As a matter of principle, I try to pay as little attention as possible to polls and the ESPN-style analysis that invariably follows. Still, it’s hard not to notice that Barack Obama’s approval rating has been trending mostly downward. This is because a lot has gone wrong.

On the issues, Obama’s highest approval ratings are for education, but he’s accomplished little there. He gets decent marks for foreign policy, but due mainly to the inertia he’s accumulated by reversing his predecessor’s policies. His own efforts (as much as they can be considered his), especially in the Middle East, have been stymied by events. The Israeli-Palestinian peace talks are at a standstill and don’t look to be going anywhere. Violence in Iraq is up and the only bright spot is looming withdrawal. Afghanistan gets worse every day.

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The domestic front is no better. The economy continues to sputter. It seems that for the next year, the best-case scenarios are a decline in the rate of decline or (fingers crossed) anemic growth. Obama’s biggest problem is his foundering Healthcare reform. The Republican Party has used the issue to exhume itself. That much of their opposition is based on demagoguery (the “socialist” label) and sophistry (the “death panel” spectre) is immaterial. They’ve mobilized their base, allied themselves with conservative Democrats and accomplished a lot. A government-run alternative, once considered mandatory by the Obama Administration, looks to be bargained away for the sake of passing a bill, any bill. If that happens, the President will take a lot of heat from the liberal wing of his party. Rachel Maddow of MSNBC, in a much discussed quote, put it succinctly:

…ultimately, if the president decides that he’s going to go with a reform effort that doesn’t include a public option, what he will have done is spent a ton of political capital, riled up an incredibly angry right wing base who’s been told that this is a plot to kill grandma…and he will have achieved something that doesn’t change health care very much and that doesn’t save us very much money and won’t do very much for the American people. It’s not a very good thing to spend a lot of political capital on.

If we assume, as is increasingly likely, that a watered-down healthcare bill is passed, Obama will still be unpopular with the right (no surprise there) and possibly with the left as well. He’ll be boxed into the center and his bargaining power will diminish. Worse, midterm elections are barely a year away and Obama must be on his best political behavior, since his party will probably loose seats next November. The race for the White House will start right after and further circumscribe the new President. So Barack Obama might not accomplish much of anything in his first term, and we must face the possibility that a crucial period in our nation’s history will be one of dithering and stagnation, another way-station on the road to decline.

-Greg Waldmann

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Nicholas Thompson, writing in this week’s New York Times Sunday Book Review, takes a look at Gregory Feifer’s The Great Gamble

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Feifer gives credence to the assertion of one general staff officer that “no one ever actually ordered the invasion of Afghanistan.” It just happened through inertia and confusion under the sclerotic Soviet leadership of the late ’70s and early ’80s.

In our February ‘09 issue, Zac Marconi also examines The Great Gamble in (naturally, this being Open Letters

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that he is able to connect the aftermath of the Soviet failure in Afghanistan to the collapse of the entire Soviet state as well as to the rise of the militant Islamic Taliban regime. In fact, he devotes the book’s final chapter to the far-reaching repercussions of the invasion …

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You can click over to our February issue for the entirety of Zac’s essay on the subject – and of course you should feel encouraged to tell us your thoughts when you’re done!

Steve Coll, perhaps the best-sourced American reporter on foreign affairs, has an excellent primer on the simmering conflict over Kashmir in the New Yorker. The situation in Pakistan is less stable than most in the West realize. In stepping down last year, Pervez Musharraf handed Pakistan’s new civilian President Asif Zardari (widower of slain opposition leader Benazir Bhutto) not only the sixty-year Kashmiri conflict in the northeast, but internal unrest that threatens to topple the government.

The violent contest for power and legitimacy between Taliban militants and Pakistan’s government is in many ways a struggle over Pakistan’s national identity – and, particularly, over whether the present government is righteously Islamic enough.

Failure here will torpedo gains anywhere else. India and Pakistan have been conducting quiet negotiations over Kashmir for much of the last decade, but “in the midst of such [an internal] contest, any agreement that made concessions to India would be harder to than ever to sell to the Pakistani public.” The Indian leadership likewise faces pressure from more militant factions to act with force. The struggle for peace reflects

a competition between two schools of radical thought: the millenarian terrorism of jihadi groups and their other supporters; and the less well-known search by sections of the Indian and Pakistani elites for a transformational peace. For both groups, Kashmir is symbolically and ideologically important. It is also, still, a territory of grinding, unfinished war.

And it is a conflict tied intimately to America’s presence in Afghanistan. Pakistan’s intelligence service, the ISI, built up the Taliban in Afghanistan as a bulwark against Indian influence, just as they supported jihadi forces in Kashmir as proxies in their fight for territory. Weaning them off of their reliance on Islamic militants will take a combination of American pressure (the US gives billions every year in military aid to Pakistan) and a workable solution to the question of Kashmir.

For an idea of the precariousness of Pakistan’s government, see this video from the The New York Times, about the fight between the government and the Taliban for the valley of Swat, a mere 100 miles from the nation’s capitol. For more on related subjects, turn to Zac Marconi’s review of The Great Gamble, about the Soviet war in Afghanistan, from our February 2009 issue. On the wider subject of the so-called “war on terror”: Greg Waldmann’s review of Lee Harris’ The Suicide of Reason, from our October 2007 issue and his review of Michael Scheuer’s Marching Toward Hell, from our April 2008 issue.