Losing track

There's just too much going on these days.

Abdullah hands the Afghan presidency to Hamid Karzai. So, where does this leave US strategy?
I have no idea - here's the take of FRI's babatim:

Our Secretary of State says that means nothing. I agree but for different reasons; in the end it does not matter who is leading the country – the Afghan government will not be a proper [counterinsurgency] partner and will continue to be part of the problem regardless of how these elections turn out. Conducting a runoff will only give the bad guys more opportunity for mischief while accomplishing nothing.

Instead, babatim suggests we focus on making the Afghan military into something useful.

If we want to rapidly build the Afghan Security Forces the only way to do it is to live and work with them 24/7. We need to adopt them, feed them, pay them, and watch after them. What can a US officer really do when the Colonel he is mentoring cannot feed his own troops because the money to buy that chow is siphoned off by officers above him? If they make a stink about it the Afghan Colonel is sure to be relieved and thrown out on the streets. The current mentors have guys fighting daily while dealing with problems they would never encounter in the American system. They do the best they can to support the unit they are assigned to mentor, but they are not really embedded. They live of separate compounds inside the Afghan compounds completely separate from their charges. Mentoring means leading by example while living and fighting with your host country troops. It does not mean setting up a parallel [Tactical Operations Center], camp, cook house, offices, and coffee shop where the Afghans are not welcomed or allowed.

All that sounds good - but I still don't know what the US gets out of a strong Afghan military if the government remains a behive of corruption.

Then there's the NY 23rd congressional race. This race is so bizarre. You had the hard right sabotaging a GOP incumbent, against the wishes of the local party. And doing it with a candidate who apparently wasn't terribly plugged into local issues.

Sure, the quest for party purity is a cyclical thing, but the dems chewing on Lieberman never seemed so top-down. And you didn't have party big-wigs on both sides of that one.

There's been an awful lot of ink about how the GOP is going to fracture - but this is an undeniable attempt by the national GOP leadership to kick out a moderate. You have to wonder just how far the Club For Growth types are going to push the party before the see the edge of the cliff.

Oh, and our progressive president is reluctantly, mournfully, yet forcefully adopting the same position on state secrets as the Bush administration. Way to suck there, guys. I hope Judge Walker sticks it to you every bit as hard as you deserve.