Afghan Promise

Dr. Abdullah Abdullah, Afghanistan's foreign minister, is one of his troubled homeland's brightest lights. A medical doctor by training, he joined Ahmad Shah Massoud's mujahedin fighters against both the Soviets and the Taliban. As the Taliban pushed back Massoud's Northern Alliance in the 1990s,Abdullah emerged as one of the coalition's most important spokesmen and was among Massoud's closest advisers. 

Before September 11 he was doomed to play Cassandra, wandering the world's capitals to warn mostly deaf ears of the dangers posed by the Taliban and al-Qaeda. During a recent visit to Washington he gave an exclusive interview to TAE senior editor Eli Lehrer and intern Ned Andrews.

TAE: There was a close correlation between the September 9 assassination of Ahmad Shah Massoud, leader of the Northern Alliance, and the September 11 attacks on the United States. Is there any hard evidence linking the two events?

ABDULLAH: The links between some of the assassins and al-Qaeda are well known. A few people have been arrested in connection with it, and the investigations are continuing.

TAE: What is Afghanistan's view of the escalating violence in Israel?

ABDULLAH: There is a conflict there that has deep roots. That conflict has to be solved through peaceful means: Israel has the right to a state and its security, and the rights of Palestinians to a state and security must be protected as well. That's how the conflict could be resolved. Having been involved in a conflict for so many years in Afghanistan, I am confident that unless the root causes of the conflict are addressed, other methods will not work.

TAE: Do you believe that Osama bin Laden and Taliban leader Mullah Omar Mohammad are still alive?

ABDULLAH: I do. As long as they are alive they can hide, but if they are dead, they cannot. Their deaths would be news that would spread anyway. Nobody could hide it.

TAE: Many of the Gulf states supported the Taliban either directly or passively. Are these countries that Afghanistan will be able to work with now?

ABDULLAH: We have started a new phase of relations with all countries. What we need in Afghanistan is stability and help with our efforts to rebuild the country. Al-Qaeda was an overwhelming force; when it allied with the Taliban, it was like a blackmailer against some countries.

TAE: What impact do you think Vice President Abdul Qadir's assassination will have on the current government? Do you fear for your safety as a result of it?

ABDULLAH: It's an incident, which has taken place in a country where 700,000 people are armed. Al Qaeda is not gone: Its members are close by, if not inside the country. Events like that cannot be prevented altogether. It shouldn't preoccupy us.

I am not worried; I have survived so many things. We have to forget about it, and build the nation.

I am struck when people say: "Qadir's death was a big loss for the Pashtun." No, it's a big loss for Afghanistan. He was a Pashtun who voted for a non-Pashtun president. He wanted unity. He was a national figure.

TAE: What role do you envision for group identity in Afghanistan's future?

ABDULLAH: From time to time, foreigners have misused differences of language, ethnic group, and religious sect in Afghanistan. The Taliban were considered a Pashtun movement. They were not! They were a transnational movement associated with deadly terrorists.

What Afghanistan needs is a national identity. This is not a problem among the grassroots of the nation. There, wisdom prevails. Where it is lacking is among the intellectuals, among the professors in the universities, who are just fueling this problem all the time.

President Hamid Karzai was elected by something like 1,300 votes out of 1,600.Were all of those 1,300 votes from people who were ethnically Pashtun like President Karzai himself? No. They were from all ethnic groups. This shows the understanding that exists among the Afghan people.

The Purpose of Freedom

Excerpted from remarks by President George W. Bush at the Ohio State University commencement:

Some needs government cannot fulfill, like the need for kindness, and for understanding, and for love. A person in crisis often needs more than a program or a check; he needs a friend--and that friend can be you. We are commanded by God and called by our conscience to love others as we want to be loved ourselves....

Service is important in your own life, in your own character. No one can tell you how to live or what cause to serve. But everyone needs some cause larger than his or her own profit. Apathy has no adventures. Cynicism leaves no monuments. And a person who is not responsible for others is a person who is truly alone. By sharing the pain of a friend, or bearing the hopes of a child, or defending the liberty of your fellow citizens, you will gain satisfaction that cannot be gained in any other way. Service is not a chain or a chore--it gives purpose to your freedom....

We serve others because we're Americans, and we want to do something for the country we love. Our nation is the greatest force for good in history--and we show our gratitude by doing our duty.... Each of us has a bond with every other American. Patriotism is proven in our concern for others--a willingness to sacrifice for people we may never have met or seen. Patriotism is our obligation to those who have gone before us, to those who will follow us, and to those who have died for us.

In March of this year, Army Ranger Marc Anderson died in Afghanistan, trying to rescue a Navy SEAL. Marc and five others gave their lives in fulfilling the Ranger creed: "I will never leave a fallen comrade to fall into the hands of the enemy."

Marc, from Westerville, Ohio, was a remarkable man. Instead of pursuing a career that might have made him wealthy, Marc decided to be a math teacher in a high school in a tough neighborhood. He was a mentor, a tutor, and the best teacher many students ever had.

After September 11, Marc joined the fight against terrorism. "I'm trained and I'm ready," he wrote to his friends. Before Marc left for Afghanistan, he arranged for part of his life insurance to pay for one of his former students to attend college. Today, that student--Jennifer Massing--plans to go to the University of Florida to study architecture.

Marc Anderson considered this country great enough to die for....America needs men and women who respond to the call of duty, who stand up for the weak, who speak up for their beliefs, who sacrifice for a greater good. America needs your energy, and your leadership, and your ambition. And through the gathering momentum of millions of acts of kindness and decency, we will change America one soul at a time.

Sugarcoating Poison

Millions of decent Americans are forced today to wage a continual battle to preserve the innocence of their children--particularly in sexual matters--against a rising tide of corrupting influences in the media, public schools, and the culture at large. Some trusting parents assume that no one would promote truly deviant actions. Certain things just seem so unthinkable and unspeakable that people lose vigilance in opposing activists who are quite ready to think, speak, and do precisely the unthinkable. 

Hence the perverse service that Joycelyn Elders has performed by contributing a preface to a new book by Judith Levine called Harmful To Minors, which is all about "The Perils of Protecting Children From Sex." This book explicitly advocates the view that sexual activity among young people is a good thing, and that sex between adults and children isn't necessarily bad. Dr. Elders, Bill Clinton's surgeon general, has contributed an aura of "educational" legitimacy to sugarcoat this very real poison.

What is the appropriate response to such arguments? We must unconditionally reject them--with outrage against those who have already been acting on the Levine doctrine. The sexual "liberation" of children represents a failure to teach the hearts, minds, and consciences of children that their sexuality is rooted in the moral possibilities of human life--the relationships, responsibilities, and commitments that are the keys to genuine happiness.

The Planned Parenthood "sex education" mantra assumes there is a body of factual knowledge that, once acquired by 13-year-olds,will allow them to take responsible sexual actions. But what sexual responsibility really requires is formation of character. It requires the ability to forego present gratification for future goods. It requires an appreciation of the importance of honor, decency, and family obligation. The knowledge that produces humane sexual choices comes from moral experience that is simply not available to the young. 

Moral character grows out of individual struggle with powerful passions during the years of maturation. The idea that young children can just be "informed" about body mechanics and then deftly manage sexual practices is absurd. Whatever the "liberationists" may claim, what invariably occurs whenever children become sexually involved is exploitation.

Children must make the connection between the discipline and the love that binds all healthy families. They must learn what it truly means to be a mother or a father. At that point their attention starts naturally to focus on assuming those roles for themselves.

Then--and only then--as their moral character solidifies toward adulthood, can they fruitfully discover the mysteries of marital love.

—Alan Keyes is a national political commentator.

Stick with Stocks

The U.S. stock market has wobbled through this summer with some heart-stopping swings, scaring many investors in other directions. They are making a mistake. Under any sensible analysis of return and risk, a diversified portfolio of shares in good businesses remains the best long-term investment.

Ibbotson Associates, the Chicago research firm, found that from 1926 to 2001, the average annual return, after inflation, of the stocks in the Standard & Poor's 500 was 7.6 percent. This compares with just 2.2 percent for Treasury bonds. In other words, stocks return more than three times as much as bonds. Thanks to compounding, after 30 years, an investment of $10,000 in stocks will rise, on average, to more than $90,000, while a similar investment in bonds will rise to less than $20,000.

Higher returns are normally correlated with higher risk, but Jeremy Siegel of the Wharton School and others have found that if stocks are held over long periods, risk declines dramatically. Mr. Siegel looked at nearly 200 years, and found that during their worst 20-year period ever, stocks rose more than 20 percent. But for bonds, the worst 20 years produced a loss of 60 percent. Mr. Siegel concluded that "the safest long-term investment for the preservation of purchasing power has clearly been stocks, not bonds."

How can bonds be risky? Nearly all bonds are exposed to inflation, which erodes principal. Businesses can respond by raising prices, so stocks increase their earnings fairly consistently from year to year. Sure, there will be recessions and bad profit news from time to time. But in the end, the growing economy will pull firms' profits, and share prices, upward again.

On August 13, 1982, the Dow closed at 777. Even today, after the second-worst bear market of the post-World War II era, it has risen 11-fold without counting dividends. For the 20 years ending on December 31, 2001, large-cap stocks returned an annual average of 15.2 percent. These valuations are a rational response to the truth about stocks--that they provide high returns at risk levels about equal to bonds.

If stocks are no more risky than bonds, yet return much more than bonds over the long-term, who do many people avoid stocks? A 1997 paper by Mr. Siegel and Richard Thaler of the University of Chicago blamed "myopic risk aversion." In other words, investors are so frightened of short-term losses in the stock market that they can't see beyond their noses.

We believe this irrational risk aversion to stocks has begun to decline, thanks mainly to the improving financial education of the American public and the rise of defined-contribution retirement plans such as 401(k)s. The United States has been through a lot in the last three years: the impeachment of a President, a disputed election for the first time in a century, the first attack on the U.S. mainland since the War of 1812, the first recession in ten years, corporate scandals, and a political response that could harm the business climate. Yet price-earnings ratios remain higher than historic averages. We take this as evidence of a growing understanding among Americans of the long-term superiority of stocks as wealth-building tools.

But not everyone is showing good sense. The debunked strategy of market timing, for instance, is enjoying a revival. A leading and currently celebrated proponent is Robert Schiller, the economist whose model called for a 38 percent decline in 1996 with the Dow in the 5000s. Six years later, the market is up 67 percent, not down.

Unfortunately, some politicians, journalists, and financiers have a vested interest in spreading fear and chasing people out of stocks. Don't listen. Stock investing remains by far the most reliable route to accumulating wealth in America.

—TAE contributing writers James Glassman and Kevin Hassett are authors of Dow 36,000.

Chinese-Americans Learn the Victim Game

The Committee of 100, an organization composed of prominent Chinese-Americans like cellist Yo-Yo Ma and architect I. M. Pei, has recently been busy apologizing for the communist regime in China. In July, the Committee wagged its finger at the U.S.-China Security Review Commission for reporting that the current Chinese government poses a grave challenge to U.S. national security interests. 

According to the Congressionally appointed commission, Beijing supplies rogue states like Iraq, Iran, Libya, and North Korea with weapons of mass destruction; builds up its military in preparation for a takeover of democratic Taiwan; attempts to steal technology through Chinese nationals studying and working in the U.S.; undercuts the U.S. min international parlays; and brainwashes Chinese citizens with anti-Americanism to the point where many Chinese gloated over September 11.

Rather than condemning China for these abuses, the Committee of 100 denounced the Security Review Commission for engaging in "ethnic stereotyping." The loyalty of all Chinese-Americans has been questioned by the commission, they squealed.

The Committee has quite a history of being outraged. When Congress investigated the mid-1990s attempts of the Chinese government to infiltrate American politics through illegal campaign contributions, the Committee cried racism. When National Review portrayed the Clintons and Al Gore in Manchurian garb in a caricature, the magazine was accused of racism by Asian groups, complete with street protests and television appearances. TAE's own cover for July/August 1998--a photo of a scowling Chinese man--inspired similar howls.

With this latest posturing, the Committee of 100 has shown itself to be just another peddler of ethnic victimization, a group utterly unprepared to tell the painful truth about contemporary China. If they were truly committed to the interests of Chinese-Americans, they would start by channeling some of their abundant outrage against China's oppressive government.

—Ying Ma is a student at Stanford University Law School.

Gun Bans Don't Cut Crime

Guns are used defensively about 2 million times each year in the U.S., according to national surveys. Physically weaker victims (women and the elderly) and those most likely to be victims of crime (particularly the poor and blacks) benefit the most from owning a firearm.

Too often, gun laws that purport to make life safer actually do the opposite, because the rules are obeyed by law-abiding citizens, not by would-be criminals--which only makes committing crime easier. One would never know it from reading the news, but not a single academic study has shown that the federal Brady Law, state waiting periods, background checks, assault-weapons bans, one-gun-a-month rules, or safe storage laws significantly reduce violent crime. Some research even finds that these regulations increase crime.

Advocates of "reasonable" gun laws need only look at Europe to see what the future holds. Europe has everything American gun-control proponents favor, but the three worst public shootings in the past year all occurred in Europe. Each took place in a so-called gun-free "safe zone." With violent crime on the rise, even draconian gun laws have not impeded European criminals' access to guns; only law-abiding citizens are kept unarmed.

Around the world, from Australia to England, countries that have strengthened gun-control laws with the promise of lowering crime have instead seen violent crime soar. In the four years after the U.K. banned handguns in 1996, gun crime rose by an astounding 40 percent. Since Australia's 1996 laws outlawing most guns and making it a crime to use a gun defensively, armed robberies rose by 51 percent, unarmed robberies by 37 percent, assaults by 24 percent, and kidnappings by 43 percent. While murders fell by 3 percent, manslaughter rose by 16 percent.

Gun control may sound reasonable, but the hard fact is this: The countries with the highest crime rates today ban guns.

—John Lott, Jr., is a resident scholar at AEI.

Thank You, Lawyers

Three of the largest insurance companies that provide medical malpractice insurance in Florida have recently gone bankrupt or stopped writing policies. Those remaining are escalating rates to cover costs. Why? Because of runaway lawsuits that make health care evermore expensive and discourage innovative treatments.

Insurance companies now "feel it is cheaper and safer to settle malpractice cases out of court than to risk large jury awards.... This litigious feeding frenzy is fueled by the unceasing plaintiff attorney advertising," complains one doctor. The social penalties "are coming to all of us in higher health care premiums, car insurance, workers compensation fees, and homeowners insurance," he maintains.

The malpractice insurance premiums of this particular physician, a family practitioner, have risen in recent years from $2,400 to $10,000 a month. Jeffrey Keller, a gastroenterologist who is retiring at age 47, reports that soaring insurance premiums are "a very significant factor" in his decision. Meanwhile, most of the dollars won by trial lawyers in malpractice suits go not to patients but to the attorneys--59 percent according to one consulting firm.

Specialists "are afraid to try anything new and risky, even though it might be better for the patient," says one surgeon. Legal worries drive many doctors to prescribe medicines and order tests they believe are unnecessary, just to protect themselves from potential lawsuits by patients. "We are seeing a crisis," says Dr. Frank Farmer, president of the Florida Medical Association. "The number of awards and amounts are astronomical." 

In many states, the trial lawyers have seen to it that there is no cap on the amount of punitive and "pain and suffering" damages a softhearted jury may award a plaintiff. In the past eight years, the average jury award has tripled in medical malpractice cases. In product liability cases, it has quadrupled. That's why insurance companies try to settle out of court.

All this has encouraged frivolous suits. More than 80 percent of the claims against physicians handled by Florida's largest insurer now close without any compensation.

None of this is likely to improve until politicians put some limits on the powers of trial lawyers--perhaps the most potent lobby now operating in American elections.

—Tait Trussell is a TAE contributing writer.