It seems all those deficit hawks have the country spooked. A new Gallup poll says that terrorism and the national debt now rank evenly — above health care costs, unemployment, the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan and the specter of climate change — as the most pressing issues for the American public. To boot, Newsweek notes that Americans can now help pay down the federal debt via donations accepted by credit card.

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Debt Becomes Americans’ Top Fear

Robert Gates repeated at his Pentagon press conference that he wants to give troops at war at least two years’ time at home for every year deployed. But there’s a new surge going on in Afghanistan, and accordingly, the plan takes a back seat to that . So when does it happen? Vice Adm. Steven Stanley, the Pentagon’s director for force structuring, doesn’t know either. But he said troops returning from Iraq will be the first to reap the benefits. In response to a question at a Pentagon briefing just now, Stanley said the real answer lies with the Army and Marine Corps. But he said that it was the Pentagon’s desire that forces returning from Iraq “start a two-year dwell period.” He wasn’t really clear about whether that meant the troops rotating out for the combat-troop drawdown that ends in August or the total withdrawal that ends in December 2011. But since Adm. Michael Mullen, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, said last month that it’ll probably be “two years” before the expanded dwell time kicks in, we can probably assume Stanley means the final component of troops returning from Iraq in 2011 will be the ones who begin the new, longer dwell period.

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Soldiers Returning From Iraq Will Be First for Expanded Dwell Time

The former governor of New Mexico, tipped by many libertarians as a national figure who could become the “next Ron Paul,” is following up his attention-getting speech for the Marijuana Policy Project with a meet-and-greet at the D.C. offices of Reason magazine. (Disclosure: I am a contributing editor of Reason.) The invitation for the RSVP-only event, below the fold: Reason magazine invites you to join us for appetizers, drinks and the opportunity to meet with Gary Johnson, former governor of New Mexico and honorary chairman of the Our America Initiative. On Tuesday, February 9th, Gov. Johnson will make short remarks at 6:30 p.m. and will be available to chat throughout the evening. Johnson, who vetoed 750 bills and never raised taxes in eight years as governor, is outspoken on issues ranging from the deficit to the war on drugs to Afghanistan and Iraq. He is frequently mentioned as a possible Republican presidential candidate in 2012. Who: Gary Johnson, Honorary Chairman of the Our America Initiative, and Reason magazine staff including Reason.com Editor in Chief Nick Gillespie What: Drinks, Appetizers When: Tuesday, February 9 from 6 to 8 p.m. Where: Reason’s DC Office It’s the sort of thing Johnson used to do without a lot of buzz; now, with the spotlight on him, it seems like an opportunity for D.C. libertarians to take a measure of him. Previous politicians who’ve stumped at the Reason offices include Rep. Jeff Flake (R-Ariz.), former Rep. Bob Barr (the 2008 Libertarian Party presidential nominee), former Sen. Mike Gravel, and California senatorial candidate Tom Campbell.

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Gary Johnson’s Libertarian Tour Continues

Al Jazeera : Hamid Karzai, the Afghan president, has said his country must reach out to its “disenchanted brothers” in an effort to stabilise the war ravaged nation. Addressing a one-day international conference on Afghanistan’s future in London, the British capital, Karzai said that fighters who are “not part of al-Qaeda or other terror groups” must be reconciled with the government. The specific plan is to establish a reconciliation initiative that focuses on district-by-district Taliban outreach . In the past, the Karzai government’s security ministers have said that they wanted to target mid-level Taliban for reconciliation, while using jobs packages to lure away and reintegrate Taliban foot soldiers.  This new initiative appears more comprehensive. The New York Times : “We see this program as the main pillar for bringing peace to Afghanistan,” said Shaida Mohammed Abdali, the deputy national security adviser. “There’s an ideological motive for an insurgency like this, and the trouble will not be resolved unless you reach out to the leadership; they are the food of the foot soldiers and where they are getting ideological and political incentives. If we only concentrate on the foot soldiers it will not be a sustainable program.” Karzai seeks $1 billion for his initiative from the London conference. But the question remains: why, absent a loss of momentum through military setback, would the Taliban leadership be interested in reconciliation?

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In London, Karzai Dares Taliban to Join Peace Talks

Vice Adm. Robert Harward, a former senior officer with the Joint Special Operations Command and U.S. Joint Forces Command, arrived in Afghanistan in late November to take charge of detention operations for his longtime colleague, Gen. Stanley McChrystal. In those two months — his command formally stood up on Jan. 8 — Harward took the dramatic step of inking a deal with the Afghan government to transition responsibility for the infamous U.S. prison at Bagram Air Field to Afghan authorities over the next several months . It’s expected to turn over to the Ministry of Defense by 2011. But there’s a lingering challenge facing Harward. Around the time he arrived in Afghanistan, The New York Times reported that the Joint Special Operations Command retains a detention facility off-limits to the Red Cross that human rights organizations and ex-detainees call the “Black Jail.” McChrystal wasn’t asked about it in his Congressional testimony last month . But in response to a question from TWI during a conference call with bloggers this morning, Harward said unequivocally that “all detainees under my command have access to the International [Committee of the] Red Cross.” The admiral suggested that The Times may have misconstrued “field detention sites” where detainees are initially in-processed for “a very short period” before transfer to detention facilities like the Parwan facility at Bagram , since the locations are undisclosed for operational security reasons. “There are no black-jail secret prisons,” Harward said. “We do have field detention sites we do not disclose, but they’re held there for very short periods, and then they’re moved — if they’re determined to need additional internment, they’re moved to the detention facility at Parwan or released.”

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McChrystal’s Chief Detentions Officer: ‘All Detainees Under My Command’ Have Red Cross Access

Rolf Mowatt-Larsen, a longtime intelligence official who works at the nexus of al-Qaeda and weapons of mass destruction, writes that al-Qaeda “has been far more sophisticated in its pursuit of weapons of mass destruction than is commonly believed.” And there’s no reason whatsoever to disbelieve him. But what ought to be pointed out is al-Qaeda’s capabilities, not just its aspirations. For one thing, al-Qaeda has failed for over a decade to acquire weapons of mass destruction. Mowatt-Larsen notes that al-Qaeda accordingly scaled back its ambitions to get nuclear weapons in favor of less-lethal but relatively easier to acquire bioweapons. But even that effort was dealt a setback by the U.S. invasion of Afghanistan in 2001. Instead, look at the pattern of recent al-Qaeda attacks or potentially al-Qaeda-inspired attacks. Lots of big-devastation conventional impact attacks in south Asia and the Middle East, with occasional forays into Europe and southeast Asia. In the United States, a failed attempt at conventional explosions of an aircraft — damaging if it would have succeeded, but it would have killed an order of magnitude fewer people than the sophisticated and complex attack on 9/11 to turn several planes into missiles and fly them into strategic targets. There’s an argument to be had over whether to put Nidal Malik Hasan’s attack on Fort Hood into the “al-Qaeda-inspired” category. If you do, you get a successful attack that killed 13 people and wounded 45, not dozens, let alone hundreds or the thousands killed on 9/11. Then you get a criminal claiming after the fact that his murder of a soldier outside a Little Rock recruiting office was connected to al-Qaeda. And failed efforts that were busted up before they reached fruition, as with Najibullah Zazi. All this is why in the just-published issue of a bulletin published by West Point’s Combating Terrorism Center , Martha Crenshaw, a terrorism scholar with the Center for International Security and Cooperation , concludes: Al-Qa`ida is declining, but it is still a dangerous organization. It is not a mass popular movement, but rather a complex, transnational, and multilayered organization with both clandestine and above-ground elements. It has proved durable and persistent. The determination of its leaders to attack the United States is undiminished and might strengthen as the organization is threatened, but another attack on the scale of 9/11 is unlikely. None of this is to say that vigilance against the prospect of an al-Qaeda WMD attack is unwarranted. But it is a call to put the chances of one into perspective.

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Sure, al-Qaeda Wants to Attack the U.S. With WMD …

The national security adviser didn’t say anything new during his afternoon talk to the Center for American Progress about reconciliation with the Taliban. Jim Jones pledged an “open door” for “those who would abandon violence” and “respect the rights of fellow citizens.” Those are parameters for negotiation, not a focus on personalities, in other words. Asked by Jon Landay of McClatchy about hypothetical negotiations with Mullah Omar as Jones headed to the elevators, Jones responded, “We’re pursuing a general strategy of engagement and we’ll see where that takes us.” But he expressed some dismay about the Pakistani military’s announcement that it won’t pursue al-Qaeda in North Waziristan during the next year . “The speed with which we are able to achieve our goals in Afghanistan has a relationship to the willingness of Pakistan to take on the safe havens that exist in the border region,” Jones said. He added that the administration is trying to get Pakistan to see the “urgency of the moment” for Afghanistan, Pakistan and “the region itself.” Convincing the Pakistanis of that urgency requires persuading them that the United States is ready, for the long haul, to promote Pakistan’s legitimate interests.

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Jim Jones Wants Pakistanis to See the ‘Urgency of the Moment’

From the Naval blogger Raymond Pritchett, aka Galrahn, a stunning observation : The State Department told NBC news on Tuesday that  there are still 5,500 missing Americans in Haiti . What the article does not mention is that no Americans have been pulled out of rubble alive in 2 days, and the odds of finding more survivors is very low. Missing does not mean dead. There are still no fixed estimates how many people were killed in the earthquake, but the  UN is now saying they have already buried 50,000 bodies . That does not count the many thousands who died and are buried inside collapsed buildings. I have not seen any estimates of how many of the estimated 250,000 wounded in Haiti were American, but there were an estimated 45,000 Americans in Haiti at the time of the earthquake. For context, there have been  4,373 American citizens killed in the Iraq war , and  962 Americans kill in the Afghanistan War . I don’t really know what to add to this.

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Haiti Earthquake May Have Killed More Americans Than 9/11, Iraq or Afghanistan

According to a new United Nations report, 2009 was the deadliest year for Afghan civilians since the U.S. invaded in 2001. The international body tallied 2,412 civilian deaths, a spike from 2,118 killed in 2008. But insurgents were responsible for the vast majority. The population-protection measures taken by Gen. Stanley McChrystal, who took command in Afghanistan in June, are responsible for a significant drop in U.S.-caused casualties. Agence France Presse : Civilian deaths caused by Western troops fell 28 percent last year compared to the year before, it said, attributing the drop to measures taken specifically to protect civilians. Commander of the foreign forces in Afghanistan, US General Stanley McChrystal , has made minimising civilian deaths and injuries a central tenet of his counter-insurgency strategy, and has ordered reduced air strikes as one way of achieving this objective. The UN report said the change in NATO forces’ command structure, “specific steps to minimize civilian casualties” and “a new tactical directive” by the force contributed to the reduction in non-combatant deaths. McChrystal can take credit for that drop, and the international recognition of his efforts is vindication. But it’s a cold comfort, given the overall spike in civilian casualties. McChrystal has testified that his metrics for success include protecting civilians from harm — whether from his troops or from the Taliban. While the deaths he’s directly responsible for are pointing in the right direction, the bottom-line total clearly isn’t.

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U.S. Caused Fewer Afghan Civilian Casualties In 2009

With all the necessary caveats about polling in Afghanistan, this new BBC poll finds a surprisingly robust acceptance among Afghans for the U.S. troop presence : Of more than 1,500 Afghans questioned, 70% said they believed Afghanistan was going in the right direction – a big jump from 40% a year ago. Of those questioned, 68% now back the presence of US troops in Afghanistan, compared with 63% a year ago. For Nato troops, including UK forces, support has risen from 59% to 62%. These are eye-opening numbers considering the results of the last BBC poll on Afghanistan , which the British news agency published in September. Back then, only 44 percent believed their country was on the right track. (A near-contemporaneous poll from the International Republican Institute pegged that right-track number at 62 percent.) While I can’t find an exact question in the previous poll about the presence of U.S. troops, only 47 percent had positive feelings about the United States in September. So perhaps the poll is an outlier. But if not, then Gen. McChrystal may have been on to something when he contended that the behavior of U.S. forces was more important than the presence of U.S. forces in terms of Afghan perceptions of occupation.

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Afghans Show Surprisingly Positive Feelings On ‘Extended Surge’

In Afghanistan, seven minutes after tweeting about a meeting with G en. Stanley McChrystal, Sen. John McCain (R-Ariz.) decided to tweet this : Here’s a press release about the poll — not usually the sort of things politicians brag about.

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The Modesty of John McCain

The New York Times reports : American missiles, presumably fired by remotely piloted drones, struck twice Wednesday in North Waziristan, the tribal region that is a stronghold of Qaeda and Taliban militants. One hopes the targeting wasn’t the result, in some vestigial manner, of spotting done by the suicide bomber who murdered CIA operatives in Afghanistan last week .

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Retribution For FOB Chapman Massacre?

A picture is emerging of Humam Khalil Abu-Mulal al-Balawi, the Jordanian double agent who murdered seven CIA agents and Blackwater contractors in Khost Province last week after convincing U.S. and Jordanian intelligence that he was key to penetrating al-Qaeda on the Afghanistan-Pakistan border. He’s an Internet enthusiast , apparently. But look at this New York Times observation : Mr. Balawi proved to be one of the oddest double agents in the history of espionage, choosing to kill his American contacts at their first meeting, rather than establish regular communication to glean what the C.I.A. did — and did not — know about Al Qaeda and then report back to the network’s leaders. An excellent point. I don’t think we have enough information to start speculating on that decision. But it raises the prospect that al-Qaeda might think it knows all it needs to know about U.S. intelligence operations in eastern Afghanistan. That would cut against the supposed freaked-out-ed-ness of al-Qaeda about the drone strikes in Pakistan. But like I said: not enough information to speculate. Update : Thanks to the magic of Twitter , I see this AP story , which ought to be huge: A former senior intelligence official says the double agent who killed seven CIA employees last week had provided information that led the CIA to kill a number of al-Qaida leaders. The former official says Humam Khalil Abu-Mulal al-Balawi had provided high-quality intelligence that established his credibility with Jordanian and U.S. intelligence. The former official says that information led to drone-launched missiles strikes. CBS News first reported al-Balawi’s connection to the missile strikes.

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Al-Qaeda’s Counterintelligence: Kill People & Blow Stuff Up

So says Capt. Matt Pottinger , one of the co-authors of Maj. Gen. Michael Flynn’s scathing assessment of intelligence operations in Afghanistan : “This is primarily about improving intelligence within the Department of Defense,” he said via e-mail “Our timing was independent of the tragic event in Khost Province,” he said, referring to the attack that killed the CIA officers. I’d encourage people to re-read Flynn’s paper for the Center for a New American Security and see if that’s always clear. It’s definitely an unusual paper, published just as, per the Los Angeles Times , Flynn is conducting precisely the overhaul his paper advocates. CNAS’s Tom Ricks sheds a bit of light on what’s going on: As I understand it, the paper was released through CNAS because Gen. Flynn wanted to reach beyond his own chain of command and his own community and talk to people such as commanders of deploying infantry units about what kind of intelligence they should be demanding.

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McChrystal Aide Did Not Mean to Call Out CIA

This is the beginning of an assessment written by Maj. Gen. Michael Flynn, the senior-most intelligence adviser to Gen. Stanley McChrystal, for the Center for a New American Security about intelligence and the Afghanistan war: Eight years into the war in Afghanistan, the U.S. intelligence community is only marginally relevant to the overall strategy. having focused the overwhelming majority of its collection efforts and analytical brainpower on insurgent groups, the vast intelligence apparatus is unable to answer fundamental questions about the environment in which U.S. and allied forces operate and the people they seek to persuade. Ignorant of local economics and landowners, hazy about who the powerbrokers are and how they might be influenced, incurious about the cor- relations between various development projects and the levels of cooperation among villagers, and disengaged from people in the best position to find answers — whether aid workers or Afghan soldiers — U.S. intelligence officers and analysts can do little but shrug in response to high level decision-makers seeking the knowledge, analysis, and information they need to wage a successful counterinsurgency. It actually gets more scathing from there. “Every level of the U.S. intelligence hierarchy” comes in for criticism. Flynn says that U.S. intelligence in Afghanistan “overemphasize[s] detailed information about the enemy at the expense of the political, economic, and cultural environment that supports it.” In other words, intelligence in Afghanistan is enemy-centric, when it needs to be population-centric, much like the military operations it supports. Flynn wants intelligence reports on “census data and patrol debriefs; minutes from shuras with local farmers and tribal leaders; after-action reports from civil affairs officers and Provincial Reconstruction Teams (PRTs); polling data and atmospherics reports from psychological operations and female engagement teams; and translated summaries of radio broadcasts that influence local farmers, not to mention the field observations of Afghan soldiers, United Nations officials, and non-governmental organizations (NGOs).” Instead, U.S. intelligence “seems much too mesmerized by the red of the Taliban’s cape.” Flynn, joined by co-authors Capt. Matt Pottinger and the Defense Intelligence Agency’s Paul D. Batchelor, writes: The intelligence community’s standard mode of operation is surprisingly passive about aggregating information that is not enemy-related and relaying it to decision-makers or fellow analysts further up the chain. It is a culture that is strangely oblivious of how little its analytical products, as they now exist, actually influence commanders. Flynn never specifically calls out the CIA. His paper says it’s talking about “the thousands of uniformed and civilian intelligence personnel serving with the Department of Defense and with joint inter-agency elements in Afghanistan,” and it focuses heavily on practical military intelligence issues. His key recommendations center on creating intelligence fusion centers around the regional commands run by NATO in Afghanistan. So, just to be totally clear: This is mostly about military intelligence. But this applies far beyond intelligence officers on a battalion’s staff: In a recent project ordered by the White House, analysts could barely scrape together enough information to formulate rudimentary assessments of pivotal Afghan districts. It is little wonder, then, that many decision-makers rely more upon newspapers than military intelligence to obtain “ground truth.” Whether or not Flynn and his co-authors make a strong argument, the paper comes just days after the CIA in Afghanistan suffered one of the greatest losses of life in the agency’s history .

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McChrystal Intelligence Adviser Strongly Criticizes U.S. Intelligence Community

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Remember the Virginians arrested in Pakistan last month for  trying to link up with al-Qaeda in the tribal areas ? Well : The five Americans were returned to prison after the brief midday session in an anti-terror court in the city of Sargodha, and another hearing was set for Jan. 18. But the judge released Khalid Farooq Chaudhry, the father of one Pakistani American defendant, Umar Chaudhry, saying there was insufficient evidence to keep him detained. All six men were arrested at the elder Chaudhry’s family home in Sargodha in mid-December. The Virginia Chaudrys might want to hold off on any family reunion plans they maybe had scheduled for 2010.

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This Guy Might Not Want to Visit His Family in Virginia

Another year is behind us, so what better way to reflect than to take a look back at TWI’s best, most popular, cleverest and head-smackingest blog posts of 2009? All day, we’ll be re-running our favorites. Throughout the year on The Independent Streak, we followed the nation’s biggest stories, including: the inauguration of a new president, the economic and foreclosure crises, tea parties, Iran, Iraq, Afghanistan, birthers, the remaking of the Republican Party (such as it was), the debates over torture, climate change and health care reform, and countless others. In retrospect, it was a pretty wild time. Let’s hope 2010 is, if nothing else, no less interesting. Enjoy!

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TWI Looks Back at 2009: The Year in Blog

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That’s the subject of an increasingly heated charge from the Afghan government after a Dec. 27 raid in the eastern province of Kunar left nine men dead. The International Security Assistance Force, NATO’s command in Afghanistan, said the men were part of an insurgent network planting improvised explosive devices. Representatives of the Afghan government say they were civilians. And the governor of the province says they were killed in an airstrike . Only one thing: there may not have been any airstrike. There’s an investigation open into the Kunar incident ordered by Afghan President Hamid Karzai. But an ISAF official who would only speak on background while the investigation proceeds said unequivocally that there was “no airstrike.” Instead, the official said, a joint U.S./Afghan operation — on the ground — disrupted an IED network, leaving nine male combatants in their late teens and early 20s dead. The allegation of an airstrike is a heated one because Gen. Stanley McChrystal, the U.S./ISAF commander, sharply curtailed the use of airstrikes upon assuming command in June following years of airstrikes that inflamed the civilian population. Obviously I’m thousands of miles from Kunar and can’t directly verify whether there was or wasn’t a strike. But the timeline of available reporting supports the ISAF official. On Monday, the day after the raid, Karzai referenced the raid, but not any airstrike . Neither did a New York Times story about the raid that ran yesterday. There are references to civilian casualties emerging from the raid, but nothing about any airstrike until Kunar Governor Sayed Fazlullah Wahedi told Reuters yesterday that a strike occurred. Yet The Times quoted the Kunar police chief, Khalilullah Ziayee, who didn’t mention any airstrikes, and he’s investigating the incident. I called Afghanistan’s embassy in Washington and asked an embassy official named Ashraf Hadari if he could confirm a strike occurred. “Not really, I cannot confirm that,” Haidari said, “I think it’s still being looked into.” Similarly, there’s a demonstration scheduled for Wednesday in Kabul to protest the deaths. I called and emailed representatives of the group that’s sponsoring it, the youth wing of the Afghan Society for Social Reform and Development, but haven’t heard back from them. When I have more information about what happened in Kunar, I’ll update. ISAF is pledging to cooperate with the Afghan investigation. But that effectively blocks its ability to come out and prove that there wasn’t an airstrike. With Karzai publicly endorsing the investigation and the governor of the province insisting the strike occurred, unequivocal public repudiations of the airstrike allegations would most likely be viewed as bigfooting the Afghan investigation and lead to additional political complications in the ISAF-Afghan relationship. And there’s no timetable for the investigation to wrap itself up.

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Was There Actually an Airstrike in Afghanistan’s Kunar Province?

The country has long been a refuge for jihadis, in part because Yemen’s government welcomed returning Islamist fighters who had fought in Afghanistan during the 1980s

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US widens war against Al Qaeda to Yemen

The Department of Justice this morning announced that twelve detainees have been transferred from the detention facility at Guantanamo Bay to Afghanistan, Yemen and the Somaliland region. Here’s the announcement, with the names of the detainees, which had previously been withheld : As directed by the President’s Jan. 22, 2009 Executive Order, the interagency Guantanamo Review Task Force conducted a comprehensive review of each of these cases. As a result of that review, which examined a number of factors, including potential threat, mitigation measures and the likelihood of success in habeas litigation, the detainees were approved for transfer. In accordance with Congressionally-mandated reporting requirements, the Administration informed Congress of its intent to transfer the detainees at least 15 days before their transfer. Over the weekend, four Afghan detainees, Abdul Hafiz, Sharifullah, Mohamed Rahim and Mohammed Hashim, were transferred to the Government of Afghanistan. In addition, two Somali detainees, Mohammed Soliman Barre and Ismael Arale, were transferred to regional authorities in Somaliland. Finally, six Yemeni detainees, Jamal Muhammad Alawi Mari, Farouq Ali Ahmed, Ayman Saeed Abdullah Batarfi, Muhammaed Yasir Ahmed Taher, Fayad Yahya Ahmed al Rami and Riyad Atiq Ali Abdu al Haf, were transferred to the Government of Yemen. These transfers were carried out under individual arrangements between the United States and relevant foreign authorities to ensure the transfers took place under appropriate security measures. Consultations with foreign authorities regarding these individuals will continue. Since 2002, more than 560 detainees have departed Guantanamo Bay for other destinations, including Albania, Algeria, Afghanistan, Australia, Bangladesh, Bahrain, Belgium, Bermuda, Chad, Denmark, Egypt, France, Hungary Iran, Iraq, Ireland, Italy, Jordan, Kuwait, Libya, Maldives, Mauritania, Morocco, Pakistan, Palau, Portugal, Russia, Saudi Arabia, Spain, Sweden, Sudan, Tajikistan, Turkey, Uganda, United Kingdom and Yemen.

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U.S. Transfers 12 Detainees Out of Gitmo

At this point in the health-reform debate, observers are well aware that the Republican strategy is to delay the vote as long as possible, even if it means dragging out debate on unrelated bills that GOP leaders support. That agenda was on display in October, when it took nearly a month to push through an extension of unemployment benefits that ultimately passed 98 to 0 . And it’s on display today, as Republicans are forcing a long-drawn debate on a defense spending bill that every member of the party will eventually vote for. The tactic forced Democratic leaders to stage a 1 a.m. cloture vote this morning on the defense bill, in hopes of passing the final bill tomorrow morning and moving back to the health-care debate. Forcing that cloture vote is the working definition of a filibuster. And yet GOP leaders have had the temerity to argue that (1) they didn’t filibuster the defense bill and (2) the Democrats are behind all the delays. This isn’t spin — it’s lying. From Roll Call : Senate Armed Services Chairman Carl Levin (D-Mich.) accused Republicans of attempting to filibuster the Defense bill, which includes funding for troops in Iraq and Afghanistan, in an effort to block work on the health care bill. Senate Minority Whip Jon Kyl (Ariz.) and other Republicans, however, sought to place the blame for the funding delay on Democrats, accusing them of dragging their feet in bringing the bill to the floor and arguing they are prepared to pass the bill. “I find it rather curious that our colleague … is accusing Republicans of filibustering this Defense appropriations bill. Republicans don’t control the Senate or the House. The House just passed this bill Wednesday. Now, it could have been passed in October or September,” Kyl said, adding that, “We always vote for the Defense appropriations bill.” Moments later, Kyl refused an attempt to pass the defense bill immediately by unanimous consent. Hours later, he voted against bringing the Defense bill to a final vote. In a perfect world, the Republicans voting with Kyl would be forced to explain why they sought to kill the bill providing troop funding in the middle of two wars.

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Senate Republicans Filibuster Defense Spending Bill — Then Deny They Did It

Holiday Scam Involving Fraudulent Checks WCIV … deployed by the US Military in Iraq (web | news) and Afghanistan, has apparently been the victim of a holiday scam , according to the organization. … Watch out for forged checks claiming to be from Force Protection Charleston Regional Business Fraud attempt spurs investigation Charleston Post Courier Force Protection, victim of holiday scam Live 5 News WCBD all 5 news articles

With fears of a new wave of domestic terrorism rising (even though those fears are statistically way out of proportion to the millions of American Muslims), The New York Times takes a look at something that really could contribute to it: fraying relations between American Muslim community leaders and the FBI . As much as certain members of Congress enjoy the politically cost-free demonization of the American Muslim community, FBI leaders don’t have that luxury, since they depend on close community relations in order to distinguish between real threats and overblown fears. Much like how the best counterinsurgency practices in Iraq and Afghanistan depend on enabling a community to basically police itself, American Muslim leaders will either be partners in the effort — or, if treated as a bunch of targets of suspicion themselves , through intensified surveillance and arm-twisting to inform, they could withhold cooperation to everyone’s detriment. The Times: The Queens imam arrested in September as investigators pursued the coffee vendor [Najibullah Zazi] was an informer who had helped authorities. Last month, federal prosecutors moved to seize several buildings across the country that house mosques, saying they were owned by a nonprofit group with links to Iran. As a rare federal investigation that has ensnared houses of worship, the case stoked apprehensions that the government sees Arab-Americans and Muslims as a people apart. Treat entire communities like an undifferentiated threat and they’ll react accordingly. Michael Rolince, a former FBI counterterrorism official who gets it, tells The Times: “There are some people in the bureau who believe, as I do, that the relationship with the Muslim community is crucial and must be developed with consistency,” Mr. Rolince said. “And there are those who don’t.” If the FBI really believes that this is a moment of heightened domestic-terrorism dangers, then this destructive behavior comes when the bureau can least afford it.

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Are You a Source or a Target?

Wow . Senior defense and intelligence officials said Iranian-backed insurgents intercepted the video feeds by taking advantage of an unprotected communications link in some of the remotely flown planes’ systems. Shiite fighters in Iraq used software programs such as SkyGrabber — available for as little as $25.95 on the Internet — to regularly capture drone video feeds, according to a person familiar with reports on the matter. This is happening in Iraq, and it’s a pretty safe bet that it could happen in Afghanistan and Pakistan, if it’s not already. U.S. military officials in Iraq discovered the drone penetration in the summer. “There’s been no harm done to troops or missions compromised as a result of it,” an anonymous senior defense official told The Wall Street Journal, “but there’s an issue that we can take care of and we’re doing so.” Reassured? The vulnerability is inherent in the drone program, which sends imagery captured by the unmanned planes to their pilots hundreds or thousand miles away. The Air Force says it’s got a new system — with the baroque name Gorgon Stare — that appears to build redundancy into the process. But this gives cause for concern: The potential drone vulnerability lies in an unencrypted downlink between the unmanned craft and ground control. The U.S. government has known about the flaw since the U.S. campaign in Bosnia in the 1990s, current and former officials said. But the Pentagon assumed local adversaries wouldn’t know how to exploit it, the officials said. Yeah, who could possibly be as smart as Americans, right? This ought to be the subject of immediate congressional hearings. As The Journal points out, the Air Force is (somewhat reluctantly) accepting that unmanned flights are the service’s future. Can that future really be compromised by a $26 hack and ignorant, arrogant, xenophobic assumptions?

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Hack the Drones for Only $25.95!

I suppose Anders Fogh Rasmussen’s heart is in the right place, but, um . NATO Secretary General Anders Fogh Rasmussen said on Wednesday the Western military bloc is seeking greater Russian assistance for international operations in Afghanistan. Speaking to reporters after talks with President Dmitry Medvedev, Rasmussen said he was inviting Russia to step up its assistance in Afghanistan, including by supplying helicopters, spare parts and fuel, and by training pilots. What could possibly go wrong here? The last time the Russians stepped up “its assistance” in Afghanistan, the Afghan people went on to enjoy the fruits of Russian generosity and prosperity. NATO is right to underscore an essential continuity. Rasmussen — seriously now — has rather uncritically embraced the Afghanistan war to date as NATO secretary-general , but this is a new plateau. He might need a quick history lesson before this goes forward.

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Next Up, U.S. to Reinvade Vietnam

As a postscript to my Richard Holbrooke piece , a weird exchange came last night at Amb. Holbrooke’s appearance before the Council on Foreign Relations when a reporter for Voice of America asked if Holbrooke’s portfolio included helping Afghanistan and Pakistan resolve some lingering border disputes. “Are you talking about the Durand Line?” Holbrooke asked after the reporter rambled a bit. (The Durand Line is a colloquial term for the border, after the British imperialist who drew it.) Indeed, said the reporter. Holbrooke laughed and replied : You know, there’s a former ambassador — he may be here today — Ron Neumann. Is Ron here? Ron has suggested we work on the Durand Line, and I kind of looked into it because one of the big problems is that we’re talking about cross-border operations in an area where the border isn’t agreed on. But it is my reluctant conclusion we really cannot achieve much in that area right now. Most of the international boundaries in this incredible area of the world with the two largest countries — China and India plus Pakistan plus Afghanistan plus some of the former Soviet republics — most of those boundaries are not agreed on. It turned out Amb. Neumann wasn’t in the audience, so I emailed him to ask what he thought about Holbrooke shooting down what might be called Durand Reform. “I am grateful that he gave my idea a look,” Neumann replied. “I respect his judgment. Perhaps its time will come in the future.” So there’s that.

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In Case You Were Wondering, the U.S. Isn’t Going to Redraw the Afghanistan-Pakistan Border

From Lt. Gen. David Rodriguez, via The Associated Press : The second-highest ranking U.S. general in Afghanistan says it will take longer to send some troops to the ramped-up war there, indicating it will probably be nine to 11 months before all are in place. Lt. Gen. David Rodriguez says logistical challenges involved in bringing so many forces in quickly will likely mean that the escalation will take longer than expected to phase in. That would extend the surge beyond next summer. That doesn’t mean none of them will arrive before next Thanksgiving, it means not all of them will be in place before then. Waiting to hear what that will mean operationally — and whether it will mean it will take longer to reverse the insurgency’s momentum than the 12 months Gen. Stanley McChrystal predicted last August.

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McChrystal Deputy: ‘Extended Surge’ Troops Will Finish Arriving by Thanksgiving

Before there was Glenn Beck, there was John Gibson, a dyspeptic Fox News host who anchored the network’s 5 p.m. block and steadily upped his outrage against liberals and Democrats. His shining moment at the network was probably the “war on Christmas” coverage of the late Bush era, culminating in his 2005 book “The War on Christmas: How the Liberal Plot to Ban the Sacred Christian Holiday Is Worse Than You Thought.” Gibson, who now hosts a radio show for Fox, is back on bookshelves with some serious heavy lifting: “How the Left Swiftboated America: The Liberal Media Conspiracy to Make You Think George Bush Was the Worst President in History.” How “swiftboating” makes any sense in this context, I don’t know. Suffice to say that the book is pretty terrible. It begins with a recap of the 2000 Florida recount that’s riddled with errors. An example: “It was Gore who took the case to the Supreme Court.” That’s exactly the opposite of what happened . The Bush campaign appealed to the U.S. Supreme Court, asking it to overturn the judgment of the Florida Supreme Court, which it did. That’s why the case was titled “Bush v. Gore” and not “Gore v. Bush” — Bush sued first. That’s the level of fact-checking you get in this book. You also get convincing “rebuttals” like this: Indeed, Bush’s “smartest move” was … wait, what? Gibson’s on the same slippery soil when he goes after the agents of “swiftboating” by name. In a chapter titled “The Echo Chamber: Dailykos and the Left-Wing Noise Machine,” Gibson fingers dailykos.com as an all-powerful source of lies and conspiracy theories. That section represents a little bit of mission creep: The real problem with the blog, and with all of the liberal blogosphere, is that it refuses to acknowledge that George W. Bush was right about everything. It’s an awful but fascinating little train wreck of a book.

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‘How the Left Swiftboated America’

More details are emerging about those five young Virginia men arrested in Pakistan . According to Pakistani authorities, they may have been arrested at a safehouse for an anti-Indian terrorist group. But that was a way station to fighting their countrymen in Afghanistan, The Washington Post and The Wall Street Journal report. The Journal: In the latest case, information from laptop computers and other material suggest the five men reached out to al Qaeda, the militant network operating from the tribal region bordering Afghanistan, said a Pakistani intelligence official. The men came in contact with al Qaeda through its local operatives, he said. Police found jihadist literature at the house where the men were arrested, as well as maps of cities and installations — suggesting they could have been planning attacks in Pakistan, said Usman Anwar, police chief of Sargodha. The Post: U.S. officials said they are exploring possible criminal charges in a case that has morphed from a missing-person investigation prompted by concerned family members in the Alexandria area, who contacted the FBI. “To prove something in a U.S. court requires meticulous effort, so we want to be cautious and careful not to characterize anyone as a terrorist unless and until we are certain that charges can be filed,” said one official, who spoke on condition of anonymity because the investigation is continuing. I’ll have more soon on the question of growing domestic radicalization.

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Pakistanis Say Arrested Virginia Men Were Going to Fight in Afghanistan

Finally someone asked about the leaks of Gen. Stanley McChrystal’s strategy review and Ambassador Karl Eikenberry’s cables appearing to oppose the troop surge! That questioner is Rep. Gerald Connolly (D-Va.). Eikenberry: “The review the president led was an extraordinary review,” with everyone encouraged to be candid. “The leaks that occurred are absolutely regrettable,” Eikenberry said. “At no time did I ever oppose additional troops being sent to Afghanistan.” What he said concerned him was a sufficient Afghan commitment. Note he suggests he did not leak anything but does not explicitly deny any leaking, either. Same goes for McChrystal. “I agree with Ambassador Eikenberry,” McChrystal said. “The leaks made our job harder.” He said he was “shoulder to shoulder” with Eikenberry, but the leaks of Eikenberry’s cables made it appear like they were at loggerheads. He elided the question about the leak of his strategy review to Bob Woodward in September, but ends the point by saying, “I absolutely regret the leaks.” Not an explicit reference to the leak of his paper, and McChrystal’s aides have denied to me on the record that anyone in McChrystal’s command leaked it.

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McChrystal and Eikenberry ‘Regret’ Leaks (and Suggest They Didn’t Leak Anything)

Rep. Ron Klein (D-Fla.) engaged Gen. McChrystal in a good colloquy about the necessity of eliminating safe havens for al-Qaeda in Pakistan, one of the strongest arguments of war critics. What’s to stop the terrorists from just going to places like Yemen or Somalia? McChrystal, who headed the hunt for individual terrorists in his old Joint Special Operations Command job, observed that “terrorists and insurgents do best in undergoverned and ungoverned areas,” prompting his strategy of hardening areas to insurgent groups through stronger Afghan governance and other direct means to meeting Afghans’ material needs. “Outside Afghanistan, the same applies. We see terrorists move to places like Somalia and Yemen,” he continued. “Our best bet is to partner with those governments” to bolster that governance, aided in some cases by “precision strikes” on individual terrorists as necessary and appropriate. “There’s no single answer,” McChrystal said. “It’s security, governance, development, precision strikes.” But Klein still wondered about what to do in the event of terrorist dispersal. “The best way is very extensive intelligence sharing with our partners and then following them,” McChrystal said. “It’s like following a criminal gang around.” What? Comparing terrorists to criminals? Call Fox News!

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McChrystal: Terrorism Is a Governance Problem

Rep. Keith Ellison (D-Minn.) asked about the progress of the civilian surge in Afghanistan, and Ambassador Eikenberry beamed as he answered the question. “We’ve made very significant progress over the last 12 months,” Eikenberry said. “By January of next year, during about a 7-week time frame … we will have had a three-fold increase.” Numbers? “About 1,000 civilians overall in Afghanistan,” with 400 of those “out in the field” beyond Kabul, “USAID development specialists, Department of Agriculture specialists, throughout the country,” law-enforcement, DEA agents. They’ll “multiply the effects of wherever they are by hiring Afghans.” Beyond January, Eikenberry expected even more: “Right now we’re in discussions with the department with what additional numbers and capabilities on the ground.” He didn’t have exact figures for his needs throughout 2010, but Eikenberry forecasted a requirement for “several hundred more over the course of the next six, nine months.” Deputy Secretary Jack Lew said something similar yesterday, about a 20 to 30 percent increase in civilians in Afghanistan next year. Still, Ellison said, that makes it 100 troops for every civilian. “You have to look at the effects they’re going to be achieving,” replied Eikenberry, a former military commander in Afghanistan. “When we talk about civilians we’re talking about individuals. Three good agricultural specialists working in the ministry” can achieve massive results, he said.

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Is The Civilian-to-Military Ratio Correct in Afghanistan?

Rep. Bob Inglis (R-S.C.) asked a great question: Sure, it would be better for Afghan farmers to grow wheat instead of poppies, a crop that heavily funds the insurgency. But how much can Afghan farmers really make? Ambassador Karl Eikenberry did not provide a clear answer. “It changes from year to year and changes from region to region,” he said, citing the “fluctiation of price of wheat, one of the main staple crops of Afghanistan.” Still, it should be possible to give a ballpark answer to such a baseline question. Instead, Eikenberry places emphasis on a point no one is contesting, the “known direct correlation between areas of instabiity in Afghanistan … and high poppy yields.” Helmand, for instance, grows “over 50 percent” of the entire poppy yield for the country, “exactly the area where Gen McChrystal’s forces have as one of the main efforts.” McChrystal clarified the point for Rep. Joseph Crowley (D-N.Y.). “We calculate the Taliban get about a third of their funding from the narco trade, but they could operate without it,” he said. The greatest threat from the narco trade is the corrosive corruption that it brings on the governance.”

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How Much Can Afghan Farmers Really Make on Wheat?

During today’s House Foreign Affairs Committee hearing on Afghanistan, Rep. Gene Green (D-Texas) asked if an increase to 400,000 Afghan soldiers and police — that figure stands at a little under 200,000 total now — will be enough. Gen. Stanley McChrystal replied that a “detailed analysis” using “basic COIN doctrine” to determine that 600,000 police and soldiers were necessary in a country of Afghanistan’s size. (That acknowledged a criticism made by counterinsurgency critics that the need is too great for the U.S. and Afghan capabilities.) “But the insurgency is not in the entire country,” he continued, so “we were able to reach what was necessary a better long term endstate.” That led to an estimate of “about 400,000,” — clarifying that that remains, sort of , his goal –  with a breakdown of 240,000 soldiers and 160,000. That total, however, is “not a hard number at this point but a goal we work toward and adjust accordingly. As McChrystal said earlier, he will “re-look that every year” to determine what’s realistic.”

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Even Further Clarification on Afghan Security Force End-Strength

For their last appearance in the three-day gauntlet of congressional hearings, Gen. Stanley McChrystal and Ambassador Karl Eikenberry reunited today before the House Committee on Foreign Affairs. Rep. Howard Berman (D-Calif.), the committee’s chairman, said that U.S. efforts in Afghanistan “cannot stop at the Durand Line,” the border with Pakistan, and must instead pursue “extended terrorist network that shares the same goals” — like “destabilizing Afghanistan and destroying the Pakistani state.” Berman questioned whether Eikenberry had enough civilians, with the right skill sets, “to be effective.” To McChrystal, Berman referenced the Sunni shift against al-Qaeda in Iraq, called the Awakening, and asked whether  “we can succeed in Afghanistan without such an Awakening” if one was not on the horizon. Rep. Ileana Ros-Lehtinen (R-Fla.), the ranking Republican on the panel, also said she wanted to drill down on the “civilian surge.” (Deputy Secretary of State Jack Lew said yesterday to expect a “20 to 30 percent” increase next year above the 974 civilians who will be serving in Afghanistan by January.) She said “claims of failure” over the “past eight years” was an “affront” to the military and not, say, the Bush administration, which she doesn’t specifically reference. Ros-Lehtinen ran the gamut of conservative concerns about the strategy: the July 2011 date for security transitions; whether McChrystal has enough troops; whether the mission is sufficiently broad. And she added a new one: whether McChrystal’s rules of engagement — designed to prevent Afghan civilian casualties — are sufficient to “permanently repel and eliminate the Taliban as a threat.”

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The Final McChrystal/Eikenberry Hearing Gets Underway

Speaking of counterterrorism , here’s Amb. Daniel Benjamin , the State Department counterterrorism chief, speaking today to a Jamestown Foundation conference. (Via Marc Lynch .) Benjamin, who was a fervent critic of the Bush administration’s counterterrorism record , basically sees al-Qaeda in disarray, under pressure in Afghanistan-Pakistan and ideologically discredited. Its only real sparks of hope are in “under-governed” places like Yemen and Somalia. And, well, the good old U.S.A.: The second arena where Sunni radicals continue to succeed is in persuading religious extremists to adopt their cause, even in the United States. A bus driver, Najibullah Zazi, was trained in Pakistan and now faces charges in federal court for planning to set off a series of bombs in the United States. An indictment that was unsealed Monday in Chicago portrays an American citizen–David Headley–playing a pivotal role in last year’s attack in Mumbai, which killed more than 170 people and dramatically raised tensions in South Asia. So even if this radical movement is not mobilizing the masses, it is still galvanizing enough people to take to violence and poses a continuing, powerful threat. The importance of these two cases should not be glossed over–the conspiracies these men were engaged in had roots in the FATA, and eight years after 9/11, should give us all pause. The threat to the U.S. remains substantial and enduring despite the operational constraints on al-Qaida central. It is also multifaceted as we have seen in the movement of young men, many of them motivated by a sense of ethnic duty, who have left their communities in Minnesota, been radicalized in Somalia, and fought and died for al-Shabaab. This follows on testimony last week from Secretary Hillary Rodham Clinton , echoed to a lesser extent by Defense Secretary Robert Gates and Adm. Michael Mullen, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff.

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State Dept. Counterterrorism Chief Warns of Domestic Radicalization

Sen. Ted Kaufman (D-Del.) asked why the Taliban won’t simply reconstitute itself in the parts of Afghanistan that Gen. Stanley McChrystal’s population-security battle plan won’t flood with U.S. troops. It’s the Taliban version of the tried-and-true baseball strategy of hittin’ ‘em where they ain’t. Gen. David Petraeus’ sotto voce answer? The Joint Special Operations Command. “The difference is, of course, in Afghanistan, we can go into those areas, we can continue to disrupt them,” Petraeus said. The Taliban “really reconstituted as much in remote areas of Pakistan ,” while seeking to move into population-dense areas of Afghanistan. Further demonstrating the hybrid counterinsurgency-counterterrorism approach adopted by the administration, Petraeus continued, “We will be increasing our counterterrorist component of our strategy as well, and Gen. McChrystal may want to talk to you about that in closed session.” Did someone say JSOC ? (Well, not in public, he didn’t.) “We’ve got to kill or capture those bad guys that are not reconcilable, and we are planning to do that, and we will have national mission force elements when the spring rolls around.”

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‘We Can Continue To Disrupt’ the Taliban in Remote Areas of Afghanistan

Earlier this week, Rep. Brad Sherman (D-Calif.) told Fox News that he doesn’t support a tax hike to pay for the Afghanistan war until the nation’s jobless rate drops below 5 percent. I think we should pay for this war, but we should pay for it after the unemployment rate is down below 5 percent. We should adopt the statutes now so that these taxes become operative then. But you’ve got to have a good fiscal policy as well as a good policy to fight the global war on terror. If that figure sounds vaguely familiar, it’s because House Minority Whip Eric Cantor (R-Va.) yesterday set the same conditional jobless threshold for any tax hikes. There’s a key distinction to be made here: Cantor, as Dave pointed out yesterday, doesn’t support tax hikes in any context, making his call for the 5 percent threshold that much more disingenuous. Sherman, on the other hand, does support the war surtax, just not in the middle of an employment crisis. Of course, with the jobless rate currently at 10.2 percent (and rising), it will likely be years before the 5 percent figure is realized.

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Cantor Not Alone in Call for 5 Percent Jobless Ceiling on Tax Hikes

He may not survive the upcoming U.K. election, but Prime Minister Gordon Brown gave a speech today in Parliament arguing against any strategy for Afghanistan that doesn’t prop up Afghan governing capacity: Our objective is clear and focused; to prevent al Qaeda launching attacks on our streets and threatening legitimate government in Afghanistan and Pakistan. But if we limit ourselves simply to targeting al Qaeda – without building the capacity of Afghanistan and Pakistan to deal with terrorism and violent extremism – the security gains will not endure. He pledged to send an additional 500 troops to Afghanistan, raising the U.K. force component to 9,500, or a bit less than a tenth of current NATO forces.

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Gordon Brown Doesn’t Want to Restrict the Afghanistan Mission

The two countries share security concerns centered around Pakistan and Afghanistan, and New Delhi seeks to enlist American support to press Islamabad to tackle militants on its soil

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Massive war games showcase deepening India-US ties

The attack, which harmed no Indian embassy staff, occurred as India seeks to retain influence in Afghanistan and control any possibility of an Islamist surge in a region with traditional ties to Islamabad

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Nirupama Rao in Afghanistan after bombing

Curious about how Vice President Joe Biden, formerly one of Afghan President Hamid Karzai’s biggest supporters, came to oppose an expansive state-building commitment to Karzai’s government? Norm Kurz, Biden’s former communications director, explains in a Washington Post op-ed . Yesterday’s virtues are today’s vices. Karzai, once the man no one opposed, is the weak leader unable to knock heads; a Pashtun by heritage but hardly a tribal leader able to inspire followers; a smooth-talking politician in league with a brother running part of the country’s flourishing drug trade; a venal and power-hungry vote thief, subverting U.S. and NATO efforts to bring democracy to Afghanistan. Sure, but the question this raises — and I don’t know the answer — is whether the U.S. ought to have seen Karzai this way earlier, or at least have tempered its formerly glowing opinion of him. Kurz further writes: Biden and others worked for Karzai’s success for nearly eight years and have gotten very little from their investment. But it’s also fair to ask whether basing national security decisions on the shortcomings and failures of Hamid Karzai and his regime justifies leaving Afghanistan without having done the only thing the United States was asked to do so long ago: help establish security. It’s highly unlikely Kurz would have written this without at least Biden’s tacit approval or, at the very least, published this unless he wanted to give readers the impression that Biden believes the above paragraph. That contention holds that even Biden’s reportedly counterterrorism-heavy/Pakistan-first proposals for Afghanistan strategy would not be indifferent to Afghanistan’s fate. I’m not sure how all of this is supposed to work, but there’s a lot about Biden’s proposals that only exist behind closed doors, so everyone ought to be careful when saying they know what Biden’s about.

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Is Joe Biden Speaking Through the Washington Post Op-Ed Page?

This didn’t fit into my piece yesterday , but at his parley with the Council on Foreign Relations, Shah Mehmood Qureshi, the Pakistani foreign minister, said that it’s “in Pakistan’s enlightened self-interest to normalize [and] be at peace with India.” Asked by a distinguished retired U.S. diplomat, Teresita Schaeffer , whether Qureshi’s vigorous denouncement of terrorist groups extended to those that target India — which Pakistan has historically sponsored — Qureshi assured her that “organizations that carry out acts that result into [things like last year's] Mumbai attack are certainly no friends of Pakistan.” And yet, this happened this morning in Kabul : A powerful suicide bomb rocked Kabul this morning outside the Indian embassy, destroying vehicles and splintering buildings, killing at least 17 civilians and wounding nearly 80 people, officials said. There was an attack last year at India’s Afghanistan embassy as well. It makes no sense for these attacks to occur, at the very least, unless the insurgent groups believed they were acting in Pakistan’s interest.

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Another Bombing of the Indian Embassy in Kabul

Intellectually, it makes sense, since the only reason anyone in the U.S. cares about the Taliban is because the Taliban sheltered al-Qaeda ahead of 9/11, and the continuing relationship between elements of the Taliban and al-Qaeda provides al-Qaeda in Pakistan with a degree of strategic depth in Afghanistan. Yet it’s still noteworthy that the administration summoned The New York Times to the White House to push the line that it was going to sharply distinguish between the two organizations as it considers its next Afghanistan and Pakistan steps: “Clearly, Al Qaeda is a threat not only to the U.S. homeland and American interests abroad, but it has a murderous agenda,” one senior administration official said in an interview initiated by the White House on Wednesday on the condition of anonymity because the strategy review has not been finished. “We want to destroy its leadership, its infrastructure and its capability.” The official contrasted that with the Afghan Taliban, which the administration has begun to define as an indigenous group that aspires to reclaim territory and rule the country but does not express ambitions of attacking the United States. “When the two are aligned, it’s mainly on the tactical front,” the official said, noting that Al Qaeda has fewer than 100 fighters in Afghanistan. Another official, who also was authorized to speak but not to be identified, said the different views of Al Qaeda and the Taliban were driving the president’s review . “To the extent that Al Qaeda has been degraded, and it has, and to the extent you believe you need to focus on destroying it going forward, what is required going forward?” the official asked. “And to prevent it from having a safe haven?” My emphasis. The administration is now considering two alternative propositions that require delicate assessment. The first is, as the piece reports Richard Holbrooke is arguing, whether the Taliban would allow al-Qaeda back into Afghanistan if it took control. And there, the available evidence appears to support Holbrooke’s contention that it wouldn’t. Taliban elements have free reign in many areas of southern and eastern Afghanistan, yet the administration is contending that there are only an estimated 100 al-Qaeda operatives in Afghanistan. Now, even a Taliban fulsomely backed by Pakistani intelligence couldn’t take control of the entire country, so it’s unlikely that any Taliban “victory” scenario is going to end up with the Taliban and its affiliates running all of Afghanistan, and accordingly the administration will have to ask whether quantitative gains in Taliban control would lead either al-Qaeda or the Taliban to change the current dynamic. What’s more, it has to ask whether, say, the upcoming Pakistani military offensive in Waziristan would make al-Qaeda’s senior leadership look for safer haven. The danger for the administration is clear: premising a strategy on an optimistic scenario or a dimunition of danger is both substantively and politically troublesome. That’s not to say it’s necessarily wrong , but it’s what Gen. McChrystal would call a high-risk option. The second consideration is whether the public will support a war that really does decouple al-Qaeda from the Taliban. So far the polling doesn’t suggest the public will . But there the considerations are actually much easier: if the public doesn’t support such a war and such a decoupling is necessary, then it’s the war that should be scaled down. Any temptation to overstate the relationship between the Taliban and al-Qaeda in order to sustain support for the war will be a disaster. But that’s too often the kind of inertial thinking that takes over Washington at war.

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Decoupling al-Qaeda From the Taliban

The libertarian think tank releases this video, offering a soup-to-nuts critique of the Afghanistan war, complete with ominous-sounding music:

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Cato vs. Afghanistan

Via Nate Silver , I’m just now seeing the full crosstabs of a 10/1 Fox News/Opinion Dynamics poll. Looking it over, it’s tough to see how a straight-up Republican organization would have altered it at all. Most of the questions deal with fears of the national debt, which is one of the worst-reported, least-understood economic issues out there. And most of the rest deal with paranoid questions about Afghanistan that pit the president against his generals. The weirdness begins early: I guess it’s interesting to learn that a 5-point plurality of Republicans wish Hillary were president, but who’s been asking this? Next, a question from GOP talking points: Next, a clutch of debt questions that reveal — surprise! — that most Americans don’t want the government to spend money “so future generations don’t have to pay.” Next, the suggestion that “U.S. military commanders” are being overruled by the president’s feckless policies. And finally, some good, old-fashioned misinformation on terrorism. For more on how Fox News is often responsible for passing on bad information about terrorism and the law, consult Cato’s Julian Sanchez . – You can follow TWI on Twitter and Facebook .

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A Fox News Poll on Our America-Hating President

Consider this pseudo-controversy ended. Now that Defense Secretary Bob Gates has joined in with national security adviser Jim Jones to remind Gen. Stanley McChrystal of the virtues of restraining public advice ahead of the Afghanistan strategy review, the McChrystal camp endorses the message. From Lt. Col Tadd Sholtis, McChrystal’s spokesman in Kabul: “General McChrystal concurs with the Secretary and shares his perspective that the President’s military and civilian policy advisers need to provide candid but private advice.”

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McChrystal: I Totally Agree With Gates and Jones

More from Gen. Stanley McChrystal’s remarks in London to the International Institute for Strategic Studies. I strongly urge you to check out his remarks in full . Here he gets a question about “Iran’s significance for the Afghan equation.” McChrystal’s reply: Iran, of course, being, you know, in such proximity to Afghanistan and having significant influence inside Afghanistan, is a big player. They, in my view, they have a lot of very positive influence inside Afghanistan, some of it cultural, some of it financial, just things that any neighbor would have to try to build the stability. I think that if Iran takes a very mature look at a stable Afghanistan and support the government of Afghanistan, then we’ll be — we’ll be in good shape. If they were to choose not to do that, and they were to choose to support insurgents, I think that would be a significant miscalculation. I can’t wait for the braying conservative outcry against McChrystal’s craven appeasement of the butchers of Tehran or whatever. For what it’s worth, McChrystal sounds unconvinced that Iran actually is supporting Afghan insurgents, while Michael Vickers, an assistant secretary of defense, yesterday testified that Iranian “meddling there [in Afghanistan] is somewhat less than they’ve done in Iraq, but they do support Sunni groups; strange alliances, but they do, in fact.”

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If McChrystal Wasn’t a General, the Right Would Call Him a Rank Iran Appeaser

Ambassador Peter Galbraith, recently sacked from the U.N. Assistance Mission in Afghanistan over his rejection of the mission’s stance on fraud in the Afghan presidential election, takes issue with spokesman Farhan Haq’s statement to me that Galbraith’s firing “takes the focus away” from dealing with election fraud. Haq’s statement is “absurd,” Galbraith wrote in an email. “The UN created the ‘Galbraith fiasco’ by firing me at this time,” Galbraith said. “Inevitably people were going to ask why. And Abdullah’s strong comments came before my letter leaked and before I spoke to the media.” Galbraith is referring to the letter he wrote to U.N. Secretary General Ban Ki-moon, published by The New York Times today , saying UNAMA can’t “overlook the fraud without compromising our neutrality and becoming complicit in a cover-up.” Abdullah Abdullah, the Afghan presidential candidate whom Hamid Karzai has (probably) defeated, said through an aide , that “By firing someone like Peter Galbraith from his post, it is the first sign that fraud is victorious over the law.”

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Galbraith: I Wasn’t the One Who Made Afghan Election Fraud About Me

Salim Hamdan, Osama bin Laden's alleged driver, was held in Cuba at Guantanamo Bay prison camp like these detainees. (Department of Defense photo by Petty Officer 1st class Shane T. McCoy, U.S. Navy) New documents obtained by TWI related to the case of Mohammed Jawad , an adolescent tortured by Afghan police and then abused again by U.S. interrogators, suggest that not only certain CIA interrogations, but  of interrogations by the Department of Defense demand a broader investigation as well. Last month, Attorney General Eric Holder announced that he would investigate only CIA interrogations that appeared to have violated the agency’s rules and guidance from the Department of Justice. The Jawad case, however, reveals that U.S. military interrogations also violated well-established laws and appear to have violated the Justice Department’s legal guidelines as well. The newly-obtained documents also reveal that the Department of Defense repeatedly failed to follow up on complaints by Jawad’s lawyers that its officers were breaking the law. Illustration by: Matt Mahurin Jawad, who was about 12 years old when he was captured and accused of throwing a hand grenade at U.S. soldiers, endured “cruel and inhuman” treatment and possibly “torture” while in U.S. custody, a U.S. military commission judge ruled last year, determining that his supposed “confessions” to the crime were therefore unreliable. A federal district court judge later similarly refused to admit the confessions in ruling on Jawad’s habeas corpus petition, and announced that without Jawad’s statements, the government’s case was “riddled with holes.” She eventually granted Jawad’s petition, and Jawad was released on August 24 after nearly seven years in captivity, most at the U.S. detention center at Guantanamo Bay. Despite the court’s rulings that Jawad was mistreated in U.S. custody, however, no one has ever been punished or otherwise held accountable. His lawyers say that despite repeated requests, the Defense Department never investigated whether its officers had violated the law. Jawad’s lead military lawyer, Air Force Maj. David Frakt, has released to TWI some of the details of how and why he asked the Defense Department to investigate, and how his repeated complaints about Jawad’s treatment went ignored. Jawad now plans to sue the United States for his mistreatment , which included such extreme sleep deprivation that it appears to have violated even the rules governing interrogation tactics issued by the Bush Justice Department’s Office of Legal Counsel, which issued the now-infamous “torture memos.”  A military judge in Jawad’s case excluded his “confessions” in part on the grounds that he endured 14 days straight of sleep deprivation (by means of what came to be known as the “frequent flyer” program), which may well have amounted to torture. Justice Department memos approved up to 96 hours of sleep deprivation, although some make reference to 180 hours, which would be 11 days. But 14 days exceeds the guidelines of all of the legal memos regarding interrogations that have been revealed so far. According to Judge Stephen Henley, the U.S. Army colonel who ruled on Jawad’s military commission case, Jawad was “moved from cell to cell 112 times from 7 May 2004 to 20 May 2004, on average of about once every three hours.” Jawad was shackled but not interrogated; “the scheme was calculated to profoundly disrupt his mental senses.” The alleged purpose of the “frequent flyer” program, Judge Henley wrote, was “to create a feeling of hopelessness and despair in the detainee and set the stage for successful interrogations.” But by the time Jawad was subjected to it, he “was of no intelligence value to any government agency,” Judge Henley ruled. “The infliction of the ‘frequent flyer’ technique upon the Accused thus had no legitimate interrogation purpose.” (Significantly, interrogation experts say sleep deprivation doesn’t produce useful information even if the subject does know something.) When Frakt, Jawad’s appointed military defense lawyer, learned about how the frequent flyer program was used on Jawad, he became so concerned that, as a military officer, he felt obliged to report to his superiors what he believed was evidence of a war crime. So on May 29, 2008, Frakt sent a memo to the chief defense counsel at the Office of Military Commissions. “I am reporting a suspected LOAC violation that I have uncovered in the course of my duties as a defense counsel assigned to the Office of Military Commissions Defense,” Frakt wrote. Frakt wrote that after an exhaustive review of the facts and relevant law, he believed Jawad had been tortured — in violation of the Geneva Conventions, U.S. and international law, and Defense Department regulations. “Accordingly, I believe I have an affirmative obligation to report the incident to my chain of command,” he wrote. Frakt cited several provisions, all of which require reporting of suspected war crimes to a supervisor. Records provided by the government in the course of the case before the military commission reveal that from May 7, 2004 to May 20, 2004, Jawad, a teenager at the time, was subjected to the program. “During this 14 day period, Mr. Jawad was moved from cell to cell 112 times, an average of every 2 hours 50 minutes,” Frankt wrote in the memo. “There were eight extra moves of very short duration between the hours of midnight and 0200 to ensure maximum disruption of sleep.” After sending that memo, Frakt expected to receive a response. At least, eventually. But he received nothing. So on October 7, 2008, he followed up with an e-mail to the Commander in charge at the U.S. Southern Command post, Joint Task Force for Guantanamo Bay, or SouthCom-JTFGTMO. He cc’d four lawyers in the Pentagon’s Office of General Counsel. In his e-mail, Frakt wrote: On 29 May, I filed this LOAC violation memo with the Chief Defense Counsel, COL David. He forwarded the memo to your office on or about 1 June. Presumably your office forwarded it to SOUTHCOM. I have never received any information about the investigation. The military judge in the Jawad case recently found that Jawad was subjected to the frequent flyer program, and that it constituted “abusive conduct and cruel and inhuman treatment.” (see attached ruling) He found it unnecessary to decide whether the conduct rose to the level of torture but did find that the action was intended to seriously disrupt the mental senses, which is one of the elements of psychological torture. He recommended disciplinary action for this “flagrant misbehavior”. [Confidential testimony from Guantanamo officer indicated] that the program was standard operating procedure, was carried out on many detainees as part of the camp “incentives program” and was personally approved by Col Nelson Cannon (now Maj Gen) and Brig Gen Jay Hood (now Maj Gen). Please provide me with an update on the status of the mandatory LOAC violation investigation or direct me to the appropriate officials who can respond to this inquiry. If you need any further supporting documentation to assist you in the investigation, please let me know. Thank you very much. Frakt received no response. In January of this year, he sent another e-mail to the same Commander and a Captain at Joint Task Force-Guantanamo, and the same set of lawyers in the Pentagon’s General Counsel office. It read, in part: It has now been over seven months since this report was filed. I have never received any update on the status of the mandatory LOAC violation investigation. In the interim, the Military Commission has determined that the violation did, in fact, occur and that “under the circumstances, subjecting [Mr. Jawad] to the ‘frequent flyer’ program from May 7-20, 2004 constitutes abusive conduct and cruel and inhuman treatment.” In other words, Mr. Jawad was abused, in clear violation of the Geneva Conventions. The commission has specifically recommended that “those responsible should face appropriate disciplinary action.” (See attached Ruling D-008) Upon receipt of a LOAC violation report, a formal investigation is mandatory and should be done by the most expeditious means available. However, it does not appear that the DoD Directive was followed because I have never been contacted by anyone regarding my report. Please confirm whether JTF-GTMO or SOUTHCOM investigated this incident, and provide me with an update on the status of this investigation or direct me to the appropriate authority at USSOUTHCOM who can answer this query. If I do not receive a satisfactory explanation, I intend to pursue this matter with the appropriate Inspector General offices. Thank you very much for your prompt attention. V/R David J. R. Frakt, Major, USAFR To this day, says Frakt, he has not hear back from DoD as to whether anyone investigated the abuse and potential war crimes violation. The Defense Department and US-SOUTHCOM-JTFGTMO did not respond to TWI’s request for comment. TWI has other outstanding requests for comment from the the Defense Department, including an explanation of why the department stopped reporting the deaths of detainees in U.S. custody in Iraq and Afghanistan, and a statement of the current policy of reporting those deaths. Despite at least half a dozen requests, TWI has never received an answer.

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Documents Suggest Detainee Abuses by Defense Department