Denial is a River in the Hindu Kush

Obama continues to ignore the ramifications of his Pakistan policy. Osama bin Laden is killing Americans now. Pakistan is unable and unwilling to clear out the FATA and NWFP now. We likely have intelligence to put the heat on a lot of AQ and Taliban members now. By his standards, we should be lighting up the Pakistani frontier. This isn't a hypothetical, this is a reality. Either he is willing to resume raids in Pakistan or he isn't, and if he is he needs to acknowledge that attacking Pakistan is going to be just as damaging to support for the war on terror as supporting Musharraf in Pakistan. They were shooting at us. This isn't an academic question for point-scoring - this is a real policy decision, and Obama needs to tone down the rhetoric or prepare for a conflict that will be nowhere near as clear-cut as he would have us believe. Pakistan made a truce with the Taliban because they were tired of killing their soldiers and their citizens and because in counterinsurgency, sometimes you have to deal with the devil. Letting us smack around Pakistanis and tribal kinsmen is only going to create more attacks on the Pakistani government. We too will have to make deals with those tribes if we want to stabilize Afghanistan.

Meanwhile, McCain's Afghan policy continues to buy into the fantasy that another "surge" will save Afghanistan. It won't, unless you want a larger surge (let's talk 3-4x larger), and a replication of one of the pre-surge reductions in violence - an Anbar awakening. That means allying with some of the fundamentalist tribes that used to harbor or support al Qaeda, not hunting down and destroying every formerly anti-American tribe in Afghanistan (or, Senator Obama, the NWFP or FATA). We essentially have two options to stabilize Afghanistan without a massive long-term presence that will last generations - installing a less-than-democratic central government that has made peace with some of the belligerents and delegated to the tribes, or a new Iron Amir with dictatorial powers. America wants stability, democracy, and withdrawal within a few years - it will get two if it is lucky.

McCain had a stronger performance than his last debate, and seemed to tackle the real long-run issue for the "American empire" - domestic expenditures - more directly than Obama did. Both, however, were mum on Medicare, the biggest and faster growing of the American entitlement programs. Both made legitimate points on their own healthcare proposals, but ultimately as far as the "elephants in the room" are concerned, nobody really knows what to do about the immediate problems of global financial meltdown (especially since this will increasingly require linking foreign and domestic policies), and nobody really wants to talk about how many planks of their platforms will have to be torn out in January.

I haven't needed to wait long for the geopolitical hysteria over the financial crisis to start. Iceland, unable to bail out its financial institutions without compromising its fiscal solvency, hoped the EU would be able to bail it out. No such luck. Now Russia may offer the capital injection, and already some observers think it may be part of a Russian attempt to subvert NATO (and perhaps even establish a security presence in the North Atlantic!).

As usual, everything in the Middle East is going swimmingly.