The leading presidential candidates in Afghanistan’s upcoming August 20 election are briefly profiled in a chart prepared by the DNI Open Source Center. See “Afghan Presidential Election: Potential Candidates and Powerbrokers” (pdf), May 4, 2009.
Further background on elections in the region may be found in “Middle East Elections 2009: Lebanon, Iran, Afghanistan, and Iraq” (pdf), Congressional Research Service, May 18, 2009. (Elections in Lebanon took place on June 7.)
No one will be surprised if we end up with a continuing resolution to push our shutdown deadline out past the midterms, so the real question is what else will they get done this summer?
Rebuilding public participation starts with something simple — treating the public not as a problem to manage, but as a source of ingenuity government cannot function without.
If the government wants a system of learning and adaptation that improves results in real time, it has to treat translation, utilization, and adaptation as core functions of governance rather than as afterthoughts.
Coordination among federal science agencies is essential to ensure government-wide alignment on R&D investment priorities. However, the federal R&D enterprise suffers from egregious siloization.