Follow this link to the article in Newsweek by Michael Hirsh.

Hirsh starts off by discussing the news that George Soros has launched a $50 million effort to purge economics of its free-market zeal.

He then goes on to discuss the disarray in the field of economics at the moment. It is an enlightening discussion even if Hirsh’s understanding of it is fatally flawed.

I can’t help but wonder if Hirsh suffers from the general innumeracy of the American public. He takes ideas that require real numbers (as in the mathematical definition of real numbers) to analyze, but seems to reduce it to the two binary digits.  It is not a question of whether or not we need to have financial regulation.  We have to be able to figure out how much to have.  I get suspicious of writers or of economic experts who can only think in yes or no absolutes.  Certainly George Soros is not one of those people.

Michael Hirsh is also the author of At War with Ourselves: Why America Is Squandering Its Chance to Build a Better World.

Follow this link to the story in Vanity Fair.

This gives another point of view on affairs of the office.

I did work in a department where the financial administrator was living with the boss of the group.  It certainly did raise a lot of speculation about how the affair affected the work at the office.

Perhaps, if the boss had an independent financial administrator, he would not have made a presentation to a Vice President about how the department was way over budget.  The VP stalked out of the meeting in anger after telling the department head that he had a lot of gall to make such a presentation.  You can imagine how long the boss remained in his position.

If you care to see what Huffington Post readers thought about the article, then follow this link.

Follow this link to the story in the Washington Post.

Matthew Hoh, Foreign Service officer and former Marine captain, says he no longer knows why his nation is fighting.

Even without my passing judgment on what Hoh has to say, I think it is important to listen to what he says.  It gives some insight as to what we are facing and why we have such trouble training a military force in Afghanistan among a people who were able to expel the Soviet Union (or was it just the Russians by that time?) from their country.

Follow this link to see the discussion on Huffington Post.

I left the comment:

This answers a lot of my questions. I have been wondering how it is that we have an awful time training the Afghan military to overcome the Taliban when the Afghan people were able to throw out the Russians with just a modicum of help from us?

If you read the book, “The Kite Runner” you have an inkling of where the Pashtuns sit within the Afghanistan society. What Matthew Hoh says fits in quite well with what I learned from the book.

Trying to “give” the rural Afghanis a centralized government is to try to give them exactly what they do not want. No wonder we cannot succeed. If all we need to gain their loyalty is a little money and a promise to get out, why can’t we try that? They will be able to fight off the Taliban themselves.

It is not a matter of more troops or less troops. It is a matter of understanding the situation and applying the right strategy.

There were some interesting links in the responses on Huffington Post.  I’ll point them out here as I read them and  discover which are valuable.

Follow this link to the piece on Bill Moyers web site about Rory Stewart and his view on what we need to do in Afghanistan.  That article, in turn, has even more links for follow up research. One of these links is to the piece in the London Review of Books titled The Irresistible Illusion by Rory Stewart. This might be the most important article of the bunch.

Follow this link to the piece on thedailybeast.com. The introduction to the piece explains what it is all about:

The landscape has changed dramatically since Gen. McChrystal called for a major surge in March. Andrew Exum, who helped draft that report, on the strategic upsides of Obama taking his time.

I think that all of these items point out what is wrong with the strategies being considered.  They point to a more appropriate strategy.