The Crisis Stage

This has been a pretty rough week... This UN thing. The Jerusalem thing and the Afghanistan thing. Seems like a thousand plans sinking in quicksand. This came up today and I kept looking at it over and over::

Stratfor.com (Strategic Forecasting): The situation in the region is, in our view, reaching the crisis stage for the United States. Things are going very wrong for the Bush administration. The threat of an Islamist rising from the Mediterranean to the Persian Gulf no longer is an interesting theoretical concept. Except for Jordan, it is becoming a reality. Under the circumstances, Jordan's stability and security should not be assumed in the next year or so. If Iran -- or native Iraqi leaders -- send the Shiites into the streets, then all of Iraq will be in chaos and a perfect storm will have formed.

Our perception of the U.S. strategy has been that the basic assumption was that the United States has the time to let the guerrillas burn themselves out or that it has enough time to craft an effective strategy. We do not think that basic assumption is valid any longer. The collapse of the cease-fire between the Israelis and Palestinians creates a regional force that can be contained only by decisive U.S. action in Iraq.

Salon.com: "We're losing the war in Afghanistan, too":

Afghanistan is full of mutually reinforcing relationships, on smaller local levels. These types of alliances are what the politics of Afghanistan are made of. As many Afghans point out, Karzai isn't really the leader of Afghanistan; he's simply a figurehead over a set of rival parties vying for control. In reality, the Afghan state is just a complicated anarchy in which various local players, with varying amounts of power, exert power over one another in different ways.

There are no functional political processes in the country, just naked power dynamics. And this is to be expected: Afghanistan's provincial governors, village mayors and police chiefs are really only local military strongmen -- usually former mujahedin -- who are ostensibly allied with Karzai but ultimately loyal to no one. Many are self-sufficient, independent sovereigns over the areas under their control, and act and think as soldiers. The political dynamic resembles a battlefield, a state of war, even with Afghanistan at peace.

Most Afghans refer to their country's local leaders as jangsalar, Dari for "warlords," or tufangdar, "gunmen," which is, essentially what they are. Kabul journalists use the term "warlordism" to describe the country's core problem (which allows them not to name names). And yet warlordism also has a cause, which journalists are glad to point out if you ask them.

"The Americans," said one newspaper editor to me, in July. "The Americans put the warlords into power."