Barack Obama, January 28:

President Obama has not changed his view on whether the self-described mastermind of the Sept. 11 attacks should face trial in New York City, a White House spokesman said today, despite fresh criticism from Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg that the proceedings should be moved from Manhattan.

Michael Bloomberg, January 28:

“It would be great if the federal government could find a site that didn’t cost a billion dollars, which using downtown will,” Bloomberg said at a press conference Wednesday morning. “It’s going to cost an awful lot of money and disturb an awful lot of people.”

Barack Obama, January 28:

The White House ordered the Justice Department Thursday night to consider other places to try the 9/11 terror suspects after a wave of opposition to holding the trial in lower Manhattan.

The dramatic turnabout came hours after Mayor Bloomberg said he would “prefer that they did it elsewhere” and then spoke to Attorney General Eric Holder.

Since when are politicians considering a billion dollars a lot of money?

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Right in the first sentence, the New York Times attempts to show the folly in the Obama policy:

The leaders of one of the largest Pashtun tribes in a Taliban stronghold said Wednesday that they had agreed to support the American-backed government, battle insurgents and burn down the home of any Afghan who harbored Taliban guerrillas.

In order to teach the people of Afghanistan how a functioing democracy works, we must teach them to burn first and prosecute later. But before we do that, we need to teach them a lesson in capitalism:

In exchange for their support, American commanders agreed to channel $1 million in development projects directly to the tribal leaders and bypass the local Afghan government, which is widely seen as corrupt.

So here’s the problem that threatens to rip apart the country–tribalism will eventually foster this attitude that a central government cannot be trusted. The United States was somehow able to avoid this in Iraq. You had three very fractured sides–Shia, Sunni, and Kurd, all nursing grudges against one another that went back decades–and yet Iraq appears to be stabilizing.

Such a coalition was never struck with Afghans, with a large portion of the country left in the hands of the Taliban. They don’t play by the same rules as the American soldiers, or even the Afghani ones. There’s even some new wiggle room in this administration:

The new plan has two tracks: to reintegrate Taliban fighters into Afghan society and to allow Taliban leaders to play a political role in Afghanistan, a far more politically charged idea.

So my hats off to you, President Obama, for allowing a legitimacy and power sharing for our sworn enemies. Hope you didn’t leave this brilliant idea out of your speech tonight.

More specifically, it’s the actions of Senate Foreign Relations Committee Chariman, Sen. John Kerry (D-Mass.), who is still insisting his presidential campaign is right five years on:

The Massachusetts senator and 2004 Democratic presidential candidate has long argued the Bush administration missed a chance to get the al-Qaida leader and top deputies when they were holed up in the forbidding mountainous area of eastern Afghanistan only three months after the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks.

Although limited to a review of military operations eight years old, the report could also be read as a cautionary note for those resisting an increased troop presence there now.

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