Neocons have begun to warm to Barack Obama’s foreign policy vision.

Kabul, Afghanistan 

The spectacle of Afghanistan’s presidential elections seems to be finally entering its final act. Pulling out of the runoff race at the last minute, Abdullah Abdullah has cleared the way for Hamed Karzai to be the winner by default. 

Both men appear to have achieved many, if not all, of their original goals. Karzai, of course, has retained his seat for another five years. Abdullah, the underdog, has denied Karzai the much-needed legitimacy that a second round of voting was supposed to confer. Now the Afghan president will be serving under the cloud created by the massive fraud that characterized the first round of voting in August.

Obama wants a study of the country at a micro-level. That seems reasonable enough in the abstract--but it's also coming a bit late. This, too, wasn't done during that January-March review? It also signals something less than a vote of total confidence in the judgment of the top U.S. commander on the ground, Stanley McChrystal.

Barack Obama is currently mulling what will certainly be some of the defining choices of his presidency: Should he send a lot more troops to Afghanistan, as his commander there has recommended, and, if so, what should their objectives be?

Understanding the issue is critical. So over the past couple weeks, TNR has commissioned a series of pieces examining various angles of our involvement in Afghanistan. Here they are:

Dick Cheney says the Bush administration left the Obama administration with a plan (and a good one) for Afghanistan:

When the world last left Wesley Clark in early 2004, he was a streaking meteor of a presidential candidate. Still fresh from leading NATO in the Kosovo war, he arrived as a savior for the left, who saw a bulletproof patriot that the rest of America could believe in; hero of the netroots, beloved by Michael Moore and Madonna; hope of the Clintonites, delighted by such a clean ideological slate.

• The ‘Civilian Surge’ Myth: Stop Pretending That the U.S. Can Actually Nation-Build, by Steven Metz

  

Back when my wife was teaching third grade, I used to joke about grading her students’ book reports the way you might treat an academic paper or a book review in TNR. (“This book report on George Washington, a scant three pages, does nothing to advance our understanding of the first president.”)

Kevin Drum thinks people, including myself, are being too hard on the Obama team when it comes to AfPak policymaking:

If [Rajiv] Chandrasekar's account is correct, the fault isn't really with the Obama administration at all.  It's with the military: McKiernan was on board with the counterinsurgency strategy but didn't indicate that he needed more troops to implement it....

Later, of course, McKiernan was pushed out and a new commander took a fresh look at what resources were needed.  But that hardly reflects badly on Obama, and it doesn't really sound like anyone screwed up back in March.  Long story short, the military changed its mind about troop levels between March and September, and now Obama has to decide how to respond to that.  I don't really see a case for ineptness here...

Here's the problem: There are, or should be, plenty of people in the Obama administration who understand how much manpower the counterinsurgency approach implied by their March policy review would require. Here's what COIN guru John Nagl was saying back in February, before the review was completed:

At this week’s Association of the U.S. Army Annual Meeting and Exposition in Washington DC, Defense Secretary Robert Gates offered a startling blunt rebuke of General Stanley McChrystal, commander of U.S. forces in Afghanistan. While the commentariat buzzed about rifts in the Obama administration and a potential  Truman-MacArthur showdown, I couldn’t help but wonder: What the heck is the Association of the U.S. Army Annual Meeting and Exposition? I skipped lunch yesterday and headed to the DC convention center to find out.

Liberal pundits, Defense Secretary Robert Gates, and National Security Advisor James Jones are in agreement: General Stanley McChrystal, commander of U.S. and NATO forces in Afghanistan, was wrong to give public voice to his views about the best way forward in that beleaguered country. Yale law professor Bruce Ackerman accused McChrystal of “a plain violation of the principle of civilian control.” Washington Post columnist Eugene Robinson put it most bluntly: "The men with the stars on their shoulders … need to shut up and salute." Some are even drawing parallels between McChrystal and Douglas MacArthur. All these critics are wrong.

Also noteworthy from that Newsweek oral history is this view, from a former Taliban deputy minister, of the trouble Arab "camels" brought to his cause:

WASHINGTON--At a White House dinner with a group of historians at the beginning of the summer, Robert Dallek, a shrewd student of both the Kennedy and Johnson administrations, offered a chilling comment to President Obama.

"In my judgment," he recalls saying, "war kills off great reform movements."

Frankly, I don't care that Chicago lost its bid for the Olympics.  Really, I don't.

But maybe the president's trip to Copenhagen was useful since his top battle commander in Afghanistan, General Stanley McChrystal, traveling from England to Denmark, had the opportunity to meet Barack Obama on Air Force One.  Their talking with each other is, after all, a rarity.  In fact, Obama and McChrystal had spoken but once since the general took on AfPak as his turf in early June 2009. With whom, then, is Obama conversing? And how independent of mind on military matters are they? Or are they of the touchy-feely persuasion?

Speaking in diplomatese, the White House press office graded the Obama-McChrystal conversation as "productive," which means neither a disaster nor especially gratifying. My guess is that, in this context, it actually means not impolite. Their differences have been a big topic in the news, and the standoff is clear: McChrystal wants more troops and has a strategy to mobilize them; the president wants less, many many less, and to get Kabul off the nightly news. During the campaign, he spoke of the American involvement in Afghanistan as a war of necessity rather than a war of choice, like Iraq, which was made to seem like a war of sinful desire. No longer.

The Iranian regime has made headlines this week with its announcement that it will allow inspections into its recently discovered enrichment site in Qom, and its agreement, albeit ambiguously, to allow enrichment to be handled by Russia or France. Less covered, but actually more important, are recent statements from the Iranian opposition against the nuclear weapons program--warning Western leaders not to be fooled by Ahmdinejad’s latest concessions, and actually offering a viable alternative to solve the current nuclear standoff.

I don't know how many head-of-state nut cases arrived in New York for the annual meetings of the United Nations General Assembly. But surely there are many others besides Mahmoud Ahmadinejad and Muamar Gaddafi. There is a class of rulers from Africa, for example, who govern recklessly in behalf of themselves but under the cover of one or another form of millenarianism. (The brutal clowns of South America are a bit different. They still believe that Fidel Castro is a model for building the good society.) This is, I suppose, the revenge of ideology over the London School of Economics.

Largely invisible in the current debate over troop levels in Afghanistan, which has exposed some stress fractures between the Obama White House and the Pentagon, is Centcom commander David Petraeus. Given his immense credibility as the man perceived to have "saved" Iraq, Petraeus could have a potentially decisive influence on a domestic political debate about troop levels by making his own assessment known. But, while Petraeus's commentary about Iraq was once ubiquitous, today he's laying awfully low.

Look, everything I know about the top U.S.

With the Iraq war spinning out of control in mid-2005, retired Marine General James L. Jones spoke with his old friend Peter Pace, the incoming chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff. Jones, who is now Barack Obama's national security advisor, had been sounded out for the Joint Chiefs job but demurred. One reason: He felt that civilian leaders in Washington were warping the military planning process. "Military advice is being influenced on a political level," Jones warned Pace, according to Bob Woodward's book State of Denial. Jones's warning squared with other reports at the time that U.S. commanders in Iraq felt pressure to keep troop levels low. Faced with a growing Democratic onslaught, the Bush White House was all too determined to pretend that the war was under control.

USA Today finds that under the new American commander in Afghanistan, Stanley McChrystal, NATO airstrikes are down 50 percent. Unfortunately Afghans are probably far more aware of last week's airstrike in Kunduz--Afghan officials now say 30 civilians were killed--than they are of that statistaic.

The Soviet defeat in Afghanistan is often cited as evidence that major powers simply can't tame that miserable country. But Gregory Feifer's The Great Gamble: The Soviet War in Afghanistan actually offers some cause for hope about America's prospects there. We are now conducting a military operation  completely different from the Red Army's stupidly brutal approach. Athough U.S.

The WaPo's Rajiv Chandrasekaran has a long article on the sacking of David McKiernan, formerly the top U.S. commander in Kabul. The main reason for McKiernan's removal, according to Chandrasekaran:

This is interesting. Last November, the New York Times revealed a secret Bush administration order that authorized commando incursions into Pakistani territory. President Obama's new Afghanistan commander shows up in the piece:

Baghdad, Iraq In December 2007, the Alpha Company of the 4-64 Armor Battalion of the Fourth Brigade, Third Infantry Division, arrived in the neighborhood of Saidiyah in southwest Baghdad. More than half of the onceupscale, religiously mixed neighborhood's 60,000 residents had fled to Jordan, Syria, or other parts of Iraq. Those who stayed rarely ventured out of their homes. Up until a few months earlier, human corpses had littered the street, where stray dogs feasted on them. The police were responsible for collecting the bodies and delivering them to the morgue, but they tended to shirk this duty because warring militias often booby-trapped the bodies.