The New Yorker

War and Politics
by Steve Coll October 26, 2009

Over the summer, the Afghan Taliban’s military committee distributed “A Book of Rules,” in Pashto, to its fighters. The book’s eleven chapters seem to draw from the population-centric principles of F.M. 3-24, the U.S. Army’s much publicized counter-insurgency field manual, released in 2006. Henceforth, the Taliban guide declares, suicide bombers must take “the utmost steps . . . to avoid civilian human loss.” Commanders should generally insure the “safety and security of the civilian’s life and property.” Also, lest anxious Afghan parents get the wrong idea, Taliban guerrillas should avoid hanging around with beardless young boys and should particularly refrain from “keeping them in camps.”

The manual might be risible if the Taliban’s coercive insurgency were not so effective. Afghanistan’s self-absorbed President, Hamid Karzai, might even consider leafing through it; if he could account for his citizenry’s appetite for justice and security half as adaptively as his enemies do, Barack Obama would not be struggling so hard to locate the “good war” he pledged to win during his campaign for the White House.

Afghanistan’s deterioration cannot be blamed on one man, and certainly not on Karzai. After the Taliban’s fall, he was a symbol of national unity in a broken land—for several years, he was perhaps the only Afghan leader able to attract the simultaneous confidence of northern Tajik militias, southern Pashtun tribes, and international aid donors. The landslide he won in the 2004 election truly reflected his standing.

Gradually, however, Karzai seemed to succumb to palace fever and corruption. An unfortunate blend of ego and passivity hobbled him; he could neither manage the American presence in his country nor turn its failures to his advantage by remaking himself as a convincing nationalist. For years, the Bush Administration accepted Karzai’s limitations, and did nothing to create conditions from which a plausible alternative might emerge. In 2008, as another election approached, President Bush’s advisers at last sensed trouble; some of them considered trying to dump Karzai. In the end, however, Bush chose a policy of neutrality, which the incoming Obama Administration endorsed.

There is no sugarcoating how Karzai played his hand: he or his backers tried to rig the election on August 20th, a day on which several million of his countrymen defied Taliban threats of violence to attend the polls. Recently, after weeks of equivocating, the head of the United Nations mission in Kabul, Kai Eide, of Norway, admitted that the vote had been marred by “widespread fraud.” (The U.N. had earlier fired Eide’s American deputy, Peter Galbraith, for chasing this conclusion too vigorously.) U.N. voter-turnout estimates show that most of the fraud occurred in Karzai’s strongholds and lifted his tally far more than any other candidate’s. In southern Helmand Province, for example, the U.N. estimates suggest that Karzai’s campaign may have manufactured more than seventy thousand fake votes; in Kandahar, a hundred and twenty thousand; in Paktika, a hundred and sixty thousand. From June through August, nearly two hundred coalition soldiers died in military operations designed in part to create security for the election.

Karzai’s apparent betrayal has the capacity to shock, but it would be a mistake to overemphasize his failings, just as it was an error to overemphasize his early successes. American interests in Afghanistan—namely, the disablement of Al Qaeda along the Pakistan-Afghanistan border, and the pursuit of a region free from the threat of Taliban revolution—should not be wholly confused with the quest for an honest President in Kabul, where rulers have not often been trustworthy.

A second round of voting now looks probable; it could help calm the country, or it could make things worse. In any event, the election is not yet an utter catastrophe. Two years ago, in Kenya, Mwai Kibaki allegedly stole his reëlection to the Presidency, and the country erupted in mass riots and militia killings. In June, Iran’s fraud-riddled vote ignited a protest movement with revolutionary ambitions. In Afghanistan, despite possibly decisive fraud, the opposition has barely thrown a rock. Abdullah Abdullah, the aggrieved second-place finisher, just holds press conferences in his garden.

It goes without saying that Afghans have had enough of violence. Abdullah’s restraint signals a broader, resilient desire among many political and tribal leaders to avoid having their country descend into chaos again. This is the opening that American policy has repeatedly failed to grasp since the Taliban’s fall in late 2001: an opportunity to reject the false expediency of warlords and indispensable men, in favor of deepening participatory, Afghan-led political reform and national reconciliation.

In tandem with a decision about troop levels, the Obama Administration requires an ambitious political strategy for Afghanistan, one that will seize upon the willingness of opposition leaders to negotiate even with a tainted President Karzai about an array of national questions. These include how electoral fraud might be prevented in the future; whether provincial governors should be elected rather than appointed at the President’s whim; how ethnic balance can be assured as the country’s Army and police force grow; whether political parties should be encouraged; whether the 2004 constitution should be revised to strengthen parliament; how local government can be improved; how corrupt or drug-dealing government officials should be brought to account; and how Taliban foot soldiers and leaders might be encouraged to forswear violent revolution for constitutional politics.

It is not the specifics of these talks that matter most; it is the prospective project of continuous Afghan-led negotiations, formal and informal, amply resourced with money, international attention, and supportive expertise. Some of these projects, such as the establishment of local rehabilitation centers for defecting low-level Taliban fighters, demand urgent investments, within months.

Such political work will be no more certain to succeed than anything else in Afghanistan. Karzai will resist encroachments upon his authority; efforts to satisfy northern groups such as those aligned with Abdullah will conflict with efforts to pacify the Taliban, who are rooted in the south and the east. It is essential work, nonetheless—counter-insurgency campaigns rarely prevail unless military deployments are intimately connected with political negotiations.

Since the Soviet Union invaded Afghanistan, in 1979, attempts by foreign powers to shape events there have repeatedly been thwarted by what intelligence analysts call “mirror imaging,” which is the tendency of decision-makers in one country to judge counterparts in another through the prism of their own language and politics. The Politburo, for example, engaged in energetic debates about the extent to which Afghanistan might conform to the stages of revolutionary development contemplated in Marxist-Leninist theory.

As the Obama war cabinet now debates its choices, American discourse barely refers to Afghan leaders by name or to the particular equations of the country’s diverse provinces. Instead, historical analogies and abstract concepts from political-theory texts abound—arguments about “legitimacy” and “governance,” as if the Taliban were motivated primarily by the “Rights of Man.” Obama and his advisers might profitably consult the Democratic Party’s own book of rules, specifically an entry composed by a peaceable boss from Massachusetts: All politics is local. In the case of Afghanistan, there is a corollary: All local progress, or failure, will be political.

Pop Music

Wrapping Up

A genre ages out.

by October 26, 2009

Freddie Gibbs rhymes the way he talks: quickly and cleanly, with little sentimentality or exaggeration. Photograph by Evan Hurd.

Weighing in early on what academics call “periodization” is a dicey proposition. If you try to locate the moment of a major paradigm shift, in the moment, perhaps by calling your album “Hip Hop Is Dead,” as Nas did in 2006, you’re slipping into weatherman territory. Will it rain tomorrow? Will another great rap album pop up? The life spans of genres and art forms are best perceived from the distance of ten or twenty years, if not more. With that in mind, I still suspect that Nas—along with a thousand bloggers—was not fretting needlessly.

If I had to pick a year for hip-hop’s demise, though, I would choose 2009, not 2006. Jay-Z’s new album, “The Blueprint 3,” and some self-released mixtapes by Freddie Gibbs are demonstrating, in almost opposite ways, that hip-hop is no longer the avant-garde, or even the timekeeper, for pop music. Hip-hop has relinquished the controls and splintered into a variety of forms. The top spot is not a particularly safe perch, and every vital genre eventually finds shelter lower down, with an organic audience, or moves horizontally into combination with other, sturdier forms. Disco, it turns out, is always a good default move.

Hip-hop, a spinoff from New York City’s early disco culture, has been a commercial proposition since the release of “Rapper’s Delight,” in 1979. That’s thirty years, a long time for any genre. If you want to be conservative and decide that mainstream cultural relevance kicked in toward the end of the eighties, with New York’s golden age and the quick follow-up of gangsta rap, the wildly popular genre from Los Angeles, that still leaves twenty years of cultural impact. This may be a fine time for hip-hop to atomize. The original form has done an awful lot of work.

“The Blueprint 3” falls in line with other recent mass-market successes in hip-hop. Compare it to Kanye West’s “Glow in the Dark” tour, or Kid Cudi’s breakout hit “Day ’n’ Nite,” and you will notice that this is hip-hop by virtue of rapping more than sound. The tempos and sonics of disco’s various children—techno, rave, whatever your particular neighborhood made of a four-on-the-floor thump—are slowly replacing hip-hop’s blues-based swing. It doesn’t matter if you’re talking about the rudimentary digital sound of New Orleans bounce or the crusty samples of New York hip-hop: this music wants to swing and syncopate. On major commercial releases, this impulse is giving way to a European pulse, simpler and faster and more explicitly designed for clubs.

A mildly entertaining patchwork of styles, anchored by lots of guest singers and rappers, “The Blueprint 3” is only tenuously connected to Jay-Z’s best work, and a patient listener will have to accept that. Gone are the autumnal poise and the tightly nested meanings, verses delivered with the bravado of someone who knows he could go all night but will bow out early to appear deceptively human. The new Jay-Z is a relaxed impresario, a Macher with A-list friends making safe choices. On the single “D.O.A. (Death of Auto-Tune),” Jay-Z mentions rappers that he previously overshadowed, an acknowledgment, perhaps, of a shift in hierarchy: “This shit need a verse from Jeezy, I might send this to the mixtape Weezy.” The latter is a reference to Lil Wayne, who publicly claimed the title of “greatest rapper alive,” while also stipulating that it used to belong to Jay-Z. Wayne was right, for a while, and then went weirdly silent, save for a few odd rock tracks. Wayne’s 2008 release, “Tha Carter III,” which included “A Milli,” a thick, psychedelic ramble tied to a thin, metronomic canter, was the year’s biggest-selling album—and probably the last moment when hip-hop was both popular and improbably weird.

“The Blueprint 3” features nothing as startling or vital as “A Milli.” (Jay-Z albums were once routinely loaded with three or four such songs.) The only tune that interrupted the summer flow of Michael Jackson songs in my Brooklyn neighborhood—not far from where Jay-Z grew up—was “D.O.A.,” a bit of a stylistic throwback, using a generous sample of an obscure 1970 rock record. It sounds more like vintage nineties Jay-Z, and it’s the only track in that mold. The rest of the album veers toward a pop median, giving synthesizers and R. & B. singers the last say. For “Run This Town,” that means Rihanna has to tackle a dreary and aimless melody that could be saved only by someone with a surplus of persona. (Mary J. Blige and Nina Simone come to mind.) On “Empire State of Mind,” Alicia Keys improves matters significantly, sending her voice high and strong: “Let’s hear it for New York! ” Why not?

The album begins, though, with “What We Talkin’ About,” which sounds like a cover of a slow Italian disco number from the seventies with a particularly tuneless chorus. “Young Forever” is genuinely European, a flat-footed remake of “Forever Young” by the German synth-pop band Alphaville. “Off That,” Jay-Z’s duet with the young rapper of the moment, the genial and deft Drake, works over a brisk computerized bubble that doesn’t necessarily sound as if it needed any rapping. None of the beats here are subpar, and Jay-Z is too smart to be boring, but there are few verses you’ll walk around repeating (unlike “The Black Album,” from 2003, which read like an alternate Bartlett’s, all pith and punch lines), and the music simply confirms that Jay-Z knows what’s happening in pop, not that he necessarily belongs there.

Other rappers will likely ride this new wave of club beats better than Jay-Z, but they have yet to emerge. It won’t be Kid Cudi, whose singsongy mumble does nothing to save “Already Home,” a sluggish number on “The Blueprint 3,” and whose début album, “Man on the Moon; The End of the Day,” manages to be both distracted and ill-tempered.

As the marquee names nudge rap into its transitional, synthetic phase, a host of traditionalists are doing strong work in well-known older styles. This movement reminds me of metal and jazz, areas where artists work in a larger number of established subgenres that do small but consistent business with loyal audiences. The claim to shock is traded in favor of a reliable form and a reliable following.

Raekwon, one of the Wu-Tang Clan’score members, just released “Only Built 4 Cuban Linx . . . Pt. II,” the follow-up to his 1995 début, “Only Built 4 Cuban Linx . . . ” It’s a sequel few thought would come and fewer thought would be any good. (Imagine if “Chinese Democracy” had been as good as “Appetite for Destruction.”) Raekwon has drifted between uninspired beats and retreads since the nineties. He seems to have found his voice by simply returning to where he started. “Cuban Linx II” sounds like an old Wu-Tang record: scraggly samples from soul records and rapid, gnomic bundles of rhymes about drug-selling and agitated encounters. Almost every skit involving Raekwon or his partner, Ghostface Killah, involves somebody yelling at somebody else. This is the Wu-Tang vision of living in the projects, “The Wire” before there was “The Wire.” Whether or not it really represents life as Raekwon and his bandmates know it isn’t relevant; this is the life that they know how to describe, and there’s an urgency here that’s entirely missing from the recent work of artists like Jay-Z and Kid Cudi.

Freddie Gibbs is the one rapper I would put money on right now. And, though it may be irrelevant to his gift, the criminal life that Raekwon raps about on “Cuban Linx II” is still very familiar to Gibbs. When I spoke to Gibbs on the phone, he told an unadorned story about growing up in Gary, Indiana. “We don’t even have a movie theatre,” he said. “We don’t even have a mall. I can’t ride around Gary and get inspired—we don’t have anything.” Several years ago, Gibbs was selling drugs out of a friend’s recording studio. He eventually decided he could rap better than the people coming in to record. His efforts found their way across the Web to Interscope Records, and Gibbs was signed. He moved to Los Angeles in 2005, and began to work at a relentless pace. “I was two hundred per cent into this rap thing,” Gibbs said. “Four P.M. to 1 P.M. the next afternoon in the studio.” When Joe Weinberger, the man who signed him, left Interscope, Gibbs was dropped.

Gibbs returned to Gary briefly, falling back into crime. Some friends encouraged him to return to California, and he did. He has now released five mixtapes onto the Internet, some using the material originally intended for Interscope. These are not quite like other hip-hop mixtapes circulating, where the standard practice is to record new material over other artists’ well-known beats. They are closer to fully formed albums, especially the newest one, “Midwestgangstaboxframecadillacmuzik.” The beats are almost all original and there is a minimum of filler. (Gibbs’s take on this approach is also a short summation of the music industry’s woes: “These rap motherfuckers giving you twenty-five songs with only five good ones—who is going spend their hard-earned money on that?”) Gibbs rhymes the way he talks, quickly and cleanly, with little sentimentality or exaggeration. After years of bloated expansion and leveraging of fantasies, “gangsta rap” has largely become a meaningless term. Unvarnished reporting delivered with a panache that balanced the pain—this was gangsta rap’s first achievement, not unlike the cry of mid-seventies reggae artists like Culture and Bob Marley. Somewhere along the way, the struggle to escape became a love of accumulation, and underdogs ended up sounding as smug as the authorities they once battled.

“I think rap is about to go back to the early nineties,” Gibbs told me. “You could do whatever you wanted, and radio had to play it.” Gibbs does not currently have a record deal, and he isn’t looking for one.