Josh Philip Ross

The New Yorker has an excellent article this week on the newly refurbished Kabul-to-Kandahar highway, on which the United States spent $270 million. It gives a good sense of how much still remains to be done in Afghanistan, and it serves as a reminder that the country remains insecure and violent, with a resurgent Taliban making gains for the same reason they did the last time around: because there is a gaping power vacuum.

Yes, the road got built — as one American official in Kabul put it, “It just goes to show what you can do when money is no object” — but I imagine that the country would be in much better shape if instead of invading Iraq, we had focused our military and financial resources on pacifying and rebuilding in Afghanistan. And considering that Afghanistan (and neighboring Pakistan) is where the terrorists actually are, that would have been a more obvious tactic in the war on terror.

Do you find that your digital watch is just too easy to read? Daniel Kleinfeld has alerted me to a great solution.

Hey, that reminds me: what ever happened to Swatch Internet Time? Has it become the Esperanto of chronography?

• Eve Ensler, author of The Vagina Monologues, gave $2,000 to Howard Dean.
• Actor Edward Norton gave $2,000 to Dennis Kucinich.
• One Steven Buscemi donated $1,000 to Wesley Clark.
• Treat Williams gave $250 to Howard Dean.

I don’t know what’s most frightening about this: that this website is giving out celebrities’ home addresses, that our political donations are public information, that all these people live in the same building, or that Edward Norton gave two grand to “the little guy from Ohio,” as I heard him described by a woman from Trinidad at the Wes Clark Rally in Brooklyn a couple of weeks ago.

Update: Gawker has an update:

Oh, it’s just an office address. Boo. Still. They all have the same agent? That’s eerie.

The New York Times provides further insight into the Spanish Election [via Eschaton]:

The contest in Spain had always been close between the governing Popular Party, which backed Mr. Bush’s policies, and the Socialists, who opposed them. Other issues at stake before the bombings were unemployment, a housing shortage, women’s rights and social benefits.

In March 2003, at the height of opposition to the Iraq war, the Socialists were ahead in polls. With the economy roaring and the Socialist Party in disarray, the Popular Party pulled ahead. On March 7, the last date in which polls were published, an Opina poll showed that the gap had narrowed, giving the Popular Party 42 percent, compared with 38 percent for the Socialists ….

Voters said they were enraged not only by the government’s insistence that the Basque separatist group ETA was responsible, despite mounting evidence to the contrary, but they also resented its clumsy attempts to quell antigovernment sentiment.

For example, the main television channel TVE, which is state-owned, showed scant and selective scenes of antigovernment demonstrations on Saturday night, just as it ran very little coverage of the large demonstrations against the war in Iraq last year. It also suddenly changed its regular programming to air a documentary on the horrors of ETA.

That was the last straw for some Spaniards, who said it evoked the nightmare of censorship during the Franco dictatorship little more than a quarter of a century ago.

Ever since the Spanish voted out the ruling Popular Party, there has been talk that the people’s choice was somehow a victory for Al Qaeda, or at least a dangerous gesture of appeasement. This line of argument requires that we agree to two givens, both of them controversial:

1. The Bush administration and its allies are fighting terror effectively, so any other political choice is a vote against a successful war on terror.

2. The Spanish made their choice out of fear, hoping that by removing their pro-Bush leader they would appease the Islamists and prevent future attacks.

As far as the first point goes, among my strongest complaints against the Bush administration is that it has not done nearly enough to combat terror. Bin Laden is still at large, Al Qaeda is still clearly capable of impressive attacks against Western capitals, Pakistan and Saudi Arabia remain essentially as they were before 9/11, and security measures at home have been half-hearted and underfunded. The Iraq war may well end up improving the lives of Iraqis, but it was a misdirected salvo in the war on terror ? a costly and distracting endeavor that pulled resources and attention from the real threat, which was and is the shadowy underworld of Islamist terrorism. They get their weapons and logistical support from Pakistan, not Iraq, and their money from Saudi Arabia. Remaking the Middle East is dandy, but the failure to focus on Al Qaeda is legitimate grounds for criticism.

On the second point, I’m not at all convinced that the Spanish voted out of fear. In fact, Aznar’s government was craven and cowardly in the days after the Madrid bombings, at a time when bravery and leadership were called for. Instead of coming forward with everything they knew, the government covered up mounting evidence that the attack was mounted by Islamists, instead blaming ETA [via Talking Points Memo]. Why? Because Aznar’s participation in the Iraq War has been deeply unpopular, while his successes against ETA helped bring him to power.

As the Washington Post points out:

Suspicion that the government manipulated information — blaming ETA in order to divert any possible link between the bombings and Aznar’s unpopular support for the war in Iraq — helped fuel the upset victory of the Socialist Workers’ Party in Sunday’s elections. By then, Islamic extremists linked to al Qaeda had become the focus of the investigation ….

On Saturday night — hours before the polls opened — the government announced the arrests of three Moroccans and two Indians, and the discovery of a videotape from a purported al Qaeda official asserting responsibility for the attacks. Thousands of Spaniards responded by taking to the streets, banging pots and pans in protests and denouncing the government.

That voter anger swept the Socialists back to power for the first time in eight years.

So the Spanish voted against the party that had failed to protect the Spanish people from Islamist terrorism and then refused to face up to what had happened in Madrid. I’m not sure how a vote for the status quo ? a government that fought terror by sending a few troops to Iraq and by lying in the face of disaster ? would have been braver than a vote for change.