By Steve Hynd
Most days, I tweet far more links to news stories than I end up blogging about, usually because I don't have a full blogpost worth to say about a lot of those links. For others, I use Twitter as a place to link dump and I'll go back to them later and pull them together for a post.
Just as a sample, here's some of the stuff I was reading and tweeting this morning.
-- Agent Ignatius of the WaPo has been reading a website about Pashtun customs and has some recommendations for Obama regarding reconcilliation of the Taliban in Afghanistan. Some of it seems to make sense to me, but my friend Joshua Foust is always cautioning me against broad-brush stereotyping or policy prescriptions based on the supposedly "tribal" nature of Afghans, saying it doesn't figure as much as many Westerns think.
-- The Marines are sending more 155mm howitzers to Afghanistan. That just doesn't seem like a "population-centric COIN" good idea to me.
-- Saudi Arabia's intelligence chief, Prince Turki al-Faisal, has been waxing lyrical on several subjects. He's said that Hilary Clinton is trying to put a spanner in the works of a nuclear-free Middle east, on behalf of the israelis, that Iran is going to own Iraq and, perhaps most importantly, thatan "inept" United States cannot fix Afghanistan's problems and should stop trying.
-- In Pakistan, a group calling itself the Punjabi Taliban has invited former president Musharraf to visit North Waziristan, saying they've set up a fan club there for him. At first, I checked the dateline on the item to make sure it didn't date from April 1st, then I noticed that the news came from an email supposedly sent to the head of the Pakistani army's media arm - and Pakistan's establishment have the knives out for Mushie right now. Maybe this item is just propaganda rather than a true expression of militant fandom for the former dictator.
-- The Governator says welfare programs in California will be terminated. No subsidized day-care for low-income families, no welfare-to-work program and a 60% cut in funding for community mental health, all to try to fix CA's massive budget deficit.
So how come is it that conservatives always go for the poorest people's jugulars first? How many millionaires and billionaires live in CA that could be taxed some extra and not have to give up work to look after their autistic kid?
-- In Iraq, the Sadrists sound like they're ready to back Maliki if he'll agree to release about 2,000 of their people he's detained. Saudi intelligence chief Prince Turki al-Faisal says Maliki is trying to hijack the legitimate results of the election, which Allawi's faction won by a bare majority, and that it will lead to more bloodshed, even civil war. Meanwhilethe new leader of Al Qaeda in Iraq is promising �days soaked with blood� for Shiites. With more and larger attacks reported every day now, the oft-repeated claim that there was a post-surge calm comprising a "success" for the US is looking ready to be consigned to the scrapheap of history.
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