Pakistan to be a permanent 'almost-failed' state?

Below is a long NYT article which gives a good flavor of what's happening now in Pakistan.

I'm no expert, but I think we can make several conclusions:

- Musharraf's detention and repression of lawyers and democratic opposition leaders (who are mostly in the capital, Karachi), had little or nothing to do with fighting Islamic extremism in Pakistan's hinterland. It was simply a dictator holding onto power and flouting democracy.

- Years of war and conflict in neighboring Afghanistan have radicalized Muslims there and in Pakistan. And Musharraf's flouting democracy has spurred a younger generation to take up arms in order to make change, rather than through parties and elections. This lesson bears repeating: More often than not, military conflict and political repression in a country lead to radical religion, not the other way around. But left unchecked, this becomes a self-reinforcing process.

- The problems in Pakistan -- lack of respect for democratic institutions; violent radicalization of young Islamists; and self-identification among the young with Islamist militias rather than with local tribe or elders -- are now self-reinforcing, systemic and generational. They won't be fixed soon. A significant portion of the population has no faith in democracy; they prefer the establishment of an Islamist state by force. Thankfully, they don't have the means to achieve that, although they can continue to carry out terrorist attacks at random, at will; and the Islamists' home territories outside the capitol are nearly impossible for Pakistan's army to control.

- With strong military junta like Musharraf's in power, Pakistan can remain an almost-failed, almost-Islamist state in a permanent standoff: Pakistan's junta can hold onto power and the resources of the state, including its nuclear weapons and security services; but it won't be able to control the Taleban or Islamist terrorists in Pakistan's remote villages.

- An almost-failed, almost-Islamist Pakistan would not pose an existential threat to America; but it would make our fight against the Taleban in neighboring Afghanistan very difficult; and it could become the new training ground of choice for al Qaeda and similar terrorist groups.

- Today the "traitorous" New York Times leaked that the Bush Administration was considering covert special forces operations inside Pakistan, hoping for Musharraf's cooperation in light of his current troubles. Officially, Pakistan's government responded quickly and negatively to the leaked report. In any case, since the problem in Pakistan is now systemic, even if attempted, such small-scale operations would surely fail to achieve any kind of meaningful, long-term change in Pakistan; more likely than not, America would simply end up with egg on its face.

Final Conclusion: America's foreign policy options in Pakistan are limited, and none are good. We could continue to support Musharraf diplomatically and perhaps financially; but this could do us more harm than good if average Pakistanis and the international community blame us for Musharraf's oppressive regime. (Many already do.) Or, we could disavow Musharraf, halt aid to Pakistan, and try to support opposition parties; but America's reputation in Pakistan is so bad that our open support for any party or candidate could actually backfire on us. Or, we could withdraw diplomatically, financially, and militarily from Pakistan's affairs, and hope for the best; but America's foreign policy establishment -- and the U.S. public -- almost always prefers doing something to doing nothing, even if our doing something makes matters worse. Moreover, the next U.S. President will be under great pressure to do something about Pakistan.

Next-Gen Taliban
By Nicholas Schmidle
January 6, 2008 | The New York Times Magazine

One day last month, I climbed onto a crowded rooftop in Quetta, near Pakistan's border with Afghanistan, and wedged myself among men wearing thick turbans and rangy beards until I could find a seat. We converged on the rooftop that afternoon to attend the opening ceremony for Jamiat Ulema-e-Islam's campaign office in this dusty city in the southwestern province of Baluchistan. Jamiat Ulema-e-Islam, better known by its abbreviation, J.U.I., is a hard-line Islamist party, widely considered a political front for numerous jihadi organizations, including the Taliban. In the last parliamentary elections here, in 2002, the J.U.I. formed a national coalition with five other Islamist parties and led a campaign that was pro-Taliban, anti-American and spiked with promises to implement Shariah, or Islamic law. The alliance, known as the Muttahida Majlis-e-Amal, or M.M.A., won more than 10 percent of the popular vote nationwide — the highest share ever for an Islamist bloc in Pakistan. The alliance formed governments in two of the country's four provinces, including Baluchistan.

A cool breeze blew across the rooftop, and a green kite flew above in the crisp, periwinkle sky. The J.U.I. was gearing up again for national elections, then scheduled for the second week of January, but the message this time was remarkably different from what it was five years ago. One by one, hopefuls for the national and provincial assembly constituencies gave short speeches. Most of them spoke in Pashto, but, knowing Urdu, I could understand enough to realize that they weren't rehashing the typical J.U.I. rhetoric. No one praised the Taliban. Shariah was mentioned only in passing. Just one person, a first-time candidate in a suede jacket who probably felt obliged to prove his credentials in a party of fundamentalist mullahs, attacked the United States. Afterward, party workers handed out free plates of cookies and cups of tea.

This seemed altogether too gentle. Had the J.U.I. gone soft? Among several firebrands conspicuous by their absence was Maulvi Noor Muhammad, Quetta's former representative in the National Assembly and an outspoken supporter of the Taliban, so I went to see him at his madrassa. Adolescent students, many wearing the black turbans favored by the Taliban, mingled by the metal entrance gate. Muhammad had told me in the fall of 2006 that the sole reason that the Taliban hadn't defeated NATO forces in Afghanistan yet was because NATO had B-52's, and when I reminded him of this, he smiled through a mouthful of missing teeth. "The Taliban have more than made up for that disadvantage now with suicide bombers," he said.

If the government's version is correct, radical Islamists pressed their advantage to terrible effect in assassinating Benazir Bhutto during a rally on Dec. 27. Bhutto's family and her party clearly have no faith in the probity of President Pervez Musharraf's government, and many - including Nawaz Sharif, Bhutto's nearest rival in the Pakistani opposition - have accused the government of creating the security situation that led to her murder. Musharraf responded in a nationally televised speech on the evening of Jan. 2 by doubling his insistence that terrorists were responsible: "We need to fight terrorism with full force, and I think that if we don't succeed in the fight against terrorism, the future of Pakistan will be dark." Efforts at democratic integration by parties like the J.U.I. have now been overshadowed by the violence of their antidemocratic Islamist colleagues - a network of younger Taliban fighting on both sides of the Afghan-Pakistani border, jihadis pledging loyalty to Al Qaeda and any number of freelancing militants. Disrupting and discrediting democracy may, of course, be the point. The Bhutto assassination could well make moderation impossible, as Islamist radicals savor their disruptive power - and enraged mainstream parties threaten the stability of the government itself. For now, the Bhutto killing has given the opposition a rare unity, and the elections, although delayed to Feb. 18, may well go ahead. The J.U.I. remains determined to continue campaigning. Six weeks, however, could prove to be a very long time in Pakistan's embattled politics.

In Quetta, Maulvi Noor Muhammad, who is 62, sat on the madrassa's cold concrete floor wrapped in a wool blanket as he leafed through a newspaper. Speaking in Pashto through an interpreter, he said that Maulana Fazlur Rehman, the J.U.I. chief, had visited three times in the previous few weeks to persuade him to enter the election. Muhammad claimed to have refused each time because he believed the J.U.I. had drifted from its core mission: to lead an aggressive Islamization campaign and provide political support to what he referred to as the mujahedeen, a term for Muslim fighters that can shift in meaning depending on who is speaking. "Participating in this election would amount to treason against the mujahedeen," he said. I asked about the others in the party who had decided to run for office. Muhammad shook his head in disappointment and explained how, following the government operation against the Red Mosque rebels in Islamabad, Pakistan's capital city, in July, President Musharraf put religious leaders under tremendous pressure. "Musharraf threatened to raid several madrassas," Muhammad said. "The political mullahs got scared."

Maulana Fazlur Rehman is exactly the sort of "political mullah" whom Muhammad portrayed as running scared. In the past year, the J.U.I. chief has tried to disassociate himself from the new generation of Taliban wreaking havoc not only across the border in Afghanistan, as they have for years, but also increasingly in Pakistan. At the same time, Rehman has been trying to persuade foreign ambassadors and establishment politicians here that he is the only one capable of dealing with those same Taliban. (Rehman told me that he never offered Muhammad a chance to enter the election; he even added that the J.U.I. had already expelled the Taliban guru "on disciplinary grounds." ) In the process, some Islamists maintain that Rehman has sold them out. Last April, a rocket whistled over the sugarcane fields that separate Rehman's house from the main road before crashing into the veranda of his brother's home next door. A few months later, Pakistani intelligence agencies discovered a hit list, drafted by the Afghan and Pakistani Taliban, with Rehman's name on it.

"The religious forces are very divided right now," I was told by Abdul Hakim Akbari, a childhood friend of Rehman's and lifelong member of the J.U.I. I met Akbari in Dera Ismail Khan, Rehman's hometown, which is situated in the North-West Frontier Province. According to this past summer's U.S. National Intelligence Estimate, approved by all 16 official intelligence agencies, Al Qaeda has regrouped in the Tribal Areas adjoining the province and may be planning an attack on the American homeland. "Everyone is afraid," Akbari told me. "These mujahedeen don't respect anyone anymore. They don't even listen to each other. Maulana Fazlur Rehman is a moderate. He wants dialogue. But the Taliban see him as a hurdle to their ambitions. "

Rehman doesn't pretend to be a liberal; he wants to see Pakistan become a truly Islamic state. But the moral vigilantism and the proliferation of Taliban-inspired militias along the border with Afghanistan is not how he saw it happening. The emergence of Taliban-inspired groups in Pakistan has placed immense strain on the country's Islamist community, a strain that may only increase with the assassination of Bhutto. As the rocket attack on Rehman's house illustrates, the militant jihadis have even lashed out against the same Islamist parties who have coddled them in the past.

Western audiences might find news about Islamists fighting among themselves rather appealing. But jihadi wars, at least since the expulsion of the Soviets from Afghanistan, have tended to spill over borders, all the more so since Sept. 11, 2001. And within Pakistan, the struggle for supremacy between those Pakistani Islamists who want to gain power democratically and those who want to abolish democracy altogether could well tear the country apart.

The election season got off to a late start, postponed by President Musharraf's suspension of the constitution and declaration of a state of emergency. In November, when politicians should have been out stumping and rallying support, many were dodging the police. Besides sacking dozens of judges and pulling private television channels off the air, Musharraf arrested thousands of lawyers, students, social activists and political leaders during the 42-day emergency regime, which ended on Dec. 15.

The most damaging result of the emergency, however, may have been the doubt it sowed within the opposition, splitting those advocating participation from others calling for a boycott. The split hit the six-party Islamist M.M.A. alliance hardest of all. While Rehman repeated the J.U.I.'s intention to field candidates, his main partner in the alliance, the Jamaat-e-Islami party, argued that the polls would be rigged and participation would legitimize Musharraf's regime. Both parties stuck to their positions, and in mid-December, the Islamist alliance fell apart.

Rehman maintained that he could persuade Jamaat-e-Islami supporters to vote for the J.U.I. this time around, but even some of his fellow party members doubted that would work. "In the last election, everything was related to Afghanistan and how innocent Afghans were being killed," Chaudhry Sharif, a longtime J.U.I. member from Rehman's district, told me last month. Now Rehman "has to answer his people when they ask him, 'What happened in our own country?' " Despite the M.M.A.'s taking power in the North-West Frontier Province, hundreds of civilians have died in Islamist terrorist attacks. The public's previous image of mullahs as incorruptible politicians has also been tarnished. Rehman's chance of attracting swing voters appeared dim.

For now, it is Islamist violence that seems to have the political upper hand rather than the accommodation of Islamist currents within a democratic society. The mainstream parties have addressed Islamic militancy strictly as a security issue. Benazir Bhutto used particularly aggressive rhetoric against militants — her main rival, Nawaz Sharif, has a more religiously conservative base — but all of the main political figures outside the M.M.A. treated jihadi violence within a pro- or anti-Musharraf context, and as an effect of U.S. relations rather than as a problem integral to Pakistan's political culture. "This election comes down to whether you are pro-Musharraf or anti-Musharraf," a lawyer at a Pakistan Peoples Party rally told me a few weeks ago. In the North-West Frontier Province, the Awami National Party, a secular, nationalist Pashtun outfit, also stands to gain from the M.M.A.'s decline and will dilute the Islamists' influence in the provincial assembly.

Jihadis have, of course, increasingly opted to intervene in Pakistan by attacking mainstream politicians and their supporters. Only a week before Bhutto's assassination, a suicide bomber targeted the former interior minister, leaving more than 50 people dead. It was the second attempt on the minister's life; the first, in April, killed nearly 30 people. And of course Bhutto's arrival home in October, after years abroad, was greeted by two suicide bombers who detonated themselves beside her float, killing about 140 people. In the aftermath of her killing, more violence seems inevitable. But the politics of terror and assassination are probably secondary, among jihadis, to the gradual extension of their control over rural and semiurban stretches of western Pakistan — a power base that, at least in the short term, can be disrupted only by the Pakistani military. Baitullah Mehsud, the Taliban commander from South Waziristan who captured about 250 soldiers in August, recently warned a J.U.I. candidate there not to run unless several of his arrested Taliban fighters were released. More ominously, in mid-December, 40 representatives from different Taliban gangs from across the North-West Frontier Province and the Tribal Areas banded together into a single group, Tehrik-i-Taliban Pakistan (the Pakistani Taliban Movement). The movement named Mehsud their leader. He has also been named by Pakistani authorities as a suspect in Bhutto's murder.

[Text here deleted. -- J]

Rehman's critics blame him and his party for facilitating the local Taliban, an allegation he resents. "We are politicians, and we will have to go to our constituencies to get votes in an election," he told me, as we sat together in the drawing room of his home in Dera Ismail Khan. "If there is a war going on, no one can vote." Halogen spotlights dotted the ceiling, and soft leather couches lined the walls. Rehman wore a pinstripe waistcoat over a shalwar kameez. The room smelled of strong cologne. He added, in a rare moment of candor, "But even we are now afraid of the young men fighting."

[Text here deleted. -- J]

Abdul Rashid Ghazi and his entourage of Islamic militants finally clashed with state security forces in early July, but the real rebellion actually occurred in the preceding months, when Ghazi and his brother flouted efforts by Rehman and other religious elders to talk them down. Back in April, when I had asked Ghazi how he felt with the entire old guard turning against him, he looked more amused than worried. "Everywhere you look, you can see youngsters rejecting the old ones because old people do not like change," he said. "They are rigid." Before army commandos killed him in July, Ghazi promised that a government assault on the Red Mosque would be a blessing for the mujahedeen. His "martyrdom," he used to say, would further invigorate the jihadis and expedite an Islamic revolution in Pakistan.

Since Ghazi's death, hundreds of soldiers and policemen have died in suicide blasts or in gunfights against the Taliban. The capture of the soldiers in South Waziristan has perhaps been the worst of it. (In a Taliban-produced DVD circulating around Dera Ismail Khan, a teenager saws the head off a soldier while, in the background, three of his adolescent peers chant "Allahu akbar.") But the militants have not spared Pakistan's top spy agency, the Inter-Services Intelligence (I.S.I.), which orchestrated the rise of the Taliban in Afghanistan in the 1990s. In September, twin suicide blasts went off, and one ripped through a bus carrying I.S.I. employees to work in Rawalpindi, the military's garrison city near Islamabad, killing at least 25 people. The intelligence officer I met in Dera Ismail Khan, whose area of operations included the Taliban-ruled enclave of South Waziristan, maintains that his contacts with the militants were severed long ago. "We can hardly work there anymore," he told me. "The Taliban suspect everyone of spying. All of our sources have been slaughtered."

I asked Rehman, who used to refer to the Taliban as "our boys," if he still considered the Taliban, even those who might be firing rockets at his house, his boys. "Definitely," he replied. "But because of America's policies, they have gone to the extreme. I am trying to bring them back into the mainstream. We don't disagree with the mujahedeen's cause, but we differ over priorities. They prefer to fight, but I believe in politics."

Mushahid Hussain, secretary general of the pro-Musharraf faction of the Pakistan Muslim League, told me that no one can negotiate the politics of the North-West Frontier Province better than Rehman. "We know that we need a bearded, turbaned guy out there," Hussain told me. It is perhaps a measure of how inextricable Islamism and politics have become in Pakistan that even the United States would deal with an anti-American like Rehman. In September, he had the first meeting of his 30-year political career with an American ambassador. What did Rehman and Anne Patterson, the American envoy, discuss? "She urged me to form an electoral alliance with Benazir Bhutto and Musharraf," he told me a few days after the meeting. "I am not against it. But politically, because of the American presence in Afghanistan and rising extremism, it is a bit hard for us to afford." Plus, the fact that the Americans thought Bhutto could tackle the Taliban had simply baffled him. "She has no strategy in those areas, and nothing to do with those people," he said.

When asked if Patterson's meeting signaled a change in American attitudes, an embassy spokeswoman said it "reflects our approach to democratic politics in Pakistan" and was "part of a process of talking to all those who represent political movements in Pakistan, across the spectrum." The U.S. has given more than $5 billion to Pakistan in the past few years to fight Islamist militants, but recent reports suggest that the aid has not been effective. Late last month, Congress put restrictions on some military aid and called for the restoration of democratic rights.

Even after the Bhutto assassination, Rehman told me he would stay in the election — although, as he put it, "the reality is that this is complete anarchy, and no one can run a campaign."

Before his death at the end of the Red Mosque standoff in July, Abdul Rashid Ghazi was allies with a young cleric in the Swat Valley, in the North-West Frontier Province. The cleric's name is Maulana Fazlullah. For a year, Fazlullah trained his militia and amassed a following. Twice a day, he delivered a radio address, broadcast to tens of thousands of people in Swat, over his illegal station. He preached about the virtues of Shariah, the ills of female education and the honor of jihad and the Taliban. In retaliation for the assault on the Red Mosque, Fazlullah's militiamen and suicide bombers launched attacks on convoys and police stations throughout the Swat Valley.

When, in October, I asked Rehman if he had any control over Fazlullah, he said the negotiating efforts of the J.U.I. leader there, Qari Abdul Bais, were saving Fazlullah and the Pakistani Army from going to war. But when I met Bais, a septuagenarian with a cane, he offered this estimation of Fazlullah: "He is totally out of control." Fazlullah created a more difficult situation for Musharraf and the generals — and, in a different way, for local religious leaders — because his ambitions exceeded the mere creation of an Islamic emirate in Swat. In November, his men began conquering territory and taking over police stations in neighboring districts, pulling down Pakistani flags and raising their own. By late November, the Pakistani Army had had enough and mounted an immense offensive against Fazlullah and his men, a bloody battle that continued into late December. I was able to visit Fazlullah's compound (since destroyed) just before the military attacks began and get a sense of what a Taliban-controlled area in Pakistan would be like.

[Text here deleted. -- J]

The Pakistani Army now claims to have killed hundreds of Taliban, and arrested hundreds more, in its Swat Valley operation. The army also says that local people in Swat greeted them with sweets, and that the homes of some top leaders, including Sirajuddin, had been destroyed. Ghafoor's phone line has been cut for weeks, as have those of others in the group — although Sirajuddin has made occasional calls to the press, as when he accepted responsibility for a suicide attack in late December.

When I met Rehman in Peshawar in the fall we sat outside on plastic lawn furniture in the shade of a large oak tree. He rubbed a strand of chunky, orange prayer beads, and we discussed the changing leadership in the borderlands of Pakistan. In the past five years, more than 150 pro-government maliks, or tribal elders, had been killed by the Taliban. Oftentimes, the Taliban dumped the bodies by the side of the road for passers-by to see, with a note, written in Pashto, pinned to the corpse's chest, damning the dead man as an American spy. "When the jihad in Afghanistan started," Rehman told me, "the maliks and the old tribal system in Afghanistan ended; a new leadership arose, based on jihad. Similar is the case here in the Tribal Areas. The old, tribal system is being relegated to the background, and a new leadership, composed of these young militants, has emerged." He added, "This is something natural."

Though Rehman describes the emergence of the local Taliban in evolutionary terms, he explains it as a result of a leadership crisis in Pakistan. He respects the secular-minded people who created Pakistan but insists that social and religious changes over the past two decades have made such leaders much less relevant: "We have to adjust to reality, and that demands new leaders with new visions."

I asked if he considered himself such a new leader with a new vision.

"I don't consider myself as someone extraordinary," Rehman said. "I have the same feelings as everyone else in the current age: if the weather is warm, everyone feels warm; if it is cold, everyone feels cold. The difference between me and other people is in our responsibilities." He took a long breath of the fresh, fall air, continued rubbing his prayer beads and leaned over the chair to spit. "That's why I am so careful, because my decisions can affect many, many people. I am trying to bring people back from the fire, not push them toward it." Rehman once seemed ready to introduce Taliban-style rule in Pakistan. Now he is trying to preserve democracy from being destroyed by ruthless militants. If he can't succeed, can anyone?

Nicholas Schmidle is a Pakistan-based writer and a fellow of the Institute of Current World Affairs. This is his first article for the magazine.

Immigration debate baloney

America's Biggest Divide
By Robert B. Reich
January 4, 2008 | Prospect.org

The biggest divide in America today isn't over social issues like abortion or gay marriage. It's not even over the war in Iraq, or taxes. The biggest split is over immigration.

Demagogues on the right and left are telling Americans our jobs are threatened, our social services overwhelmed, and their streets unsafe because of immigrants. Fear and prejudice are on the rise. According to a recent Pew survey, more than half of Hispanic adults in America today worry they or someone close to them could face deportation.

The fear-mongers won't compromise. Earlier this year, when Congress tried to enact a bipartisan bill that would better secure the borders and also try to regularize the plight of undocumented immigrants -- giving them a path to become regular citizens and avoid the constant fear of deportation -- the bill was killed by these agents of fear and intolerance.

Well, I have some news for these demagogues. If they think this country or this economy can succeed in coming decades without tens of millions of additional immigrants, they're not thinking straight. The huge baby boom generation -- 77 million Americans born between 1946 and 1964 -- will be retiring, and there aren't nearly enough native-born Americans after them to keep this economy going, let alone keep money flowing into the boomers' Social Security and Medicare trust funds. The graying of America means we need this new wave of immigrants.

Remember also that most of us born here are descended from immigrants. In 1900, the same proportion of people living in America had been born elsewhere as there are today, including today's undocumented immigrants. What we've learned over the years is that people with the guts and gumption to leave their country of birth and come to America are almost by definition ambitious. And the single most important asset of this economy and society is ambition.

I'm not arguing that we throw our borders open. No, we need better border security. But to think immigrants are our enemies, or to believe that they're taking more out of the economy more than they putting into it, is pure baloney. To reduce the entire debate over immigration to the simple question of whether someone is here legally is to miss all the insidious ways that prejudice is hurting so many who are here legally. And to conclude that working in America without proper documentation is an offense equal to a heinous crime, meriting the permanent breakup of families who have lived and worked here for years, is to be blind to the realities all around us.

At this time of year especially, we need to remind ourselves of the tolerance and generosity that built this country by allowing our immigrant ancestors to become full-fledged Americans.

For once I agree with Giuliani

For once I agree with Giuliani, who said this during the NH debate Saturday:

"Former New York Mayor Rudy Giuliani said his priority as president would be dealing with illegal immigrants who have committed crimes.

"'Since you can't throw out all 12 million people, whether Governor Romney would like to do that or not or anybody else would, you just can't do it. It's not physically possible to do.'"

Taibbi: Obama's rising cred

Obama's results in Iowa could make this Taibbi story seem prophetic or naive. Nevertheless, I still want a black President, just because. Time will tell!


Obama on the Rise
By Matt Taibbi
December 17, 2007 | RollingStone.com

All love stories are beautiful at the beginning, and what we're witnessing now is the beginning of a new one: America and Barack Obama. The story begins with the world spinning off its axis, the country mired in dark times and the way of the fresh-faced savior seemingly blocked by a juggernaut agent of the Status Quo. Only in the end, in the moment that sportswriters die for and that comes once a generation in politics if we're lucky, the phenom rises to the occasion, gets the big hit in the big game and becomes a man before our very eyes. The old power recedes, and the new era is born.

That's grand language for a forum as vulgar and profane as presidential politics, but this is the moment that Barack Hussein Obama was born for, and it really is happening before our very eyes. Like Kennedy or Reagan or even Bill Clinton, Obama is a politician whose best chance for success has always been on the level of myth and hero worship; to win the Democratic nomination, he must successfully sell himself not just as a candidate but as an icon, a symbol of the best possible future for twenty-first-century multicultural America and an antidote to both the callous reactionary idiocy of the Bush administration and the shrewd but soulless corporatism of the Clinton machine.

With just weeks to go before Iowa, Obama is succeeding at that sales job, thanks in part to an unexpected avalanche of positive press and in even greater part to Hillary Clinton's recent performance as a creaky, suddenly vulnerable establishment villain. In just a few weeks, the first real votes in this insufferably long process will finally be cast, and when they are, the Powers That Be may find that they waited too long to get the real show started -- that the long wait gave America just enough time to decide that it's ready to move on to something new.

For most of this campaign season, I doubted that Obama really was that new something. Now I'm not so sure he isn't. Whoever Barack Obama is, there's no doubting the genuineness of his phenomenon. And maybe, who knows, that's all that matters.

After debacles in Iraq and New Orleans and mushrooming scandals that exposed much of Congress and the Cabinet as a low-rent crime family hired to collect protection money for the likes of Halliburton and Pfizer, people simply do not trust the politicians they vote for to be anything less than an embarrassment. You get the sense they approach the upcoming election with the enthusiasm of a two-time loser offered a selection of plea deals.

People hate the mechanized speeches, they hate the negative ads, and they especially hate venomous news creatures, myself included. It's now so bad that a poll last month found that fifty-six percent of all likely voters agreed with the phrase that the presidential race is "annoying and a waste of time" -- a shocking number, given that it excludes the forty to fifty percent of Americans who already don't vote in presidential races.

People don't want to feel this way, but the attitude everywhere is the same: What choice do these assholes give us? And it's that grim prejudice that has pervaded this process for a generation, forcing the public to choose from an endless succession of lesser evils and second- raters of the Kerry-Dole genus, stuffed suits who offered nothing like a solution to the main problem of feeling like shit about the American civic experiment.

Until now. Emphasizing that this is not necessarily a reflection of who or what Obama really is, he unmistakably and strikingly attracts crowds that, to a person, really seem to believe that his election will fundamentally change the way they feel about their country.

"I just want to see if there's going to be a difference with this cat," says Richard Walters, a forty-three-year-old New Yorker, who had come to hear Obama give a speech at Harlem's famed Apollo Theater. "Because if there's something different, we need it -- now."

"At this point, I'd be glad if he recited the alphabet correctly," says Xiomara Hall, another New Yorker. Laughing, she and her friend add, "We got hope. Change is goood!"

"I just want to see if he can do something, anything, to change things," says Shirley Paulino, another visitor to the Apollo event. "See if he is what he says he is. We just -- we need it, you know?"

Normally the sight of prospective voters muttering platitudes about "hope" and "change" would make any reporter erupt with derisive laughter, but at Obama events one hears outbursts of optimism so desperate and artless that I can't help but check my cynical instinct. Grown men and women look up at you with puppy-dog eyes and all but beg you not to shit on their dreams. It's odd to say, but it's actually moving.

An important component of this phenomenon is that the Obama crowds are surprisingly free of the usual anti-Republican venom. As much as anything, his rise is a reflection of the country's increasing boredom with partisan hatred.

"I'm so tired of the president just talking to one part of the country, or one group," says Malia Scotch-Marmo. "I was in my twenties with Reagan, but I felt he talked to me, even though we were all Democrats. It would be great to have a black president. It would be great for kids to see. It would be a nice mind shift."

It's a mood thing, not an issue thing, and it stems entirely from Obama's unique personal qualities: his expansive eloquence, his remarkable biography, his commanding physical presence. I saw this clearly on display at an event in Portsmouth, New Hampshire. It was a foreign-policy discussion arranged by his campaign that I thought was going to be a disaster. The candidate's handlers had announced a start time of 8:30 a.m., but when dozens of reporters and a hundred or so audience members arrived, we learned that the candidate wouldn't be showing up until eleven. Up to then, the room had to listen to a panel of academic corpses blather about the Middle East.

By 10 a.m., the press section was afire with sarcastic ripostes. "I slept in the car," said one hack. "I had to. I already checked out of my hotel in Manchester."

But once Obama showed up, the sarcasm evaporated. There was nothing remarkable about Obama's speech and subsequent Q&A session, except that he delivered every line with the force and confidence of someone who's already been president for years. Obama's shtick is to sell his future presidency as one that would recast America as the good guy of the world, one that would be guided by the principles of basic decency ("This isn't just about drawing contrasts. It's about doing what's right"), openness ("Not talking [to other countries] doesn't make us look tough. It makes us look arrogant") and a vision that embraces the challenges of this century ("The task of the next president is to convince the American people that global interdependence is here to stay. Global trade is not going away. The Internet is not going away"). His presentation is deliberately vague on most counts, but the overall effect is augmented by his emphasis on easily remembered concrete positions -- like his promise to withdraw all combat troops from Iraq within sixteen months.

But mostly, Obama is selling himself. When he talks about "showing a new face to the world," it's not exactly a mystery that he's talking about his face. In person, Obama is a dynamic, handsome, virile presence, a stark contrast to the bloated hairy shitbags we usually elect to positions of power in this country.

Moreover, he completely lacks that air of grasping, gutter-scraping ambition sickness that follows most presidential hopefuls around like a rain cloud -- the vengeful impatience that hovers over Rudy Giuliani, or that creepy greediness for media attention that strikes one like an oar in the face in the presence of Mitt Romney . To use a sports cliché, Obama acts like he's been there before, and his handlers are aware enough of how well their candidate is wearing his climb to power that they've consciously chosen to contrast it with that of his rivals.

In particular, the Obama camp harps incessantly, without naming names, on the sense of entitlement that infects Hillary Clinton's campaign persona. Poor Hillary: While Obama glows like the chosen one, taking Kennedy-esque flight on the wings of destiny, next to him Hillary sometimes comes off like an angry drag queen, enraged that some other tramp has been allowed to "Danke Schoen" in her Las Vegas. Obama sees this and isn't above pointing at her Adam's apple. "I'm not running for president because I think this is somehow owed to me," Obama says. And people believe it. In Portsmouth, the same crowd that had to suffer through a two-and-a-half-hour wait sent Obama back on the road with a standing ovation. "There's just something about him," says one middle-aged gentleman. When I suggest that his comment was vague, he shrugs. "Yeah, but it's good vague."

Of course, underneath the veneer of fresh-faced optimism that Obama is pushing -- note that the word "idealism" isn't appropriate here, because Obama isn't selling idealism so much as a kind of reinvigorated, feel-good pragmatism -- there operates a massive, well-oiled political machine no less ruthless and ambitious than that of his establishment rival, Hillary Clinton. Obama has raised $80 million, and it would be a grievous mistake to describe his candidacy as a grass-roots affair, particularly when he counts among his bundlers many of the lobbyists and political-finance pros who buttress the Clinton run.

Even a cursory glance at Obama's money men is enough to confirm that fact. The list includes Wall Street hotshots from Lehman Brothers, Oppenheimer and Co., and Citigroup, a smattering of Hollywood players and Native American casino interests, representatives of big pharmaceuticals and the insurance sector -- in short, all the major food groups of reviled corporate influence-hunters.

Worse still, Obama's financial backing is reflected in some of his Senate votes and campaign positions, including most notably his support for expanding NAFTA to Peru, limiting the ability of injured workers and consumers to sue for damages, and pouring federal funds into E85 corn-based ethanol, an alternative fuel for which the market is dominated by the Illinois-based Archer Daniels Midland Company. More than once I heard Obama give stirring speeches, only to mar them with plugs for ethanol.

Obama's massive war chest allows him to compete not merely in the areas of personal charisma and "hope" but in the trench warfare of local pavement-pounding staff. He boasts thirty-seven offices in Iowa, maintaining a presence in towns with populations as low as 1,400.

In Iowa, New Hampshire and South Carolina, three early-primary states, Obama has trotted out endorsements from an impressive cast of local pols -- support that came under fire when it was learned that many of the politicians had received campaign contributions from Obama's cornball-titled political action committee, the "Hopefund." But here's the funny thing: When the Clinton campaign decided to take aim at Obama for "using his PAC in a manner that appears to be inconsistent with the prevailing election laws," the criticisms fell on deaf ears even among crusaders for campaign-finance reform. "Obama is being held to a higher standard," says Craig Holman of Public Citizen. "It's hard to criticize him as long as everyone else is doing it."

Indeed, it's Hillary Clinton -- who, if not for Obama, would be the story of historic change in this race, the first woman ever to make a serious run at the Oval Office -- who has been left to carry the million-pound cross of all the ugliest recent sins of the Democratic Party, dragging to Iowa her Iraq War vote, the Clinton record on NAFTA, and a list of corporate sponsors that could keep Bruce Reed and Al From hard all night long.

In what may turn out to be the final cruel irony in a career full of them, Hillary, at the climactic moment of her political life, now sees herself transformed into a symbol of the corrupt status quo . At multiple stops on the campaign trail, I've heard Obama voters say they rejected Hillary because she represents the "old-boys' network." The irony is doubly cruel because the same cozy coalition of moneyed insiders that foisted waffling yahoos like John Kerry on the party rank-and-file and urged Democrats toward cynical moves like support for the Iraq War, all in the name of "electability," now find their wagons circled around a candidate -- Hillary -- who may be the least electable of the Democratic contenders. In a stunning Zogby poll whose release coincided with Obama's recent charge to the top, a survey of prospective voters showed that Hillary would lose to all the top five Republicans in the election, while either Obama or John Edwards would defeat or tie every single one.

As for Edwards, he too lurks as a crucial character in a possible Hillary death drama, a passionate Cassius to Obama's coolly pragmatic Brutus. In town hall after town hall, in the remotest corners of states like Iowa and New Hampshire, Edwards casts Hillary as an elitist creature of political privilege bought off by lobbyists and indistinguishable from George Bush, charging audiences not to "trade corporate Republicans for corporate Democrats." Edwards delivers this argument with a healthy and convincing dose of class resentment -- he is flawlessly playing the part of the small-town favorite son returned from the big city full of devastating tales of aristocratic treachery. He leaves behind crowds that are jazzed and angry and suddenly wanting no part of the Hillary-Evrémondes in charge of "their" party. But while Edwards is running the more revolutionary campaign, it's Obama (whose "differentness" is more visible on TV) who's getting traction as the candidate of "change."

All of which adds to the whiff of destiny that lately seems to surround Obama. At the outset of the campaign season, he was treated as a not-ready-for-prime-time sideshow, with media pundits all in one voice bitching about his "rookie mistakes" and "lack of aggressiveness." But now that he's got the numbers and the momentum, even the most hardened political cynic has to ask -- why not this guy? Would it be such a terrible thing for America to show that it's big enough to elect a black president? Wouldn't that be something all by itself? The very fact that the public, mostly on its own, has lifted Obama past an arrogant establishment consensus adds to his appeal as a symbol of the idea that not everything in our politics is rigged, that not everything that they tell us is impossible really is.

So maybe it's OK to let the grandiose things that an Obama presidency could represent overwhelm the less-stirring reality -- i.e., Obama as more or less a typical middle-of-the-road Democrat with a lot of money and a well-run campaign. Maybe it's OK because it's not always about the candidates; sometimes it's about us, what we want and what we want to believe. And if Barack Obama can carry that burden for us, why not let him? Seriously, why not? The happy ending doesn't always have to ring false.

Jared Diamond: Unsustainable consumption

Jared Diamond wrote one of my favorite books: Guns, Germs, and Steel. He's right: our future well-being will be determined not by our ability to consume more, but by our ability to maintain or even improve our standard of living while consuming less. This will require political consensus, personal restraint, and public and private investment in efficient technologies.

What's Your Consumption Factor?

By Jared Diamond

January 2, 2008 | New York Times Op-Ed

To mathematicians, 32 is an interesting number: it's 2 raised to the fifth power, 2 times 2 times 2 times 2 times 2. To economists, 32 is even more special, because it measures the difference in lifestyles between the first world and the developing world. The average rates at which people consume resources like oil and metals, and produce wastes like plastics and greenhouse gases, are about 32 times higher in North America, Western Europe, Japan and Australia than they are in the developing world. That factor of 32 has big consequences.

To understand them, consider our concern with world population. Today, there are more than 6.5 billion people, and that number may grow to around 9 billion within this half-century. Several decades ago, many people considered rising population to be the main challenge facing humanity. Now we realize that it matters only insofar as people consume and produce.

If most of the world's 6.5 billion people were in cold storage and not metabolizing or consuming, they would create no resource problem. What really matters is total world consumption, the sum of all local consumptions, which is the product of local population times the local per capita consumption rate.

The estimated one billion people who live in developed countries have a relative per capita consumption rate of 32. Most of the world's other 5.5 billion people constitute the developing world, with relative per capita consumption rates below 32, mostly down toward 1 .

The population especially of the developing world is growing, and some people remain fixated on this. They note that populations of countries like Kenya are growing rapidly, and they say that's a big problem. Yes, it is a problem for Kenya's more than 30 million people, but it's not a burden on the whole world, because Kenyans consume so little. (Their relative per capita rate is 1.) A real problem for the world is that each of us 300 million Americans consumes as much as 32 Kenyans. With 10 times the population, the United States consumes 320 times more resources than Kenya does.

People in the third world are aware of this difference in per capita consumption, although most of them couldn't specify that it's by a factor of 32. When they believe their chances of catching up to be hopeless, they sometimes get frustrated and angry, and some become terrorists, or tolerate or support terrorists. Since Sept. 11, 2001, it has become clear that the oceans that once protected the United States no longer do so. There will be more terrorist attacks against us and Europe, and perhaps against Japan and Australia, as long as that factorial difference of 32 in consumption rates persists.

People who consume little want to enjoy the high-consumption lifestyle. Governments of developing countries make an increase in living standards a primary goal of national policy. And tens of millions of people in the developing world seek the first-world lifestyle on their own, by emigrating, especially to the United States and Western Europe, Japan and Australia. Each such transfer of a person to a high-consumption country raises world consumption rates, even though most immigrants don't succeed immediately in multiplying their consumption by 32 . [Another reason to secure our borders: To keep all those beaners and boat people consuming closer to 1 than 32! Just kidding. -- J]

Among the developing countries that are seeking to increase per capita consumption rates at home, China stands out. It has the world's fastest growing economy, and there are 1.3 billion Chinese, four times the United States population. The world is already running out of resources, and it will do so even sooner if China achieves American-level consumption rates. Already, China is competing with us for oil and metals on world markets.

Per capita consumption rates in China are still about 11 times below ours, but let's suppose they rise to our level. Let's also make things easy by imagining that nothing else happens to increase world consumption — that is, no other country increases its consumption, all national populations (including China's) remain unchanged and immigration ceases. China's catching up alone would roughly double world consumption rates. Oil consumption would increase by 106 percent, for instance, and world metal consumption by 94 percent.

If India as well as China were to catch up, world consumption rates would triple. If the whole developing world were suddenly to catch up, world rates would increase elevenfold. It would be as if the world population ballooned to 72 billion people (retaining present consumption rates).

Some optimists claim that we could support a world with nine billion people. But I haven't met anyone crazy enough to claim that we could support 72 billion. Yet we often promise developing countries that if they will only adopt good policies — for example, institute honest government and a free-market economy — they, too, will be able to enjoy a first-world lifestyle. This promise is impossible, a cruel hoax: we are having difficulty supporting a first-world lifestyle even now for only one billion people.

We Americans may think of China's growing consumption as a problem. But the Chinese are only reaching for the consumption rate we already have. To tell them not to try would be futile.

The only approach that China and other developing countries will accept is to aim to make consumption rates and living standards more equal around the world. But the world doesn't have enough resources to allow for raising China's consumption rates, let alone those of the rest of the world, to our levels . Does this mean we're headed for disaster?

No, we could have a stable outcome in which all countries converge on consumption rates considerably below the current highest levels. Americans might object: there is no way we would sacrifice our living standards for the benefit of people in the rest of the world. Nevertheless, whether we get there willingly or not, we shall soon have lower consumption rates, because our present rates are unsustainable.

Real sacrifice wouldn't be required, however, because living standards are not tightly coupled to consumption rates. Much American consumption is wasteful and contributes little or nothing to quality of life. For example, per capita oil consumption in Western Europe is about half of ours, yet Western Europe's standard of living is higher by any reasonable criterion, including life expectancy, health, infant mortality, access to medical care, financial security after retirement, vacation time, quality of public schools and support for the arts . Ask yourself whether Americans' wasteful use of gasoline contributes positively to any of those measures.

Other aspects of our consumption are wasteful, too. Most of the world's fisheries are still operated non-sustainably, and many have already collapsed or fallen to low yields — even though we know how to manage them in such a way as to preserve the environment and the fish supply. If we were to operate all fisheries sustainably, we could extract fish from the oceans at maximum historical rates and carry on indefinitely.

The same is true of forests: we already know how to log them sustainably, and if we did so worldwide, we could extract enough timber to meet the world's wood and paper needs . Yet most forests are managed non-sustainably, with decreasing yields.

Just as it is certain that within most of our lifetimes we'll be consuming less than we do now, it is also certain that per capita consumption rates in many developing countries will one day be more nearly equal to ours. These are desirable trends, not horrible prospects. In fact, we already know how to encourage the trends; the main thing lacking has been political will.

Fortunately, in the last year there have been encouraging signs. Australia held a recent election in which a large majority of voters reversed the head-in-the-sand political course their government had followed for a decade; the new government immediately supported the Kyoto Protocol on cutting greenhouse gas emissions.

Also in the last year, concern about climate change has increased greatly in the United States. Even in China, vigorous arguments about environmental policy are taking place, and public protests recently halted construction of a huge chemical plant near the center of Xiamen. Hence I am cautiously optimistic. The world has serious consumption problems, but we can solve them if we choose to do so.

Jared Diamond, a professor of geography at the University of California, Los Angeles, is the author of "Collapse" and "Guns, Germs and Steel."