Support for the war continues to slide in the US.

Support for the war in Afghanistan has ebbed to a new low in ABC News/Washington Post polls, with concerns over strategy and broad doubts about the reliability of the Afghan government leaving Americans sharply divided on where to go from here.

Just 44 percent now say the war in Afghanistan has been worth fighting, the fewest in a question dating to early 2007. Fifty-two percent instead say the war has not been worth it, up 13 points from its low last December – still well below Iraq levels, but majority negative nonetheless.

Steve Coll asks, what happens if we fail? Among other things,

The Nineties Afghan Civil War on Steroids: Even if the international community gave up on Afghanistan and withdrew, as it did from Somalia during the early nineties, it is inconceivable that the Taliban could triumph in the country completely and provide a regime (however perverse) of stability. About half of Afghanistan’s population is Pashtun, from which the Taliban draw their strength. Much of the country’s non-Pashtun population ardently opposes the Taliban. In the humiliating circumstances that would attend American failure, those in the West who now promote “counterterrorism,” “realist,” and “cost-effective” strategies in the region would probably endorse, in effect, a nineties redux—which would amount to a prescription for more Afghan civil war. A rump “legitimate” Afghan government dominated by ethnic Tajiks and Uzbeks would find arms and money from India, Iran, and perhaps Russia, Europe and the United States. This would likely produce a long-running civil war between northern, Tajik-dominated ethnic militias and the Pashtun-dominated Taliban. Tens of thousands of Afghans would likely perish in this conflict and from the pervasive poverty it would produce; many more Afghans would return as refugees to Pakistan, contributing to that country’s instability

Also, “momentum for a Taliban revolution in Pakistan”; “increased Islamist violence against India, increasing the likelihood of Indo-Pakistani war”; and “increased Al Qaeda ambitions against Britain and the United States”.

Further reading on the conditions for an opportunity society (see previous post).

At his Senate confirmation hearing in February, Arne Duncan succinctly summarized the Obama administration’s approach to education reform: “We must build upon what works. We must stop doing what doesn’t work.” Since becoming education secretary, Duncan has launched a $4.3 billion federal “Race to the Top” initiative that encourages states to experiment with various accountability reforms. Yet he has ignored one state reform that has proven to work, as well as the education thinker whose ideas inspired it. The state is Massachusetts, and the education thinker is E. D. Hirsch, Jr.

The “Massachusetts miracle,” in which Bay State students’ soaring test scores broke records, was the direct consequence of the state legislature’s passage of the 1993 Education Reform Act, which established knowledge-based standards for all grades and a rigorous testing system linked to the new standards. And those standards, Massachusetts reformers have acknowledged, are Hirsch’s legacy. If the Obama administration truly wants to have a positive impact on American education, it should embrace Hirsch’s ideas and urge other states to do the same.

Sooner or later the US will find itself grappling with an immense fiscal problem. The recession and stimulus have combined to produce record-breaking deficits, and economic recovery will not come close to restoring balance. US voters have big questions to answer about the entitlements they demand and the taxes they are willing to pay.

This dismal outlook might not seem the ideal setting for a call to new ambition in US social policy. But that is exactly what Isabel Sawhill and Ron Haskins, scholars at the Brookings Institution, issue in their new book, Creating an Opportunity Society.

Unreal as such a summons might seem just now, the authors should be congratulated for refusing to be deflected – and not only because their book is full of excellent analysis and proposals. In two ways, their effort turns out to be well timed after all.

The remainder of this article can be read here. Please post comments below.

Perfect.

An expectedly interesting essay by Timothy Garton Ash. I applaud the strictures against hindsight bias, an endlessly recurring analytical error which practitioners of my trade seem especially prone to.

Every writer on 1989 wrestles with an almost unavoidable human proclivity that psychologists have christened “hindsight bias”—the tendency, that is, to regard actual historical outcomes as more probable than alternatives that seemed real at the time (for example, a Tiananmen-style crackdown in Central Europe). What actually happened looks as if it somehow had to happen. Henri Bergson talked of “the illusions of retrospective determinism.” Explanations are then offered for what happened. As one scholar commented a few years after 1989: no one foresaw this, but everyone could explain it afterward. Reading these books, I was again reminded of the Polish philosopher Leszek Kołakowski’s “law of the infinite cornucopia,” which states that an infinite number of explanations can be found for any given event.

And this–the direct quotation from Gorbachev, I mean–was something I hadn’t seen before.

[Gorbachev] mistakenly believed such changes would stop at the frontier of the Soviet Union, which he saw as a country, not an internal empire. Instead, as [Harvard's Mark] Kramer shows, the revolutionary changes in East-Central Europe contributed directly to the dissolution of the Soviet Union itself. Robert Conquest, the historian of the Soviet Great Terror and Ukrainian famine, asked Gorbachev many years later whether, if he had known where it would all lead, he would have done the same again. He replied: “Probably not.”

Well, well. Though always a plausible speculation, I had not previously seen those words attributed to the great man himself.

In contrast, by the way, I thought this column by Garton Ash was pretty lame. Though it might be that what put me off was his closing appeal to “Europe”: play your full part in shaping the future of the world!

So, 20 years on, the question before us Europeans is this: Can we recapture some of the strategic boldness and historical imagination of 1989? Or shall we now leave it to others to shape the world, while we snuggle down, Hobbit-like, in our national holes, and pretend there are no giants yomping overhead?

Grandiosity bias. No, Europe, enough with the historical imagination. Take a breather and think small for a while.

Thanks to A&L for both links.

They are on a roll. The good news just keeps coming.

Republicans have moved ahead of Democrats by 48% to 44% among registered voters in the latest update on Gallup’s generic congressional ballot for the 2010 House elections, after trailing by six points in July and two points last month… Over the course of the year, independents’ preference for the Republican candidate in their districts has grown, from a 1-point advantage in July to the current 22-point gap.

Barack Obama and the Democrats want you to know they had a good week. Last Tuesday Republicans threw away a New York congressional seat they had held for a century, preferring to fight each other than win an easy contest. Excellent, say Democrats. Civil war in the Republican party augurs well for next year’s mid-term elections.

What’s that, you say? Oh, yes, Democrats did lose the governorships of New Jersey and Virginia, with huge swings to the other side, but this was to be expected with the economy in such bad shape. Read nothing into that, say Democratic strategists.

Still joyous over this electoral affirmation, Democrats in the House of Representatives then made history over the weekend, with passage of their health-reform bill. The margin was narrow, admittedly, in a chamber they dominate. So what? A win is a win (except in New Jersey or Virginia). Everything is going to plan.

The remainder of this article can be read here. Please post comments below.

A lot of the post-election commentary has been entertaining, if not very enlightening. To any disinterested observer,  the Republicans had a good day on the whole last Tuesday. Not an unalloyed success, bearing in mind the self-inflicted wound in New York, but looking at New Jersey and Virginia, a pretty good day. So the question was how this good result for the Republicans was going to be turned into a bad result, or a result of no significance either way.

Eric Alterman explains “why Democrats are smiling“. Sort of explains.

While the Democratic brand is obviously not what it was when so many of us were brought to tears a year ago by that beautiful scene in Grant Park, Republicans are on the verge of civil war. The sure-to be-a loser side appears to have all the soldiers and the reasonable-sounding side, and the one that can win, appears to have well, not much going on. The Republicans’ suicide will be anything but painless if this keeps up—and it will, if only to continue to juice Fox’s ratings.

Well, as you can see, the piece is not a model of clarity. I’ve read that second sentence four or five times and I’m still not sure what it means. (Didn’t the reasonable-sounding side that can win, in fact, just do so? Can you win and still have “not much going on”? What else apart from winning do you really need to have going on?) But over the course of the article it does emerge that Alterman sincerely believes the Democrats have cause to celebrate Tuesday’s results. Well done!

Gail Collins in the NYT also deserves special mention, I think. She is not alone in believing that the elections were meaningless, but she gets extra credit for regarding their meaninglessness as so self-evident that she does not have to establish the point. She can just celebrate it, by lampooning the view that elections convey any information whatever. Love that title: “Hark! The Voters Speak!” What delicious irony. How we laughed. As though any such thing could happen in an election.

Even Charlie Cook, doyen of poll-gazers and a reliably informative commentator, comes off a little blase in this piece for National Journal. He says Tuesday did not tell us anything we didn’t already know. (Maybe he meant anything he didn’t already know.) We already knew that independents were turning in droves against the Democratic party. We already knew that Jon Corzine was so unpopular he would lose even to a divided opposition. We already knew that a staunchly conservative Republican could win a purple state by a big margin if he “projects a moderate, mainstream, nonthreatening, tolerant image”. Did we really know all those things? If I were a Republican, I’d still be pleased to have them confirmed, and if I were a Democrat I definitely wouldn’t be smiling.