The German magazine Spiegel writes pleadingly of the need for President Obama to provide more “leadership” on Afghanistan. It is one of several European newspapers that are wondering: what’s up?

Afghanistan and Pakistan are being shaken by attacks, and the Taliban is dictating the course of the war. US President Obama has been silent about the situation for far too long and European countries like Germany and France are correct to demand better American leadership on the issue of Afghanistan.

The most important piece of news from the most recent meeting of NATO defense ministers was that there was no news. …

For once, this hesitation cannot be attributed to widespread war fatigue in Europe. The mission in Afghanistan is seen as a toxic issue in all Western nations, and every government that has provided troops has come under sharp criticism at home. What the US’s NATO allies now find far more irritating is US President Barack Obama’s silence on the issue.

The world has been waiting for clear words from the White House for months. Obama has had government and military analysts studying the military and political situation in the embattled Hindu Kush region since early January. He appointed Richard Holbrooke, probably the US’s most effective diplomat in crisis situations, to be his special envoy to the “AfPak” region, he has replaced generals and he has deployed more troops. The answers Obama asked his experts to provide after taking office have been sitting on his desk for a long time. But the conclusions vary. Obama will have to make his own decision, one that will shape his political fate.

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I would like to open nominations for the best reader comment on the Belmont Club.  The rules are:

• It should have been submitted by someone other than myself in this version of the Belmont Club or in any of the archives.
• The comment should make sense on its own and not require the context of the main post in order to be comprehensible.
• Supply a link to the comment in your nominations by obtaining the link location of the comment. For example, the first comment in the previous post by Life of the Mind has the link value http://pajamasmedia.com/richardfernandez/2009/10/27/code-review/#comment-1
• After the nominations close, I’ll tabulate the most frequently suggested comments and conduct a small poll. The prize is a modest gift certificate from Amazon which I will pay for.  Many people have generously donated to the Belmont Club. I think it’s only fair to give the commenters a small prize back.

Two contrasting reports have recently appeared in the news. The Washington Post describes how a British local government authorized itself to conduct comms checks, covert surveillance and an undercover operation to discover whether or not a mother had improperly filled out an elementary school enrolment form. They gave a mother the mafia treatment over what was essentially a primary school issue. Critics have drawn attention to its lack of proportionality, like a case of using a pile-driver to crack a nut. In the meantime retired General Wesley Clark argues that America has been taking the opposite approach: taking a pop-gun to a T-rex by deciding to treat grave threats to its information infrastructure as if they were trivial.  The story of the British local government’s valiant detection efforts need to be told first.

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Shannon Love at Chicago Boyz surveys the British political scene and muses on whether the recent rise of the British National Party tells us anything about how a European society can be infatuated with the Left one year and switch over to fascism in a relatively short period.

Via Instapundit comes a disturbing report that one-fifth of the British electorate would consider voting for the British Nationalist Party (BNP), which is considered by almost everyone left or right to be a genuine fascist party.

How did Britain come to this state?

Simple, the current liberal order has proven itself ineffective in addressing many of the major problems that Britain faces. As I wrote three years ago, liberal orders don’t slowly evolve into authoritarian ones. Instead, they become less and less effective until they suddenly collapse into an authoritarian order. People simply lose faith that the liberal order can function and they throw their support behind an authoritarian order just to survive.

If fascism and Left wing socialism share most of their political DNA then this process is easy to understand. When the vital 5% — or whatever crucially differentiates them — flips then one becomes the other. The BNP is not a ‘conservative party’ in the American mold. It is essentially a racist but economically Left wing organization which accepts a large state role in managing the economy. Where it differs with the Left is for whose benefit the economy should be managed. For the Left the answer is: for the benefit of what it defines to be the historical victim — Muslims, immigrants from former colonies and people with special sexual needs. For the BNP the answer to the question is: for the benefit of the poor white; the indigene; the people who have lived in the British isles. The Left correctly accuses the BNP of dividing the nation. What it fails to recognize is that the BNP is simply paying them back in their own coin. This exchange of toxic currency has set up a zero sum game. It has cast the Left as the champions of one side and the BNP is happily casting itself as the champions of the other.

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Only two years ago the public was reliably informed that Iran had halted its nuclear weapons program in 2003 and that the only threat it represented existed in the fevered brain of the vast right wing conspiracy. Today we are told by equally reliable sources the administration is negotiating to delay the country’s ability to build a nuclear weapon for about a year, “buying more time for President Obama to search for a diplomatic solution to the Iranian nuclear standoff.” Not a bad comeback for a program that stopped a long time ago.  David Sanger of the NYT describes the administration’s latest diplomatic initiative with Iran.

VIENNA — Iranian negotiators have agreed to a draft deal that would delay the country’s ability to build a nuclear weapon for about a year, buying more time for President Obama to search for a diplomatic solution to the Iranian nuclear standoff. …

If Tehran’s divided leadership agrees to the accord, which Iran’s negotiators indicated was not assured, it will remove enough nuclear fuel from Iran to delay any work on a nuclear weapon until the country can replenish its stockpile of fuel, estimated to require about one year. As such, it would buy more time for Mr. Obama to try to negotiate a more comprehensive and more difficult agreement to end Iran’s production of new nuclear material.

In 2007 ABC News reported:

In a stunning reversal of Bush administration conventional wisdom, a new assessment by U.S. intelligence agencies concludes Iran shelved its nuclear weapons program over four years ago.

“We judge with high confidence that in fall 2003, Tehran halted its nuclear weapons program,” reads a declassified version of the National Intelligence Estimate key findings. We judge with moderate confidence that the earliest possible date Iran would be technically capable of producing enough highly enriched uranium (HEU) for a weapon is late 2009.”

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Whenever a proposal is advanced to expand government oversight over activities such as child rearing, education and health care — and this includes subjects like euthanasia or family abuse — those who want to leave major choices to individuals or families, despite the fact they may sometimes or often do the wrong thing are described as uncaring, and ‘regressive’. In contrast, those who wish to shift the power of decision to government are characterized as “compassionate”, “enlightened” or “progressive”. And since there are often cases when government does better than individuals the substance of the decision can be argued back and forth.

One of the arguments for centralizing power in government is that it reduces variance. People get ’standard’ care, which is ‘equitable’ and predictable. This is contrasted with the wider distribution of outcomes when the same decisions are left to individuals. In the health care debate for example, there are people who obviously get great health care and others who get relatively bad insurance. Wouldn’t it be better if the variance were reduced by a government program?

Left out of this argument is the idea of systemic risk. Leaving decisions to individuals makes it unlikely that they will all get it right but it equally implies they almost never get it all wrong. Society based on individual choices has a diversified portfolio of outcomes. In contrast if a government gets it wrong, it goes spectacularly wrong. Let’s forget about Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac for a moment; turn our eyes away from Barney Frank and look across the Atlantic to the UK’s ironically named Office of the Public Guardian.

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Forbes says that more than half a million new claims for unemployment insurance were filed in the week ending October 17. Many will be looking for new jobs or contracts and trying to seek them as cheaply as possible.  What is the minimum amount that a person can spend to build an effective online platform to find piece work and jobs? People who’ve worked in the software development field probably know the answers to those questions already.  But for a person who’s spent his life on a factory floor, driving a truck or working largely on an office-supplied computer a simple set of suggestions might help. Here are some tips for a person who already has a computer and broadband access to the Internet. They might not be the best, but they are probably a useful starting point for someone standing on the edge of the Great Digital Ocean.

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Andrew Brown of the Guardian called the Roman Catholic Church’s offer to admit disaffected Anglicans “the end of the Anglican Communion”, describing the 1/7th of the clergy which its believes will jump ship as a death blow. If so, it is the coup de grace. The Anglican Communion has long been hemorrhaging members, fleeing from a church which many of its members believe has abandoned its traditional beliefs. Most of those who were expected to take up the Catholic Church’s offer to convert are described as social conservatives who think their community has gone too far toward embracing openly gay bishops and women priests. The Daily Mail put the indictment against the Archbishop of Canterbury plainly: he’s no longer a divine, but a politician and those are dime a dozen. “If our Archbishop spent less time fretting about climate change, he might notice the pope is about to mug him”.

it is quite possible for moderately intelligent people to listen to the Archbishop preach a sermon or deliver a lecture on theological matters and not be at all sure what he is on about. … Some will remember how not very long ago he incautiously suggested during a radio interview that officially sanctioned Sharia courts might be allowable for Muslims in this country. … Far too often he sounds like a Guardian leader writer in full flood rather than a divine.

One of his pet subjects is global warming. There may be nothing wrong with that – except that there are already many people, some of them rather more expert than he is, lecturing us about its supposed perils. Shouldn’t an Archbishop of Canterbury offer us guidance on moral issues?

But Andrew Brown’s article in the Guardian fails to see this; and he seems to think that Rome is interested in cannibalizing the Anglican church in order to become more like them; he thinks Benedict is coveting their married clergy, gorgeous liturgy and brilliant seminaries. Brown sees the move as Rome’s way of making itself more hip via the back door. It is only pretending to absorb Anglicanism, secretly it wants to follow in its footsteps.

this is a huge coup for Rome. They may not get the churches – and they certainly don’t want to have to pay for them – but they get so much more. For a start, this establishes a tradition of married Roman Catholic clergy in the west. The language, the services, and the gorgeous choral music of Anglicanism are more obviously attractive, but the real long term significance of this announcement is the talk about seminaries. …

If the former Anglicans can train up successors who will also be able to have wives, the Roman Catholic church may have found a way to escape the prospect of a largely gay priesthood to which the doctrine of compulsory celibacy appeared to condemn them. It is ironic that Anglican efforts to deal honestly with the problem of sexuality should have provided the Catholics with the excuse they needed to strike this decisive blow. God always did move in mysterious ways.

Andrew Brown doesn’t grasp the fact that the Roman Catholic Church is already late to the party. Anglicanism had already been laid low by many years of continuous attack by another, much more powerful religion. This religion had largely eaten it out from within; turned it from a regular religion into a social work organization, changed it from a proclaimer of the Gospel to what in many cases was regarded as a mouthpiece for political correctness.  This was precisely what the Daily Mail meant when it accused Rowan Williams of preoccupation with Global Warming and sounding “like a Guardian leader writer in full flood”.  The Roman Church comes as a scavenger on a field on which this powerful force stands plucking at the throat of most Christian denominations. That powerful force is a religion itself; the one world faith born in Europe and the real successor to Anglicanism as the source of official piety in Britain.  That religion is of course socialism/communism. John Gray in the New Statesman follows the ups and downs of one of the largest churches in the Western world.

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Buried beneath news of the “balloon boy” hoax is the story of Muslim versus Muslim attacks in Southwest Asia. The latest installment in that saga is the bombing of Islamic schools all over Pakistan. The Daily Times banners “Students Terrorised”.

* Three women among six killed in first-ever attack on students as twin suicide bombers hit Islamic University Islamabad
* 25 female students among 29 injured
* Punjab closes educational institutions indefinitely while NWFP, Balochistan and Sindh closed till Sunday

ISLAMABAD/LAHORE: The provincial governments on Tuesday ordered the closure of government and private educational institutions across the country following an attack on the International Islamic University Islamabad (IIUI) in which six people, including three female students, were killed and 29 others injured.

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Hillary Clinton’s memory failed her again. The Secretary of State claimed she mis-spoke after her claim to have stayed at the ruined hotel in Belfast was debunked by British newspapers. “Mrs Clinton told assembled politicians at Stormont: ‘When Bill and I first came to Belfast we stayed at the Europa Hotel … even though then there were sections boarded up because of damage from bombs.’” The trouble with that is it could not have happened. The Times Online reports:

The Europa, where most journalists covering the decades-long conflict stayed, was famed as Europe’s most bombed hotel, earning the moniker “the Hardboard Hotel”.

However, the last Provisional IRA bomb to damage the Europa was detonated in 1993, two years before President Clinton and his wife checked in for the night.

The last time the Europa underwent renovations because of bomb blast damage was in January 1994, 22 months before the presidential entourage booked 110 rooms at the hotel.

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