The Wisdom of Comic Strips

DOONESBURY: A GUIDE TO POLICY ANALYSIS

In thinking about writing the next blog it occurred to me that something on a light note might be in order so I started to make notes on my initial professional career as a political reporter in Hawaii. Then came yesterday's (Sunday) newspaper and an inspiration for the next best thing, a comic strip--Doonesbury. No one has ever presumed that Doonesbury is just a comic strip, but rather a serious but light slant on the world as seen by Garry Trudeau.

To capsulize, Doonesbury cartoonized (if there is such a word) a crucial element of our problem in Afghanistan. As stated in previous blogs, we are looking for local warlords, militias, organized thugs, etc., whom we can hire long enough to help us begin to extricate ourselves from the Afghan morass in which we find ourselves. As Trudeau depicted it, such hires are situational opportunists who will rent themselves to us to help keep the local peace, but are quick to jump ship if a higher bidder comes along. In an August 21 blog, I characterized such hirees as lower case sob's. A congressional staff report in early summer gave evidence of the need for such thuggish hirees to protect our supply convoys from attack. That report went on to speculate that some of this protection money may even be trickling down to local Taliban groups as another layer of protection.

Last Saturday, the Washington Post presented what seemed to be confirmation that we are now prepared to officially incorporate upper and lower case SOBs into our basic strategy by tolerating more corruption within the Kabul government of President Hamid Karzai (an upper case SOB). The Post quoted an unidentified senior defense official as saying, "There are areas where you need strong leadership, and some of those leaders are not entirely pure. But they can help us to be more effective in going after the primary threat, which is the Taliban." This is not really a shocking statement. It has been evident for some time that our repeated efforts to get Karzai to clean up corruption in the countryside he controls, within his government, and within his family, have gone unheeded, but we have not gone to the barricades to force the issue.

President Franklin Roosevelt supposedly once said about bureaucracy something to the effect--you can beat it, punch it, and kick it, but it's like a pillow; in the end it returns to the same shape. Thus it is within the Afghanistan regime with its rampant corruption.

Going further, there was also an item in our local newspaper on Sunday from the New York Times News Service, reporting that the United States has tentatively agreed to bail out Afghanistan's largest bank to head off a major financial crisis in that country. A major share holder in that bank is Karzai's brother. Thus, Wall Street has come to Kabul. Even if we haven't figured a clear way out of our military involvement in Afghanistan, we do have a lot of experience in bailing out banks. If our bailout experience at home can be extended to Afghanistan, in about a year the bank will again be prospering.

To conclude by returning to a quote used in an earlier blog (July 29). When FDR was asked about our relationship with one time dictator of Nicaragua, Anastasio Samoza, the President said, "He may be a son of a bitch, but he's our son of a bitch." We seem to be expanding our efforts to bring a lot of upper and lower case SOB's/sob's into our fold, but as Doonesbury makes the case, exaggerated perhaps but not without a foundation in truth, they may not be "ours" for long. But, optimistically, maybe just long enough for us to tunnel our way out of the mess.