In 1812, Napoleon Bonaparte of France, head of the largest army in the world, began the worst military campaign in history. His ill-fated and tragic invasion of Russia led to nearly two thirds of the French army getting killed. The effects of the doomed maneuver were so long-standing that France never again recovered its military potency. Senator Barack Obama recently stated that if he's elected president the US will engage in a military maneuver just as foolish.

Within Senator Obama's recent pronouncements on Iraq is an ominous and troubling prescription about the small land-locked country of Afghanistan. The proposal involves sending "at least" two additional combat brigades to support the 50,000 NATO troops already present in Afghanistan. He goes on to ask for more helicopters, more nonmilitary assistance, and more intelligence gathering.

All of this, in Senator Obama's eyes, is supposed to suggest his greater military aptitude; his attempt to show that he will finish the job -- capturing Bin Laden and defeating the Taliban -- that his Republican predecessor was unable to finish. It is also a lot of politics, because increasing troop presence in Afghanistan allows Obama to say that he supports troop withdrawal from Iraq without appearing like the "surrender monkey" that the Republican opposition will inevitably try to paint him as around election time.

Yet Senator Obama's proposal is one of the worst military ideas in recent history. Here is why:

Afghanistan is considered the "graveyard of empires." Shortly after 9/11, in his 2001 Foreign Affairs essay, Milton Bearden, the CIA station chief in Pakistan in the 1980's, stated that unless the US proceeded with caution it would end up "on the ash heap of Afghan history."

The list of emperors and nations that have tried to hold Afghanistan is long and there is not a single success story. The Soviet Union spent ten years there, with helicopter gunships and tactical nuclear weapons, and failed. The British Empire spent nearly a hundred years trying to alternatively invade and control Afghanistan and veritably failed at both. The Ottoman Empire, which considered itself the inheritor of Roman power, never bothered with Afghanistan. In fact, they were actually dealt crippling blows by invaders from Afghanistan. In the seventh century, even the heaving Arab armies that had been able to take over then world power Persia in a mere five years after the death of Muhammad were unable to take Afghanistan. For Afghanistan to become Muslim more than a hundred years later it took a local ruler from within, and even then power was not centralized in one man. In other words, Senator Obama is setting the US up for failure of world-historical proportions.

Unfortunately most American policy makers don't quite understand the difficulty associated with holding Afghanistan because they think that successful invasion is tantamount to a successful occupation. That, of course, is the same tragedy that befell everyone from the Soviets to the armies of Muhammad. Afghanistan allows itself to be invaded. It doesn't allow itself to be held. Testament of this lies in the fact that it has now been seven years since the US military entered Afghanistan and yet just the other day an American base was actually infiltrated and 9 marines were killed. It will only get worse.

The reasons that Afghanistan is impossible to hold have to do with geography. Because of its centralized and landlocked location insurgents can disappear into any number of neighboring countries and use them as a base to launch attacks on the occupier. These days the base of insurgent operation are the tribal areas of Pakistan. Even if, miraculously, the US is able to clean out the tribal areas - an operation to which no sane Pakistani politician or military dictator would agree - it would simply mean that the Taliban would move to another one of the neighboring countries. It could be Turkmenistan or Tajikistan or most likely, Uzbekistan, which is now, as the noted journalist Ahmed Rashid pointed out in his aptly titled book Descent Into Chaos, producing militants at an alarming rate.

It would perhaps behoove Senator Obama to look at some of the ways the current Afghan insurgency uses the Afghan geography to its advantage:

- Recently US and UK forces captured one stash of Taliban heroin worth nearly two billion dollars going out from an Iranian port.

- Before that, an investigation by the Independent UK discovered that the Taliban are going to the northern border to purchase weapons directly from the Russians.

- Simultaneously an investigation by the NYTimes revealed that the Taliban have taken control of the marble mines in Pakistan's tribal areas.

All this doesn't even include any mention of the vast number of foreign fighters that come to Afghanistan from across the world, using the countless entry points into the country.

Historically, issues of geography have perhaps been at forefront of any military planning with respect to Afghanistan, but with Senator Obama, they barely register.

For someone who previously disparaged the Iraq war as a "dumb war" and a "rash war" his suggestions about increasing troop presence in Afghanistan is a mistake. It is the sort of thing that led Napolean Bonaparte to destroy France.

But perhaps the only thing worse than Senator Obama's ideas are those of Senator McCain. No doubt dueling with his opponent, he recently announced that under his plan the US will commit even more troops to Afghanistan than it would under Senator Obama's plan. Such breathless scheming taking place by the leading presidential contenders will lead to disaster.

Getting bogged down in Afghanistan would be infinitely worse for the national interest than any Iraq.

A few weeks ago Jewcy broke the story that a viral e-mail, directed at Jewish voters, accused "bigot" Sen. Barack Obama of "hating" Jews and sympathizing with the Nation of Islam. Many prominent Jewish leaders condemned this slander, but some readers might remain convinced. Eli Valley takes their hysteria to the next level.

CLICK TO ENLARGE

By killing two South Korean hostages and refusing to release the remaining twenty-one, including eighteen women, the Taliban is taking a new path that hints it is becoming an Afghan branch of Al Qaeda. [Christian Science Monitor]

Cheney says he was wrong about the status of the Iraqi insurgency. The Vice President admitted to Larry King that he was (gasp!) "incorrect" in saying two years ago that the insurgency was in its “last throes.” [Iraq Slogger] It took two years of vicious, bloody insurgency and thousand of military and civilian casualties for the VP to finally admit he was "incorrect." That's noble of him. Now, how about some remorse.

The House of Representatives passed a measure intended to improve diagnosis and treatment of PTSD in service members returning from Iraq and Afghanistan. [Iraq Slogger]

Pro-Taliban fighters have seized control of a mosque and shrine in the Mohmand area of Pakistan's North West Frontier province and renamed it the Red Mosque. The tribesmen have expressed support for Abdul Rashid Ghazi, the leader of Islamabad's Lal Masjid, or Red Mosque, killed in a government assault last month. [Al Jazeera]

Tori of Atlanta, a voluptuous Southern courtesan, will be in Iraq this month to entertain the men of the Private Security Contractors Association. [Iraq Slogger]

"One of the least covered aspects of the fallout from the Iraq war is the rising toll of suicides, both near the battlefield and back home." [Editor & Publisher]

Efraim Halevy, former chief of Israel's Mossad intelligence agency, says it is time for Israel to speak directly with the leaders of Hamas. [The Wall Street Journal]

The Bush administration offers 25 percent more aid to Israel as part of the massive arms deal for Saudi Arabia, but Democrats and Jewish groups say they still want many questions answered before signing off on the plan. [Jewish Telegraph Agency]

Syria’s political and military leaders have rescheduled the start of hostilities against Israel on the Golan for the second two weeks of November, 2007, postponing their original planning by more than two months. Also, Saudi Arabia will not promise to attend Bush's proposed Mideast peace conference, and they say Israel needs to show peace rather than just talk about it. [Debka]

Professor Martin Kramer, a senior fellow at Shalem Center's Adelson Institute for Strategic Studies, blogs on the geopolitical situation of the Jews. [The Jerusalem Post]

Egyptian and Jordanian foreign ministers arrived in Jerusalem representing the only two Arab governments that have signed peace deals with Israel. They spoke today about the peace initiative and specifically avoided referencing the Arab League, which has never recognized Israel. Yet, without mentioning the League, the two foreign ministers are pushing the Arab League’s peace plan for the region which stipulates three main conditions for normal relations with Israel: 1. full withdrawal from land occupied in the 1967 war, including Jerusalem, 2. the creation of a Palestinian state, and 3. a just solution to the Palestinian refugee problem. [Debka] [The Washington Times]

Beijing’s Xinhua news service reported today that Taliban rebels have demanded that eight Taliban prisoners be released in exchange for eight South Korean hostages. The hostages are primarily female members of a Christian group who were abducted last Thursday in Ghazni, southwest of Kabul. [Xinhua]

The deadline for releasing the Taliban prisoners was set for Tuesday evening and then extended indefinitely. Debka reported this afternoon that the Taliban has killed one of the hostages. [Debka]

Shvitz editor Michael Weiss, posted yesterday on Libya’s release of six medical workers—five Bulgarian nurses and one Palestinian doctor—who were held for eight years under the dubious and unsubstantiated charge of deliberately infecting children with the virus that causes AIDS. [Jewcy]

Susannah Sirkin, deputy director of Physicians for Human Rights, said, “The charges were fabricated; the nurses were tortured into confessing; there was no due process.” [The New York Times]

In the aftermath of the prisoners’ release, the EU has no problem normalizing relations with Libya’s leaders: French President Nicolas Sarkozy will travel to Tripoli to boost the EU-Libya ties. [BBC]

President Bush’s lynchpin: personal diplomacy via frequent video conferences with Prime Minister Nuri Kamal al-Maliki of Iraq. They chat on troops and leadership and God, which is all well and good, but where are the results? [The New York Times]

David Remnick writes the Letter from Jerusalem in this week’s New Yorker profiling Avraham Burg, a former Speaker of the Knesset, and a “Zionist politician who has lost his faith in the future” (of Israel).

“People are not willing to admit it,” Burg said, “but Israel has reached the wall […] We are already dead. We haven’t received the news yet, but we are dead. It doesn’t work anymore. It doesn’t work. . . . There is no one to talk to here. The religious community of which I was a part—I feel no sense of belonging to it. The secular community—I am not part of it, either. I have no one to talk to. I am sitting with you and you don’t understand me, either.”

“After some fifteen, twenty years in political life I had a feeling all of a sudden that, to use the Biblical term, Israel was the kingdom without prophesy. I realized that the three founding narratives of the national idea of Israeliness were over: the mass immigration to the land, aliyah; the security of the land; and the settling of the land. All three had served their purpose and were no longer the core of the nation’s narratives.”

On the Holocaust as a reference point for Israeli statehood, Burg told Remnick,

"We confiscated, we monopolized, world suffering. We did not allow anybody else to call whatever suffering they have ‘holocaust’ or ‘genocide,’ be it Armenians, be it Kosovo, be it Darfur. In the last years, Israeliness has confined itself for itself only and lost interest almost for what happens in the world. For me, Israel is shrinking into its own shell rather than struggling for a better world."

Otniel Schneller, a Knesset member from Ehud Olmert’s centrist Kadima Party, has said that when Burg dies he should be denied burial in the special section of Mt. Herzl National Cemetery reserved for national leaders.

Today, more than 600 French Jews made aliyah. [JTA]

Pro-Taliban militants in Pakistan have ended their truce with the government and killed at least 70 people in the last two days.

I admit I have little, if anything, to offer in resolving any kind of conflict in the Middle East. However, I do have a marketing note for Pakistan:

"Islamabad?" Really? Maybe it's time to think about a name change.

If the U.S. had a city somewhere in the Midwest called "Separationofchurchandstatesucksalot" -- I think we'd do a little PR.

Agence France-Presse: Pakistani security forces began their assault on the mosque compound before daybreak on Tuesday, just hours after talks broke down to end the eight-day siege in central Islamabad.

Olmert calls for Syria to resume peace talks with Israel; Blair pushes for greater authority in his peacekeeping role; Iranian executions for rape, adultery, insulting religious sanctities, and homosexuality; The Jewish Agency will house 58 Sudanese refugees near Sderot. [Jewish Telegraph Agency] [The New York Times]

Bloody battle ends, leaves 82 dead at Red Mosque in Islamabad, Pakistan. [The Washington Post]
Craig Cohen, deputy chief of staff at the Center for Strategic and International Studies, discussed the deadly military raid at Pakistan's Red Mosque -- which ended an eight-day standoff with anti-government, pro-Taliban forces -- and the impact it will have on President Pervez Musharraf's control of the U.S.-allied country. [The Washington Post] [The Los Angeles Times]

Abbas convenes the Palestinian legislature; Hamas boycotts. [The New York Times]
According to Abbas, “thanks to the support of Hamas, Al Qaeda is entering Gaza.” [The New York Times]

I have to admit one of my greatest joys in reading the news comes when I get the chance to find out what Afghanistan's last Jew is up to. One can't help but conjure images of The Odd Couple reading about the disputes between Zebulon Simentov and Yitzhak Levin before Levin died in 2005:

Among other antics, they held separate services, had vicious shouting matches neighbors say could be heard down the street, and denounced each other to the Taliban as spies for Israel's Mossad intelligence agency.

Talk about narcissism of small differences. Somebody really should make a film. Cast: Sasha Baron Cohen as Simentov and Chevy Chase as Levin. Don't ask why Chevy Chase comes to mind--something in my gut links Spies Like Us to Borat to squabbling Afghan Jewish men.

These days, the news from Kabul isn't especially exciting, but the old fella's in quite a mood:

"He drinks a lot and is very impatient," the boy laughed. "But if you had brought a bottle of whiskey he would have been in heaven."

While his wife and two children enjoy a far more hospitable existence in Israel, Simentov waits around and tends to the synagogue that sparked the feud with Levin. He huffs about a possible property dispute with Levin's son and something about not needing to go to Israel because he doesn't speak Hebrew. What does he think of Karzai? You guessed it: he preferred the commies and the Taliban.

I'm serious about that film. Somebody get Ari Sandel on the horn...

This past weekend at a book expo, Naomi Klein plagiarized Gandhi a bit when she said of the war with Islamic fundamentalism :

I’m not against fighting for civilization and all that,” Klein said, “It’s just that I’m still not sure where ‘civilization’ is… I’m still looking.

Post-colonial and subaltern studies have rightfully made us suspicious of using the term 'civilization' without great care. From what privileged vantage point is anyone allowed to say what is and isn't 'civilization?' This is a familiar enough argument even to those unfamiliar with the hotshot philosophers that made this worldview popular. While it didn't originate with 20th century French thinkers, the most recent vintage of this thought was almost certainly fermented in the casks of existentialism.

In a nutshell, existentialists believed that the Ultimate and Divine, and the revealed capital 'T' Truth are falsehoods (or in some cases, the Divine did exist but was unknowable due to its Divinity and all). The Klein principle translates to 'civilization' insofar as it emphasizes that there isn't a perfect arbiter to flawlessly reveal what is 'civilized,' and so one is forced into an agnostic position. But existentialists made a big deal out of responsibility--i.e., 'if God isn't responsible for me and the truth, then I am.' Definitions are more grey, more difficult and less comforting because they are always up for debate and redefinition, however we must take the leap--do something and say something in spite of the fear that uncertainty brings, in spite of the near certainty that somebody will come along at some point with something better. The one who refuses (or who is incapable) of taking that leap is the tragic figure--not the principled hero--of the existentialist world.

It may be true that none of us can or should be so arrogant as to say we know about Civilization and everybody else had best get on board with it. But today, the most well-meaning people think this position excuses them from the hard work of trying to define what is civil, what civilization is, and then fighting to make sure it survives. They seem almost too disappointed in the lower-case 'c' to put any force of will behind the struggle.

Then again, Klein may not be mired in a philosophical conundrum. In her case it's probably just idealism gone haywire. Since the current state of things doesn't meet her standard, she won't be pinned down saying anything definitive about civilization. This is a cop-out and its dangerous--it makes the best the enemy of the good. Besides, existence is a clear-cut issue. Either one exists or one does not, which means that there can be no agnosticism-- no matter how idealistic--in an existential struggle.

As for Klein's confusion, somebody should tell her to take a glimpse at the Islamic civilization that is wrecked on a daily basis by Islamic fundamentalists. A picture of Kandahar 100 years ago compared with today maybe? Or how about Bamiyan? Might Ms. Klein agree that the gargantuan stone statues represented a great many hours when people were carving rock instead of killing or maiming one another? More importantly, the Afghan peoples' reverence for them as historic and cultural landmarks was testament to their pride in the accomplishments of humanity. It was a very pluralist respect for others--a respect for art, religious difference, and shared history that the Taliban blew apart. Irresponsible is too mild a way to characterize those who won't come right out and say that the fight against people who do this is a fight for civilization.

Who reads only the Koran?

We do! We do!

Who drops walls on gays and Jews?

Who makes bombs out of their shoes?

We do! We do!

Mullah Sabir: Look at the news reports. Half of Afghanistan is again under our control. We have advanced to just outside of Kabul. President Hamid Karzai is a prisoner in his own palace. True, he constantly flies around the world and spends time with the powerful leaders of the West. But in his own country he does not even dare to travel around. You can well imagine that, at our meeting of 33 Taliban chiefs, the mood was anything but sombre.