War Notes: December 26, 2009

I hope everyone enjoyed the holidays. The war drags on, and we'll kick along with it.

Did you know that we are approaching the 3,000th day of U.S military involvement in Afghanistan? When I was a kid I remember an explosive documentary on Vietnam called "The 10,000 Day War." If you were to begin counting the "War in Afghanistan" as beginning with the 1979 Soviet invasion, the war has now lasted 11,000 days. Oh well, at the end of the day, these are all numbers. Hopefully someone will throw together some poignant analysis to commemorate the 3,000th day on Thursday.
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Here's another statistic for you: zero. That's the number of floor debates about the war in Afghanistan since the invasion was authorized in 2001. That bothers Representative Eric Massa (D-NY). Massa is a rock solid progressive, and though he has called on the House of Representatives to hold public deliberations on the conduct and future of the conflict it's unclear if he's got the statute among the leadership to get any meaningful action going.
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The New York Times is displeased with El Presidente:
Mr. Karzai still does not seem to understand that substantial and urgent change is needed- in policies and personnel- to fix a government that has lost credibility and is barely hanging on in the face of an increasingly powerful Taliban insurgency.
Karzai's new cabinet, unrolled to some fanfare, actually does little to address corruption and competency issues that have plagued the government since its early days. Most notably, Karzai excluded Abdullah Abdullah and his close allies, while returning 12 out of 24 members to the cabinet, and appointing several warlords with highly questionable human rights backgrounds. As far as I can tell, it's par for the course.