Twitter interview with ABC’s Jake Tapper. Most notable of his tweets: “we must stand strong for democracy in Iran as we stood for Democracy in Poland, Germany, and Czechoslovakia” and “if we are steadfast eventually the Iranian people will prevail.”

As I note in a New Atlanticist post contrasting the American and European responses to Iran’s election fiasco,

The American president is, for good and bad, in a unique position.  As important and powerful as the leaders of the UK, France, and Germany are, they’re not the international lightning rods that the occupants of the White House are.

Aside from the fact that backing from America could quite likely harm Mousavi’s cause and help Ahmadinejad’s, big words from the Leader of the Free World^TM must be backed up by action in a way that a statement by the European Union do not.

[...]

The Atlantic’s Andrew Sullivan, probably the American blogosphere’s most passionate supporter of the Iranian protestors, writes, “I’m relieved we don’t have a president McCain. His heart is in the right place but his head is a blogger’s, not a president’s.”  My strong guess, though, is that, had McCain prevailed in November, he would be saying much the same thing.   Presidential candidates and senators have the luxury of spouting off about their ideals, while a president’s words have much more consequence.

A whole lot more at the links.

Ana Marie Cox interviewed John McCain this afternoon and reports via Twitter that “if he were POTUS, he would have already ordered Joint Chiefs of staff to investigate efficacy of DADT.”

DADT is, of course, the “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell” policy on gays in the military that has been in place since the early days of the Clinton administration, replacing the old policy whereby potential recruits and security clearance seekers were directly asked if they were homosexual and denied if they answered in the affirmative.

If this is correct, he’s done a 180 in the last two years.

At the 2007 GOP debate at Saint Anselm College on Jun 3, 2007, McCain said, “We have the best-trained, most professional, best- equipped, most efficient, most wonderful military in the history of this country, and I’m proud of every one of them. There just aren’t enough of them. So I think it would be a terrific mistake to even reopen the issue. The policy is working. And I am convinced that that’s the way we can maintain this greatest military. Let’s not tamper with them.”

Here’s the video.

Cox writes, ” I believe McCain on this. I think one of the reasons he got so testy was that he knows he’s arguing the wrong side.” Could be.

Marc Ambinder has compiled a list of “The Six Top Conservatives Obama Listens To.”   As several of those who saw the link via Twitter have noted, arguably none of them are conservatives:

1. The Mainers, Sens. Susan Collins and Olympia Snowe
2. Dick Lugar
3. John McCain
4. David Brooks
5. Harvard Law Professor Jack Goldsmith

A perfectly fine list of Republicans to whom I’m perfectly happy the president is listening.  But I’m not sure any of them are conservatives – and am quite sure some of them aren’t.  There are several on an “Others” honorable mention list but only George Will is inarguably a conservative.

UPDATE: Commenter Herb asks an interesting question:

For the sake of discussion: which conservatives do you wish Obama would listen to?

I’ll open that one up to the readers.

A Gallup poll released yesterday finds that, “More than 6 in 10 Republicans today are white conservatives, while most of the rest are whites with other ideological leanings; only 11% of Republicans are Hispanics, or are blacks or members of other races. By contrast, only 12% of Democrats are white conservatives, while about half are white moderates or liberals and a third are nonwhite.”

This is pretty stark but, as Nate Silver points out, “not exactly anything new.”

88 percent of George W. Bush’s voters in 2004, and 91 percent of them in 2000, were white. And nearly 98 percent of Ronald Reagan’s voters in 1980 were white as were 96 percent of Gerald Ford’s in 1976. The GOP is, in fact, slightly less white than it once was, as they do relatively better among Hispanics and Asians than among blacks (if still not particularly well), and Hispanics and Asians are starting to make up a larger fraction of the nonwhite (and overall) voting pool.

Silver continues,

The Democrats, however, are becoming less white at a much faster rate than the Republicans. Whereas 85 percent of their votes were from white voters in 1976, the number was just 60 percent last November. This is, of course, a helpful characteristic, since the nonwhite share of the electorate, just 11 percent in 1976 and 1980, represented more than a quarter of the turnout in November.

Consider this remarkable statistic. In 1980, 32 percent of the electorate consisted of white Democrats (or at least white Carter voters) — likewise, in 2008, 32 percent of the electorate consisted of white Obama voters. But whereas, in 1980, just 9 percent of the electorate were nonwhite Carter voters, 21 percent of the electorate were nonwhite Obama voters last year. Thus, Carter went down to a landslide defeat, whereas Obama defeated John McCain by a healthy margin.

He wonders if this isn’t the Southern Strategy coming home to roost.  One might counter that the Democrats have answered  with a racially and culturally divisive strategy of their own, which accounts for their declining percentage of the white vote concomitant with their gains among minorities.  But, from the standpoint of winning elections, that’s probably a smarter strategy.

It’s going to be increasingly difficult in the future for Republicans to win nationwide appealing only to whites.  The party has long written off black voters, who tend to vote as a bloc, but can’t afford to also write off Hispanics; together, they comprise more than a quarter of the population — and growing.

Eleven years ago this month, Atlantic Monthly published a brilliant essay by Christopher Caldwell entitled “The Southern Captivity of the GOP.” It detailed how the party went from the 1994 “Revolution” that swept up both Houses of Congress to getting crushed in the 1996 presidential election and was on its way to a midterm setback in 1998.  A big part of that was losing the Hispanics.

Democrats who had arrogantly assumed that standard-issue minority politics would easily pull Hispanics into the party fold were proved wrong throughout the 1980s. Hispanic voters turned out to be disproportionately entrepreneurial and disproportionately receptive to Republican family-values rhetoric, and gave the party roughly a third of their votes in the three presidential elections from 1980 to 1988. Leaving aside Puerto Ricans and Dominicans in New York, who do fit the Democrats’ minority paradigm, the Republicans were doing better with the Hispanic vote than might be expected.

But the Republicans in the 104th Congress tried to shore up their Texas and California right wings with hostile rhetoric on immigration. They passed legislation that sought to deprive not just illegal but also legal immigrants of federal benefits. (Newt Gingrich and other Republicans backpedaled in 1997, reversing some of the measures, but the damage was done.) And California’s Proposition 187, supported by Republican Governor Pete Wilson and aimed at denying benefits to illegal immigrants, brought angry Hispanics to the polls in unprecedented numbers. Clinton took 72 percent of the Hispanic vote nationwide, including 81 percent in Arizona and 75 percent in California; he took 78 percent of Hispanics under thirty. He nearly split the Hispanic vote even in Florida, where 97 percent of the Cuban population voted for Reagan in 1984.

Recall that, prior to Clinton’s win in 1992, California’s massive electoral vote block had been a “lock” for Republicans.  Since 1996, Republicans haven’t even bothered to contest it in presidential elections.  And Florida has gone from a pretty solid Republican state to an intense battleground.  Beyond that,

As southern control over the Republican agenda grows, the party alienates even conservative voters in other regions. The prevalence of right-to-work laws in southern states may be depriving Republicans of the socially conservative midwestern trade unionists whom they managed to split in the Reagan years, and sending Reagan Democrats back to their ancestral party in the process. Anti-government sentiment makes little sense in New England, where government, as even those who hate it will concede, is neither remote nor unresponsive.

Of course, while the GOP did lose seats in 1998, costing Gingrich his job, it rallied to win the presidency (although not the plurality of votes for president) in 2000 and again in 2008.   But it’s lost congressional seats in every single election since, losing its majority in both Houses in 2006 and becoming a decided minority in 2008.

Granting that there was a perfect storm working for the Democrats in 2008 — an unpopular Republican incumbent, an unexciting Republican ticket, two unpopular wars, a collapsing economy, and a charismatic Democratic candidate with a compelling backstory — the Republicans lost states that it had theretofore been thought theirs in perpetuity.

Demographics isn’t destiny and this trend therefore isn’t set in stone.  But the Republican Party will need to drastically change the inertia if it wishes to be other than a regional party in the coming years.

Politico’s Mike Calderone has noticed quite a few Republicans blogging at the left-leaning Huffington Post lately. While its namesake founder posits that” is a reflection of our traffic, our brand, and the fact that we are increasingly seen … as an Internet newspaper, not positioned ideologically in terms of how we cover the news,” a more practical explanation is more plausible:

Just as Democrats learned to love — or at least understand — the Drudge Report, Republicans flock to The Huffington Post largely because of the site’s broad reach. In April, The Huffington Post brought in a record 8.8 million unique visitors, according to Nielsen — a number that includes quite a few mainstream media journalists and cable news producers.

“With The Huffington Post, particularly, we see a lot of value in engaging with people who wouldn’t necessarily be inclined to agree with our point of view,” said Coburn press secretary John Hart, who added that it’s one of a handful of sites that can have an instant impact on the national debate.

“HuffPo and [Talking Points Memo] really are the assignment editors for many in the Washington press corps — particularly the cables,” said Brian Rogers, who was a spokesman for Sen. John McCain’s presidential campaign. “That’s not just a Republican hack saying it — that’s speaking as a press guy fielding calls and e-mails daily from the MSM that start with, ‘Did you see this thing on Huffington Post?’ They were effective and they wasted a lot of our time.”

Just as Willie Sutton robbed banks because “that’s where the money is,” those trying to influence political opinion will go wherever they can get the most buzz for their buck.  It’s the same reason, incidentally, so many Republicans are willing to go on The Daily Show or The Colbert Report.

I stumbled on these at Daylife whilst looking for a photo to illustrate my “Obama Foreign Policy: Bush 2.0?” post:

U.S. President Barack Obama (R) hugs graduate John S. McCain IV (L), son of U.S. Sen. John McCain, while attending the 2009 U.S. Naval Academy graduation in Annapolis, Maryland, May 22, 2009.

It’s a nice reminder as we head into the Memorial Day weekend that partisan politics is but a small part of life and that the things that unite us are much more important and powerful than those that divide us.

Ben Smith quotes lawyer A.B. Culvahouse explaining legal obstacles to Joe Lieberman’s having been John McCain’s running mate.

“Five states have sore loser statutes … [making] it very difficult for someone who’s not a member of the Republican Party to become the vice presidential nominee if they only switch parties to become a Republican shortly before the convention,’ Culvahouse said in public remarks at the Republican National Lawyers Association annual meeting aired on C-SPAN.

Culvahouse specifically noted the example of West Virginia, a state Republicans have relied on in recent elections, saying “the constitutionality of that statute has already been litigated in West Virginia.”

“So you were looking at going to the Supreme Court, which is not particularly appetizing,” he said.

I can’t find the West Virginia statute with a quick Google search but none of the sore loser laws I’m aware of would apply.   What they’re designed to do is prevent what Lieberman did in his most recent Senate bid and John Anderson did in 1980 and Pat Buchanan did in 1996:  run in one party’s primary, lose, and then run in the general election with another party.   Lieberman was not a candidate for president in the 2008 Democratic primaries.

The editorial board at The Economist (which apparently considers itself a “newspaper” despite coming out weekly in magazine format) praises President Obama for having “already done some commendable things” in the foreign policy arena but charges that, domestically, “His performance has been weaker than those who endorsed his candidacy, including this newspaper, had hoped.”  They note that, after a euphoric election, “Mr Obama’s once-celestial approval ratings are about where George Bush’s were at this stage in his awful presidency.”

They excoriate him, in particular, for “failure to grapple as fast and as single-mindedly with the economy as he should have done. His stimulus package, though huge, was subcontracted to Congress, which did a mediocre job: too much of the money will arrive too late to be of help in the current crisis.” Additionally,

The failure to staff the Treasury is a shocking illustration of administrative drift. There are 23 slots at the department that need confirmation by the Senate, and only two have been filled. This is not the Senate’s fault. Mr Obama has made a series of bad picks of people who have chosen or been forced to withdraw; and it was only this week that he announced his candidates for two of the department’s four most senior posts. Filling such jobs is always a tortuous business in America, but Mr Obama has made it harder by insisting on a level of scrutiny far beyond anything previously attempted. Getting the Treasury team in place ought to have been his first priority.

They acknowledge that he is “learning” but “Mr Obama has a long way to travel if he is to serve his country—and the world—as he should.”

Take the G20 meeting in London, to which he will head at the end of next week. The most important task for this would-be institution is to set itself firmly against protectionism at a time when most of its members are engaged in a game of creeping beggar-thy-neighbour. Yet how can Mr Obama lead the fight when he has just pandered to America’s unions by sparking a minor trade war with Mexico? And how can he set a new course for NATO at its 60th-anniversary summit a few days later if he is appeasing his party with talk of leaving Afghanistan?

Jennifer Rubin and Mark Steyn argue that the reason Obama isn’t meeting The Economist’s expectation is not so much his managerial incompetence but rather that he’s much more liberal than he pretended to be on the campaign trail and therefore has a very different agenda.   As Steyn puts it,

The nuancey boys were wrong on Obama, and the knuckledragging morons were right. There is no post-partisan centrist “grappling” with the economy, only a transformative radical willing to make Americans poorer in the cause of massive government expansion.

I’m reminded once again of a line Jeff Medcalf posted on Dave Schuler’s Other Blog in mid-October:  “[M]any of the people voting for Obama seem to be doing so on the hope that he doesn’t mean what he says, and most of the people voting for McCain are doing so on the fear that Obama means exactly what he says.”

A lot of the Obamacons, fed up after eight years of Bush and not impressed by the McCain-Palin ticket were willing to overlook a lot to vote for a fellow who seemed a lot like themselves: intellectual, nuanced, able to speak in paragraphs, reasonable, and so forth.   But, alas, his domestic agenda was not one that would ultimately sit well with conservatives — just as his foreign policy was actually not going to set very well with progressives.

That, said, I think The Economist is right to reflect on managerial style.

One of the flaws of the American system is that we frequently elect amateurs to high office, thus imposing a steep learning curve.  In parliamentary systems, leaders work their way up through the ranks, filling key ministerial posts, and learning the ropes.  A new premier from the out party has typically been the leader of a Shadow Government and a new leader from the in party has typically been the number two man in the Government.   A new president, by contrast, has typically never been part of an administration and may never have lived in the capital before taking office.

In recent years, Americans have preferred governors for the presidency, which typically meant people came to the White House knowing how to create and manage a staff but with little grasp of How Washington Works or much knowledge of a whole range of issues that states don’t deal with.   Conversely, someone coming from Capitol Hill is much savvier on those scores but have no clue how to run an administration.

Obama, alas, is the worst of both worlds, having neither gubernatorial experience nor much Washington experience.   He’s been an incredibly talented dilettante, getting elected to one job and then the next without learning the ropes.  He’s a fast learner and will get the hang of it but, to come back to the Hillary Clinton quip that starts the Economist piece, “the Oval Office is no place for on-the-job-training.”   Except, as already noted, that it usually is.

Of course, Obama has taken over at a particularly unfortunate time, having inherited two wars and a global financial crisis, so his margin for error is even less than usual.

In fairness, although my preference was for the other guy, it’s not a slam dunk that John McCain would be doing any better.   He’s got more leadership training and experience but he’s never been a governor or vice president, either.  And he’s got some temperament issues that in some ways make him less suited for crisis management than Obama.

Regardless, anyone who has extremely high expectations that a new president is going to reshape the world has a strong likelihood of being disappointed.

In an op-ed in the Washington Post this morning, Sens. John McCain and Joseph Lieberman make the case for pursuing a counterinsurgency strategy in Afghanistan:

Loose rhetoric about a minimal commitment in Afghanistan is counterproductive for another reason: It exacerbates suspicions, already widespread in South Asia, that the United States will tire of this war and retreat. These doubts about our staying power deter ordinary Afghans from siding with our coalition against the insurgency. Also important is that these suspicions are a major reason some in Pakistan are reluctant to break decisively with insurgent groups, which, in a hedging strategy, they view as integral to positioning Pakistan for influence “the day after” the United States gives up and leaves Afghanistan. That is why it is so important for the president to reject the temptations of minimalism in Afghanistan and instead adopt a fully resourced, comprehensive counterinsurgency strategy, backed by an unambiguous American commitment to success over the long term. In doing so, he must invest the political capital to remind Americans why this fight is necessary for our national security, speak openly and frankly to our nation about the difficult path ahead, and — most of all — explain clearly to our fellow citizens why he is confident that we can prevail.

Not too long ago Pat Lang, who certainly should know, made a similar argument for pursuing a counterinsurgency strategy in Afghanistan even while doubting that the American people would accept such a thing:

I did COIN. I did it in South America. I did it in SE Asia. I did it in Arabia. I did it.

It works. It worked in Iraq. It has been very expensive in Iraq, expensive in money, expensive in political capital, and very expensive in blood if some of that is yours.

Was it necessary to do COIN in Iraq? Yes. It was. The ground was ripe in Iraq for irregular warfare against the US occupation. The “human terrain” was perfect for it. The illusions that accompanied the occupation made the US occupying force a perfect target for irregular warfare. Having made so many mistakes in Iraq, COIN was the only method that would bring the US success in Iraq other than mass murder. The Republican and neocon slogan word “Surge” is just code for COIN. The additional US troops were just part of that COIN effort.

Afghanistan is another place where COIN can work. The ground in Afghanistan is even more fertile for long term irregular warfare against the foreign other than was Iraq. Irregular warfare in Afghanistan is an age-old way of life. In Afghanistan, the people in the next valley are often one’s tribal enemy.

Nevertheless, COIN can work in Afghanistan. The question is not if COIN will work in Afghanistan. The question is whether or not we should pay the exorbitant price that COIN will exact from us for the privilegege of using this methodology in that country.

There are several questions at hand. The first is whether a counterinsurgency strategy can work at all in Afghanistan. Frankly, I’m skeptical given the particular conditions there. Clearly, Col. Lang and Sens. McCain and Lieberman believe it can. That isn’t dispositive but it is testimony that deserves to be taken seriously.

The second is that we need a serious evaluation of the costs of a counterinsurgency strategy in Afghanistan that can be successful. Make no mistake: it will be more expensive, possibly many times more expensive, both in dollars and American lives than such a strategy has been in Iraq and we haven’t reached the end of the road in Iraq yet. Like Col. Lang, I’m skeptical that Americans are willing to shoulder such a burden.

There’s an even more serious question: should we be willing to shoulder such a burden? We are not the British or the Russians. We long for no empires in far-away countries. The insurgents we would be fighting don’t plan on leaving but we do.

The situation in Afghanistan presents us with a terrible dilemma. We can’t just walk away from Afghanistan. On that I’m in complete agreement with Sens. Lieberman and McCain. The downside risk is too great. I doubt that we’re willing to expend the billions of dollars, the thousands of lives, and the years of devotion that a successful counter-insurgency strategy of the sort advocated by Sens. McCain and Lieberman would require but that’s the only way we can leave Afghanistan without taking very serious risks. And the only other approach available that I can envision leaves us with forces stuck in Afghanistan for the foreseeable future, possibly forever.

Jonathan Last offers a long retort to the notion that Rush Limbaugh is a significant influencer of American politics, much less the de facto leader of the Republican Party.  He rejects, for example, the notion that having a large audience necessarily matters:

Consider television. From 1998 to 2005, Everybody Loves Raymond was among the top 15 rated shows on TV. For five of those years it was in the top 10. It averaged 17.4 million viewers. Was Everybody Loves Raymond influential? I would argue that the show left a very small–maybe non-existent–cultural footprint.

If you sift through the Nielsens from recent years, you’ll find a number of highly-rated shows pulling in tens of millions of viewers, which were basically invisible after the credits rolled. This is true even at the very top of the heap: CSI and Home Improvement each finished #1 overall and yet, had they been canceled in the middle of their ratings dominance, I doubt anyone would have noticed.

The obvious rejoinder is that Raymond existed solely to make us laugh (and thereby sell high priced ad space) while Rush, although no doubt an entertainer, is in fact trying to persuade his audience toward his political viewpoint.

Well, I’ll assume that Limbaugh can send a crowd of people toward a weblink if he mentions it on his program or his website. But crashing a server doesn’t take all that much. Slashdot and Boing Boing can do that, too. Can Limbaugh sell books? I’m not being pedantic–I honestly don’t know the answer to this question. But if Limbaugh really is influential, then the mere mention of books he likes ought to be enough to routinely put them high on the NYT’s best seller list for weeks, the way Oprah Winfrey’s approval does.

He’s managed to get a couple of (frankly, not very good) books of his own atop the bestseller list.  Otherwise, I don’t know.

Well, I’ll assume that Limbaugh can send a crowd of people toward a weblink if he mentions it on his program or his website. But crashing a server doesn’t take all that much. Slashdot and Boing Boing can do that, too. Can Limbaugh sell books? I’m not being pedantic–I honestly don’t know the answer to this question. But if Limbaugh really is influential, then the mere mention of books he likes ought to be enough to routinely put them high on the NYT’s best seller list for weeks, the way Oprah Winfrey’s approval does.

I understand that Limbaugh (and other conservative talk-radio hosts) weighed in heavily against the Bush immigration deal. That deal failed. But was this because of Limbaugh? Maybe. But presumably Limbaugh was against a great number of other Bush initiatives that passed–No Child Left Behind, Medicare prescription drugs, the omnibus energy bill, the Detroit bailout.

Well, the Detroit bailout failed in Congress and Bush just did it anyway.  But otherwise, that’s right.

The 2008 primary season provided a particularly good indication of Limbaugh’s level of influence. He seems to have supported Mitt Romney. Despite Limbaugh’s support, Romney received only 4.7 million votes. The candidate Limbaugh favored least and argued against most–John McCain–won the nomination. Again, I’m not a devotee of Limbaugh’s show, but my sense is that Limbaugh made his distaste for McCain very apparent. Republican primary voters paid little heed.

Quite true.

After the Romney flame-out, Limbaugh began promoting what he called “Operation Chaos,” where he instructed listeners to vote for Hillary Clinton in Democratic primaries. Limbaugh claimed a good deal of credit for her subsequent victories, but I’ve never seen any data which suggests that his influence was significant, let alone decisive. To the contrary, almost all of the Democratic primary results–both before and after “Operation Chaos”–fit within a stable racial, socio-economic model.

Yup.

Limbaugh’s powers of influence seem more on the level of Howard Stern. At his peak, Stern drew about 13 million listeners, which is in the ballpark with the 14 million or so Limbaugh has drawn through most of this decade. Like Limbaugh, Stern was credited with having a great deal of influence on his listeners. But that influence never really materialized beyond his ability to get people to tune in to a show he was giving away for free. Stern’s one attempt at translating his influence to the movies failed–the 1997 Howard Stern’s Private Parts opened to $14 million and grossed only $40 million. And when Stern moved to subscription-based satellite radio, his audience let him go without a second thought.

Ouch.

Within the last couple of days both Sen. John McCain and former Secretary of State Henry Kissinger have offered contrasting strategies for Afghanistan. John McCain’s plan was explained in a speech before the American Enterprise Institute and Henry Kissinger’s plan in an op-ed in the Washington Post.

There are some points on which the two men agree. Both agree that Afghanistan is too important for us just to walk away.

McCain

I am confident victory is possible in Afghanistan. I know Americans are weary of war. I’m weary of it. But we must win the war in Afghanistan. The alternative is to risk that country’s return to its previous function as a terrorist sanctuary, from which al Qaeda could train and plan attacks against America. Such an outcome would constitute an historic success for the jihadist movement, severely damage American standing and credibility in a region that already doubts our resolve, and threaten the future of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization. A terrorist sanctuary in Afghanistan would encourage and enable al Qaeda and other terrorist groups to destabilize neighboring countries. Broader insecurity in Afghanistan – with the violence, refugee flows, and lawlessness it would engender – could spill beyond its borders to nuclear armed Pakistan or other states in south and central Asia, with the gravest implications for our national security.

Kissinger

The Obama administration faces dilemmas familiar to several of its predecessors. America cannot withdraw from Afghanistan now, but neither can it sustain the strategy that brought us to this point.

The stakes are high. Victory for the Taliban in Afghanistan would give a tremendous shot in the arm to jihadism globally — threatening Pakistan with jihadist takeover and possibly intensifying terrorism in India, which has the world’s third-largest Muslim population. Russia, China and Indonesia, which have all been targets of jihadist Islam, could also be at risk.

Both agree that what we’re doing now isn’t working.

McCain

The situation in Afghanistan is nowhere near as dire as it was in Iraq just two years ago – to cite one example, civilian fatalities at their peak in Iraq were ten times higher than civilian deaths at their peak in Afghanistan last year. But the same truth that was apparent three years ago in Iraq is apparent today in Afghanistan: when you aren’t winning in this kind of war, you are losing. And, in Afghanistan today, we are not winning. Let us not shy from the truth, but let us not be paralyzed by it either.

Nearly every indicator in Afghanistan is heading in the wrong direction. Civilian fatalities in Afghanistan have increased dramatically as security has deteriorated, particularly in the southern provinces of the country. The number of insurgent attacks was higher every single week in 2008 than during the same week in 2007. Since 2005, violence has increased over 500 percent, and despite the presence of tens of thousands of coalition troops, growing portions of the country suffer under the influence of the Taliban. The percentage of Afghans rating their security positively has declined from 77 percent in 2005 to 40 percent today. Only a third of Afghans say that U.S. or NATO forces have a strong presence in their areas, down from 57 percent just two years ago, and Afghans cite the lack of security and corruption as the foremost reasons their country is moving in the wrong direction.

Kissinger

Heretofore, America has pursued traditional anti-insurgency tactics: to create a central government, help it extend its authority over the entire country and, in the process, bring about a modern bureaucratic and democratic society.

That strategy cannot succeed in Afghanistan — especially not as an essentially solitary effort. The country is too large, the territory too forbidding, the ethnic composition too varied, the population too heavily armed. No foreign conqueror has ever succeeded in occupying Afghanistan. Even attempts to establish centralized Afghan control have rarely succeeded and then not for long. Afghans seem to define their country in terms of a common dedication to independence but not to unitary or centralized self-government.

However, although the two men have differing views on the way forward in Afghanistan, even their contrasting approaches have distinct similarity. Kissinger proposes what is essentially the denial of territory approach that I’ve favored over the period of the last seven years. Keys to this are a classic COIN strategy in the vicinity of Kabul:

Military strategy should concentrate on preventing the emergence of a coherent, contiguous state within the state controlled by jihadists. In practice, this would mean control of Kabul and the Pashtun area. A jihadist base area on both sides of the mountainous Afghan-Pakistani border would become a permanent threat to hopes for a moderate evolution and to all of Afghanistan’s neighbors. Gen. David Petraeus has argued that, reinforced by the number of American forces he has recommended, he should be able to control the 10 percent of Afghan territory where, in his words, 80 percent of the military threat originates. This is the region where the “clear, hold and build” strategy that had success in Iraq is particularly applicable.

a more restricted mission in the rest of the country:

In the rest of the country, our military strategy should be more fluid, aimed at forestalling the emergence of terrorist strong points. It should be based on close cooperation with local chiefs and coordination with their militias to be trained by U.S. forces — the kind of strategy that proved so successful in Anbar province, the Sunni stronghold in Iraq.

and diplomacy to gain the support of Afghanistan’s neighbors:

In Afghanistan, such an outcome is achievable only if its principal neighbors agree on a policy of restraint and opposition to terrorism. Their recent conduct argues against such prospects. Yet history should teach them that unilateral efforts at dominance are likely to fail in the face of countervailing intervention by other outside actors. To explore such a vision, the United States should propose a working group of Afghanistan’s neighbors, India and the permanent members of the U.N. Security Council. Such a group should be charged with assisting in the reconstruction and reform of Afghanistan and establishing principles for the country’s international status and obligations to oppose terrorist activities. Over time, America’s unilateral military efforts can merge with the diplomatic efforts of this group.

John McCain, on the other hand, favors a reemphasis on counter-insurgency in Afghanistan:

As it was in Iraq, security is the precondition for political and economic progress in Afghanistan. And the way to provide enduring security is by applying the same basic principles of counterinsurgency tailored for the unique circumstances of Afghanistan, backed with robust intelligence resources and a sufficient number of troops to carry it out.

This strategy should be operationalized through a nationwide civil-military campaign plan. There is today a campaign plan for Regional Command-East, one in the works for Regional Command-South, and a patchwork of other operations throughout the country. There is no comprehensive, nationwide plan for the war that spells out what level of combat troops and resources will be required, where, and to do what. The fact that we are engaged in this fight without such a plan more than seven years after our initial invasion explains much of the failure of our efforts thus far.

encouraging the Afghans to increase the size of their military:

The Afghan army is already a great success story: a multiethnic, battle-tested fighting force. The problem is that it is too small – it currently stands at 68,000 – and, even with the increase in projected end strength to 134,000, it will remain too small. For years, the Afghans have been telling us they need a bigger army, and they are right. After all, their country is more populous and significantly larger than Iraq. At a minimum, we need to more than double the current size of the Afghan army to 160,000 troops, and consider enlarging it to 200,000. The costs of this increase, however, should not be borne by American taxpayers alone. Insecurity in Afghanistan is the world’s problem, and the world should share the costs. I believe we should work with our allies to establish an international trust fund to provide long-term financing for the Afghan army. At the same time, we need to increase the number of trainers and mentors assisting the Afghan police, who have suffered neglect and mismanagement for too long.

and using diplomacy to gain the support of Afghanistan’s neighbors:

A special focus of our regional strategy must be Pakistan. For too long we have viewed Pakistan as important because of our goals in Afghanistan. Yet Pakistan is not simply important because of Afghanistan; Pakistan is important because of Pakistan. We cannot simply subordinate our Pakistan strategy to our Afghanistan policy.

We should start by empowering the new civilian government in Islamabad to defeat radicalism with greater support for development, health, and education. Today, development assistance constitutes just one percent of all U.S. funding directed toward programs in the tribal and border areas. This must change. We should also strengthen local tribes in these areas who are willing to fight terrorists – the strategy used successfully in Anbar and elsewhere in Iraq – while recognizing that such an approach will not be nearly as quick or far reaching as it was in Iraq.

Interestingly, both McCain and Kissinger make a similar point about the NATO allies. They should be encouraged to give the support they’re most likely to offer, i.e. development support rather than additional military assistance.

Kissinger

Symbolically, the participation of NATO partners is significant. But save for some notable exceptions, public support for military operations is negligible in almost all NATO countries. It is possible, of course, that Obama’s popularity in Europe can modify these attitudes — but probably to only a limited extent. The president would have to decide how far he will carry the inevitable differences and face the reality that disagreements concern fundamental questions of NATO’s future and reach. Improved consultation would ease this process. It is likely to turn out, however, that the differences are not procedural. We may then conclude that an enhanced NATO contribution to Afghanistan’s reconstruction is more useful than a marginal military effort constrained by caveats. But if NATO turns into an alliance a la carte in this manner, a precedent that can cut both ways would be set. Those who tempt a U.S. withdrawal by their indifference or irresolution evade the prospect that it would be the prelude to a long series of accelerating and escalating crises.

McCain

While I believe the United States should continue to encourage European troop contributions and press for the reduction of caveats on their use, I also believe we should move away from stressing what Washington wants Europe to give, and more toward encouraging what Europe is prepared to contribute. Many of our NATO allies – and other allies and partners outside NATO, including countries in Asia and the Gulf – are fully capable of contributing many badly needed resources. In many areas, non-combat related contributions – from police training to a trust fund for the Afghan National Army – will be as critical to long-term success as more European troops on the ground.

I’m skeptical that Afghanistan will be able to muster a substantially larger force in the absence of a functional central government less corrupt than the one in Kabul now and I believe that creating such a government in Kabul remains beyond our grasp. As I understand the Obama Administration’s current policy with respect to Afghanistan, it rejects the nation-building aspects of the Bush Administration’s approach while retaining most of the military objectives of its predecessor’s strategy, which it will secure by increasing the American troop level in Afghanistan while hoping for increased military support from our NATO allies.

To his credit John McCain emphasizes the importance of explaining the importance of Afghanistan to the American people. That will be important since even under the best of circumstances we’re not going to see success in Afghanistan for the foreseeable future.