Must read: The truth about the environment, an economist article by Bjorn Lomborg. In it he attacks some of the sacred cows of environmentalist doctrine, and wins. That said, there are still many good arguments in favor of environmentalism that don’t have anything to do with impending global disaster and starvation.

Time has a transcript of a satellite phone call with Alex Perry, their correspondent who was on the scene when the prison revolt at Mazar-i-Sharif began.

Somehow Robert Fisk has managed to find his way to Kandahar, the Independent claims that he’s the only Western journalist who has been able to do so. His first dispatch from Kandahar is jarring, it tells of refugees fleeing American bombing and Northern Alliance assaults. I really hate war.

In Europe, they’ve rounded up 12 people associated with the assassination of Northern Alliance commander Ahmed Shah Masood. The article also the problems with England’s amnesty program. One of the people implicated in the assassination lives in London and runs something called the “Islamic Observation Center” despite the fact that he was sentenced to death in his native Egypt for his role in a plot to assassinate the Egyptian prime minister. The article doesn’t mention Al Qaeda, but it doesn’t take a genius to figure out why terrorists based in Europe would execute a suicide attack on an Afghan political figure.

The Virtues of a Proxy War
Like most liberals, I’ve long considered to be proxy wars to be a bad thing, and historically speaking, they are bad things. Throughout much of the Cold War, the United States and the Soviet Unions fought proxy wars in places like Angola, the Congo, and Latin America. For the Cold War players, it was far too risky to use your own troops, because if things escalated and NATO troops faced off with Warsaw Pact troops, the end of humanity could ensue. Instead, the idea of the game was to expand your own sphere of interest or shrink your oppoent’s by supporting factions in various developing nations that were sympathetic to your cause, regardless of the brutality of those factions. Many of the problems that we now see around the world are direct offshoots of these proxy wars.

Anyway, when the United States opted to use the Northern Alliance as its on the ground force for removing the Taliban from power, I felt that good old “here we go again” feeling. I’d read all about how the Northern Alliance had taken the country straight from being a Soviet satellite to being a lawless hellhole where rape, murder, and banditry were features of everyday life, even in the big cities. I thought we were going down that same “the enemy of my enemy is my friend” path that would lead to massive bloodshed and lawlessness in Afghanistan, not to mention daily human rights catastrophies that we’d all be very ashamed of soon enough.

Much to my surprise, that’s not how it turned out. In fact, I think that our choosing to fight a proxy war probably saved literally thousands of lives. If we’d invaded Afghanistan ourselves, the fact is that there’s no way we would have won most battles simply by showing up and waiting for the Taliban forces to surrender or defect. The fact that things work that way in Afghanistan was shocking to me, and probably to most other people unfamiliar with its customs as well. It seems at this point that nearly every Afghan fighting in service to the Taliban did so out of fear rather than out of conviction, and that they were eager to switch sides as soon as it became practical.

Not only has this meant that we didn’t have thousands of soldiers killing each other every day, but it has also prevented many civilian deaths and the destruction of the remaining infrastructure in Afghanistan. Kabul fell to the Northern Alliance with almost no loss of life. That wouldn’t have been the case had it been invaded by the US Marines instead.

So here’s to the proxy war. Afghanistan is almost completely liberated from the Taliban (and more importantly the “foreign Taliban”), and Al Qaeda’s significant infrastructure in Afghanistan has been destroyed. Afghanistan will no longer be the staging area for training global terrorists, and Al Qaeda will no longer have the government of a nation in its hip pocket. The other side of the coin is that for this to really be a success, we have to continue to demand that the Northern Alliance not revert to its sectarian ways, and that they start forging a real peace that can serve Afghanistan in the long term. If Afghanistan reverts back to the country it was in 1992, we’ll be facing the same problems we do now ten years down the road.

More William Safire goodness. I didn’t link to his first column denouncing Bush’s plan to use military tribunals, but I can’t resist linking to this one. The whole column is worth reading, but here’s the key paragraph:

Military attorneys are silently seething because they know that to be untrue. The U.C.M.J. demands a public trial, proof beyond reasonable doubt, an accused’s voice in the selection of juries and right to choose counsel, unanimity in death sentencing and above all appellate review by civilians confirmed by the Senate. Not one of those fundamental rights can be found in Bush’s military order setting up kangaroo courts for people he designates before “trial” to be terrorists. Bush’s fiat turns back the clock on all advances in military justice, through three wars, in the past half-century.

The “that” in the first sentence refers to the assertion that the military tribunals are implementations of the Uniform Code of Military Justice.

The amount of infrastucture in Afghanistan devoted to training terrorists and supporting Islamist foreigners who lived there is truly staggering. This Observer story describes what the reporter found when he was taken on a tour of Khowst, the town where Al Qaeda members lived and trained. On 9/11, when people talked about terrorist training camps in Afghanistan, it was generally assumed that they were groups of tents out in the middle of the desert that could be relocated in no time. Clearly, that’s not the case at all. In Khowst alone, the foreigners built a hospital, a giant mosque, and several fixed compounds for training recruits to serve as soldiers in the Taliban army or to “travel” — taking the jihad overseas to attack Westerners.

This New York Times article has lots of quality information on the prison revolt near Mazar-i-Sharif, which apparently is still ongoing. You’d think that the Afghans would disarm their prisoners, but apparently a lot of them managed to smuggle weapons into the prison. The article also clears the air about the reported massacre of Taliban soldiers in a school in Mazar-i-Sharif. I quote:

When the Northern Alliance conquered Mazar earlier this month for their first big victory of the war, more 300 Taliban fighters died in the fighting, and 250 were taken prisoner, according to the International Committee of the Red Cross and the Afghan Red Crescent. There was talk of a massacre of the Taliban as the town fell, but in later interviews Taliban fighters taken prisoner, and the commander of the Northern Alliance whose forces surrounded the compound, said they died not in a massacre, but more in chaotic combat for the town.

Courtesy of Snopes.com: the day after Thanksgiving is not the biggest shopping day of the year. I love it when something that everybody knows is true isn’t. For those of you who might be interested, I didn’t shop at all on Friday.

New York Times: Swept Up in a Dragnet, Hundreds Sit in Custody and Ask, ‘Why?’