Yikes. Well, then, it’s just not happening. No way. Thanks for coming out. Talk about your nuclear options. Imagine having the power to just toss aside decades of attempted negotiations and other peace efforts, not to mention the blood that’s been shed, with a single statement. Netanyahu isn’t the only one who has or who wields this power, but he is the most powerful right now, and he is the latest and most obvious example. Is there any chance that the US would really respond meaningfully?

Then, in Afghanistan, a story that shows that the winter is no longer down season for fighting. That dynamic has been changing dramatically over the past several years. Another new, or new-ish development, a drone attack inside Afghanistan, in Helmand, to be precise, that killed 16 people. They “seemed to be insurgents” villagers told the New York Times. Given McChrystal’s welcome emphasis on not killing civilians with air strikes, this is an interesting development. Could it be that we’ll be seeing more drones fire their missiles into southern Afghanistan? Could it be related to the killings of the intelligence agents in Khost two weeks back, or to the impending arrival of the new waves of troops? Seven western troops were killed the yesterday, however, so the one sure thing we can say is that this foe has not been cowed by anything the US has done yet.

There’s no shortage of dysfunction “over there”–wherever that “there” is at a given moment–but I was glad to see over this past weekend a few pieces that asserted, in different ways, from different angles, that there may be more commonalities between us and them–whoever “them” is at a given moment–than is often recognized. The first, from a very interesting op-ed about intelligence gathering and the support given, or not given, to intelligence gatherers. Written by former spook Robert Grenier, it has some sections, particularly the last few paragraphs, which seem overwrought in its defense of certain orders carried out by the CIA in the early years of the war on terror. The scenarios sketched in the first half, though, were captivating. But the part that made me smile was dropped in about halfway through: “Loyalty can take many forms, but when all is said and done, loyalty is essentially tribal. That is as true for us as it is for any Afghan.”

The tribes and tribalness of other lands is so often raised without recognition that we, in our way, are just as tribal. You see it in the cities and in the countryside, in business and in sports and in social circles and definitely, unquestionably, in politics. Not clearly as defined, obviously, but very present, and very important for understanding the group dynamics that drive policy and personal debates in this country and as we look overseas.

The other note was in Nicholas Kristof’s column “Religion and Women.” He writes:

Religions derive their power and popularity in part from the ethical compass they offer. So why do so many faiths help perpetuate something that most of us regard as profoundly unethical: the oppression of women? It is not that warlords in Congo cite Scripture to justify their mass rapes (although the last warlord I met there called himself a pastor and wore a button reading “rebels for Christ”). It’s not that brides are burned in India as part of a Hindu ritual. And there’s no verse in the Koran that instructs Afghan thugs to throw acid in the faces of girls who dare to go to school.

Yet these kinds of abuses — along with more banal injustices, like slapping a girlfriend or paying women less for their work — arise out of a social context in which women are, often, second-class citizens. That’s a context that religions have helped shape, and not pushed hard to change.

Again, if we’re thinking this is something that happens only among the “other”–most commonly Muslims, in this past decade–we’re fooling ourselves. It’s a question of orthodoxy, of fundamentalism, and of habits which exists in many forms, in many religions, and in secular circles as well. You can say it’s deeper-rooted in certain places, or that it manifests more often, more visibly, in certain places, but to pretend something so unfortunately elemental is the sole habit of one faith, or one people, is foolishness.

It’s speculative, naturally, but the reasoning is sound, the analysis clear-eyed. In that vein, and because I wasn’t able or inclined to try to put together any kind of “people of 2009″-type list, I thought I’d engage in a little speculation of my own, some possibilities for People of 2010, or at least for the next few months. Sticking with Afghanistan, we’ve got the various Taliban factions who are likely planning their next moves, their strategy for when the weather warms (though the winter is less of a deterrent to fighting and plotting than it has been in the past). We will soon have those 30,000 troops that Obama pledged to the effort and, one hopes and prays, the civilian components that will accompany them to carry out essential non-military aspects of the counterinsurgency strategy being employed. A good report on the necessity of the latter, from the US Institute of Peace, is here.

Others? America’s un- and underemployed. It’s painfully divided and increasingly puerile and compromised Congress. The people working amid the worsening conflicts in southern Sudan, where more people were killed than were in Darfur. Iraq’s political leadership, which has elections coming up (as does Afghanistan, possibly, and Sri Lanka, too). The shrinking number of foreign correspondents being counted upon to provide actual information about all these places.

There are many other possibilities (feel free to suggest your own). At the top of the list, though, I’d put the Iranian protesters, the people who continue heading to the streets by day and to the rooftops by night to voice their displeasure with the country’s boorish and repressive theocratic regime. Analysis aside (I’ll attempt some shortly), these people are remarkable. The odds and the risks are immense, but they have kept at it. There are so many ways to be distracted nowadays, to lose the impetus for action, but they have used these tools (online, mainly) to augment their efforts rather than as an alternative to them. There are clearly people among their number who have found a deep and abiding sense of purpose and decided that this moment, and what they do next, truly matters. There are ways they could be comfortable, that they could get along just fine, even with the goons they have making their laws. But they have decided that getting along isn’t good enough, that they want change, and they’ve found the resolve, and enough support–overt and, no doubt, covert–to march another day.

There will be more opportunities as well. In the coming weeks, writes Robin Wright, “the regime’s most urgent goal is to prevent opposition activists from turning next month’s 11-day celebration marking the Shah’s ouster in 1979 into a counterrevolution against his successors.” The regime learns, too, and is employing it’s own techno-military-torture intimidation tactics, but they are also showing signs (via Andrew Sullivan) that they are responding the volume and the persistence of the outrage, that they’re being made accountable to some degree. To be sure, they are still saying some scary things. There’s no guaranteeing the outcome for the demonstrators, who are gathering not only in Tehran but in several other cities as well. It matters, though. Of that there is no question. The outcome–or the evolution of this, I might say, since there’s no guarantee of a concrete outcome any time soon–matters to them, of course, but it also matters to the US and American policy towards Iran, to large swathes of the Iraqi population, to Israel and its planners (keeping the trigger pullers in Tel Aviv at bay is one of the great challenges of the coming year), and to people like the Burmese, who are being told they’ll get an election in the coming year as well, and have every reason to believe that they are, again, being lied to, by a venal coterie of rulers who care little, if at all, about the welfare of their own people. An inspiration, possible inspiration, and possible model to many, these Iranians could well be writing history before our eyes.

Ashura, the most emotionally charged religious holiday on the Iranian calendar, is almost here. Wearing green and black, the Shiite faithful will beat themselves in ritual self-flagellation Sunday and perform elaborate passion plays reenacting the doomed 7th century battle of Imam Hussein, a grandson of the prophet Muhammad, to retain the throne of Islam. “Ya Hussein!” the faithful will chant. And this year, the chant will have an echo: “Ya Hossein! Mir-Hossein!”

The next few days could be tempestuous, explosive, historical. Could be none of the above, but the elements are all in place, apparently the planning as well, for something big. The preamble is already underway:

Police officers and militia forces clashed with demonstrators in central Tehran all day Saturday and then again in northern Tehran in the evening, where the government forces shut down a speech by former President Mohammad Khatami, a reformist leader. The demonstrators, who defied an official ban and turned a Shiite mourning ceremony into a protest, underlined the government’s inability to suppress the opposition despite the use of violence. Protests have continued since a disputed presidential election in June, and one of the largest was expected on Sunday.

Back to Daragahi:

“We are planning to protest on Ashura,” a twenty-something blacksmith said, his hands and face covered with soot outside his shop in Narmak, the east Tehran neighborhood were Ahmadinejad grew up. “They will try to stop us and arrest us,” he said. “But we’re not just one or two people they can pull out. We’re many.”

And then I was going to point to another story, about a guy called Jorge Munoz, a 44 year-old born in Colombia and now living in Queens, in New York City. Every night–every single night–Munoz collects leftovers from bakeries, supporters, other food providers, and wherever else he can find it, and hands it out to homeless and hungry men and women. He’s not a wealthy man; he works as school bus driver. But, the story says, “In five years, he has served 70,000 meals, he reckons, with no financial aid from the city or anyone else.”

And then there would be some stirring words about dedication, about selflessness, about what it takes for people and places to heal, and then we’d wish you a merry Christmas. That was the plan. Heck, there was even word of a poll showing that people still, believe it or not, read newspapers (thanks, Rosanna).

But I couldn’t stop myself from reading on. Just couldn’t. So along with Aceh’s achievements, and Munoz’ remarkable temerity, there’s news that graft and theft continue to plague Sri Lanka’s attempts to recover from that same tsunami. And there’s the truly shocking story out of Mexico, about the aftermath of the raid that killed drug lord Arturo Beltran Leyva. One of Mexico’s Marines was also killed during the raid. The state tried to recognize him, and…

“Killed during a raid that ended the life of a notorious drug lord, the marine was buried a hero, ushered to his grave by an honor guard of commandos in camouflage, his mother awarded a folded flag. Hours later, the grieving mother, the marine’s sister, his brother and an aunt were mowed down by gunmen in a revenge attack that sent a chilling message to the Mexican military combating drug traffickers.”

Wow. That’s as cold-blooded as it gets. And that stuff makes a deep impression, too, no matter the season. So, despite my best efforts to focus on the positive, the noble, the inspiring, it’s impossible to ignore the base, the gut-wrenching, the craven and violent. There can never just be one or the other. And they don’t cancel each out. Rather, they exist together, simultaneously, always. Best I can say, I think, is that knowing how awful and selfish and brutal people can be makes people like Munoz, and episodes like the dawn of better days in Aceh, all the more remarkable.

Kandahar, 2006

There was a time, a while back, when I would sit down to read the day’s news and a question would come into my head, involuntarily: What exploded today? This spanned a few years, actually, a time when the bombings in Iraq were mounting at a terrifying rate, when there was the occasional attack in Afghanistan, when a scan of the headlines might alert you to some episode of woe you in Sri Lanka, parts of India, part of the Philippines or Indonesia (to name a few). It just kept happening. It became the norm, not the exception. Tales of bloodshed before breakfast. That’s how most days started.

It feels like that today. Of late, big attacks in Baghdad, a massacre in the Philippines, a report about the insane numbers of civilians who are still getting killed in the Congo, policemen killed in Afghanistan, north and south. And today, just on the splash page of the Times’ website…

“22 people, including five women, were killed Tuesday when a car bomb ripped through a marketplace in the central Pakistani town of Dera Ghazi Khan…”

In Kabul, a “blast killed at least eight people and wounded 40 more…”

In Baghdad, “A series of apparently coordinated car bombs exploded in central Baghdad on Tuesday morning near the Green Zone, government ministries and the Iranian Embassy, killing four people and wounding at least 14 others…”

And that’s without even looking yet at other papers from other places. Dispiriting, to say the least, and that’s just when seen from afar, from a perch in New York, feeling rather useless. For those who live in these places, who had invested hope in these places, it has to be crushing. Last night, there was a screening of a documentary called Living in Emergency, a tale of Medecins San Frontieres/Doctors Without Borders personnel working in the field in Liberia and Kenya.  Credit to MSF for letting everything show, warts, blood, life, death, arguments, doubts and all. It’s an extremely compelling production that gets at the question of what to do when you feel hopeless, when the bodies are stacking up, when you could probably save many of them given the proper resources, but not in these cases–you know what to do but just can’t do it. And “these cases” are happening all over the world, more often in places few people are paying attention to.  How do you then find that psychological space, that way of being, that allows you to keep doing it? Some do, some don’t, the film shows, but the work, the need, remains and always will. You just need to try to find ways to weather the days when it feels like it just doesn’t matter, when these awful headlines keep stacking up (like the coffins in the picture above, from Kandahar, back in 2006). Another very powerful example, very much worth watching–it’s about 15 minutes–is this report the LA Times put up the other day, on ex-gang members from LA going to work with kids in rural Alabama, and despite everything they’ve been through, being shocked at what they find.

It also says that passport-holders from Cuba, Iran, North Korea, Libya, Syria, Sudan, Afghanistan, Lebanon, Somalia, Iraq, Yemen and Algeria should face additional screening.

Whole thing is interesting, and a little frightening, but don’t you think there are some surprising omissions in the list above, or at least one in particular? (Hint: It begins with a “P” and ends with “askistan.”) If I try to think like the people who’d put together a list like this, I’d think they’d want Pakistan on there, no? I wonder if that’s the case in the UK.

As it was several months ago, the Iranian security forces seem to be trying to gauge how forcefully to respond. The protesters, too, I’d imagine, will need to figure out how they want to proceed. I want to believe that they can maintain composure and non-violence and still have an impact, that they can take the long view on this, since it’s not going to change in the immediate future. Possible? I’m not sure. Any inherent “goodness” really means little when talking about tangible results. And there are likely many arrests and injuries and some deaths to come. But it’s remarkable that such bravery is, and has been, coming from a country that was long maligned by the previous administration. I’d imagine there are some contacts between various western agencies and people involved–if those western agencies are doing their jobs. But I’d also hope that, say, Palestinians–and Americans, too–take note of what’s happening, of the groundswell of support for those in green who’ve taken to Iran’s streets, rooftops, internet servers, and elsewhere.

To recap: He reviewed the history of this, the reasons behind the initial invasion, invoking 9/11, focusing on al Qaeda (which has “distorted and defiled Islam”) and the base it had in Afghanistan. Iraq drew resources away, we were reminded, but that war is coming to an end, thanks to the “character of men and women in uniform.” He implied that the problems plaguing Afghanistan and Pakistan were essentially inevitable given the way the war was fought and ignored. But now proper attention can be paid to achieving a “narrowly defined” goal–denying al Qaeda room to operate–and the additional manpower will allow the US to do what needs to be done, stopping the momentum of the Taliban and bolstering the Afghan state and military, so that they can take over the battle sooner rather than later.

There was a nominal, unconvincing endorsement of the Karzai government, an assertion that despite the fraud that marred the recent elections, it represents the basic wishes of the people, or something lame like that. Obama said he has asked the questions that needed to be asked, deliberated at length with his cabinet and with military officials because he owes it to the people he’s going to send over there to fight. (Another implicit slapdown of Cheney, who was part of a team that  wantonly betrayed the compact between armed forces and Commander in Chief.) The borderlands of Afghanistan and Pakistan is the “epicenter of violent extremism” and cannot be allowed to spin further out of control. Therefore, the troops, who will counter the Taliban’s progress and train up the Afghan military. Therefore, a civilian surge, which will help build capacity, infrastructure and commerce. Therefore, the declaration–much stronger than the earlier bit about Karzai–that the US will not provide “a blank check” and will differentiate between effective, honest officials (governors, minsters, whomever) and the shady ones. And therefore, we’ll keep working with, on, and in Pakistan as well, since that’s obviously part of the problem, too.

Parrying counter-arguments, he said this is not Vietnam, there are not enough troops there now to be effective, that there will be a time-table on this, that we will support Afghan-led efforts to re-integrate the Taliban (interesting) and will begin withdrawing troops in 18 months (allowing, he said later, for considerations of “conditions on the ground”). Heading into the home stretch, he connected this back to domestic affairs, to the ongoing economic crises and concerns, our values, morals, responsibilities–trying, it seemed, to cast this as not only the right thing to do in Afghanistan, but for Americans, as well. In fact, it’s the American thing to do, he asserted, the right thing, the proper and just thing, in accordance with values and morals and such. “None of this will be easy,” but he is resolute. Some unity would be nice, too. Thank you, God Bless, etc.

Some brief reflections (yours are invited, of course, too): This is an awful, awful thing, but I can’t disagree. There’s no chance of making anything better if numbers stay where they are or go down. No chance. And he did a fairly good job of making that point, and of speaking to several audiences at once. The rhetoric was good, too, as is his custom. But now is the time when the planning goes live, when two-dimensional arguments are put into play in three-, four-, five-dimensional environments. Iraq coming to an end? I’m not so sure about that. The Pakistanis are on the ball? Definitely debatable (and why not mention some effort to curb tensions between Pakistan and India, which is a factor here as well?). I would’ve been pleased to hear him pledge that the US, and the international community, will clean up its act over there as well, that the dodgier contractors will be pulled from the field, that there will be more oversight on western operators, not just Afghan ones. And 18 months? That’s not a very long time for a very ambitious agenda. There’s so much to do, so much to undo, so much to build, so much to rebuild, and many people that need to be convinced it can be done. He seemed to be straining when making the case that this action is in line with American moral and values and all that. Wonder how that will play. My hunch is that there are quite a few Afghans who’ll be glad to hear this news. But they’ll need to see results. I’m in pretty much the same boat, and I say that as someone who does underestimate the tremendous complexity of the situation, as someone who has seen plenty of war, who knows what it does to people, those who fight it and those who live through it, who is skeptical and filled with trepidation about some of the consequences of these decisions. I hate that this is the case, but I think it’s the right thing to do.

Whether it will work, I don’ t know. My sense of that will depend on the day, or the last bit of news. The only certainty is that, as he said, this will not be easy.