Afghanistan Magic: How to Turn Mass Killing Into Public-Relations Victory

Thomas Barnett, a Pentagon consultant who contributed to post-2001 fiascos with his creation of an "arc of instability", blogs with an apparently straight face about the Washington Post story, which we covered last Friday, that the US military had finally admitted "operational mistakes" in the killing of up to 150 civilians in western Afghanistan:

It is both amazing and a credit to our military that we can so swiftly (just a month) and so readily admit serious operational mistakes in the field.

Some people--most actually--read this story and see only the screw-up. But the correction is impressive, despite the mistake.