A sad and not terribly unusual case:

An Army cook and single mom may face criminal charges after she skipped her deployment flight to Afghanistan because, she said, no one was available to care for her infant son while she was overseas. Spc. Alexis Hutchinson, 21, claims she had no choice but to refuse deployment orders because the only family she had to care for her 10-month-old son — her mother — was overwhelmed by the task, already caring for three other relatives with health problems.

Her civilian attorney, Rai Sue Sussman, said Monday that one of Hutchinson’s superiors told her she would have to deploy anyway and place the child in foster care. “For her it was like, ‘I couldn’t abandon my child,’” Sussman said. “She was really afraid of what would happen, that if she showed up they would send her to Afghanistan anyway and put her son with child protective services.”

Hutchinson, who is from Oakland, Calif., remained confined Monday to the boundaries of Hunter Army Airfield in Savannah, 10 days after military police arrested her for skipping her unit’s flight. No charges have been filed, but a spokesman for the Army post said commanders were investigating.

Kevin Larson, a spokesman for Hunter Army Airfield, said he didn’t know what Hutchinson was told by her commanders, but he said the Army would not deploy a single parent who had nobody to care for his or her child. “I don’t know what transpired and the investigation will get to the bottom of it,” Larson said. “If she would have come to the deployment terminal with her child, there’s no question she would not have been deployed.”

My guess is that the Army will be lenient with Hutchinson, likely giving her nonjudicial punishment under Article 15 of the UCMJ.   Her actions were stupid rather than venal and it would be both unjust and a publicity nightmare to put her in jail.  Indeed, the best course of action here would be a hardship discharge.

The broader question is why the Army allows people to draw paychecks and fill unit slots who are essentially permanently non-deployable.  It’s not just single parents, although there are a lot of them in the service.  There are also large numbers of dual-military couples with children, presenting essentially the same issue.  People with ailments that are treatable and allow them to fulfill peacetime duties but not go off to war are allowed to serve as well.  And when their units go off to the fight, they remain behind.

This makes no sense, if one presumes that the primary function of the military is war-fighting rather than job creation or social welfare.  It was an irrational policy in the 1980s, when the U.S. military was mostly a deterrent. It’s simply crazy given the operations tempo of the past two decades.

The scuttlebutt that’s coming out now in Washington is that President Obama doesn’t much like the plans for Afghanistan offered by his advisors:

WASHINGTON – President Barack Obama does not plan to accept any of the Afghanistan war options presented by his national security team, pushing instead for revisions to clarify how and when U.S. troops would turn over responsibility to the Afghan government, a senior administration official said Wednesday.

That stance comes in the midst of forceful reservations about a possible troop buildup from the U.S. ambassador in Afghanistan, Karl Eikenberry, according to a second top administration official.

In strongly worded classified cables to Washington, Eikenberry said he had misgivings about sending in new troops while there are still so many questions about the leadership of Afghan President Hamid Karzai.

Despite his having campaigned for two years on the urgency and necessity of the war in Afghanistan, it’s not difficult to see why President Obama would have misgivings on doubling down there. Victory at a cost and in a timeframe acceptable to the American people is far from assured and may even be impossible. And then there’s domestic criticism along the lines of Nicholas Kristof’s column in the New York Times today:

So if President Obama dispatches another 30,000 or 40,000 troops, on top of the 68,000 already there, that would bring the total annual bill for our military presence there to perhaps $100 billion — or more. And we haven’t even come to the human costs.

As for health care reforms, the 10-year cost suggests an average of $80 billion to $110 billion per year, depending on what the final bill looks like.

Granted, the health care costs will continue indefinitely, while the United States cannot sustain 100,000 troops in Afghanistan for many years. On the other hand, the health care legislation pays for itself, according to the Congressional Budget Office, while the deployment in Afghanistan is unfinanced and will raise our budget deficits and undermine our long-term economic security.

So doesn’t it seem odd to hear hawks say that health reform is fiscally irresponsible, while in the next breath they cheer a larger deployment of troops in Afghanistan?

Meanwhile, lack of health insurance kills about 45,000 Americans a year, according to a Harvard study released in September. So which is the greater danger to our homeland security, the Taliban or our dysfunctional insurance system?

It seems to me that similar criticisms could be made of all of our military spending, our overseas military bases, our foreign aid, of supporting embassies in other countries, and so on. Are those really the alternatives or is it a false choice? Might we withdraw from Afghanistan only to find ourselves spending even more on defense a couple of years down the road?

I think I’ve made my own views pretty clear. I think that there are tactical, strategic, legal, and moral reasons for not simply withdrawing from Afghanistan but, following the lead of Afghanistan authority Rory Stewart, I think that we need to take a longer, more modest, and less military view. I think that we’ll need what Ralph Peters has described as “a compact, lethal force” in Afghanistan for the foreseeable future but I’m skeptical of any large force of ours in Afghanistan whether for counter-terrorism as has been suggested by Vice President Joe Biden or counter-insurgency as Gen. Stanley McChrystal’s plan that’s on the president’s desk now provides.

What will the president do? What should the president do?

Please leave your policy prescriptions in the comments including the strategic objectives, how you’d accomplish them, the relationship between your preferred approach and the strategic objectives, and how you would mitigate the risks of your approach.

In hindsight, it appears that Major Nidal Malik Hasan, the mass murderer who killed 14 (one of the soldiers killed, Francheska Velez, was six weeks pregnant) and wounded another 30 at Fort Hood, had long made it known that he sympathized with the enemy. Bloomberg’s Justin Blum:

Major Nidal Malik Hasan, the Army psychiatrist accused of a shooting spree that killed 13 people at the Fort Hood Army Base in Texas, called the war on terrorism “a war against Islam,” said a doctor who was in a graduate program with him.

While studying for a masters degree in public health in 2007, Hasan used a presentation for an environmental health class to argue that Muslims were being targeted by the U.S. anti-terror campaign, said Val Finnell, a classmate. “He was very vocal about the war, very upfront about being a Muslim first and an American second,” said Finnell, 41, a preventive medicine doctor in Los Angeles, in an interview yesterday. “He was always concerned that Muslims in the military were being persecuted.”

[...]

Finnell said he remembered Hasan “vividly” and said of the shooting: “I’m not surprised, based on the things he said in the past. I’m shocked that it happened, but not surprised.”

In conversations, students challenged Hasan on his statements and he would become “visibly upset, sweaty, nervous,” Finnell said. Toward the end of the program, in 2008, Hasan gave a presentation that was billed as a survey of the climate for Muslims who serve in the U.S. military, Finnell said. “It wasn’t really very objective,” Finnell said. “It was like he was trying to prove a point.”

One witness claims Hasan shouted “Allahu Akbar!” before he began shooting.  Another witness says, “He didn’t say a word.”

Clearly, Hasan was unstable and, at very least, not fit to serve as an Army officer, much less an Army psychiatrist treating returning veterans from a war he hated.  So, why was he still serving?

As NPR’s Tom Gjelten reports,

The vital facts of Hasan’s life do not suggest a man determined to kill dozens of his fellows as they sat unarmed in a crowded waiting room. He was born in Arlington, Va. His parents were immigrants, but so are millions of other Americans. His heritage was Palestinian, but he didn’t even speak Arabic. He went to Virginia Tech and in 1997 joined the Army. It was through the Army that he got his medical training. He was due to be deployed to Afghanistan.

Those who look for a ready explanation for the murderous rampage at Fort Hood can choose between two broad narratives: Maybe it had to do with the travails of an Army psychiatrist, dealing with soldiers who had been traumatized, even disfigured, by their war experience; or maybe it had to do with being Muslim.

[...]

The portrait of Hasan as a Muslim radical doesn’t entirely make sense to those who knew him well. Imam Faisal Khan, whose D.C.-area mosque Hasan attended over a 10-year period, never got the idea he was ashamed of his Army service.

“He would come in his uniforms many times,” Khan said. “He would come in his uniform and pray. And then I knew he was in the Army. He liked his job. That’s what he was trained for, you know, to serve in the military.”

His psychological evaluations were apparently well within normal range, with “No signs of physical or mental problems in examinations as recently as September,”  according to Army records obtained by WaPo.

And yet there were strong signs that things were not right.   His alleged comments while away at a civilian* school would likely have escaped military attention.  But other officers noticed troubling behavior, too.

Col Terry Lee, a retired officer who worked with him at the military base in Texas, alleged Maj Hasan had angry confrontations with other officers over his views.

[...]

“He was making outlandish comments condemning our foreign policy and claimed Muslims had the right to rise up and attack Americans,” Col Lee told Fox News. “He said Muslims should stand up and fight the aggressor and that we should not be in the war in the first place.” He said that Maj Hasan said he was “happy” when a US soldier was killed in an attack on a military recruitment centre in Arkansas in June. An American convert to Islam was accused of the shootings.

Col Lee alleged that other officers had told him that Maj Hasan had said “maybe people should strap bombs on themselves and go to Time Square” in New York.

He claimed he was aware that the major had been subject to “name calling” during heated arguments with other officers.

Federal law enforcement officials have said Maj Hasan had come to their attention at least six months ago because of internet postings that discussed suicide bombings and other threats. The officials said the postings appeared to have been made by Maj Hasan but they were still trying to confirm that he was the author.

He was a daily attendee of a radical, Wahhabi mosque and there are numerous reports that Hasan was harassed because of his views.

Hasan, 39, told relatives he’d been harassed by other soldiers for his faith. Last month, soldier John Van de Walker, 30, was arrested for scratching Hasan’s Honda with a key, police said.

The manager of the Killeen, Tex., apartment complex where Hasan lived said the vandal had returned from Iraq and targeted Hasan because he of a Muslim bumper sticker. “No one should have to deal with that kind of hate. Maybe he snapped,” said Alice Thompson, 53.

One hesitates to psychoanalyze crazies but, rather clearly, Hasan harbored rage years before his car was keyed.  And the Army took appropriate action in response to that incident.

In hindsight, it’s pretty clear that the Army didn’t do the same with regard to the signs that Hasan was unfit.  But it’s not at all inconceivable that “the Army” had no idea.  The fact that several of his colleagues had heard him say highly inflammatory things doesn’t mean that these things were reported up through the chain of command.  Further, it’s not entirely clear what his superiors could have done with these reports, aside from confronting and counseling him.

While highly constrained in terms of time, place, and manner, military officers are allowed to disagree with official government policy in casual conversation with one another.  Plenty of officers, including those currently deployed to Iraq and Afghanistan, have no doubt expressed bitterness at missions they don’t believe in.  Lord knows, a large number of them did so about the various deployments ordered by Bill Clinton in the 1990s.  And, while it may not have made Hasan a popular guy on base, one doesn’t have to be a Muslim or want Americans killed to hold the view that citizens have a right to “rise up” against an invading force.

Beyond that, there’s a natural reluctance to be overly aggressive in challenging a Muslim soldier as an enemy sympathizer.  Being accused of racial profiling can be damaging to one’s career.  Further, it can feed natural resentments against Muslim soldiers, almost all of whom are just as loyal to the country, the uniform, and their fellow soldiers as the next guy.

I’m of course reminded of Sgt. Hasan Akbar, who went into a religious-inspired rage and murdered two 101st Airborne Division officers in 2003.   But, as Spencer Ackerman reminds us, Sergeant John Russell, who killed five soldiers in a shooting spree at Camp Liberty back in May, was not a Muslim.  So, outlandish claims that “the enemy is infiltrating our military” are unhelpful.

We have a natural desire to want to make sense of tragedy.  Unfortunately, we seem to have lone psychopaths going on shooting sprees and committing mass mayhem every now and again.  And we only see the “obvious” clues in hindsight.

*UPDATE:  A more recent AP report points out that the graduate school where Hasan made the comments was run by the military and adds further fuel to the fire that his seniors should have been aware of that they had a problem.

“I told him, `There’s something wrong with you,’” Osman Danquah, co-founder of the Islamic Community of Greater Killeen, told The Associated Press on Saturday. “I didn’t get the feeling he was talking for himself, but something just didn’t seem right.” Danquah assumed the military’s chain of command knew about Hasan’s doubts, which had been known for more than a year to classmates in a graduate military medical program. His fellow students complained to the faculty about Hasan’s “anti-American propaganda,” but said a fear of appearing discriminatory against a Muslim student kept officers from filing a formal written complaint.

“The system is not doing what it’s supposed to do,” said Dr. Val Finnell, who studied with Hasan from 2007-2008 in the master’s program in public health at the military’s Uniformed Services University of the Health Sciences. “He at least should have been confronted about these beliefs, told to cease and desist, and to shape up or ship out.”

[...]

Danquah said he was so disturbed by Hasan’s persistent questioning that he recommended the mosque reject Hasan’s request to become a lay Muslim leader at Fort Hood. But he never saw a need to tell anyone at the sprawling Army post about the talks, because Hasan never expressed anger toward the Army or indicated any plans for violence.  “If I had an inkling that he had this type of inclination or intentions, definitely I would have brought it to their attention,” he said.

Finnell said he did just that during a year of study in which Hasan made a presentation “that justified suicide bombing” and spewed “anti-American propaganda” as he argued the war on terror was “a war against Islam.” Finnell said he and at least one other student complained about Hasan, surprised that someone with “this type of vile ideology” would be allowed to wear an officer’s uniform.   But Finnell said no one filed a formal, written complaint about Hasan’s comments out of fear of appearing discriminatory.  “In retrospect, I’m not surprised he did it,” Finnell said. “I had real questions about what his priorities were, what his beliefs were.”

Hasan received a poor performance evaluation while at Walter Reed Army Medical Center, according to an official who spoke on condition of anonymity because he was not authorized to discuss the case publicly. And while he was an intern at the suburban Washington hospital, Hasan had some “difficulties” that required counseling and extra supervision, said Dr. Thomas Grieger, who was the training director at the time.

Hasan was promoted from captain to major in 2008, the same year he graduated from the master’s program. Bernard Rostker, a military personnel expert at the Rand Corp., said Hasan’s advancement was all but certain absent a serious blemish on his record, such as a DUI or a drug charge. “We’re short of officers, particularly at the major and lieutenant colonel level because of the war, and we’re short of psychiatrists,” said Rostker, who served as under secretary of defense for personnel and readiness during the Clinton administration. “There would have had to be something very detrimental in his record before there would have been a banner that would have said, ‘No, we don’t want to promote him.’”

If senior military leaders knowingly kept quiet about Hasan’s incompatibility for service in order to meet personnel quotas, they’ve aided and abetted the murder of thirteen soldiers.

Remember a couple of weeks ago, when Congress passed a $680 billion appropriation? Well, don’t worry–the military will be getting still more money:

The nation’s top military officer said Wednesday that he expected the Pentagon to ask Congress in the next few months for emergency financing to support the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, even though President Obama has pledged to end the Bush administration practice of paying for the conflicts with so-called supplemental funds that are outside the normal Defense Department budget.

The financing would be on top of the $130 billion that Congress authorized for the wars just last month.

The military officer, Adm. Mike Mullen, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, did not say how much additional money would be needed, but one figure in circulation within the Pentagon and among outside defense budget analysts is $50 billion.

Link via John Cole, who says:

Personally, I think it would be supremely irresponsible to act on this legislation without seeing the CBO score. I’m hoping Max Baucus and the blue dogs will get on that, because I’d like to know how this legislation will pay for itself. I suggest we put this off a few months to talk about the costs and how we are robbing future generations.

Oh, wait. This is for the military. Never mind.

That’s pretty much the Washington attitude.

(cross posted to Heretical Ideas)

The next episode of OTB Radio, our BlogTalkRadio program, will record and air live from 5:30-6:30 Eastern.

Dave Schuler and I will be joined by Zenpundit’s Mark Safranksi to talk about the “elections” in Afghanistan, today’s off-off-year elections in the USA, and the state of opportunity in America. 

We’ll also be taking calls at (646) 716-7030. Owing to a high trolls to legit callers ratio, however, we’ll be using the BTR chat feature to screen for legit calls.

You can play the show, subscribe to its feed, or share it with your friends via the widget below:

(Note: The playback automatically updates to the most recent show available. Older shows can be accessed at the show archives.)

President Karzai narrowly won a clearly fraudulent election. His main challenger, Abdullah Abdullah, has withdrawn from consideration as a candidate, ruling out a run-off election. That leaves us with an Afghan government of little or no legitimacy, unworthy of our confidence or that of the Afghan people. Classical counter-insurgency strategy requires a government with the support of the people. We don’t have such an ally in Afghanistan.

What next? The Los Angeles Times editors put in their two cents:

The status quo cannot continue. Obama has yet to decide whether he will heed the call of the U.S. commander in Afghanistan, Gen. Stanley A. McChrystal, for up to 40,000 more troops, but he has said he will not walk away from the country altogether. If that’s the case, it seems Obama has no choice but to hold his nose and press on with a weakened ally. Given that, he must push for a national unity government in Kabul to broaden its base of support and, at the same time, help develop a more decentralized administration of a land that has always been a loose collection of tribes and districts. Decentralization would allow the West to spread its resources to regional leaders rather than concentrating them in the hands of Karzai and his clique. Any U.S. strategy for stabilizing Afghanistan and drawing support away from the Taliban depends on a political leadership perceived as legitimate and a government that serves its people.

The editors of the Christian Science Monitor offer a similar prescription with a little more flesh on the bones, proposing five ways for us to move forward:

1. Strongly encourage him [i.e. Karzai] to form a new “unity government” that includes Mr. Abdullah, who on Sunday graciously removed himself from the runoff race. Karzai needs a government with wider appeal and greater credibility if he is to effectively influence the entire country.

Abdullah, who was formerly Karzai’s foreign minister, contributes on both of those counts. He ran the race (and quit it) on an anticorruption message. He hails from the Northern Alliance that helped topple the Taliban (Karzai comes from the dominant southern Pashtun ethnic group).

2. Apply quiet behind-the-scenes pressure on Karzai. The tough-love public criticism of Karzai has worked mostly to ostracise the Afghan president. Sen. John Kerry’s more subdued, but still firm, weekend of persuasion last month produced the desired effect – Karzai’s agreement to a runoff.

3. Washington should move quickly to influence selection of the Kabul government’s new cabinet. Certainly America’s contribution of troops and treasure gives it that right.

Karzai will be tempted to reward friends with high-profile posts, but what matters is competency in governance, especially in three key jobs: defense, interior, and finance. The US has successfully urged competency before – for instance, in backing the current finance minister (and prime minister) of the Palestinian Authority, Salam Fayyad.

4. Shift aid and relationships to local and regional leaders. This point counts as much as the first three combined – probably more. Insurgents do their courting outside Kabul, and the US should, too.

For 1,000 years Afghanistan has been ruled with tribal, decentralized government. Experts suggest a constitutional change that takes some powers from the president and gives them to the parliament (one idea even considers the Swiss model of semi-sovereign cantons).

But the US shouldn’t wait for such a formal change. If insurgents are to be won over (or bought), if aid is to be turned into roads and schools, if trust and a justice system are to be regained – that must happen at the local and regional level. This strategy has the added benefit of a certain independence from Karzai – but it has to be managed carefully so as not to openly insult him.

5. Finally, the US and its allies need to provide the resources and commitment to support good governance and security at the national, provincial, and local levels. For instance, it does no good to train police if the Taliban lures them away with many more times the pay. And once Afghan security forces have been trained, they need their foreign “teachers” to follow up with them on patrol. That’s a people-intensive effort.

While I think that many Americans are tired of the war in Afghanistan and skeptical both of the support of our NATO allies and the confidence of the Obama Administration in the effort, I also think that withdrawing from Afghanistan presents tactical, strategic, legal, and moral problems. I would rather that we had never invaded Afghanistan. I would rather that we would have completed our objectives there by now. However, having invaded and not achieved our objectives I think that we need to find a set of objectives and a strategy for which the American people will at least tolerate a continuing involvement with the country.

If, alternatively, the Obama Administration is insistent on pursuing the old objectives and the stated strategy, it should be fully resourced and engaged in with confidence. It certainly won’t be a classic counter-insurgency strategy.

My first piece for ForeignPolicy.com, “Europe’s Obama Fatigue,” is online.

Despite George W. Bush’s defiant “you’re with us or you’re against us” public stance, he actively solicited advice and input from his NATO partners. Obama, by contrast, is saying all the right things in public about transatlantic relations and NATO but adopting a high-handed policy and paying little attention to Europe.

[...]

It would be ironic, indeed, if the Europeans started longing for the good old days of the Bush administration. But that nostalgia is closer than you might think.

Supporting arguments at the link.

UPDATE: As one might expect, this piece is generating some strong rebuttals.

Daniel Larison argues:

You cannot gauge the importance or unimportance of Europe to the United States on the largely cosmetic, superficial and procedural clashes Washington has had with various European states in the last nine months. Under the previous administration, Europe continued to be “important” to the U.S. even when major EU powers opposed administration policy in very public, dramatic ways. To the extent that Obama is losing ground with Europeans, he had far more goodwill and support to lose; in almost every European country, he continues to rate higher after the drop-off from unrealistic expectations than Bush did at almost any point. Obviously relations were and remained far more strained under the last administration than they have been so far under this one. We notice the minor clashes that have taken place because there was a widely-shared, unreasonable expectation that amity and concord with Europe would prevail under Obama.

[...]

European and especially German interests were flatly ignored by Bush when it came to handling Russia. Promises to Ukraine and Georgia of eventual membership in NATO were given over strenuous German opposition. Were European interests and opinions being heeded then? No. The missile defense ploy prompted Moscow to threaten abandoning its commitments under the European conventional forces treaty and elicited a great deal of bluster from Medvedev about targeting Russian missiles on European soil. Was European security strengthened by any of this? No. What matter then if Bush went through the motions and observed the right formalities when he was getting the major decisions wrong?

Most western European allies were not seriously consulted, nor were their objections given much weight, when the Bush administration decided to push ahead with the missile defense plan. In all of the new commentary claiming that Europe has soured on Obama, this seems not to count at all.

Judah Grunstein adds:

[I]f George W. Bush learned to listen to Europe, and in particular NATO, it was largely after he’d been chastened by the failure of the Iraq war and the 2006 mid-term elections. Up until his final NATO summit, Bush continued to talk loudly about the largely unpopular measures of NATO expansion and missile defense. He listened in the sense that he allowed the alliance — led by France and Germany — to turn him back, but it was out of weakness, not out of strength. There was no movement at all when it came to climate change, which is a major driver of public opinion here.

As for Obama’s handling of Europe, I’d agree with the characterization of his aloofness, especially with regard to the current Afghanistan strategic review. But while my sympathies would normally be with Europe on this sort of thing, I do think that Obama invited the NATO allies last April to assume greater ownership of the Afghanistan war. Given their refusal to do so, I don’t blame him for the freeze-out now. That said, Obama’s brush-off of the U.S.-EU summit is inexcusable and reflects a myopic view of the EU’s potential, especially with the advent of the Lisbon Treaty.

I actually don’t disagree with either Dan or Judah on most of these points and think some of the disagreement comes from the provocative  title the FP folks chose.  My argument is neither that the Europeans have tired of Obama or even that Bush was particularly adept at transatlantic diplomacy.  Rather, it is that Bush cared more about Europe — and particularly the UK and New Europe — than Obama and therefore invested more of himself in the relationship.

It’s true that Obama’s stance on, for example, missile defense and NATO expansion is more popular in some quarters than Bush’s.  Indeed, I prefer his approach on the latter and quibble with him on the former mostly on how the rollout was done vice the policy itself.  But the policy differences are  a reflection of Obama’s prioritizing Russia’s views over that of Europe, especially East and Central Europe.   I think Bush was ultimately wrong in his zeal to bring Georgia and Ukraine into NATO but it was a policy preference motivated by the stated ideals of the Alliance of “a Europe whole and free.”

Columnist Thomas Friedman has put in his vote for what we should do in Afghanistan: Don’t Build Up

It is crunch time on Afghanistan, so here’s my vote: We need to be thinking about how to reduce our footprint and our goals there in a responsible way, not dig in deeper. We simply do not have the Afghan partners, the NATO allies, the domestic support, the financial resources or the national interests to justify an enlarged and prolonged nation-building effort in Afghanistan.

His view is founded in three principles:

1. Whatever happens in Afghanistan must come from the Afghans themselves. We can’t force anything on the Afghans (or Iraqis) that they don’t want themselves.
2. Be patient.
3. The world needs us.
   

   My last guiding principle: We are the world. A strong, healthy and self-confident America is what holds the world together and on a decent path. A weak America would be a disaster for us and the world. China, Russia and Al Qaeda all love the idea of America doing a long, slow bleed in Afghanistan. I don’t.

The short version of my reaction is that I agree.

The longer version of my reaction is that we have a much more difficult challenge ahead in Afghanistan than many seem to be crediting. We need to find a way to continue to provide support to Afghanistan over a long period of time as we did Germany, Japan, and South Korea. I believe that experience suggests that support will only continue as long as we have troops in Afghanistan. Consequently, I believe that we need to find a way to maintain some troops in Afghanistan, albeit fewer than we have now and with a significantly more limited mission than our current forces have.

I welcome my fellow OTB contributors updating this post with their own views on this subject.

An incredibly junior foreign service officer has resigned over disagreement with our AfPak policy, prompting a high level scramble within the administration and a long feature in the Washington Post.

As I wrote in “While Obama Dithers,” a piece for New Atlanticist,

They’ve brought this on themselves.  Granted, President Obama inherited this war and his people may have fought it differently had they been in charge during the first seven years.  (An unlikely counterfactual, to be sure, since he was an unknown state senator at the time.) But it’s a fight he clamored for during the campaign, stressing it as “a war of necessity.” And he doubled down almost immediately, sending more troops and firing a well-respected four star commander to replace him with a counterinsurgency guru.  But now he’s dithering, signaling in the press that he’s lost confidence in the strategy and can’t make up his mind as to what to do now.

Yes, it’s complicated. There are a lot of unknowns and the number of American casualties is escalating.  But those men are dying while their commander-in-chief hems and haws, trying to decide whether to heed the expert advice of the general he hand-picked three months ago, do a 180 and go with a counter-terror strategy as preferred by Vice President Biden, or some politically expedient middle course.  Their public indecisiveness certainly isn’t doing much to bolster the resolve of the Matthew Kohs of the world, much less the young soldiers, sailors, airmen and marines being asked to risk their lives while they wait.

Much more at the link.

UPDATE: Alex Massey has published an excellent counterpoint, “Afghanistan: A Modest Case for Dithering,” that I’ve republished at New Atlanticist.

UPDATE II:  Kevin Drum shares my sense that this story is rather odd.

Hoh “already had a lot of frustration” after two months?  And he quit two months after that?  Unless Hoh is the fastest learner on the planet, that really doesn’t seem like enough time to get very far up the learning curve.

Otherwise, like me, he thinks Koh’s analysis has substantial merit.

Month to date there have been four U. S. casualties in Iraq. Each death remains a tragedy but that’s a far cry from a year ago or two years ago. Fatalities in the Iraqi security forces have declined, too, each month of this year seeing fewer casualties than in the corresponding month of last year. Things are far from quiet in Iraq but are clealry much better than they were and than they might have been. As U. S. casualties ratchet up in Afghanistan, largely proportional to the increasing U. S. forces in Afghanistan, we seem to hear less and less coverage of Iraq.

In today’s column, lest we forget about Iraq entirely, Tom Friedman warns of Iraq’s continuing significance and its strategic importance relative to Afghanistan:

Watching Iraqi politics is like watching a tightrope artist crossing a dangerous cavern. At every step it looks as though he is going to fall into the abyss, and yet, somehow, he continues to wobble forward. Nothing is easy when trying to transform a country brutalized by three decades of cruel dictatorship. It is one step, one election, one new law, at a time. Each is a struggle. Each is crucial.

This next step is particularly important, which is why we cannot let Afghanistan distract U.S. diplomats from Iraq. Remember: Transform Iraq and it will impact the whole Arab-Muslim world. Change Afghanistan and you just change Afghanistan.

I think he’s simultaneously right and wrong. Real change in Iraq in the direction of liberal democracy would have enormous significance. I’m not entirely sure whether that’s what’s happening or whether we’re merely seeing the emergence of Saddam Lite.

And I think that he’s largely wrong about Afghanistan through oversimplification. It is impossible to change Afghanistan at all in isolation. Afghanistan and Pakistan are the Corsican Brothers, each feeling the other’s pain, and their fates are inextricably entwined. I seriously doubt that we can prevail militarily in Afghanistan in the absence of a legitimate, decent government there and that will be impossible without a legitimate, decent government in control of the territory it claims in Pakistan, too. And that, in turn, would have tremendous implications for the entirety of south and central Asia.

And can whatever we see as the desired end state in each of Iraq and Afghanistan be maintained without an ongoing commitment to both countries?

Over at The Glittering Eye I muse in a related vein over the interrelationship between our military and our grand strategy. Is there an intrinsic conflict between nation-building and having the biggest, toughest military in the world? How should we be using our military and what are our interests?

My colleague Sarwar Kashmeri, a nonresident senior fellow with the Atlantic Council’s International Security Program, has inaugurated the New Atlanticist Podcast series with an interview with Ambassador Peter Galbraith on the Afghanistan election crisis. Galbraith believes Afghan President Hamid Karzai has been permanently tainted by the fraud in the initial contest and argues that the issue of Karzai’s legitimacy must have an impact on U.S. and allied decision-making going forward in Afghanistan.

Go to Peter Galbraith Afghanistan Elections Interview to play podcast, which lasts less than 7 minutes, and for a collection of related publications and commentary.

Well, the UN-backed Electoral Complaints Commission has said that a third of the counted votes in the Afghanistan election were fraudulent and ordered a run-off between Hamid Karzai and second place finisher Abdullah Abdullah.  Karzai looks unlikely to comply and nobody really wants a run-off, anyway.

So, as I write in my New Atlanticist essay, “Afghanistan Election: Now What?” we’re left with some rather unpleasant alternatives.  If Karzai tells the commission to go to Hell and declares himself the winner, we’re in trouble.  If we have a run-off, we’re likely not going to have this resolved until next winter.

Politico’s Laura Rosen and others have said an arrangement is being worked out to allow Karzai to keep the presidency with Abdullah getting a significant portfolio. And, surely, the denial by both sides that this is happening can not be considered dispositive.

Further, as [WSJ's Gerald Seib] points out, “it’s also possible all this agonizing over the election matters more to outsiders than it does to Afghans. “  Not only is the central government less important in their daily lives that it seems from outside but, frankly, they’re not used to Western style democracy and may be willing to accept a few points of corruption as close enough.  Especially since Karzai’s likely to win a two-way race, anyway.

But the United States and its NATO allies, already facing declining domestic support for the war, needs to have at least the illusion of legitimacy to work with here.  Considering the bad alternatives on the table, a deal between Karzai and Abdullah, with a speech by the latter urging his supporters to back the new coalition government, may be the best outcome.

Bad options seem to be all we have these days.

Stephen Coll, president of the New America Foundation, has an article in Foreign Policy making the case for more humble objectives in Afghanistan. In the article he criticizes both the counter-insurgency strategy advocated by Gen. Stanley McChrystal, the commander of U. S. forces in Afghanistan:

To succeed, counterinsurgency approaches require deep, supple, and adaptive understanding of local conditions. And yet, as General McChrystal pointed out in his assessment, since 2001, international forces operating in Afghanistan have “not sufficiently studied Afghanistan’s peoples, whose needs, identities and grievances vary from province to province and from valley to valley.” To succeed, the United States must “redouble efforts to understand the social and political dynamics of…all regions of the country and take action that meets the needs of the people, and insist that [Afghan government] officials do the same.”

and the counter-terrorism strategy advocated recently by Vice President Joe Biden:

There are narrower objections that should be registered about the “counterterrorism-only” or “counterterrorism-mainly” argument. It is probably impractical over a long period of time to wage an intelligence-derived counterterrorism campaign along the Pakistan-Afghan border if a cooperating Afghan government does not have access to the local population; if American forces are not present; and if the Pakistani state has no incentive to cooperate. This is exactly the narrative that unfolded during the 1990s and led to failure on Sept. 11 for the United States.

The article is chock-full of intriguing observations about the situation in Afghanistan and is well worth your attention. I certainly agree with him that we should focus our energies in Afghanistan on objectives we can actually accomplish and that further real American interests. In the light of this I wonder if the bar has not been set too low for Gen. McChrystal? I read Gen. McChrystal’s report as a recommendation for averting defeat. Are they the same as the requirements for achieving success? Or will that require significantly more resources? Gen. McChrystal does say that both more resources and a definite change in strategy are necessary for success:

Success is achievable, but it will not be attained simply by trying harder or “doubling down” on the previous strategy. Additional resources are required, but focusing on force or resource requirements misses the point entirely. The key take away from this assessment is the urgent need for a significant change to our strategy and the way that we think and operate.

and

Resources will not win this war, but under-resourcing could lose it. Resourcing communicates commitment, but we must also balance force levels to enable effective ANSF partnering and provide population security, while avoiding perceptions of coalition dominance. Ideally, the ANSF must lead this fight, but they will not have enough capability in the near-term given the insurgency’s growth rate. In the interim, coalition forces must provide a bridge capability to protect critical segments of the population. The status quo will lead to failure if we wait for the ANSF to grow.

However, I don’t see a commitment in the report that if the general receives what he’s requested that it will achieve the desired outcome. Am I being too critical? Or, as Stephen Coll proposes, should we be seeking more humble objectives in Afghanistan?

For a long time now I’ve been saying that the biggest problem facing our forces in Afghanistan isn’t the absence of a viable partner in the Afghan government or whether we should be pursuing a strategy of counter-terrorism or counter-insurgency or the tactics we’re employing there. It’s the logistics. Here’s another example of that. Would you believe that the fully burdened cost of gasoline in Afghanistan is $400 a gallon?

The Pentagon pays an average of $400 to put a gallon of fuel into a combat vehicle or aircraft in Afghanistan.

The statistic is likely to play into the escalating debate in Congress over the cost of a war that entered its ninth year last week.

Pentagon officials have told the House Appropriations Defense Subcommittee a gallon of fuel costs the military about $400 by the time it arrives in the remote locations in Afghanistan where U.S. troops operate.

Our way of waging war is fuel intensive and the more soldiers we have in Afghanistan the more fuel we’ll need there.

The fully burdened cost of fuel accounts for the cost of transporting it to where it is needed, said Kevin Geiss, program director for energy security in the Office of the Assistant Secretary of the Army for Installations and Environment.

And moving fuel by convoy or even airlift is expensive, according to the Army news release from July 16, which quoted Geiss. In some places, Geiss said, analysts have estimated the fully burdened cost of fuel might even be as high as $1,000 per gallon.

As I pointed out some time ago in a lengthy post at my blog (which I’m too lazy to find the link for right now), we’re spending significantly more per soldier in Afghanistan than we have in Iraq and, essentially, there are no economies of scale. The more soldiers we have in Afghanistan the more it will cost. The fully burdened cost of fuel is a good part of that.

Afghanistan is landlocked and the only practical choices for bringing supplies into the country are overland through Pakistan which has become increasingly dangerous or by air which is fabulously expensive. Overland through Iran seems to be out.

Ariana Huffington has generated quite a bit of buzz for her unlikely-to-be-taken suggestion that Vice President Biden resign in protest if President Obama sends more troops to Afghanistan.   The cuteness of the suggestion has unfortunately overshadowed the opening paragraph in Holly Bailey and Evan Thomas’ Newsweek piece on “A Day in the Life of Joe Biden” (HTML title: “Joe Biden, White House Truth Teller”):

Joe Biden had a question. During a long Sunday meeting with President Obama and top national-security advisers on Sept. 13, the VP interjected, “Can I just clarify a factual point? How much will we spend this year on Afghanistan?” Someone provided the figure: $65 billion. “And how much will we spend on Pakistan?” Another figure was supplied: $2.25 billion. “Well, by my calculations that’s a 30-to-1 ratio in favor of Afghanistan. So I have a question. Al Qaeda is almost all in Pakistan, and Pakistan has nuclear weapons. And yet for every dollar we’re spending in Pakistan, we’re spending $30 in Afghanistan. Does that make strategic sense?” The White House Situation Room fell silent. But the questions had their desired effect: those gathered began putting more thought into Pakistan as the key theater in the region.

As I explain in my New Atlanticist essay “Strategic Balance in AfPak,” Biden’s got a point.

AP Photo