David Ignatius
The Washington Post

It’s easy to get depressed reading the news out of Afghanistan. The insurgents are getting stronger, the United States is sending another 20,000 troops there — and yet even Defense Secretary Bob Gates admits that American soldiers aren’t a long-term solution. So what to do?

In sorting out these policy dilemmas, it helps to talk to Afghans such as Saad and Jahid Mohseni, who are struggling with these problems every day. The two entrepreneurial brothers are running a media business in the war zone of Kabul and, far from giving up, they keep thinking of innovative ways to adapt and survive.

I first met the Mohseni brothers in April at the offices of their Moby Media Group in Kabul. We met again in Washington last week, and their comments convinced me that many U.S. policymakers are misdiagnosing the real danger in Afghanistan. What will destroy that country’s experiment in democracy isn’t the Taliban or other insurgent groups, but the lawlessness and corruption that have been allowed to fester under the government of President Hamid Karzai.

The core issue is bad governance. The biggest threat the Mohseni brothers face right now isn’t insurgent attacks from Taliban fighters. It’s kidnappings by the criminal gangs that are destroying normal life in Kabul. “The resurgence of the Taliban is a result of the public’s hunger for law and order,” Saad Mohseni told me.

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Barack Obama's cabinet choices reflect a centrist approach in the tradition of former President Bill Clinton.

Julian E. Zelizer
Author of “Rightward Bound: Making America Conservative in the 1970s”

Many observers use historian Doris Kearns Goodwin’s term, “A Team of Rivals,” to describe the cabinet that President-elect Barack Obama is assembling.

They use the term to characterize choices like former Obama opponent Sen. Hillary Clinton — expected to be nominated Monday as Secretary of State — and current secretary of defense Robert Gates who is being asked to stay on by Obama.

But a more useful term might be a team of centrists. The most striking characteristic of the current lineup is how the personalities reflect the centrist vision of the Democratic Party promoted by Bill Clinton and his colleagues at the Democratic Leadership Council in the 1990s.

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Vice-President elect Joseph Biden smiles with Secretary of Defense Robert Gates at a press conference on Monday.

Katrina vanden Heuvel
Editor and Publisher, The Nation

Barack Obama not only had the good judgment to oppose the war in Iraq but , as he told us earlier this year, “I want to end the mindset that got us into war.” So it is troubling that a man of such good judgment has asked Robert Gates to stay on as Secretary of Defense–and assembled a national security team of such narrow bandwidth. It is true that President Obama will set the policy. But this team makes it more difficult to seize the extraordinary opportunity Obama’s election has offered to reengage the world and reset America’s priorities. Maybe being right about the greatest foreign policy disaster in US history doesn’t mean much inside the Beltway? How else to explain that not a single top member of Obama’s foreign policy/national security team opposed the war–or the dubious claims leading up to it?
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