5 highlights
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In a democracy, there is one simple yardstick of moral success. The more control the state needs to exercise, the more repression it needs, and the more freedom it abridges, the more unsuccessful that state is.
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But our narrative is Janus-faced: To pronounce domestic policy as a success we attribute the rise in militancy to Pakistan; to pronounce foreign policy as a success we say this is home-grown.
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The idea that discreet burials will somehow break the cycle of youth being inspired to take up arms is proving naïve. Quite the contrary.
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There is no strategy to elicit trust. Our only strategy is fear, fear and fear.
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If the endgame is engineered demographic change, through brute coercion, we are setting ourselves up for a long and violent war. If the endgame is a normal democratic political process, then we seem to be too clever by half.