Alan Grayson, the former Democratic representative from Orlando who made national headlines for his pointed criticisms of the Republican Party, is running for Congress — somewhere.

Grayson, considered to be a firebrand for the left, garnered national attention during the charged federal health care reform debates in 2009. His most famous moment came when he proclaimed on the House floor that the GOP’s health care plan was for sick people to “die quickly.”

“The Republican health care plan [is]: Don’t get sick,” he said. “But, the Republicans have a back up plan in case you do get sick. … This is what the Republicans want you to do. If you get sick, America, the Republican health care plan is this: Die quickly!”

After his speech, Grayson made various appearances on cable news shows and was considered one of the few Democrats making as much noise as the GOP during the health care debates.

But the unpopularity of the health care debates and the waning popularity of the Democratic Party posed a significant threat to Grayson’s 2010 reelection, as well as other Democrats in the House. Grayson was voted out of office, along with a slew of other Democratic representatives, during the 2010 election. Dan Webster won Florida’s Eighth district with 56 percent of the vote that year. Grayson earned 38 percent.

Florida District Eight is situated in Central Florida and includes part of Orlando — a big metropolitan city that tends to vote Democratic. But the district also contains a long stretch that runs as far as north as Ocala and as far south as Celebration, picking up small towns that tend to vote for Republicans.

In 2008, Grayson won the seat with 52 percent of the vote. His opponent, Republican Ric Keller, was running for his fifth term. Obama carried the district that year, but President George W. Bush had won it in both 2000 and 2004.

Even though District Eight was Grayson’s last seat, Grayson isn’t sure he’ll be running for that same seat again.

Florida officials are currently gearing up to redraw congressional district lines next spring. Because of two successful ballot initiatives, the state Legislature does not have the ability to gerrymander districts when it meets, and many have predicted that this may provide a handful of more Democrat-friendly districts.

Central Florida, in particular, is likely to change more than most areas. According to new Census data, the population in Central Florida counties (Orange, Osceola, Seminole, Lake and Volusia) increased by 541,000 residents from 2000 to 2010. Orange County, specifically, grew by 28 percent. It is very likely the area will gain a new congressional seat.

As of now, there is no telling which district might be best suited for Grayson’s comeback attempt. In Florida, congressmen and congresswomen do not need to reside in the district they wish to represent.

Todd Jurkowski, Grayson’s campaign spokesperson, tells The Florida Independent the campaign is keeping a close eye on the redistricting process.

Jurkowski says Grayson is looking to run for “any seat that represents the metro-Orlando area.” He says that Grayson has kept in contact with many of his former constituents from District Eight and hopes to represent the area once more.

Grayson announced he was running for Congress again in early July, which made him one of the first in Florida to file for 2012. Grayson had already raised nearly $100,000 before filing the paperwork.

Despite a well-funded and energetic campaign to keep his seat in 2010, Grayson received criticism for an ad comparing Webster to a member of the Taliban. Grayson’s “Taliban Dan” ad attacked Webster for what Grayson claimed were his extreme fundamentalist religious views on women’s rights and abortion.

The ad featured a woman’s voice saying:

Daniel Webster wants to impose his radical fundamentalism on us. Webster tried to deny battered women medical care, and the right to divorce their abusers. He wants to force raped women to bear the child. Taliban Dan Webster. Hands off our bodies and our laws.

Many say that the ad “backfired” on Grayson, but his campaign maintains that the real reason Grayson, along with many other Democrats, lost in 2010 was weak turnout.

“The reason he lost in 2010 was because Democrats didn’t vote,” Jurkowski says. Because President Obama will be running for reelection in 2012, turnout for Democrats could be significantly higher than in 2010.

Aside from the media storm surrounding some of Grayson’s more incendiary comments, his campaign notes that the candidate has been a constant advocate for progressive causes. Grayson supported a tax increase for wealthy Americans — despite being among richest members of Congress. He also called on the Florida Chief Justice to halt “foreclosure mill” cases, which involved three law firms that were scrutinized for possibly carrying out illegal foreclosures in 2010.

“He needs to run to help save this country,” Jurkowski says. “Florida needs more Democrats. … It needs more progressives.”

Ed. note: This report is part of a collaboration with WNYC’s It’s a Free Country to cover the 25 most captivating 2012 congressional races around the country. To read past entries in the series, click here and here.

Should Obama fire McChrystal, it’s an opportunity to reorient Afghanistan strategy. Ironically, Hastings recounts Biden thinking McChrystal’s adjusted plan for Kandahar is “CT-plus,” meaning something closer to the counterterrorism-and-Pakistan-centric alternative Biden advocated last fall. I confess I don’t quite understand how he sees it that way. But it might convince Obama that McChrystal came around to Biden’s way of thinking anyway. And that no matter what, Afghanistan’s endgame is a political settlement with a Taliban divorced from al-Qaeda — a consensus view within the administration, including the senior military leadership — with Pakistan providing the political guarantees of Taliban compliance. That’s so Biden!

And if McChrystal ends up keeping his command, he’s in a chastened political and bureaucratic position. Hastings quotes an anonymous McChrystal aide musing about “a possibility we could ask for another surge of U.S. forces next summer if we see success here.” If there’s one thing McChrystal’s remarks to the magazine killed, it’s that. The barely concealed compromise within the Obama strategy for Afghanistan is that after the July 2011 transition to Afghan security control, McChrystal and counterinsurgency get phased down over time, and Lt. Gen. William Caldwell’s training mission for Afghan security forces gets phased up — as does Biden’s desired counterterrorism missions and emphasis on Pakistan. McChrystal and his allies will not be in any position to undo that bargain even if they want to.

Regardless of whether McChrystal should be fired — there’s, frankly, a compelling case to be made when considering the Uniform Code of Military Justice’s penalty of court martial for “any commissioned officer [using] contemptuous words” against the civilian chain of command — my guess is that he won’t be. Obama summoned McChrystal back to Washington pretty much immediately after the story hit, which suggests that he’s not thinking about a wholesale revision of his strategy. What’s more, if he does fire McChrystal, he’ll have the arduous task of finding new leadership for the war while the clock to July 2011 ticks, introducing new uncertainty among allies and enemies and NATO troops and dealing with another big round of strategy-in-disarray stories. All of which points to McChrystal having to learn to live with Biden — and the new influence that the general inadvertently gave the vice president.

“A year ago, there were about 150,000 total Afghan national security forces,” he said. “Today, there are 230,000. That’s a significant growth in a 12-month period. In 18 months – that 12, plus the next six months – we will have equaled the growth of the last seven years, so you can see that pace has accelerated.”

But numbers aren’t the whole story, McChrystal said. The quality of Afghan forces is moving ahead rapidly over the past year through coalition forces working side by side with their Afghan partners.

“Today, about 85 percent of the Afghan National Army has real partnerships as they go around the battlefield,” he said. Though the Afghan forces are many years away from a level of professionalism that would be expected of long-standing forces such as the U.S. Army, the general said, they have made significant progress.

Keep an eye on those figures tomorrow morning when Gen. David Petraeus and Michele Flournoy, the undersecretary of defense for policy, testify before the Senate Armed Services Committee about Afghanistan. With the Marja offensive an unsettled operation and the Kandahar “process” subject to some delays, security force expansion is likely to be a key focus of tomorrow’s hearing, especially considering committee chairman Carl Levin’s (D-Mich.) consistent advocacy for emphasizing the training mission in the war effort.

Why? Because in emerging and underdeveloped states, weak legal systems and official corruption create incentives for powerful people to exploit those resources, rather than allow mineral wealth to fuel national renewal. Think Congo or Sierra Leone. It’s easy to tick off the ways in which what political scientists call the “Resource Curse” applies to Afghanistan: a tenuous legal structure; warlordism; war; foreign interventionism; corruption throughout the political system; an uneasy and unstable relationship between provincial and national authorities; and an uneasy and unstable relationship in provinces and districts with instruments of local governance as well as national governance.

Blake Hounshell at Foreign Policy pronounces himself skeptical that Afghanistan will ever be able to develop the full potential of its mineral wealth and thinks U.S. officials fed the Times the piece to distract from a spate of bad Afghanistan news. But that’s all commensurate with a central aspect of the Resource Course: rapacious foreign governments and corporations eager to help extract all that iron, lithium, copper and cobalt from the ground for a cut-rate price.

The operation to secure the Kandahar region will unfold more slowly and last longer than the military had planned, Gen. Stanley McChrystal said. The slower pace of the make-or-break operation reflects the reality that the Taliban is not a hated occupier in Kandahar, and the residents McChrystal is trying to protect do not universally want his help.

“I do think it will happen more slowly than we had originally anticipated,” McChrystal said.

McChrystal predicted he can still demonstrate a turnaround in the war by year’s end, as U.S. Defense Secretary Robert Gates said this week is necessary to sustain public backing for a war now in its ninth year.

The question going forward is whether the Taliban have sufficient support within the city to invalidate the premise that the coalition can degrade its momentum, timetable or no timetable. Look to Undersecretary of Defense Michele Flournoy and Gen. David Petraeus to address that question in Senate testimony next week — or not.

Michele Flournoy, left, created the Office for Rule of Law and International Humanitarian Policy, which is led by Rosa Brooks. (ZUMA, Bloggerama)

For the first time, the Department of Defense has established an office to guide policy on emerging non-traditional military activities like compliance with the rule of law, humanitarian emergencies and human rights. It’s a bureaucratic change that effectively frames international legitimacy as a security issue, a reflection of the legacy of the Iraq and Afghanistan wars among some policymakers. And the office’s first test may be its perspective on the thorny questions surrounding how the department handles al-Qaeda and Taliban detainees.

[Security1] Announced within the Pentagon in late May, the Office for Rule of Law and International Humanitarian Policy is being led by Rosa Brooks, a senior adviser to Undersecretary of Defense for Policy Michele Flournoy and a former director of Georgetown Law School’s Human Rights Center. It endeavors to ensure that the broad strategic aims of the Obama administration regarding adherence to a rules-based international order don’t get lost in the pressures of military contingencies. It will also advise senior Pentagon officials on their contributions to interagency planning and White House requests for advice on rule-of-law compliance, and will work with Congress and non-governmental organizations focusing on its host of issues.

The office — created by Flournoy with support from Defense Secretary Robert Gates and run by a staff that will eventually number 20 people — reflects a recent recognition that the legitimacy of the U.S. military in combat plays its own battlefield role, especially in conflicts like Afghanistan, where perceptions by civilians about whether to support America’s allies or its adversaries are considered decisive. “The counterinsurgency and counterterrorism doctrine has really moved in the direction of saying that these issues are not luxuries,” Brooks explained in a Monday interview at the Pentagon. “These issues are absolutely central to achieving our military objectives in a counterinsurgency or a counterterrorism environment, where the name of the game is ‘Do you have credibility? Do you have legitimacy? Are you building the structures that support long-term stability?’”

Many of the office’s emerging responsibilities will center on entrenching respect for the rule of law and human rights as a core focus within the Defense Department. Previously, Pentagon officials who worked on those issues were spread throughout the policy directorate, in bureaus as disparate as Counternarcotics and Detainee Affairs, a reflection of the secondary — Brooks called it “ad hoc” — treatment the department has traditionally provided to humanitarian concerns. Karen Greenberg, the director of New York University’s Center on Law and Security, said the office needs to “restore the notion that the rule of law is there on the table no matter what.” Matthew Waxman, a deputy assistant secretary of defense for detainee affairs at the end of the Bush administration, added that “sometimes important strategic issues can fall into bureaucratic seams, and redrawing parts of the organizational map can help address that.”

That contrasts with the previous administration’s perspective that human rights and the rule of law were impediments to effective military operations. President Bush famously judged in 2002 that al-Qaeda and Taliban detainees ought to be treated humanely “to the extent appropriate and consistent with military necessity.”

While building a staff and a budget means that Brooks anticipates the office’s agenda will take shape over the next several months, she said some early priority “areas to look at” include the Defense Department’s security assistance and training for partner militaries — to ensure it “not inadvertently undermin[e]” the U.S. interest in promoting the rule of law — and the effectiveness of department support to judicial systems.

Developing broader policy guidance to protect civilians during combat is another likely focus for the office, Brooks said, citing Gen. Stanley McChrystal’s guidance to his troops in Afghanistan about the need to secure civilian support for NATO military operations. “Reducing civilian casualties supports achieving military objectives,” Brooks said. “If the population is furious at you because bombs keep falling on schools, it’s harder to achieve your objectives.” She added that the propriety of “a global directive of that sort” required further study, but anticipated that any such study would have “potential consequences” for crafting military doctrine on protecting civilians.

“The goal would be to see if we need to make changes,” Brooks said, stressing that her agenda is still preliminary. “It’s a moral goal, and it is a tactical and strategic goal, to minimize civilian casualties. Are we doing it as effectively as we could? Do we have the systems in place, the doctrine in place, the training in place, to do as well as we could, while recognizing that doctrine, training, et cetera matters?”

In some cases, like U.S. compliance with treaty obligations, Brooks said she expects her office to serve in a supporting role to other agencies, while taking the lead on issues where the military has the greatest stake. “The State Department can’t determine whether DOD needs to revise its doctrine to better protect civilians,” she said.

Some human-rights advocates greeted the establishment of the new office with optimism. “To the extent the Pentagon is engaging directly with foreign governments, having a human rights voice in that room is extremely important, so the U.S. speaks with a single voice,” said Tom Malinowski of Human Rights Watch. “You don’t want the State Department coming in one day with a broad policy agenda [including] respect for human rights and humanitarian principles and the Pentagon coming in the next day talking about basing rights without the two being coordinated.”

Greenberg said the big test for the office will be its ability to help influence the emerging shape of detainee policy. Administration officials and congressional leaders have discussed the creation of frameworks for indefinite detention without charge, an idea that found its way into the National Security Strategy under the rubric of creating an “approach that can be sustained by future Administrations, with support from both political parties and all three branches of government.” Malinowski cautioned against viewing detainee policy as a crucible for the new office, but said he hopes the office can “guard against the tendency of the Pentagon as an institution to reflexively defend the expanded powers that it received in the last administration.”

Brooks said that her office “will work very closely” with Col. William Lietzau, the deputy assistant secretary for detainee affairs, but did not specify any programmatic agenda. “Bill Lietzau is someone who’s already attuned to those issues anyway, so those are the kinds of conversations that we’re always having,” Brooks said, concerning how to “make sure that as we try to work through these thorny inherited detainee issues that we’re doing it in a way that buttresses our broad commitments to rule-of-law norms.”

“And it’s not easy on those issues,” she added. “The briar patch we started out with has been a tough one to get ourselves out of without sustaining a lot of little scratches.”

Waxman wrestled with those issues while he ran detainee policy for the Rumsfeld Pentagon. He hailed Brooks’ office as a step toward integrating law and strategy. “Often those issues are thought of as separate spheres: The lawyers in the general counsel’s office and the military judge advocates say what the legal bounds are and the policy advisers and military planners and operators decide within those bounds what the strategy is,” Waxman said. “That’s too simplistic and risks missing the many ways in which the two operate in tandem, and this new office looks like it’s intended to help ensure they do so effectively. For example, the United States may have a strategic interest in abiding by certain standards, because we want to promote those standards abroad among foreign forces or because it’s believed to strengthen counterinsurgency efforts to win hearts and minds.”

Brooks herself will continue to wear several hats in the Pentagon. In addition to becoming the first deputy assistant secretary of defense for Rule of Law and International Humanitarian Policy, she’ll remain Flournoy’s senior adviser and helm the policy directorate’s Global Strategic Engagement Team. “Rosa is an excellent person to do this job,” Malinowski said. “I’m happy to hear the position has been created and happy to hear she’s filling it.”

That attack used “rockets, small arms and grenades” and sought to use four operatives as suicide bombers. They were killed before they could detonate.

One U.S. contractor is dead. Nine U.S. servicemembers are wounded. Two of those nine are said to have returned to duty, and the rest ”are currently in stable condition,” according to an ISAF press release. But it’s been a long time since there was an attack this large on Bagram. Coming a day after the Kabul attack, the message the Taliban seek to deliver is that there aren’t any safe areas for the allies of the Afghan government.

The powerful blast occurred on a major Kabul thoroughfare that runs by the ruins of a one-time royal palace and government ministries. It wrecked nearly 20 vehicles, including five SUVs in the NATO convoy, and scattered debris and body parts across the wide boulevard. The body of woman in a burqa was smashed against the window of the bus.

That’s an immensely powerful blast if it’s able to take out five surely-armored NATO SUVs and still do damage to 15 other cars, motorcycles and trucks. Judging by the photos in this Washington Post gallery, I’ve driven down the road that the Taliban attacked, and it’s indeed heavily trafficked. The blast essentially welcomes home Afghan President Hamid Karzai, who firmed up his ties to the Obama administration last week in Washington.

Presidents Hamid Karzai and Barack Obama at the White House on Wednesday (EPA/ZUMApress.com)

The presidential communique has been issued. A longer-term “Strategic Partnership Declaration” will follow by the end of the year. But the most important and immediate result of this week’s visit to Washington by Afghan President Hamid Karzai is a consensus each side will claim for two “processes”: one for outreach to the Taliban, and the other for rolling back its influence in portions of the southern Afghan city of Kandahar.

[Security1] There is no indication of a quid pro quo. But in public appearances Thursday, the day after Karzai met at the White House with President Obama, senior U.S. and Afghan leaders left little doubt that they would claim the support of the other for the two major initiatives, each of which is a high priority for the other.

Seated beside Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton at the U.S. Institute of Peace, a congressionally funded research organization, Karzai said one of the major messages he would take back to the Afghan people is “U.S. backing of the peace process,” a term he has used repeatedly this week. The peace process refers to an effort beginning with a “consultative peace jirga,” or conference, that Karzai will hold on May 29 for Afghans to come to consensus on the terms of a peace deal to offer to the Taliban in the hope of ending nearly nine years of insurgency. Since his November inauguration to a second term in office — which came after his election was defined by widespread fraud — Karzai has prioritized demonstrating that he will provide the negotiated end to the war that Afghans repeatedly tell pollsters they desire.

That effort received a high-profile endorsement from Gen. Stanley McChrystal, the commander of NATO forces in Afghanistan, during a Pentagon news conference. McChrystal called the peace jirga “an appropriate effort” to figure out “an Afghan-led process” for ending the war. “The way ahead cannot be war,” McChrystal said, “The way ahead has to be a resolution to it.”

Karzai was similarly declarative about a long-telegraphed U.S. priority — turning military and Afghan governance attention to Kandahar, a major southern city of about 850,000 Afghans and the spiritual home of the Taliban. While much of the city remains under at least formal government control, the Taliban have been able to re-establish major presences in the city and its surrounding areas, most recently assassinating the deputy mayor in a mosque in broad daylight. Karzai previously indicated discomfort with the prospect of major fighting in the city, telling a shura council of 1500 Kandahar notables in April that no operation would go forward without local support.

On Thursday, however, Karzai, McChrystal and Clinton sounded harmonious notes about what McChrystal described as not an operation but a “rising tide of security” into the city. All three expressly forswore the use of the word “operation” — the word conjured up inappropriate images of “tanks, troops moving” through the city, Karzai said — and instead said Kandahar would be a “process” featuring more out-governing the Taliban than out-fighting it. Karzai suggested he became more comfortable with the “process” in Kandahar in the last week.

“This is the consequence of consultations that we have had” with the Americans, Karzai said. “The effort in Kandahar and the surrounding area has to be explained better, the modality of it has to be explained better, so we’re not calling it at all an operation.” Instead, the “process” would feature “bringing conditions to the Kandahar region and around where there is better governance, better resources and more active, vigorous vibrant intelligence activity and then, if and when and where needed, an operation militarily, in consultation with the community and backed by the community.”

McChrystal told reporters at the Pentagon not to expect a “D-Day and an H-hour and an attack” on the city, calling it “a process, not an event.” Instead, he will surge forces — NATO and Afghan — into Kandahar and its surrounding areas “without lapsing into major fighting” that he said “the insurgents would love to see.”

While McChrystal did not specify his battle plan at his briefing, informed sources indicated to TWI that McChrystal would seek to raise the current force mix in Kandahar from 6900 NATO troops and 5300 Afghan troops currently to 11,850 NATO forces and 8500 Afghans by September, with an emphasis on more than doubling the Afghan police presence there. That “rising tide” will coincide with planned rapid assemblies of local jirgas to “reconnect” Kandaharis to national, provincial and local government representatives — something to which Karzai said today he is committed. By November, McChrystal’s command expects to see subtle and favorable changes in Afghan perceptions of the capabilities of the government to provide a better life and for Afghan security forces to keep the peace.

McChrystal said in his press briefing that one of the lessons of months’ worth of difficult fighting in Helmand province is that change is measured in Afghan perceptions of which side offers a better future — and can’t be easily observed. “If you go every day, each day, it’s not a dramatic change,” McChrystal said. “If you go months’ difference, then it is.” That raised the prospect of months of ambiguous progress, at best, occurring alongside what McChrystal forecast would be violent and bloody contests with the Taliban.

While McChrystal and the Afghan government intend to press the insurgents into exercising diminished relevance in Kandahar, Karzai was more forceful than his American counterparts in saying explicitly that he seeks to negotiate peace with the Taliban.

“The peace process will be with those of the Taliban and other militant groups who are not part of al-Qaeda or other terrorist networks or ideologically against us — when I say us I mean the allies and all of us — in any way that will endanger our constitution, the freedoms and the democracy and the progress that we have achieved,” Karzai said. He said he wanted robust efforts at reintegrating what he called “countryside boys” who have fought alongside the Taliban out of material or transactional concerns, but he also pledged to talk to the senior Taliban leadership, an effort that would lead him to turn to Pakistan and regional countries to support and facilitate.

Clinton, by contrast, lowered expectations for what the peace process will deliver, the pace at which it will move, and what the U.S. can support. “People cannot just show up and say that they’re prepared to reenter Afghan society after having directed suicide attacks and other kinds of violence against Afghanistan,” Clinton said, claiming no distance from Karzai’s position. “This process really starts with the reintegration off the battlefield that the president was describing, of people who for a variety of reasons found themselves in the ranks of the Taliban. I don’t think any of us can predict what the outcome of the next phase will be,” referring to talks with the senior Taliban leadership.

She expressed skepticism that “leaders of the Afghan Taliban” are interested in a peace deal. “They are very much against it,” Clinton said. “We don’t expect to see them walking through the door.” Clinton conceived of an Afghan peace process defined by “starting with reintegration but thinking hard about what reconciliation would mean.”

In a joint appearance with Karzai yesterday, President Obama implicitly tied the two “processes” together.

“At what point do the Taliban start making different calculations about what’s in their interests, and how the Afghan people feel about these issues, is in part going to be dependent on our success in terms of carrying out our mission there,” Obama said at the White House. “So we are a very I think important partner in facilitating this potential reconciliation and effectively empowering the Afghan government so that it is in the strongest possible position as these talks move forward.”

I think the most immediate thing that we’ll be interested in discussing with President Karzai and his team next week has to do with the next upcoming event, which is the consultative peace jirga scheduled for perhaps just several weeks from now.  And in particular here, we’re interested in, as Ben [Rhodes of the National Security Council] suggested, in President Karzai’s objectives for the jirga, what he hopes to achieve; and then, most important for us, how it is we can best support him.

Karzai announced in January that he’d assemble a “peace jirga” to establish national Afghan consensus around an offer to Taliban leadership to stop the insurgency. We don’t know what it will include. Its prospect for receptivity are in doubt. Afghan human rights activists are worried about being cut out of the process and, effectively, sold out.

Meanwhile, the civilian and military leadership in Afghanistan, Amb. Karl Eikenberry and Gen. Stanley McChrystal, are about to brief the White House press corps on their end of the visit and what they’ve been up to recently.