When does a blog designed to be wonky and even deliberately obscure in its choice of subject matter go too far? Would it be when its “mail bag” postings involve, on the one hand, the arcana of Afghanistan’s ethnic-political identities, and on the other, the merits of carbon taxes verses cap-and-trade as an approach to climate-change regulation? Perhaps, but you are New Yorker readers, and I have faith in you.

On my conversation with Hamid Gailani, Barney Rubin, one of the country’s preeminent experts on Afghanistan, who is based at New York University, writes to point out that my characterization of the Gailanis as “Pashtuns” is incorrect. They are a distinguished religious family with a strong Pashtu-speaking following, but they are originally of Arab origin—”Sadat” being the preferred term to describe them. Hamid’s grandfather came to Afghanistan from Baghdad around 1905. Barney continues, “There was some dispute in the G/Jilani family there. You may have noticed that one of the main Sunni Mosques in Baghdad is named after Abdul Qadir Jilani.” Tourism notes from all over!

Separately, Greg Staple, a Washington attorney who follows climate-change politics closely for Vinson and Elkins, offers this comment on my post about ExxonMobil’s decision to weigh in to support carbon taxation, as opposed to a cap-and-trade regime, to address carbon emissions. His main point is that the problem with carbon taxes, in the view of their opponents, is that nobody can say with confidence how much tax would be required to change behavior enough so that the taxes would reduce emissions adequately. Some economists speculate a much heavier tax than is generally proposed might be required. The point is, no one knows, whereas with cap-and-trade, the “cap” can be set in advance—although, it should be noted, evasions of the complicated regime might also result in under-performance.

From Staple:

You’re probably right in thinking that carbon taxes will enjoy some renewed attention as Congress prepares to enter the home stretch on cap-and-trade…[but] I doubt very much that this will change the outcome of the current debate because the tax advocates have yet to table a serious (i.e. workable) legislative alternative on Capitol Hill. Nor have they been able convincingly to show how any give tax program will: (a) deliver the environmental benefits desired (e.g., an 80% plus reduction in emissions by 2050) or (b) equitably recycle the resulting taxes to the public. As a result, Rex Tillerson notwithstanding, the tax vs. cap-and-trade debate is about where it was in August 2007….

In the meantime, however, many cap-and-trade advocates have moved much closer to the tax camp by placing a new emphasis on “tax and rebate” or “tax and invest” rather than “tax and trade.” Auctions….are also in vogue, thanks to the campaign promise of President-elect Obama. Thus, as a fairly close observer of climate regulation in Washington, I think some form of cap-and-trade bill will ultimately prevail, provided the President chooses to expend the necessary political capital later this year (or early next). That is still a big “if,” I know, in these uncertain economic times.

Staple’s 2007 journal article assessing the two approaches is here, and it goes into more detail about the two policy approaches.

Last Thursday, Lasantha Wickramatunga, who was fifty-two years old and the editor of a Sri Lankan newspaper called the Sunday Leader, was assassinated on his way to work by two gunmen riding motorcycles. The Leader’s investigative reporting had been fiercely critical of the government and of the conduct of its war against Tamil separatists; Wickramatunga had been attacked before. He knew that he was likely to be murdered and so he wrote an essay with instructions that it be published only after his own death. Some mutual friends in the region sent a copy to me today. Read it in full below. It is like nothing else you will read today, that I promise.

A very brief bit of context: Sri Lanka’s government, drawing support from the island’s Sinhalese ethnic majority, has been at war since the nineteen-eighties with various militant separatist groups representing the country’s Tamil ethnic minority. In recent years, the war has narrowed to a contest between government troops and the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam, a group designated as a terrorist organization by the United States and others. The L.T.T.E. purports to speak for the aspirations of Tamil civilians, but it has conducted its campaign with child soldiers, suicide bombers, and other horrors. For its part, the Sri Lankan government has arranged for the disappearance and murder of uncounted numbers of Tamils, just as it “disappeared” and murdered thousands of its own Sinhalese citizens during an earlier period of counterinsurgency.

The country’s current president, Mahinda Rajapaksa, who is referred to in Wickramatunga’s essay, came to power emphasizing human rights and reform but has more recently pursued a military solution to his L.T.T.E. problem. Sri Lankan troops have lately marched deep into Tamil territory under a heavy veil of media censorship. Local journalists have been accused of disloyalty to the war, which has inspired or created a pretext for attacks against them and their offices. Wickramatunga believed that he would be killed, and the Sri Lankan government would be responsible for his murder.

According to media reports from Sri Lanka, the government has condemned Wickramatunga’s murder and ordered an investigation. Sri Lankan journalists and others today staged a silent march in Colombo, the capital, to protest his killing. Reporters Without Borders, a Paris-based group devoted to protecting journalists, issued a statement about Wickramatunga’s murder that said, “President Mahinda Rajapaksa, his associates and the government media are directly to blame because they incited hatred against him and allowed an outrageous level of impunity to develop as regards violence against the press.”

Here is his essay:

No other profession calls on its practitioners to lay down their lives for their art save the armed forces and, in Sri Lanka, journalism. In the course of the past few years, the independent media have increasingly come under attack. Electronic and print-media institutions have been burnt, bombed, sealed and coerced. Countless journalists have been harassed, threatened and killed. It has been my honor to belong to all those categories and now especially the last.

Sayed Hamed Gailani, who is the First Deputy Speaker of Afghanistan’s Senate, dropped by my office in Washington last Friday. He wore a plaid sport jacket and a tie. He is fifty-four-years-old, about five feet tall, and stocky. He sports a trimmed beard, but the impression he conveys, like many others in his prominent and international family, is of a man comfortable in the West. Hamed is the eldest son of Pir Sayed Ahmed Gailani, a spiritual leader of a Sufi order in Afghanistan who, during the anti-Soviet war of the nineteen-eighties, led the National Islamic Front of Afghanistan, one of the more liberal and pro-royal resistance groups. N.I.F.A. was one of the groups criticized during this period for being more effective in Congress than in the Afghan war. Ultimately, the Pakistan Army shunted them aside because they supported the centrist, exiled King of Afghanistan rather than the radical Islamist networks preferred by Pakistan’s intelligence agency.

Hamed Gailani wanted to talk, last week, because a presidential election is scheduled in Afghanistan late next year; just about every politician in the country seems to be maneuvering in advance of the campaign. President Hamid Karzai has said he intends to run for a second five-year term but there is a widespread sense that his position in the country, and as a client of the United States, is weakening; the effect of this perception has been to stimulate a sort of circling of political carrion birds. From week to week there are new rumors about who might decide to challenge Karzai; the Kabul “mentioner” has put into play Gailani’s father, a brother of the late Tajik guerrilla leader Ahmed Shah Massoud, the former finance minister Ashraf Ghani, and several others—even Zalmay Khalilzad, outgoing U.S. Ambassador to the United Nations (who has said he will not run). From my own less-than-purposeful rounds of the American national-security bureaucracy, I have the clear impression that there are at least some people working on Afghanistan from inside the U.S. government who would like to see a plausible opponent to Karzai emerge, but at the same time, that there is no sense of where such a candidate might come from, and little desire to force the issue. After all, down the path of electoral manipulation lies “The Man Who Would Be King”—and you will remember how that one ended.

Gailani had come to the United States on a private visit and had sought out meetings with State Department, U.S. A.I.D., and Pentagon officials before swinging around to my think-tank office. (He had hoped to meet some people involved with the Obama Administration’s transition team, but was unable to do so, he said.) It seemed clear that Hamed was hoping to stir interest in his father as a potential presidential candidate. Pir Gailani, as his father is known, is an ethnic Pashtun, like Karzai (and like the Taliban), and he is a religious figure with a popular following. However, he is also in his mid-seventies and has a reputation as a poor public speaker; some Afghan specialists I spoke to doubted he could be a serious contender for the presidency.

Nonetheless, Hamed Gailani had some interesting things to say about the political scene in Afghanistan.

On Karzai:

The president is losing ground, there is no doubt about it, whether in the senate or in the lower house. His graph of popularity is quite low. So I think it is with the common man….His chances are very very dim…. He’s not consulting anyone. He’s not sharing anything. He really doesn’t believe in collective participation. He thinks he’s Ahmed Shah Baba [an eighteenth-century king regarded as the father of modern Afghanistan] and that he’s going to keep it no matter what the cost.

On the proposal to dispatch thirty thousand additional American troops to Afghanistan:

A military surge for the sake of military surge serves no purpose. It is widening the ground of more confrontation and armed resistance and counterattacks. It’s not going to be confined to Taliban alone. That will lead to a purposeless war, a surging war…Your presence over there will just be for killing and being killed….The secret of success, and a continuous sustained presence of the United States of America is in a stable Afghanistan where the government has the confidence of the people and the people cooperate with that government.

On negotiating with the Taliban:

Mullah Omar will continue this fight. It doesn’t matter how I try to convince him. We tell him, “The West has no problem with you?” He says, “Pardon me? They don’t have a problem with me? If they don’t have a problem, why is my name on a list? Why is Guantanamo my minimum punishment?…The key to the Taliban’s pacification or channeling them into the political process is nowhere else in the world…but in Pakistan…The Pakistanis realize this fact that they can’t hold onto this situation for too long. Either they tame them or engage them or they will have to hand them over. The Taliban, they know it too. They are not very comfortable with Pakistanis.”

On Gulbuddin Hekmatyar, a former C.I.A. ally turned anti-American guerrilla leader, now loosely allied with the Taliban:

He says he’s tired of being in exile, living in exile….He is in Pakistan. He’s willing to come in….if there is a nationwide agenda.

On U.S. policy toward candidates who might consider a run against Karzai next year:

The signal as I have heard it directly from Ambassador Wood [in Kabul]—they favor the process, not one individual. That’s a sound argument to my mind. I’m going to encourage that.

Rex W. Tillerson, the chairman and chief executive of ExxonMobil Corp., delivered a speech in Washington yesterday endorsing a carbon tax of about twenty dollars per ton as a better way to address global warming than the principal alternative-policy idea, known as a cap-and-trade system, which has already been adopted in Europe. Many large corporations, accepting the political and policy environment signaled by the 2008 election results, are transiting from fundamental opposition to climate-change remediation policy toward a political-engineering phase in which the corporations will seek to influence policy details and mechanisms. For its part, ExxonMobil has come some distance from its earlier period of funding climate-change skeptics; its new proposal is credible, and puts a notable foot down on one side of a carbon-policy debate that has yet to reach resolution, and which is likely to become fluid later this year. Tillerson said that he had been “chewing” on this dichotomous policy question for three years, searching and failing to find a third alternative, and that he decided Exxon had to weigh in now to avoid risking irrelevancy when the Obama Administration and Congress begin negotiating later.

Last year, the Senate considered but defeated a cap-and-trade bill called Lieberman-Warner. The basic idea of a cap-and-trade system is to control carbon emissions by creating a regulated marketplace in which polluters can buy and sell emissions while adhering to aggregate caps. The case for this approach is that it offers an enforceable total-emissions target, achieved through a market mechanism whose flexibility might ease necessary changes in the industrial economy. The case against it is that it threatens to be complex to administer and is subject to abuses; there are also differing views about whether Europe’s experiment with cap-and-trade has worked well enough to warrant emulation. That Lieberman-Warner made the Senate floor and came within shouting distance of passing has encouraged some environmental groups to stay on this policy path.

All along, however, some economists who are concerned about global warming have advocated a broad carbon tax as an alternative to cap-and-trade. The case for a tax is that it may be a simpler and more durable policy, allowing big businesses and alternative-energy garage-innovators alike to adjust to a global-warming policy in a steady-state environment, motivated by price incentives, rather than regulatory incentives. A carbon tax has appeal for the same reason that a gas tax has appeal—if done properly, it would set a policy and price regime that would change behavior but not require a master’s degree to understand. Tillerson, for example, said Exxon prefers a carbon tax because its capital expenditures are made over decades, and he feared the cap-and-trade bureaucracy might become “a new Wall Street of energy” and whose year-to-year workings and evolution would be difficult to predict.

I have no well-developed view about this debate, and I certainly don’t know enough about what’s happened in Europe to offer an empirical analysis about its example. However, long before Exxon weighed in, I was inclined to think that a carbon tax would be preferable to the invention of a new government-regulated marketplace—replete with executive orders, commissioners, auditors, etc.—if a tax could achieve the same goals. This is a minority view among climate-change types, I understand, but it is not regarded as full-blown heresy.

The majority view, as I understand it, holds that a carbon tax would also be complex to administer—that it would also be subject to abuses—and that, anyway, the cap-and-trade experiment is under way in Europe and should not be abandoned. In any event, my impression has been that a carbon tax was regarded as politically unachievable in the Senate, in comparison to cap-and-trade. That was usually where the discussion stopped. It may be that Exxon et al, adjusting to the political contours of 2009, will start the discussion up again; policies they favor are almost by definition plausible politically. Obviously, Congress is not likely to raise taxes of any kind, or impose the costs of cap-and-trade, while the current economic crisis is in full bloom. But that is not really the question this spring—any politically plausible new carbon tax or regulatory regime would likely be set up to phase in only as the economy recovers. The issue, in the meantime, is what the shape of that regime should be.

The Center for Strategic and International Studies has published a new report, “FATA—A Most Dangerous Place,” about the Federally Administered Tribal Areas of Pakistan. Its principal author is Shuja Nawaz, the author of a richly detailed book on the Pakistan Army, “Crossed Swords,” and the brother of a distinguished former Pakistan Army chief. Nawaz enjoyed extensive access to the Pakistan Army while conducting his research for this report, including sessions with the current Army chief, Parvez Kiyani. The analysis and recommendations he brings forward reflect, to some extent, the Pakistan Army’s perspectives and priorities, and so they are useful both on their own merits but also as a source of insight into where the Army, a notably opaque institution, is coming from as it considers Pakistan’s interests and options in what is arguably the most important theatre of war, counterinsurgency, and counter-terrorism policy facing the incoming Obama Administration.

That would appear to be the sound of gears grinding on the smooth-gliding Obamamobile. Two process errors on the same day! The first one—failing to vet Bill Richardson properly—is forgivable. Nobody vets Richardson. Perhaps I should mention that when I was recently in Pakistan, Nawaz Sharif went out of his way to cite him to me as his favorite American politician. Anyway, with a bodies-are-buried godfather of political soul like the governor of New Mexico, you appoint him and hope that he is experienced and mature enough by now to self-police. That’s essentially what Richardson did here, by pulling out of the Commerce Department post—a grand-jury investigation into political favors-trading by his office boiled hotter than he had anticipated, so he took himself out before he could do himself or the President-elect any harm. Embarrassing, perhaps, but not a big deal. The Obama team’s second process error, however—failing to consult Diane Feinstein, the incoming chair of the Senate Intelligence Committee—about a decision to appoint an inexperienced fellow California pol, Leon Panetta, to head the C.I.A., well, that’s a gangly unforced error. Heads need not roll, perhaps, but one or two ought to be bowed in humility.

As to the Panetta appointment itself, it is unconvincing. The C.I.A. directorship is a diminished post, no longer in charge of the full intelligence community and subordinate to the Director of National Intelligence (who will apparently be Dennis Blair, a retired admiral.) Still, the C.I.A. director has four important jobs: manage the White House relationship; manage Congress, particularly to obtain budgetary favor; manage the agency’s workforce and daily operations; and manage liaisons with other spy chiefs, friendly and unfriendly. Panetta is thoroughly qualified for the first two functions but unqualified for the latter two. He seems to have been selected as a kind of political auditor and consensus builder. He will make sure the White House is protected from surprises or risks emanating from C.I.A. operations; he will ensure that interrogation and detention practices change, and that the Democratic Congress is satisfied by those changes; he will ensure that all of this occurs with a minimum of disruptive bloodletting. All good, but it is not enough. The essential problem is that Panetta is a man of Washington, not a man of the world. He’s seventy-years-old, spends his time on his California farm, and he’s been out of the deal flow, as they say on Wall Street, for about a decade; he knows California budget policy like the back of his hand, but what intuition or insight does he bring to the most dangerous territories in American foreign policy—Anbar Province, the Logar Valley, the Federally Administered Tribal Areas? Compared to his counterparts in Pakistan, Jordan, Israel, Britain, etc.—the critical relationships in national security that the C.I.A. Director alone can manage—he is a relative novice not only about intelligence operations but also about the foreign-policy contexts in which they occur. The country needs a better clandestine service. The C.I.A. has taken in an unusually talented pool of young case officers who volunteered after September 11th—probably as good a young talent pool as the government has had since the nineteen-sixties. But the agency they signed up for has been battered around and led by revolving door. Panetta may make the White House feel more secure about unfinished bureaucratic and operational reforms at Langley, but he is unqualified to forge the next-generation spy service that a country with as many enemies as this one has needs and deserves.

Sherle Schwenninger sets the stimulus debate in a broad and convincing context and replies to the unrelenting Japan analogy-mongers. He favors ambition.

One last note from Pakistan for now. After Mumbai, there is much skepticism in India and in sections of the American government about whether Pakistan will truly crack down on Kashmir-focussed terrorist groups such as Lashkar e Taiba and Jaish-i-Mohammed and their leaders, or whether, as in the past, the Army and its intelligence arm, Inter-Services Intelligence or I.S.I., will undertake a series of temporary detentions and light prosecutions, only to release those detained after a few months. This historical pattern is now referred to sardonically in India as a “catch and release” approach to terrorism. So it was striking to see that phrase used as the headline on a very sharp piece of investigative reporting in the Herald, one of Pakistan’s leading news magazines.

The writer, Massoud Ansari, opens his account with the case of Khalid Fauji, an aide to Amjad Farooqi, who organized two assassination attempts against former President Pervez Musharraf in late 2003, and who has also been accused of involvement in the kidnapping and murder of Daniel Pearl. Ansari reports:

Fauji…was picked up in 2004 when the police and the intelligence agencies launched a joint operation to capture Farooqi from Nawabshah, which ended in the latter’s death. Fauji, the Herald has learnt, was kept in a safe house and interrogated without being charged for nearly one year after being captured. On October 8, 2005, Tariq Jamil, then city police chief of Karachi announced his arrest in a press conference, claiming that the militant had just been picked up from a hotel.

This is typical I.S.I. tradecraft, unfortunately—hold a suspect in secret for a prolonged period, then dump him into the Pakistani court system as if the suspect had just been identified. Here is the Pakistani version of America’s secret-prisons problem. The Army and I.S.I. run their ambiguous campaigns against militants entirely out of sight, and with no judicial accountability. At the same time the country supports a parallel, open policing and judicial system with judges and lawyers who, while too often corrupt and venal, nonetheless value their independence. During the last several years, the independence of the judicial system has become a national cause championed by a lawyers’ movement. When I.S.I. does decide to dump a terrorist into the open-court system, the evidence it can offer of the suspect’s confessions is not likely to withstand the scrutiny of the country’s British-inspired, liberal-minded or at least defiant and ornery lawyers and judges.

In this case, Ansari continues,

All that Fauji was eventually charged with was possession of arms and explosives…He was tried but released within two years: none of the charges were proved since the weak evidence against him did not meet the standards of the higher courts. Fauji, however, is not an isolated case. In fact, several militants who had been arrested for their alleged implication in high-profile terrorist acts across the country have been released. A list prepared by the Crime Investigation Department (CID) reveals that from Sindh alone nearly 121 high-profile terrorists were released from 2002 to 2007. In each case, the prosecution’s case was not strong enough. According to the list, those released include 40 men from Sipah-e-Sahabah [a vicious anti-Shia group with ties to Al Qaeda], 19 from Lashkar-e-Jhangvi, 21 from Harkatul Mujaheddin, 15 from Jaish-e-Mohammed…and one Taliban….Many of these militants have fallen off the radar of security agencies.

Ansari’s reporting describes an essential source of failure in Pakistan’s counterterrorism and counterinsurgency campaigns: even where there is the will, there is often not a way.

Pakistan’s capacity to break this pattern will be tested in the Mumbai case. I.S.I. is now holding and interrogating several suspects in the attack who will likely be prosecuted under Pakistani law, sooner rather than later, as a centerpiece of Pakistan’s efforts to convince India and the United States that it is taking serious action against those responsible for the deaths of Indian and American citizens in that raid. Once these indictments reach Pakistani courts, they will surely be tested and scrutinized by defense lawyers whose ranks today are in a broad state of politicized opposition to the Pakistani security establishment. This scrutiny will unfold, too, in a general atmosphere of deep anti-Americanism in Pakistan, and no particular mood of love for India; any Mumbai prosecution will be seen in some quarters here as a product of Indian and American coercion.

To seek justice for the Americans killed in Mumbai, the F.B.I. and the Justice Department will almost certainly come forward with indictments in U.S. federal court, so that the U.S. government can pursue the Mumbai shooters and organizers if Pakistan’s court system catches and releases once again.

Pakistan is shrouded in fog and out of gas. The metaphors are tempting but I mean this literally. This is the time of year when cold dense fogs descend on northern India and eastern Pakistan. They have a wonderful quality about them - wet, billowy, pervasive, chilling. They’re fogs of the sort you imagine gripped Edwardian London - they smell of smoke and factory pollutants. Perhaps it would be unhealthy to revel in them for years on end, but surely a few days here and there can do no harm. The fogs are, however, highly disruptive for travelers. Airports in the region can close down for days at a time. Cancelled flights have ultimately forced me to drive all the way from Delhi to Islamabad, and now that I’m in Pakistan, I’ve had to stick to the Grand Trunk Road, because the modern motorway linking Lahore to Peshawar is also closed, due to the fog. I certainly don’t mind - the G.T. Road is endlessly entertaining. The trouble, however, is finding a way to move along it. In Pakistan this week, each day brings a new scavenger hunt for fuel. In the Punjab, at least, there are widespread shortages of both petrol and natural gas. (Pakistan has undertaken a campaign to convert cars to natural gas and has installed an impressive national system of roadside fueling stations selling natural gas, which is less polluting and produces less carbon dioxide than gasoline - it would be impressive, that is, if supplies were consistently available.) It’s hard to get a reliable fix on why the shortages this week are occurring. There are the official explanations, which involve macroeconomic conditions and infrastructure problems, and then there is the word on the street, which emphasizes the effects of criminal hoarding rackets tied to government-mandated price policies. In Pakistan there are usually five explanations for every problem, and five problems for every explanation.

The view from my car window this morning:

When I arrived in Pakistan yesterday, I grabbed some national newspapers and opened up Dawn, an English-language daily. The lead front-page story reported on a suicide bombing that had killed three dozen people at a polling station in the west of the country. By habit, I turned inside to the pages with more granular, national news. On page 3 I found the following headlines:

I turned to page 4:

On to page 5, then:

Surely an adorable zoo animal gave birth somewhere, people.