The Pentagon's Credibility Cage Match

By Steve Hynd

In the red corner! The Pentagon and Saint General David Petraeus, who claim that things are getting better in Afghanistan because Petraeus has thrown out the COIN book he wrote the foreword to, escalating airstrikes and unpopular night raids. Wait another Friedman Unit - six months - they claim, and we'll all be able to see what they see.

In the blue corner! A tag team! The sixteen (yes, that many) agencies of the U.S. intelligence community in the form of two new classified intelligence reports which say the military are wearing rose colored glasses followed by the International Red Cross with a report that says Afghan's haven't had it so bad in 30 years and that "we are entering a new, rather murky phase in the conflict in which the proliferation of armed groups threatens the ability of humanitarian organizations to reach the people who need their help."

It's a double whammy, and the Pentagon's poor-form whining that the spooks in D.C. aren't out there in the field like their boys are can hardly apply to the ICRC, who has people in the very thick of the action without body armor, guns and heavily protected vehicles.

It should be a knockout of the U.S. military's credibility about its "gut feelings" on Afghan progress - but wait!

The fix is in! The referee is biased. Having been gotten to by the Pentagon early, the White House had declared the military the winner in the credibility stakes before the match even begun and says there'll be no change of strategy in Afghanistan for at least four more years - and maybe forever. According to his spokesbot, President Obama is "pleased" with the war.

That will suit the D.C. chattering classes, whom we are told today by one of their luminati have a "growing progressive-realist-centrist axis of agreement" on Afghanistan policy. And indeed they do - bar a few - agree with each other a terribly sycophantic amount. However, their agreed upon axis shares two major flaws with the military's plan.

Firstly, none admit that their plan for Pakistan amounts to "clap harder". The West is in the unenviable position of having invaded the country next door because they couldn't invade the country that was the real problem - and now, as Pakistan keeps playing a double game, it cannot get out of that country without an embarassing "lose" being recorded by history.

And that flaw leads to the second, fatal, one. Neither the "Axis of Agreement" - even the supposed progressives - nor the U.S. military have a plan that takes matters to zero troops. That is, they don't have an actual exit strategy. All of their plans call for a residual American troop presence of 10-30,000 soldiers in perpetuity. Their NATO allies, not at all so concerned with the win-lose table as American serious people are, have already declared their intention to leave the U.S. in the lurch come 2014, no matter what.

And that's why Giles Doronsorro's December Afghan review as given to Reuters, while short, is the most accurate you will see.

"What's going to happen next year is quite clear: less Europeans, more Taliban, and Karzai not being able to do the work."

Let's get rrrrready to continue to rrrrrumble!