Bad Policies in Afghanistan

Here is a posting on Unfogged.com:

We're apparently still holding prisoners incommunicado at Bagram for weeks at a time without access to the Red Cross. There's no possible excuse for this -- it's not as if there's domestic political pressure that makes abiding by international law and norms of civilized behavior in this regard particularly difficult. No part of the public who would think of this as being soft on terrorists is paying enough attention to make it an issue. I would really like to be making excuses for the Obama administration as generally well intentioned on this sort of human rights issue, but I have no idea at all of how one could possibly justify this sort of thing.

One of the things that made me want to cut the Obama administration slack for good intentions on detainee issues was that Phil Carter of Intel Dump was the administration official in charge of those issues, and he had a long written record of decent positions on these issues. He's just quit for personal reasons.

I've got nothing useful to say here, but I'm not happy.

I've moved to a smaller, more rural area with a much more conservative population. I was at a tire store getting snow tires when a father and son had a bit of an argument. The son ranted that torture was OK in Iraq and Afghanistan because the people being fought "weren't real soldiers". The father dissented. I bit my tongue. I think in analogies and for me the analogy would be the English in the American Revolutionary War treating all prisoners as rebels and traitors and not as soldiers. (In fact there was a fair bit of this and it hardened attitudes in the colonies.)

This kind of 'hard' approach in Iraq and Afghanistan is asking for more trouble in the present and the future. It is so foolish. But it is an attitude that many have. Sadly, the Obama administration is showing itself liable to this kind of short-sighted policy by allowing illegal detentions (and I suspect torture as well) to continue despite the horrible repercussions of torture under the Bush administration. This is yet another reason why I have lost all faith in the Obama administration.