Farewell. The Flying Pig Has Left The Building.

Steve Hynd, August 16, 2012

After four years on the Typepad site, eight years total blogging, Newshoggers is closing it's doors today. We've been coasting the last year or so, with many of us moving on to bigger projects (Hey, Eric!) or simply running out of blogging enthusiasm, and it's time to give the old flying pig a rest.

We've done okay over those eight years, although never being quite PC enough to gain wider acceptance from the partisan "party right or wrong" crowds. We like to think we moved political conversations a little, on the ever-present wish to rush to war with Iran, on the need for a real Left that isn't licking corporatist Dem boots every cycle, on America's foreign misadventures in Afghanistan and Iraq. We like to think we made a small difference while writing under that flying pig banner. We did pretty good for a bunch with no ties to big-party apparatuses or think tanks.

Those eight years of blogging will still exist. Because we're ending this typepad account, we've been archiving the typepad blog here. And the original blogger archive is still here. There will still be new content from the old 'hoggers crew too. Ron writes for The Moderate Voice, I post at The Agonist and Eric Martin's lucid foreign policy thoughts can be read at Democracy Arsenal.

I'd like to thank all our regular commenters, readers and the other bloggers who regularly linked to our posts over the years to agree or disagree. You all made writing for 'hoggers an amazingly fun and stimulating experience.

Thank you very much.

Note: This is an archive copy of Newshoggers. Most of the pictures are gone but the words are all here. There may be some occasional new content, John may do some posts and Ron will cross post some of his contributions to The Moderate Voice so check back.


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Monday, June 21, 2010

Agency and self interest

By Dave Anderson:

The people that the US practices COIN on actually have their own interests past that of being passive receivers of US wisdom, electricity and lollipops.  Whocoodaknown.  Joe Klein at Time Magazine makes that stunning discovery as he discusses the problems that the US strategy in Afghanistan has:

It is now clear that Hamid Karzai's government is incapable of doing
that. "Karzai is not incompetent," a Western diplomat told me. "He is
acting according to his own priorities � his family, his tribe, his
nation, in that order."

So the Karzai family is pursuing its own interests as aggressively as they can.  Those interests do not coincide with US interests.  Therefore a disconnect exists between US doctrine and US actions on the ground.  That disconnect means the pretty words about holding and building are ineffective words as the Afghan government does not want to imperil itself by cleaning up all the side deals which keeps it in power and enriches its elite.  It means it does not want to deploy tens of thousands of well trained Tajik speaking soldiers to the Pashtun south.  It may deploy poorly trained and motivated soldiers that are not a coup in waiting, but the Karzai family is acting with agency.  What a shock!



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