Afghanistan: Furour over Petraeus' Alleged Remark "They Burn Their Own Children"

To the shock of President Hamid Karzai's aides, Gen. David H. Petraeus suggested Sunday at the presidential palace that Afghans caught up in a coalition attack in northeastern Afghanistan might have burned their own children to exaggerate claims of civilian casualties, according to two participants at the meeting.

The exact language Petraeus used in the closed-door session is not known, and neither is the precise message he meant to convey. But his remarks about the deadly U.S. military operation in Konar province were deemed deeply offensive by some in the room. They spoke on the condition of anonymity to describe the private discussions.

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Afghanistan Feature: "Travel with Paula" and See the Destroyed Villages (Foust)

Tom Ricks ran a guest-post today by Paula Broadwell, a former adviser to General Petraeus [commander of US forces in Afghanistan] and current PhD candidate at King’s College London, who is touring the war on a research trip. It is, in a word, abhorrent.

Start with the title: “Travels with Paula (I): A time to build.” It’s so… hopeful. So upbeat. The soldiers and Marines are building a glorious new future! The photos and story, however, tell a different story.

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Beyond The Arizona Shootings: The Real Danger of Divisive, Vitriolic Politics (Miller)

Cartoon: R.J. Matson (St Louis Post-Dispatch)In this important dialogue about the decency of our politics, an important point may be missed. The heated rhetoric, the hate speech, the shock-jocks, and the vitriolic politicians, have already claimed a prominent victim.

The truth.

The Greek dramatist Aeschylus wrote that the first casualty of war is truth, and if politics is war "by other means",  in the last decade it has moved from a chivalric duel to a scorched-earth campaign.

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Afghanistan Public-Relations Alert: "We Had to Destroy This Village So We Could Rebuild It"

The tone in the article in the US military's Stars and Stripes is the familiar of the upbeat, as General David Petraeus, the commander of US forces, addresses villagers in Kandahar Province in southern Afghanistan.

But there is a twist in the headline: "Petraeus Promises Villagers US Will Rebuild What It Has Knocked Down". 

That's right: the people addressed by Petraeus about their "truly unique opportunity" are in the special position of having no village.

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Afghanistan Lesson: It's Not Iraq (Rosen)

We have been surging in Afghanistan every year since 2005. We have been engaged in counterinsurgency since then as well. More and more of the same failed tactic is not going to work. And there is no strategy. The generals are begging for more time, more reviews and moving the goalposts year after year. How many Afghan and American lives are we going to throw away while we experiment with counterinsurgency in a country of no strategic importance? Pity the Afghans if we impose the Iraqi success on them.

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History Lesson: From the Big Muddy of Vietnam to the Quagmire of Afghanistan (Ryan)

The US was stuck in the “Big Muddy” for years, but it finds itself just as stuck today in Central Asia, drawn in by the enemy.

Obama’s recent decisions on Afghanistan, on Yemen and on Pakistan, coupled with the baying from Congress about Iran and the ongoing Tea Party tirades paint an American system that favours the tactical and symbolic over the strategic. There is no space to consider the observations of a man like Mikhail Gorbachev; the US is condemned to remain in their "quagmires", both real and imagined.

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Afghanistan: Holbrooke Death Overtakes Analysis of "No Decisive Victory"

The headline news in Washington is the death of Richard Holbrooke, the senior US diplomat involved in attempted resolution of conflicts from Bosnia to Afghanistan. The coverage is exemplified by this final sentence from a long profile in The Washington Post:

As Mr. Holbrooke was sedated for surgery, family members said, his final words were to his Pakistani surgeon: "You've got to stop this war in Afghanistan."

The tributes are likely to swamp any coverage of the current situation. On Sunday, Rajiv Chandrasekaran --- who wrote the Post eulogy for Holbrooke --- had published a long article on the tensions between US officials and Afghan President Hamid Karzai.

And last night Deb Reichmann of the Associated Press wrote an incisive and significant-analysis which is likely to disappear today:

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Afghanistan: Hamid Karzai --- America's "Question Mark" (Chandrasekaran)

Afghan President Hamid Karzai had heard enough.

For more than an hour, Gen. David H. Petraeus, U.S. Ambassador Karl W. Eikenberry and other top Western officials in Kabul urged Karzai to delay implementing a ban on private security firms. Reconstruction projects worth billions of dollars would have to be shuttered, they maintained, if foreign guards were evicted.

Sitting at the head of a glass-topped, U-shaped table in his conference room, Karzai refused to budge, according to two people with direct knowledge of the late October meeting. He insisted that Afghan police and soldiers could protect the reconstruction workers, and he dismissed pleas for a delay.

As he spoke, he grew agitated, then enraged. He told them that he now has three "main enemies" --- the Taliban, the United States and the international community.

"If I had to choose sides today, I'd choose the Taliban," he fumed.

After a few more parting shots, he got up and walked out of the wood-paneled room.

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Afghanistan: America's Failed War of Attrition (Scahill)

It is not simply a matter of ideology versus technology. The Taliban is not one unified body. The Afghan insurgency is fueled by fighters with a wide variety of motivations. Some are dedicated jihadists, but others are fighting to defend their land or are seeking revenge for the killing of family members by NATO or Afghan forces. While Al Qaeda has been almost entirely expelled from Afghanistan, the insurgency still counts a small number of non-Afghans among its ranks. Bolstering the Taliban's recruitment efforts is the perception in Afghanistan that the Taliban pays better than NATO or the Afghan army or police.

The hard reality US officials don't want to discuss is this: the cultural and religious values of much of the Pashtun population--which comprises 25–40 percent of the country--more closely align with those of the Taliban than they do with Afghan government or US/NATO forces.

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Afghanistan Latest: US and NATO Move Towards Perpetual Commitment

Success/withdrawal is dead. Long live the new date for success/non-withdrawal.

The amnesia in most of the reporting on this week's NATO summit on Afghanistan is quite remarkable. No one mentions that, only weeks ago, President Obama's policy was for a total pull-out of US combat forces by July 2011. Instead the assumption --- pushed by the US military --- was now established: troops would remain until 2014.

And now, even more remarkably, the media is pulled along with yet another narrative: "NATO and American officials also warned that if Afghanistan had not made sufficient progress in managing its own security, 2014 was not a hard and fast deadline for the end of combat operations."

It will be a perpetual transition.

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