Three Afghanistan Stories: CIA, Voting, and Strategy…plus one more.

The plot thickens—as policymakers search to find the right direction in Af-Pak–and news that the CIA funded President Karzai’s brother:

The financial ties and close working relationship between the intelligence agency and Mr. Karzai raise significant questions about America’s war strategy, which is currently under review at the White House.

The ties to Mr. Karzai have created deep divisions within the Obama administration. The critics say the ties complicate America’s increasingly tense relationship with President Hamid Karzai, who has struggled to build sustained popularity among Afghans and has long been portrayed by the Taliban as an American puppet. The C.I.A.’s practices also suggest that the United States is not doing everything in its power to stamp out the lucrative Afghan drug trade, a major source of revenue for the Taliban.

via Brother of Afghan Leader Said to Be Paid by C.I.A. – NYTimes.com.

John Burns of the Times blog At War also weighs in on the implications of this major story from last week.

On the voting issue, former Ambassador to Croatia, UN elections official (and BYU Human Rights Seminar speaker) Peter Galbraith warns in an Op-Ed today that all is not well in Kabul for the runoff election:

Still, much more needs to be done. The conditions that made fraud possible in the first round are still present. Although the Election Complaint Commission did a Herculean job of tossing out illegitimate votes, the final tally still included hundreds of thousands of phony ballots, most for Mr. Karzai.

via Afghanistan Votes, the U.N. Dithers – NYTimes.com.

And finally, Timothy Egan muses on “Napoleon’s Dynamite” and the benefits of dithering in making empire-building (or busting) decisions:

We were wary, following the advice of Jefferson and others, of ceaseless and senseless overseas wars. Wars for territory. Wars for defense. Wars for revenge. Wars because one religion was better than another. This was not our way. We didn’t meddle. We fought “good wars,” against imperial occupiers like Great Britain and, much later, the Nazis. …

Now comes the first United States official known to resign in protest of American strategy in Afghanistan. Matthew Hoh, former Marine Captain and up-and-coming foreign service officer, says American presence has thus far only fueled the insurgency. …

Yet, to leave now, we are told, would be to abandon a country to people who live 8th century lives with 21st century weapons. And they have a hatred warped by religion — making for the worst kind of enemy….

For the president, if thoughtful dithering produces a more enlightened policy, he will be well served by stretching time.

via Napoleon’s Dynamite – Timothy Egan Blog – NYTimes.com.

UPDATE:  An extra courtesy Prof. Valerie Hudson and the NYT—this one is a little mind-bending in the good, historical manner of speaking:

“Our soldiers are not to blame. They’ve fought incredibly bravely in adverse conditions. But to occupy towns and villages temporarily has little value in such a vast land where the insurgents can just disappear into the hills.” He went on to request extra troops and equipment. “Without them, without a lot more men, this war will continue for a very, very long time,” he said.

These sound as if they could be the words of Gen. Stanley McChrystal, the top American commander in Afghanistan, to President Obama in recent days or weeks. In fact, they were spoken by Sergei Akhromeyev, the commander of the Soviet armed forces, to the Soviet Union’s Politburo on Nov. 13, 1986.

Read on at Transcripts of Defeat – NYTimes.com

Going to Extremism – The Conversation Blog – NYTimes.com

In a Kennedy Center Lecture yesterday, a terorrism analyst painted a grey picture of the threats 8 years after 9/11 that isn’t a whole lot better.  In that spirit, see this fascinating chat between two Times columnists, Gail Collins and David Brooks:

The mind gapes at events like these, yet each year there are thousands and thousands of honor killings.  Now, of course, it should be said immediately these sorts of practices are perpetrated by an extremist fringe. But this extremism seems to have an outsized influence on world events….Does any of this ring true? Do you see a confrontation looming?

How is America going to end? Slate’s “Choose Your Own Apocalypse” lets you map out the death of the United States. – By Josh Levin – Slate Magazine

In case you ever wonder what the threats to the US might be,  consider Joshua Levin’s compilation, guaranteed to ruin your morning.  A few of the first from among 144 scenarios, culled from a wide range of writing and ideas:

1. Electromagnetic Pulse: A nuclear weapon detonated at high elevation could knock out the country’s electrical infrastructure, sending us back to the Stone Age. The congressional EMP Commission says an electromagnetic pulse “is one of a small number of threats that can hold our society at risk of catastrophic consequences.”

2. Foreign Invasion: The Red Dawn scenario: A hostile alliance of foreign powers dispatches a team of elite combat troops to America. They launch a coordinated assault with thousands of paratroopers on key military and communications installations, dealing the U.S. government a fatal blow.

3. Russia Hits the Button: Nobel Prize-winning physicist Steven Weinberg says the United States should fear “a mistaken attack on our country by the huge Russian arsenal of nuclear weapons.” As recently as 1995, a “retaliatory” nuclear strike was barely averted when Russian officials figured out at the last second that what they thought was an enemy strike was really a craft launched to monitor the Northern lights.

4. Loose Nukes: Taliban fighters wrest nuclear weapons from a destabilized Pakistan. Or al-Qaida acquires a small arsenal of nukes from a disintegrating Russia. The nonstate actors launch against the United States in an attack exponentially worse than 9/11.

5. Dirty Bombs: Terror groups armed with “radiological dispersal devices”—a cocktail of radioactive material and garden-variety explosives—launch coordinated attacks in a dozen major cities. The attacks destabilize the government and break our spirit. The terrorists win.

6. Abandonment: After a series of devastating attacks, Washington admits it can no longer protect large swaths of the nation. The United States contracts to a smaller core that’s easier to defend.

7. Suicidal Tyrant: An Ahmadinejad-like figure strikes at the heart of the Great Satan, launching nuclear weapons at major American cities and pushing the country to anarchy.

via How is America going to end? Slate’s “Choose Your Own Apocalypse” lets you map out the death of the United States. – By Josh Levin – Slate Magazine.

Philip Agee – b. 1935 – Unspooked – The Lives They Lived – Obituaries – NYTimes.com

Another brief glimpse inside the looking glass:

Philip Agee was never part of any solution, just another facet of the shadow world’s ever proliferating strangeness.

The Speech’s the Thing

via Views differ on CIA chief’s speech | FP Passport

Needed | Intel from the Real 007

Who knows if this is reality-based reporting, but it makes for a fun read from FP:

Who’s Got the H-Bomb?

The mission: Infiltrate the nuclear weapons programs of India, Pakistan, and North Korea to determine which ones possess the hydrogen bomb.

Briefing: It’s long been assumed that these smaller nuclear powers possess inferior nuclear weapons. During the Cold War, only superpowers had the ability to make advancements in nuclear weaponry, such as developing the hydrogen bomb. But the barriers are no longer so high. “The idea is out,” says John Pike, director of the defense and intelligence news Web site GlobalSecurity.org. He adds that the computational power available to design a device and conduct tests is leaps and bounds above what was available to Cold War-era scientists. And required materials such as plutonium, uranium, and tritium are available to any country with a nuclear reactor. Israel, which has a relatively small nuclear weapons program, is widely thought to already possess the H-bomb. Such weapons are roughly a thousand times more powerful than the bomb dropped on Nagasaki during World War II.

Do the newer members of the nuclear club possess weapons only as potent as the Nagasaki bomb? Take North Korea, whose detonation of a small nuclear device in 2006 was deemed a failure by many because of its low yield. Pike doubts the North Koreans are “ignorant peons” and wonders if the smaller bomb could be used to trigger a larger, more dangerous hydrogen device. Possession of the H-bomb could also complicate certain conflicts, such as the long-simmering dispute between India and Pakistan over Kashmir.