Afghanistan

I listened to the majority of President Obama's speech the other day and it seems that it was mostly well-received. A not insignificant portion seemed to have changed their minds about the acceptability of sending more troops there after he laid out his case.

And as a friend of mine pointed out, this is something he has said he was going to do ever since he started campaigning for pres - looking to get out of Iraq and more emphasis on Afghanistan.

It's a little worrisome, though. Afghanistan is known as "the graveyard of empires" - both Russia and Alexander the Great were defeated there. And I understand the troop deployment is timeboxed, but it's still expensive.

I look at tech news fairly frequently and it is a little perturbing how advanced the Chinese infrastructure for developing a lot of really important pieces of technology is (I am mainly talking about solar panels here). And I think about the Chinese currency manipulation to keep their import costs high and export costs low. And I think about how there are 1.2 billion people in China and something like 300 million in the United States, and I worry that the days of the US being the world's jolly but kind of dumb big brother are fading fast. Sure, there've been some really asinine moves by the US government in the past 8 years, but I have a lot more faith in ours than in the authoritarian one that governs China.

I guess I'd like to clarify that I have no problems with people from China - it's their government. It's scary and the exact opposite of benevolent. For example: their athletes are hand-picked early on for a particular sport without regard to what they actually want to do - and then taken from their families to high performance centers.

So, like Paul Krugman and Bob Herbert, I am a little worried about spending money on Afghanistan when it's clear we have an awful lot of work to do in the United States. It's obvious we've learned some lessons from the problems in Iraq but is it enough? And is it worth it?

I am not sure. I suppose all I can do is wait and see, and hope that the work President Obama is soon to do on our rather atrocious job market is not hampered by this war effort.