Good News from Afghanistan!

Only two weeks on the ground and General Petraeus is already making things happen! 

KABUL, Afghanistan — After intensive discussions with NATO military commanders, the Afghan government on Wednesday approved a program to establish local defense forces around the country, with the potential to help remote areas thwart attacks by Taliban insurgents. 

The NATO-backed program, which will be supervised by the Interior Ministry, will pay salaries to the members of these new forces, an inducement that could generate widespread recruitment. (NY Times)

Afghanistan Awakening

General Petraeus is adapting the successful Iraqi Awakening concept and applying it to Afghanistan.  Karzai is suspicious (probably because he and his cronies can't make money off of it), but NATO is pressing on.

The program is similar in some respects to the Sunni Awakening movement in Iraq — although it is not expected to include insurgents who have switched sides. 

I'm waiting to hear what Army veteran and military commentator Ralph Peters has to say.  He is one of my go-to experts on this kind of stuff.  It falls in line with what Peters has suggested to try and salvage some kind of win from this sagging effort.

Nationalization could take decades, making a regional approach the way to go.  You can call it bribery, you can call it making friends with "the enemy," but it worked in Iraq, and such an approach fits the cultural landscape.

Incentivizing local chieftains and their tribes to reject the Al Qaida foreigners is a good idea and it could work.  

McChrystal Fired, Petraeus Demoted, Obama Diminished (Further)

Adversity does not build character, it reveals it

President Obama is living proof.  He is a petty, petulant man who has failed every test since becoming president.  So the child-caesar fired the general.  Good enough, but he had to drag him halfway around the world (where he was leading tens of thousands of America's finest) to publicly kick him when he was down.  Must've been a real ego builder.

Here is the true test of these two men
Stanley McChrystal, stripped of his command and military rank, will still be a battle-tested man of cast iron character and a rock-solid American hero.  Barack Obama, once he vacates the presidency, will be nothing but a self-absorbed man whose only accomplishments were fooling some of the people one time and winning an anticipatory Nobel Prize. 



For the conspiratorial-minded, here are three thoughts...

General McChrystal did not really vote for Obama; they were just playing the Rolling Stone reporter.

The Rolling Stone reporter did this all on purpose to poison the military-press relationship.  Since 9/11, even liberal reporters have gained a grudging respect for our troops, often writing glowing reports about them while still criticizing the wars they fight.  That's over now.  No embed will ever be the same again, and that's how the liberals want it.

Obama demoted General Petraeus (the Afghanistan commander falls under CENTCOM) to take him out of the 2012 Presidential Campaign equation.