Avatar

As I was on the way to the theater to see Avatar, I thought I'd take a stab at pre-reviewing the movie based just on the trailers and articles I'd read about it. What I came up with was something along the lines of: "This will be a great movie, but not a great film." Which is to say, I thought it was going to be highly effective entertainment without necessarily being something more substantial than that.

With a pretty substantial caveat, I think that's a pretty apt description of James Cameron's multi-hundred-million-dollar, twenty-years-in-gestation labor of love. It's a spectacular, astonishing thing to sit through, especially if you see it in IMAX 3-D, as I did. But it's also like cotton candy - disintegrating nearly as quickly as you can form any kind of impression of it.

The film's plot pretty much fits into the three-minute trailer: It's 2154, and Jake Sully (Sam Worthington), a paraplegic ex-Marine, takes his murdered twin brother's place in something called the Avatar program, on an Alpha Centauran moon called Pandora. The moon is a dense, bountiful rainforest populated by various wild creatures including the sentient, ten-foot-tall, blue-skinned humanoid Na'vi. RDA, the megacorporation in charge of mining the moon for precious unobtanium (har), grows human/Na'vi hybrids which are driven remotely by human operators in order to study the Na'vi for diplomatic and shareholder conscience-appeasement purposes. They're the carrot. The stick is the company's military wing, personified by Col. Miles Quarich (Stephen Lang, sporting some nasty scars courtesy of the local wildlife), another ex-Marine who sees Jake as a valuable reconnaissance asset for the inevitable throwdown with the locals. This initially puts Jake at odds with his avatar-driving scientist colleagues, Grace Augustine (Sigourney Weaver) and Norm Spellman (Joel Moore). But when he gets nearly killed and then mysteriously adopted by the local Na'vi tribe and falls in love with their princess, Neytiri (Zoé Saldana), he begins to question his loyalties. When Quaritch and his sleazy corporate boss Parker Selfridge (Giovanni Ribisi) decide they need the rich vein of unobtanium under the local village and will simply take it by force, Jake goes native and joins a Na'vi rebellion against the "sky people."

Much of the joy of the movie isn't from its narrative. It's been said over and over again how this movie looked like nothing else, and was steps ahead of anything else being done with CGI. That part of the hype is absolutely true. It's a movie which gets exponentially better by the size of your screen - if you're going to see it, see it on the biggest damn theater you can find. The 3-D effects, while initially a bit disorienting, are done in such a way as to contribute to the film, not distract from it. There are a number of really standout sequences, especially the Na'vi flying through floating, Miyazaki-esque mountains on the backs of pterodactyl-like "banshees," the phosphorescent nighttime forest scenes, and at the end, the astonishing battle where the Na'vi and forest creatures take on the human helicopter gunships and powered armor suits. It really is one of the greatest action scenes ever committed to film.

More importantly, the animation just works - which wasn't clear from watching the trailer beforehand on a laptop screen. Partly it's the superiority of Cameron's motion capture technique, which allows the human actors to clamber their blue alter egos over to the far side of the uncanny valley (a feat that only a few motion-captured creations have achieved before). Partly it's the animators' sheer attention to detail, like the movements of the tiny set of secondary eyes behind the primary pair on the banshee heads. And partly it's that the cast is surprisingly strong, even in tall-blue-person form. Sam Worthington, who was so dull in Terminator 4, is in his element here, as the slightly reticent but cynical wiseass who discovers something about the place that appeals to him without completely falling off the cliff into sentimentalism. Sigourney Weaver is probably the standout of the cast as the prickly but decent Dr. Augustine. Saldana is somewhat limited by her dialogue, which includes many of the film's cheesiest lines, but manages to acquit herself pretty well. Michelle Williams, as the scientists' sympathetic helicopter pilot, makes the most of a limited role. And even Ribisi and Lang, given little to do except demonstrate their characters' moral bankruptcy, leave enjoyably deep teeth-marks on the scenery.

There's no substantial technical aspect of this film, in fact, that lands wrong. The score is James Horner on autopilot, but James Horner on autopilot is still better than 90% of Hollywood music - although you should definitely leave the theater at the predictable final beat in order to miss the ending credits song, which will make you long for a Celine Dion comeback. The editing is deft, and shows off the astonishing depth of the world. And the production design is at its worst only somewhat derivative, and in many cases staggeringly creative. It's almost enough, in fact, to cover for the fairly gaping hole in the entire endeavor.

When the plot was first leaked onto the Internet, Avatar was derisively described by some as "Ferngully in space," or "Dances with Wolves in space." There's a lot of truth to those descriptions. The plot is not the film's strong point. The only thing that comes close to a surprise is which characters Cameron bumps off and which he allows to survive, and even that's not especially surprising (although it was, in at least two cases, pretty disappointing). But the really disappointing thing isn't the simplicity of the plot, since it's entirely possible to make a great film with a straightforward narrative arc. It's the missed opportunities.

There are feints in the direction of really interesting ideas in this movie. The idea of someone literally assuming a new identity at the cost of a previous one isn't explored in anything like the depth that it could have been: Jake returns to his own, crippled body when his avatar sleeps, and says at one point that he's not sure which world is real anymore… but his human world never really felt real to begin with. We know he was looking for an adventure and that the reward for cooperating with Quarich will be an otherwise-unaffordable operation to restore his spine and legs to full function, but aside from that the character's human side isn't really given much depth, which undercuts the transformation - why do we care what you become if we don't know what you were before?

As a mirror image of that flaw, the villains aren't given much - or, really, any - depth. Their only motivation is profit. In some of the background material for the movie, unobtanium is described as a superefficient superconductor, without which the economy and remaining environment of Earth will fall apart. It wouldn't have taken much to work that into the script - a line or two would have done the trick, and would have fleshed out the backstory far more. It is specifically said during the movie that Earth is "dying" thanks to the environmental degradation of the kind we see the human miners beginning to inflict on Pandora, but we're not invited to think anything other than "good riddance."

Of course, giving us a reason to think that would have given moral dimension to the villains, which would have been problematic during the final battle, where Jake and his new friends kill quite a large number of human soldiers without so much as a moment's hesitation. It's much easier to cheer when the helicopter door gunner's head gets used by an enormous banshee as a handle to hurl him to his death if he's just a sadistic gun for hire. Cameron's enemies have always been unthinking, immoral or amoral creations - the Terminators, the Aliens, the iceberg - but it's still disappointing to see him apply that same philosophy to humans. Again, a missed opportunity: we see Neytiri and Avatar Jake express sorrow and thanks when they hunt and kill animals, in one of the many sequences which plays very obvious homage to Native American rituals. But perhaps they should also extend the same courtesy to the soldiers they slaughter? The message of the film - and let's not, please, pretend that it doesn't have one - is a combination of anticolonialism and environmentalism. But it's a silly, half-baked, one-dimensional message: Corporate Humans with Big Machines are Evil and Destroy; Natives who Live With Nature are Purely Good. Never mind that I don't see Cameron giving up his garage full of muscle cars or personal aircraft and communing with nature, or that Avatar was made and sold with corporate money and high technology. The message is more important than the reality. Even if it's the kind of over-the-top message that invites the audience to feel vindictive rather than reflective. As narrative, this lack of subtlety doesn't work, and as a call to action it's worse than useless.

The counterargument, of course, is that trying to work in moral complexity would ruin the movie. I think that's missing the point. Movies like The Dark Knight have shown us that you can have a huge, commercially successful blockbuster with at least a modicum of moral depth, or at least an effort to consider ethical questions rather than present them as settled - a film, in other words, rather than a cartoon. With Avatar, James Cameron has shown us that he has perhaps the best technical skills of any director working today - now he just needs to work on putting something more behind them.

Cynicism and the Anti-West Wing

Although it's very unlikely that anything will ever replace Top Gear as my favorite television show on this side of the pond, I do have a new second-favorite. It's called The Thick of It, and it's what you might call political satire. You might also call it dark comedy. It doesn't really have an American equivalent - there was a pilot of an American version made, but it didn't get very far, thanks to the fact that it's somewhat harder to swear on American TV - and swearing is a very big part of the show (and its companion movie, In The Loop, from which the last set of clips comes).

In fact, the closest American counterpart would probably be The West Wing, a show I like a great deal,* but whose general temperament is entirely different than The Thick of It. The West Wing's characters are mostly high-ranking idealistic do-gooders whose selfishness and character flaws are usually (although admittedly not always) balanced out by their ultimate Good Decisions. The Thick of It focuses on mid-level government bureaucrats working in an underfunded social affairs department - the highest-ranked person we meet is the PM's hyper-profane, super-aggro Scottish communications chief Malcolm Tucker. The rest of the cast are dysfunctional in one way or another; the closest the show has to a protagonist is young Labour Party Special Adviser Olly Reeder, who spends most of his time making snide, inappropriate jokes and generally being exactly the kind of smug prick who ruins DC parties. It's exactly the opposite of the West Wing - where the American show often treads the line between compelling drama and schmaltzy feelgooditude by emphasizing the good that can come of working in politics, its British counterpart treats politics as a game played by selfish, insecure prats without regard for the consequences to the public at large. The most West-Wing-ish character on the show, Season 3's new Secretary of State for Social Affairs and Citizenship Nicola Murray, who has a sort of well-meaning if directionless bent, has over the four episodes covering her tenure in office sent her 12-year-old daughter to a terrible school for political reasons, tried to intimidate a reporter, fired the wrong staffer, effectively blackmailed her Shadow Cabinet counterpart and inadvertently gotten her daughter's headmaster fired for doing her a favor. Abbie Bartlett she ain't.**

As funny as The Thick of It often is, the mean-spiritedness of both the characters and the situations the writers place them in can get a little tiresome. The West Wing was at least more various in its depiction of consequences - most of the characters at one point or another made bad or immoral choices, and occasionally the show didn't make everything right by the end of an hour, as when President Bartlett ordered the Qumari defense minister killed. The Thick of it is relentlessly cynical. So maybe it's an unfair comparison. But I tend to believe that our TV shows say something about us, particularly when they're commercially successful. And successful fictional shows taking place entirely or mostly in political settings are a rare breed - aside from these two, I can't think of any that qualify from the last decade. So in a sense I'm compelled to draw comparisons between the two.

And the question that comparison raises is - are the British really that much more cynical about politics than we are? I'm not inclined to think so. It's a hard thing to measure, particularly since this particular example of cynicism is expressed in the form of dark comedy, which has a much longer and more illustrious history in the UK than in the US: our greatest practitioner of it, Stanley Kubrick, did after all relocate permanently to Britain for much of his life. But I think cynicism about politics runs deeper than just what our TV shows look like.

For example, when the big British expenses scandal broke earlier this year, I wondered if there would have been as much anger had it been transposed directly to the US. My guess is that there wouldn't have been - William Jefferson (who was just recently sentenced to prison - finally), after all, had nearly a hundred thousand dollars in cash in his freezer and was re-elected anyway, and that sum dwarfs any of the expenses claims. I follow American politics pretty closely and have at least a passing awareness of British politics, and I get the sense that there are more and bigger scandals in Washington than in London - to my (admittedly limited) knowledge, there hasn't been a British Nixon in living memory. And let's not forget that our voter turnout is amongst the lowest in the world, which may not be a sign of cynicism but certainly contributes to it.

On the other hand, high-level sex scandals in the UK seem to be greeted with laughter rather than impeachment. We tend to vastly overreact; while some politicians can survive their, ah, exposure, most others don't. Britain isn't at the level of France, with Mitterand's wife and mistress standing next to each other at the funeral, but there seems to be a certain level of acceptance that politicians are human and make human mistakes that's often lacking in American politics. We, on the other hand, seem to forget that our politicians are humans, too - and it seems to shock us at a much deeper level when they cheat on their spouses than when they take bribes. Our politicians may be venal and corrupt, but they should at least be sexless, dammit! Still, sex scandals are only one part of how we see our leaders, and it's certainly not the largest part.

I'm fully aware that this is all sort of half-formed. I haven't lived in Britain long enough (especially since St Andrews isn't really representative of anything except... well, St Andrews) to have much personal experience in how people think about politics here. But I get the sense that for all that the British dislike their political leaders, there's not the same depth of hatred towards them that there is in America - no one shows up outside of Gordon Brown's rallies with assault rifles (or whatever the closest legal equivalent in this country would be).

But maybe that's it. Maybe cynical comedy goes some small way towards dissipating public anger towards the government. If that's the case, I think we can't get a real American equivalent of The Thick of It soon enough.


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* Although if I ever meet the person who advised the show's writers on military matters, I will punch them very hard in the face. I say this because I'm fairly confident that this person was not an actual military veteran (who would punch me back much harder) thanks to the vast number of basic errors the show makes about the military and warfighting in general - and when I say basic, I mean "shit you can find out in five seconds with Google" basic.
** I should point out that The Thick of It has made the West Wing comparison explicitly on at least one occasion, where Olly is writing a speech against a deadline and says, "This is exciting, it's like the West Wing," only to have Nicola shoot back, "Shut up, Olly, you're not Josh."

The Show Must Go On!

It's early in the afternoon on Saturday, I'm in my office, soaked completely through from rain that conveniently stopped as soon as I arrived and holding a useless lump of an umbrella that the wind turned inside-out as soon as I stepped out the door... and yet I'm smiling, because I saw something so characteristically, hilariously British that I didn't really have any other choice. It was this:

Well, no, that's not really it. That's a crummy picture I took with my BlackBerry in the one moment when the rain slowed down enough that I didn't think it was going to short out and explode in my hand. But that's the tail end of the parade of the Lord Mayor's Show, a hundreds-of-years-old tradition which in its entire history has only ever been cancelled once, for Wellington's funeral. They're not going to let some pesky rain - even a LOT of pesky rain - stop them. Where Americans would probably call the whole thing off and spend the day inside watching Gossip Girl reruns, the British just put raincoats on their horses and plastic bags over their marching band music and go ahead like nothing's wrong. There were even people out watching and cheering the whole spectacle.

Of course, you could see on the face of every musician, roller-blader, and marching soldier in the parade - except the few lucky ones sitting inside enclosed vehicles - the same, simple thought: "This sucks!"

And on that issue, there was no cultural disagreement whatsoever.

Predicting

One of the things I like about LSE is its program of events. In the last year, they've had Dmitri Medvedev and Michael Chertoff (when he was still DHS secretary), and every couple of days there's another interesting-sounding event - so many that you actually have to limit yourself from going to all of them in order to have any time left to actually work. It's one of the things I absolutely prefer about living in cities. In any case, this evening I went to a talk by Bruce Bueno de Mesquita, the NYU political scientist who uses a complex game-theoretical model to predict the outcomes of complex negotiations. He's an interesting, charismatic guy - which you can see from his recent appearance on the Daily Show - and I think there's something to his prediction model, for which he claims 90% accuracy.

But something about the whole thing bothered me a bit. Partly, it's arrogance - which is referenced in a mostly-flattering recent New York Times Magazine profile - exacerbated by false self-deprecation (he gave us several variations on "no one listens to me" but bragged about how well he knew Condoleezza Rice, for example). Partly, it's the fact that for all his talk about transparency, he won't actually release the design of his prediction software - there is some complicated copyright arrangement, but it also conveniently means that he has a lock on its use in consulting gigs for corporate and government clients, for which he can presumably charge a decent fee. And partly it's my innate suspicion of anyone who glibly claims a 90% success rate at anything much more complicated and difficult than walking to work without being struck by a bus.

During the Q&A, someone asked about the idea of black swans, unpredictable events that completely change the factors on which predictions are based. Bueno de Mesquita agreed that those can negatively impact his predictions, but he also claimed that he'd written code into his software that allowed him to model the impacts of such events - and, he added, the point about rare and unpredictable events is that they're rare. Which is a reasonable point, although I'm not sure I'd be quite so glib about the power of random and unpredictable events to change history.

I also actually managed to ask a question, based on my sense that there was something else about his approach that I found pretty unsettling. I'll admit I didn't phrase it as well as I might have, but the basic gist of it was that between his game-theory model (which I wasn't arguing the accuracy of, since I had no alternative evidence) and the predictive success of statistical models like the ones Nate Silver uses, is there a danger of complacency in the idea that we can actually predict the future? I don't think he cared for the analogy between his model and stats-based approaches like Silver's - a point he clearly considers very important, since he repeated it with another questioner a minute later. He then basically said that he wasn't worried about broader ramifications since not very many people take him seriously. But I think that's a dodge, really, particularly given that in response to a later question he rattled off the level of influence he had with every presidential administration since Reagan. So I think it's really a failure to engage with the idea that accurate prediction of the future, whether it's in fact possible or not, may not actually be a desirable end.

But getting back to the main point about the presentation, I didn't quite put my finger on it until after it was over what it was that bothered me about it so much. It's because for all his one-liners and charisma - and it was an entertaining lecture - the whole enterprise seems very Robert McNamara-ish to me: it embodies the "systems analysis" model that if you just sanitize your inputs and use the right equations, everything else falls into line. I realize that both computer processing power and the sophistication of game theory have advanced hugely since the 1960s, but the principle remains the same, and I don't think the problem before was that the computers were using vacuum tubes and punch-cards. With better technology and methods, you can get some improvement on your successful prediction rate, but paradoxically that may be ultimately a danger: the higher your rate, the more confident you become in the method, and the more willing you may be to push the envelope and act in (possibly risky) ways that you would not have without the prediction. He referred to "engineering" the results of negotiations based on his tool, which I assume was in reference to his business consulting primarily, but convinced me that despite his studied insistence that game theory is an academic tool, he saw it as something else as well.

I can see that Bueno de Mesquita realizes that he can't make claims that are too absurd for his model's abilities - he included a list in his presentation about "what game theory can't do," and I think his repeated insistence that it wasn't a statistical model was to reinforce the idea that game theory isn't a perfect crystal ball that can predict markets and help you find true love, or whatever. I respect that. On the other hand, I think the renown it's brought him has in many respects gotten the better of him - his new book is called "The Predictioneer," for example, which isn't exactly a subtle approach. And that approach makes me worried that in his attempts to understand and "engineer" human behavior, he's only going to push it to an extreme.

Split the Nobel

Most people I've talked to (and much of the media commentary I've read) about Barack Obama winning the Nobel Peace Prize has been pretty negative. There's a nasty undertone in a lot of it - and not just from the usual right-wing suspects - about him, even though he had nothing to do with the decision to award the prize. Furthermore, I think his comments about it strike exactly the right tone of self-effacement and non-complacency. That said, I agree to some extent that it's premature to award such a distinction to a president who's only been in office for a few months and doesn't have a major treaty or peace agreement to his name. I've been surprised over the last few days how many non-Americans I've talked to who dislike the idea of Obama getting the prize - obviously, graduate students at LSE are not a representative sample of anything, but it undermines the easy explanation that Americans are opposed to the decision and foreigners (or Europeans) are in favor. But I also agree with Rachel Maddow (amongst others) that there are absolutely justifications for awarding the prize to him, even at this early stage. I think and hope he'll take the right lesson from it, and I believe it will have a net positive effect, but I'm not completely sanguine about it.

But in any case, all this ground has been covered before, and I doubt anyone is going to change their mind at this point - and my scribblings certainly won't have that effect. But I quite randomly had an idea that I haven't seen written anywhere else before which I think is worth floating.

Alfred Nobel's will stated that the Peace Prize should go to, "the person who has done the most or best work for fraternity between nations, for the abolition or reduction of standing armies and for the holding and promotion of peace congresses." Obviously the awarding committee has taken some liberties with that intention - Martin Luther King Jr., for example, obviously deserved the award, but had done nothing to promote "fraternity between nations" or to abolish standing armies. The same is true with the man who many people argue was the logical winner this time around, the courageous Zimbabwean prime minister Morgan Tsvangirai. President Obama's win makes sense using Nobel's original formulation, but makes much less if we stick with the broader formula that the committee seems to have used at least since the 1960s. And the committee has said nothing in its public statements about changing their procedures or considerations.

So instead of arguing endlessly about whether someone like Tsvangirai deserves it more than Obama, I have another proposal. Why not split the Nobel Peace Prize into two?

The first would be a prize basically set up along the lines of Nobel's original proposal, to be given to a person (or an organization) who had done the most for international peace. I think you could in fairly good conscience give this award to Obama, partly because he's redefined the critically important US relationship with the rest of the world on the grounds that he has made some legitimately important decisions: closing Gitmo, canceling the deployment of anti-missile systems in Eastern Europe, and backing up his stand against nuclear proliferation in Iran with the stated intent to slash the US nuclear arsenal. Yes, it's early, but various other Peace Prize winners were given the award despite not having achieved their goals. I think the stronger argument against Obama for an international peace prize is that he's overseeing two wars, one of which only seems to be getting worse and worse, but at the same time I'm not sure who else would qualify - it hasn't exactly been a bumper year for peace, after all.

The second could be a prize for human rights or social justice in more general terms, and that could be awarded to Morgan Tsvangirai, or (posthumously) to Neda Agha-Soltan, or to various other people who have advanced - and in many cases made huge sacrifices for - a particular cause or a broader social justice movement within one particular nation. This award could be given much wider latitude, and allow the committee to recognize particular causes or nations without shorting people or groups who had a truly international impact.

This division would refocus the award and allow it to sidestep this controversy and possible future ones - and if there were no obvious winners in either category, the committee could simply redirect the prize money and hope for a better next year. After all, they've done it before. It may not be a perfect solution, but with the growing sense that the Peace Prize has become increasingly irrelevant, it might be the kind of vast re-organization needed to restore its credibility.

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* That distinction, to my mind, definitely belongs to the decision to award the Peace Prize to Henry Kissinger, with Yassir Arafat a close second.

Afghanostic

I just got back from a fairly contentious debate at Chatham House on the topic of Afghanistan and whether British troops should be involved there or not. It's an interesting debate to watch from an American perspective, for a number of reasons. For someone who pays quite a lot of attention to American politics, it's interesting to observe a debate occurring in parallel - and a casual watcher of the debate as it unfolds on British TV could be forgiven for thinking that the British had the largest contingent of troops in the country (although, to be fair, the same casual viewer watching American TV would probably think that the international contingent was the setup for a bad joke - a Frenchman, a German and a Briton).

The organizers had done a good job of getting people to cover the bases of the debate. There was the Ministry of Defence official who I ended up feeling pretty sorry for, since he had to toe the government line and was getting it from both sides, an anti-war campaigner, the former EU envoy to Afghanistan, a Scottish Labour MP who clearly didn't care much for his own party's platform, and an academic from the King's College Department of War Studies. It wasn't an American cable news-style smackdown, but there were definitely some sparks, particularly between the MP and the MoD official. Oh, and the anti-war campaigner was accused by an Afghan expat in the audience of "doing the Taliban's work for them." Unlike many of the debates I've seen on the BBC and Channel 4, there was a significant amount of discussion of Britain's role in the war vis a vis the United States, and it wasn't particularly favorable towards the "special relationship" - by and large, the discussants seemed to view the US as simply dictating policy to the UK. Brigadier Howes argued that the UK had helped set American policy from time to time, but didn't seem especially convinced of his own argument, and all in all the opinion in the room seemed to be focused on the idea that the UK needs a more Europe-focused defense policy. That's fair; I'm not enough of an American nationalist to think that the UK's interests or situation are or should be inherently aligned with ours.* And to my (foreign) ears, the argument that British boots on the ground in Afghanistan are stopping terrorist attacks back home ring a bit hollow - as several people pointed out tonight, the much more effective counter-terrorism operations are conducted by British security services operating domestically. But I didn't find the anti-war message - that we should just give Afghanistan over to the Afghans, come what may - especially convincing either.

I guess what the panel reinforced for me is my agnosticism on the topic of Afghanistan. I think it's pretty unarguable that the war was botched almost from the outset, and that we missed a huge opportunity to build functional state and security mechanisms between the Taliban's defeat in 2001 and its resurgence around 2006, in no small part because we (speaking here for both the US and the UK) were occupied with Iraq. Eight years is a long time to ask people to put up with a steady drumbeat of cost and casualties for an uncertain benefit, and the three to five more years that Stanley McChrystal is apparently planning for is difficult to imagine. And I agree with the argument - advanced by various war opponents but with particular eloquence by Ahmed Rashid - that Western military activity is only inflaming the border region between Afghanistan and Pakistan and further destabilizing Pakistan,** leading to a potentially devastating wider conflict of some variety. Most vividly, though, the sham re-election of Karzai was a disaster, a slap in the face to everyone who worked (and, in the case of some Afghan, British and American soldiers, died) in order to try and improve Afghanistan's lot and bring about something like meaningful self-rule.

And yet... I also understand the worries of the Pakistanis that if the West pulls out of Afghanistan, the insurgency in their northwest provinces will escalate. I can only imagine the propaganda victory al Qaeda - which, granted, has little presence in Afghanistan these days - would achieve if they could claim that they had helped drive the West out. The "flypaper theory" is mostly BS, but there's every reason to believe that bin Laden and Zawahiri are still in the border region, and keeping a military presence nearby means that they're limited in what they can do, where they can go and who they can meet, not to mention keeping the possibility alive that they might be killed or brought to justice. And as rotten as things still are for Afghan women and girls, leaving would only enable their further oppression. Finally, there are many, many Afghans who would be targeted for their cooperation with Western forces if we up and left, and our record of protecting those kind of people in places we've pulled out of isn't particularly encouraging.

I should say too that I don't find myself caring very much about the domestic political side of the American Afghan debate - I don't buy the argument that Petraeus or McChrystal are trying to undermine Obama in support of some right-wing political agenda. I'm pretty sick of the political scorekeeping getting in the way of real substantive argument in general, and particularly on foreign policy - I want everyone involved making what they see as the best decisions possible, no matter what the outcome of the 2010 or 2012 elections are (although that level of nonpartisan focus is admittedly a pipe dream).

So I'm really, honestly torn, and not for lack of reading or thinking about the subject. I want to believe that Gen. McChrystal and his COIN experts can turn things around, but I don't have any faith in the Afghan government to make the political progress that's an absolute necessity for the war to succeed. I understand the importance of the mission and the desire to be able to answer the question of why we're still killing and dying there, but at the moment even the best outcome of any course of action looks fairly grim. I appreciate that in war there are no half measures and yet expect that since politics are involved, they are inevitable.

Given the topics I'm working on, I can't imagine that my views on this topic will remain unsettled forever, or even for all that much longer. And events certainly seem to be moving along - at the moment, with the elections and the high rate of casualties, pessimism seems to be the reigning opinion on the topic, which pushes the needle further towards the "take our ball and go home" option. But I'm not ready to make that jump just yet. So we'll see what Obama orders and how the Europeans react, and hope that whatever it is, Afghanistan's losing streak ends and ends soon.

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* One big way in which this is true is the different characteristics of our immigrant communities - as a (very minor and anecdotal) example, in four years of living in New York and Washington, I never saw anything like the Muslim demonstration I saw in North London on Saturday.
** Which is labeled "nuclear-armed Pakistan" with such frequency that I wonder when the country is going to amend its title card at the UN to include a little picture of an A-bomb.

London Week One

Today I passed an important milestone. No, it wasn't one week living in London, or one year since I started class at St Andrews. It was a much more important event than that: the day I stopped eating off paper plates with plastic silverware. Yes, today I finally got real flatware, like a real adult. Or something.

I'm pretty sure - at least I hope I'm pretty sure - that this is the last time I'll ever live in institutional housing. I don't regret the choice: moving to a new city, starting a doctoral program without a built-in social group means that it's possible that you'll be very, very isolated. A dorm, even one as relatively quiet as mine (I still, after a week here, haven't met three of the ten people on my hall), is infinitely more sociable than what my mom calls "some grotty bedsit" on the outskirts of the city. And you can't beat the location, either. Still, it's odd to think about the fact that while my contemporaries from high school and college are getting married, buying houses and having children, I'm living in a dorm and considering activities as part of "Freshers Week."

That oddness aside, I'm very happy right now. I'm fundamentally more of a city person than a small-town person; maybe that will change when I'm older and have a family, but for the foreseeable future I think I'll stick to urban areas. And London definitely qualifies. One of the things I really prefer about city life is that, with so much more happening, you can accrue a bunch of semi-interesting mini-stories in a week's time:

- The "One and Other" project, which is still running at Trafalgar Square, in which random people living in Britain are invited to stand atop the empty fourth plinth for an hour at a time and do whatever they want. I wandered in that direction with a friend on Friday night, and came across a bizarrely magical scene: a full moon illuminating a woman in a cyan ballgown and a rooster mask playing the theremin.

- The range of transportation options taken by suit-wearing City types. Aside from the seemingly endless supply of Bentleys and Aston Martins, my personal favorite has been the pinstriped gentleman I saw riding a tiny moped with a black apron daintily draped over his pants.

- The street juggler in Covent Garden, who wore nothing but pink shorts which left nothing to the imagination, rode an eight-foot-tall unicycle and juggled machetes and a running chainsaw on a cold, windy evening. He earned my £2.80 like nobody's business.

- The demonstration I saw in Camden Town by about a hundred British Muslims, the men sporting skullcaps and full beards, the women speaking in broad North London accents from underneath their burqas. They had a sign which read "Communism is dead, capitalism is dying, ISLAM is the FUTURE." A few passerby were arguing more or less good-naturedly with the pamphleteers, but I decided that my post-sports practice shower was more important than pointing out the conflation of religion and economic policies on their banner.

- The cabbie who managed to live up to all the bad London cabbie stereotypes during a five-minute ride when he asked why Obama was giving "Gordon Blair" the cold shoulder; I said something about the rumors that Obama has bad feelings about the British because his uncle was tortured in British custody in Kenya in the '40s; he responded by saying, "Well, we should'a drowned the whole bloody lot of 'em then." To his (very partial) credit, he responded to our stunned silence by saying, "Oh, well, I don't actually believe that," but it was a bit late for that...

So you could say things are more interesting here, and mostly in a good way. I've become the Smilingest Man in Central London (which is admittedly not a difficult title to acquire) with the realization that I'm finally back in something like the right place for me. I'm sure that will wear off over time, but for the moment, I'm definitely enjoying it.

More soon.