The contortions of Brooke Buchanan

I would not like to be John McCain's spokesperson Brooke Buchanan these days.  Between her boss's disregard for facts and his complete reversals of past positions, the poor woman's got a lot of 'splainin' to do.

Here's Brooke (via TPM) after McCain insisted on TV last night that Christmas bomber Umar Abdulmutallab bought a one-way ticket to Detroit -- two weeks after being corrected on air for making the same mistake:

McCain spokesperson Brooke Buchanan tells us that the senator is "aware now" that Abdulmutallab was not on a one-way ticket.

"The initial reports are where Senator McCain was taking the information was from," she says. "He's actually focused on bigger things, like making sure this doesn't happen again."

 That is, he's too focused on the problem to bother with facts.

Brooke also had to go into action after McCain declared himself "disappointed" that Secretary of Defense Robert Gates and Joint Chiefs Chairman Mike Mullen both stated unequivocally that they supported repeal of the military's "Don't Ask Don't Tell" policy for gays in the military.

The incredible shrinking Afghan surge

There was once a series of Peanuts comics in which Snoopy reflected on a tussle with a cat (who ripped him to shreds). In each comic, Snoopy doubled the weight of his antagonist -- that 50-pound cat, that 100-pound cat, that 200-pound cat (if memory serves...).

Something of the opposite seems to be happening in newspaper reports of Obama's "final" decision on a troop surge in Afghanistan. Two days ago, CBS News reported an "exclusive" that Obama had decided on 40,000 additional troops. The White House furiously denied it. Yesterday, the Times' Elisabeth Bumiller reported that Gates, Mullen and Clinton were "coalescing around a proposal to send 30,000 or more additional American troops." Now, this evening (Nov. 11), Bumiller and Mark Landler are out with a story claiming that Obama and team "have begun examining an option that would send relatively few troops to Afghanistan, about 10,000 to 15,000, with most designated as trainers for the Afghan security forces," prompted in some degree by reservations expressed by Karl Eikenberry, current U.S. ambassador to Afghanistan and once the top U.S. commander there.

As a complement, the Times also reports tonight something I've long suspected - that much of this angst is choreographed to put some pressure on Karzai and his government. Noting that the U.S. in one sense has precious little leverage, Helene Cooper reports:

Officials said Mr. Obama’s Afghanistan review took weeks longer than expected in part because officials were unhappy about reports of fraud in the Afghan elections, and they implied that even after the new Afghan strategy is announced, details will not be final.

“I’m not saying that we’ll be in a perpetual state of review, but the time the president has taken so far should signal to people that he will not hesitate to take a hard look at things and question assumptions if things are not moving in the right direction,” a senior White House official said.

Indeed, an AP story by Ben Feller and Anne Gearan, which claims that Obama has rejected all options presented to him in their current form, suggests a search for further leverage in the crevices of troop deployment:

But the president raised questions at a war council meeting Wednesday that could alter the dynamic of both how many additional troops are sent to Afghanistan and what the timeline would be for their presence in the war zone, according to the official, who spoke on condition of anonymity to discuss Obama's thinking.

Military officials said Obama has asked for a rewrite before and resisted what one official called a one-way highway toward war commander Gen. Stanley McChrystal's recommendations for more troops. The sense that he was being rushed and railroaded has stiffened Obama's resolve to seek information and options beyond military planning, officials said, though a substantial troop increase is still likely...

The key sticking points appear to be timelines and mounting questions about the credibility of the Afghan government. Administration officials said Wednesday that Obama wants to make it clear that the U.S. commitment in Afghanistan is not open-ended.

Leverage, leverage, leverage. Cooper's story suggests a search in other directions:

While they declined to go into many specifics, the officials, speaking on the condition of anonymity because the Afghanistan review is not complete yet, said they had a range of diplomatic, financial and economic options if the targets were not met.

One lever, they said, would be to shift money from Mr. Karzai’s central government to provincial leaders who perform better than their national counterparts. And although a complete withdrawal of American troops is not considered an option, Mr. Obama might endorse a partial withdrawal that would lead to a more limited counterinsurgency strategy initially advocated by Vice President Joseph R. Biden, Jr.

It would seem that Obama wants Karzai in a Skinner box. At the same time, he does not sound like a man preparing to disengage.

Mike Mullen "re-arms" America, Covers Obama

A remarkable credo published today in the Washington Post by Mike Mullen, Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, in an essay titled "Building our Best Weapon":

We have learned, after seven years of war, that trust is the coin of the realm -- that building it takes time, losing it takes mere seconds, and maintaining it may be our most important and most difficult objective.

That's why images of prisoner maltreatment at Abu Ghraib still serve as recruiting tools for al-Qaeda. And it's why each civilian casualty for which we are even remotely responsible sets back our efforts to gain the confidence of the Afghan people months, if not years.

It doesn't matter how hard we try to avoid hurting the innocent, and we do try very hard. It doesn't matter how proportional the force we deploy, how precisely we strike. It doesn't even matter if the enemy hides behind civilians. What matters are the death and destruction that result and the expectation that we could have avoided it. In the end, all that matters is that, despite our best efforts, sometimes we take the very lives we are trying to protect.

You cannot defeat an insurgency this way.

Mullen is writing specifically about U.S. efforts to stabilize Afghanistan. But the unequivocal moral code he lays down has sweeping implications -- for the interrogation of prisoners (that is, for the policies initiated by Cheney, Rumsfeld, Bush et al, implemented at Bagram and Guantanamo and then transferred to Abu Ghraib); for Israel in Gaza; for pilotless drone attacks in Pakistan, for all counterinsurgency efforts, and ultimately all warfare.

Mullen does not directly address the impact on 'trust' of the U.S.'s pilotless drone attacks on the tribal regions of Pakistan. But he does lay responsibility for a poor working relationship with Pakistan largely on U.S.'s doorstep:

Looking through that regional lens is difficult given our trust deficit with Pakistan. A whole generation of Pakistani military officers either doesn't know the United States, doesn't trust us or both. What they do know is that military aid restrictions went into effect under the Pressler Amendment in 1990. We basically cut them off for 12 years, and in the process cut ourselves off.

As one Pakistani official put it recently, "The U.S. abandoned Pakistan, and that mutual distrust didn't allow and still in many ways does not allow both parties to find a common strategy to defeat terrorism."

We are working to turn that around. Already, a small contingent of U.S. military experts is assisting in the professional development of Pakistani counterinsurgency trainers. Pakistani officers will increasingly be invited to attend our war colleges. And I am hopeful that more U.S. aid and technical assistance may flow to the border regions.

For my part, I have made it a priority to develop closer ties with the head of the Pakistani military, Gen. Ashfaq Kiyani, and other military and civilian leaders. If I'm in the area, I go to Pakistan. Trust cannot be won over the phone. You build it one person -- and one issue -- at a time.

I have never read anything like Mullen's back story for the failures of antiterror efforts in Pakistan over the past seven-plus years (though complaints are common that the U.S. disengaged from Afghanistan once the Soviets pulled out). The near-universal media take was that the Bush Administration shelled out billions without conditions or oversight, and that Pakistan's antiterror efforts were essentially bogus or at best ambivalent. Mullen is reaching back to an earlier era to explain why the "alliance" has failed to be effective. Add this to the roster of official and quasi-official U.S. apologies for past missteps.

Like the 16 generals who flanked Obama when he signed his executive orders banning torture and closing Guantanamo within a year, Mullen is providing cover for Obama to implement a more restrained, nuanced, "sensitive" and multi-faceted approach to foreign policy, national security and war.

Obama grabs Maliki's gift

Breaking: Obama has called for withdrawing removing U.S. combat brigades from Iraq within sixteen months of Jan 2009.

No seriously -- writing in today's New York Times, he has seized on Maliki's call for a timetable for U.S. withdrawal to double down -- to declare victory and get out. That's a double victory cry -- Iraq's government is asserting control, and my call for troop withdrawal is/was the right strategy. Never mind that I was wrong about the surge's prospects for success. He's going to seize on that success; McCain won't. McCain's sword is knocked out of his hand.

It's a brilliant move. A day after the Times reports that the Bush Administration is considering more rapid redeployment of troops out of Iraq, and acknowledging that the U.S. needs to concentrate more forces in Afghanistan (which Obama has emphasized for over a year), Obama in one fell swoop quiets cries that he's shifting strategy on Iraq and cites Administration and U.S. military authorities to support his strategy:

Lt. Gen. James Dubik, the American officer in charge of training Iraq’s security forces, estimates that the Iraqi Army and police will be ready to assume responsibility for security in 2009.

As Adm. Mike Mullen, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, recently pointed out, we won’t have sufficient resources to finish the job in Afghanistan until we reduce our commitment to Iraq.

He then firmly rejects McCain's call for a "presence in Iraq similar to our permanent bases in South Korea" (avoiding the inflammatory "100 years" language while nailing McCain on its substance), covers his 16 months pledge by reiterating his age-old pledge to "make tactical adjustments," and details how he'd be "careful getting out" with a series of steps that look a lot more likely to succeed in maintaining stability now than they did even a few weeks ago (though I still doubt he'll be able to withdraw as fast as he claims). Finally, he serves notice that he'll not be swiftboated, repeating what's become a new mantra (emphasis added below):

But for far too long, those responsible for the greatest strategic blunder in the recent history of American foreign policy have ignored useful debate in favor of making false charges about flip-flops and surrender.

It’s not going to work this time. It’s time to end this war.

Related post:
NYT seconds Obama's "Central front in the war on terror"