"If a case of soap is pilfered from a U.S. military base here or pinched from a NATO shipping container, it will probably, sooner or later, end up for sale in the Bush Market..."

"... a sort of thieves’ outlet mall in central Kabul. Named after George W. Bush, the U.S. president who launched the war in Afghanistan, the bazaar has flourished for more than eight years, thanks to the long presence of foreign troops that provided war booty aplenty. But in the Obama era, with its steady withdrawal of U.S. forces, the good times are ending in the sprawling hive of vendors who hawk mountains of Pop-Tarts and enough Head and Shoulders shampoo to combat the dandruff of untold army divisions."

"Alexander the Great arrived in the area of Afghanistan in 330 BC after defeating Darius III of Persia a year earlier at the Battle of Gaugamela."

"His army faced very strong resistance in the Afghan tribal areas where he is said to have commented that Afghanistan is 'easy to march into, hard to march out of.'"

"Afghanistan was conquered by the Maurya Empire, which was led by Chandragupta Maurya from Magadha... [A]s he was going to war with the generals of Alexander, a wild elephant of great bulk presented itself before him of its own accord, and, as if tamed down to gentleness, took him on its back, and became his guide in the war, and conspicuous in fields of battle."

"Arab armies carrying the banner of Islam came out of the west to defeat the Sasanians in 642 CE and then they marched with confidence to the east. On the western periphery of the Afghan area the princes of Herat and Seistan gave way to rule by Arab governors but in the east, in the mountains, cities submitted only to rise in revolt and the hastily converted returned to their old beliefs once the armies passed."

"From the 16th century to the early 18th century, Afghanistan was divided in to three major areas.... The Kandahar region in the south served as a buffer zone between the powerful Mughals and Safavids, and the native Afghans often switched support from one side to the other."

"King Amanullah Khan moved to end his country's traditional isolation in the years following the Third Anglo-Afghan war. He established diplomatic relations with most major countries and, following a 1927 tour of Europe and Turkey (during which he noted the modernization and secularization advanced by Atatürk), introduced several reforms intended to modernize Afghanistan."

"Amid charges of corruption and malfeasance against the royal family and poor economic conditions created by the severe 1971–72 drought, former Prime Minister Mohammad Sardar Daoud Khan seized power in a non-violent coup on July 17, 1973, while Zahir Shah was receiving treatment for eye problems and therapy for lumbago in Italy."

"In response to the Soviet occupation of Afghanistan, the Carter administration and Reagan administration in the U.S. began arming the Mujahideen.... The 10-year Soviet occupation resulted in the killings of between 600,000 and two million Afghans, mostly civilians."

"The Taliban started shelling Kabul in early 1995 but were defeated by forces of the Islamic State government under Ahmad Shah Massoud... [W]hile trying to consolidate control over northern and western Afghanistan, [the Taliban] committed systematic massacres against civilians.... Bin Laden's so-called 055 Brigade was responsible for mass-killings of Afghan civilians.... [E]yewitnesses in many villages describ[ed] Arab fighters carrying long knives used for slitting throats and skinning people.... Of roughly 45,000 Pakistani, Taliban and Al Qaeda soldiers fighting against the forces of Massoud only 14,000 were Afghans."

"In early 2001 Massoud addressed the European Parliament in Brussels asking the international community to provide humanitarian help to the people of Afghanistan. He stated that the Taliban and Al Qaeda had introduced 'a very wrong perception of Islam' and that without the support of Pakistan the Taliban would not be able to sustain their military campaign for up to a year. On this visit to Europe he also warned that his intelligence had gathered information about a large-scale attack on U.S. soil being imminent."

***

And so we continue to the 2d day of this 206 day project, reading the "History of..." Wikipedia page for the 206 countries of the world. Yesterday's country, like many of the countries we'll encounter (in alphabetical order), was Abkhazia, much more obscure to us than today's country, a place we've been hearing about continually for the past decade. And yet, how much do we really know about Afghanistan? I've extracted a handful of sentences, all from before this last decade, in an effort to create a faint sense how little we know.

"Nine young and impoverished Afghan girls lost their lives..."

"... in a land-mine explosion Monday while they were collecting firewood in eastern Afghanistan."

Taliban spokesperson sends email with the bcc addresses on the cc line.

400 addressees revealed:

The list, made up of more than 400 recipients, consists mostly of journalists, but also includes an address appearing to belong to a provincial governor, an Afghan legislator, several academics and activists, an[d] l Afghan consultative committee, and a representative of Gulbuddein Hekmatar, an Afghan warlord whose outlawed group Hezb-i-Islami is believed to be behind several attacks against coalition troops.

Camille Paglia, who voted for Obama in '08, delivers a fine rant about why she's not voting for him this time.

She's interviewed on video here, by Glenn Reynolds. Most of the interview is about art in America and her new book "Glittering Images" (which I just bought, in Kindle). But in the end, she's asked why she's not voting for Obama — she's voting for Jill Stein — and out flow the words, which I started transcribing without knowing how long she'd go on. I kept transcribing, because it was all such great material, so here it is (with a few screen grabs, taken from the art section of the interview):

I was very excited about him. I thought he was a moderate. I thought that his election would promote racial healing in the country. 

This is the point at which I started transcribing, thinking: This is how I felt, when I voted for Obama in 2008. Except I wouldn't say I was "very excited." I wasn't caught up in the ecstasy. I thought it was the better bet, compared to the GOP alternative, and I hoped for the moderation and advancement in attitudes about race.

It would be a tremendous transformation of attitudes. And instead: one thing after another. Not least: I consider him, now, one of the most racially divisive and polarizing figures ever. I think it's going to take years to undo the damage to relationships between the races. 

Yes, this hope for racial transformation got squandered early, over that awful Henry Louis Gates incident. Back to Paglia:

But beyond that, I am just sick and tired of endless war. I was in favor of bombing the hell out of the Afghanistan mountains after 9/11, but I would have never agreed to this land war in Afghanistan, this endless land war, as well as things like this Libyan incursion that Obama appears to have been pushed into by these women, like Hillary Clinton and Samantha Power, the chaos in foreign policy, the bowing to foreign leaders.

Also the Obamacare: of course, we need health care reform in this country. What a mess! Everyone agrees about that. But the Obamacare is, to me, a Stalinist intrusion — okay? — into American culture.

The creation of this culture of surveillance, from these bureaucracies, which is also carried over into Obama's endorsement of drones on the military level as well as for police control of the population. I mean, I don't understand how any... veteran of the 1960s who's a Democrat could not see the dangers here, that Obama is a statist. It's exactly what Bob Dylan was warning about in "Subterranean Homesick Blues," okay?

I paused the video at "It's exactly what Bob Dylan was warning about" and asked Meade what song she's about to name, and he said "Masters of War," and I said "That's what I thought." But it's "Subterranean Homesick Blues," and as soon as she says it, we know why. (Look out kid/They keep it all hid/Better jump down a manhole/Light yourself a candle...)

You don't want government agencies being empowered to intrude into people's lives like this. The controlling force in Obamacare is the IRS! Okay? This flies in the face of what the Free Speech Movement was about at Berkeley or about any of the values, I feel, of my generation.

Yes. Exactly. This is how the Democratic Party lost me — by trading freedom for statism.

So I feel the Democratic Party needs to be shattered and remade to recover its true progressive roots. I don't see progressives. All I see is white upper-middle-class liberals who speak in this unctuous way about the needs of the poor.

Unctuous. Yes. White upper-middle-class liberals lubricating themselves.

They have no connection whatever with the working class. Okay? It's the professional class gone amok. And that's why they don't notice what a bureaucratic nightmare Obamacare is.

Eric Holder announces the end of "the Obama administration’s limited effort to scrutinize the counterterrorism programs carried out under President George W. Bush."

The NYT reports:

The Justice Department did not say publicly which cases had been under investigation. But officials had previously confirmed the identities of the prisoners: Gul Rahman, suspected of being a militant, who died in 2002 after being shackled to a concrete wall in near-freezing temperatures at a secret C.I.A. prison in Afghanistan known as the Salt Pit; and Manadel al-Jamadi, who died in C.I.A. custody in 2003 at Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq, where his corpse was photographed packed in ice and wrapped in plastic.

Mr. Holder’s announcement might remove a possible target for Republicans during the presidential campaign. But the decision will disappoint liberals who supported President Obama when he ran in 2008 and denounced what he called torture and abuse of prisoners under his predecessor.

It's one thing to run for office, quite another to occupy it. You can criticize and express all manner of outrage from the sidelines, but when you are on the inside, it's different, and by cycling the Democratic Party into power, the American people got to learn something about what the Bush Administration did. Those who don't like Obama should see the value of what we learned.

"Taliban insurgents beheaded 17 Afghans... two of them women..."

"[T]hey were attending a party that featured music and mixed-gender dancing...."

"Why Afghanistan Isn’t a Campaign Issue: Neither Obama nor Romney Have a Solution."

Nobody wants to talk about it:

It’s generally recognized across the board, now, that the Taliban won’t be militarily defeated, nor is there any immediate prospect of a political solution to the conflict....

So, the U.S. will leave Afghanistan locked in the throes of the same civil war that was underway when it first invaded in late 2001, albeit with the scoreboard having been reversed: The Taliban is now the insurgent force, while its erstwhile enemies, the Northern Alliance, form the basis of the regime in Kabul...



“The United States military often tends to behave as though you can create an effective allied military by just running them through the right number of training courses, giving them the right number of weapons, paying salary in sufficient amounts to raise a large enough force,” warns George Washington University professor Stephen Biddle. “But success and failure in building a third-world military, which is essentially what we are trying to do in Afghanistan, usually turns on soft questions like politics, whether the military in question gets captured by cronyism and politicized–and in this case, whether the politics of their relationship with their mentors works.”

It’s not hard to see how that relationship is poisoned if U.S. personnel suspect their Afghan charges could, at any point, shoot them in the back. The resultant wariness among American trainers towards their Afghan charges becomes a vicious circle, warns Andrew Exum, a former Army Ranger and consultant to the U.S. military in Afghanistan. “The Afghans must surely sense the Americans and other Westerners do not fully trust them, and it would only be natural for them to respond to that mistrust in kind.”...

 “The war is going to be in a condition of long-term stalemate as of 2014,” [Biddle] warns, “and what that means is that the U.S. Congress is going to be asked to write multi-billion-dollar-a-year checks to keep this war going for a long, long time.” Whether or not Washington will remain willing to fund Afghanistan’s security after most U.S. troops leave remains an open question — and not one that’s likely to be discussed on the presidential campaign trail.

Force them to discuss it!

Prosthetics.

Nose.

Leg.

"On Friday, the president’s Chicago campaign team sent a message that little is off limits..."

"... using a searing video to raise doubts about Mr. Romney’s toughness in a national security crisis. They followed that up on Tuesday with a hard-hitting, kitchen-sink television commercial accusing Mr. Romney of sending jobs overseas and of sheltering his personal wealth in Swiss bank accounts. And then, in a seamless transition, Mr. Obama was in Afghanistan on Tuesday afternoon, vividly reminding Americans of the weighty responsibilities that he shoulders as the nation’s commander in chief and — by way of the one-year anniversary — of his decision to approve the raid that killed Osama bin Laden."

From a NYT opinion piece called "Romney Confronts Power of the Presidency," by Michael D. Shear. An alternate headline might be "Obama Embarrassingly Deploys the Power of the Presidency for Campaign Purposes."

When they shift back into campaign mode on Saturday...

Back?

Mr. Obama and his wife, Michelle....

A silly locution, found only in the New York Times.

... will bring to a close the first week of the general election campaign with a pair of huge campaign rallies in Ohio and Virginia that are intended to rekindle memories of his 2008 campaign.

I think this is a terrible mistake, going huge as a way to bring back the hugeness of 4 years ago. It's huge already to be President. You can't pile hugeness on top of that. And the hugeness of the past was something that built up, beginning from an unlikely underdog position, marked by the word "hope." This actually could work. How do you bring that feeling back? It's an intimate feeling, a sense that this new person has emerged. But a President holding 2 giant rallies? Going small is what would remind us of the past.

But the NYT's Shear is promoting the idea that Romney's in trouble, Romney's going to get it, because the President has the power of the Presidency to unload on the candidate who's so far only had to fight off midgets (or as Shear puts it — apparently without much knowledge of Bible stories — Romney's been "the Goliath in a field of Davids"). This appropriation of the power of presidency becomes an issue. It's an ugly thing when we can see it. Shear ends his piece with what is obviously going to be the Obama side of that issue:

The weaving of campaign and official business is the hallmark of presidential reelection campaigns, perfected by previous administrations of both parties. And Mr. Obama’s team will be no different in making use of the trappings of his office.

Mr. Obama’s team will be no different? Other's have "perfected" the "weaving"? I'm not seeing perfect weaving (or "seamless transition"). I'm seeing really crude and clumsy weaving and seams all over the place.

"Football spiked: Obama to address nation on Bin Laden anniversary live from Afghanistan."

"The official reason for the trip is to sign the new strategic partnership agreement with Karzai, but of course that doesn’t require his physical presence in Afghanistan. We all know why he’s there and why he chose today to visit. One word: Scoreboard."

***

I must be the last blogger in the world to notice that Obama went to Afghanistan. The linked story was posted yesterday at 3:35 pm, just as I was in the final rush preparing my last Conlaw class of the semester. After class, we played with puppies. That took a while. When we got home — because these were not our puppies — we sat around eating and watching a movie — "Bridesmaids" (HBO on Demand) — and got about halfway through before I sensed that the baseball game in San Diego must be on (because Meade was consulting his iPad), and that presented the perfect opportunity to cave in to sleepiness (I'd been up since 5) and appear attractively magnanimous. I switched to the game and switched off my personal consciousness. I really don't monitor the news constantly.

***

But, so Obama traveled to Afghanistan to "speak[] to an American television audience on Tuesday night from Bagram Air Base, [and] declare[] that he had traveled here to herald a new era in the relationship between the United States and Afghanistan, 'a future in which war ends, and a new chapter begins.'" The quote is from the first sentence of the article in the very Obama-friendly New York Times, and it's not very flattering, is it? He went all the way to Afghanistan to do a TV show aimed back at us here at home. He went there for a showy backdrop for the show. And he traveled there to "declare[] that he had traveled here to herald a new era." Herald... new era... I hear sarcasm. If the NYT didn't mean sarcasm, then they're so Obama-friendly that they don't hear how PR language like that sounds to a person who is just trying to read what he believes is supposed to be a newspaper.

"My fellow Americans,” he said, speaking against a backdrop of armored military vehicles and an American flag...

The NYT notes the showy backdrop. (By the way, the intro "My fellow Americans" will always, for me, call to mind LBJ.)

... “we’ve traveled through more than a decade under the dark cloud of war. Yet here, in the pre-dawn darkness of Afghanistan, we can see the light of new day on the horizon."

Oh, brother. Dark... pre-dawn darkness... light... new day... Not only is light and darkness a hackneyed metaphor, applied clumsily, but it's the very metaphor LBJ used over and over in his effort to manipulate our emotions about the Vietnam war.

Arianna Huffington calls Obama's bin Laden ad "despicable."

She said:

"I don't think there should be an ad about that... It's the same thing Hillary Clinton did with the 3 a.m. call. 'You're not ready to be commander-in-chief.' It's also what makes politicians and political leaders act irrationally when it comes to matters of war because they're so afraid to be called wimps, that they make decisions, which are incredible destructive for the country. I'm sure the president would not have escalated in Afghanistan if he was not as concerned, as Democrats are, that Republicans are going to use not escalating against him in a campaign."

"This is not a natural illness. It's an intentional act to poison schoolgirls."

"We are 100 percent sure that the water they drunk inside their classes was poisoned. This is either the work of those who are against girls' education or irresponsible armed individuals."

If you really want to locate the "war on women," check out Afghanistan.

Did a suicide bomber in Afghanistan almost kill Secretary of Defense Leon Panetta?

The NYT reports:

The Pentagon press secretary, George Little, said that Mr. Panetta was never in danger but he could not explain the Afghan’s motive or whether he was a suicide attacker aiming for Mr. Panetta’s plane. Nor could he explain why the Afghan was on fire. "For reasons that are totally unknown to us at this time, our personnel discovered that he was ablaze," Mr. Little said. "He ran, he jumped on to a truck, base personnel put the fire out and he was immediately treated for burn injuries."
Mr. Panetta proceeded with his schedule. But in a sign of the nervousness surrounding the visit, Marines and other troops among the 200 people gathered in a tent at Camp Leatherneck to hear Mr. Panetta speak were abruptly asked by their commander to get up, place their weapons — M-16 and M-4 automatic rifles and 9-mm pistols — outside the tent and then return unarmed. The commander, Sgt. Maj. Brandon Hall, told reporters he was acting on orders from superiors.

“All I know is, I was told to get the weapons out,” he said. Asked why, he replied, “Somebody got itchy, that’s all I’ve got to say. Somebody got itchy; we just adjust.”

Rogue U.S. soldier kills 15 civilians in Afghanistan.

"He reportedly left his military base in the early hours of the morning, attacking at least two homes. Nine children are among the dead."

The soldier - who reportedly suffered a breakdown before the attacks - is said to have handed himself over to the US military authorities after carrying out the killings....

"This is going to have very, very bad effect, I believe, and I think it is time the US may have to alter their policy of not allowing their soldiers to be tried in foreign countries," [said Prince Ali Seraj, head of the National Coalition for Dialogue with the Tribes in Afghanistan].

So now the theory is that we don't accept apologies when we perceive ulterior motives?

Democrats, hoping to keep Rush Limbaugh's Fluke floundering going, reject his apology:

By the time he apologized, online protesters had been organizing for days on social networking Web sites and liberal hubs like Daily Kos. They called on companies like ProFlowers to remove their ads from “The Rush Limbaugh Show” and appeared to be having some success, as companies like Sleep Train said they had suspended advertising....

Mr. Limbaugh’s critics dismissed his apology as having been forced by the advertiser pressure. Reflecting those feelings on NBC’s “Meet the Press” on Sunday, Representative Debbie Wasserman Schultz of Florida, the Democratic National Committee chairwoman, said, “I know he apologized, but forgive me, I doubt his sincerity, given that he lost at least six advertisers.”

Eric Boehlert of the liberal media monitoring group Media Matters for America predicted on Sunday that the apology would not “stop the pressure that’s being applied to his advertisers.”

“His comments were so egregious, naturally advertisers will have doubts about being associated with Limbaugh’s brand of hate,” Mr. Boehlert said in an e-mail message.

Now, I believe in general principles, and I want to know what the general principle is about accepting apologies. I'd like to nail down people like Debbie Wasserman Schultz and Eric Boehlert, because their candidate, Barack Obama, is one of the greatest purveyors of apologies in the history of the world!

Why did Obama apologize for the burning of Korans in Afghanistan? Should his apology be rejected as insincere because it didn't come from pure recognition that Americans had done wrong? Obviously, the apology was motivated by American self-interest. He wanted to stop the violent reaction.

The tendency in recent years has been to demand apologies. But these demands are bogus unless apologies are accepted. Now, some people criticize our culture of apology. Santorum didn't like Obama's apology for the Koran burning.

And Rush Limbaugh is the furthest thing from an apology guy:


February 20, 2012: "Why did Clinton bother with all the public apologies with Jesse Jackson and so forth over the Lewinsky stuff? Because it offended people's sense of decency where it comes to family values. He had to get 'em back."

October 12, 2011: "Leaked cables show Japan nixed a presidential apology to Hiroshima and Nagasaki for using nukes to end the overseas contingency operation known as World War II. Will the next president apologize for the current one? The obsessive need of this president to apologize for American exceptionalism and our defense of freedom continued recently when Barack Obama's State Department (run by Hillary Clinton) contacted the family of al-Qaeda propagandist and recruiter Samir Khan to 'express its condolences' to his family....We apologized for killing a terrorist before he could help kill any more of us. It's yet another part of the world apology tour that began with Obama taking the oath of office to protect and defend the United States and its Constitution against all enemies foreign and domestic, something he immediately felt sorry for."

January 31, 2011: "[W]e're minding our own business on September 11th; our own airplanes are hijacked by Islamist Muslim radicals, 3,000 people end up dead, and we think we have to reach out to Muslims. Obama gets elected, he goes over there, and gives this speech in Cairo as an apologist for the United States. It's always perplexed me.... Obama has been to Egypt. He apologized for us. He told everybody over there, 'We've been wrong and we're gonna make it right. I'm president now, and we're not gonna do these horrible, rotten things to you that my predecessors have done. I'm apologizing,' and still with Barack Hussein Pharaoh Obama now, President of the United States going into his third year, there's still anti-American sentiment in Egypt. How can this be? Where is the love? Where his the consensus?"

July 22, 2010: "People have asked me about this woman Sarah Spitz, who's now 'apologized,' and they want my reaction to it. And this is another thing I'll react to it but I really don't want to. This bores me as well, this whole concept of forcing people to apologize for things they meant to say. Why is she gonna apologize? She meant to say it, she wrote it, stand by it. You want to watch me die, Sarah? Say it! Where are your guts? Well, she's 'apologized.' 'A producer for an NPR-affiliated radio station has apologized for saying she would 'laugh loudly like a maniac and watch his eyes bug out' if she were to see conservative radio host Rush Limbaugh suffering a heart attack."

Why apologize? Sarah, this is where you people just flummox me. You wrote it. You meant it. Stand by it. She apologizes to "anyone I may have offended and I regret these comments." She doesn't regret 'em, and she hasn't apologized to me. She just apologized to anybody she "may have offended," but why apologize in the first place? She's buckling to pressure. She meant to say it.

She meant it. (interruption) What, Snerdley? What? (interruption) I don't know who is pressuring her to apologize. I have no idea who's pressuring here. You'd have to ask her. But I don't know why she's apologizing. She meant it! Stand by it. She knows damn well she meant it. Everybody on that website, in that listserv, meant everything they wrote. It's just fascinating to see they don't have the guts to stand by it. So that's my reaction. If you want to know what I think about it, that's it. (interruption) If she apologized to me directly? I don't know what I would do, but... (sigh) (interruption) Well, yes, I know I'd be gracious, but I'd just... (interruption) Well, I don't know if it will ever happen, but the point is that the latest trend in apologies, "That's not who I really am." You know, "That's not the person I am." Bull! It is who you are! You are a commie! You are a full-fledged Marxist liberal! You do wish I was dead. It is who you are.

I don't care whether it's Tiger Woods saying, "You know, that's really not who I am." It is. It is who you are! What, did somebody steal your personality for a day and grab hold of your hands and start typing on your keyboard and it wasn't you? "This is not who I am. I want everybody to know, as a publicist I understand and this is not who I am." It is who you are! This is one of the big problems we have in this country: People don't have the guts to be who they are and stand up for who they are and admit what they really are, especially under fire. "Oh, that wasn't me. I don't know what happened there! We were just hanging around with a bunch of like-minded people and then you saw it, and that means 'that's not who I am.'" I bet the other people in this group are a little upset she's apologizing.

Ha ha. I'll stop there. I hit the mother lode. LOL. Ha ha ha.

So, what do you say? Anyone looking for consistency here?

After reports of burned Korans, "a deadly chain of events that has not only inflamed tensions but possibly exposed a crippling weakness" in the Afghanistan exit strategy.

WaPo puts it this way:

The killing of the U.S. officers on Saturday occurred two days after a man wearing an Afghan army uniform fatally shot two American troops in eastern Afghanistan, the latest in a string of incidents in recent months in which local security forces have turned against NATO personnel.

Some of the killings have been perpetrated by Afghan troops whose loyalties lay with the Taliban. But, in most cases, the attacks have been the result of tensions between U.S. forces and Afghans who felt as though they had suffered an insult to themselves or their faith.

But Obama apologized. The article doesn't mention Obama. Only "Senior Obama administration officials," who, we're told, "have sought to reassure a war-weary American public that the NATO combat mission in Afghanistan would draw to a close by the middle of next year." The middle of next year, that is, after the election. We weren't supposed to be thinking about Afghanistan during the election season.

Here's the NYT article:

American officials sought to reassure both Afghanistan’s government and a domestic audience on Sunday that the United States remained committed to the war after the weekend killing of two American military officers inside the Afghan Interior Ministry and days of deadly anti-American protests.

But behind the public pronouncements, American officials described a growing concern, even at the highest levels of the Obama administration and Pentagon, about the challenges of pulling off a troop withdrawal in Afghanistan that hinges on the close mentoring and training of army and police forces.

This article does refer to Obama, his apology for the Koran burnings, and the impending presidential election — in the context of things Romney and Santorum said. Romney's comment is so bland, it's not worth quoting. Santorum, in what the NYT calls "harsh criticism," faults Obama for apologizing when the burning of the Korans was not an intentional display of disrespect.

Here's the full transcript of what Santorum said (on ABC's "This Week," i.e., the George Stephanopoulos show). Santorum, referring to the Koran burnings, says "a mistake was made, clearly a mistake, which we should not have apologized for."

[S]ay it's unfortunate, say that this is something that should have been done.... But to apologize for something that was not an intentional act is something that the President of the United States... suggests that there is somehow blame, this is somehow that we did something wrong in the sense of doing a deliberate act wrong. I think it shows that we are -- that I think it shows weakness. I think what we say is, look, what happened here was wrong. But it was -- it was not something that was deliberate, and we are -- we -- you know, we take responsibility for it. It's unfortunate. But to apologize, I think, lends credibility that somehow or another that it was more than that.

Do we have any actual experts on Afghan culture who can tell us what apologies mean to Afghans? Obviously, we have trouble understanding what counts as a manifestation of disrespect and why it inflames the Afghan people to such a degree, or whether it's bogus inflammation used as an excuse for violence, so I have no confidence that Obama or Santorum is any good at predicting the effect of apologizing or not apologizing on the events in Afghanistan.

Both of them seem to take a position on apologizing that has to do with their American cultural values. As Americans, we can talk about the meaning of apologies and form opinions about whether Obama or Santorum has the better philosophy. But choosing a President, I want someone effective at doing what is in American interests around the world.

Obama came into office claiming some special insight into how we are perceived in other countries, and he made us feel that he would improve these perceptions. This has not happened.

Santorum offers a different approach. Perhaps reciting and adhering to clearly stated American values would work better than Obama's apologies for America. But I don't see any special understanding or expertise in either of these men. They are just 2 American men behaving according to their instincts and ideology.

"Baad involves giving a young woman, often a child, into slavery and forced marriage."

"It is largely hidden because the girls are given to compensate for 'shameful' crimes like murder, adultery and elopement...."

The strength of the traditional justice system and the continuing use of baad is a sign both of Afghans’ lack of faith in the government’s justice system, which they say is corrupt, and their extreme sense of insecurity. Baad is most common in areas where it is dangerous for people to seek out government institutions. Instead of turning to the courts, they go to jirgas, assemblies of tribal elders, that use tribal law, which allows the exchange of women.

"This act by American soldiers is simply inhuman and condemnable in the strongest possible terms."

"We expressly ask the US government to urgently investigate the video and apply the most severe punishment to anyone found guilty in this crime." — Hamid Karzai.

"The US has agreed in principle to release high-ranking Taliban officials from Guantánamo Bay..."

"... in return for the Afghan insurgents' agreement to open a political office for peace negotiations in Qatar, the Guardian has learned."