... which he cast as if given in a speech by President Obama : 1. We have no partner in Afghanistan. The control of the government of Afghan President Hamid Karzai hardly extends beyond the embattled capital of Kabul. He himself has just been returned to office in a presidential election in which voting fraud on an almost unimaginably large scale was the order of the day. His administration is believed to have lost all credibility with the Afghan people. 2. Afghanistan floats in a culture of corruption. This includes President Karzai’s administration up to its highest levels and also the warlords who control various areas and, like the Taliban insurgency, are to some degree dependent for their financing on opium, which the country produces in staggering quantities. Afghanistan, in fact, is not only a narco-state, but the leading narco-state on the planet. 3. Despite billions of dollars of American money poured into training the Afghan security forces, the army is notoriously understren...

Sometimes it doesn't take paragraphs of analysis to get the point across. From Politics Daily : Half a million Americans have served two 12-month tours in Iraq or Afghanistan; 70,000 have served three combat tours; and 20,000 have served five or more deployments, according to Defense Department data. That's one out of every 600 American citizens.

It's in today's Daily Beast , and even though it has been said here and elsewhere before, reaching the MSM with this story is a good thing. General McChrystal is being not just disingenuous but damn near dishonest, as Leslie Gelb details: The key for McChrystal is getting the 44,000 troops in battle within the next 12 months. But that just can’t be done. The most optimistic assessment comes from Kimberly Kagan of the ever-optimistic, fighting Kagans (the others being Bob and Fred). According to The Wall Street Journal, her recent study for the Institute for the Study of War assessed that “it would be difficult to move enough troops from other posts to deploy anywhere close to 40,000 troops before next summer at the earliest." U.S. armed forces are so thinned out and ill-prepared from having to fight two wars and stay ready for a slew of other conflicts that it is indeed “difficult,” if not outright impossible, to deploy the requested troops in time to head off McChrystal...

... because it makes points about this being an essentially unwinnable war that I have been attempting to make for months. It's a McClatchy , and I am not going to excerpt it because you should go there right now and read the whole goddamn thing. Here are three take-aways: 1) General McChrystal actually says we need 60-80,000 more troops to avoid a risk of defeat. 2) Even sending 45,000 more troops to Afghanistan only gives use a moderate chance of success [which is actually what a moderate risk of defeat is] 3) We don't have even 45,000 troops to send without risking the structural integrity of our armed forces . At best, military experts say, we could commit about 35,000 of the right kind of troops, and that would leave us with virtually no combat-ready uncommitted reserves. Yet both nationally and locally there are folks who either ignore the whole issue or live in a fantasy world where we can just go in and win if we commit ourselves . Get a clue: for years there were...

I was dismayed when I heard Barack Obama was given the Nobel peace prize.

From the Times : The Obama administration is considering outbidding the Taliban to persuade Afghan villagers to lay down arms as it struggles to find a new approach to a war that is fast losing public and congressional support.... One official said the key emphasis in the White House meetings had been to identify options that would prepare the way for American troops to leave. Apart from training more Afghan troops, the focus has shifted to accepting a political role for the Taliban, while also trying to weaken them by winning some over. Afghans are known for changing sides back and forth during their long years of war — there is an old saying that “you can rent an Afghan but never buy one” — and battles have often been decided by defections rather than combat. Paying Taliban foot-soldiers to switch sides could spare US lives and save money, say its advocates. A recent report by the Senate foreign relations committee estimated the Taliban fighting strength at 15,000, of whom only 5% a...

Because it seems obligatory to have an opinion on President Barack Obamais winning of the Nobel Peace Prize, I will tell you mine: I agree with Malia Obama that the news is slightly less significant than her three-day, school-free weekend. That said, here's my rather idiosyncratic round-up of the (a) most honest; (b) most Orwellian; (c) most ironically accurate; and (d) most humorously ironically accurate responses to this award from both Delaware and the world. The first items are comment rescues from Delawareliberal where pretty much everybody has either pointedly ignored Donviti's acid assessment, or--in the case of Delawaredem--engaged in exactly the kind of Orwellian rebranding of President Obama's increasingly militarist foreign policy into an enlightened approach to world peace that explains why very few Democrats have any moral authority of foreign affairs these days. First, Donviti : Indefinite detentions. Wants to extend sunsetting patriot act provisions Guantano...

First, two significant quotations. From Randolph Bourne's War is the Health of the State : The Government, with no mandate from the people, without consultation of the people, conducts all the negotiations, the backing and filling, the menaces and explanations, which slowly bring it into collision with some other Government, and gently and irresistibly slides the country into war. For the benefit of proud and haughty citizens, it is fortified with a list of the intolerable insults which have been hurled toward us by the other nations; for the benefit of the liberal and beneficent, it has a convincing set of moral purposes which our going to war will achieve; for the ambitious and aggressive classes, it can gently whisper of a bigger role in the destiny of the world. The result is that, even in those countries where the business of declaring war is theoretically in the hands of representatives of the people, no legislature has ever been known to decline the request of an Executive, ...

OK, I officially never want to hear about the 2000 US Presidential election again from anybody who does not question this decision : The White House has ended weeks of hesitation over how to respond to the Afghan election by accepting President Karzai as the winner despite evidence that up to 20 per cent of ballots cast may have been fraudulent. Abandoning its previous policy of not prejudging investigations of vote rigging, the Obama Administration has conceded that Mr Karzai will be President for another five years on the basis that even if he were forced into a second round of voting he would almost certainly win it. The decision will increase pressure on President Obama to justify further US troop deployments to Afghanistan to prop up a regime now regarded as systemically corrupt. The acceptance was conveyed by Hillary Clinton, the Secretary of State, in a meeting with her Afghan counterpart hours before Mr Obama received a formal request from General Stanley McChrystal, the comman...

From Reuters regarding President Obama's rather vague strategic goals for Afghanistan and Pakistan: Topping Obama's objectives, according to a draft document obtained by Reuters, was improving Pakistan's counterinsurgency capabilities and building up Afghan security forces so that the role of the United States could be reduced. But the document offered few specifics and set no target dates. It said the administration would assess its progress against the goals by the end of next March. Now let's go off the net for the moment, and examine Thomas T. Hammond's Red Flag over Afghanistan , which is pretty much seen today as the definitive contemporary short work on the Soviet experience there: From page 160, the sub-section entitled "The Disintegration of the Afghan Army": The Soviets probably assumed that the Afghan Army would be of great assistance in suppressing the rebels, but they have been disappointed. In fact, one might say that the Afghan army has be...

... when a President of the United States would actually request network time to explain the use of US military force in a new venue--like the recent raid into Somalia . The President would lay out for the American people his reasoning, discuss the importance of Somalia to US global policy, and even sketch for us the parameters by which he would continue to order such actions. Sadly, those days no longer exist. Presidents, Democrat or GOPer, simply conduct foreign policy and order military interventions large and small without the slightest nod in the direction of public accountability. Strangely enough, nobody even thinks this development is newsworthy anymore.

From Anti-war.com : Following confirmation by the French military that they definitely weren’t in the process of invading Somalia, the United States military is now confirming that it is, in fact, American forces that are pouring into the southern portion of the country in a helicopter-backed invasion. US military officials confirmed to the Associated Press today that forces from the US Joint Special Operations Command had invaded the lawless African nation, and were the ones responsible for the attack on the tiny village of Barawe this morning that was the first staging ground of the attack. What the officials wouldn’t comment on was exactly why the United States, which launched a failed “peacekeeping” operation in the nation in 1993 and backed an Ethiopian invasion in 2007, had decided to launch yet another foreign adventure, though media outlets speculated that it was probably something to do with al-Qaeda. The United States has recently been supplying the self-described Somali “gov...

In response to one of my usual rants against interventionist wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, commenter Marshfox raises an important point : Here is what I remember about 9/11, I went back to war, for the second time in my career. Only this time, the attack was on us. I have a problem with the WMD issue, and history says that the odds are against us in Afgan. That being said, I know now what the Vietnam Vets feel like, alone and abandoned, they did what they thought was right, and look what they got for it. I equate my position on this like that of the commander of the U-Boat in Das Boot. He is my kind of patriot, compared the the true beliver Nazi first officer he had. You may find fault with my analogy yet it fits for me. My eyes aren't blind, I am no mindless robot, but we started it now we need to finish it, if not you betray those who gave their lives already. I am old, but I go and volunteer for the kids, they need old hands and maybe I will bring them all home again safe one...

Now that we have generals running our foreign policy in the Middle East and Central Asia, this is what you can expect : Speaking on the eight-year anniversary of the September 11 terrorist attack, top US commander in Afghanistan General Stanley McChrystal says that he sees no indication of any large al-Qaeda presence in Afghanistan. Gen. McChrystal’s comments come at a time when the Obama Administration is facing an increasing revolt over the ongoing war in Afghanistan, and officials have used the “threat” posed by al-Qaeda as their primary justification for continuing the conflict. Seemingly oblivious to having already dismissed the conflict’s ostensible raison d’etre, the general continued to defend the war, maintaining that it was winnable given increased effort and insisting that, while he had no evidence to back it up, he “strongly believes” the war has prevented other terrorist attacks. Meanwhile, the Taliban insurgency continues to spread; the Christian Science Monitor : Long...

Now let's see, General McChrystal wants another 20,000 troops for Afghanistan, where we are going to stay either for several more years or several more decades, depending on whether you believe the US military or the British military. Ultimately, with contractors and support troops in the Indian Ocean and central Asia, this will give us well over 100,000 troops fighting or supporting the Afghan-Pakistan war. At the same time, the Obama administration is scaling back any thought that we will actually start withdrawing troops from Iraq prior to the 30 January 2010 election. We'll have about 130,000 troops there--so that means we will have (again considering support units based in Bahrain, Qatar, Kuwait, and the Persian Gulf) closer to 200,000 folks in that region. That's naught, naught, carry the naught, and--oh shit, Uncle Jed--we've got well over a quarter-million Americans fighting two different wars, neither of which is going very well at the moment. Oh--and befo...