My Dear American Friends,

From the bottom of my heart, I want to thank you for all you have sacrificed to help my country. You liberated Afghanistan from the brutal rule of the Taliban and Al-Qaeda. We are delighted to have them gone.

Afghanistan is far from America, and few Americans knew much about my native land before the terrible events of September 11, 2001 brought our fates together. I know that no American can forget the tragedy of that day, just as no Afghan can forget the string of tragedies over the past thirty years that have turned our proud country to rubble.

It’s strange for me to watch the Afghanistan debate in the United States knowing that what America decides will have almost as great an impact on the future of Afghanistan as elections in our own country. Americans are rightly asking what has been gained from eight years of war – your soldiers are dying, the Taliban is growing stronger, Al Qaeda has safe havens in Pakistan, and my own government is riddled with corruption and cannot yet stand on its own feet. Many Americans saw the August Afghan elections as a last straw and are asking how a counter-insurgency strategy can work if the Afghan government is not able to hold a clean election, provide basic services, or bring any semblance of justice and security.

But while I ask the American taxpayers and their representatives to hold me accountable for how international funds are being used by the Afghan government, I also hope that the American people can understand how much the U.S. policy of funding and arming Afghanistan’s warlords after the 2001 intervention helped create the situation we are in. What could we have done to stand up to the warlords other than make deals with them? Once we did, how could we create the culture of accountability we all know is badly needed? This is not to mention all the problems that have been created by the poor coordination among international military forces or the negative impact on our credibility of civilian casualties from US bombing.

We have all made terrible mistakes, but what’s done is done. The key question you must now answer is whether you will support a strong and broad engagement in Afghanistan to lay a foundation for long-term security, or will begin scaling back your engagement and focus more narrowly on fighting Al Qaeda in Afghanistan and Pakistan. For your sake as well as for our own, I hope you do the former.

If you scale back now, before we are able to develop our own institutions, there is a decent chance our system will collapse. If you stay in your bases and whack the Taliban and Al Qaeda from the sky, you will only stir the hornet’s nest and destabilize our already weak government. Trust me, a failed or terrorist state in Afghanistan will become everyone’s problem. If the Taliban and Al Qaeda take over and use Afghanistan as a base to export extremism and terror, what will you do then? Will you come back? As tough as it seems, won’t it be easier to make the current flawed system work?

The new Afghanistan is just eight years old. We are very far from perfect, but we are doing a lot to educate our young girls and build a multi-ethnic society. With your help, we’ve made great progress in strengthening our army, but we’ve had very little progress in improving the quality of our policing, building a justice system, or giving farmers meaningful alternatives to growing opium poppies. I believe that together we can make significant progress in all of these areas, but we need our leadership, your robust support, and a bit more time.

We need you to stay and help us, and you need us to succeed. But it would not be fair for us to ask you to sacrifice so much without our making commitments as well. For this reason, I today want to make a series of pledges to the American people.

From this day forward I will commit myself to fighting fraud and corruption within my government. Corruption is not a part of Afghan culture, and we Afghans need to hold ourselves to a higher standard. I will kick-start this process today by asking my brother, Ahmed Wali Karzai, to step down as Chairman of the Provincial Council of Kandahar.

Within two months, my government will publicly present our list of top goals for the next three years in key areas such as good governance, development, education, policing, judicial reform, and agriculture, and measurable benchmarks that we can all use to determine whether these goals are being met. For each goal, we will determine what support we need from the international community to make progress. If we do not reach these benchmarks, I will fully understand if the international community begins reducing its support to our government. It will literally be life and death for me and every member of our government to bring about this progress, and corruption or other interference with this process simply will not be tolerated.

You may be asking how I can do this when my own position is so shaky after a deeply flawed election whose outcome remains uncertain. I take full responsibility for the electoral fraud carried out in my name, but will it matter who ultimately wins if international support is withdrawn prematurely and our state collapses? We need to get our act together now. For this reason, I would like to invite my challenger, Dr. Abdullah Abdullah, to become my full and equal partner as Co-President of Afghanistan.

I beg you, for our sake as well as yours, help give us one last chance to build a better future for all of our children. From where I stand, the alternative seems unimaginable for both of our countries.

This blog was originally published in the Huffington Post on October 1, 2009.

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I fear that I sound like a crotchety old guy when I say that it seems to me that America’s standards are rapidly deteriorating and that we need far better leadership to get us out of our funk.

If our economy is a high-end service economy, we should be mortified by the tumult in our financial markets brought about by excessive greed, unbelievably poor and lax regulation, and a system that increasingly socializes risk even as profits are privatized. It is amazing that an administration that came to power calling for deregulation, and put many officials in power who are openly disdainful of regulation, will end up leaving a legacy of nationalization of key industries.

If we are an industrial economy, then we should all be terrified by the current strike at Boeing, which is threatening to derail the phenomenally dramatic turnaround in that company’s fortunes stemming from their successful gamble on the 787 Dreamliner. But why, many ask, should the workers not be doing what some claim to be extorting the company at its moment of greatest opportunity and vulnerability when workers across the United States feel that CEOs even from failing companies are getting enormous salaries when the average worker is getting squeezed?

On top of that, standards seem to be falling across the board. People walk around with their pants lowered to their knees, the engineer of a commuter train in LA crashed because he was texting his friends rather than doing his job, and there seems to be a declining sense of common purpose across the board. I travel in Asia very regularly and I am always amazed by the sense of common purpose in places like Korea and Japan. Of course, I value American individualism, but would it harm us so much of more people started thinking about the common good more and less about their individual and often selfish needs?

This brings me back to the leadership issue. America has lost its way, and it is up to all of us, especially our leaders, to get us moving in the right direction. George Bush harmed us all when he said after 9/11 that we should all respond by going shopping. Americans are an idealistic people and we do not recognize ourselves in Guantanamo or Abu Ghraib. We need leaders who can inspire us to be our best and to believe in our own ideals to get us out of this national depression.

We also need to dramatically reform our immigration policies to ensure that the best and brightest people from around the world can come to the United States to start businesses and raise families. It’s probably impossible to calculate the financial contribution of the Jewish, Indian, Chinese, and other immigrants to the United States over the last hundred years, but my guess is that it would be a very sizable proportion of our overall growth, not to mention their contributions in science, the arts, medicine, and so many other fields. That we are not scouring the earth for the best and brightest and inviting them to come here is nothing short of insane in this increasingly competitive world.

I know that the McCain campaign is trying to use Barak Obama’s inspiring rhetoric against him, but inspiration to be our best is, it seems to me, exactly what we need more than anything. The current administration has shown us how we look at our worst, and Americans do not like what we are seeing in the mirror. America is a better country than what we are expressing today. Our next leader, whoever it may be, has to lead us back to our best selves.

Garumph!

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As you all know, the crisis in Burma is transforming from a natural disaster to a humanitarian catastrophe due to the xenophobia, incompetence, and malevolence of the Burmese government. With every day that passes, the situation of the up to tow million Burmese people affected by this crisis, almost three quarters of whom have reportedly not received any assistance, is becoming ever more precarious. It is clear that the time has come for bold international action.  My colleague, Brian Vogt, wrote an excellent piece detailing one strategy for getting aid through to those who need it earlier this week.  Brian is quite right to warn that we must not to allow our disgust for the Burmese junta lead us to political posturing rather than decisive action.

Although the Chinese government stated last week that they did not think it appropriate for the Burma crisis to be brought to the UN Security Council, it is becoming increasingly clear that stronger action by the UN and the international community will be required to break this deadly impasse. French Prime Minister Bernard Kouchner was among the first to call for aid drops in Burma, even against the wishes of the Burmese regime. British Prime Minister Gordon Brown is now calling for a UN summit on aid to Burma. The United States must continue to take a lead in these efforts, and to build international consensus around a more aggressive assistance agenda with the greatest amount of international legitimacy possible. Clearly, food and aid drops will not be enough as water-borne diseases begin to take their toll over the coming days, particularly on the young and the elderly.  Specifically, the United States can actively support the provision of assistance under chapter 7 of the UN Charter, as was done for Somalia and other recent humanitarian crises.

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Although much of the ongoing debate about immigration seems to always focus on what type of people America should to keep out, the real issue for our long-term security is not whom we should keep out, but whom we must bring in.

In the increasingly inter-connected global economy, America’s competitive edge will only be maintained by our ability to engage the most effective and entrepreneurial workforce and establish the essential conditions for its success. As our country’s education system continues to fall in global rankings, our immigration system will become an even more essential tool of national competitiveness.

The United States has a distinguished history of spurring innovation and economic growth through the targeted application of immigration policy. In the years before, during and after World War II, for example, the U.S. gave refuge to thousands of Jewish scientists from Europe who played a central role in laying the scientific foundation for America’s technology-driven post-war economy. Today, America simply cannot maintain our competitive edge without using strategic immigration as a fundamental driver of American competitiveness.

Much has been made of India’s and China’s growing ability to educate the highly qualified scientists and engineers needed to drive those countries’ growth well into the future, while America’s numbers of science and technology graduates continue to dwindle. But the competitiveness of economies and societies in the 21st century will be measured less by how many students each graduates in strategic fields than by the overall skill set of each population. Although the United States probably cannot educate more scientists and engineers than China or India, we can and must use our immigration policy to actively seek the best, brightest, highest educated and most motivated people from around the world through a much expanded H1-B visa program.

For almost two decades, one driver of skilled worker immigration has been the H1-B visa program that allows for highly skilled temporary workers in specialized occupations. Much of the growth of Silicon Valley and other U.S. technology centers can be directly attributed to highly skilled and motivated H1-B visa holders and other recent immigrants, most notably from India and China. (A Duke University study has found that 25% of American technology start-ups were founded by foreign-born entrepreneurs from 1995 to 2005; in addition, 26% of technology start-ups founded by immigrants had CEO’s, presidents, founders or lead researchers from India.)

The current level of 65,000 H1-B visas granted annually is hardly enough to fill our economy’s need. Employers like Microsoft’s Bill Gates have pushed for recruiting and retaining <http://help.senate.gov/Hearings/2007_03_07/Gates.pdf>  more foreign-born workers in information technology and other fields, as opposed to “driving away the world’s best and brightest precisely when we need them most.” The proposed legislation, expanding the H1-B visa base to 115,000 visas per year with the potential to go to 180,000 is a step in the right direction, but far more needs to be done with these visas and in other areas of U.S. immigration policy to better leverage the magnetic pull of our society — our prosperity, tolerance, rule of law, diversity, democratic system, etc. — to actively build a population that can further enhance America’s competitiveness.

There is no reason that any graduate in the top twenty percent of his or her class from India’s world renown Indian Institutes for Technology (IITs) and other comparable institutions should not be fast-tracked for U.S. citizenship provided they meet other essential criteria and possess skills that match America’s needs. Here again, the proposed bill’s merit-based points system for immigration that takes educational levels, occupation, English proficiency and other criteria into account is a positive step — although the devil will be in the details of how the points are allocated.

To further facilitate this process, however, the President and Congress should also establish a national commission on strategic immigration and U.S. competitiveness to develop an action agenda for recruiting people with needed skills to come to the United States. Such a commission would bring together corporate, academic and other leaders to outline the types of skills we will need for the 21st century workplace. It would work towards a strategic immigration policy that complements other education initiatives and worker training programs to enhance our competitive edge in key sectors including science and technology — but by no means limited to these fields.

Immigration policy, of course, serves multiple critical purposes including reuniting families, providing safe haven for refugees, fostering diversity and keeping terrorists and other bad actors out. But alongside a just, compassionate, and fair humanitarian immigration policy, the United States must build a strategic immigration initiative that recruits those with needed skills and helps lay the foundation for an even more prosperous and successful future.

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Although the high price of oil is creating a much more attractive market for investment in the development of alternative energy sources and energy conservation, our historical experience has shown that this increase in investment will likely decrease if the price of oil goes down. As a result, current investment levels in alternative energy are likely less than they would be if there was more certainty in the market that oil prices would not dip below an established minimum price.

While the costs of America’s over-dependence on oil are well known — supporting dictatorships, indirectly funding terrorism, harming US economy and global environment, etc. – the political costs of promoting a gas tax provide additional market certainty that oil prices will not dip so low as alternative energy sources begin to emerge so as to undermine the growth of alternative energies (as happened in the 1980s) have thus far proven insurmountable.

One way of creating this level of market certainty and therefore of further promoting investment in alternative energy sources and efficiency would be for the United States government to pass a gas tax at a level per gallon to be determined, that would only go into effect if oil prices fell below a certain value per barrel. All tax increases gained from this tax method would be offset by decreases in the payroll tax (a more progressive tax outcome).

If, for example, a gas tax were passed that would not go into effect until the price of oil per barrel dropped below sixty dollars a barrel (assuming that as the agreed minimum cost), no tax would be imposed under current conditions. If prices were to below this level, the tax would kick in and be updated quarterly to increase the price of oil per gallon to the equivalent of sixty dollars per barrel. Payroll taxes would be reduced by a fractional percentage to make sure that the overall cost to American consumers would be zero, although the wealthiest Americans would end up paying slightly more because many people in this group do not pay significant amounts of payroll tax relative to their incomes. Investors would know for certain that oil prices would never drop below $60 a barrel and could therefore plan, and act, accordingly.

Passing such a law would give a strong push to investors to more strongly promote the development of alternative energy sources and would make clear that the American government is serious about reducing our reliance on oil and imported oil. Taking this step would also itself have the potential to reduce oil prices.

What do readers think?

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As career members of the Justice Department, we respectfully call on Attorney General Gonzales to step down from his post. Our commitment to the rule of law is a bedrock principle of our country. By supporting the detention without due process of American citizens in Guantanamo, Cuba, and by inappropriately interfering with the work of U.S. Attorneys, Attorney General Gonzales has undermined that basic principle of our democracy. The replacement of Attorney General Gonzales with an individual better able to defend and protect our commitment to the rule of law would be an important step towards reestablishing perceptions of our government within the Justice Department, across the United States, and globally.

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There are few people I have more respect for today than Nebraska Senator Chuck Hagel. Senator Hagel has proven that he can rise above partisan divide to do what he feels is right in spite of partisan politics. The Vietnam War veteran stated yesterday in the Senate foreign relations committee:

”There is no strategy. This is a ping-pong game with American lives. These young men and women that we put in Anbar province, in Iraq, in Baghdad are not beans. They’re real lives. And we better be damn sure we know what we’re doing – all of us – before we put 22,000 more Americans into that grinder… I think all 100 senators ought to be on the line on this. What do you believe? What are you willing to support? What do you think? Why were you elected? If you wanted a safe job, go sell shoes.”

The issue of our strategy in Iraq and whether or not to escalate our involvement in the Iraqi civil war and put more American lives at risk is a fundamental question for our country, a question on which all of our representatives must vote their conscience, no matter what the political consequences. There are many good reasons to have a two party system, but I deeply hope that our leaders can overcome the pressures of partisanship to make the right call for the country.

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