An American Lion

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It's useful to note that David Gregory has lost nearly every speck of credibility he may have once had climbing, literally, over the cold, dead body of Tim Russert to become the voice of reason and the Establishment for NBC News. This man is being used to sell things and even he knows what those things are. He has that knowing smirk that tells you what's what. I think he's far too glib in this interview, but that's my taste. I tend to prefer the people who talk to newsmakers to have a bit of dignity. Dignity can't sell a war anymore to the American people. We need telegenic news celebrities to accomplish this.

President Obama has been fairly succinct on this front:

As a candidate, Obama called Afghanistan a war worth fighting, as opposed to Iraq, a conflict he opposed and has since begun easing out of.

A new survey by the Gallup organization, released Tuesday, showed only 35 percent of Americans now approve of Obama’s handling of the war; 55 percent disapprove.

He made no direct reference to public opinion Tuesday night, although he seemed to touch on it when he said, “The American people are understandably focused on rebuilding our economy and putting people to work here at home.”

“After 18 months, our troops will begin to come home,” he said flatly.

When speaking publicly, that "conditions" clause becomes more evident, however:

Our overarching goal remains the same:  to disrupt, dismantle, and defeat al Qaeda in Afghanistan and Pakistan, and to prevent its capacity to threaten America and our allies in the future.

To meet that goal, we will pursue the following objectives within Afghanistan.  We must deny al Qaeda a safe haven.  We must reverse the Taliban's momentum and deny it the ability to overthrow the government.  And we must strengthen the capacity of Afghanistan's security forces and government so that they can take lead responsibility for Afghanistan's future. 

We will meet these objectives in three ways.  First, we will pursue a military strategy that will break the Taliban's momentum and increase Afghanistan's capacity over the next 18 months.

The 30,000 additional troops that I'm announcing tonight will deploy in the first part of 2010 -- the fastest possible pace -- so that they can target the insurgency and secure key population centers.  They'll increase our ability to train competent Afghan security forces, and to partner with them so that more Afghans can get into the fight.  And they will help create the conditions for the United States to transfer responsibility to the Afghans. 

Because this is an international effort, I've asked that our commitment be joined by contributions from our allies.  Some have already provided additional troops, and we're confident that there will be further contributions in the days and weeks ahead. Our friends have fought and bled and died alongside us in Afghanistan.  And now, we must come together to end this war successfully.  For what's at stake is not simply a test of NATO's credibility -- what's at stake is the security of our allies, and the common security of the world.

But taken together, these additional American and international troops will allow us to accelerate handing over responsibility to Afghan forces, and allow us to begin the transfer of our forces out of Afghanistan in July of 2011.  Just as we have done in Iraq, we will execute this transition responsibly, taking into account conditions on the ground.  We'll continue to advise and assist Afghanistan's security forces to ensure that they can succeed over the long haul.  But it will be clear to the Afghan government -- and, more importantly, to the Afghan people -- that they will ultimately be responsible for their own country. [bold=emphasis mine]

The man is quite a lawyer, in any case. He has his escape hatch and General Petraeus has seized upon it. Too bad there is still this pesky detail:

CIA Director Leon Panetta's assessment comes as President Barack Obama advances a risky new war plan that relies on 98,000 U.S. troops to prop up the Afghan government and prevent al Qaeda from returning. No longer overseeing the commander in chief's mission is Gen. Stanley McChrystal, sacked this past week in a stunning shake-up in U.S. military leadership after his critical comments about the White House.

"We're seeing elements of progress, but this is going to be tough," Panetta told ABC television's "This Week."

He said al Qaeda's evolving attack strategy increasingly relies on operatives without any record of terrorism involvement or those already in the U.S. As for Osama bin Laden, Panetta said it's been years since the U.S. had good intelligence about his whereabouts.

Panetta estimated there are fewer than 100 al Qaeda militants operating inside Afghanistan, with the rest hiding along Pakistan's mountainous western border. He said U.S. drone strikes and other spy operations have helped to "take down" half of al Qaeda's senior leaders.

If there really are "fewer than 100" then the President has met his goals and all he has to do now is order the withdrawal. There is no justification to keep fighting the Taliban when there are virtually no al Qaeda left. We cannot invade Pakistan openly, but we can continue to use drones and Special Forces troops to continue to assassinate key leaders (as much as I hate the use of drones, I am a realist and I doubt they will stop being used). We don't need over 130,000 men and women in Afghanistan to accomplish that task. There is a strong case to be made that making peace with the Taliban is preferable to another decade of war--except that Hamid Karzai and his narco-trafficking brother probably wouldn't survive a reordering of the political establishment in Afghanistan. Is anyone bothering to ask the Pakistani ISI what we should do? Don't we need their permission nowadays?

There is simply no reason, military or otherwise, to keep all of those troops in Afghanistan. Just by using the logic laid out by the President, there are more al Qaeda in Yemen, North Africa, and probably in a few other hotspots around the globe than there are in Afghanistan, but most of our troops are now tied down in the one place al Qaeda has been defeated. How did General Petraeus get his job and how does he keep it after openly speculating that we will need to "change" the timeline of the July 2011 withdrawal?

Anyway, it's President Obama's war now, and it has been for some time. I hope he figures out that the way out of a war is to stop listening to the Generals and the Admirals and to start listening to the diplomats.

Here's to paying attention to those pesky details.

The Price of FreedomI'm not sure what constitutes "new information" here because nothing listed here is a surprise to me:

A six-year archive of classified military documents made public on Sunday offers an unvarnished, ground-level picture of the war in Afghanistan that is in many respects more grim than the official portrayal.

The secret documents, released on the Internet by an organization called WikiLeaks, are a daily diary of an American-led force often starved for resources and attention as it struggled against an insurgency that grew larger, better coordinated and more deadly each year.

The New York Times, the British newspaper The Guardian and the German magazine Der Spiegel were given access to the voluminous records several weeks ago on the condition that they not report on the material before Sunday.

The documents — some 92,000 reports spanning parts of two administrations from January 2004 through December 2009 — illustrate in mosaic detail why, after the United States has spent almost $300 billion on the war in Afghanistan, the Taliban are stronger than at any time since 2001.

As the new American commander in Afghanistan, Gen. David H. Petraeus, tries to reverse the lagging war effort, the documents sketch a war hamstrung by an Afghan government, police force and army of questionable loyalty and competence, and by a Pakistani military that appears at best uncooperative and at worst to work from the shadows as an unspoken ally of the very insurgent forces the American-led coalition is trying to defeat.

Anyone who studied what happened at Wanat, anyone who has been paying attention to the war effort, and anyone who understands the situation we face can tell you that shortages, frustration, corruption, and the Pakistani ISI have been commonplace in any discussion about Afghanistan.

Giving this information to The Guardian and to Der Spiegel is designed to push public opinion in Britain and Germany towards disengagement from Afghanistan. If there's a specific outcome that Wikileaks would like to see here it is the fracturing of the NATO alliance and the removal of British and German forces from Afghanistan.

Wikileaks is being used. They are now being fed propaganda and are bravely passing it off as sensationalistic. There's nothing in those documents that shows that we are not kicking ass and killing people on our terms, not theirs. If you have read the academic papers on Wanat and the progress of the war, you're already bored with what they have put out.

There's nothing "damaging" in there if you want to demonstrate to your enemy that you will do whatever it takes to win. This is like showing your trump card before it is necessary. This is the "stop opposing us" move that should either drive the fence sitters to the enemy or make them come over to our side. All anyone has to do is look for the name of their village, elder, tribe or region and see what the Americans think of them. Then, look at how easily the Americans can kill anyone in the region. It's not rocket science. This is the opening gambit of the Petraeus disengagement from Afghanistan. It says, "calm down--we're leaving--when  we're gone, you go kill whoever you want." It's Iraq Redux.

The operational detail is exceptional. It shows just how much we track, record, database and remember. It's almost Germanic in the obsession with who's for or against us.

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Crude, yes. But what else can describe Ron Paul's bizarre screed against NATO?

No one should discount the fact that the war in Afghanistan is now President Obama's war, but this notion that we should not fight a land war in Asia is some pretty weak tea. President Bush sent the troops into Afghanistan to dislodge the Taliban and most of America agreed that this was the land war in Asia that needed to be fought. The folly of installing the Karzai brothers is where the adventure went off the rails.

But whenever someone starts saying that we should be "out of NATO," forget it. The only thing guaranteeing that the United States remains a player in European affairs is by way of NATO.

The generals keep having their way:

President Obama removed Gen. Stanley A. McChrystal as commander of American forces in Afghanistan on Wednesday, and tapped as his replacement the general’s boss, Gen. David H. Petraeus, the architect of the 2007 surge in Iraq.

Mr. Obama, standing with General Petraeus and Vice President Joseph R. Biden Jr. in the White House Rose Garden to underline the continuity and solidity of his Afghan policy, said that he had regretfully accepted General McChrystal’s resignation.

He said he had done so not out of personal insult, but because a magazine article featuring contemptuous quotes from the general and his staff about senior administration officials had not met standards of behavior for a commanding general, and threatened to undermine civilian control of the military.

“War is bigger than any one man or woman, whether a private, a general or president,” Mr. Obama said. “As difficult as it is to lose General McChrystal, I believe it is the right decision for national security.”

“I welcome debate among my team,” he said, “but I won’t tolerate division.”

Let me see if I can get this straight. There are just the two generals? The only generals who can fight a war are named Petraeus and McChrystal (because you never hear the name of General Odierno uttered anywhere except in hushed whispers when no one talks about Iraq) and President Obama can't fire them both so he fires one of them and demotes the other one, even though he never did or said anything to deserve being demoted?

And, to extend this out to its logical conclusion, President Obama puts the man who convinced him to hire McChrystal in the first place in charge of Afghanistan, taking him from his job at CENTCOM? This is leadership? When everything appears to be going in the wrong way, go with the guy who set the agenda? Doesn't anyone remember when Petraeus was swept into the CENTCOM job by popular acclaim? You know, when President Bush was running things? I thought we had an election and changed Presidents. Apparently not.

That's nuts. The war is not on track. This isn't about who replaces McChrystal. It's about who brings the right mentality and focus to the task at hand. 

If you want to signal change, you remove the defective pieces. You name a new team and give them a clear strategic goal to achieve. You don't play this bizarre game of multi-dimenstional chess.