Joel Mathis

I feel like most of today’s McCain-Lieberman-Graham op-ed about the need to stay the course in Afghanistan could’ve been written four or five or six years ago. But I really want to focus on this particular paragraph: At the strategic level, our effort continues to be undermined by the perception that the United States will again abandon Afghanistan. This suspicion makes everything our troops are trying to achieve significantly harder. It creates perverse incentives for the Taliban to keep fighting, for the Pakistani army to hedge its bets by providing support to the Taliban, and for our Afghan allies to make counterproductive decisions based on fears of a post-American future. But here’s the thing: Eventually the United States will leave Afghanistan. The Afghans will remain, and Pakistan will be next door. Everybody knows this. Now, I don’t know how long it will be before that exit takes place. It might be next year, 10 years from now, or even another 100 years. But history seems t

Over at The Philly Post , today I get after the Republican candidates who are criticizing President Obama for apologizing in Afghanistan for the burning of Korans by American troops there. The mission of U.S. troops in Afghanistan isn’t to trample upon native sensibilities—it’s to hunt terrorists and help the locals build their country so that it never again serves as the base for an attack on the United States. That involves the (tricky) winning of hearts and minds. Treating the Koran with disrespect—even if it’s an accident—actively works against achieving those goals. Apologizing isn’t just the right thing to do, in this case; it’s an act of strategic military necessity. So the rush by Mitt, Rick, and Newt to condemn the president for apologizing isn’t just contemptible: It’s dangerous and juvenile. It signals that all three men see the world as a series of cartoon caricatures, that they are bullies who demand respect but believe that giving respect means showing weakness. Maybe

Bill Kristol is good at finding new ways to be contemptible. It's bad that Marines in Afghanistan urinated on dead Taliban, he says, but you know what really makes him mad? The Obama Administration apologizing for it.  So perhaps, as Rep. Allen West, once a battalion commander in Iraq, put it last week, all the sanctimonious Obama administration bigwigs “need to chill.” Did Defense Secretary Leon E. Panetta really need to speak up at all? Couldn’t comment have been left to some junior public affairs officer at Camp Lejeune? And once he decided to weigh in, did Panetta need to condemn the Marines’ action as not just deplorable but “utterly deplorable”? Perhaps he felt a need to match Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, who expressed not just dismay but “total dismay.” Maybe, our current civilian leaders should spend a little less time posturing and a little more time supporting the troops who’ve been sent abroad to fight at the direction of their administration. Kristol is conge

Boot is so exasperated with those weak appeasers in the Obama Administration: One of the most discomfiting aspects of the forthcoming U.S. pullout from Iraq is what it portends for Afghanistan. In a nutshell, it appears more and more likely that Obama will pull out of Afghanistan too, even though the war there is far from won. Thus we read in the  Wall Street Journal  today : “The Obama administration is exploring a shift in the military’s mission in Afghanistan to an advisory role as soon as next year, senior officials said, a move that would scale back U.S. combat duties well ahead of their scheduled conclusion at the end of 2014.”   The Afghan army is capable but still needs time to develop. If we pull out too fast the army could fracture and the entire country could be plunged into a civil war which would, among other possible consequences, allow Afghan territory to once again become a haven for  Al Qaeda  and other transnational terrorist groups.  That seems a high price to pay

Our Scripps Howard column this week is about Bob Woodward's new book, "Obama's Wars." My take: Bob Woodward's new book reminds us of an important proposition: American democracy and long-term war are a bad mix. It's certainly bad for democracy. One of the most disturbing revelations is the lengths that President Obama went to in order to ensure the military obeyed his orders in Afghanistan -- dictating a six-page single-spaced document dictating the terms of 2009's surge of 40,000 troops to that country. Why the detail? Because the president felt sure his generals and admirals would find "wiggle room" to violate the spirit of the order setting a 2011 deadline to begin drawing down troops there. The American Constitution is clear: The president is the commander-in-chief. He makes the country's big decisions about how we fight war. Generals and admirals give their best military advice, and then execute the decisions the president has mad

I'm trying to imagine what the world would look like if Andrew Bacevich ran the United States. Every couple of years, Bacevich -- a retired Army colonel who is now a history professor at Boston U -- releases a new book that goes something like this: America is overextended and entirely too militarized. We need to live within our means, bring the troops home and start practicing a citizenship where all of us (and not just the one-half of one percent of us) serve as citizen soldiers, devoted to the common defense of our nation instead of power projection around the world. " Washington Rules: America's Path to Permanent War " is another one of these books; Bacevich is a bit of a one-note Johnny -- but it's an interesting, angry, erudite note, and so I keep returning to him. Instead of rooting him on, though, it might be good to ponder how things change if anybody in power took Bacevich's views seriously. So what does the world look like if America took Bace

Here's a couple of contrasting quotes for you: Gen. Stanley McChrystal , 8-30-09, in the memo that laid the foundation for President Obama's surge of American forces in Afghanistan. The people of Afghanistan represent many things in this conflict -- an audience, an actor, and a source of leverage - but above all, they are the objective. The population can also be a source of strength and intelligence and provide resistance to the insurgency. Alternatively, they can often change sides and provide tacit or real support to the insurgents. Communities make deliberate choices to resist, support, or allow insurgent influence. The reasons for these choices must be better understood. GIRoA and ISAF have both failed to focus on this objective. The weakness of state institutions, malign actions of power-brokers, widespread corruption and abuse of power by various officials, and ISAF's own errors, have given Afghans little reason to support their government. These problems hav

Quite coincidentally, I posted earlier today on why it's important to keep civilian casualties low in the Afghanistan conflict -- even if the result is that American troops sometimes find themselves more endangered than their weaponry suggests they need to be. Now The Guardian goes into some detail about how the deaths of civilians in Afghanistan has been more widespread than reported: The logs detail, in sometimes harrowing vignettes, the toll on civilians exacted by coalition forces: events termed "blue on white" in military jargon. The logs reveal 144 such incidents. Some of these casualties come from the controversial air strikes that have led to Afghan government protests, but a large number of previously unknown incidents also appear to be the result of troops shooting unarmed drivers or motorcyclists out of a determination to protect themselves from suicide bombers. At least 195 civilians are admitted to have been killed and 174 wounded in total, but this

I obviously haven't had time to go through the 90,000 Afghan war documents that WikiLeaks dumped on the public today , so I'll have to rely for now on the New York Times' overview: As the new American commander in Afghanistan, Gen. David H. Petraeus, tries to reverse the lagging war effort, the documents sketch a war hamstrung by an Afghan government, police force and army of questionable loyalty and competence, and by a Pakistani military that appears at best uncooperative and at worst to work from the shadows as an unspoken ally of the very insurgent forces the American-led coalition is trying to defeat. Let's take that piece-by-piece. The war, the Times says, is hamstrung by... * The Afghan government. We knew that . * The Afghan police force. We knew that . * The Afghan army "of questionable loyalty and competence." We knew that . * And a Pakistani military that might be an "unspoken ally" of the anti-American insurgent forces. We

It's become something of a meme among portions of the right ( and in the military ) in recent months that American troops in Afghanistan aren't really allowed to defend themselves, and that those troops are thus more exposed to danger than they should have to. It's an argument that ignores, completely, one of the central points of counterinsurgency doctrine : The people of a country are the "battlefield" that is to be won -- and if you kill innocent civilians, you're probably losing that battlefield. Via BBC , proof of the concept: The authors of the report by the Massachusetts-based National Bureau of Economic Research say they analysed 15 months of data on military clashes and incidents totalling more than 4,000 civilian deaths in a number of Afghan regions in the period ending on 1 April. They say that in areas where two civilians were killed or injured by Nato's International Security Assistance Force (Isaf), there were on average an extra six vi

Washington Post : The U.S. military is funding a massive protection racket in Afghanistan, indirectly paying tens of millions of dollars to warlords, corrupt public officials and the Taliban to ensure safe passage of its supply convoys throughout the country, according to congressional investigators. It's really not a good day for Afghan war supporters.