Recently in Afghanistan Category

"'This is probably the best example of violation of the separation of church and state in this country,' said Weinstein. 'It's literally pushing fundamentalist Christianity at the point of a gun against the people that we're fighting. We're emboldening an enemy.'"

I like Saving Private Ryan as much as the next guy, but this, in a word, is ridicky-goddamn-diculous. Apparently, our troops in Iraq and Afghanistan are routinely outfitted with sniper rifles etched with New Testament verse. "Trijicon confirmed to ABCNews.com that it adds the biblical codes to the sights sold to the U.S. military. Tom Munson, director of sales and marketing for Trijicon...said the inscriptions 'have always been there' and said there was nothing wrong or illegal with adding them. Munson said the issue was being raised by a group that is 'not Christian.'"

Newsflash: Given that we're currently engaged in multiple wars and are strongly trying to avoid any appearance of being involved in any sort of anti-Muslim Crusade, arming our soldiers with "Jesus rifles" and crafting bible-thumping war reports for the Commander-in-Chief isn't just catastrophically stupid. It's basically writing the Al Qaeda recruiting posters for them.

Update: Also, "They started it!" is not an appropriate response to this dismal revelation.

Update 2: Trijicon stands down -- Jesus rifles are hereby discontinued, most likely because of quotes like these: "General David Petraeus also addressed the scopes this morning, calling the matter 'disturbing and a serious concern for me.'"

"First, there are those who suggest that Afghanistan is another Vietnam. They argue that it cannot be stabilized and we are better off cutting our losses and rapidly withdrawing. Yet this argument depends upon a false reading of history. Unlike Vietnam, we are joined by a broad coalition of 43 nations that recognizes the legitimacy of our action. Unlike Vietnam, we are not facing a broad-based popular insurgency.

And most importantly, unlike Vietnam, the American people were viciously attacked from Afghanistan and remain a target for those same extremists who are plotting along its border. To abandon this area now -- and to rely only on efforts against al-Qaeda from a distance -- would significantly hamper our ability to keep the pressure on al-Qaeda and create an unacceptable risk of additional attacks on our homeland and our allies."

This is a bit late by now, but regardless: As you all know, President Obama made the case last week for sending 30,000 more troops in Afghanistan. At this point -- and like Fred Kaplan -- I'm conflicted about our continued involvement there...but I'm leaning toward withdrawal. Everything I've heard about the war lately has had that "Vietnam in '66" sense to it: A corrupt government as our ally; trouble winning "hearts and minds"; The US stepping half-blindly into a conflict that's been simmering for centuries (in Southeast Asia, it was the endless Vietnamese war against interlopers; here it's long-simmering ethnic rivalries between the Pashtuns and everyone else.) And now, our new progressive-minded president tells us: If we just commit X more troops (where, now X=30,000), we can win, close up shop, and go home. Uh, really? I think I've already seen this movie a few times.

Obama's shout-out above to basically token international support doesn't assuage my fears. And, as far as the threat posed by Vietnam: True, Tonkin never happened, but obviously policymakers of that era were less sanguine about a Communist victory in South Vietnam than we are today -- The threat of the Enemy can always gets unduly amplified in the heat of the moment. (Speaking of said Reds, it should sober us to acknowledge that all we've done so far in Afghanistan is basically manage to re-create the Soviet experience in the region. Iirc, that didn't end so well.)

Al Qaeda is in Afghanistan, yes, and if we could weed them out and destroy their capacity to attack again, all the better. (And always remember: If Dubya, Rummy et al had just finished the job properly in 2002 rather than salivating over Iraq, we would be in a lot better position right now.) But Al Qaeda is also in Somalia, Tajikstan, Yemen, the Philippines, Kosovo...all over the place. We don't have the resources to play whack-a-mole in all these nations anymore, particularly when every whack usually just works to create new moles. (You'd think we learn that the Hydra sprouts two more heads every time you cut off the wrong one.)

The biggest argument in favor of increasing our military position in Afghanistan would be the continued stability of neighboring Pakistan. (There's Vietnam again -- it's another variation of the Domino Theory.) But, there's a good amount of evidence to suggest that more troop increases by us will only inflame the situation and further destabilize Pakistan. In which case, I'm not sure what we're doing over there, and what we could possibly accomplish in 18 months that we haven't gotten done the last seven years.

In short, it seems to me like we had our shot in Afghanistan, and Dubya blew it. I could be wrong, of course. But, to my mind, now feels like a good time to recognize that fact and stop chasing good money after bad.

"I will tell you the more I just stayed awake last night thinking about this thing, the more I think of it, I don't know what in the hell it looks to me like we're getting into another Korea [...] I don't think it's worth fighting for and I don't think we can get out. And it's just the biggest damned mess that I ever saw." Also via Greenwald today and in light of Obama's upcoming decision on Afghanistan, former LBJ aide Bill Moyers painstakingly pieces together how his old boss made the decision to escalate in Vietnam. "We will never know what would have happened if Lyndon Johnson had said no to more war. We know what happened because he said yes."

"After Gates was confirmed as George W. Bush's defense secretary in December 2006, he gave several speeches outlining major reforms that his successor should undertake--in weapons procurement, promotion policy, and the whole careerist culture inside the Pentagon. (With only two years in office, combined with a plateful of crises in Iraq and elsewhere, he knew he wouldn't have time to take those steps himself.) When he stayed on at Barack Obama's request, and thus became his own successor, many wondered whether he would turn his words into action. With this budget, he has begun to do just that."

A holdover from the bookmarks of last week: Slate's Fred Kaplan offers a concise overview of the proposed Obama-Gates military spending reforms. (These are not spending cuts, by the way, despite what you may have heard -- just some much-needed and long-overdue reprioritizing over at the Pentagon. I also like the idea of phasing out defense contractors in favor of presumably much more cost-conscious civil servants.) "This budget will not go down easily in the Pentagon or in Congress. The F-22, the DDG-1000, and the Future Combat Systems are the favored systems by much of the Air Force, Navy, and Army brass, respectively...The F-22 in particular is also a favorite of many legislators -- the result of politically shrewd subcontracting that spread out production of the plane to key districts in 46 states."

"It's a debate that the Bush administration never seriously had in the seven years following the post-9/11 invasion. Now, by contrast, in the wake of three major strategic reviews, Obama is extending and deepening the discussion of Afghanistan, because the outcome of this debate may set the course of American foreign policy for the remainder of his presidency." Counter-terrorism (CT) or counter-insurgency (COIN)? In Slate, Fred Kaplan discusses the major decision on Afghanistan before Obama this week.

Update: "'We have a clear and focused goal: to disrupt, dismantle and defeat al-Qaeda in Afghanistan and Pakistan, and to prevent their return to either country in the future,' Obama said. 'That is the goal that must be achieved.'" The president announces our new Af-Pak strategy. Sounds like the COINS won out. Update 2: Or did they? Call it CT-plus.

"The good news is that, seven years after the Sept. 11 attacks and nearly three years after the resumption of full-scale war with the Taliban, we are finally beginning to formulate a strategy -- and we have officers in place who think strategically. As history shows, however, smart generals and shrewd strategists don't necessarily yield victory -- especially in Afghanistan."

As the incoming administration correctly looks to reprioritize Afghanistan, Fred Kaplan summarizes the current situation in our "other" war, and the potential pitfalls ahead. "[T]here is a paradox: More U.S. troops are needed to provide security to the Afghan people; but these troops may, at the same time, fuel the insurgency -- which will require more troops, and on the cycle goes."

"'If you think of this as sort of a combination of [the hunt for] Eric Rudolph, who was the Olympic bomber, and the movie 'Deliverance,' multiplied by a factor of 10, that's really what you're focusing on in trying to find bin Laden,' said Robert Grenier, the former CIA station chief in Pakistan." Also high on the foreign policy to-do list for President-elect Obama: bringing the war on terror back to Osama bin Laden.

Alas, despite Dubya's occasional bouts of half-hearted bluster, it seems the bin Laden trail may well have gone ice-cold over the past few years, while we've been focused on Iraq. "Robert Baer, a former CIA field officer, told CNN he's talked to 'a dozen CIA guys who've been on the hunt for him, and half of them told me they assumed he was dead, the other half said they assumed he was alive, but the key word here is assume. They don't know.'...[Commander of special operations at Tora Bora Dalton] Fury says the best route for the president-elect to take would be to change the dialogue about bin Laden...He believes taunting the al Qaeda leader may force him to prove he's relevant and, in the process, lead the United States right to him."

After stops in Kuwait, Afghanistan, Iraq, Jordan, and Israel, Sen. Obama takes his message to the heart of Berlin, before a crowd of over 200,000 at the Brandenburg Gate. [Video | Transcript.] As Der Spiegel's chief foreign desk editor put it after the speech: "No. 44 has spoken."

Well, let's make sure we all do our part on Election Day first. Still, it's safe to say the Obama World Tour has been knocked out of the park so far. Between this and Iraq's backing of the Obama plan earlier in the week, McCain's chances are, at least to my mind, looking downright dismal these days. And whining about the press, a.k.a. the mythical maverick's former "base", isn't going to right the ship for the GOP. Yep, all in all, things are looking pretty good for November...and beyond.

(By the way, when Sen. Obama isn't making the case for world peace, he's also got a pretty sweet jumper.)

"This is the week that should have effectively ended John McCain's efforts to become the next president of the United States...During this past week: McCain called the most important entitlement program in the U.S. a disgrace, his top economic adviser called the American people whiners, McCain released an economic plan that no one thought was serious, he flip flopped on Iraq, joked about the deaths of Iranian citizens, and denied making comments that he clearly made -- TWICE." I may have been slacking of late, but others have been keeping up the good fight. By way of Supercres, HuffPo columnist Max Bergmann lists ten campaign-derailing gaffes by John McCain, from last week alone. (So that's not counting Czechoslovakia, McCain's switch on Afghanistan, or the unfortunate "ape rape" revelations.) I must say, he really is an astoundingly bad candidate.

"Just as it had on the day before 9/11, Al Qaeda now has a band of terror camps from which to plan and train for attacks against Western targets, including the United States...'The United States faces a threat from Al Qaeda today that is comparable to what it faced on Sept. 11, 2001,' said Seth Jones, a Pentagon consultant and a terrorism expert at the RAND Corporation."

In the NYT, Mark Mazzetti and David Rohde explore how, despite all their endless bluster and unconstitutional behavior, the Dubya administration is losing the war against Al Qaeda, and has apparently given up on catching Bin Laden. "By late 2005, many inside the CIA headquarters in Virginia had reached the conclusion that their hunt for Bin Laden had reached a dead end...'You had a very finite number' of experienced officers, said one former senior intelligence official. 'Those people all went to Iraq. We were all hurting because of Iraq.'"

At one point in Mike Nichols' smart, surprisingly enjoyable Charlie Wilson's War, the freewheeling, fun-loving Representative Charles Wilson (Tom Hanks), he of the Texas 2nd Congressional District, tells his schlubby, foul-mouthed partner at the CIA, Gust Avrakotos (Philip Seymour Hoffman), "You ain't James Bond." Deadpans Avrakotos, "You ain't Thomas Jefferson, so let's call it even." True, Bond and Jefferson they're not, but that's actually part of the appeal of Nichols' lively little film. A strangely optimistic, almost Capraesque movie about the covert proxy war in Afghanistan (and, ultimately, the inadvertent role played by the U.S. in fostering the Taliban), Charlie Wilson's War -- adapted by The West Wing's Aaron Sorkin from the book by the late George Crile -- is no grim, sober-minded edutainment. Moving at a brisk clip and maintaining a light touch -- too light, some might argue -- throughout, the movie instead depicts how a few (relatively) ordinary, committed people can change the world...provided one of them is sitting on the House Defense Subcommittee, and has stacked up a sizable amount of chits.

When -- after a quick flash-forward setup -- we first meet Congressman Charlie Wilson (Tom Hanks, eschewing the Pvt. Ryan earnestness for his more sardonic Bachelor Party/Volunteers side), he's lounging in a Vegas hot tub with a coke-snorting television producer, a Playboy bunny, and two strippers. In short, he seems like a out-and-out cad. But there's something endearing and even statesmanlike about his piqued interest in a 60 Minutes report, playing in the corner, on the mujahideen in Afghanistan. (Maybe it's the Dan Rather Texas connection.) Delving further into the issue back in Washington, Wilson -- exercising the power of his crucial committee position -- singlehandedly doubles U.S. funding of the mujahideen from $5 million to $10 million. This by-all-accounts token gesture draws the attention of the wealthy Houston socialite Joanne Herring (Julia Roberts, solid), a woman with money, connections, and a fervent commitment to anticommunism, and she sends Wilson off to Pakistan to meet with President Zia-ul-Haq about the situation in neighboring Afghanistan. There, Wilson is moved to the cause by the sight of a dismal refugee camp, and soon enough, he's enlisted an important ally in Avrakotos, a profane Langley veteran (Hoffman, showing yet another side after Before the Devil and The Savages this year, and nearly running away with the movie.) Together, these three -- Wilson, Herring, Avrakotos (John Rambo's unique contributions to the cause of Afghan freedom are sadly overlooked -- set in motion a scheme not only to increase funding radically for the war but to funnel Soviet weaponry owned by Israel and Egypt to the freedom fighters there. Of course, some delicate diplomacy is required, and, in any case, giving Afghan youths an arsenal of helicopter-slaying RPGs doesn't seem like such a great an idea in retrospect...

While nodding to the dismal events that follow American intervention in the region, Charlie Wilson's War hardly dwells on the blowback, or on anything -- a few refugee camp horror stories and a Pavel Lychnikoff cameo notwithstanding -- that might interrupt its tone of hearty, back-slapping jocularity. (Supporting turns by Amy Adams, Emily Blunt, Ned Beatty, Denis O'Hare, John Slattery, and Peter Gerety help speed things along in a comfortable groove.) And yet, however feel-good, Wilson ultimately feels more ripped from the headlines than even the filmmakers could've guessed. Some lawmakers have trouble distinguishing between Pakistan and Afghanistan at one point, and Herring begins an introduction of Pakistan's President by saying, "Zia did not kill Bhutto." (Leavening the chill that follows this now-eerie moment, Rudy Giuliani and John Murtha also come up at various times as punchlines.)

But, its timeliness and prescience aside, what I found most impressive about Charlie Wilson's War is how aptly it portrays the feel of Washington. This was somewhat surprising to me as, while I liked Sorkin's The West Wing decently enough as a TV drama and admired its general idealism about politics, the show always felt rather fake to me. But, be it due to Crile or Sorkin or Nichols, Wilson conveys a lot of the telling details of life inside the Beltway quite well -- the hallway horse-trading and neverending quid pro quos, the simultaneous meetings, the bland, institutional cafeterias; the bevy of youngish staffers (and inordinately pretty administrative assistants) on Capitol Hill, the deals crafted over dinner or drinks, the conference calls, the memory holes, myopic thinking, and CYA behavior. Outside of The Wire's nuanced take on the compromises of Baltimore city politics, it's hard to think of a more on-target recent portrayal of the (non-campaigning) political process. Sadly, for Congressman Wilson as for today's legislators, fiddling with the internal dynamics of far-flung nations we barely understand for short-term gain is All in the Game. Still, as Charlie Wilson's War proves, don't let it ever be said that nothing gets done in Washington.

Congressman Tom Hanks bends the House rules for the mujahideen in Afghanistan in the new trailer for Mike Nichols' Charlie Wilson's War (from the book by George Crile), also starring Julia Roberts, Philip Seymour Hoffman, Amy Adams, Emily Blunt, and Ned Beatty. Hmmm...it looks a bit like Volunteers.

A day after Scotland Yard announces it managed to prevent a major terrorist incident (with the help of Pakistan), terror is back on the menu here at home, with the GOP invoking 9/11, 9/11, 9/11 and Lieberman -- absolutely wallowing in shamefulness now -- actually calling Lamont's recent victory a boon for plane-bombers. This was a terrifying near-event indeed -- were it not for top-notch intel work by British authorities, the world might've experienced another horrific day akin to September 11 in very short order. But, look closely, and you'll find this plot by homegrown British terrorists bears the likely marks of Al Qaeda, which, last I recall, we left somewhere near Afghanistan to go dink around in Iraq. Crossover Joe and the GOP can shout terror to the heavens, but the fact is that Osama bin Laden and Al Qaeda are more of a threat to us today because of Dubya's non-sequitur Iraq sideshow. Make no mistake: America is less safe because Dubya and the neocons chose to cut and run in Tora Bora so they could prosecute their war of choice in Baghdad.

"I do think she is so into this that she sees it from the inside out...And I'm not sure she adequately grasps all the mistakes we have made." The NYT profiles Meghan O'Sullivan, the deputy national security adviser for Iraq and Afghanistan. "In Baghdad, American Embassy officials sometimes use the phrase, 'Let's not Meghan-ize the problem,' meaning, let's not try to impose order on the chaos of Iraq with one of her five-point presentations." But, to be fair to O'Sullivan, the fellow she's briefing every day hasn't shown a propensity for understandiing anything more complex. In fact, five points may be stretching the limits of the presidential curiosity.

By way of a friend, the State Department releases its mandated yearly human rights report for 2005 (here), finding cause for alarm in Iran, Russia, China, Venezuela, Burma, North Korea, Belarus and Zimbabwe and (surprise, surprise) progress in Iraq and Afghanistan. The report doesn't delve into human rights violations here at home (although China tries to fill that gap in response every year), but it does unequivocally state -- in bold, no less -- that "countries in which power is concentrated in the hands of unaccountable rulers tend to be the world's most systematic human rights violators." Hey y'all might be on to something. Deadpans the head of Amnesty International: "The Bush administration's practice of transferring detainees in the 'war on terror' to countries cited by the State Department for their appalling human rights records actually turns the report into a manual for the outsourcing of torture."