Thanks very much for your dose of humble reality…I couldn’t agree with you more. Indeed, eight years on and billions and billions of dollars in “international community” aid later, we should be more than humble about what’s going on, and what it’ll take to simply do no harm, let alone engage at the nexus of culture and the rule of law, sensitive to the former, consistent with the latter.

Two pieces for your consideration about the missing element of analysis: religion.

1. http://www.military.com/news/article/coin-the-currency-of-victory-in-afghan-war.html; and,

2. http://www.csmonitor.com/2009/0804/p09s04-coop.html.

Both discuss just how little we know about the prism through which life is seen in many places Central Asia…

Keep up the good work!

That’s simply not the case, at least in the pundit circles I see. The war might be a foregone conclusion at a lot of op-ed pages, but there is an entire progressive movement dedicated to challenging Barack Obama on the fundamental merits of the war, and they’ve gathered enough funding for full-time bloggers on the subject.

I’m not opposed to arguing the merits—hell, if I had more energy and hours in the day I think I could probably make a meaningful contribution for the staying argument—but Walt’s premise is false, even if some of his points are good ones. That’s what I wrote off as a “straw man.” His six points deserve addressing, but accusing people of not even talking about it — especially as opinion polls show a slim majority thinking we have no reason to be there — is not a particularly valid point.

By the way, I think you shouldn’t call what Walt does “arguing against a straw man.” You’ve said this about Rory Stewart as well, inaccurately. A straw man is an intentional misrepresentation of an opposing view to make it easier to tear down. Analyzing with good faith the rhetoric of our politicians and leading psuedo-expert wonks is not to construct a straw man; it’s to understand the flaws in thinking that have guided American policy recently. Finding the flaws is something you and I should support–even if we don’t agree (I don’t) with his conclusions.

Thanks for the hard-nosed reality here. This is KEY. One thing I pointed out to Heidi Vogt for her article which predictably did not get included, is the fact that despite all the hype during the Iran election debacle, and the lack of hype during the Honduras coup, the populations utilizing twitter in both places were essentially similar, educated, western-focused, english speaking, with high internet access(in iran this was of course tempered by Iranian filtering). In Iran’s case those tweeting reflected western bias and the western paradigm on Iran (USA is good, Ahmadi bad we need dialogue but without Ahmadi). In Honduras’ case they ran counter to the dominant US paradigm which reflected statements out of State opposing the coup.

so wht happened? No one is aware of the people tweeting from Honduras, whereas everyone and their grandmother has heard about Iran. At the end of the day, twitter was not providing a revolutionary new outlet, it just provided yet another microphone for the privileged and those whose message was comprehensible, understandable, and manageable by the western media paradigm.

We’ve got a long way to go to correct this, but at least we’re trying, right?