Philadelphia.

In his thorough history of 9/11 The Looming Towers, Lawrence Wright makes a pretty persuasive case that Osama bin Laden’s goal in planning out terrorist attacks throughout the 1990s was to suck the U.S. into a Soviet-style war in Afghanistan. Bin Laden had no delusions about turning the U.S. into a Muslim country. Instead, he wanted to pull America into an expensive, dispiriting, unwinnable war—the sort of war nearly every power that has invaded Afghanistan has had to extract itself from, tail between legs. Wright writes that bin Laden was initially dispirited at the ease with which U.S. forces removed the Taliban from power.

Of course, we then let bin Laden escape. And then came Iraq. We’ve since given bin Laden more than he ever could have thought possible, and more. Two protracted wars. And our war in Afghanistan is looking more and more like the Soviet war bin Laden was hoping to emulate.

We’re now well into our ninth year in Afghanistan. The Soviets pulled out after 10. With Obama’s surge, we’ll be close to 100,000 U.S. troops in the country next year. That’s about the number the Soviets had deployed at the height of their own war. About the only difference between the two wars is that technology has shifted more of our war casualties from the killed column to the maimed. I guess that’s something.

Here’s a question for the politicians who support Obama’s plan, as well as those to the right of him who think it isn’t warmongery enough: What exactly does “victory” in Afghanistan look like? Certainly no one in his right mind thinks the country is going to look like, say, Iowa in 20 years. Same for Iraq. Are we expending what in the end will be a few trillion dollars and likely the lives of 6,ooo-7,000 troops to create another . . . Saudi Arabia? Another Egypt?

We do  have a pretty good idea how bin Laden pictured victory. It looks a lot like what we’re seeing now. He wanted a holy war. We gave him two. We’ve compromised our values, rolled back civil liberties, and let our politicians generally scare the crap out of us whenever they want new powers. Oh, and we’ve let the bastard live to gloat about it all.

This war should have been over the moment we disposed of the Taliban. The military doesn’t build liberal societies. They destroy illiberal ones (and they do it very well). I’ll wager we have at least 50,000 troops in both Iraq and Afghanistan by the end of Obama’s first term. In fact, I’ll bet it’s closer to 75,000. Lovely that this was the anti-war candidate.

There’s no easy way out of either of these wars.

Which is a pretty damned good reason to excercise more discretion about when to get into them.

Last month, Purdue University student Roy Sun was arrested and charged with “terroristic mischief.” He could face up to eight years in prison. His crime? He got a little too pissed off about a parking ticket.

Sun got the ticket and had a boot put on his car after local parking officials discovered he was using a permit that didn’t belong to him. So Sun removed the boot, put it in a box with $20 (the amount of the fine) and the ticket, and put the box in the school’s Visitor’s Center, which also happens to be where students go to pay parking fines.

The school evacuated the center after finding the unattended box, then came to arrest Sun.

According to a local TV station…

Police said terroristic mischief is when a person knowingly or intentionally places a device with the intent to cause a reasonable person to believe that it is a weapon of mass destruction.

Sun’s probably guilty of being a bit too cute, here. But terrorism? Given that he left a parking ticket that included his name and address in the box, it seems unlikely that he intended the package to be mistaken for a dirty bomb.

Buenos Aires.

I think I’m going to start keeping a running tally of how many blogs, commenters (on this site), and Twitterers out me as a secret Republican shill versus how many out me as a secret Democrat shill.

Anyone want to lay odds on which side wins?

As I wrote in a previous post, yesterday was the deadline by which Maricopa County Superior Court Judge Gary Donahoe gave Dep. Adam Stoddard to apologize for swiping documents from a defense attorney’s file in open court last month. In response, Maricopa County Sheriff Joe Arpaio vowed that Stoddard will not apologize.

Sure enough, last night Stoddard called a press conference to announce that he wouldn’t be apologizing to anyone. Here’s the video:

Freelance journalist Nick Martin was there:

Before Stoddard walked off in defiance of his court-ordered deadline, Craig Mehrens, a veteran Phoenix attorney who has agreed to represent Cuccia in the case, called out to him through the crowd: “See you in jail.”

Stoddard’s lawyer, deputy county attorney Tom Liddy, stepped in to try to answer reporters’ questions. But the heckling by Mehrens continued.

Mehrens insisted several times that the detention officer had not written the prepared statement himself, implying that Stoddard was little more than a yes man for his boss, Sheriff Joe Arpaio.

I still think Donahoe was wrong (and possibly exceeded his authority) to order Stoddard to apologize. He should have just held him in contempt from the get-go. Now the county may be on the verge of a constitutional crisis. That’s bad for Donahoe, whose court now faces a crisis of legitimacy if he can’t find a police agency to carry out his order. But it’s entertaining as hell for the rest of us.

In refusing to dismiss a lawsuit against New York City brought by two brothers arrested on trumped-up drug charges, Brooklyn Federal Judge Jack Weinstein had some harsh words for the city’s police department. From the NY Daily News:

“Informal inquiry by [myself] and among the judges of this court, as well as knowledge of cases in other federal and state courts … has revealed anecdotal evidence of repeated, widespread falsification by arresting officers of the New York City Police Department,” Weinstein wrote.

He said that while the vast majority of cops don’t engage in crooked practices, it was common enough to be an institutional problem.

The judge said that despite better training for recruits and tough disciplinary action for bad cops, “there is some evidence of an attitude among officers that is sufficiently widespread to constitute a custom or policy by the city approving illegal conduct.”

Maximo and Jose Colon were arrested and jailed last January for participating in a drug deal with undercover officers at a Brooklyn bar. They were released—and the officers who arrested them were later indicted—when surveillance video showed the arresting officers fabricated the entire drug deal. From an A.P. story on the case last June:

Jose quickly got the tape to defense attorney Rochelle Berliner, a former narcotics prosecutor. She couldn’t believe what she was seeing.

“I almost threw up,” she said. “Because I must’ve prosecuted 1,500, 2,000 drug cases … and all felonies. And I think back, Oh my God, I believed everything everyone told me. Maybe a handful of times did something not sound right to me. I don’t mean to sound overly dramatic but I was like, sick.”

What the tape doesn’t show is striking: At no point did the brothers interact with the undercover officers, nor did the brothers appear to be involved in a drug deal with anyone else. Adding insult to injury, an outside camera taped the undercover officers literally dancing down the street.

If it weren’t the tape, the Colons would probably still be in prison.

The Colons’ lawsuit argues the incident is one of many, brought about in part by arrest quotas imposed on officers by the NYPD.

Indiana.