Archive for the 'Obama Administration' Category

From Rajiv Chandrasekaran at The Washington Post:

Residents of this onetime Taliban sanctuary see signs that the insurgents have regained momentum in recent weeks, despite early claims of success by U.S. Marines. The longer-than-expected effort to secure Marja is prompting alarm among top American commanders that they will not be able to change the course of the war in the time President Obama has given them.

Firefights between insurgents and security forces occur daily, resulting in more Marine fatalities and casualties over the past month than in the first month of the operation, which began in mid-February.

Marines and Afghan troops have made headway in this farming community, but every step forward, it seems, has been matched by at least a half-step backward.

Two-thirds of the stalls in Marja’s main bazaar have reopened, but the only baker fled the area a week ago after insurgents kidnapped his son in retaliation for selling to foreign troops and the police.

Men have begun to allow their burqa-clad wives to venture out of their homes, but an effort by female Marines to gather local women for a meeting last week drew not a single participant.

The Afghan government has assigned representatives to help deliver basic services to the population, but most of them spend their days in the better-appointed provincial capital 20 miles to the northeast.

“We’ve come a long way,” said Lt. Col. Cal Worth, the commander of one of the two Marine infantry battalions in Marja. “But there’s still a long way to go.”

The slow and uneven progress has worried senior military officials in Kabul and Washington who intended to use Marja as a model to prove that more troops and a new war strategy can yield profound gains against the Taliban. Gen. Stanley A. McChrystal, the top U.S. and NATO commander in Afghanistan, told officers here in late May that there is a growing perception that Marja has become “a bleeding ulcer.”

The central question among military leaders is whether Marja will improve quickly enough to be proclaimed an incipient success by the fall, when the Pentagon will begin to prepare for a year-end White House review of the war that will help to determine how many troops Obama withdraws in July 2011.

We discussed these very issues in McChrystal Calls Marjah a Bleeding Ulcer, and raised (at least) the following questions:

Did General McChrystal not cover the basics of classical counterinsurgency doctrine with his civilian bosses?  Did he or any of his reports mislead the administration into believing that Marjah or any other town in Afghanistan would be pacified in 90 days?  Did he or his reports – or anyone in the administration – really believe that this government ex machina we brought to Marjah would work?

Forgetting classical counterinsurgency doctrine which normally presumes that COIN will take ten or even more years, for anyone who has been listening and watching for the past several years, the most successful part of the campaign in Iraq, i.e., the Anbar Province, took about three and a half years from the inception of Operation Al Fajr until late 2007 when Fallujah was finally stable at the conclusion of Operation Alljah.

Security in Ramadi preceded Fallujah slightly, Haditha preceded Ramadi by a little and Al Qaim was secure before Haditha.  But the whole of the Anbar Province took over three years and the efforts of the best fighting force on earth, the U.S. Marine Corps, in which more than 1000 Marines perished and many more were wounded or maimed.  No one in his right mind would claim that the U.S. Marine Corps did not understand or implement a successful strategy in the Anbar Province, where the Marines had to fight their way through an indigenous insurgency (finally co-opting their services) to get to the 80-100 foreign fighters per month flowing across the Syrian border.  Iraq is still not entirely stable, and its security will be a direct function of the extent to which we confront Iran in its quest for regional hegemony.

This report is so bizarre, so jaw dropping, and so disturbing, that it naturally leads to many other very important questions.  Does McChrystal believe that the COIN operations will be successfully concluded within a year or even a year plus a few months?  Did he communicate that to the administration?  If so, does the administration believe it?  Was time frame ever brought up?  Did the administration simply lay down expectations without reference to historical precedent for successful COIN campaigns and without asking General McChrystal?

 Commenter jonesgp1996 gave us the following link in response to my questions: Secrets from Inside the Obama War Room.  This important exchange is included.

Inside the Oval Office, Obama asked Petraeus, “David, tell me now. I want you to be honest with me. You can do this in 18 months?”

“Sir, I’m confident we can train and hand over to the ANA [Afghan National Army] in that time frame,” Petraeus replied.

“Good. No problem,” the president said. “If you can’t do the things you say you can in 18 months, then no one is going to suggest we stay, right?”

“Yes, sir, in agreement,” Petraeus said.

“Yes, sir,” Mullen said.

The president was crisp but informal. “Bob, you have any problems?” he asked Gates, who said he was fine with it.

The president then encapsulated the new policy: in quickly, out quickly, focus on Al Qaeda, and build the Afghan Army. “I’m not asking you to change what you believe, but if you don’t agree with me that we can execute this, say so now,” he said. No one said anything.

“Tell me now,” Obama repeated.

“Fully support, sir,” Mullen said.

“Ditto,” Petraeus said.

Thus the panic at the Pentagon and in Kabul, and thus the belief on the part of the horrible Hamid Karzai that NATO cannot win, and his attempt to distance himself from NATO efforts.  There you have the man who campaigned on the “good war” in Afghanistan, and the counterinsurgency experts who told him that COIN can be done with presto governments and ANA troops within 18 months.

Missed by much (or most) of the media, the Obama administration published a new National Security Strategy.  I would otherwise have attempted to conduct a serious review of said strategy, but it isn’t a serious document.  It talks about the American commitment to the two-state solution, while ignoring the fact that Palestinians are increasingly rejecting the two-state solution.  The strategy document discusses the fact that America will underwrite international or global security, while ignoring the fact that we are flat broke and in need of printing more money in order to pay our debts.

The strategy waxes almost poetic concerning the prevention of nuclear proliferation, while at the same time we have implemented the most weak-kneed, pitiful, powerless and naive strategy concerning Iran since the Carter administration.  Iran will go nuclear during this administration’s watch and under the purview of this national security strategy.  The strategy document goes on about our commitment to human rights, just after Obama bowed to the Chinese Premier (the monster who continues to implement the forced abortion policy in China), and while we also ignore the possibility of a Northern logistics route for Afghanistan because of human rights violations in Turkmenistan.

Then there is this wonderful statement on page 8.  “Climate change and pandemic disease threaten the security of regions and the health and safety of the American people.”  Well there you have it.  Anthropogenic global warming poses a national security threat – after the revelations of complete falsification of data in the presumed intellectual power centers of the AGW religion.

The new national security strategy promotes a just and sustainable international order:

Our engagement will underpin a just and sustainable international order—just, because it advances mutual interests, protects the rights of all, and holds accountable those who refuse to meet their responsibilities; sustainable because it is based on broadly shared norms and fosters collective action to address common challenges.

Don’t trust my analysis.  You can go read the document for yourself (grab a stout cup of coffee first – or maybe a stout beer).  But it reads like it was written by a college sophomore in international studies for a contest named “Imagine: Tribute to John Lennon – What Do You Want the World to Look Like When You Grow Up?”

The Center for a New American Security has issued a report (h/t Blackfive) entitled America’s Extended Hand: Assessing the Obama Administration’s Global Engagement Strategy.  More on that shortly.

Recall the ineptitude, blunders and poor judgment we have discussed recently regarding the Obama administration and its foreign policy.  The administration has chosen to work with criminal and gangster Ahmed Wali Karzai in Kandahar in the belief that they can change him.  In Rapidly Collapsing U.S. Foreign Policy Part II we discussed how Kuwait, Saudi Arabia and even the UAE are so certain that our “diplomatic” efforts with Iran will fail to prevent them from developing nuclear weapons that they have all begun pursuing nuclear power programs in earnest (as predecessors to a nuclear weapons program).  Iran is increasingly aggressive in the region.  An Iranian aircraft buzzed the U.S. Aircraft Carrier Dwight D. Eisenhower as reported by the Navy Times, and I reported that “During the 2008 deployment of the 26th MEU, an Iranian helicopter all but landed on the deck of the USS Iwo Jima.  The Marines could almost touch it from a standing position on the deck, but no actions were taken.  The Navy refused to allow the Marines to fire on the aircraft.”

In spite of recommendations to seriously engage the Caucasus region, we have snubbed our allies in Georgia (in spite of their having sent the Georgian 31st Infantry Battalion to assist us in Afghanistan)  and most recently it appears that we are losing Azerbaijan.  “Azerbaijan’s long-standing alignment with the United States is rapidly unraveling in the wake of Washington’s recent policy initiatives. As perceived from Baku, those US initiatives fly in the face of Azerbaijan’s staunch support over the years to US strategic interests and policies in the South Caucasus-Caspian region.”  Read the entire sad and depressing Jamestown report.

Just today it was reported that:

Mahmoud Ahmadinejad’s chief of staff, Esfandiar Rahim Mashaei, said Wednesday that if Israel attacked Iran it would be destroyed within a week.

Speaking at a political conference of ultra-conservatives in Iran’s north, Mashaei said, “If the Zionist regime attacks Iran, the Zionists will have no longer than a week to live.”

The semi-official Fars news agency quoted him as saying that the Islamic Republic would destroy Israel “in less than 10 days”.

On his visit to Saudi Arabia he then claimed that “the annihilation of Israel should be a global goal.”  The additional instances are too difficult and time consuming to catalog – from our “ally” Russia attempting to undermine our presence at the Manas air base (ending this fiasco cost us a fortune) to Obama’s ghastly and dreadful West Point speech on Afghanistan, to the refusal to fund the reliable replacement warhead program, to the decision to grant Russian inspectors full access to our nuclear weapons sites, to the idea that we can find moderate elements of Hezbollah.  Exhaustion prevents me from completing the matrix of all of the gaffes, blunders, screw-ups, ill-conceived notions, and failed policies.

Now to the CNAS report.  The money quotes are given below.

We conclude that, in many ways, the Obama administration has achieved its initial objective of “re-starting” America’s relationship with the world. The administration clearly understands the importance of dialogue and of listening to foreign publics, and it is attempting to incor­porate a sensitivity to public opinion into its foreign policy decision making and translate public support into political leverage …

America’s global standing was in tatters due to an unpopular war in Iraq, a perception of unbridled American unilateralism and charges that the United States hypocritically advanced democ­racy abroad while compromising democratic values at home.

The folks at CNAS aren’t stupid; they just comprehend the world differently than do I.  But this comprehension is so ideologically skewed and out of touch with reality it makes their work literally unusable.  Time will be brutal to “scholarship” such as this.  When Iran goes nuclear, reports like this will be trumpeted to show how naive this kind of research is.  When Israel has to go it alone and war comes to the Middle East, my (and Michael Ledeen’s) advocacy for regime change (and my advocacy for fomenting an internal insurgency) will look like a cake walk compared to the mess we are left with, and much less violent and convulsive.  When Russia invades Georgia again on their way to relieve their bases in Armenia, we will look stupid and weak in our alliance with the mobster Putin (and even more ignorant if we award the tanker contract to EADS, a company in which Vladimir Putin owns a significant part).

With scholarship like this, CNAS is simply irrelevant.  They will have neither a positive nor a negative impact on policy.  The studies they are producing lack seriousness and gravitas.

From NYDailyNews.com.

President Obama and Afghan leader Hamid Karzai praised each other Wednesday and insisted the tenuous relationship between the U.S. and Afghanistan has never been stronger, but they didn’t erase significant differences over how to govern the patchwork nation.

“There are days that we are happy. There are days that we are not happy. It’s a mutual relationship towards a common objective,” Karzai said at a joint East Room press conference. “The bottom line is that we are much more strongly related to each other today than we ever were before in this relationship.”

When the two leaders met more than a month ago in Kabul, Obama was frank and insisted Karzai crack down on corruption in his government, which the U.S. believes has hurt military and diplomatic efforts. Karzai publicly squawked about the tone of that meeting.

There are even bigger differences to be resolved. The U.S. is particularly concerned about peace talks Karzai would like to open with Taliban leaders and regional warlords while U.S. troops are in the midst of a campaign in the Helmand Valley region.

Even though the issue remains prickly for both leaders, they used the occasion to try to cast a more positive image of friendship and solidarity. Though not a full-fledged state visit, Obama even gave Karzai the red carpet treatment.

Of their differences, Obama said, “A lot of them were simply overstated,” adding, “I am very comfortable with the strong efforts that President Karzai has made thus far and I think we both agree that we’re going to have to make more efforts in the future.”

TCJ three days prior concerning Ahmed Wali Karzai, Hamid Karzai’s criminal brother who runs Kandahar like a mobster.

“The plan is to incorporate him, to shape him. Unless you eliminate him, you have to [do this],” said a senior coalition official involved in planning what is viewed as this summer’s make-or-break military operation in Kandahar. “You can’t ignore him,” he added. “He’s the proverbial 800lb gorilla and he’s in the middle of a lot of rooms. He’s the mafia don, the family fixer, the troubleshooter.”

“ISAF faces a number of political challenges as well. A majority of Afghan watchers point to Ahmed Wali Karzai as one of the biggest barriers to smooth operations in the city—he demands a cut of most commerce that takes place in the area, and the DEA alleges he has ties to the illegal narcotics industry. However, because he is the President’s brother, there is no chance of removing him from power. Similarly, Kandahar is, in effect, run by a group of families organized into mafia-style crime rings. They skim profits off almost all reconstruction projects in the city, and have developed a lucrative trade ripping off ISAF initiatives. They sometimes violently clash with each other.”

From the Guardian.

Barack Obama warned today that coalition forces in Afghanistan faced months of hard fighting, but said they had started to “reverse the momentum of the insurgency” by taking the fight to the Taliban.

From the Air Force Times.

The Taliban no longer run and hide when they see a fighter jet overhead, brazenness that airmen attribute to the nearly year-old directive to limit close-air support.

Joint terminal attack controllers, airmen on the ground who call in airstrikes, and fighter pilots report that insurgents are encouraging each other to continue firing because they know the Air Force’s F-16s and A-10s are dropping far fewer bombs now than this time last year.

“Keep fighting; [coalition forces] won’t shoot” is the order that enemy leaders are giving — in Pashtun and Dari, words that the JTACs have heard over their radios.

One is almost persuaded to believe that the White House is spewing forth propaganda.

Iran is attempting to move to higher Uranium enrichment, and Ambassador John Bolton is warning us to get ready for a nuclear Iran.  The CIA has already warned us.  Unless Israel acts unilaterally, the Obama administration will be in the difficult position of trying to explain why so much energy was invested in the prevention of a nuclear Iran, when it was acceptable all along for Iran to possess a nuclear weapon.  In other words, it must explain why containment would have worked all along, thus making fools of those who tried to forestall that otherwise acceptable condition.

In a stark testimony to the fact that the Middle East has no confidence in our stomach for doing whatever is necessary to contain Persian hegemony, Kuwait and France have signed agreements on nuclear cooperation, and Saudi Arabia has established a new national agency to take the lead role in nuclear activities.  These countries do not need commercial nuclear power for purposes of energy infrastructure.  Commercial nuclear power is the first step to having the infrastructure, QA, training and protocols to control a weapons program.  Even the UAE is planning a nuclear site with four reactors.

Iran has made no attempt to hide its lack of fear of U.S. presence in the region.  Iran has been at war with us in Iraq since the inception of Operation Iraqi Freedom, and there are dead U.S. servicemen whose lives were sacrificed to the altar of avoiding the necessity of addressing the regional conflict.  Just recently an Iranian reconnaissance aircraft buzzed the U.S. aircraft carrier Dwight D. Eisenhower, coming within 1000 yards of the ship.  This kind of aggression has become fairly routine.  During the 2008 deployment of the 26th MEU, an Iranian helicopter all but landed on the deck of the USS Iwo Jima.  The Marines could almost touch it from a standing position on the deck, but no actions were taken.  The Navy refused to allow the Marines to fire on the aircraft.  Iran has made its presence known in the recent Iraqi elections, and Moqtada al Sadr is trying to emerge as a legitimate political power after having been trained in Iran for the last several years.

Things don’t look much better to the North.  In spite of recommendations to seriously engage the Caucasus region, we have snubbed our allies in Georgia (in spite of their having sent the Georgian 31st Infantry Battalion to assist us in Afghanistan)  and most recently it appears that we are losing Azerbaijan.

Azerbaijan’s long-standing alignment with the United States is rapidly unraveling in the wake of Washington’s recent policy initiatives. As perceived from Baku, those US initiatives fly in the face of Azerbaijan’s staunch support over the years to US strategic interests and policies in the South Caucasus-Caspian region.

Current US policies, however, are seen to favor Armenia in the Karabakh conflict resolution negotiations, curry favor with Armenian advocacy groups in domestic US politics, split Turkey and Azerbaijan from one another over the Karabakh issue, isolate Azerbaijan in the region, and pressure Baku into silent acquiescence with these policies.

Key actors in the region tend to share Azerbaijan’s perceptions in this regard. During last week’s nuclear safety summit in Washington, Georgian President, Mikheil Saakashvili, and Turkish Prime Minister, Recep Tayyip Erdogan, spoke frankly in this regard. They told US interlocutors at every step that the refusal to invite Azerbaijan’s President, Ilham Aliyev, to the summit was a mistake, counterproductive to US interests in the region, and confirming perceptions that Washington was attempting to isolate Baku.

US President, Barack Obama’s, meeting with his Armenian counterpart, Serzh Sargsyan during the Washington summit (while failing to invite the Azerbaijani president) confirmed perceptions that Armenian issues in US domestic politics distort Washington’s policy on the Karabakh conflict and toward Azerbaijan.

Ankara had cautioned Washington against such moves ever since Erdogan’s December 2009 visit to the US. At least from that point onward, Turkey has closed ranks with Azerbaijan, instead of distancing from it and opening the Turkish-Armenian border promptly and unconditionally at the Obama administration’s urging. The administration insists on de-linking the border opening from the continuing Armenian military occupation of seven districts beyond Karabakh, deep inside Azerbaijan. The administration had, instead, hoped to link the border opening with the April 24 US anniversary of the 1915-1918 Armenian events in Ottoman Turkey.

Washington’s summit miscalculation is the latest in a year-long series of blows to US-Azeri relations. This trend continues amid an apparent US strategic disengagement from the wider region (rationalized as a “strategic pause” to assuage pro-US governments there). In Azerbaijan’s case, Washington seems unable even to fill the long-vacant post of US ambassador in Baku. The vacancy deprives the United States of steady high-level access to Azerbaijan’s leaders (which had never been a problem previously), while making it more difficult for Washington to grasp the crisis in US-Azerbaijan relations and its region-wide implications.

Addressing an April 14 cabinet meeting in front of TV cameras, President Aliyev criticized the US policy of pushing Turkey to open the border with Armenia, despite the latter’s occupation of seven Azeri districts beyond Karabakh. This move pulls the rug from under Azerbaijan’s carefully constructed negotiating position for a stage-by-stage peaceful solution to the conflict. It also seems designed to separate Turkey from Azerbaijan. Accordingly, Aliyev complained about “certain countries that believe that they can meddle in everything…by exerting pressure and blackmailing. This is how we see it. This policy clearly runs against Azerbaijan’s interests, and the Azeri state is taking appropriate steps.”

It isn’t clear if the U.S. policy regarding Azerbaijan is malicious or merely inept.  What is clear is that we are still witnessing the collapse of U.S. foreign policy, a fact both easy and sad to catalog.

Prior: Rapidly Collapsing U.S. Foreign Policy

From Jackson Diehl:

Forty-seven world leaders are Barrack Obama’s guests in Washington Tuesday at the nuclear security summit. Obama is holding bilateral meetings with just twelve of them. That’s led to some awkward exclusions — and some unfortunate appearances, as well.

One of those left out was Mikheil Saakashvili, president of Georgia, who got a phone call from Obama last week instead of a meeting in Washington. His exclusion must have prompted broad smiles in Moscow, where Saakashvili is considered public enemy no. 1 — a leader whom Russia tried to topple by force in the summer of 2008. After all, Obama met with Viktor Yanukovych, the president of Ukraine and a friend of the Kremlin. And he is also meeting with the leaders of two of Georgia’s neighbors — Armenia and Turkey, both of which enjoy excellent relations with Russia.

So is anyone really surprised?  Each passing day of our Caucasus policy makes another Russian invasion of Georgia more likely.  Perhaps Obama’s previous assurances to Georgia ring hollow now?  And perhaps Georgia will rethink sending the Georgian 31st Infantry Battalion, recently deployed to serve alongside the U.S. Marines in the Helmand Province, to assist with the campaign in Afghanistan?

Prior:

It’s Time to Engage the Caucasus

The Coming War in the Caucasus

Obama, Russia and the Future of Georgia

Rapidly Collapsing U.S. Foreign Policy

We previously noted that Obama campaign rhetoric on nuclear weapons relied on ending the global threat via negotiations rather than refurbishment and development.  In a reversal of that rhetoric, the administration is targeting nuclear refurbishment with new dollars.

President Obama is planning to increase spending on America’s nuclear weapons stockpile just days after pledging to try to rid the world of them.

In his budget to be announced on Monday, Mr Obama has allocated £4.3billion to  maintain the U.S. arsenal – £370million more than George Bush spent on nuclear weapons in his final year.

The Obama administration also plans to spend a further £3.1billion over the next five years on nuclear security.

The announcement comes despite the American President declaring nuclear weapons were the ‘greatest danger’ to U.S. people during in his State of the Union address on Wednesday.

And it flies in the face of Obama’s Nobel Peace Prize, awarded to him in October for ‘his extraordinary efforts to strengthen international diplomacy and cooperation between peoples’.

The Nobel committee was attacked at the time for bestowing the accolade on a new president whose initiatives are yet to bear fruit – which included reducing the world stock of nuclear arms.

The budget is higher than that allocated by George Bush – who was seen by many as a warmongering president in the wake of the Iraq invasion in 2003 – during his premiership.

During his 70-minute State of the UNion speech on Wednesday, which marked his first year in office, Obama said: ‘I have embraced the vision of John F. Kennedy and Ronald Reagan through a strategy that reverses the spread of these weapons, and seeks a world without them.’

This represents an important reversal of position regarding the nuclear weapons stockpile.  His supporters (who don’t realize – or admit – the half century of deterrence and peace that nuclear weapons have afforded) must surely feel betrayed, but before heaping scorn on him from the left or accolades from the right, it’s best to recall the state of nuclear weapons in the U.S.

As noted in National Security and Nuclear Weapons in the 21st Century (DoD and DoE):

… quite unlike the United States, Russia maintains a fully functional nuclear weapons design, development, test and manufacturing infrastructure capable of producing significant quantities of nuclear warheads per year.  For a variety of reasons, Russia has explicitly placed increased emphasis on nuclear weapons in its national security policy and military doctrine, and has re-incorporated theater nuclear options into its military planning …

… the current path for sustaining the warhead stockpile—successive refurbishments of existing Cold War warheads designed with small margins of error—may be unsustainable in the future. Specifically, the directors of the nation’s nuclear weapons laboratories have expressed concern about the ability to ensure confidence in the reliability of the legacy stockpile over the long term, without nuclear testing.

Successive efforts at extending the service life of the current inventory of warheads will drive the warhead configurations further away from the original design baseline that was validated using underground nuclear test data. Repeated refurbishments will accrue technical changes that, over time, might inadvertently undermine reliability and performance. The skills, materials, processes, and technologies needed to refurbish and maintain these older warhead designs are also increasingly difficult to sustain or acquire.  Some of the materials employed in these older warheads are extremely hazardous.  Moreover, it is difficult to incorporate modern safety and security features into Cold War era weapon designs.

As a consequence, the stockpile stewardship program is expanding its range of component and material testing and analysis, and is likely to identify more areas of concern. However, without nuclear testing, at some time in the future the United States may be unable to confirm the effect of the accumulation of changes to tested warhead configurations. As the United States continues to observe a moratorium on underground nuclear testing, certification of the safety, surety, and reliability of the existing stockpile of weapons (with their narrow performance margins) will become increasingly difficult.  In the near-term, the United States has no choice but to continue to extend the life of these legacy warheads.

However, the Departments of Defense and Energy are pursuing an alternative to this strategy of indefinite life extension; namely, the gradual replacement of existing warheads with warheads of comparable capability that are less sensitive to manufacturing tolerances or to aging of materials. The generic concept is often referred to as the Reliable Replacement Warhead (RRW). The RRW concept promises other attractive benefits such as improved safety and security, production processes that are less complex, elimination of many hazardous materials in existing warheads, and production of less hazardous waste.  The directors of the nuclear weapons laboratories believe that modern scientific tools developed for the stockpile stewardship program, including advanced computer modeling and experimental facilities, will enable design and certification of the RRW without nuclear testing.

In addition to the technological problems associated with maintenance of older nuclear weapons, the Air Force and Navy have both treated nuclear weapons billets as second class occupations, and have allowed the doctrinal understanding (and availability of the fraction of nuclear weapons that are deployable) to atrophy over the last couple of decades.

Obama has spent approximately what Bush did on nuclear weapons refurbishment.  In order to ensure a viable nuclear deterrent into the 21st century, much more needs to be done.  The U.S. must restart the manufacture and design of a new generation of nuclear weapons.  Without this, the RRW program cannot go forward.  That will be the test of Obama’s vision and fortitude.  This allocation of money is just kicking the can down the road.  The left will want to heap scorn upon him, the right will want to praise him for his wise decision.  He deserves neither.

Glenn Reynolds links Ann Althouse, who after the SCOTUS decision on McCain-Feingold, questions Obama’s intent to formulate a forceful response.  Ann asks, “Why would a law professor oppose a Supreme Court decision on a matter of constitutional law and not respect the authority of the Court and honor our system of separation of powers?”

Taking a quick detour, I have always been a fan of John and Abigail Adams.  John is in my opinion in many ways the singular father of our republic.  The strength of Abigail Adams is a story with its own merit, and worthy of study by any woman who aspires to greatness.  Without her, John wouldn’t have been the man he was.  Watching the HBO series John Adams made me even more a fan of John and Abigail.  Quite simply, it is stunning, and if you’re like me, you intended to watch a DVD, put it aside, watch another next week, and so on.  I ended up watching all of them in a single day.  I couldn’t help myself.

Now back to Ann’s question.  Ann has smart commenters, and kent offers this brilliant summary.  “Because, so far as President Present is concerned: this is a nation of men, not laws.  He is, at his core, the anti-John Adams.”

That’s it.  I find a whole host of reasons to dislike Mr. Obama, but this sums the issue up as nicely and succinctly as I can imagine.  If you haven’t watched the HBO series on Adams, you must do so as soon as possible.  After completing it, sit back and ponder the proposition that Obama is, at his core, the anti-John Adams.

From The New York Times:

Senior White House advisers are frustrated by what they say is the Pentagon’s slow pace in deploying 30,000 additional troops to Afghanistan and its inability to live up to an initial promise to have all of the forces in the country by next summer, senior administration officials said Friday.

Tensions over the deployment schedule have been growing in recent weeks between senior White House officials — among them Vice President Joseph R. Biden Jr., Gen. James L. Jones, the national security adviser, and Rahm Emanuel, the White House chief of staff — and top commanders, including Gen. Stanley A. McChrystal, the senior commander in Afghanistan.

[ … ]

One administration official said that the White House believed that top Pentagon and military officials misled them by promising to deploy the 30,000 additional troops by the summer. General McChrystal and some of his top aides have privately expressed anger at that accusation, saying that they are being held responsible for a pace of deployments they never thought was realistic, the official said.

Other White House officials said to be frustrated by the deployment pace include Thomas E. Donilon, the deputy national security adviser, and Denis R. McDonough, the national security chief of staff. “Gates and Mullen made a clear statement that this would be achieved by summer’s end,” a senior administration official said, referring to Defense Secretary Robert M. Gates and Adm. Mike Mullen, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff.

[ … ]

Last month in Kabul, Lt. Gen. David M. Rodriguez, the deputy commander of American and NATO forces in Afghanistan, did not back away from that schedule, but he told reporters of the difficulties he faced even in getting all the forces in by fall. He said that bad weather, limited capacity to send supplies by air and attacks on ground convoys carrying equipment for troops from Pakistan and other countries presented substantial hurdles.

“There’s a lot of risks in here, but we’re going to try to get them in as fast as we can,” he said at the time. “There’s a lot of things that have to line up perfectly.”

On a visit to Afghanistan last month, Admiral Mullen pressed military logisticians on how they would be able to meet the schedule. But even Admiral Mullen, who said he was “reasonably confident” that the logistics would work out, acknowledged the tall order before the military, saying, “I want a plan B because life doesn’t always work out.”

Geoff Morrell, the Pentagon press secretary, said Friday that the military was moving as rapidly as it could and that reports of tension with the White House amounted to a “fabricated and contrived controversy.” Mr. Morrell said that “the preponderance of the forces will be there by the middle of the summer and we are moving heaven and earth to get all of them there by the end of the summer.” He added that the Pentagon anticipated “that 92 percent of them will be there by the end of August and we hope to even improve upon that.”

But military officials acknowledged that they were taken aback by the president’s initial insistence that the troops be in place within six months. Last fall, military officials repeatedly said that it would take as long as a year to 18 months for all the troops to be in place.

You would think something as important as logistics in a land-locked country had been addressed and analyzed before.  Yes, I’m sure it has.  I very sure.  I’m very, very sure.  I’m certain it has.  I’m very certain.  I’m VERY, VERY CERTAIN.  It’s just that the idiots at the White House won’t listen to the Milbloggers.

Logistics rules.  The logisticians tell the Generals what to do, and not even the President overrules them.  It’s just the way it works.  Military logisticians will meet the schedule or they won’t.  Either way, more histrionics at the White House won’t change anything.  The Obama administration is now trafficking in a world where reality matters.

But there is one more thing.  The hollering and objections for lack of timeliness of a man who wasted precious months considering the alternatives to more troops in Afghanistan rings rather hollow.  It’s a tale full of sound and fury, signifying nothing.

Richard North at Defence of the Realm engages in a little gloating (and frustration as well).

Referring to the daily stream of truck convoys that bring supplies into the landlocked nation, Hilary Clinton said to the Senate Armed Services Committee:

“You know, when we are so dependent upon long supply lines – as we are in Afghanistan, where everything has to be imported — it’s much more difficult than it was in Iraq, where we had Kuwait as a staging ground.

You offload a ship in Karachi. And by the time whatever it is – you know, muffins for our soldiers’ breakfast or anti-IED equipment – gets to where we’re headed, it goes through a lot of hands. And one of the major sources of funding for the Taliban is the protection money. That has nothing to do with President Karzai.”

Yup! That’s precisely what we said on 3 September and then again on 13 September of this year , on the blog and in the Booker column …

As we pointed out – it is all done under a doctrine of “plausible deniability”. We do not pay the Taliban – oh no! But we build their payments into the contractors’ fees, which they then pass on, to ensure safe passage.

And well deserved gloating it is.  I will engage in a little myself.  And … much frustration.  One year and eight months ago I described the Taliban and al Qaeda strategy of interdiction of supply routes from the Pakistan port city of Karachi to the Khyber pass (and through the Torkham Crossing) or Chaman towards Kandahar (a smaller percentage of our supplies goes through Chaman than Khyber).  In fact, my Logistics category is well populated with studies of supply problems – larger scale through Pakistan, and smaller scale logistics to remote combat outposts in which the helicopter is king because we don’t own the roads and can’t ensure security.  It costs $400 to get a single gallon of gasoline to the Helmand Province.

Approximately one year ago I recommended an alternative logistics route, and nine months ago I concluded that it was time to engage the Caucasus in order to make this happen.  The proposed route: through the Caucasus region, specifically, from the Mediterranean Sea through the Bosporus Strait in Turkey, and from there into the Black Sea.  From the Black Sea the supplies would go through Georgia to neighboring Azerbaijan.  From here the supplies would transit across the Caspian Sea to Turkmenistan, and from there South to Afghanistan.

Difficult?  Certainly.  Riddled with political problems and in need of security?  Sure.  But better than what we have with Pakistan if we had worked to make it happen.  Instead, we courted the Russians for a route through their territory, and thus far to no one’s surprise there has been precious little in the way of real cooperation or significant amounts of supplies going through Russia.

As if this issue has not been developing and growing for the last several years, senior Pentagon officials now face a dilemma.  Deploy additional troops, but supply those troops with currently unknown logistical routes.

The White House has settled on sending additional troops to Afghanistan, and now the Pentagon must grapple with another thorny problem: how to support them once they get there.

For Ashton Carter, the top Pentagon official in charge of weapons purchases, that has meant focusing on the concrete — literally. Basic materials for building bases are in short supply or nonexistent in Afghanistan, so U.S. officials must search for staples like concrete next door in Pakistan.

Another priority: Getting thousands of blast-resistant trucks from Oshkosh Corp.’s factory in Oshkosh, Wis., to U.S. forces in the Afghan hinterlands.

“At this phase, Afghanistan is a logistics war as much as any other kind of war,” said Mr. Carter, whose formal title is under secretary of defense for acquisition, technology and logistics, in a recent interview.

Unlike Iraq, Afghanistan has no modern infrastructure. Critical supplies such as fuel must be imported. The country is landlocked and has just three major overland routes. Enormous distances separate bases and outposts. High mountains and valleys, as well as extreme weather, make air travel difficult.

Defense Secretary Robert Gates has pushed the Pentagon to stay on a wartime footing rather than focus on preparing for future conflicts. Top officials have shifted their priorities.

“Everything is…more expensive, but that’s not really as much the issue as whether you can get it done at all,” Mr. Carter said.

Mr. Carter’s predecessor had a full plate dealing with defense-industry programs such as the $300 billion Joint Strike Fighter and the sprawling $200 billion Army modernization effort known as Future Combat Systems. Mr. Carter, by contrast, is entrenched in the minutiae of Iraq and Afghanistan, as well as big weapons programs.

The author of the article, Mr. August Cole, makes excuses for the current administration in the last three paragraphs.  Busy, they are.  Finally focused on the details unlike their predecessors in the Bush administration who were focused on defense industry programs.  Except that this is a false narrative.  Obama’s defense team has been in place long enough to decipher the problems.  If a Milblog can pick up on the problems and alternatives, so can the DoD.

The Bush team failed in terms of setting up conditions for logistical success in Afghanistan.  But this doesn’t obviate or justify the current failure to plan for supplies.  The Bush team never planned for more troops in Afghanistan.  The Obama team did, and is just now stumbling over the most important element of any campaign – logistics.

Is it too late to engage the Caucasus?  Is it too late for the Obama team to start thinking ahead or at least reading the Milblogs?