Wilderness of Mirrors, Great Game Edition - Steve Coll says that one of the problems for Afghans with their recent history is that they don't even know what their recent history is:

To a greater extent than any other armed conflict on the planet, Afghanistan's unfinished 24-year war has been shaped by rival foreign intelligence agencies: The Soviet Union's KGB, America's CIA, Pakistan's Inter-Services Intelligence Directorate, Saudi Arabia's General Intelligence Department and Iran's multiple clandestine services. They primed various Afghan factions with cash and weapons, secretly trained guerrilla forces, financed propaganda and manipulated political conventions.

When spies help construct a civil war, one seed they sow is confusion. Afghans today have little basis to trust their own recent history; too much remains hidden.

Coll's piece focuses more specifically on the early-1980s KGB than that lead-in promises. Vodalians will find ourselves saying, "What about Saudi Arabia's General Intelligence Department?" (See "The Vodalus Approach" at right.) But he provides at least a sketch of more recent history, a gift that keeps on giving, in his conclusion:

The clandestine structure of the Cold War-era Afghan war anticipated the character of the fractured, deception-laden civil war that raged there during the 1990s. After Moscow and Washington withdrew, regional intelligence agencies -- in most cases trained, inspired and funded by the CIA or the KGB during the 1980s -- intervened directly. They often used the same covert methods pioneered by their mentor agencies. Pakistan's still-obscured role in aiding the rise of the Taliban between 1994 and 1996, and Uzbekistan's clandestine support for ethnic Uzbek warlords reigning in Mazar-e Sharif are two examples among many. In addition, after his expulsion from Sudan in 1996, Osama bin Laden introduced his stateless terrorist network to Afghanistan -- a secret brotherhood that operated as a conspiracy within the Taliban's Pakistani-supported conspiracy.

A consequence of this history for Afghans is evident in today's headlines. When political violence occurs, it is very difficult for anyone to express confidence about its origins. A government minister was killed 10 days ago by a cold, hungry, angry mob at the Kabul airport. The country's interim government, eschewing the obvious, made arrests and announced that the minister had been assassinated in a covert plot, perhaps with international dimensions. Now it has backed away from that assertion. Which is true? Sadly, either seems plausible.

Advantage (Barely): Unqualified Offerings - Michael Wilbon has an excellent appreciation of the USA-Russia hockey game in Saturday's Washington Post.

(Four) Last Words on the Olympics' "Good Old Days" - "The East German Judge."

Worthy Of Their Hire - I remember the years of "amateur" Olympics - Mark Spitz and Eric Heiden and, especially, Sugar Ray Leonard, Maryland's Pride. I remember the Miracle on Ice and even, prepubescently, Peggy Fleming. Oh the lost years of glory, before professionalism, sponsorships and the Dream Team, when athletes competed for the love of sport itself. Now NBA players and NHL players and money-grubbing pros have ruined the games.

Faced with that much crap, one hardly knows where to start.

Glory Days, then. At the time of the Olympic revival at the end of the 19th Century, "amateur" was how upper-class young men kept out the riff-raff. Championship-caliber athletes from working-class and poor backgrounds had to turn pro. By my childhood, "the amateur ideal" had morphed into affirmative action for socialist countries: corporate money and perks, bad; government money and perks, good! I remember a mini "outrage" that Mark Spitz touched off after winning one race. He walked around the pool, hands outstretched, waving to the crowd in celebration. What was the outrage? He was carrying his sneakers as he did so! Why, he might, might be slyly trying to endorse...whatever brand they were. No one knew. No one cared. (Note to younger readers: there was a time when no one gave much thought to brands of athletic footwear. We had no personal rocket packs back then either.) But Jim McKay (note to younger readers: Olympics coverage did not always suck) reported that there were demands that Spitz be stripped of his medal for this possible commercial contamination of the amateur clean room.

And Russian hockey players lived like dukes.

To the extent that the Olympics was supposed to enable, "peaceful competition among nations," the West had to fight with one hand tied behind its back. Many landmark Olympic contests in those days took on political overtones from the Cold War. Our claim in the twentieth century was that market economies were better than command economies, and we kept getting thrown into sporting contests where we were forbidden to bring the strengths of a market economy to bear: if our system rewarded our best athletes for being our best, it disqualified them for Olympic competition. If their system rewarded their best athletes for being their best - well, that was okay.

Even apart from the Cold War, the Olympic system problematized amateurism. What you gained was an artificially lit stage for a certain class of athlete-in-embryo, depending on the commercial opportunities of a given sport. Take boxing. Sugar Ray Leonard's Olympic fights stick in my mind more than his professional fights do. But Leonard in his professional prime was surely a better fighter than Leonard at the end of his amateur career, and his professional opponents were better, by and large, than his amateur ones. In the amateur days, the US Olympic basketball team had a role as a showcase of promising talent, but if there's one thing we've learned since 1992, it's the chasm in ability between professional basketball players and their amateur counterparts.

In the "amateur" Olympics, the best athlete Western athletes were advertising themselves. Leonard made himself bankable. Spitz earned himself a (piddling) entertainment career; Johnny Weismuller, a much better one. A parade of figure skaters made themselves famous in the Olympics so they could make themselves rich in the Ice Capades and like shows. Professionalism wasn't banished, merely sublimated. Lost to a parallel universe were unnumbered Olympic moments of athletes who, once they'd made the sometimes difficult decision to turn pro, could no longer compete in The Games.

And the members of the IOC lived like bandit chiefs.

Nothing focuses complaints about how professionalism has ruined the Olympics quite like men's basketball, though one hears similar complaints about hockey. The words I hear most often are "pointless" and "unfair," especially when discussing the real (1992) Dream Team. It depends on your definition of fair, of course, and the purpose of the Olympics themselves. The Dream Team and their opponents played on the same court, with the same ball and the same rules. The goal of sport is not to be equal to your competition, it's to be superior. That the Dream Team was. This was still a useful political point to make in 1992. Americans had complained for years that, were we able to send our best athletes (meaning: pros), those Commies would see just what was what. The first Dream Team was an unprecedented collection of talent and a thing of beauty in its own right. And whatever complaints you might (justly) lodge against subsequent US basketball teams, the Olympics clearly meant something to the original edition. If the goal of sport, and Olympic sport, is to discover just how good humans can be at something athletic, the Dream Team was instructive.

And it was great for foreigners.

No, really. I am not just talking about the Hapless Foreign Opponents who testified that getting crushed by their American idols was the thrill of their lives, either. F.A. Hayek said that when you destroy markets, you destroy prices, and when you destroy prices, you destroy information. Before 1992, basketball programs in other countries simply didn't know just how good it was possible to be at their sport. The Dream Team showed them, and international basketball has gotten steadily better ever since. Some day a European center will even learn to play defense.

Contrariwise, the NHL-vs.-USSR games of the 80s proved that the Russkies really were pretty good at hockey. Needless to say, as soon as Russian players got the chance to earn NHL money, they took it, too.

With hockey, the rumblings in sports media are not whether NHL players are good for the Olympics, but whether the Olympics are good for the NHL. The League comes to a full stop; the players risk injury. Why does the NHL even let its valuable players compete? There's the promotional value, yes. But I think the NHL doesn't want to alienate its foreign talent pool. While NBA players seem decreasingly interested in playing for the Olympic team, NHL players seem to relish playing for their countries. If the NHL forbids it, they have unhappy players and maybe something more. Someone might try to start a viable European league; some players may sit out Olympic years altogether. (Or worse, given the habits of European hockey players, they might obey the league and just whine all year.)

Which brings us to the final paradox. Professional basketball players and hockey players are rich. While there is some endorsement value, playing in the Olympics will not make them meaningfully richer. In their financial stratosphere, playing in the Olympics practically counts as giving it away. NBA players (I mean the US ones) seem far less willing to do this than NHL players, but USA basketball still fills its roster. What possible reason for joining the US basketball team can there be? Patriotism, a sense of duty, the desire to go somewhere different and meet strange people, the chance to show how good you are at your game on the world stage. Why do hockey players represent their national teams instead of taking the month off? They're not showcasing their abilities in hopes of a professional career - they already have one. It would seem they like playing hockey, and they like playing hockey for their countries. Patriotism and the pure joy of sport always were supposed to be the Olympic ideals.

Friendlies - Tonight's excellent USA-Russia hockey game puts me in mind of two related things, one of which goes here, the other in another item.

You hear people complain that this year's USA-Russia matchup doesn't mean and couldn't mean what 1980's "Miracle on Ice" game meant. How true. Now say it with me: Huzzah!

Here are some reasons why the 1980 game meant so much: Afghanistan. (Um, let's skip that one.) The Brezhnev Doctrine. "Malaise." America Held Hostage. (No, the Russians didn't do it, but we needed a break.) MAD. Sakharov. Russia's hockey tradition and the United States' lack of same. And especially, the unequal "amateur" system in force at the time, a structural advantage for socialist countries.

Almost everything that made the Miracle so memorable for those of us who saw it is something our two countries, the world and the Olympics are well rid of. In place of Systems in Conflict tonight we got - hockey. The thing itself. The US is a better hockey country than it was two decades ago. (When I was a kid fan in the 70s there was a single US player in the NHL.) The Russian players are guys that, eight months of the year, someone in North America is cheering for, because they're in the NHL somewhere. National pride of a benign sort was still at stake for players and fans alike, but it's no Twilight Struggle. May you not live in interesting times, he said, wistfully.

Men Behaving Badly - in Saudi Arabia, according to this Elaine Sciolino story in the International Herald-Tribune. The story would be more heartening - bored youth strain at the bonds of oppressive theocracy - if so many of the incidents Sciolino recounts didn't involve young men harrassing women. Not just "harrassing women" by an expansive spring-ovular-in-women's-studies definition either, but in a narrow, creepily-threatening or actually violent way. (Some of the stories also involve women flouting the rules Saudi society lays down for them, including - yuck! - "smoking water pipes filled with fruit-favored tobacco" at restaurants.)

The Saudi line has always been that its severe patriarchy was all about respect for and protection of women. Mrs. Offering and I actually knew someone who bought that - a roommate of Mrs. O's from her twenty-something days who converted to Islam and married a Saudi man she met at the Islamic Center in DC after a brief, Saudi-style courtship. The massive respect of Arabian society for women just thrilled her. (She never failed to enthuse about the "female-only" malls she'd heard about where women could shop without the danger and bother of having men around. Of course, she could have had that here. Just build a mall where the electronics store is on one side of the food court and the clothing stores and home furnishings places on the other.)

I don't believe the "respect for women" line for a minute. The point is, that's what the regime tells its subjects and, most likely, themselves. So rebellion against the values of the regime inevitably becomes bound up with bugging the hell out of chicks. Or, as a convert to a different religion once wrote: "Meet the new boss / the same as the old boss."

Mr. Offering, Your Petard Is Ready - Reader Ronald Carpio volunteers for the hopeless job of keeping Unqualified Offerings honest:

You have a point that encouraging an increasingly hostile Europe to arm itself may not be the smartest idea. But isn't the main reason why Europe has been relatively under-armed, the presence of massive US forces? You've advocated a neo-isolationist foreign policy before; if the US moves in that direction (which I think is pretty unlikely) and pulls its troops out of Europe, then they will have no choice but to massively upgrade their militaries. The way things are now, they can complain all they want, but that's all they can do...

This is a good damn question!

My instinct is that there's a difference here, but I'm not prepared to defend the point in detail yet. More later.

Snarf Alert - It's not just the book description of this Amazon.com entry, it's the reviews. The first one reads like the sort of e-mails people send the Tony Kornheiser radio show. (Via Andrew Sullivan's site.)

I've Got a Little List... - ...and Glenn Reynolds lengthens it. A Brit named Irwin Stelzer writes a column for the London Times about the contempt for Europe among Administration figures and neocon hangers-on at a dinner party Stelzer attended. While Stelzer notes that "The military weakness of Europe is only one factor that is causing the EU to be seen as irrelevant" by Americans in Stelzer's circle, it's the military weakness that Instapundit.com fixes on.

The European Union is a cheshire cat creature whose organizing principle goes by the trade name democratic socialism. In place of the grin, a pinched mouth. The disappearing body is, of course, the "democratic" part. You know what part persists. The EU elites express their dislike of the United States openly, and speak of becoming a counterweight to American power. To repeat, whatever one calls an American encouraging the EU to strengthen its military, "anti-idiot" it ain't. (And the Airstrip One boys think only Brits can't see where their own national interest lies.)

On the Other Hand - The same Mr. den Beste has a fine piece on one of the great scourges of recent history.

You May Not Be As Anti-Idiotarian As You Think If... I don't want to sound like I'm picking on Stephen den Beste specifically in the following item - both hawkish pundits and other warbloggers have have said similar things - but he has the virtue of being easiest to link:

Tom sends this link to a discussion on his own forum. In it, he himself points out that the US defense budget is 40% of the entire world's defense spending. He's horrified about that. So am I. But when Americans see that number, our reaction is that it is not that the US is spending too much, but rather that the Europeans are spending too little

...

The way to solve that is not to try to drag us down to your level, but for you to pull yourselves up to ours. Don't bitch to us because you are weak and ineffective. Get off your asses and start working.

For the last thirty years, the Europeans have been neglecting their militaries because they were certain that the US would pick up the slack for them. They didn't have to have strong armies and navies because they knew that if their interests were attacked that they would be defended by ours. There's long been an undercurrent of resentment here about that; we feel used.

Um. As many commentators have pointed out, European elites are increasingly hostile to the United States. Encouraging people who are increasingly hostile to us to build bigger armies is anti-idiotic how?

Everything Old Is New Again - People complained during the Cold War that the US preferred complaisant military dictators to less reliable democratic alternatives. Fortunately, whatever the merits of those arguments, those days are - excuse me. This just in:

As I circulated among the politicians and intellectuals of Islamabad earlier this month, Musharraf's fight with the militants was dismissed, despite the drama of the abduction of U.S. journalist Daniel Pearl. "The jihadis will get only a fraction of the election vote," was the obtuse but common refrain. Never mind that 100,000 unemployed Pakistani men, educated only in hatred and trained only for war, may pose a threat bigger than their slice of the electorate. The power struggle, as the politicians see it, is between them and Musharraf.

The general, it is widely reported, wants to graduate the return to democracy, extending his term as president for another three years, and establish a military-dominated national security council to oversee the civilians. History supports him: During a disastrous decade of failure, four successive civilian administrations failed to complete their terms amid worsening extremist violence and ever-more-spectacular displays of corruption. But the unchastened civilians are determined to block the constitutional changes Musharraf seeks. That means eroding Musharraf's still-high popularity among voters -- which means, in turn, that the general's new alliance with the United States may make a fat political target.

That's Jackson Diehl, a pretty reliable bellwether of establishment thinking, in today's Washington Post. My point is neither that Musharraf is especially execrable nor democracy in itself a panacea. The analytical parts of Diehl's column even have some value: to the extent that the Musharraf regime is identified with pro-US policies and that regime and civilian politicians are at odds, a struggle over transition to civilian rule will tend to put US interests in Pakistan at risk.

What disgusts me about Diehl's piece is, first, its blinkered contempt for these mere civilians shortsightedly insisting that a military dictator actually make good on his promise to quit the office he violently seized. They are so shortsighted that they seem more concerned with the political future of their own country than the undeserved fate of a single (courageous) American reporter. Second, his stunning take on recent Pakistani history: "successive civilian administrations failed to complete their terms amid worsening extremist violence and ever-more-spectacular displays of corruption," as if the Pakistani military and intelligence establishment never so much as lifted a finger to undermine civilian rule by, say, fomenting extremist violence.

In a lifetime of reading the papers, I've seen a bunch of military dictators come and go. To my recollection, every one of them averred that "Now is just not the right time" to leave office, every time they were asked. And there has always been someone like Jackson Diehl around to agree.

I Have Seen the Future And It Rocks - Sometime in late 2000, Mrs. Offering and I were sitting in the family office, discussing some song then current on country radio. She was sure she had heard another version before, and wondered who wrote it and who else had recorded it. We turned, literally, for no part of Unqualified Headquarters is large, most especially the office, to the PC and its always-on broadband connection. About two minutes of search-engine time later we had our answer. It's the kind of question that, in living memory, waited on trips to bookstores that may or may not have the right book on the reference shelf. I turned to Mrs. Offering and I said

"The 21st Century kicks ass!"

And it does, despite everything that has happened since. It kicks ass for reasons having nothing to do with the Civilizing Mission that the neocons believe will purge us of "decadence" and "frivolity" like, oh, having a conversation with your spouse about something that enriches both your lives and, at the moment when it will do the most good, enriching them further because a free, wealthy society makes knowledge easier than ever to come by. What I've learned since the massacres of last year and the war against our attackers and the attempts to mutate that war into a consuming and endless crusade is that we have to work to make sure the 21st century keeps kicking ass. The first step toward that is to insist on the goodness of the good.

Why do I bring this up? Because I just burned my first CD tonight, and it's so damn cool to be able to do that.

Your Regularly-Scheduled Weblog - In a transparent conspiracy to warm Unqualified Offerings' heart, Primo Ultimo Samizdatist Perry deHavilland actually noticed that there was no new material here two days in a row, and sent a kind enquiry. This site actually did worry that people would think it was Balloon Juice or Ain't No Bad Dude, taking entire weekends off, as that has never been the Offering Way. But it was one of those weekends. UO decided to bear down and complete the computer move, which was, as always, an odyssey of wonder and horror. As Robert E. Lee said, it is well that transferring stuff to new computers is so terrifying, or we should grow too fond of it.

Also, Unqualified Offerings does not know how to tell you this, but it has...other blogs. They don't mean what you mean to it, Loyal Reader, oh no, but they are, among other things, a good way to get familiar with Movable Type before converting this site over.

(Note: These blogs are related to various role-playing games that Unqualified Offerings plays, and enjoys, at its advanced age. If that sort of thing floats your boat, you can find sites for two Amber characters, Robin and Carton, and a site for a campaign I run using R. Sean Borgstrom's stunning Nobilis rules. The Robin site has a nice piece of image-editing: the "painting" there started life as a photograph. The Carton blog is in a stage of design that web developers call "fucked up in most browsers." The Nobilis blog is the one that, eventually, may come closest to being of interest to regular readers of this site.)