Ever since he helped convince Hamid Karzai last week to agree to a run-off election, John Kerry has become a critical player on Afghanistan policy to a degree that's surprising even for a chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee. Today, Kerry gave a speech on Afghanistan at the Council on Foreign Relations, in which he indicated that, while he thinks General McChrystal's counterinsurgency plan is too ambitious, he would support Obama sending some additional troops. A couple hours after the speech, in an interview with TNR, Kerry talked about how and why he believes Karzai has changed and what he considers his own role to be in working with the Obama administration.

Up from History:
The Life of Booker T. Washington

By Robert J. Norrell

(Harvard University Press, 508 pp., $35)

I.

Once the most famous and influential African American in the United States (and probably the world), Booker T. Washington has earned at best mixed reviews in the decades since his death in 1915. Black intellectuals and political activists, from W. E. B. Du Bois to the present day, have generally seen Washington as a conservative racial accommodationist, yielding to the repressive power of Jim Crow and urging American blacks to abandon their political struggles for equality and instead to set their sights on a future of manual labor and petty property ownership.

The defense ministers of our NATO allies met last week in Slovakia--a place where NATO power has much recent neighborly resonance--and among the gathering was also Robert Gates. His position on Afghanistan is not quite clear, poised as he is between his president and his men. Of course, Obama has more power. And his men are not really his in the sense that his career, even while in the military, was with intelligence operations and not the military.

Now, having already chastised General Stanley McChrystal for embarrassing him and his boss, Gates did not especially need his civilian colleagues, to a person, in the Western defense apparatus to join together and press for "more" rather than "less" in Afghanistan. It is something that wouldn't have occurred had George Bush still been president, whatever position he actually held on additional men, women and materiel to the AfPak battle theatre.

In any case, what is clear is that the alliance does not want to be dragged into a military commitment. Afghanistan is its military commitment, and strongly so. It has acted to influence Obama in actually fulfilling his commitment made to American voters last year and it is trying to prevent him from backtracking or sidetracking. This is, moreover, not just a rhetorical move: it comes with the promise of personnel, the most precious promise of all.

The NYT reports on the NATO defense ministers meeting in Brussels, which featured a surprise appearance by General McChrystal:

President Obama faces an enormous political challenge in figuring out how to respond to General Stanley McChrystal's request for more soldiers in Afghanistan. One the one hand, resisting troop requests from the military during a time of war is difficult for any chief executive--particularly for Democratic presidents. On the other hand, Americans are showing little stomach to once again commit more troops to a distant, war-torn region: No recent survey has found majority support for the idea.

General Stanley McChrystal's request to send more troops to Afghanistan has induced sticker shock for many Americans--including, apparently, President Obama. The integrated counterinsurgency, or COIN, strategy that McChrystal wants to pursue has many components: protecting Afghan civilians, rapidly expanding the Afghan army and police, reforming government, providing economic development assistance, weaning Taliban fighters and leaders away from Mullah Omar and Osama bin Laden, reconciling them into the new government, and targeting those who refuse. This makes it a demanding strategy that McChrystal reportedly believes will require providing at least an additional 10,000 to 40,000 U.S. troops and more than doubling existing Afghan forces to a total of 400,000 indigenous soldiers and police. (Full disclosure: I served as a member of General McChrystal's assessment team in June and July 2009, but I do not speak for his command, and the views expressed here are strictly my own.) This price tag has further galvanized opposition to a war whose support was already fading fast.

For months, the White House has been saying that President Obama would personally roll out the results of his administration's long-delayed Sudan Policy Review, which will officially set the direction of U.S. policy for Darfur and South Sudan, a region that will soon decide whether to become an independent country. (Update: Click here to read the text of the actual policy and my analysis.)

Now, the review is finally here. It will be announced by Hillary Clinton, UN Ambassador Susan Rice, and the U.S. envoy to Sudan, General Scott Gration. Obama does not plan to attend, most likely because the president's political handlers don't want to further associate him with a policy that has been an ongoing public-relations disaster. That's a shame, because it signals to the world and the government of Sudan that Obama himself is not particularly engaged on the issue, and it's a sad contrast to the deeply concerned speeches Obama gave in front of Save Darfur groups before he became president. (He even co-wrote an introduction to Not on Our Watch: The Mission to End Genocide in Darfur and Beyond, by Don Cheadle and John Prendergast.)

While we won't know the exact contents of the review until we hear today's announcement, the initial press leaks make it sound like a consensus document. It does not include many of the most dramatic policy prescriptions advocated by Scott Gration, who has often spoken about lifting sanctions as soon as possible and otherwise incentivizing Khartoum without applying much in the way of pressure. (He has described his preferences thusly: "We've got to think about giving out cookies. … Kids, countries--they react to gold stars, smiley faces, handshakes, agreements, talk, engagement.") For instance, the review does not provide for Sudan's removal from the list of designated State Sponsors of Terrorism, it does not call for an immediate lifting of sanctions without a quid pro quo from Khartoum, and it does not authorize Gration to negotiate directly with Sudan's president, who has been indicted of war crimes by the International Criminal Court (ICC). The review also does not adopt Gration's preferred description of the violence in Darfur—he wants to call it "the remnants of genocide," but the policy review is said to maintain that genocide "is taking place" in Darfur.

Alex Massie gives eight reasons why Petraeus is unlikely to run for president in 2012--and why, if he does, he's even more unlikely to win. Four of those reasons can be summed up in two words: Wes Clark.

In light of the latest Petraeus '12 speculation (this time from Peter Beinart), Andrew Sullivan wants to know why everyone's so sure the General is a member of the GOP, wondering whether people are just assuming "that military = Republican." As best I can tell, the assumption that Petraeus is a Republican stems from the fact that he is.

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.”)

The situation in Afghanistan increasingly looks like Iraq did not too long ago. Not the actual political or military circumstances, of course, but the analysis and commentary. Phrases like "We’re entering a decisive period" and "It’s now or never" are being tossed around ominously as the debate over troop increases rages. One can hardly read an op-ed without being told that the situation is dire and that this is a critical time, perhaps even our Last Chance to Get It Right. Most notably, the report produced by General Stanley McChrystal announced that "the short-term fight will be decisive."

I’m grateful to Michael Cohen for challenging my views on General McChrystal, because it invites me--indeed, compels me--to say more about how I reached my conclusion. (Click here to find out why Joe Biden flipped on Afghanistan.)

Let’s begin with some propositions about which I suspect there’s little disagreement: Entering or expanding a war is the gravest decision a political community can make. Lives, scarce resources, and honor are at stake, and the consequences of mistaken judgments are both large and lasting. Whatever may be the case for other regimes, a democracy cannot sustain the decision to enter or expand a war without the people’s informed assent.

I was a junior in college when LBJ made his fateful choice to escalate the war in Vietnam after assuring the American people that he would do nothing of the sort and winning the presidency in part on the basis of that assurance. The people were shut out of the process, and Congress lacked the information to object. It was not until years later, largely through leaks, that we learned about the doubts and dissent that attended that decision. Would it have made a difference if we had known? Who knows? But the fact is that we didn’t, with consequences that have persisted down to the present.

Camp Julien is surrounded by reminders of Afghanistan’s past. The coalition military base--which sits in the hills south of Kabul, just high enough to rise above the thick cloud of smog that perpetually blankets the city--is flanked by two European-style palaces built in the 1920s by the modernizing King Amanullah. Home to Soviet troops and mujahedin during the past decades of war, the now-crumbling palaces are littered with bullet holes and decorated with graffiti in multiple languages. Uphill from Julien is the old Russian officers’ club, dating from the Soviet invasion and featuring a recently refilled swimming pool that overlooks the southern half of the city. The pool is said to have been the site of executions in the 1990s; the condemned were apparently shot off the diving board.

Our culture lives virtually without its history, which makes it a very weird culture, indeed. In France, on sabbatical a few years back, I listened to a dinner conversation about Marshal Foch. Who? Marshal Foch. How did we come around to him? Someone at the table said she'd been born in Tarbes, a small town known primarily for its proximity to Lourdes. Another guest noted that Foch had been born there. And then followed a long, discursive conversation about Foch. Everyone (except me) contributed, some a few gossipy morsels (imagine gossip 70 years after the man's death), others much deeper thoughts, including a young journalist's views on Foch's views on Napoleon. As I recall, withering. The evening ended with an argument about whose remains were next to Foch's at Les Invalides. So who was John J. Pershing? Well, there's a Pershing Square in New York … very shabby.

But, suddenly, there's a lot of talk and print about General Douglas MacArthur. In Cambridge this past Saturday, a middle aged scientist said that MacArthur had been insolent to President Truman over how to end the Korean War. "And it was a good thing he was canned."

I remember when he was canned. I was a child when the general was dumped, and--yes--it was a very good thing that he was dumped. He had delusions of victory when the price of victory would have been nuclear weapons. In any case, the Korean War was a very unpopular war, more unpopular certainly than the Iraq War. People were impatient for it to end. And one of the reasons they were impatient was because it was going nowhere.

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.

Jim Jones's stern words for General McChrystal on the Sunday shows have gotten plenty of attention, but less noticed were Jones's comments about John McCain, who'd accused Jones of not "want[ing] to alienate the left base of the Democrat Party” on Afghanistan:

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.

Newsweek has a long and thorough profile of Obama's man in Afghanistan:

I confess to reading people on the right. Sometimes with utter dismay. Oftentimes with respect. Among the people I read regularly is Peter Wehner who actually writes for Commentary's website, Contentious, with other conservative intellectuals. And very contentious they are. Wehner actually was one of George Bush's speechwriters. Since I thought some of Bush's speeches quite alright--and even better--this fact is not a disqualifier.

Indeed, Wehner is one smart guy ... and a stylish writer besides. What's more, he knows his history. Today, he's dug into the history of the Cold War, an era not so strategically remote from our own. Except that the enemy is militarily far weaker than we are but stronger in the fact that it hides behind civilians--committed to it and utterly indifferent to it--which, given our scruples, provides enormous advantages to our foe.

This is the circumstance that permits the Goldstone panel, installed by the oh, so impartial Human Rights Council, to accuse Israel of war crimes. Moreover, it is the setting for charging the United States and NATO in Afghanistan also with war crimes.

Could the Dems lose the House in 2010?

Keynes' "General Theory" was all about rational expectations.

And he was right that you could spend your way out of a recession.

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

More evidence for the idea that policymakers see "winning" in Afghanistan and an end in and of itself:

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.

A conservative veteran's group wants to make it happen: 

Mr. Hegseth, for his part, said his group [Vets for Freedom] planned to use Gen. McChrystal's name and image in all of its mailings about Afghanistan as a way of making him the public face of the Afghan war. The idea draws heavily from the Bush administration, which used Gen. David Petraeus as an effective public surrogate during the Iraq debates.