Opinion: In today’s pages: 8 years after the attacks
This article was originally on a blog post platform and may be missing photos, graphics or links. See About archive blog posts.
The Opinion pages mark the anniversary of the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks by looking at two very different aspects. Author Rebecca Solnit writes about the failure of the terrorists to terrorize in New York on that day, as ordinary people reacted with calm, generosity and bravery under the most fearful of circumstances:
A young man from Pakistan, Usman Farman, told of how he fell down and a Hasidic Jewish man stopped and saw the Arabic inscription on Farman’s pendant. Then, ‘with a deep Brooklyn accent, he said, ‘Brother, if you don’t mind, there is a cloud of glass coming at us. Grab my hand, let’s get the hell out of here.’ He was the last person I would ever have thought to help me. If it weren’t for him, I probably would have been engulfed in shattered glass and debris.’
The editorial board looks at another effort that isn’t going all that well: the war in Afghanistan.
But today, the situation in Afghanistan is grim. Taliban insurgents have been regaining ground while U.S. military and Afghan civilian casualties are on the rise and the support of the American public is eroding. Far from vanquished, Al Qaeda is largely residing in the borderlands of Pakistan.Afghans are increasingly fed up with the corruption and incompetence of President Hamid Karzai’s U.S.-backed government. Now Karzai’s reelection is in dispute. Government election officials say he won a first-round victory with 54% of the vote in last month’s balloting, but the independent Electoral Complaints Commission says it has ‘clear and convincing’ evidence of fraud, and it has ordered a partial recount. Karzai must win fairly or face a runoff. Simply stated, there can be no good argument for risking American lives in support of a government that is considered illegitimate by its own people.
Altogether, the board concludes, the burden of proof is on President Obama to show why we should have a continued military presence in the country.
The board also considers the case of former Assemblyman Michael Duvall, who resigned after his, um, unofficial speech to a colleague about his sexual exploits. It’s bad enough that a state legislator was voting in line with the interests of a power company while sleeping with its lobbyist, but why wasn’t the assemblyman to whom Duvall was boasting disturbed by the ethical lapses and doing something about it?
Finally, on the Op-Ed page, an environment writer bemoans the loss of Van Jones from the president’s environment team. Far from a radical, Jones has evolved into a pragmatic environmentalist, Judith Lewis writes.
--Karin Klein