Between books

Cutting down poppies in Afghanistan

After finishing the exhaustive biography of Mickey Mantle late last month, I decided to take a break and catch up with a few magazines. I'm glad I did. Here are a few highlights:

-- "The Opium Wars." From National Geographic Magazine's February 2011 issue, an on-the-ground account of U.S. efforts to wean Afghan farmers off growing opium poppies. Robert Draper explains how America's national security interests are tied to this strategy:

The grim axiom defining today's Afghanistan, 85 percent of whose citizens are farmers, is that its economy relies on two dueling revenue streams. One flows from Western aid, in the hopes that the country will renounce the Taliban. The other flows from opium trafficking supported by the Taliban, which use the proceeds to fund attacks on Western troops. Only recently has the Afghan government seemed to take stock of the obvious: For the outside world's largesse to continue, the national economy's addiction to opium must end. The poppy fields must be destroyed. But just as this devoutly Muslim nation did not become the world's leading opium supplier overnight, uprooting Afghanistan's poppy mind-set promises to be a complicated endeavor.

Gov. Nikki Haley

-- "The Comet: Gov. Nikki Haley of South Carolina." From the March 6 issue of The New York Times Sunday Magazine. This Q&A interview with the Palmetto State's new Republican governor -- a daughter of wealthy Sikh immigrants who's converted to Christianity -- reveals her to be plain-spoken and just a touch competitive.

Q. You’re said to be incredibly competitive. Outside politics, how does this manifest itself?
A. Ask my kids. When we have basketball tournaments, I am the basketball queen. When we play the Wii, I am the bowling queen. And I will forever say that I am the Putt-Putt queen.

Q. How do you react when you lose?
A. I don’t lose, so I don’t have to worry about that.

--  "How Chris Christie Did His Homework." From the Feb. 27 edition of the NY Times Sunday Magazine. Yes, a piece on another Republican governor. But whereas Haley has been in office only since January, Christie already has established himself as a GOP star just two years after winning election in New Jersey. He professes to have no interest in running for president in 2012 but if the Republicans win their war on public employee unions, it will be Christie -- not Wisconsin's Scott Walker -- who gets the credit for being first to draw a line in the sand.

Gov. Chris Christie

As Matt Bai reports:

Some critics have posited that Christie’s success in office represents merely the triumph of self-certainty over complexity, the yearning among voters for leaders who talk bluntly and with conviction. Yet it’s hard to see Christie getting so much traction if he were out there castigating, say, immigrants or Wall Street bankers.

What makes Christie compelling to so many people isn’t simply plain talk or swagger, but also the fact that he has found the ideal adversary for this moment of economic vertigo. Ronald Reagan had his “welfare queens,” Rudy Giuliani had his criminals and “squeegee men,” and now Chris Christie has his sprawling and powerful public-sector unions — teachers, cops and firefighters who Christie says are driving up local taxes beyond what the citizenry can afford, while also demanding the kind of lifetime security that most private-sector workers have already lost.

It may just be that Christie has stumbled onto the public-policy issue of our time, which is how to bring the exploding costs of the public workforce in line with reality.

Looking forward to starting a novel when we go on vacation this week. In the meantime, wanted to recommend the Haley Q&A as a quick read and the other two pieces as well worth their time, given the in-depth reporting and incisive analysis each one offers.

Photo gallery of poppies by David Guttenfelder for National Geographic

Photo of Nikki Haley by Matthias Clamer for The New York Times

Photo of Chris Christie by Mark Peterson for The New York Times