The Road Goes On

In response to this request for comments in the New York Times today,

“What would you like to hear from the president tonight? Will his supporters be open to persuasion? How can he best convince you that he is proceeding on the right path in Afghanistan?

Share your thoughts.”

I wrote the following:

I admit, I am nervous about the war. It has numerous similarities to Vietnam - though also some key differences. We are deep in dept and can ill afford this war. I was against the War on Terror when Bush began it. I was against going into Afghanistan. Even as a high schooler I understood that Al Qaeda were terrorists and not linked to any country. I was even more against going into Iraq. It was obvious to me that President Bush’s justifications for it were empty.

However, here we are. Eight years into both wars. And President Obama has taken on the thankless task of figuring out what to do with them. He has determined to take us out of Iraq, for which I am grateful, but he’s doing it slowly and carefully. As much as I think we need to be out right this moment, I appreciate his reasons for making sure Iraq can remain roughly stable after we leave. The more difficult decision he has made is Afghanistan.

No matter what decision he made, President Obama was going to upset a large part of this country and the world. It is by no means clear cut, stay or go. And even among the myriad of possible actions, it is immensely hard to determine which is the best. Only President Obama truly has the information in front of him to best make the decision. I hope no one in the government with held information from him in an attempt to bias his decision.

Afghanistan is a mess. A mess, at least partly, of our making. The government is corrupt, the countryside largely unpatrolled and in the hands of extremists. Many Afghanis who are friendly to our face, fight us by night.

Pakistan is under siege, fast becoming a place where the extremists are flocking and have targeted. Even more terrifying, Pakistan has a large stockpile of nuclear weapons. If it decays one or more is almost guaranteed to fall into the wrong hands.

The two are linked. The border between Pakistan and Afghanistan is porous. So the enemy being fought in both countries is one and the same. They cannot be separated.

If we leave Afghanistan, we may leave the Taliban and the extremists strengthened with a stronghold in Afghanistan from which to double their attempts to destabilize Pakistan. If they succeed, America could become the next target. A target of nuclear armed extremists. Or the extremists could become emboldened and attempt to further destabilize other areas of the Middle East.

Or it is possible our leaving may remove the wind from the sails of the extremists. With out us meddling in Middle Eastern affairs the extremists would no longer have an immediate enemy to point to and proclaim, “They are fighting a war against Islam. We must fight them!”

If we stay, we may further inflame the situation and send more young Muslims to the cause of the extremists. We may sink billions of dollars and thousands of American lives into a Vietnam style quagmire, and gain nothing. The result may end up being the same as if we had left, only we’ll be worse off.

Or we may be able to stabilize Afghanistan, much as we did Iraq. We may be able to employ a COIN strategy that wins over the populace, builds a stable democratic government, defeats or marginalizes the extremists and leaves whole region far better off than it was when we went in.

Both decisions have terrifying worst case scenarios. And both have attractive best case scenarios.

I deeply appreciate President Obama’s thoughtfulness and deliberation in making his decision. Frankly, I don’t know what decision I wanted to hear. The more I read about the situation the more I become convinced that it is a problem that I do not know the answer to.

For me, the question of whether or not America should fight a war boils down to this: would I be willing to be drafted to win this war?

I don’t know the answer to that question with regard to Afghanistan. It is simply too complicated.

What does Obama need to say to convince me he’s made the right decision? He needs to tell me how we’ll pay for staying. If we’re going to stay, then we all need to contribute to paying the cost. If that means more taxes or cuts elsewhere, then so be it. He needs to prove to me that our that our strategy will at least have a chance of succeeding. He needs to show me how we’ll try to reform Afghanistan’s corrupt government, how we’ll win over the populace and how we’ll corner, defeat and marginalize the extremists. He needs to show how he’ll win over the Pakistanis as well. Right now they fear us almost as much as the extremists. But we need their help if we are to succeed.

Finally, he needs to show that it is not just us carrying the burden. Nuclear armed extremists - the ultimate threat from this situation - are a threat to the whole world. The world should be behind us in this. If staying and fighting is truly the answer then our allies should be in this with us. Thus far they’ve shown a willingness to send symbolic troop amounts and pat us on the back. They need to do more.

I’ve had bad luck getting my comments through their moderation for reasons unknown to me.  Just wanted to make sure the comment was preserved.

Sorry I have these droughts.  I just get distracted by the rest of life.  Life’s been good, but busy.  We finally released our software at work - and of course the bug reports started rolling in immediately.  We’ve already released a couple of patches.  We also immediately started working on the next version and I’ve been wrapped up in that.

Shelly and I had our second anniversary of being together.  Kinda scary, but we had a good time.  We went to Maestro’s here in town.  Holy cow it was good!  It was really expensive, but completely worth it.

We’re loving our new landlords.  Glynn and PJ are awesome.  And they are many, many orders of magnitude better than our previous landlords.  Yes I know, I still haven’t posted that tale.  I will, I just have to find a spare moment to sit down and write it up in a way that does it justice.

I haven’t been reading as much lately, all of my spare time has been focused on a single project (Muddy Reality - I’ll get to that later).  Shelly and I have been going to a local Bikram Yoga class a couple of times a week, in lieu of frisbee.  It has gotten to cold to play frisbee outdoors.  Yeah, I know, I’m a wimp where the cold is concerned.  Bikram Yoga is hot room yoga - perfect for Saratoga’s winters.

My reading list hasn’t changed much, still working on Mankiw’s Introduction to Economics, also still working on Malcolm Gladwell’s Outliers, as well as the Gang of Four book and Stroustrup’s book.  Shelly’s been reading Animal, Vegetable, Miracle by Barbara Kingsolver.  She’s been reading it out loud to me or occasionally I’ll take over and read it to her.  It’s really good, and has been making us both think about trying to start a more extensive indoor garden using grow lamps and such.  We’re still not sure if we can afford it, but we’re thinking very hard about it.  In any case we’ve been trying to, with some success, get most of our food from the local farmer’s market.  Of course, the market’s going to go indoors soon and so the fresh fruits and veggies will likely go away.

I haven’t actually made much progress on all those books, because all of my spare time has been focused completely on writing Muddy Reality, Middle Earth Mud’s new engine.  In alpha 6 I took ten steps back after taking 10 forward in alpha 5.  I decided that the telnet engine at Muddy Reality’s core - the one still pretty much exactly the same as it was in CircleMUD - simply wouldn’t do.  I started over, from scratch.  There is no longer a single line of code left over from CircleMUD.  It’s all mine.  And I started from a clean slate.

Well, it took a couple of weeks, but as of this weekend Muddy Reality’s object oriented C++ telnet engine is fully functional.  So is the new command interpreter.  I finished them and spent a while pounding them trying to break them.  They held up very well.

The next step is writing the new databasing engine and then starting on the account system.  I’m almost reluctant to post this.  Posting about the development seems to encourage the continuation of development hell.  But I feel like an update is necessary.

Anyway, I need to get back to work.  I’ll try and do this more often, so that posts will be shorter and not such a slog.

So I picked up a copy of N. Gregory  Mankiw’s Principles of Economics 5th edition for fun and to educate myself on Economics.  I’m 5 pages in and I’m already encountering gross over simplifications that suggest a political bent that I sorely disagree with.  Now granted, I’m only 5 pages in.  And this is a first semester undergraduate Economics textbook.  So of course there are going to be some oversimplifications.  But some of them are so blatantly Laissez-faire Capitalist and anti-government conservative in their world view and in the way the issues are simplified that I can’t not answer them in some way.  I’ve already writen notes all over this page.  Let me give you an example of Mankiw’s take on the environment:

Laws that require firms to reduce pollution raise the cost of producing goods and services.  Because of the higher costs, these firms end up earning smaller profits, paying lower wages, charging higher prices or some combination of these three. Thus, while pollution regulations yield the benefit of a cleaner environment and the improved health that comes with it, they have the cost of reducing the incomes of the firms’ owners, workers and customers.

Yes - reconfiguring production to reduce pollution can incur short term costs.  But often the lower pollution method of production is much more efficient and reduces costs in the long run.  For example, clean renewable energy.  There’s an enormous entry cost.  But once you’ve built the wind mills and solar panels you have only maintence to consider.  You don’t have to pay for fuel!  Which means in the long run they are far more efficient!

There are more, but they aren’t quite as blatant as that one.  And one of the revolves around an assertion that higher taxes create a disincentive to work and thus lower overall production.  It comes as an unsupported assertion in the book and I wonder what kind of evidence their could possibly be to support that.  I’m sure there is evidence, but I wish he’d provide some in the text book.  Hopefully I’ll see it further along.

Here’s to you, to me and one and all
To the garda, and the gargle, and the trophy on the wall
Here’s to you, to me and one and all
The day that D’arcy’s drunken donkey won the race at Donegal

Shelly and I are gonna go see Gaelic Storm this weekend at the Irish 2000 Music and Arts Festival.  I can’t wait!  If anyone in the Saratoga Area wants to tag along, we’d love to go in a big group.  If you want to come go down to price chopper and ask about Irish 2000 tickets at the register, then talk to us about carpooling.  Hopefully we can find a couple of designated drivers so the rest of us can have a merry old time.

Well, Shelly and I have succesfully moved.  A block and  a half down the street.  We love the new place.  It’s far better than the old one and the rent is actually cheaper.

Apparently our old landlords weren’t just bad landlords - they were actually criminals!  More on that later, I have to run.

Just wanted to say, we’re baaack!  Oh and the week’s down time was due to the move and having to wait to get internet installed at the new place.  Anyway, I’m off I’ll be back later to tell the tale of the clueless landlords who attempted to commit morgage fraud and managed to screw over many a tenent along the way before finally getting caught.