Today!

At the gym this morning watching CNN I couldn't help but smile.  Seeing the excitement on the mall in DC just gives you a really good feeling.

The coverage is interesting.  Fortunately Maureen just came in and made me change the channel off of Good Morning America to NBC, and we got to see a really insightful interview of Colin Powell by Matt Lauer.  He asked about Afghanistan, specifically "What are we doing there? What is the mission?"  and quoted Joe Klein's latest thoughts on the Karzai government (not sure which article exactly, but some recent ones are here and here), basically asking what the game plan is now, years after the mission to capture or kill Osama Bin Laden began.

Powell's initial answer was that the mission was to make sure Afghanistan did not become a place in which Bin Laden could operate again, which is troubling in its open-endedness.  We should all be wary of even the broad idea of the US attempting to prop up a government just because we think it is better than the alternative.  Afghanistan is a pretty good example of how that can go wrong, and there will be a lot of work to do to figure out how to transition out of occupation.  It's a real mess, and props to Matt Lauer for keeping it in mind in his interview.