Meanwhile in Afghanistan…

“The question now is: bail out Kabul Bank or let the Karzai government collapse?”
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Bail them out so it can be stolen again? Don’t think so.

Oh boy. I wanted to snark about how the Afghans finally have the same peeance and freeance that we do, but if that bank is so central to the day-to-day functioning of the government, that’s just plain awful.
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Why would it be the job of the US to bail out the bank of Afghanistan?
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Oh, right, because we’ve been occupying Afghanistan for a decade.
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What on Earth do we think we can achieve, and at what cost, by indefinitely occupying Afghanistan?

Uh, yeah… I think we can just say “no” to a U.S. taxpayer financed bailout of a bank in Kabul. We have to draw a line somewhere and this seems a pretty obvious place to put one,

Elvis,
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There’s a couple of square inches of U.S. foot that don’t have any bullet holes in them.
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We have a national policy tradition to uphold.
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What’s the functional definition of foreign policy “insanity” – repeatedly supporting the same types of corrupt leaders and policies in the ME and expecting a different result?

This was American money to begin with. Its off the backs of American taxpayers who can not afford it but had no vote in its distribution. To suggest that WE replace it so it can happen again is absolutely rediculous. It their gov is to sink because of this issue. Then in the words of GWB “bring it on”

How about no. We bailed out banks before and we still havent seen that money.

Lets see $900 Million was “lost” in Afghanistan. This isn’t the first time taxpayer money was “lost” (more like stolen) in Bush’s failed attempt to bring democracy to the ME.
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Let the Karzai government fall. I recent paying taxes so that people in another country can “lose” it while there is a concerted effort in this country to end the social safety net.

Makes no difference where our tax money goes. Whether it stays here or goes over there, the results are the same. It’s just gone and nothing is accomplished.

As Joe Klein has wet dreams about bank bailouts for Afghanistan, our own country is nearing a point of no return.
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Hey Joe, we don’t have enough money to bailout my kid’s piggy-bank, let alone Afghanistan’s central bank.
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And you think China is going to step up and bail out Afghanistan? You are more delusional than I thought you could possibly be.
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China has bigger fish to fry than Afghanistan, Joe Klein.
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Next time I take a trip on the Interstate near here, or remember the U.S. space program, or fly and think about the Air Traffic Control System, or watch the repairs after the ice storm we had, I’ll try to remember that.

Thanks for your addendum, Joe. I agree. Though the issue of China getting all of these sweetheart contracts in the region needs to be addressed too!

Oh, yeah, almost forgot…
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I’ll REALLY think about it the next time I have a reason to think about the origins of the Internet.

Thanks for the update, Joe.
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I think this is a job for the international community, especially those countries–I’m talking about you, China–who are getting the benefits of the stabilization of Afghanistan (mineral extraction contracts etc.) without helping to pay for the war. The U.S. can play a role in this, but it certainly shouldn’t be the lead dog. We’re doing plenty already.
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What are we doing? What are we accomplishing? How is it cost-effective?
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This is aging data, from Oct. 2009, but I don’t see how it could have gone down since that time (link): “The U.S. spends about $3.6 billion a month in Afghanistan, according to data provided by the Congressional Research Service recently.” And as we all know, Afghanistan’s GDP is under $12 billion. We don’t have any concrete goals there, I guess, just vague intentions, but I don’t see how any of them can be accomplished by this massively expensive permanent occupation.
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Yeah, afguy, it’s the same old game. There’s no such thing as a perfect policy that eliminates struggle among humans, for sure. But must we constantly support rulers who do awful things to their citizens, thereby making them hate us? Hell, let China have Afghanistan. Good luck, guys. http://swampland.blogs.time.com/2011/01/05/trouble-in-pakistan-2/#comment-229633
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Here’s a disturbing video from Egypt, featured on AJE, of a civilian leaping up and pulling a plainclothes officer manning a water cannon off an armored vehicle: http://www.liveleak.com/view?i=85d_1296036872

Yeah and the next time I cruise down the road watching perfectly good roadsigns being replaced with new ones, mowers cutting sholders in the middle of winter where there isn’t even any grass growing, perfectly good roads being paved over anew for the sake of “creating jobs” (the list goes on and on), I’ll remember it too. This is where I see my hard earned tax money going in my neck of the woods, though I’m sure it’s not that way in your liberal utopia.

Hey, you’re the one that made the “ALL taxes are bad” implication.
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Taxes BAD!!! Hulk HATE taxes!! Hulk SMASH taxes!! Hulk just not sure WHY… HIM just hear it somewhere…

AFGUY LIBERAL NUTCASE!! HIM HAVE NO BRAIN!! HIM OLBERMAN IN REAL LIFE!!

LIBERAL Utopia? West Kentucky? You’ve gotta be kidding me… this is Mitch’s home turf.

Press on the caps lock a little harder, 2/3… I’m having trouble hearing you.

“The momentum of Asia’s economic development is already generating massive pressures for the exploration and exploitation of new sources of energy and the Central Asian region and the Caspian Sea basin are known to contain reserves of natural gas and oil that dwarf those of Kuwait, the Gulf of Mexico, or the North Sea.”

- Zbigniew Brzezinski, The Grand Chessboard, 1997

http://michaelfury.wordpress.com/2009/05/11/the-gas-must-flow/

We’re giving away $900 million to them over there, so we don’t have to give away $900 million to them here.
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http://emptywheel.firedoglake.com/2011/01/31/the-900-million-headline-versus-our-afghan-policy-backing-a-vertically-integrated-criminal-enterprise/

Meanwhile, in Iraq….
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It really WAS all about oil after all.
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And BP (of all companies) stands to profit!
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http://www.mercurynews.com/california/ci_17243003?nclick_check=1

The U.S. is flushing $2B a week in Afghanistan with no apparent strategic goals. $900M to save the Kabul Bank? Seriously, who cares?

Our problem isn’t spending money in Afghanistan. Our problem is that we are spending money in a completely pointless way.

The main problem is that while we are spending money on Afghanistan, we largely aren’t spending money in Afghanistan. It is going to defense contractors, not the people of Afghanistan.

If brought all of our troops home and actually spent $2B a week in Afghanistan, the people there would actually throw rose petals (or, more likely, opium poppies) at U.S. tourists when they visited.

Meanwhile in the USofA
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‘Pay China First’ — Republicans’ Wild Plan To Avoid U.S. Debt Default
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http://tpmdc.talkingpointsmemo.com/2011/01/pay-china-first—-republicans-wild-plan-to-avoid-us-debt-default.php?ref=fpblg

“The U.S. is flushing $2B a week in Afghanistan with no apparent strategic goals. $900M to save the Kabul Bank? Seriously, who cares?”
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Really, it’s chicken-feed:

The US flew nearly $12bn in shrink-wrapped $100 bills into Iraq, then distributed the cash with no proper control over who was receiving it and how it was being spent.
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The staggering scale of the biggest transfer of cash in the history of the Federal Reserve has been graphically laid bare by a US congressional committee.

The only thing that seems to matter is who is bribing whom. And that also goes for our own government, in spades.
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http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2007/feb/08/usa.iraq1

Yeah and the next time I cruise down the road watching perfectly good roadsigns being replaced with new ones, mowers cutting sholders in the middle of winter where there isn’t even any grass growing, perfectly good roads being paved over anew for the sake of “creating jobs” (the list goes on and on), I’ll remember it too.
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America’s infrastructure is crumbling. We need to spend billions of dollars just to maintain what we have, much less improve our infrastructure for the 21st Century.
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If in 2/3′s neck of the woods the highway department is replacing good road signs, re-paving roads without potholes, and mowing dirt instead of spending the money and labor on repairing bridges, upgrading rail transit, and otherwise making his community more favorable for commerce then I would suggest that 2/3 lives in a community of morons and consider relocating out of the South.

I’d like to point out one more thing. Joe Klein — ever the Village moderate — seems to think that bailing out the Kabul Bank is something that we should only do if we can get the rest of the world community to shoulder some, most, or all of the burden. That is an insane position to take.

Whether the Kabul Bank should be bailed out is a question that needs to be asked (although the fact that the government pays its employs through the bank would seem to be irrelevant as the government presumably could set up an alternative mechanism for payroll for a trivial cost). If it were up to me, I would want a bucketload of conditions, far exceeding Joe Klein’s. That being said, the cost of the bailout would be a tiny fraction of what we are spending there.

Quite literally, if bailing out the bank means that our occupation would end even 3 days earlier, it would be worth it.

China isn’t spending $2B a week in Afghanistan. Nor is any other country but the U.S. It would be nice if they chipped in. But it would be insane to refuse to bail out the bank, if necessary, just because we think some countries are refusing to share the burden.

square1,
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The Interstate is crumbling. Long stretches are under near CONSTANT repair these days. By the time they get finished with one stretch, it’s time to start patching again.
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The ATC System has needed an upgrade for years but the sub-contracted re-designs have eaten up lots of money and never worked. I watched something the other night that said that, without new airports or upgrades to the control hardware, 40% of travelers in the near-future will be unable to fly because the system won’t be able to accommodate the extra aircraft needed.
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We stopped development on the next shuttle and waited on “free enterprise” to determine what it would be, rather than have gov’t involvement. (Someone must have sat on the “Invisible Hand™” because the shuttle is essentially gone without any replacement on the horizon). So…. now we will need the Russkies’ heavy lift capability. Ironic, eh what???
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Our space exploration program is… well, not exactly thriving. It looks like we’re trying to figure how how little of one we can get by with without becoming the butt of a Chinese joke. (Maybe we can borrow some more money from them to “jump-start” ours?)
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The Ice Storm© was 2 years ago… we’d still be without power and phone service here in West Ky without emergency gov’t aid.
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Now, someone refresh my memory about the absolute evils of government involvement…

Time to pay up, it’s that simple. Or we can have the world see us as welchers.

The world? How about your own citizens?
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You people never cease to amaze me

@square1: If memory serves me, we TRIED to get the Chinese involved in funding the security of that region, emphasizing the resources that they are exploiting also. My opinion was that, if they were as “mired” as we are, there would be less mischief they could commit against us.
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Don’t think it worked too well, as they know a sucker when they see it… that theory applies to us, too. Highly doubt they were asleep when the USSR and GB bloodied their noses in that part of the world.
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A pity it was our nap time during that period.

I agree, what a total fraud this whole “infrastructure” line is. Everybody knows the US is number one, baby!
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Liberals are just too lazy to come up with another lie to tell about how they live to waste your money on make-work, do-nothing government programs to make middle-class people’s worse off. If they were really concerned with the middle-class in this great nation, they’d be for putting those folks’ money where it can really make a difference in main street lives: Iraq and Afghanistan.
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It’s just ridiculous how much tax-payer money is being pissed away repaving the same roads, rebuilding the same bridges, re-securing the same chemical plants and cargo ports, re-laying the same train tracks and electrical grid over and over ag–Jesus Christ, what the hell is that?
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Sh*t what’s that terrifying noise coming from the street under my Midtown window?
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I agree, stuart.
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Let’s add those little items that we DON’T see to the list.
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We don’t have steam pipes but we DO have OLD gas and water mains here, some of which are over 100 years old.
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Drainage ditches are silting up, forcing storm runoff across roads instead of beside them. Branches high over power lines are broken and hanging, waiting for another big ice/snow storm. The secondary roads here really suffer from the freeze/thaw cycle. Temp repairs are being done more and more poorly with shovels and rakes instead of the heavier equipment to do it right.
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I forget what percentage of the bridges on the secondary roads have already been found to be in need of replacement but it’s high. And no money to keep inspecting them, let alone replace or repair them.
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We also have one slightly used/more than slightly contaminated nuclear fuel processing plant for sale or rent. (Bring your own clean groundwater – what’s there is unuseable by residents)
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On a lighter note… Comcast sux as a cable provider. We lose signal every time it rains but stand little chance of getting it repaired unless one of the city councilmen moves into the area. Just the way things work around here. It’s who you know…

Things are really getting out of hand when the Kabul Bank is adjudged “too big to fail.” Is there anything in the world that is not “too big to fail?”

Actually, we did. As of last month, virtually all the money given to the banks under the TARP program was paid back, in some cases with substantial interest. Still not happy that it had to be done, but the long term cost to the American taxpayer was virtually nil.

“Is there anything in the world that is not “too big to fail?”
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Yeah, and you prove it every time you post a comment.

Grab the kids and women and get the h*ll out of there.

Eh? Yeah. The backbone of this country, the hard working, sweat from the brow middle class is no longer too big to fail. The entire middle class could fall into poverty and some on the right will say it is a good thing.