By Benjamin Hand

This past week, President Obama informed the American public that he intends to send a large number of new troops to reinforce our existing force in Afghanistan, a figure currently reported to be somewhere in the neighborhood of 30,000. This is fewer than the 40,000 that General McCrystal reportedly asked for, but more then the 10,000 that many early reports estimated that President Obama might send. Regardless of the political motivation behind why President Obama may have decided to send a substantial number of new troops to Afghanistan, the question that needs to be asked is- what exactly are we hoping to achieve in Afghanistan, and in what way does an increased troop level accomplish that goal?

This past week, President Obama, referring to his decision to increase troop levels in Afghanistan, said that he wanted to “finish the job” we started. It seems only natural to now ask what exactly that job was, and how exactly the President and his military and national security team plan to finish it. Throughout the course of the invasion and occupation, our given reason for being in Afghanistan has been a moving target. Post 9/11, it was framed as a national security issue. We were told that we had a valid imperative to invade because Afghanistan was a safe haven for Al-Qaeda, and disrupting that state of affairs was vital to the security of the United States. There was surely a great deal of truth to this claim, though the case could be made that using small elite units in combination with predator drones might have been a more effective means of capturing or killing high-ranking targets such as Osama Bin Laden or Ayman al-Zawahiri. However, as it has become clear that many of the high-ranking targets had slipped into Pakistan, including both Bin Laden and al-Zawahiri, the dialogue on Afghanistan has shifted away from counter-terrorism and towards nation building.

When it became apparent that there was no longer a substantial Al Qaeda presence in the country, new rhetoric was employed to justify our continued presence. We started to hear about the necessity of nation-building in the region, and we were told that the mission was to build a stable liberal state that would be capable of withstanding any attempt by the Taliban to retake power. It was argued by many in national security community that the Taliban had to be defeated and driven from power, because as long as they maintained influence in Afghanistan it meant that Al Qaeda would always be able to find a safe haven in the region. Again, this isn’t to say that there isn’t a substantial amount of truth to these claims. It seems clear that Al Qaeda was able to find a safe haven in Afghanistan under Taliban rule, and as of current reports it seems that they no longer have the ability to plan operations in Afghanistan.

But what does that mean for national security in the United States and the European Union? There have been several terrorist attacks in the European Union since the invasion, planned not in Afghanistan but within the countries where they took place. So global terrorist groups, including Al Qaeda, have not been deterred because they lack a safe haven in Afghanistan under the protection of the Taliban government.

It is now important to return to the question – what are we attempting to “finish” in Afghanistan? Is our goal to assure that Al Qaeda will no longer be able to find a safe haven in Afghanistan, and therefore decrease their ability to orchestrate attacks against the United States? If so, then it seems that such a goal could be accomplished with a small number of elite troops and predator drones to carry out strategic strikes against specific targets. It has been well documented that the United States had the ability to carry out strikes against Al Qaeda targets in Afghanistan before 9/11, but choose not to. If our stated goal is to build a stable, liberal state in Afghanistan, then we need to be honest about what that might mean, and why we are doing it. A liberal government would benefit the Afghan people, but forming such a government surely can’t be our only reason, for there are dozens of countries that could benefit just as much from economic assistance and state building. Are we ready as a country to spend 20-30 years and hundreds of billions of dollars in the region as peacekeepers and nation-builders? Perhaps the answer is yes, though I would argue that it is neither economically feasible nor politically possible. We should be clear about these points before more troops are deployed. When President Obama says that we need to finish what we started, he should be able to tell us what the end result will look like.

By Branden Adams

The 4.5-acre hole in Lower Allston might seem unusual to a Harvard student who wanders twenty minutes south of the Yard.  But to many American city-dwellers, urban calderas like the one at the site of the Allston Science Complex are increasingly common in the post-post-downturn landscape.

In downtown Boston, at the corner of Bromfield and Washington Streets, the Science Complex’s sister hole lies in rubble, the capital for its construction having vanished in the same economic recession that cancelled Harvard’s construction plans.  As a symbol of the worldwide recession, the urban caldera is not an anomaly; it has become characteristic of the landscape.

The Allston Science Complex hole, though, is a bit more difficult to classify.  Because of its relationship to a university as well as a city.  Because of this classificatory ambiguity ,many fail to appreciate the hole in all its literal as well as symbolic messiness.

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An understanding of the environment in which it formed will help to understand the Big Hole in Allston.  This environment is, first and foremost, an American environment, one replete with early Yankee suburbanization, early railroad industry, and brutalist 1960s architecture.

Lower Allston, like many places  on the outskirts of downtown Boston in the late seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, was first used as pastureland.  When the New England railroads began to grow in the nineteenth century, an abattoir was placed near the current Brighton Mills Shopping Center on Western Avenue.  The spot was perfect— it boasted easy access to the rail line from Boston to Worcester, so that the livestock could be brought in from nearby farms and unwanted or spoiled entrails could be drained to the nearby Charles River.  Combining Allston’s prime location with their own successful lobbying for the appropriate routing of transportation thoroughfares, Brighton businessmen of the 1830s cemented Allston’s place in the Boston geography as a sluice of dead animal detritus.

Fifty years ago, Lower Allston was the last hump yard on the Boston and Albany Railroad before the trains headed downtown. The wide rail yard and its environs, where cars were attached and sorted, became a prime spot for massive warehousing.  Such warehousing, in turn, became the new industrial shipping paradigm as urban space was rendered unsuitable for the type of industrial rail transport that preceded the current distribution center.  This use of the space, though, soon become obsolete, as the sorting and attaching of railcars came to be done further and further away from Boston.

But  the B&A left its trace.  In 1962, a route was proposed for the Massachusetts Turnpike, that was to run directly next to the Boston and Albany Line.  As a result of this route,   Lower Allston was cut off entirely from Allston Village, Brighton, and consequently, the rest of Boston by the super-highway Mass Pike.

Concurrently, an exemplar of horrific mid-century urban renewal–the Boston Redevelopment Authority–was formed in the early 1950s by Mayor John Hines.  The Authority was formed largely as a reaction to the anti-Yankee populist rhetoric of the Catholic Irish that had resulted in the Yankees leaving downtown Boston for Wellesley  and other suburbs. In the mid-fifties, in the BRA’s first major project, Hines and cronies took their cranes to the “blighted” West End of Boston.  Residents were displaced without provision of new homes, and a centuries-old working-class neighborhood was destroyed and replaced by the current high-rise condominiums.  This episode has become notorious around the Boston area, harming the BRA’s reputation significantly.

n the twentieth century, the Lower Allston neighborhood, cut off from surrounding neighborhoods by the Mass Pike, was left with a residual sense of placelessness, both in the minds of its residents and in the minds of the citizens of the rest of greater Boston.  By this time, the Lower Allston neighborhood had seen its last days as pastureland and had become a working-class community.

The BRA saw an opportunity for intervention.  They decided to give a similar treatment to Barry’s Corner (as Lower Allston is also called) as they had to the West End.  This time, though, residents of Lower Allston were aware of the West End fiasco.  As the BRA slowly managed to condemn houses and kick out residents, the remaining residents hoped desperately for redemption.

But those with the power won the struggle.  The last houses were condemned and destroyed despite protests from local students from Harvard and local residents.  This time, though, there was something different in the air.  The BRA, looking to repair its public image amid the multitude of criticisms coming from every direction, decided that it ought to build affordable housing on the spot of the demolished houses.

The result was the Charlesview Apartment complex (which, ironically, had no view of the Charles).  As has happened in so many other locations across the country ,the new apartments materialized, and residents’ resistance ran into a wall.  It was into this petrified maelstrom that Harvard ventured in the 1990s to buy a new campus.

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The community is, and has been for a long time, a working class community.  The light industry that Harvard has forced out of its recently acquired properties included the distinctively working class automobile repair shops, as well as retail spaces that were primarily of service to the working-class community.

It is important to remember that although the retail makeup of the neighborhood may be changing, the people who live there do not necessarily change with it.  If the Harvard plans are realized, all signs seem to point to a new upper-middle-class neighborhood that will be unaffordable to many of the current residents.

But the Harvard plans seem untenable at the moment.  When the Harvard endowment took an $11 billion dollar hit and all the liquefied assets that were being used to fund the Science Complex construction were shifted back across the river, the idea of the New Campus in Allston seemed to become little more than the pipe dream of a Lehmann executive.  But this pipe dream has left a big mark, something on the magnitude of the Arizona Meteor Crater.

When you visit Allston (as you ought), there is an oddity about the place.  The Science Complex hole is located directly between the Charlesview Apartment complex on one side and  single-family homes on the other.  The disjuncture is strartling.  Along Western Avenue, the Charlesview apartments continue their now seemingly endless stare-down with the malefactor of their demise across the street.  Beautiful renderings of the new middle-class patrons of Allston circulating about a magnificent Science Complex are plastered on the walls of the construction site.

Reality, though, tells a different story.  The November 24^th issue of The Crimson, which carried an article about the distribution of rat-proof trash receptacles in Allston, depicts the present state more accurately.  Instead of the window shoppers of the pipe dream, Allston now has rats.

By Andrew Bluebond

This piece originally appeared in Campus Progress.

This month’s execution of Washington-area sniper John Allen Muhammad prompted discussions about everything from death row inmates’ last meals to how varying religions feel about capital punishment, but there was little talk of the possibility that Virginia was executing an innocent person.

The case against Muhammad was strong. His accomplice testified against him, and unless the courts accepted his plea of insanity, then it was not very likely that he would have escaped with anything less than a conviction on all counts and the maximum sentence. Still, every time the state executes someone, it does so knowing full well it might be killing someone who didn’t commit a crime.

Recently, Showtime’s Dexter has begun slyly exploring this issue, parsing it in a way others don’t dare, and yielding some interesting lessons.

The series’ star is Dexter Morgan (Michael C. Hall), a Miami Police Department blood spatter analyst and serial killer. Dexter isn’t your typical mass murderer, though, in that he only kills people who have murdered or gravely wronged others and not been convicted—until now. (SPOILER ALERT!). For the first time in three and a half seasons, Dexter has mistakenly wrought his vengeance on an innocent.

When the murder takes place, the seeds of the victim’s possible innocence are sown as he begs for mercy. Dexter, as usual, remains unfazed; that is, until he returns to his office at the police station, where he discovers his colleagues have arrested the man who committed the crime for which he just killed. An immediate crisis of conscience ensues as the episode comes to close.

The next episode opens on Dexter still reflecting upon his latest kill. “So I made a mistake,” he says to himself. “It could have happened to anyone—well, any murderer.” He adds, “Not that murderers typically care whether their victims are innocent or not. Then why is it eating at me?” As Dexter’s latest kill gnaws at him internally, viewers notice something within themselves: they too feel uncomfortable.

When Dexter was just killing child molesters and murderers, viewers were not as troubled by the vigilantism. He may not have been their ideal bringer of justice, but as long as he was dispatching “bad” people, they could say, “He isn’t so terrible. In fact, he’s kind of good—those criminals had it coming.” On the other hand, if he’s killing innocents, then Dexter, once a strong moral compass, is no better than Jason or Freddy Krueger.

Execution touches people differently than war casualties or gang violence, because it’s right at home, and it could be us. We could end up like one of the Marietta Seven: sentenced to death based on the allegations of a woman who changed her story mid-testimony and later confessed to the crime (a murder) herself (she was so high at the time of the killing that she had to have her memory “refreshed” by a hypnotist).

That’s why it’s especially terrifying to think that the U.S. criminal justice system, the body charged with protecting the innocent from murders, could commit murder.. We want to believe that the appeals process is airtight, that no innocent person could ever be put to death in the United States. But, just as Dexter takes a risk every time he unsheathes his tools for another kill, America takes a risk with every prisoner it sends to the gas chamber or gallows (Washington and New Hampshire still allow hangings).

Since 1973, 139 people have been exonerated from death row in the United States. It would be somewhat comforting to believe that these were the only 139 innocent people to reach death row, but that isn’t likely. The state has probably already executed an innocent person, but it is difficult to know because appeals and investigations end when hearts stop. It may take a while, but it seems inevitable: One day, the state will find itself like Dexter–fully aware that it is has killed an innocent person with no way to undo what it has done.

Andrew Bluebond is a junior at Claremont McKenna College.