Center for a New American Security

Well, as we discussed yesterday, there are great books doomed to become (potentially) awful movies starring Matt Damon. But apparently there are also great books which can become potentially amazing movies starring Matt Damon*. I blogged about Playing the Enemy: Nelson Mandela and the Game That Made a Nation being one of the best books I read last year. I am so excited to see this film:

*As a decidedly short version of the 6'3" Francois Peinaar, but still.

Greg Jaffe is one the nation's leading defense correspondents, has won the Pulitzer Prize, and had the good sense to marry a girl from East Tennessee. Greg's latest book -- co-authored with David Cloud -- is The Fourth Star: Four Generals and the Epic Struggle for the Future of the United States Army. Gian Gentile described the book as "coin-porn" in surely one of the most lamentable turns of phrase in the history of the English language. But I really liked it, as have reviewers. Writing in the New York Times, Dexter Filkins called it "a very good book, readable, detailed and rich. The profiles of Abizaid, Casey, Chiarelli and Petraeus are nuanced and well drawn; the generals really come to life, as does the Army itself."

I sat down with Greg to harrass him. As in my wont.

1. First off, congratulations on writing a very good book – one praised last weekend and one I enjoyed tremendously. I saw you, though, while you were writing the book, and you were almost at your wit’s end. How many weekends did I see you at CNAS glued to your monitor with an open word document? Which one is more difficult – writing daily dispatches from a war zone or writing a book from within the confines of an office?

A book is much harder.. Writing from Afghanistan or Iraq is physically exhausting, but there is usually dramatic stuff happening all around you. Soldiers in Iraq and Afghanistan tend to be unflinchingly honest and frank. They are in life or death situations. The challenge is to find the right narrative thread and then just absorb it all. Writing about generals – particularly serving generals – is the toughest thing you can do as a military reporter. No one wants to irritate the boss. There is also a certain amout of theater to being a general. Petraeus is a master of it (in a good way). But David (my coauthor) and I didn’t want to be theater critics. It is really hard to cut through the theater and find the real person. I wonder if some of these four-stars spend so much time in character as “the four star” that they sometimes lose touch with the real person. I think they do.

2. They say that George W. Bush learned the hard way that not all generals are created equal, but it seemed as if you went out of your way to describe all four of the generals you profiled in a way that was sympathetic to their struggles in command. History, meanwhile, will almost certainly judge Gen. Casey in a harsher light than Gen. Petraeus. Knowing both men, do you think this is fair?

Petraeus is a very effective strategic leader. What bugs me is the narrative that he was somehow birthed atop Mount Olympus as the brilliant four star who saved the Army. In reality, his career is a bizarre departure from the norm. He does four tours at the elbow of top generals – Galvin (twice), Vuono and Shelton. He spends relatively little time in the field actually leading soldiers (especially compared to Casey). Petraeus’ career path doesn’t win him a lot of admirers among his peers, who whisper that he’s a palace general or a bit of a suck-up. But it makes Petraeus a much better general and probably a less adept battalion and brigade commander. This is a guy who starts preparing for a strategic leadership role as a captain. I don’t think Casey was as effective. But it is a huge mistake to write him off as not bright, intransigent, lazy or stuck in the Cold War as many in the COIN crowd tend to do. He is a smart person. He works incredibly hard. He was a great soldier and quite possibly a better battalion and brigade commander than Petraeus. So David and I tried really hard to understand why Casey makes the decisions that he makes. He is a product of these experiences that he has growing up in the Army. I think we all have dismissed him far too quickly in our rush to celebrate Petraeus. Casey’s struggles in Iraq need to be dissected and understood. If you call him as a failure or “no Petraeus” you miss important lessons.

3. This is a blog which started out focusing almost exclusively on counterinsurgency doctrine and strategy. As one of the keener observers of U.S. Army officer culture I know, what have your impressions been as the Army has struggled to balance conventional operations and doctrine with the more “irregular” challenges of Iraq and Afghanistan.

This whole conventional vs. irregular debate is stupid. War is war. And we waste far too much energy trying to categorize it. I think most lieutenants, captains and majors are beyond this false conventional vs. irregular frame that we try to impose on war. I wish I could say the same for the more senior people in the Pentagon. My worry isn’t that we’ll skew too much towards irregular. My worry is that the surge in Iraq made it all look too easy and that deep down we think that if we just add 44,000 more troops to Afghanistan we can have the same result. I know McChrystal doesn’t believe it. I know you don’t believe it.

4. No, it ain't just the numbers. Fighting a counterinsurgency campaign as a third party is mighty difficult -- and best avoided. You obviously thought telling the stories of four key generals would make for a good read – and it did. But if you had to write another book-length treatment of the U.S. military and the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, what would you write about?

I think a hard look at the last eight years in eastern Afghanistan would be really interesting. There have been some great commanders there, like Nicholson, Cavoli, Kolenda, and all kinds of fascinating experiments, successes and failures. Too often we media cretins boil all of eastern Afghanistan down to the Korengal Valley or Wanat or Kamdesh. All are fascinating. But a hard look at what the US has wrought in the east with the Afghan government would be interesting.

5. You wrote a short piece in the Washington Post’s Outlook section on the challenges facing Gen. McChrystal and an administration that could not be more different than the one that preceded it. What are your impressions of Gen. McChrystal and his challenges? Are there any lessons he can draw from the successes and failures of Gens. Abizaid, Chiarrelli, Casey and Petraeus?

We should ask McChrystal that question! I feel a bit dumb answering it. I guess the biggest mistake would be to define his mission too narrowly. He has to understand Kabul and Washington as well as the Helmand River Valley, Konar Province and the Korengal. It feels tougher in Afghanistan than Iraq because the fight is so radically different. All four generals that David and I chronicled got into trouble in Iraq by defining some critical task or failing as not in their lane or beyond their ability to fix. One of Casey’s key aides – COL Bill Hix – once said to Casey that: “This is your war.” At the time, Casey was hesitant to try to wrest control of the faltering and pathetic reconstruction effort from the State Department. Hix’s counsel seems like good advice. And McChrsytal definitely seems to be thinking big.

6. Your wife is from my hometown. Does she ever speak of how lucky she was to have avoided my mother as her English teacher in high school? And what is it like being a nice guy like you and wed to an East Tennessean? Do your in-laws teach you how to fight with knives or make moonshine? Has visiting your in-laws prepared you for spending so much time in the tribal areas of Afghanistan?

This question seems designed to get me into trouble with my wife and my in-laws who own more guns than I do and also understand how to use the Internets and the Google. Go Vols! See Rock City! Rocky Top!

More guns? Greg, you own a gun? Look out, everybody, Jaffe's armed! No, just kidding: we'll make you an East Tennessean yet...

BUY THE BOOK HERE!

I interrupt my blogging hiatus to bring you the following report.

Christopher Buckley, one of my favorite authors, read Matthew Hoh's letter and is now calling for us to withdraw from Afghanistan. All fine and good. But he chooses an unfortunate historical analogy:

Reading [Matthew Hoh's] letter, I thought of the famous exchange between the Confederate soldier and his Yankee captor.

 

Why do you hate us so, Johnny Reb?

 

Because this is our land, and you’re on it.

Ah, yes, I remember the Great Southern War for Independence. How the Union Army, fearing quagmire, realized its errors and so wisely withdrew from the newly declared Confederate States of America... uh, hold on... what?! Maybe Christopher Buckley has read different histories of the U.S. Civil War than I have, but I think the Union Army ended up sacrificing a couple hundred thousand dead to affirm federal supremacy, preserve the union and end slavery. I'm not saying Afghanistan is in the same ballpark or even in the same sport in terms of importance, but we can all agree Buckley would have been wiser to have stuck with the tried-and-true Vietnam analogies on this one.

So there's this book by Moshe "Chiko" Tamir that I cannot read. It's an untranslated memoir about his service as an Israeli officer in southern Lebanon that is basically the Israeli equivalent of Men at Arnhem or Ma guerre d'Indochine. The problem is that I do not read Hebrew. If there are any Hebrew-reading readers of this blog who would like to read a rip-roaring war memoir and answer some research-related questions for this poorly educated blogger, please let me know. I have a small research budget that can make it more worth your while.

andrew.exum@kcl.ac.uk

I'll be away from the blog today.

Well, this looks ... awful.

Seriously, the president and the secretary deserve some credit for this:

When the Obama administration proposed canceling a host of expensive weapons systems last spring, some of the military industry’s allies in Congress assumed, as they had in the past, that they would have the final say.

 

But as the president signed a $680 billion military policy bill on Wednesday, it was clear that he had succeeded in paring back nearly all of the programs and setting a tone of greater restraint than the Pentagon had seen in many years.

 

Now the question is whether Mr. Obama can sustain that push next year, when the midterm elections are likely to make Congress more resistant to further cuts and job losses.

 

White House officials say Mr. Obama took advantage of a rare political moment to break through one of Washington’s most powerful lobbies and trim more weapons systems than any president had in decades.

 

Rahm Emanuel, the White House chief of staff, said Wednesday that the plan was to threaten a veto over a prominent program — in this case, the F-22 fighter jet — “to show we were willing to expend political capital and could win on something that people thought we could not.”

 

Once the Senate voted in July to stop buying F-22s, Mr. Emanuel said in an interview, that success “reverberated down” to help sustain billions of dollars of cuts in Army modernization, missile defense and other programs.

 

Mr. Emanuel said the strategy emerged when the defense secretary, Robert M. Gates, told Mr. Obama they needed to “shake up sacred cows and be seen as taking on fights.”

 

Military analysts said Mr. Gates, a holdover from the Bush administration, also aimed at the most bloated programs. And Senator John McCain of Arizona, the former Republican presidential candidate, who has criticized the Pentagon’s cost overruns, provided Mr. Obama with political cover to make the cuts without being seen as soft on the military.

This means we can spend the money we're saving on making other government departments and agencies more useful, perhaps. Or pay off our Chinese creditors.

That's all I have to say right now.

Update: I vote Susan Finkelstein for Alumna of the Year.

Yesterday, I wrote the following in an op-ed which ran in the Daily Beast:

The Obama adminstration has, I believe, some leverage at the moment, which it could use to affect the composition and behavior of the next Afghan government. As long as Afghanistan’s ruling politicians—Hamid Karzai especially—think the United States might reduce its commitment to Afghanistan, they could be willing to accede to U.S. demands on key ministerial and provincial-level appointments. Just as an Afghan government consisting mainly of those politicians thrown out by the Taliban in 1996 would spell continued insurgency and mission failure, a more inclusive and competent Afghan government would enable the success of a counterinsurgency strategy.

 

As Steve Biddle and others have noted, though, the primary weakness of U.S. counterinsurgency doctrine is its assumption that the interests of the host nation will line up with those of the United States. In Afghanistan—as in Iraq and Vietnam—U.S. military officers and diplomats have dealt with host-nation governments whose composition and behavior has often been at odds with U.S. objectives and interests. So while countless memoranda and manuals exist instructing U.S. servicemen on how to wage counterinsurgency campaigns at the operational and tactical levels, there is currently little guidance for how U.S. policymakers should use leverage over its Afghan partners.*

Mark Moyar notes that his new book has exactly this kind of guidance for policy-makers, and as I plucked it off my shelf, I discovered that yes, yes, it does in the final chapter. I have not yet had the chance to read this book, though it has been on my list and even traveled with me to Palo Alto a few weekends back. But if you are so inclined, you can buy it here. Gian Gentile reports that it is excellent, and Gian moonlights as a darn good historian when he's not being a skeptic of counterinsurgency doctrine, so you can take his word on it in lieu of my own.

*This sentence, obviously enough, was not underlined in the original op-ed. But that grammatical error? Yeah, that was there. Mama Muqawama will no doubt let me hear about that one...

My readers are geniuses. They would have this debate sorted in no time, even if it took the Thunderdome:

Maybe we could handle it another way, taking a clue from classic Greek warfare and playing to the President's interests. We get the best COIN basketball player and match them against the best CT dude and winner gets to make the call on CT or COIN for the rest of this Presidential term. We get a quick and final decision and the WP can have a twofer writing Afghanistan and the President's latest basketball team(s) in the same story. We have Ex, Col Gentile and Charles Barkley do the TV color. Pay per view bonanza.

Meanwhile, staying on the same subject, I read this yesterday and thought it pretty smart.

A great American, sure, but a reader noticed this important comment posted by "gadstian" on the Washington Post's website at 11:50 yesterday morning.

I am very disturbed by the journalistic standards of this article and strongly encourage Washington Post readers to contact the paper directly.

First, I am currently serving in a PRT in Iraq. I trained with Matt in northern Virginia in April of this past year before we both moved on to our respective assignments. Matt is a smart young man who has honorably served his country, but by no means was or is he an expert on counterinsurgency, Afghan tribal culture, or U.S. strategic policy.

Second-- this article is riddled with inaccuracies to an extent that almost shocks me, and really makes me question its intent and veracity, coming as it does at a critical time in the debate over Afghan policy.

Matt Hoh is NOT a Foreign Service Officer. This basic fact, central to the article and its headline, is wrong, despite the wording in his letter.

Matt is a "3161" State Department employee, a special category of temporary appointments brought on for 12 month assignments in certain areas of expertise-- engineering, ag, business, rule of law, etc. Some may sign on for a second 12-month tour.

This is a very different thing than being an FSO-- a commissioned, career diplomat who is a generalist and is appointed not as a result of an online job application and single interview (sometimes over the phone), but after a series of competitive oral, written, and physical exams.

Referring to Matt as a "U.S. Official" is about as accurate as referring to a postal employee as a U.S. official.

I am not trying to denigrate 3161s or postal employees! But this article gets such basic facts wrong about Matt that I am astounded, and either bespeaks very poor journalism or, worse, an article produced primarily to push a specific political agenda and that knowingly uses false facts to give a certain impression.

There are hundreds, perhaps over 1000, 3161s in Iraq and Afghanistan. Many, many of them are ex-military (having done multiple tours in Iraq and/or Afghanistan), and have also faced combat, death, etc., just like Matt bravely did. In my own PRT, we are rocketed frequently, have small arms fire, IEDs, etc., hit our movement teams, you name it.

My point is that as compelling as Matt's story sounds to civilians, it is a fairly typical story here in theater, and by no means gives one any special insight.

There are so many people here with the same experience--or much more experience--that would passionately disagree with Matt's assessment.

Maybe Matt is right; maybe not. But to present his memo and resignation as a significant event of a "U.S. official" with special insight is, with all due respect to Matt, patently absurd. He is a de factor contractor that was on the ground in his PRT about 4 months! On that, one assesses strategic counterinsurgency??

And I absolutely guarantee the only reason Matt warranted an audience with Holbrooke and sudden offers of a Kabul job on the Embassy's front office was that the State Department was well aware of plans to go very public at a critical time-- plans for articles like this splashed over front pages, offers from detractors of Afghan policy to meet and speak, etc. I don't know Matt well and will not impugn his motivations, I believe he is no doubt sincere. But there is nothing special about him that's not special about hundreds of others still in theater, and I cannot believe that he has simply stumbled into the current publicity without discussions with many people about how to use this situation for maximum effect.

I wish Matt luck, and don't doubt that he will do well, with a career jump-started by the current affair. Again, maybe he's right.

But I challenge the Washington Post to explain what I note above-- How and why do you assert Matt is a Foreign Service Officer? Did you not confirm that with him, or did he present himself as such? How did he come to your attention? Why did you not interview other 3161s or FSOs with different views? And, finally, WHY does someone on the ground for a few months warrant such front page coverage?

I'm a fan of the Washington Post, but as I told a family friend in Tennessee this past weekend who was asking me for good news sources on Afghanistan, the "down-range" reporting the Times, the Post, and the Wall Street Journal produces on Afghanistan is worlds better than anything produced from Washington. Datelines, in other words, matter. I have a little less respect for the Washington Post after this article.

Wondered what a Pakistani madrassa actually looks like?

Something like this:

Londonstani has been getting about.

More to come soon...

Why, you ask? Because if this is true, and if the CIA is empowering Ahmed Wali Karzai at the same time in which NATO/ISAF is saying abusive local power-brokers are a threat to mission success, then this is yet another example of NATO/ISAF carrying out one campaign in Afghanistan while the CIA carries out another -- with both campaigns operating at cross purposes to one another. I should say here that I am in no position to confirm or deny this report. I can, however, say that numerous military officials in southern Afghanistan with whom I have spoken identify AWK and his activities as the biggest problem they face -- bigger than the lack of government services or even the Taliban. And so if AWK is "the agency's guy", that leads to a huge point of friction between NATO/ISAF and the CIA. Again, I am not currently serving as an advisor to ISAF and cannot speak for Gen. McChrystal's command. But I do not have to:

“If we are going to conduct a population-centric strategy in Afghanistan, and we are perceived as backing thugs, then we are just undermining ourselves,” said Maj. Gen. Michael T. Flynn, the senior American military intelligence official in Afghanistan.

 

“The only way to clean up Chicago is to get rid of Capone,” General Flynn said.

Again, I am not in a position to confirm or deny that the CIA has an enduring relationship with AWK, and I am telling the truth when I tell you that all I "know" about this is what I read in the open source world. But you can be darn sure that if we think that AWK is the CIA's guy, the Afghans most certainly believe that to be the case.

...have we lost America? (Warning: clicking on this link will lead you to genius.)

1. Yes, it might be true that NATO and Afghan troops outnumber insurgents 12-1. This is as irrelevant a statistic in guerrilla warfare as enemy body count. The only things worth measuring in any war are those things that bring each side closer to or farther from realizing expressed political objectives. We do not set our troop levels in counterinsurgencies or any other war based upon those of the enemy but rather upon what levels are appropriate for operationalizing the expressed strategic goals of the civilian leadership. Only if we had the option of pursuing a strategy of annihilation against the Taliban would their troop levels matter. As long as the Taliban and other insurgent groups continue to have the effect on the Afghan population they are having, their troop levels can be 600 guys or 60,000 guys and it does not matter.

2. I like how pundits who spend their time casting doubt on the assessments and opinions of those with in-depth understanding of Afghanistan and NATO operations there jump at the chance to sing the praises of others with in-depth understanding of Afghanistan and NATO operations when they conveniently advance assessments and opinions that match up with conclusions they themselves have already reached. (Here's but one example.) Afghanistan and the U.S. presence there is a wicked problem about which many intelligent people can disagree. But suddenly the opinion of a junior State Department employee -- talented and patriotic though he may be -- is the only opinion that matters? So Matthew Hoh is wise but Carter Malkasian and Kael Weston* are what, fools? Or Rory Stewart is clever but Ashraf Ghani and Clare Lockhart are dim? All three are clever, of course, and that's what makes policy options on Afghanistan so devilish. Look, if someone writes something and it matches up with your opinion, by all means say so. But I know about 50 really smart people on Afghanistan with lots of time on the ground there, and no two have the same opinion about what U.S. policy should be. Let's not turn one dude whose opinions on Afghanistan happen to line up with the zeitgeist into the flippin' Delphic oracle.

*To name two people currently doing the same work as Hoh -- in conditions equally tough.

Also and finally, do not miss my post this morning for the awesomely named "Daily Beast." The key take-away:

The Obama adminstration has, I believe, some leverage at the moment, which it could use to affect the composition and behavior of the next Afghan government. As long as Afghanistan’s ruling politicians—Hamid Karzai especially—think the United States might reduce its commitment to Afghanistan, they could be willing to accede to U.S. demands on key ministerial and provincial-level appointments. Just as an Afghan government consisting mainly of those politicians thrown out by the Taliban in 1996 would spell continued insurgency and mission failure, a more inclusive and competent Afghan government would enable the success of a counterinsurgency strategy.

When passing through Zabul Province this past summer, I got a brief from a smart U.S. Army officer with whom I had served in the 10th Mountain Division. Over the course of the briefing, he told the group I was with that "rural" is too urban a description for Zabul. What he meant was that the province was almost Biblical in terms of its development. The people of Zabul are isolated, remote, and enjoy no known natural resources. The literacy rate is around 11% -- 1% for women. It's all subsistence agriculture, and making matters worse is the fact that the U.S./NATO mission in the province is underesourced and thus dedicated almost entirely toward keeping Route 1 open. (The population is spread out over the province, too, making population-centric counterinsurgency difficult if not impossible.) All of this is worth keeping in mind when you read the resignation letter of the senior U.S. civilian official in Zabul Province (.pdf). These are the words of a man beaten down by the realities of the mission. I'm a pretty optimistic, cheerful guy, but even I would have a tough, tough time pulling a year's duty in Zabul. I salute those who do, including the young intelligence officer (and reader of this blog) who stuffed a powerpoint presentation of how we can do the mission in Zabul better into my cargo pocket as I was getting on a helicopter. Guys like that just make you shake your head in wonder, which is why even in this mournful letter, the author takes the time to praise the amazing men and women in our armed services in Afghanistan. 

(See also Karen De Young's article today, which includes pushback from Amb. Holbrooke and others.)

Sen. Feingold on a troop increase in Afghanistan: "There will be resistance to this if necessary."

While it is true I am still heartbroken from this weekend's loss, I am also crashing on a writing assignment and thus not posting much today. I have a lot of links I am going to dump in the next 24 hours or so, though, so be patient.

Newspapers reported today that the F8 incident reported with much ensuing panic yesterday was a hoax. However, it wasn't long before the small sense of relief was overshadowed by new episodes of death and destruction.

A mine exploded under a bus in Mohmand killing 15, mainly women and children, various news outlets reported. It seems this time the civilians might not actually have been the target since the road where the blast happened is used frequently by the miiitary. Although of course, you have to wonder if the people who put the mine there decided a few dead civilians was a risk worth taking.

A suspected car bomb in Peshawar wounded 13, nine of whom are in critical condition. While a suicide bomber attacked a military aircraft servicing facility 75 km from Islamabad killing seven.

The capital itself got a respite, but the streets were pretty quiet. Londonstani toured the various markets on his daily chores and found most of the shops to himself. The downside was that there were no cabs.

While the blow back is clear for everyone to see, no one really knows what is happening in the tribal areas themselves. Reporter friends have been up to Dera Ismail Khan and Peshawar to talk to those fleeing the conflict zones but their stories of having to flee after government forces suggested (in no uncertain terms) that it's time to leave did little to shed light on how the fighting is actually unfolding. Of course, the government and the militants claim to be heaping humiliation on each other in buckets, but its anyone's guess what's actually happening. 

The latest government numbers put Taliban deaths at 142 and their own losses at 20. The latest figures from aid agencies suggest 120,000 have been made homeless.

But while the military operation and the attacks away from the frontline are getting the headlines, it seems to Londonstani that the predictable see-saw of Pakistani politics is thinking of double backing on itself once more. There are whisperings amongst the English speaking super elite, the taxi drivers and the very low level government clerks that maybe it's time the army took over once more.

From Londonstani's point of view this is just wierd. It wasn't that long ago that everyone seemed to be on the streets shouting death to Musharraf. Now, I've heard a possible Pakistani future leader say, "You know if Musharraf hadn't made a couple of small mistakes towards the end, he would have been remembered as the man who saved the nation."

At the time of the most stringent anti Musharraf hysteria, Londonstani remembers sitting in a newsroom asking a visiting Pakistani analyst, "But who's gonna replace Musharraf? You think the same people who ran the country into the ground before him are suddenly going to start amending their ways?"

The analyst said he thought they had learnt their lesson. But it seemed much like bringing Afghan warlords back to Kabul. And, the fear is that the results could actually be much the same.

The complaints of the upper sections of society is that this present government is completely venal, corrupt and incompetent. "'What's new?" Someone with a sense of history might ask, but it seems that this government is setting new records at such a pace that the whole "only the army can run Pakistan" has come back into popular usage a year and a bit after they were last in power (it normally takes a few years). But of course, there is a conspiracy that this is actually what they have been planning all along anyway.

It would be pretty depressing if it wasn't for the fact that there does seem to be a growing sense among young upper and middle class Pakistanis that its time to step the plate. That the old paradigm is very, very broken and their only other option - going abroad - is not really all that appealing. After all, how many financial professionals with qualifications from their country's best institutes actually want to drive cabs?

Londonstani is going to be off on a world wind tour of Pakistan over the next few days.. so hopefully more on what people are thinking behind the scenes.

Thom is probably right that the broad support a counterinsurgency campaign in Afghanistan enjoys among NATO defense ministers adds a little pressure on the president and his advisors. (Who, if you ask me to speculate, are probably very wisely using this moment of uncertainty over a continued U.S. role to put pressure on Afghanistan's civlilian leadership.)

But I want to highlight, for a moment, some very good work on Afghanistan being directed by a man who does not support the idea of a broader counterinsurgency strategy. Rory Stewart, Tyler Moselle and the Carr Center for Human Rights Policy at Harvard are doing some serious work on Afghanistan policy, and this lecture by Michael Semple on what a good political officer needs to know about Helmand is well worth your time. (h/t GoA) I do not know who the political advisor is for Helmand Province, but the political advisor for the Marines there is a legend in the State Department and exactly the right person for the job.

I, meanwhile, am off to Tennessee to celebrate Mama Muqawama's 60th birthday, so posting will be light this weekend.