…authorities feel the need to create and post a sign like this:

Such is the lost luster of the Zimbabwean dollar, which is experiencing insane inflation. To put it into perspective, if Bill Gates were to convert his entire net worth of $40 billion into Zimbabwean dollars today, his portfolio would be worth $173 in twelve short months. President Mugabe has driven the Zimbabwean economy into the toilet, but don’t use their bank notes to wipe, even though such an act actually makes financial sense.

A roll of toilet paper costs about $1.50 U.S. dollars and has about 352 sheets per roll. That means each sheet is worth about US $.004, or 3,600 Zimbabwe dollars, according to OANDA.com.

So according to these calculations, using a ZWD 1,000 note in place of a piece of toilet paper is a wise financial decision.

If you get enough famine, disease will surely follow, and there currently is a cholera outbreak that has killed 1,000. Zimbabwe is “not free” in terms of civil rights and political liberties, according to Freedom House. The country has the 151st freest press and falling, and it has the 155th freest economy. Mugabe needed to leave office two decades ago, but there he is, still ruining a once prosperous society.

Last summer, Lynn Westmoreland said the following about Barack Obama:

“Just from what little I’ve seen of her and Mr. Obama, Sen. Obama, they’re a member of an elitist-class individual that thinks that they’re uppity.”

You don’t need a dog-whistle to hear racial tinging with the word “uppity”. especially for someone who lives in Georgia. Westmoreland was reelected,but the stupid comment lives on.

Yesterday, GOP Congressman Paul Broun triggered Godwin’s Law, likening Barack Obama to Adolph Hitler.

“It may sound a bit crazy and off base, but the thing is, he’s the one who proposed this national security force,” Rep. Paul Broun said of Obama in an interview Monday with The Associated Press. “I’m just trying to bring attention to the fact that we may – may not, I hope not – but we may have a problem with that type of philosophy of radical socialism or Marxism.”

Broun cited a July speech by Obama that has circulated on the Internet in which the then-Democratic presidential candidate called for a civilian force to take some of the national security burden off the military.

“That’s exactly what Hitler did in Nazi Germany and it’s exactly what the Soviet Union did,” Broun said. “When he’s proposing to have a national security force that’s answering to him, that is as strong as the U.S. military, he’s showing me signs of being Marxist.”

Ed Morrissey factchecks Broun here. Here’s the video of what Obama said last July.

The controversial part of what Obama said is here:

We cannot continue to rely on our military in order to achieve the national security objectives we’ve set. We’ve got to have a civilian national security force that’s just as powerful, just as strong, just as well-funded.

Certainly Obama’s comments raise questions, especially about this civilian national security force being just as powerful and strong and well-funded as our military, but there is no valid reason to go off half-baked, making grand and unfounded projections. Can our party please recruit politicians who can refrain from making such idiotic comments? I wonder if Erick Erickson lives in either of those districts. As Captain Ed noted:

If we plan to offer a rational alternative to the coming debacle of the next two years, then we’d better stick to facts and eschew hyperbole. We need to oppose the reality of the radical agenda proposed by Obama and the Democratic majorities in Congress, not fantasies spun out of context-free snippets of speeches. The more critics invoke Hitler and Stalin instead of Jimmy Carter and Lyndon Johnson, the better the reality of Obama, Reid, and Pelosi will seem in 2010.

P.J. O’Rourke offers an acerbic template, and he views a conservative America as a “land of freedom and responsibility, knowledge, opportunity, accomplishment, honor, truth, trust, and one boring hour each week spent in itchy clothes at church, synagogue, or mosque.” His thesis is that we had the opportunity to move the country in that direction and we blew it, and it’s a thesis I agree with. In one sense, we didn’t lose by much, but in another, we lost by a lot. The election of Barack Obama sealed the deal on the Southern Strategy:

Since then modern conservatism has been plagued by the wrong friends and the wrong foes. The “Southern Strategy” was bequeathed to the Republican party by Richard Nixon–not a bad friend of conservatism but no friend at all. The Southern Strategy wasn’t needed. Southern whites were on–begging the pardon of the Scopes trial jury–an evolutionary course toward becoming Republican.

[...]

There was no need to piss off the entire black population of America to get Dixie’s electoral votes. And despising cracker trash who have a laundry hamper full of bedsheets with eye-holes cut in them does not make a man a liberal.

Blacks used to poll Republican. They did so right up until Mrs. Roosevelt made some sympathetic noises in 1932. And her husband didn’t even deliver on Eleanor’s promises.

Kiss 11% of the electorate goodbye for another generation. We we are going down a similar road with Hispanics by our wrong-headed approach on immigration:

Our attitude toward immigration has been repulsive. Are we not pro-life? Are not immigrants alive? Unfortunately, no, a lot of them aren’t after attempting to cross our borders. Conservative immigration policies are as stupid as conservative attitudes are gross. Fence the border and give a huge boost to the Mexican ladder industry. Put the National Guard on the Rio Grande and know that U.S. troops are standing between you and yard care. George W. Bush, at his most beneficent, said if illegal immigrants wanted citizenship they would have to do three things: Pay taxes, learn English, and work in a meaningful job. Bush doesn’t meet two out of three of those qualifications. And where would you rather eat? At a Vietnamese restaurant? Or in the Ayn Rand Café?

There goes 12% of the electorate. Obama and McCain had similar positions on immigration legislation, but Hispanics voted overwhelmingly for Obama. Why? Perhaps because McCain is a Republican, and Hispanics are repulsed by the positions taken by a good number of Republicans. O’Rourke’s takes on immigration and social issues are more libertarian, and they should be conservative positions. It is intellectually inconsistent to call for a smaller, less intrusive government while at the same time calling for larger, more intrusive bureaucracies. On immigration, I think we should have comprehensive reform to recognize the fact that around 12 million are here illegally. I don’t know if O’Rourke and I are in synch on policy, but I think our attitudes toward immigration are.

On abortion:

If the citizenry insists that abortion remain legal–and, in a passive and conflicted way, the citizenry seems to be doing so–then give the issue a rest. Meanwhile we can, with the public’s blessing, refuse to spend taxpayers’ money on killing, circumscribe the timing and method of taking a human life, make sure parental consent is obtained when underage girls are involved, and tar and feather teenage boys and run them out of town on a rail. The law cannot be made identical with morality. Scan the list of the Ten Commandments and see how many could be enforced even by Rudy Giuliani.

Personally, I’m pro-life and I think Roe v. Wade was wrongly decided, but conservatives need to spend more time persuading than legislating. We can do some common-sense things on the margins, but that’s about it.

O’Rourke derides the GOP for participating in the growth of government and our approach toward taxes:

Anyway, a low tax rate is not–never mind the rhetoric of every conservative politician–a bedrock principle of conservatism. The principle is fiscal responsibility.

Conservatives should never say to voters, “We can lower your taxes.” Conservatives should say to voters, “You can raise spending. You, the electorate, can, if you choose, have an infinite number of elaborate and expensive government programs. But we, the government, will have to pay for those programs. We have three ways to pay.

“We can inflate the currency, destroying your ability to plan for the future, wrecking the nation’s culture of thrift and common sense, and giving free rein to scallywags to borrow money for worthless scams and pay it back 10 cents on the dollar.

“We can raise taxes. If the taxes are levied across the board, money will be taken from everyone’s pocket, the economy will stagnate, and the poorest and least advantaged will be harmed the most. If the taxes are levied only on the wealthy, money will be taken from wealthy people’s pockets, hampering their capacity to make loans and investments, the economy will stagnate, and the poorest and the least advantaged will be harmed the most.

“And we can borrow, building up a massive national debt. This will cause all of the above things to happen plus it will fund Red Chinese nuclear submarines that will be popping up in San Francisco Bay to get some decent Szechwan take-out.”

Yes, this would make for longer and less pithy stump speeches. But we’d be showing ourselves to be men and women of principle. It might cost us, short-term. We might get knocked down for not whoring after bioenergy votes in the Iowa caucuses. But at least we wouldn’t land on our scruples. And we could get up again with dignity intact, dust ourselves off, and take another punch at the liberal bully-boys who want to snatch the citizenry’s freedom and tuck that freedom, like a trophy feather, into the hatbands of their greasy political bowlers.

McCain was clearly on the side of fiscal responsibility before he ran for president, and he never sold me on continuing all of the Bush tax cuts. He may have had to take that position during the primaries, but he didn’t have to make it a focus in the presidential run. I don’t know about other conservatives, but I worry less about tax rates and more about a permanently imbalanced budget and an ever-growing national debt.

On free markets:

What will destroy our country and us is not the financial crisis but the fact that liberals think the free market is some kind of sect or cult, which conservatives have asked Americans to take on faith. That’s not what the free market is. The free market is just a measurement, a device to tell us what people are willing to pay for any given thing at any given moment. The free market is a bathroom scale. You may hate what you see when you step on the scale. “Jeeze, 230 pounds!” But you can’t pass a law making yourself weigh 185. Liberals think you can. And voters–all the voters, right up to the tippy-top corner office of Goldman Sachs–think so too.

We, the conservatives, who do understand the free market, had the responsibility to–as it were–foreclose upon this mess. The market is a measurement, but that measuring does not work to the advantage of a nation or its citizens unless the assessments of volume, circumference, and weight are conducted with transparency and under the rule of law. We’ve had the rule of law largely in our hands since 1980. Where is the transparency? It’s one more job we botched.

You can’t have free markets without rule of law and sufficient transparency to allow oversight. The bottom line is that most people live their lives conservatively, so the O’Rourke brand of conservatism should not be a stretch for a majority of Americans. But this means that the leaders of the conservative movement need to change their priorities. It should be about freedom, free markets, rule of law, individual rights and fiscal responsibility.

Even after a day of mulling, Joe Biden’s remarks at a Seattle fundraiser a few days ago are still troubling to me because they say something about both Joe Biden and Barack Obama. Here’s what Joe the Politician said:

“Mark my words,” the Democratic vice presidential nominee warned at the second of his two Seattle fundraisers Sunday. “It will not be six months before the world tests Barack Obama like they did John Kennedy.”

“They” was Nikita Khrushchev. How was John Kennedy tested? Severely:

Although Kennedy was keenly aware of some of the risks of such meetings — his Harvard thesis was titled “Appeasement at Munich” — he embarked on a summit meeting with Khrushchev in Vienna in June 1961, a move that would be recorded as one of the more self-destructive American actions of the cold war, and one that contributed to the most dangerous crisis of the nuclear age.

Senior American statesmen like George Kennan advised Kennedy not to rush into a high-level meeting, arguing that Khrushchev had engaged in anti-American propaganda and that the issues at hand could as well be addressed by lower-level diplomats. Kennedy’s own secretary of state, Dean Rusk, had argued much the same in a Foreign Affairs article the previous year: “Is it wise to gamble so heavily? Are not these two men who should be kept apart until others have found a sure meeting ground of accommodation between them?”

But Kennedy went ahead, and for two days he was pummeled by the Soviet leader. Despite his eloquence, Kennedy was no match as a sparring partner, and offered only token resistance as Khrushchev lectured him on the hypocrisy of American foreign policy, cautioned America against supporting “old, moribund, reactionary regimes” and asserted that the United States, which had valiantly risen against the British, now stood “against other peoples following its suit.” Khrushchev used the opportunity of a face-to-face meeting to warn Kennedy that his country could not be intimidated and that it was “very unwise” for the United States to surround the Soviet Union with military bases.

Kennedy’s aides convinced the press at the time that behind closed doors the president was performing well, but American diplomats in attendance, including the ambassador to the Soviet Union, later said they were shocked that Kennedy had taken so much abuse. Paul Nitze, the assistant secretary of defense, said the meeting was “just a disaster.” Khrushchev’s aide, after the first day, said the American president seemed “very inexperienced, even immature.” Khrushchev agreed, noting that the youthful Kennedy was “too intelligent and too weak.” The Soviet leader left Vienna elated — and with a very low opinion of the leader of the free world.

Kennedy’s assessment of his own performance was no less severe. Only a few minutes after parting with Khrushchev, Kennedy, a World War II veteran, told James Reston of The New York Times that the summit meeting had been the “roughest thing in my life.” Kennedy went on: “He just beat the hell out of me. I’ve got a terrible problem if he thinks I’m inexperienced and have no guts. Until we remove those ideas we won’t get anywhere with him.”

A little more than two months later, Khrushchev gave the go-ahead to begin erecting what would become the Berlin Wall. Kennedy had resigned himself to it, telling his aides in private that “a wall is a hell of a lot better than a war.” The following spring, Khrushchev made plans to “throw a hedgehog at Uncle Sam’s pants”: nuclear missiles in Cuba. And while there were many factors that led to the missile crisis, it is no exaggeration to say that the impression Khrushchev formed at Vienna — of Kennedy as ineffective — was among them.

So, in other words, like with Kennedy, some bellicose dictator in the world is going to decide that Obama is “too intelligent and too weak” and will opt to throw a hedgehog at Obama’s pants, and it could be vitally serious if that “hedgehog” is nuclear-powered. But there’s more from Biden:

The world is looking. We’re about to elect a brilliant 47-year-old senator president of the United States of America. Remember I said it standing here if you don’t remember anything else I said. Watch, we’re gonna have an international crisis, a generated crisis, to test the mettle of this guy.”

Joe Biden is directly saying that some unnamed dictator is going to instigate an international crisis, taking advantage of an inexperienced commander-in-chief, in part because the commander-in-chief is inexperienced and perhaps viewed as too accommodating. Ever since they were picked as running mates, the VP candidates have been receiving daily briefings from national security officials. Does Biden base his words on this daily intel or is he just spitballing? In either case, his guaranteeing an international crisis in the first six months of an Obama administration demands an explanation. It’s one thing to tell a guy in a wheelchair to stand up, but it’s something else to reveal our hand on national security and tell the world that an incident is guaranteed to arise in part because we elected a president who is perceived to be rollable by a dictator or three. If this other nation has nuclear weapons or acquires them, then this is highly troubling. And there’s more:

“I can give you at least four or five scenarios from where it might originate,” Biden said to Emerald City supporters, mentioning the Middle East and Russia as possibilities. “And he’s gonna need help. And the kind of help he’s gonna need is, he’s gonna need you – not financially to help him – we’re gonna need you to use your influence, your influence within the community, to stand with him. Because it’s not gonna be apparent initially, it’s not gonna be apparent that we’re right.”

Not only is Biden predicting an international crisis, he is predicting how Obama will respond to the crisis and Biden is predicting how people will react to Obama’s response, which will be unfavorable. The response will be so unfavorable that Biden is urging the more strident Obama supporters to circle the wagons around the new administration. Biden is saying that Obama will have made the right choice, but on what basis? Joe Biden was wrong on the Reagan defense build-up and wrong on the 1991 Gulf War. To most liberals (I’m guessing), Joe Biden was wrong to vote “yea” on the 2002 Authorization to Use Military Force on Iraq. Joe Biden was also wrong on the surge strategy for Iraq, as was Barack Obama. Why should we trust that Obama-Biden will make the right choice when a belligerent gets belligerent? It took Obama a whole week to figure out the right answer after Russia invaded Georgia.

In the early days of the Bush administration, an international crisis was stoked by the Chinese when a fighter pilot engaged an American surveillance jet. The fighter pilot died after the planes collided and the American plane was forced to land at a Chinese airbase. The American crewmen were held hostage and Prince Bandar from Saudi Arabia helped negotiate their release. The jet was held by the Chinese and eventually returned, but the Chinese presumably gained some technology in the process. That incident was relatively small and easily forgotten. It doesn’t like that’s the sort of incident Biden is predicting.

Biden’s remarks are revealing about Joe Biden because they once again show that he has a big mouth and insufficient self-control to shut it, even when vital matters of national security are involved. He elocutes like an intelligent guy, but like with his Seattle speech and his nonsensical and wrong comments about Hezbollah at his last debate, the things that come out of his mouth are bewildering and bespeak poor judgment. What has Joe Biden really learned from his 35 years of experience? From where I sit, not nearly enough.

[Just because I think McCain is going to lose, doesn't mean I'm going to stop fighting for him to win, and I'll do what I can until November 4th when the election is called one way or the other. Nothing would make me more happy than to be totally surprised by a McCain victory. Nevertheless, I can't help looking beyond.]

If there is any politician who has a right to blame George W. Bush, it’s John McCain.  In 2000, the one man standing in the way of McCain’s quest for the presidential brass ring was Bush.  In 2008, the one man standing in the way of McCain’s quest for the presidency is Bush (and his sub-30% approval rating and 90±% nation-going-in-the-wrong-direction rating).  Sure, McCain’s opponent this time around is Barack Obama, but the Bush legacy of incompetence and cronyism–ladled with a big helping of economic crisis–is going to crush the McCain campaign into little tiny bits.  A good debate performance won’t change a thing.  I’d like to be wrong, but the electoral map paints the picture.

There were several major presumptions the GOP held that George W. Bush frittered away during his time in office:  We had better answers on the economy, we were superior to the Democrats in national security, we knew how to control spending, we were the party in favor of a smaller and more retrained government, and we were the more ethical party in the wake of the Clinton years.  All gone.

Bush did not impose enough fiscal discipline while in office, then a mortgage crisis happened on Bush’s watch, followed by a financial markets crisis.  There goes the economic presumption.  Bush blew it on Iraq, first by screwing the pooch on WMD intelligence and then by mismanaging a war for three-and-a-half years, costing us thousands of lives and hundreds of billions of our money.  There goes the majorities in both houses of Congress, there goes Donald Rumsfeld and there goes the presumption that military-friendly Republicans knew how to run a war.

During the Bush years, we doubled our national debt and our president signed one big spending bill after another.  Our budget deficit is going to be around a half a trillion.  So much for controlling spending.  In terms of ethics, we’ve had Rovian campaign tactics, an administration that was okay with violating international conventions on detainee treatment, and presidential appointees whose politicizing was only exceeded by their gross incompetence.

Bottom line, we deserve to lose, but given the substandard performance of the Democratic majority in Congress, not by much.

So how to go forward?  To me, the first step is new leadership, especially in the House.  Second, we need to challenge Barack Obama if and when he moves too far to the left.  I predict he’ll have a decent honeymoon period, given the dismal approval ratings of the Reid-Pelosi Congress.  Back in 1993, Bill Clinton had more serious challenges with Congress because his Congressional counterparts weren’t hyper-partisan lightweights.  Obama has a natural advantage, not only of winning this election but of confronting fellow party members while in office, if he has the stones to do it.

What else?  Plenty.  Militarily, the GOP can stand behind the Petraeus plan for Iraq and a similar counterinsurgency plan for Afghanistan, and we can challenge Obama if (and perhaps when) he guts our military presence in Iraq too quickly.  Conservatives should push for a more highly trained and adaptable and versatile military, combining high tech with high training.

Ethically, we need to clean house.  Given the 2006 electoral aftermath, quite a bit has been done already, but we can do more and better.  This is another reason why we need new leadership.  We can’t adequately combat Democratic corruption if we allow corruption in our own party.

Fiscally, we need to focus on eliminating waste, and we can do so by re-allying with Citizens Against Government Waste and the Concord Coalition and other similar groups.

Philosophically, we need more conservative think tanks, and those think tanks need to re-think what conservatism is all about.  To me, we need to recognize that 20% of our economy is the government, and that it needs to be run competently while at the same time we should try to restrain its growth and intrusions.  On immigration, conservatives have lost the argument.  We should settle for comprehensive reform and try to work in as much border control as can be had.  Conservatives should work to expand political and economic freedoms, both domestically and abroad, and protect rights.

We’ve lost the debate on health care, and I honestly have no idea what a conservative model for health care is.  We’ve partially lost the debate on taxes.  When it comes to income taxes, Obama prevailed.  Because of this, we should push for tax simplification and for reasonable reductions in taxes on business and capital gains.

Communications-wise, we could use a conservative version of Media Matters and ThinkProgress to challenge the narratives and storylines put out by a non-conservative media (only 7% of national media were self-described conservatives in a survey a few years back).  We need better internet forums (the 3.0 version of Redstate sucks, for example).  We’re going to be in the wilderness for a while, so conservatives are just going to have to get more chatty and more activist.  In talk radio, Rush Limbaugh and others were influential in growing the conservative movement, but they also dumbed it down.  We need fewer Hannitys and Levins and more Medveds and Bennetts.  We need fewer slogans and more complete thoughts.  Rush Limbaugh needs to untie the half of his brain that’s tied behind his back.

Just a couple of thoughts.

In several places, I’ve made the case that a proper counterinsurgency needs to be implemented in Afghanistan, along the lines of what is being done in Iraq. Because of differences in geography, culture, urbanization and other factors, the tactics in will be assuredly different in Afghanistan, but the general principles of clear-hold-build should apply. Am I absolutely sure about this? No, but I’ve seen some materials that are persuasive. The Atlantic is one.

Politically and strategically, the most important level of governance in Afghanistan is neither national nor regional nor provincial. Afghan identity is rooted in the woleswali: the districts within each province that are typically home to a single clan or tribe. Historically, unrest has always bubbled up from this stratum—whether against Alexander, the Victorian British, or the Soviet Union. Yet the woleswali are last, not first, in U.S. military and political strategy.

Large numbers of U.S. and NATO troops are now heavily concentrated in Kabul, Kandahar, and other major cities. Thousands of U.S. personnel are stationed at Bagram Air Force Base, for instance, which is complete with Burger King, Dairy Queen, and a shopping center, but is hundreds of miles from the heart of the insurgency. Meanwhile, the military’s contact with villagers in remote areas where the Taliban operate is rare, typically brief, and almost always limited to daylight hours.

The Taliban are well aware that the center of gravity in Afghanistan is the rural Pashtun district and village, and that Afghan army and coalition forces are seldom seen there. With one hand, the Taliban threaten tribal elders who do not welcome them. With the other, they offer assistance. (As one U.S. officer recently noted, they’re “taking a page from the Hezbollah organizations in Lebanon, with their own public works to assist the tribes in villages that are deep in the inaccessible regions of the country. This helps support their cause with the population, making it hard to turn the population in support of the Afghan government and the coalition.”)

The rural Pashtun south has its own systems of tribal governance and law, and its people don’t want Western styles of either. But nor are they predisposed to support the Taliban, which espouses an alien and intolerant form of Islam, and goes against the grain of traditional respect for elders and decision by consensus. Re-empowering the village coun­cils of elders and restoring their community leadership is the only way to re-create the traditional check against the powerful political network of rural mullahs, who have been radicalized by the Taliban. But the elders won’t commit to opposing the Taliban if they and their families are vulnerable to Taliban torture and murder, and they can hardly be blamed for that.

To reverse its fortunes in Afghanistan, the U.S. needs to fundamentally reconfigure its operations, creating small development and security teams posted at new compounds in every district in the south and east of the country. This approach would not necessarily require adding troops, although that would help—200 district-based teams of 100 people each would require 20,000 personnel, one-third of the 60,000 foreign troops currently in the country.

Each new compound would become home to roughly 60 to 70 NATO security personnel, 30 to 40 support staff to manage logistics and supervise local development efforts, and an additional 30 to 40 Afghan National Army soldiers. The troops would provide a steady security presence, strengthen the position of tribal elders, and bolster the district police. Today, Afghan police often run away from the superior firepower of attacking Taliban forces. It’s hard to fault them—more than 900 police were killed in such attacks last year alone. But with better daily training and help only minutes away, local police would be far more likely to put up a good fight, and win. Indirectly, the daily presence of embedded police trainers would also prevent much of the police corruption that fuels resentment against the government. And regular contact at the district and village levels would greatly improve the collection and analysis of intelligence.

Perhaps most important, district-based teams would serve as the primary organization for Afghan rural development. Currently, “Provincial Reconstruction Teams,” based in each provincial capital, are responsible for the U.S. military’s local development efforts. These teams have had no strategic impact on the insurgency, because they are too thin on the ground—the ratio of impoverished Afghan Pashtuns to provincial reconstruction teams is roughly a million to one. Few teams are able to visit every district in their province even once a month; it’s no wonder that rural development has been marred by poor design and ineffective execution.

Local teams with on-site development personnel—“District Development Teams,” if you will—could change all that, and also serve to support nonmilitary development projects. State Department and USAID personnel, along with medics, veterinarians, engineers, agricultural experts, hydrologists, and so on, could live on the local compounds and work in their districts daily, building trust and confidence.

Deploying relatively small units in numerous forward positions would undoubtedly put more troops in harm’s way. But the Taliban have not demonstrated the ability to overrun international elements of this size, and the teams could be mutually reinforcing. (Air support would be critical.) Ultimately, we have to accept a certain amount of risk; you can’t beat a rural insurgency without a rural security presence.

As long as the compounds are discreetly sited, house Afghan soldiers to provide the most visible security presence, and fly the Afghan flag, they need not exacerbate fears of foreign occupation. Instead, they would reinforce the country’s most important, most neglected political units; strengthen the tribal elders; win local support; and reverse the slow slide into strategic failure.

This strategy appears to be in synch with the latest Army field manual, FM 3.07, Stability Operations, and it looks like a natural extension of the counterinsurgency manual (FM 3.24). Mountainrunner has a summary of FM 3.07, but the bottom line is that it focuses on a comprehensive approach, and it challenges every soldier to be more than just a warrior:

The manual honestly realizes that the Soldiers (it is an Army document) are public diplomats and must intelligently operate in a local and global information environment where perceptions matter.

2-74. Stability operations are conducted among the people, in the spotlight of international news media, and under the umbrella of international law. The actions of Soldiers communicate American values and beliefs more effectively than words alone. Therefore, military forces ensure consistency in their actions and messages. They provide the media with prompt, factual information to quell rumors and misinformation. They grant media representatives access to information within the limits of operations security. Finally, they understand the culture of each audience and tailor the message appropriately.

2-75. No other military activity has as significant a human component as operations that occur among the people. With urbanization, these operations will be increasingly conducted among concentrations of people and thus significantly affect their psyche. Human beings capture information and form perceptions based on inputs received through all the senses. They see actions and hear words. They compare gestures and expressions with the spoken word. They weigh the messages presented to them with the conditions that surround them. When the local and national news media are unavailable or unreliable, people often rely on “word of mouth” to gain information or turn to the Internet, where unverified information flows freely at unimaginable speeds. To the people, perception equals reality. Creating favorable perceptions requires an understanding of the psychological motivations of the populace and shaping messages according to how people absorb and interpret information to ensure broad appeal and acceptance.

At Registan.net, Joshua Foust highlighted how we’ve screwed up in terms of civilian casualties and poor information ops. We can’t prevail in this kind of conflict when more civilians are killed than militants. This is no way to conduct a COIN campaign.

Another critical component to a successful plan is to work toward political solutions. The structure of the government matters less than its legitimacy and its ability to represent the people. In this New York Times piece, a couple of veterans from Afghanistan have some ways to get the Afghan government to a better place:

First, the Afghan government must confront corruption in its own ranks. Tribal elders in Ghazni told us that they are “slapped on one cheek by the Taliban, and on the other cheek by the government.” They talked of extortion by the police, dysfunctional courts and rampant bribery in government offices. The average Afghan spends one-fifth of his income on bribes. It’s no surprise so many actively or passively support the Taliban.

To fight corruption, President Hamid Karzai should immediately do three things: fire those seen as the most corrupt cabinet ministers, provincial governors and district governors; arrest and prosecute the most notorious warlords from the civil war in the 1990s, who committed unspeakable atrocities but are living openly in Kabul or the provinces; and break the relationship between the government and the country’s largest industry, the poppy trade.

The coalition can assist in these reforms by “embedding” Western civilian experts in law, government and business management at every level of the Afghan government. This can improve performance and transparency. For example, one government worker described to us how a corrupt land deal was reversed because “locals were able to confront the governor together with a coalition representative, which made the issue hard to ignore.”

Second, the Afghan government must rethink its approach to extending central government control throughout the country. Afghanistan’s remote valleys have long sheltered tribesmen with an antibody reaction to outside power. Yet the Afghan Constitution, drafted under close American tutelage, posits a highly centralized government, with the leaders of Afghanistan’s 34 provinces appointed by and beholden to Kabul, rather than to their own people.

Decentralizing power does not necessarily require amending the Constitution, but it does demand that central authorities in Afghanistan focus on providing services of national scope: an army and police force, roads, electricity, a postal service and the like. Actual governance at the district level must stem from traditional tribal, social and religious structures.

Third, the Afghan government must negotiate with Taliban groups that have shown an honest willingness to renounce violence in exchange for a path back into the country’s political life. Most Afghans we spoke with drew a sharp distinction between Afghan Taliban and other groups opposing the government — Al Qaeda, Arab foreign fighters and members of the Pakistani Taliban. They view Afghan Taliban as “sons of Afghanistan” who deserve to be treated differently than their more extreme foreign counterparts.

Afghanistan is a rural, conservative country, and there will inevitably be districts where the people elect local Taliban rule. What’s essential is that these places don’t provide a staging area for a coup against the Kabul government or terrorist plots beyond Afghanistan. Incorporating the unarmed Taliban members into the government would give them something to lose, thus providing Kabul with new leverage over them.

Enhancing the legitimacy of an elected, representative government is the coalition’s central task. With the help of “the lion of the people,” the Afghan government and the coalition can defeat all spoilers in Afghanistan; otherwise, no amount of force will ever be enough to win.

As with Iraq, we cannot achieve victory through military means alone. This was a lesson we did not learn in the Vietnam War. The South Vietnamese government had all kinds of problems, and we did little to reform it over all those years. In Iraq, Ryan Crocker and David Petraeus worked in concert, and it worked, combining military ops, political reforms and economic aid. A similar set-up is needed for Afghanistan. The NATO hierarchy is not working and it needs to be reorganized, and the nations that refuse to let their soldiers engage in kinetic operations need to send those soldiers home. Herschel Smith has had it up to here with NATO, saying it cannot be rehabilitated:

More than five months ago on the heels of a number of bureaucratic entanglements that had slowed the progress of recently deployed Marines in Afghanistan, The Captain’s Journal asked the question Can NATO Be Rehabilitated? We also predicted that in order to give Petraeus latitude to implement counterinsurgency doctrine, we would have to bring U.S. forces out from under the command of NATO, or possibly place a U.S. General in charge of NATO forces. This has come to pass as we predicted.

We have also noted that the campaign in Afghanistan relies heavily on special forces and raids against mid-level Taliban commanders rather than contact with the population and ensuring security. In other words, it is being treated as a counter-terrorism campaign rather than a counterinsurgency campaign. Australian infantry is not even allowed to engage in kinetic operations, and must sign documentation concerning their deployment that they have not provoked such fire fights.

Rather than making contact with the population, many NATO troops have been kept on Forward Operating Bases (FOBs); rather than finding and killing the enemy, NATO has placed emphasis on reconstruction efforts, reconstruction that goes unused in many cases because there is no security. Rather than conducting dismounted patrols, many troops have been confined to vehicles, obviously increasing the risk from IEDs.

[...]

Our question five months ago was prescient. There are individual countries who are assisting in Afghanistan, but as an organization, our judgment is that NATO cannot be rehabilitated. This is why, for all of his bluster about returning America to a position of respect across the globe, Barack Obama’s demand that NATO fulfill an increased role in Afghanistan is a doomed strategy. More troops to sit on FOBs and provide force protection for themselves (while Marines and British forces take the brunt of the battle in the South) won’t help the campaign.

Smith is making a lot of sense to me.

Michael Yon is in Afghanistan and he weighs in.

This is a land of paradox. The people here are friendly and hospitable, violent and suspicious. The war effort enjoys broad support, yet our alliance is unraveling. The Taliban are widely despised, and yet certain elements of it are integral parts of Afghan society. People want the national government to succeed, yet they have little or no faith in it. In many respects, while the country takes center stage in today’s geopolitics, it is stuck in the Middle Ages.

I’ve driven over a thousand miles up and down Afghan roads during the past few weeks to find that many locals are thankful to the coalition of American, British and other NATO forces that are trying to bring peace and stability to the country. Others say they hate us.

It has become clear to me that we’re losing this war. But losing doesn’t mean lost.

When someone says they know what to do in Afghanistan, it’s best to remain skeptical. Some folks are flat-out lying, like recent attempts to deny the existence of a secret report documenting how 10 French soldiers who were killed didn’t have enough ammo or working radios. Others are telling us what we want to hear, like it will just take a few more troops and some border incursions into Pakistan to straighten out this mess.

There are a few honest players in Afghanistan, and I’m listening carefully to them. But please understand this much: In a land whose paradoxes can confuse and even crush powerful empires, any solutions – if they even exist – will not be simple or painless.

When I traveled extensively in Iraq, I spent a lot of time with combat units that were consistently winning against the enemy, both in kinetic operations and gaining the support of the people. All the while, we were losing certain aspects of that war, both in Iraq and back on the home front. It wasn’t until our tactical superiority was supported by an effective strategy that we started turning things around. Iraq now has the chance to become a peaceful andprosperous country, and a good ally. I sense that the day will come when I will request a visa togo on vacation in Iraq.

Can the same thing happen in Afghanistan? I am less confident – for today, anyway.

Gen. David Petraeus, who recently assumed command of Centcom, responsible for U.S. forces in Afghanistan and Iraq (and many other countries), knows that these two countries present different challenges. The counterinsurgency manual he revised, and his own doctoral dissertation on the effects of Vietnam on the American military and foreign policy, show an intellect that is subtle enough to recognize a paradox and honest enough not to try and hide behind it. One of the paradoxes described in the counterinsurgency manual is: “Tactical success guarantees nothing.”

If anyone can unravel Afghanistan, it’s Petraeus. But that might be beyond even his talents.

Describing his successful partnership with the U.S. ambassador to Iraq, Ryan Crocker, Petraeus recently said: “There has to be absolute unity of purpose, unity of effort, even if there cannot be and will not be unity of command.”

Right now, our enemies have unity of purpose: They want to kick us out of here. Meanwhile, we can’t even agree about whether or not this war can be won.

More troops alone will not solve the problem. Another veteran from Afghanistan offers a four-step plan:

(1) Increase the local and international security presence and its intelligence, surveillance, and reconnaissance capabilities; focus on population-centric operations. More international security forces, particularly in the east and south, are crucial. The increase must be accompanied by an intensified effort to raise and develop Afghan forces. Furthermore, we must devote more intelligence, surveillance, and reconnaissance assets to the contested areas. As a rule, each battalion-sized task force should have constant unmanned-aerial-vehicle and close-air-support coverage.

These forces must concentrate on protecting the population. To that end, they must build allies among the people; reduce the friction associated with the presence of foreign forces; work with local leaders to promote security in villages and on roads; promote local solutions to local problems; crush the militants when they reveal themselves; and give people compelling reasons to support the government and the counterinsurgency.

(2) Invest in bottom-up capability; attack the problem from both ends. Decentralization can be a powerful force on the side of the government if used responsibly. Afghan identity works from the inside out: Family, clan, village, and tribe are far more compelling to the individual than the nation. Afghans regard their elected village, district, and tribal shuras (councils) as their true representatives, not the appointed district administrators or provincial governors. Empowering these local councils to bring effective governance, basic services, and economic opportunity to their people in a manner integrated with national efforts is the best way to connect people to their government.

Local governments desperately need to draw on the expertise of civilian partners from the international community to develop durable systems relevant to everyday life. The military cannot do this alone. Ensuring these efforts are properly distributed and aligned with the national government will mitigate the very real risk of a return to the warlordism that racked the country after the Soviet war.

(3) Fix critical economic and fiscal policies at the national level. A functional economy, coupled with social and political institutions at the local level, would destroy the Taliban. The overwhelming majority of military-aged males in contested areas are unemployed outside subsistence farming. They fight for money. The economic logic of violence must change.

Afghanistan has considerable natural resources that could be harnessed to spur business and other economic growth. Sadly, national policy hamstrings efforts to do this. For instance, the timber trade has been virtually outlawed, preventing the development of local businesses while creating a black market that feeds the insurgency and resistance to the government. The underground timber economy has also resulted in significant deforestation. A smart timber policy would create incentives to manage forests in addition to generating business opportunities consonant with local interests and capabilities.

Tax policy is another study in dysfunction. According to local officials, a district is authorized to collect taxes on sales, but it must send all of the money to Kabul, which then redistributes it on the basis of perceived need. This encourages district officials to collect no taxes and claim poverty, thereby securing money from the national government. Enabling local governments to retain most of the taxes they collect, and creating systems to ensure transparency and accountability for how the money is spent, would end up bringing more money into the national coffers as well as providing better for the localities. Getting the economic and fiscal incentives right while improving local governance would also reduce the problem of government banditry.

Building systems and institutions that make local governments robust enough to earn the loyalty of their people while remaining tied to the national government is the heart of the matter in the long run. If this is done, local militant groups will die on the vine.

(4) Work with Pakistan to apply the same full-spectrum approach across the border. The socioeconomic dislocation seen in Afghanistan is similarly endemic in the Federally Administered Tribal Areas and North-West Frontier Province of Pakistan. Working with our allies in Pakistan to eliminate insurgent safe-havens is critical, but so is investment in local governance and development in the impoverished areas that have become breeding grounds for militants. Here too, potential recruits to the militant groups need a reason to support their government. The insurgencies must be defeated on both sides of the border in order for Afghanistan (and Pakistan) to have peace. Progress on these fronts, of course, would also support the counterterrorism campaign against the senior al Qaeda and Taliban leadership.

I haven’t talked much about Pakistan because, if we can’t send U.S. forces into Pakistani territory, there’s little we can do. The options are continued diplomacy and using economic incentives and sanctions. We might as well consider Pakistan just another border country, just like Syria and Iran are border countries with Iraq. Al Qaeda leadership and the nastier Taliban leaders have safe haven (more or less) in the Pakistani frontier, so perhaps the only thing we can do is pressure them from the west with a workable COIN strategy, and pressure them from the east by encouraging the Pakistani government to get off its ass and do something about its problem with Islamist militants.

Associated Press just slapped down the race card in its latest “analysis” by Douglas K. Daniel.

By claiming that Democrat Barack Obama is “palling around with terrorists” and doesn’t see the U.S. like other Americans, vice presidential candidate Sarah Palin targeted key goals for a faltering campaign.

And though she may have scored a political hit each time, her attack was unsubstantiated and carried a racially tinged subtext that John McCain himself may come to regret.

This is nothing short of a flat-out smear of Palin and the McCain campaign. Yesterday, Sarah Palin clearly conveyed the message that Barack Obama is too liberal and too far to the left for the American electorate. This is why she raised Obama’s six years of crafting education policy with Bill Ayers, a left-wing political extremist and unrepentant domestic terrorist. Either “reporter” Daniels is an idiot or in the bag for Barack Obama. The intellectually dishonest bias in this article is incredible. Here’s a small example:

Obama, who was a child when the Weathermen were planting bombs, has denounced Ayers’ radical views and actions.

Ayers’ crimes happened long ago, but to this day, he has not expressed a word of regret or sorrow for his acts. In fact, he was quoted that he and his group didn’t bomb enough. If I had the time, I’d fisk it more thorougly, but this one should go down as one of the biased articles of the campaign season.

In another CNN “factcheck”, they tested the veracity of this Joe Biden statement:

“…our commanding general in Afghanistan said the surge principle in Iraq will not work in Afghanistan.”

CNN judged Biden’s statement to be “true”, but it’s not true. The drive-bys at CNN don’t understand the difference between a surge in forces and the surge strategy. Surge strategy = counterinsurgency strategy. The surge in forces is but one component of the larger strategy. Here’s how Palin responded to Biden:

“…the surge principles, not the exact strategy, but the surge principles that have worked in Iraq need to be implemented in Afghanistan.”

Surge principles = counterinsurgency principles.

Here’s what the Washington Post reporter said about McKiernan’s comments:

The new top U.S. commander in Afghanistan said yesterday that more U.S. troops are urgently required to combat a worsening insurgency, but he stated emphatically that no Iraq-style “surge” of forces will end the conflict there.

“Afghanistan is not Iraq,” said Gen. David McKiernan, who led ground forces during the U.S.-led invasion of Iraq in 2003 and took over four months ago as head of the NATO-led coalition in Afghanistan.

During a news conference yesterday, McKiernan described Afghanistan as “a far more complex environment than I ever found in Iraq.” The country’s mountainous terrain and rural population, its poverty and illiteracy, its 400 major tribal networks and history of civil war all make for unique challenges, he said.

“The word I don’t use for Afghanistan is ‘surge,’ ” McKiernan emphasized, saying that what is required instead is a “sustained commitment” to a counterinsurgency effort that could last many more years and would ultimately require a political, not military, solution.

McKiernan was clearly saying that just an increase of forces wouldn’t end the conflict, that we can’t use the same tactics as in Iraq, and that we need to commit to a sustained counterinsurgency strategy. The transcript of McKiernan’s remarks confirms the intent of what he was trying to convey. Biden was wrong and Palin was right. An excerpt of the transcript:

Q: And does that include the request for 3,500 trainers or is the trainer request on top of that?

GEN. MCKIERNAN: The trainer request is being reviewed right now, because what we’re looking to in the future there is having units come to Afghanistan that are trained to conduct counterinsurgency operations, but are — also have been trained to work with the Afghan army and the Afghan police. So that might change the requirement for what are called the training teams or the police mentoring teams in the future.

McKiernan was talking about differences in tactics, not in the principles underlying the overall battle plan. General Petraeus was saying the same thing just days earlier. The operations still fall under a counterinsurgency umbrella, but the tactics adjust to the situation on the ground. The hacks at CNN don’t have the first clue as to what counterinsurgency doctrine is. Add their other failed “factcheck” and it’s clear to me that CNN is in the bag for Obama.

Update: Even NPR isn’t buying it.

General David McKiernan, the US commander in Afghanistan this week said “Afghanistan is not Iraq. .. What I don’t think is needed — the word I don’t use in Afghanistan is the word surge.”

On the other hand, speaking today, McKiernan said more troops should be rushed to Afghanistan “as quickly as possible.” So while he doesn’t believe in using the word surge because it resonates of Iraq, he does believe in rushing more troops to Afghanistan — a surge by another name.

As I wrote here, Joe Biden was being less than honest when he said Obama would never meet with Iranian president Ahmadinejad without preconditions in the first year of his presidency. In a “factcheck”, CNN shows that they’re in the bag for Obama by parsing “leader” and “president”. Newsflash. President Ahmadinejad is an Iranian leader and the country’s highest elected official. Whether he is the leader of Iran is irrelevant. The Obama campaign is dishonestly to trying to slide away from Obama’s remarks in July 2007 by parsing words in Clintonian fashion, and CNN is the latest enabler.

First, factcheck.org compiled the factual shortcomings of both candidates:

? Palin mistakenly claimed that troop levels in Iraq had returned to “pre-surge” levels. Levels are gradually coming down but current plans would have levels higher than pre-surge numbers through early next year, at least.

? Biden incorrectly said “John McCain voted the exact same way” as Obama on a controversial troop funding bill. The two were actually on opposite sides.

? Palin repeated a false claim that Obama once voted in favor of higher taxes on “families” making as little as $42,000 a year. He did not. The budget bill in question called for an increase only on singles making that amount, but a family of four would not have been affected unless they made at least $90,000 a year.

? Biden wrongly claimed that McCain “voted the exact same way” as Obama on the budget bill that contained an increase on singles making as little as $42,000 a year. McCain voted against it. Biden was referring to an amendment that didn’t address taxes at that income level.

? Palin claimed McCain’s health care plan would be “budget neutral,” costing the government nothing. Independent budget experts estimate McCain’s plan would cost tens of billions each year, though details are too fuzzy to allow for exact estimates.

? Biden wrongly claimed that McCain had said “he wouldn’t even sit down” with the government of Spain. Actually, McCain didn’t reject a meeting, but simply refused to commit himself one way or the other during an interview.

? Palin wrongly claimed that “millions of small businesses” would see tax increases under Obama’s tax proposals. At most, several hundred thousand business owners would see increases.

But their list is nowhere near complete. On Lebanon, Biden gaffed on Hezbollah, which is surprising for a fella who’s spent so time on the Foreign Relations Committee:

In Thursday night’s vice presidential debate between Senator Joe Biden and Governor Sarah Palin, Biden said the strangest and most ill-informed thing I have ever heard about Lebanon in my life. “When we kicked — along with France, we kicked Hezbollah out of Lebanon, I said and Barack said, “Move NATO forces in there. Fill the vacuum, because if you don’t know — if you don’t, Hezbollah will control it.” Now what’s happened? Hezbollah is a legitimate part of the government in the country immediately to the north of Israel.” [Emphasis added.]

What on Earth is he talking about? The United States and France may have kicked Hezbollah out of Lebanon in an alternate universe, but nothing even remotely like that ever happened in this one.

Nobody – nobody – has ever kicked Hezbollah out of Lebanon. Not the United States. Not France. Not Israel. And not the Lebanese. Nobody.

Joe Biden has literally no idea what he’s talking about.

It’s too bad debate moderator Gwen Ifill didn’t catch him and ask a follow up question: When did the United States and France kick Hezbollah out of Lebanon?

The answer? Never. And did Biden and Senator Barack Obama really say NATO troops should be sent into Lebanon? When did they say that? Why would they say that? They certainly didn’t say it because NATO needed to prevent Hezbollah from returning–since Hezbollah never went anywhere.

ABC News is in the bag for Obama. They correctly noted that Palin got General McKiernan’s name wrong, but they failed to mention that Biden got McKiernan’s position wrong. Which mistake is more pronounced? Biden kept saying that the “commanding general” in Afghanistan stated that the surge strategy wouldn’t work there. Biden was wrong, as McKiernan’s transcript makes clear, and it demonstrates that (like with Obama) he rejects the Petraeus counterinsurgency strategy in both Iraq and Afghanistan.

Biden also made an outrageously false comparison of expenditures in Iraq and Afghanistan:

Biden is telling absurd lies about Afghanistan tonight. In particular, he’s repeatedly claimed that “we’ve spent less in Afghanistan in seven years than we spend in a month in Iraq.”

He’s made that claim, or claims to that effect, repeatedly. It is, to put it bluntly, a complete Goddamned lie.

According to the Congressional Research Service, spending on the war in Afghanistan since 2001 has been $172 Billion. Spending in Iraq is, as the Democrats repeatedly mention, a little under $10 Billion a month.

In other words, Biden’s number is off by, oh, something like 2000%. Perhaps Obama’s Sub-Committee ought to have held some hearings on Afghanistan after all.

I wouldn’t call it a lie, but it’s definitely a major factual error.

Politifact weighed in and found two “barely true” comments by Biden and one “barely true” comment from Palin.

Biden flubbed on his understanding of the Constitution and the vice president’s role:

Meanwhile, Joe Biden is wrong about the Vice President and the Constitution — the Vice President does have a legislative role, and the VP doesn’t just preside over the Senate in case of a tie. The VP only votes in case of a tie, but voting isn’t the same as presiding. Good grief.

Also, Joe, Article I of the Constitution deals with the legislative branch, not the executive. Again, good grief.

[...]

And, yes, the VP’s legislative duties are in Article I. But that cuts precisely against the point that Biden was trying to make. Here’s what Biden said: “Vice President Cheney has been the most dangerous vice president we’ve had probably in American history. The idea he doesn’t realize that Article I of the Constitution defines the role of the vice president of the United States, that’s the Executive Branch. He works in the Executive Branch. He should understand that. Everyone should understand that. . . . The only authority the vice president has from the legislative standpoint is the vote, only when there is a tie vote. He has no authority relative to the Congress. The idea he’s part of the Legislative Branch is a bizarre notion invented by Cheney to aggrandize the power of a unitary executive and look where it has gotten us. It has been very dangerous.” This is wong on multiple levels at once. Article I — which deals with the legislative, not the Executive branch, says: “The Vice President of the United States shall be President of the Senate, but shall have no Vote, unless they be equally divided.” The Vice President presides over the Senate by right, whenever he/she wants to, regardless of whether there’s a tie vote.

What’s more, Vice Presidents, until Spiro Agnew, got their offices and budgets from the Senate, not the Executive Branch. The legislative character of that office is traditional — treating the VP as part of the Executive Branch, and a sort of junior co-President, is a recent and, to my mind, unwise innovation. That’s discussed at more length in this article from the Northwestern University Law Review.

Here’s one on Biden and elections in the Palestinian Authority:

Here’s what the president said when we said no. He insisted on elections on the West Bank, when I said, and others said, and Barack Obama said, “Big mistake. Hamas will win. You’ll legitimize them.” What happened? Hamas won.

I’m not sure what Obama said, but Biden was in favor:

If ever there was a time that proved that “good policy makes good politics”–and that politics makes strange bedfellows–today’s global program to advance the cause of liberal democracy surely must be it.

What events are creating this critical mass the president is talking about? There’s January’s free elections in Iraq and Palestine, March’s free municipal elections in Saudi Arabia, Egyptian President Mubarak’s commitment to allow competitive elections for president, and the Lebanese people’s demands for Syrian withdrawal and for free parliamentary elections.

[Update:] Glenn Kessler has more:

Biden claimed that Obama warned against the administration’s decision to push for Hamas participating in Palestinian legislative elections in early 2005. Obama had only been a senator for a few days when the election took place, but if he made such statements they did not appear in news reports or transcripts that are contained in the Nexis or Factiva news databases.

Obama was one of 70 members in the Senate who signed a letter a month before the Palestinian election expressing concern that Hamas was participating without disarming. The letter did not say a victory in the election would give Hamas credibility, but urged Bush to insist that Hamas adhere to “a basic set of principles before they can run for political office.” Biden did not sign the letter.

[End update]

On meeting Ahmadinejad without preconditions:

PALIN: Ahmadinejad, Kim Jong Il, the Castro brothers, others who are dangerous dictators are one that Barack Obama has said he would be willing to meet with without preconditions being met first.

BIDEN: Can I clarify this? This is simply not true about Barack Obama. He did not say sit down with Ahmadinejad.

Biden was speaking an untruth. Here’s what Obama said at a debate, and Joe Biden was at that debate:

QUESTION: In 1982, Anwar Sadat traveled to Israel, a trip that resulted in a peace agreement that has lasted ever since.

In the spirit of that type of bold leadership, would you be willing to meet separately, without precondition, during the first year of your administration, in Washington or anywhere else, with the leaders of Iran, Syria, Venezuela, Cuba and North Korea, in order to bridge the gap that divides our countries?

OBAMA: I would. And the reason is this, that the notion that somehow not talking to countries is punishment to them — which has been the guiding diplomatic principle of this administration — is ridiculous.

Now, Ronald Reagan and Democratic presidents like JFK constantly spoke to Soviet Union at a time when Ronald Reagan called them an evil empire. And the reason is because they understood that we may not trust them and they may pose an extraordinary danger to this country, but we had the obligation to find areas where we can potentially move forward.

And I think that it is a disgrace that we have not spoken to them. We’ve been talking about Iraq — one of the first things that I would do in terms of moving a diplomatic effort in the region forward is to send a signal that we need to talk to Iran and Syria because they’re going to have responsibilities if Iraq collapses.

They have been acting irresponsibly up until this point. But if we tell them that we are not going to be a permanent occupying force, we are in a position to say that they are going to have to carry some weight, in terms of stabilizing the region.

Emphases mine. The Corner has more. Biden even said that Obama’s comments were “naive”.

I’m running out of steam, but I’ll update (as time permits) when more factchecks come in. I’m purposely not using any “factcheck” links from either of the campaign websites.

[Update:] Biden touted a couple of legislative accomplishments:

And, by the way, a record of change — I will place my record and Barack’s record against John McCain’s or anyone else in terms of fundamental accomplishments. Wrote the crime bill, put 100,000 cops on the street, wrote the Violence Against Women Act, which John McCain voted against both of them, was the catalyst to change the circumstance in Bosnia, led by President Clinton, obviously.

McCain vote against Violence Against Women Act, but Biden failed to mention that the Supreme Court voted against it, too:
In United States v. Morrison, the Court ruled that much of Biden’s law was an unconstitutional power grab by Congress of rights reserved to the states.

And Biden is the one who with a law degree. On Bosnia, McCain supported Bill Clinton’s efforts on Bosnia and Kosovo. I saw Fred Thompson on Special Report last night, and he said it was McCain who talked Thompson into supporting those efforts.

On the Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty, Biden said:

Number two, with regard to arms control and weapons, nuclear weapons require a nuclear arms control regime. John McCain voted against a Comprehensive Nuclear-Test-Ban Treaty that every Republican has supported.

Another false statement. The Senate vote was mostly party line.

When the roll was finally called on October 13, the resolution to ratify the CTBT (including the six safeguards that Daschle had submitted as an amendment) was defeated by a 51-48 vote with one abstention. (See the voting record.) Forty-four Democrats voted for ratification as did four Republicans: John Chafee (R-RI), James Jeffords (R-VT), Gordon Smith (R-OR) and Arlen Specter (R-PA). Fifty Republican senators and one independent (Robert Smith of New Hampshire) voted against ratification, and Senator Robert Byrd (D-WV) voted “present.” The treaty fell 19 votes short of achieving the necessary two-thirds majority necessary for ratification.

From the WA Post Fact Checker, Palin stretched the truth on Biden’s agreement with McCain on Iraq.

Sarah Palin just asserted that Sen. Joseph Biden backed John McCain’s military policies until this presidential race. That is flatly false. Biden was an outspoken opponent of President Bush’s troop increases in Iraq as soon as Bush announced them after the 2006 elections. As Foreign Relations Committee Chairman, he led the most heated hearings before the troops were actually deployed.

Palin also repeated the untruthful claim that Obama voted for 94 tax increases, which is false according to factcheck.org. On the McCain health care plan, Biden said:

And then you’re going to have to replace a $12,000 — that’s the average cost of the plan you get through your employer — it costs $12,000. You’re going to have to pay — replace a $12,000 plan, because 20 million of you are going to be dropped. Twenty million of you will be dropped.

So you’re going to have to place — replace a $12,000 plan with a $5,000 check you just give to the insurance company. I call that the “Ultimate Bridge to Nowhere.”

According to the WA Post Fact Checker:

Joe Biden mischaracterized McCain’s proposal for giving Americans a tax credit to pay for their own health insurance programs in return for taxing the health benefits they receive from employers. He suggested that the average American family would lose around $7,000 on the deal, receiving a $5,000 tax credit in return for having to pay $12,000 for their own health care program.

In fact, the non-partisan Tax Policy Center has calculated that most American families would come out slightly ahead for the next decade at least. Higher-income Americans with expensive health care plans would be somewhat worse off after 2018.

Biden was telling half stories on his claim that McCain supported tax breaks for big oil.

Sen. Joseph Biden accused John McCain of offering big oil companies $4 billion in tax breaks. That is misleading. The figure comes from the share that the oil companies would get from McCain’s corporate income tax cut proposal. He has not proposed a tax break solely for oil companies.

September was another month of declining violence in Iraq, both for civilians and military personnel. Below are the pictures, and I’m guessing that Barack Obama would prefer that you don’t see them.

Once the progress in Iraq became all too obvious, even to Obama, he credited the success to the increase in troops, the troops themselves, the Sunni Awakening movements, and Muqtada al Sadr, but I haven’t heard him say a single word about the actual strategy that helped turn Iraq around. The surge in troop levels was only part of the overall plan.

We shouldn’t forget that when violence was at its very worst in Iraq, the freshman Senator from Illinois crafted a bill that would withdraw all combat brigades in less than sixteen months. The repercussions of such a withdrawal at such a time would have been staggering, in my opinion. It would’ve been a full-blown disaster.

Going forward, this issue cannot be more significant because Obama is proposing more troops for Afghanistan, yet he hasn’t said a thing about what those troops would actually do when they get there. “Get al Qaeda” isn’t a plan, it’s a hope, and we know hope is not a plan, even when words like “change” are thrown in. McCain has proposed a counterinsurgency (COIN) strategy along the lines of the successful strategy employed in Iraq. Obama has just said “get al Qaeda”, or strengthen NATO, or something like that. I’ve looked at Obama’s issues, and he has no plan for Afghanistan. This is one of the reasons why I say that Obama is a military and foreign policy lightweight.

In Baghdad, residents are saying “we should go outside and live”. Yes, risks remain and al Qaeda can still pull off suicide terrorist attacks, but the city and nation are significantly safer. On the national political stage, progress is slower and more difficult to come by, but parliament passed a provinical elections law and Anbar province has been passed from coalition forces to the national government. A Defense Department report to Congress cites improving conditions but a still-fragile environment, which in turn affects the pace of conditions-based troop withdrawals.

But with Iraq quieted, the challenge going forward is Afghanistan-Pakistan. Al Qaeda is headquartered in the Pakistani frontier areas, and so are the more belligerent Taliban leaders. There’s little we can do in Pakistan except urge the new president to take control of his own country. We can help tribal leaders wrest control from Taliban and al Qaeda chieftans, but since those Pashtun leaders don’t have U.S. firepower behind them, the chances for success are questionable. One measure of the state of disarray in Pakistan are the increased number of suicide bombings. Since July 2007, nearly 1,200 have been killed.

But putting aside whiny defeatist remarks from British ambassadors, there’s plenty we can do in Afghanistan. It looks like General Petraeus is going to push for a comprehensive COIN strategy for Afghanistan, and it’s long overdue. As it stands now, we don’t have sufficient force projection, and we have European troops who refuse to engage in kinetic combat operations. This needs to change, and I hope it will. This Atlantic article is worth a full read, and I’ll excerpt some fair chunks:

The U.S. engagement in Afghanistan is foundering because of the endemic failure to engage and protect rural villages, and to immunize them against insurgency. Many analysts have called for more troops inside the country, and for more effort to eliminate Taliban sanctuaries outside it, in neighboring Pakistan. Both developments would be welcome. Yet neither would solve the central problem of our involvement: the paradigm that has formed the backbone of the international effort since 2003—extending the reach of the central government—is in fact precisely the wrong strategy.

National government has never much mattered in Afghanistan. Only once in its troubled history has the country had something like the system of strong central government that’s mandated by the current constitution. That was under the “Iron Emir,” Abdur Rehman, in the late 19th century, and Rehman famously maintained control by building towers of skulls from the heads of all who opposed him, a tactic unavailable to the current president, Hamid Karzai.

Politically and strategically, the most important level of governance in Afghanistan is neither national nor regional nor provincial. Afghan identity is rooted in the woleswali: the districts within each province that are typically home to a single clan or tribe. Historically, unrest has always bubbled up from this stratum—whether against Alexander, the Victorian British, or the Soviet Union. Yet the woleswali are last, not first, in U.S. military and political strategy.

Large numbers of U.S. and NATO troops are now heavily concentrated in Kabul, Kandahar, and other major cities. Thousands of U.S. personnel are stationed at Bagram Air Force Base, for instance, which is complete with Burger King, Dairy Queen, and a shopping center, but is hundreds of miles from the heart of the insurgency. Meanwhile, the military’s contact with villagers in remote areas where the Taliban operate is rare, typically brief, and almost always limited to daylight hours.

The Taliban are well aware that the center of gravity in Afghanistan is the rural Pashtun district and village, and that Afghan army and coalition forces are seldom seen there. With one hand, the Taliban threaten tribal elders who do not welcome them. With the other, they offer assistance. (As one U.S. officer recently noted, they’re “taking a page from the Hezbollah organizations in Lebanon, with their own public works to assist the tribes in villages that are deep in the inaccessible regions of the country. This helps support their cause with the population, making it hard to turn the population in support of the Afghan government and the coalition.”)

The rural Pashtun south has its own systems of tribal governance and law, and its people don’t want Western styles of either. But nor are they predisposed to support the Taliban, which espouses an alien and intolerant form of Islam, and goes against the grain of traditional respect for elders and decision by consensus. Re-empowering the village coun­cils of elders and restoring their community leadership is the only way to re-create the traditional check against the powerful political network of rural mullahs, who have been radicalized by the Taliban. But the elders won’t commit to opposing the Taliban if they and their families are vulnerable to Taliban torture and murder, and they can hardly be blamed for that.

To reverse its fortunes in Afghanistan, the U.S. needs to fundamentally reconfigure its operations, creating small development and security teams posted at new compounds in every district in the south and east of the country. This approach would not necessarily require adding troops, although that would help—200 district-based teams of 100 people each would require 20,000 personnel, one-third of the 60,000 foreign troops currently in the country.

If this sounds familiar, it should. I’ve read similar material two years ago about Iraq, prior to the Republicans losing the majority in Congress. A key difference is that Afghanistan is more decentralized than Iraq, so it makes even more sense to move troops out of the few large forward operating bases and into many smallish combat outposts. The Marines in Helmand province have already demonstrated that this strategy works. For a good uptake on the current situation in Afghanistan, Herschel Smith has a comprehensive post on the subject.

(Hat tip to Engram for the graphs.)

From the Washington Times:

House Speaker Nancy Pelosi has directed nearly $100,000 from her political action committee to her husband’s real estate and investment firm over the past decade, a practice of paying a spouse with political donations that she supported banning last year.

Give her credit for supporting a ban on this practice last year, but it sounds like she needs an intervention. She just can’t help herself, paying her husband’s business using funds given to her by political supporters.

I know the contributors know this, and I’m going to say it anyway. This version of Redstate sucks. It takes way too long to navigate around this site. I’m glad the 500 internal server errors have gone away, but I just clicked on the main page icon and it took me over two minutes to get there, and that’s with a cable modem. It doesn’t matter which browser is used, this is unacceptable, especially in the middle of an extremely heated presidential campaign. I feel for you, Erick and Moe and company. I want this site to do better. But this platform is clearly a step backward. Gaaiieee! It feels like a microcosm of the McCain campaign, what with the missteps.

I saw the latest interview between Sarah Palin and Katie Couric, and she did much better. Here it is.

It looks like she’s getting the hang of dealing with national media, and she’s looking more comfortable on television. Even on Hannity’s home turf a couple of weeks ago, she looked a little shaky, but she did OK on Hugh Hewitt today. It was a rough start back then, but she’s improving at answering the myriad questions. So if she does passably well in the debate with Joe Biden, Governor Palin should ask for a couple of gack exemptions. What do I mean by this? Let me try to explain how she could respond:

You know, Katie, unlike Joe Biden, I haven’t been running for president since the 1980s. While he was on his long run for the highest office, I was raising a family and serving the City of Wasilla and the State of Alaska. I was too busy to contemplate higher ambitions like the Senator from Delaware. So when John McCain picked me for vice president, I knew I could perform the job because of my executive experience and my record of reform. But quite frankly, when he picked me, I didn’t know all the details of John McCain’s foreign policy positions and I didn’t know all the details of his biography. Who would? So when I sat with Charlie Gibson and you, I gacked. Anyone else in my position would.

But I’ll tell you this: I’ll know all those details by January 20th, 2009, and I’ll be ready for the job on Day One.

And here’s what I knew from the very beginning of this journey: I know intrinsically and instinctively the principles that John McCain stands for, and I know the principles that Ronald Reagan and Theodore Roosevelt and Abraham Lincoln stood for. So if you’re going to forgive Joe Biden for his daily or twice-daily gaffes, I think I should be forgiven a couple of gacks in these early stages. The important thing you should know is that if a President McCain is incapacitated in one form or another (God forbid), I’ll be ready to carry forward his conservative principles, his issues, his sense of honor, his desire for reform, and his reputation as a maverick.

Or something like that. Of course, if she tanks in the upcoming debate, get ready to whistle Hail to the Chief for Barack Obama. Why do I think she should take this tack? Because if she does decent enough from here on out, she deserves a do-over or two. I can’t remember a more intense personal and political destruction campaign than I’ve seen perpetrated against Palin. She deserves just that much slack.

John McCain has been losing ground for the last two to three weeks, and it’s now or never for him to turn things around. The electoral map doesn’t lie. McCain needs to make major structural changes to the campaign, and I have some ideas.

First, he should fire Steve Schmidt. The highly disciplined campaign template doesn’t work for John McCain. He tried it prior to mid-2007 and the results were substandard, even before his immigration bill nearly wrecked his campaign. McCain won the GOP nomination by being the most authentic in the group. He kept his press availability open and he trusted his instincts. He pared his staff down to the longtime friends and advisors who know him. McCain will trip up with some unguarded comments, but he works better when the Straight Talk Express is in high gear. This route would be much better than him being strait-jacketed by gun-for-hire consultants.

Second, instead of shutting off press availability to Sarah Palin, the McCain campaign should go the other way and open the Palin Straight Chat Express. But right up front, she’s going to have say that she was too busy running a state to know every detail on foreign policy and every detail on McCain’s biography and work record. She’s going to have to say upfront that her goal between now and November 4th is to make less than half as many gaffes as Joe Biden, and she likes her chances of succeeding in that endeavor. She’ll have to say that she’s a quick study but not as polished on camera as Obama, but come January 20th, 2009, she’ll be ready for the job. This is a risky strategy, but McCain picked her, and it’s ultimately his fault if she effs it up.

Third, the rapid response team in its current form is terrible. They need more and better people, especially if step #1 and #2 are implemented. The press pile-ons are almost too many to count. Smears need to be addressed within hours of the smear being made. Attacks on McCain or Palin need to be addressed within hours of the attack, with bonus points for turning them around on Obama.

Fourth, any negative attacks on Obama must be accurate and truthful. McCain needs to show that Obama is too inexperienced and too liberal, especially in light of his scant voting record. He should challenge Obama and the media by highlighting Obama’s close and longtime relationships with a pastor who’s a left-wing political extremist, and that Obama crafted education policy for six years with a left-wing political extremist and unrepentant domestic terrorist. McCain should say that Obama is a Chicago machine politician with no substantive record on change, and he should opine that America can’t risk another Jimmy Carter during a time of economic uncertainty and when we’re in the middle of a War Against Militant Islamism.

Fifth, McCain also needs to focus on his positives, that he’s the one with the better economic plan, that he has the real record of making changes in Washington, and that he knows to win a war and work with foreign leaders. If he really wants to be a maverick, he’ll make a maverick proposal such as letting the tax cuts expire for those making over $250,000 a year because of the cost of the bailout and because he’s committed to fiscal sanity.

McCain needs to shake things up, and I think this is the best way he can do it.

Engram nails it..

When Obama says “I’ve always said”, it’s time for a little fact-checking. On Bill O’Reilly’s comedy hour, Obama said:

“I think that the surge has succeeded…”

The thing is, he has never previously credited the strategy for the gains we’ve made since General Petraeus came on board, and it’s unclear if he gave it credit on the O’Reilly Factor. Why is it unclear? Because I can’t tell if he was talking about the increase in troops (which was only part of the strategy) or the strategy on the whole. Prior to the show, Obama said the improvements were because of the Sunnis in Anbar, al Sadr crumbing, and the skills of our fighting men and women, but never the actual strategy that enabled the Sunnis to stand up to al Qaeda, or helped cause al Sadr’s militias to crumble. Nor has he lauded the actual strategy that our troops actually employed to improve the situation. Obama’s “plan”, if you can call it that, was (and is) to get our troops out of Dodge. Nothing else.

What did McCain say in early 2007? This:

“I am not guaranteeing that this succeeds,” said Mr. McCain, who has long argued that additional troops were needed. “I am just saying that I think it can. I believe it has a good shot.”

For me, I wasn’t sure if it had a good shot, but I believed that it merited a good shot. Actually, a last shot. The bottom line is this. McCain was right on Iraq and Obama was wrong, and Sarah Palin had the audacity of hope to point that out:

“But just last night, Senator Obama finally broke, and brought himself to admit what all the rest of us have known for quite some time, and that’s thanks to the skill and valor of our troops, the surge in Iraq has succeeded,” Palin said referring to an answer Obama gave to Fox News’ Bill O’Reilly Thursday.

In his first appearance on “The O’Reilly factor” Obama said that the troop surge succeeded ‘beyond our wildest dreams.’ “I think that the surge has succeeded in ways that nobody anticipated, by the way, including President Bush and the other supporters,” he told O’Reilly.

Palin took issue with Obama’s response and reminded voters that John McCain initially supported the troop surge.

“I guess when you turn out to be profoundly wrong on a vital national security issue, maybe it’s comforting to pretend that everyone was wrong too. But I remember it a little differently. It seems to me there was one leader in Washington who did predict success, who refused to call retreat and risked his own career for the sake of the surge and victory in Iraq and ladies and gentlemen that man is standing right next to me. Senator John McCain,” Palin said.

I shouldn’t have to explain why this is important, but here’s one reason. Iraq is on a favorable trend line but Afghanistan is not. Barack Obama has proposed more troops for Afghanistan, and so has McCain. The difference is that Obama hasn’t said a word about the strategy those troops should actually implement when they get there, McCain has proposed a counterinsurgency strategy similar to what is working in Iraq. What’s more, our Marines in Afghanstian’s Helmand province are using the very counterinsurgency tactics in Afghanistan that they learned in Iraq, and it is indeed working. This is change I can trust.

In this episode, Andrew Sullivan is alluding some sort of equivalence between Jeremiah Wright, the bona fide left-wing political extremist who was Barack Obama’s paster for twenty-plus years, and Larry Kroon, who is pastor of Wasilla Bible Church, where Sarah Palin currently attends.

I read the transcript of the sermon that bent Sullivan so out of shape, and it’s your typical Sunday morning message. The preacher was talking about the book of Zephanaiah, which discusses the end times for all the earth. Since Wasilla is on earth, it is not excluded. The whole point of the sermon boils down to the final two paragraphs.

Yes. There’s anger with God. He takes sin personal. But there is something that answers to that anger, and that’s His love. And it’s a love that, we’re told, not only does He love the world–“He loved the world so much that He gave His only begotten Son.”, He put His Son there and said, ‘You take the anger for them.’ And with that promise is “Whoever believes in Him shall not perish, but have everlasting life.” No ‘perhaps’ there. It’s simply sayin’ “I’m gonna seek the Lord, starting with Jesus, responding with faith.” That’s what you do, given the reality of the day of the Lord.

What’s your next steps? What we’ve talked about today…what we’ve talked about today is one of the most defining things in the Christian worldview. It’s at this one point of teaching that you’ll probably decide whether you’ll accept Christianity or reject it, whether you’ll take it seriously or not. If there is no great final day of the Lord there’s really no reason to take Jesus seriously. If there is such a day and God has taken your sin very personally, then it’s absolutely essential that you take Jesus seriously. This is the issue you gotta respond to. If you choose to respond you make it personal. You call out to Jesus and you simply say, “Save me. Save me.”

Wow. Pretty extreme stuff, right? Wrong. This isn’t even close to Reverend Wright’s many anti-American statements and paranoid falsehoods and factually challenged rhetoric. Way to go Andy. In my book, you’re now an official tool for Barack Obama.

Charley James writes for the LA Progressive and he penned a sneering article about Sarah Palin in particular and Alaska in general. This seems to be par for the course for many on the left, but the interesting part of it is that Charley James has his own blog on the Obama for President website. Must be that “new kind of politics” that Obama’s been talking about. We should take bets to see how long his blog lasts before the saner heads in the campaign scrub him out of existence.

This one is so blatant that it has to be deliberate. Here’s how the article starts:

Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin told ministry students at her former church that the United States sent troops to fight in the Iraq war on a “task that is from God.”

This is false. You know, it says something when Huffington Post gets it right but AP and its reporter, Glen Johnson, gets it so, so wrong. Mr. Johnson from Associated Press continues:

“Our national leaders are sending them out on a task that is from God,” she said. “That’s what we have to make sure that we’re praying for, that there is a plan and that plan is God’s plan.”

Glen Johnson from AP basically said that Palin proclaimed that our troops were on a mission from God, just like Jake and Elwood Blues and their particular mission. AP writer Glen Johnson is putting forth a lie. Why do I say this? Because the son-of-a-bitch didn’t even have the courtesy of quoting her entire sentence, and by not doing so, he completely changed the meaning of what she said. What did Sarah Palin actually say? The bolded portion is what AP’s Glen Johnson left out:

“Pray for our military men and women who are striving to do what is right. Also, for this country, that our leaders, our national leaders, are sending [U.S. soldiers] out on a task that is from God,” she exhorted the congregants. “That’s what we have to make sure that we’re praying for, that there is a plan and that that plan is God’s plan.”

Sarah Palin was actually saying that we should pray that we’re doing what’s right, not that we’re sending “troops to fight in the Iraq war on a ‘task that is from God’.” Or to put it Ed Morrissey’s way:

…she’s not asserting that we’re doing God’s will but simply praying that we are. It’s the difference between me saying “McCain will win” and “I pray McCain will win.” The first is an assertion of fact/secret knowledge, the second is an expression of desire/hope. The AP actually stoops to picking up the quote mid-sentence to make it better fit the stereotype of the holy-roller yokel claiming divine inspiration for Bush’s Crusade.

In other words, Glen Johnson from Associated Press is trying to portray Sarah Palin as some wild-eyed, white-trash religious nut. The one-sidedness is further exacerbated because Glen Johnson (from AP) quoted a fella from Americans United for Separation of Church and State but didn’t even bother to quote anyone from the McCain campaign or any Palin supporters. By the way, did I mention that Glen Johnson is the AP reporter who wrote this? Oops, I guess I did.

A few days ago, it wasn’t clear. If it turned out that 70 (or more) civilians were killed in a recent airstrike in western Afghanistan, then it is an indicator that the U.S.-led NATO command in Afghanistan is pursuing a flawed strategy. Coalition forces lack sufficient force projection on the ground, and it looks like there’s an overreliance on air support. Afghanistan is 48% larger than Iraq and has 16% more people, yet the size of the NATO contingent is only around 60,000 and Afghan army isn’t anywhere near as combat-ready as their Iraqi counterparts. With a resurgent Taliban, we don’t have sufficient resources to mount an effective counterinsurgency campaign. It’s not just that more troops are needed, more troops are needed to secure the populace, hold territory, build political and physical infrastructure, and figure out some way to deal with the opium trade.

But if it turned out that Afgahn government sources were wrong, and that only five civilians and 25 militants were killed in the recent airstrike, then it is also an indicator that the U.S.-led NATO command in Afghanistan is pursuing a flawed strategy. Why do I say this? Because it means that our information operations are substandard, and we’re unable to override false narratives that are being put out. This is an ideological conflict every bit as much as a military conflict, and if we can’t prevail on the mediafront, then it’s not going to matter how and what we do on the battlefront.

The U.S. command is investigating the matter, but the incident is a lose-lose proposition for the NATO coalition and a poor example of how counterinsurgency warfare is being conducted.

However, it looks like unacceptable numbers of civilians were killed. The UN Assistance Mission in Afghanistan (UNAMA) has investigated and, guess what, it’s a bad deal:

“Investigations by UNAMA (United Nations Assistance Mission in Afghanistan) found convincing evidence, based on the testimony of eyewitnesses, and others, that some 90 civilians were killed, including 60 children, 15 women and 15 men,” U.N. Special Envoy to Afghanistan Kai Eide said in a statement.

The U.S. is currently running the NATO operation in Afghanistan, and we’re screwing it up. Badly. This has got to change.