• Les Gelb has a point when he says that what Afghanistan needs in the near-term is not a bigger military but one that is independent and effective. Even a bigger Afghan army is not going to independently pacify its country anytime soon. A more realistic plan might be to trade quantity for quality and aim in the next few years for Afghan forces that can keep Taliban militias from gaining ground when most U.S. forces leave, a primarily defensive mission. As Rory Stewart points out, the security forces we now plan for Afghanistan will cost about 500% of its annual government revenue, which means we will long fund it. A smaller military is one that Afghanistan might someday pay for itself. Charles Tilly argues that states developed because the need to fund armies for defense required a bureaucracy to extract taxes. What happens when foreign powers pay for the army in perpetuity?
• The people complaining that the President doesn’t talk to Stan McChystal enough are confused, as military historian Mark Grimsley points out. McChrystal’s boss is Centcom commander David Petraeus. Obama talks to him, but even that isn’t really necessary; it would reasonable if he let Petraeus report to the Secretary of Defense and Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff. Washington seems infected by a cult of the commander, where the guy in charge of a war is a treated an oracle, possessed of special knowledge unavailable to other mortals, which can only be conveyed in person.
• According to civil military relations 101, McChrystal was out of line the other day in London when he disparaged the utility of more narrowly tailored objectives in Afghanistan. The traditional view of these matters, the idea of objective civilian control, says that this is a political decision that officers should not publicly consider, as doing so will politicize the military. But what exactly is the grave harm we fear here? A coup? A collapse of command authority? These are impossible and far-fetched, respectively. I doubt politicized generals are going to poison debate, and they might even improve it. For example, it would have been helpful if more generals publicly knocked the light footprint Rumsfeld wanted for the invasion of Iraq. A bigger danger from comments like McChrystal’s is that they damage the Army’s apolitical reputation. But since that reputation is somewhat fictional — the top layers of the military are plenty political — I don’t know if that’s a bad thing. A realist’s view of this matter is that McChrystal can express his views and the President can always fire him, if he can bear the political cost. It’s also worth noting that those attacking McChrystal tend to disagree with his substantive point while those supporting him are mostly counterinsurgency enthusiasts. The reaction to the (mostly retired) generals who attacked Rumsfeld in 2006 followed a similar pattern. The civil-military thing is a bit of a smokescreen. The real trouble with McChrystal’s comment is that he’s substantively wrong.
• It’s good that James Traub wrote a piece for the New York Times’ Week in Review secton about realism and the war in Afghanistan. It would have been even better if he had cited or quoted a living realist. Maybe one of these people.

When Samuel Johnson said that ”patriotism is the last refuge of a scoundrel,” he overlooked the value of the word “reform.” (I didn’t say this first, but I can’t discover who did.) Webster’s says that “reform” means “to put or change into an improved form or condition [or] to amend or improve by change of form or removal of faults or abuses.” So in political terms, a reform is a change for the better. But whether a particular policy change would actually improve things is often controversial. Unfortunately, the mainstream media typically use the word “reform” to mean “change in a liberal direction.”

It’s bad enough that they constantly use the phrase “campaign finance reform” to refer to laws that restrict individuals’ ability to spend their money to advance their political ideas. And of course every day we hear and read the term “health care reform” used to mean new subsidies, mandates, regulations, taxes, and restrictions on how health care is provided. Needless to say, there’s heated debate in the country as to whether such laws would constitute reform.

And now the Washington Post gives us this prominent headline (page 3, upper right):

450 Mayors Petition Obama

To Adopt Broad Gun Reform

The story makes clear that what the mayors want is what used to be called “gun control” — more power for the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, and Firearms, the creation of an “Interstate Firearms Trafficking Unit,” more restrictions on gun shows, more data collection on individuals. No doubt anti-gun strategists have discovered that “gun control” is an unpopular term, so they advise advocates to use terms like “gun reform”; and reporters, headline writers, and editors at the Post go along with it.

Now try to imagine this story in the Washington Post:

450 Mayors Petition Obama

To Adopt Broad Media Reform

A new report from a national coalition of mayors urges President Obama to adopt dozens of reforms to help curb media excesses, including steps to crack down on problems with unauthorized leaks, the creation of a federal interstate media monitoring unit, new rules on media concentration, a federal database of people who use hateful language in letters to the editor and online comments.

Hard to imagine the Post would blithely accept the term “reform” in that case, isn’t it? And I don’t think the Post and other mainstream media called President Reagan’s tax cuts “tax reform.” (They did use the term “tax reform” when the proposed policy involved eliminating loopholes and thus taxing more activities, along with a reduction of rates.) Nor, I think, did they call President Bush’s proposed Social Security private accounts “Social Security reform.” They should be equally careful when liberal activists dub their proposals “reform.”

Meanwhile, kudos to Mara Liasson of NPR, who in this story from Friday uses the terms “health care legislation” and “health care overhaul,” but never “health care reform.” I hope that was a conscious choice, in recognition of the fact that about half of Americans don’t think the current subsidy-regulation-mandate legislation is in fact reform.

• Bush-era surveillance powers are set to expire at the end of this year. Julian Sanchez explores the efforts to revise the PATRIOT Act.

• More on the medical professionals who aided in acts of torture.

• Doug Bandow: Ireland is holding a second referendum on the Lisbon Treaty on Friday. If the Irish say yes, the European Union will be stronger. But will anyone notice?

• How urban planners caused the housing bubble.

• The aftermath of “Cash for Clunkers” hits automakers. Looks like it just might have been the “dumbest program ever” after all.

• Podcast: “Three Felonies a Day”

Peter Van Doren points me to some revealing passages in a new article in the Journal of Economic Perspectives. In “Subsidizing Creativity through Network Design: Zero-Pricing and Net Neutrality,” Robin S. Lee and Tim Wu caution against tiered pricing for Internet access services, writing:

[U]nless sufficient bandwidth and quality of service can be guaranteed for the “free” Internet, there is a risk that … tiering will serve to sidestep de facto prohibition on termination fees.… [A] priced-priority system could simply become a de facto fee charged for all content providers if the “free” Internet was of sufficiently poor quality and consumers shifted their usage behavior accordingly.… [T]his might dampen the introduction of new content and services and eliminate the subsidy for content innovation currently provided by net neutrality.

Locking in net neutrality by regulation would lock in a subsidy to content providers. Lee and Wu prefer it, and many of us may like the results, but it’s hard to call a subsidy regime “neutral.”

• Education expert: More government involvement in the college loan business will increase the national debt and leave Americans footing the bill.

• How Congress is cooking the books: When it comes to the health care reform debate honest budgeting is nowhere to be seen.

• More background information on the elimination of the missile defense program in Europe.

• How the “death tax” destroys wealth.

• Podcast: “Knowledge, Power and the Financial Crisis”

China’s rise from an isolated state-controlled economy in 1949 to the world’s third largest economy with a vibrant nonstate sector is something to celebrate on the 60th anniversary of the founding of the People’s Republic of China.

Under Deng Xiaoping, China’s transition from plan to market began in earnest in December 1978. For more than 30 years now, China has gradually removed barriers to a market system and increased opportunities for voluntary exchanges. Special economic zones, the end of communal farming, the rise of township and village enterprises, and the massive increase in foreign trade have enabled millions of people to lift themselves out of abject poverty.

Economic freedom has increased personal freedom, but the Chinese Communist Party has no intention of giving up its monopoly on power. China’s future will depend to a large extent on the path of political reform. Further strengthening of private property rights, including land rights, would create new wealth and a growing voice for limiting the power of government. It is doubtful that in another 60 years there will be single-party rule in China.

Here’s a nice follow up to my blog post on Tuesday: firms importing solar panels to the United States face a $70 million bill because of unpaid duties.

It seems to me that a government truly concerned about global warming–putting aside the merits of that position–would want to encourage the adoption of solar panels, including by keeping them as cheap as possible. Nor, I would have thought, is this the time to add more fuel to the fire that is starting to characterize the U.S. trade relationship with China. There’s plenty enough fuel for that already.