Expert Quits Afghan Mission And Rattles The Brass

For those of you who believe our mission in Afghanistan is a war of futility as I do then this article in today's Washington Post reaffirms that notion.

As you will learn, Matthew Hoh is no peacenik rabblerouser but a seasoned combat Marine, civil engineer and member of an elite Foreign Service team whose resignation shocked the top civilian foreign policy leaders in the Obama administration.

"I have lost understanding of and confidence in the strategic purposes of the United States' presence in Afghanistan," he wrote Sept. 10 in a four-page letter to the department's head of personnel. "I have doubts and reservations about our current strategy and planned future strategy, but my resignation is based not upon how we are pursuing this war, but why and to what end."

The State Department thought so highly of Hoh that he was flown to Washington with a face-to face talk with Richard C. Holbrooke, the administration's special representative for Afghanistan and Pakistan.

"We took his letter very seriously, because he was a good officer," Holbrooke said in an interview. "We all thought that given how serious his letter was, how much commitment there was, and his prior track record, we should pay close attention to him." While he did not share Hoh's view that the war "wasn't worth the fight, "Holbrooke said, "I agreed with much of his analysis."

He asked Hoh to join his team in Washington, saying that "if he really wanted to affect policy and help reduce the cost of the war on lives and treasure," why not be "inside the building, rather than outside, where you can get a lot of attention but you won't have the same political impact?" Hoh accepted the argument and the job, but changed his mind a week later. "I recognize the career implications, but it wasn't the right thing to do," he said in an interview Friday, two days after his resignation became final.

Many Afghans, he wrote in his resignation letter, are fighting the United States largely because its troops are there -- a growing military presence in villages and valleys where outsiders, including other Afghans, are not welcome and where the corrupt, U.S.-backed national government is rejected. While the Taliban is a malign presence, and Pakistan-based al-Qaeda needs to be confronted, he said, the United States is asking its troops to die in Afghanistan for what is essentially a far-off civil war between rural and urban rivals.

One of Hoh's last assignments was researching an answer for Adm. Mike Mullen, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, asked during a visit last April. He wanted to know why the U.S. military was suffering casualties for years fighting in the Korengal Valley near the Pakistan border.

Hoh concluded that there was no good reason. The people of Korengal didn't want them; the insurgency appeared to have arrived in strength only after the Americans did, and the battle between the two forces had achieved only a bloody stalemate.

Korengal and other areas, he said, taught him "how localized the insurgency was. I didn't realize that a group in this valley here has no connection with an insurgent group two kilometers away." Hundreds, maybe thousands, of groups across Afghanistan, he decided, had few ideological ties to the Taliban but took its money to fight the foreign intruders and maintain their own local power bases.

Continues the Post article:

Hoh's doubts increased with Afghanistan's Aug. 20 presidential election, marked by low turnout and widespread fraud. He concluded, he said in his resignation letter, that the war "has violently and savagely pitted the urban, secular, educated and modern of Afghanistan against the rural, religious, illiterate and traditional. It is this latter group that composes and supports the Pashtun insurgency."

With "multiple, seemingly infinite, local groups," he wrote, the insurgency "is fed by what is perceived by the Pashtun people as a continued and sustained assault, going back centuries, on Pashtun land, culture, traditions and religion by internal and external enemies. The U.S. and NATO presence in Pashtun valleys and villages, as well as Afghan army and police units that are led and composed of non-Pashtun soldiers and police, provide an occupation force against which the insurgency is justified."

Hoh said the United States needs to reduce its combat troop level now at 68,000. "We want to have some kind of governance there, and we have some obligation for it not to be a bloodbath," Hoh said. "But you have to draw the line somewhere, and say this is their problem to solve."

On Monday, Sen. John Kerry, chairman of the Foreign Relations Committee, told the Council on Foreign Relations that he is urging the administration to redefine its strategy that would focus “on what is achievable as well as critical, and empower the Afghans to take control of their own future.”

The senator said the United States must be both patient and realistic, and that “a sustained, long-term commitment to the Afghan people,” on civilian as well as military fronts, is essential to avoid a failure that would have enormous implications.

At the same time, Kerry said the United States need not create “a flawless democracy” in Afghanistan, nor vanquish the Taliban “in every corner of the country, or create a modern economy.

“We don’t have to control every hamlet and village,” Kerry said, using language reminiscent of America’s futile war in Vietnam. But Kerry asserted that, unlike the Viet Cong, the Taliban did not have broad, deep support among the common people, which he said portended well for eventual success in Afghanistan.

It's not that I agree with Hoh's assessment of the Afghan mission, but a notion that he speaks from first-hand knowledge unclouded by politics as is the case of our generals. Hoh's letter of resignation struck hard at the soft underbelly of our foreign policy leaders or they wouldn't have given him a second thought.

60 Lashes For Female Reporter Doing WHAT?

A Saudi Arabian court sentenced a female journalist to 60 lashes because she worked for a television station that aired the sexual confessions of a Saudi man, she and her attorney said today.

The Reuters news agency said the woman, who requested only her first name used, was unaware her Lebanese Broadcasting Corp. did not have proper authorization to operate in the Islamic kingdom. "The verdict was just because I cooperated with LBC," Rosana, 22, the female journalist, told Reuters.

By Western standards, the verdict is outrageous if the story is true. Reuters said the LBC is popular in Saudi Arabia because the station airs popular Western customs in one of the world's most religiously conservative nations.

"I was not aware (that LBC was unlicensed) but in the end this is the verdict and I accept it. I don't want to appeal," Rosana said. The court could not be reached, while a spokesman for the information ministry in Riyadh declined to comment.

"This is the first case in which a journalist was tried at a court of summary jurisdiction for an offense relating to the nature of his or her profession," said Sulaiman al-Jumaie, a lawyer who defended Abdul-Jawad, who told of his pre-marital sexual exploits on LBC in August and was sentenced to 1,000 lashes and five years in jail.

The Reuters story concludes:

Judges, who are clerics of Saudi Arabia's strict Wahhabi school of Islam, have wide powers of discretion and can issue sentences according to their interpretation of Islamic law, which critics said has led to some arbitrary rulings.

The questions I have is if LBC is broadcast regularly in the Saudi kingdom, are the clerics looking the other way until sexually-sensitive material is aired? Was Rosana the only female working for LBC?

By contrast, NBC recently concluded a series on gains women have made in the U.S. workplace hosted and edited by Maria Shriver. Makes me wonder what Rosana would have to say about that.

We are a faithful, obedient ally of the Saudis because we worship their oil which keeps us in line just as the Wahhabi clerics keep imagined infidels like Rosana under foot.

NATO Ministers Support McChrystal -- Easy For Them To Say

Reports from Bratislava, Slovakia, today indicate NATO defense ministers support Gen. Stanley McChrystal's recommendations to increase counterinsurgency strategy, nation building and additional troops in Afghanistan.

Easy for them to say. More than two-thirds of the 28-country NATO forces totalling 104,000 troops are American and far less than that are involved in combat operations.

The ministers did not discuss the number of additional troops expected. Reports claim McChrystal wants 80,000 but would settle for 40,000 additional U.S. troops.

Also, the ministers face a hard sell in some of their home countries. According to a CBS report today:

Dutch Defence Minister Eimert Van Middelkoop said his country is awaiting the final election results in Afghanistan Nov. 7 before deciding whether to augment its 2,160 troops in Afghanistan.

Danish Defence Minister Soeren Gade said allies won't increase troop levels until they're assured the new government in Kabul is committed to the NATO goals.

Defence Minister Franz Josef Jung of Germany said he also doesn't expect his country to increase its 4,200 troop numbers in Afghanistan when the soldiers' mandate from the German parliament comes up for renewal in December.

Britain has pledged 500 additional troops on a series of conditions.

Prime Minister Stephen Harper has maintained that Canada will pull its troops out of Afghanistan by 2011.

Defence Minister Peter MacKay, who is attending the meeting, has said he does not expect Canada will be asked to send more troops or extend its mission beyond 2011.

"Everyone agreed that the plusing up of the American [troops] was going to be a critical component part and that ongoing counter-insurgency efforts would have to continue," he told CBC News in a phone interview Friday.

"So it was a question of resolve and a question that everyone is waiting to have answered is what will the Obama administration do in the final analysis, and we'll go from there."

Much of the role non-U.S. NATO forces and civilians play in Afghanistan is security such as protecting fuel and weapons depots. One incident and possibly another reflects the ineptness of those forces when it comes to fighting the insurgents.

A German commander called in an aerial attack on a hijacked fuel tanker last month killing seven civilians. The Italians were accused by a London newspaper of paying locals to perform their security operations in an Afghan province, a report denied by the Italian government.

NATO's mandate in Afghanistan is spelled out on its website. The report does not differentiate by nation the activities assigned.

Since NATO took command of the UN- mandated International Security Assistance Force (ISAF) in 2003, the Alliance has gradually expanded the reach of its mission, originally limited to Kabul, to cover Afghanistan’s whole territory. The number of ISAF troops has grown accordingly from the initial 5,000 to around 50,000 troops coming from 42 countries, including all 28 NATO members. ISAF is a key component of the international community’s engagement in Afghanistan, assisting the Afghan authorities in providing security and stability and creating the conditions for reconstruction and development.

Among its tasks is training and equipping the Afghan police and military. In 2006 it established a "quick humanitarian" assistance program for food, shelter, medicine and repair of buildings and bridges. NATO members also are assigned to combat illicit trafficking from Afghanistan's largest gross national product -- heroin.

The Provincial Reconstruction Teams help build institutions within the government to "fully establish good governance and the rule of law."

Certainly, the role our allies are performing in Afghanistan is helpful but the vast majority are not putting their lives in harm's way as U.S. troops carry the brunt of the combat mission.

At the NATO defense minister's meeting, U.S. Defense Secretary Robert Gates said, "There were a number of allies who indicated they were thinking about, or were moving toward, increasing either their military or their civilian contributions, or both."

Gates squashed a proposal by Vice President Joe Biden that the U.S. pull out most or all of its troops. "We're not pulling out," Gates said. "I think that any reduction is very unlikely."

Biden represents one view point in the Obama administration in which a counterterrorism strategy focuses more on capturing and killing terrorists linked to Al Qaeda than what McChrystal and the foreign ministers were discussing.

President Obama is expected to announce his troop decision on or before the Nov. 7 Afghan election.

Would someone explain to me how a second election would produce a government we can trust? That seems to me why former Vice President Dick Cheney calls Obama "dithering" for reevaluating his Afghan strategy announced in March.

Move To Dump Insurers From Anititrust Exemption Gains

The House Judiciary Committee Wednesday voted 20-9 to remove federal antitrust exemptions the health insurance industry has enjoyed since the 1940s. Majority leader Harry Reid said a companion bill will be voted on soon in the Senate.

Finally the Democrats in Congress have showed some spunk. If the final bill is signed by President Barack Obama, the nation's insurers would be liable for certain antitrust violations including price fixing.

In the Beltway, the proposed legislation is considered punishing the industry for what many consider an erroneous report by the industry that the current health reform bills now offered in Congress would increase premiums.

I consider it leveling the playing field for the consumer by forcing the industry to become more competitive, especially if a public option is not included in the final health reform bill.

Republicans will look silly opposing the antitrust provision. Health insurance and Major League Baseball are the only two industries exempt from the law.

For those of you with an insatiable thirst for Beltway politics, read this posting on the issue by The Hill newspaper.

Another reason Democrats are showing some backbone is a growing sentiment of public support for if not a public option at least some way to force health insurers to be more responsive to consumer demands. Those feelings were suggested in the latest Washington Post/ABC News poll crunching the numbers in the divide between Democrats, Republicans and Independents.

Harold Meyerson, a Washington Post columnist, destroys the myth that the insurance industry is champion of the free market system.

In more than 30 states, five or fewer health insurance companies control three-quarters of the market (in Alabama, one company controls 90 percent). And mergers among health insurers are at an all-time high this year, the Wall Street Journal reported Tuesday. Worse yet, more and more businesses are declining to offer health insurance to employees (60 percent offered benefits this year, down from 69 percent in 2000 and 63 percent last year, according to an annual Kaiser Family Foundation study). Increasingly, individuals will have to shop for insurance in markets that are steadily less competitive.

President Obama and congressional liberals believe that one way to help Americans get the best deal for health coverage is to establish insurance exchanges where consumers can compare plans online. They further believe that merely establishing an exchange in an oligopolistic market isn't enough; the way to ensure true competition is to create a public option concerned less with preserving an industry-wide profit margin than with offering Americans a better deal.

Concludes Meyerson:

The market champions here are the president, liberals in Congress and the American public. Advocates for socialism? More like advocates for shoppers.

Another cost savings approach is to force all the states to allow its residents to purchase health insurance from out-of-state carriers. As it stands now, each state has its own insurance commission and sets the rules of what carriers must provide. The commissions' rules reflect each state's pet projects its legislators demand. Carriers which don't care to bother meeting any given state's standards simply stay out of the loop.

The result is lack of competition and promotion of insurance cartel oligarchy.

If the Democrats really are serious about lowering costs, then they must demonstrate they have the cojones to take on the trial lawyers lobby and set a cap on malpractice awards. With tort reform in this area, doctors no longer would order redundant tests on patients simply to cover their asses when a surgical or drug procedure goes haywire.

Shooting The Messenger

The White House must end its fight with Fox News now. Enough already. David Gergen, White House advisor to three former presidents, said it is "risky strategy." I agree and add it's stupid and unproductive. While Fox commentators may have succeeded in tweaking President Obama's massive ego, retaliation from the Oval Office violates a very simple rule:

You can't win a fight when cable news television is on the air 24/7, radio talk show commentators three hours a day five days a week and newspapers buy their ink by the barrel. Especially when media baron Rupert Murdock of News Corp. owns outlets in all three sectors.

Fox owes the White House gratitude because every time they are criticized their ratings go up. Not that they need it. Fox buries its competitors by a 2-1 margin at worst. This past April:

Fox News beat CNN and MSNBC combined in every hour from 6amET to MidnightET in both Total Viewers and the A(ge) 25-54 demo. FNC had the top 11 cable news programs in Total Viewers and 12 of the top 15 in the demo. FNC is the #2 network in Total Viewers on all of cable. From 9amET on, every program grew by more than 60% in the demo. The 5pmET hour, now occupied by Glenn Beck, is up 212% in the demo and up 128% in Total Viewers. Your World with Neil Cavuto is up 102% in the demo and up 60% in Total Viewers. On the Record with Greta Van Susteren is up 75% in demo and up 55% in Total Viewers. Also in demo: FOX Report is up 75%, Special Report 70%, The O'Reilly Factor 74% and Hannity 64%. Fox & Friends has now been #1 for 90 consecutive months, Studio B with Shepard Smith for 80 consecutive months.

White House Chief of Staff Rahm Emanuel is the latest Obama administration official criticizing Fox News. Asked on CNN's "State of the Union" Sunday about White House Communications Director Anita Dunn's criticisms of the cable news network, Emanuel said:

“It’s not a news organization so much as it has a perspective, and that’s a different take. And more importantly, it’s important not to have the CNN’s and the others of the world being led and following Fox, as if what they’re trying to do is a legitimate news organization,” Emanuel said.

Dunn opened a new front on the Democratic war with Fox News last week by calling it a "wing of the Republican Party." She jabbed the network by insisting they weren't even conservative.

My suspicion is that the White House fears Fox News has usurped its mantel of controlling the news and frames the national agenda with all the other media following Big Daddy Murdock.

I'm not about to reiterate every punch and counter punch thrown in the ring of public opinion. However, I think it fair to reprint portions of Brent Hume's defense of Fox. Hume, now a senior political analyst for Fox News and regarded as a veteran figure at the news organization, took the White House head on. In his "Brit Hume Commentary" segment on Fox News Channel's Oct. 12 "Special Report with Bret Baier," Hume, pointed out this "feud" the Obama administration has decided to elevate is a bad idea. According to Jeff Poor writing for NewsBusters:

"Every president ends up disgusted with the news media in general and with certain individuals or outlets in particular, but there is an old adage often attributed to Mark Twain that advises against picking fights with people who buy ink by the barrel," Hume said. "He is speaking of the big media of his day, which were newspapers."

Hume noted that generally presidents have remained above the fray when it comes to these disagreements with the media. "Most presidents though refrain from directly attacking media outlets, perhaps with that adage in mind or perhaps mindful of another saying that it is bad idea to get into a public fight with someone smaller than you are because it diminishing you and elevates your opponent," Hume continued.

And Hume also pointed out there's not a clear definition of what a victory for the Obama administration would be. News outlets are protected by the Constitution and that makes it difficult for politician to gain an upper hand when they want to go one-on-one with a particular media outlet.

"Fox News may be the biggest news channel by far but it is not as big as the presidency," he said. "There is an additional problem in fighting with the press. The protections by the First Amendment make the media largely invulnerable to attacks from politicians. For all these reasons, the kind of salvos recently fired at Fox News by the Obama White House represents, as you heard [CNN political analyst] David Gergen say, a risky strategy."

But Hume did explain how the Anita Dunn described Fox News as a "research arm or the communications arm of the Republican Party" instead of a "conservative outlet in her Oct. 11 CNN "Reliable Sources" interview.

"The White House has though chosen its words with some care," Hume continued. "Note the characterization of Fox not as conservative but as Republican. A lot more Americans identify themselves as ‘conservative' than as Republican. What is more, though, if Fox News really were a GOP mouthpiece, the White House would not be attacking it. It would feel no need to."

Now it's my turn.

I'm one of those viewers who turn on Fox simply to hear what the opposition is saying. Sometimes it is informative and provocative. Most of the time it is aggravating and an insult to one's intelligence. I find little humor when Sean Hannity refers to Press Secretary Robert Gibbs as "Minister of Propaganda."

Glenn Beck is a self-confessed clown appealing to the base level of human Pavlovian responses. Neil Cavuto has prostituted himself to role of flack for News Corp.'s talking points. I never turn on the TV until mid-afternoon so I know only the stupid snippets from the Fox And Friends Morning show replayed by MSNBC's Keith Olbermann. Shepard Smith is good and even O'Reilly is watchable until he gets lost in his own ego and steers into sexual adventurism content which is more often than I care.

Those are the commentators. They're the gravy train for Fox News Cable. They must be doing something right or no one would be watching. I will give them credit for that. They milk a formula that has crushed its opposition.

In no way am I implying CNN or MSNBC is better. I feel more comfortable watching them probably because they are closer to my personal views on politics and the world around us. It's not that I need to be reassured. It might be because I detect as much or more spin as Fox but less errors in factual presentations. By the end of the day, I don't mind being entertained.

We must keep a healthy perspective. It wasn't that long ago MSNBC was attacking the Bush administration as fiercely as Fox is now bashing President Obama.

Bush basically ignored them. Perhaps a subtle dig, such as "I don't watch the news." Yeah, Dubya was a funny guy.

But attacking the messenger is childish.

Guns vs. Butter

For critics claiming we cannot afford health care reform for our own people and the proposals are not cost sustainable, consider these apples.

It costs about $400 a gallon to deliver fuel to our troops in Afghanistan. The Pentagon reports it costs about $1 billion for ever 1,000 troops in that land-locked nation which has an infrastructure worse than the poorest barrio in Tia Juana, Mexico. The military is asking for an appropriation of $1.3 billion this year just to build things so the troops can carry out their mission. Only a fraction of those expenditures in roads, water and electrical systems would help the Afghans.

By the way, that $400/gal delivery price started out at the standard price of $2.78, according to the Defense Energy Support Center.

This information comes courtesy of The Hill newspaper which tapped its Pentagon and Congressional sources and quoted articles from trade journals. “It is a number that we were not aware of and it is worrisome,” Rep. John Murtha (D-Pa.), the chairman of the House Appropriations Defense panel, said in an interview with The Hill. “When I heard that figure from the Defense Department, we started looking into it.”

According to the article, the problem is logistics. Afghanistan has no seaports and a shortage of airports and navigable roads where thousands of IEDs are buried. The nearest port is in Karachi, Pakistan, where fuel for U.S. troops is shipped.

From there, commercial trucks transport the fuel through Pakistan and Afghanistan, sometimes changing carriers. Fuel is then transferred to storage locations in Afghanistan for movement within the country. Military transport is used to distribute fuel to forward operating bases. For many remote locations, this means fuel supplies must be provided by air, by far the most expensive delivery system.

An estimated 80% of U.S. military casualties in Afghanistan are caused by improvised explosive devices in the roads, forcing the need to use aircraft for transportation inside the country. The Government Accounting Office reported that in June 2008 alone , 44 trucks and 220,000 gallons of fuel were lost due to attacks. U.S. marines by themselves need 800,000 a day to conduct their missions, according to the GAO report.

These logistical problems are only one of many reasons President Obama has delayed a reported request for up to 40,000 additional troops in Afghanistan by Gen. Stanley McChrystal.

Meanwhile, Stanley Pincus,, the veteran Pentagon reporter for The Washington Post says the
$1.3 billion appropriation bill would add to the $2.7 billion the military has already spent in construction projects over the past three fiscal years.

At Bagram, the main U.S. base in Afghanistan, the military is planning to build a $30 million passenger terminal and adjacent cargo facility to handle the flow of troops, many of whom arrive at the base north of Kabul before moving onto other sites. The daily volume is approximately 1,000 passengers and 400 short tons of cargo each day but is expected to increase to 1,650 passengers daily. A $25 million project to expand the paved aircraft parking area to hold 18 fighter aircraft also is underway.

There's more:

The military is also spending hundreds of millions of dollars constructing facilities for the Afghan army and police. The U.S.-led coalition recently announced the opening of a $68 million, U.S.-financed forward operating base near Farah, in the western part of the country bordering on Iran. The base will house 2,000 Afghan soldiers and an American mentoring team.

Pincus reports a total of 30 U.S. bases in Afghanistan would be improved with the $1.3 billion appropriations.

From a cost-benefit ratio Afghanistan is a loser. The mission seems to keep the Taliban from regaining power and al quada extremists out in a country thirsty for some nation-building stimulus led by a crooked government and a people who are war-weary and want to be left alone.

There is already some evidence al quada and other terrorists groups are spreading to other areas to kill the infidels in Pakistan and create bases of operations in Somalia, Sudan and other middle and southeastern Asian hell holes.

The only attraction offered by Afghanistan is its fertile poppy fields some government officials, the Taliban and al quada tap as an ATM machine to finance their causes.

We're talking about the age-old circular question of guns vs. butter. Afghanistan is not Iraq. Look 10 years down the road and one sees the same old same old. Not much better or worse than eight years ago when we had a purpose to retaliate for 9/11.

At $400/gal and $1 billion/1,000 troops, one would think we could get more bang for our bucks by providing affordable health care and breathing cleaner air right here at home in River City.

Field Of Frozen Dreams

I am a native Southern Californian, love baseball, played it as a youth and because my hometown San Diego Padres suck, don't follow it that much on television until the playoffs. Watching Friday night's game in New York with the Yankees playing the Angels I may have caught a case of pneumonia in my own home 3,000 away from home plate.

Believe me, it was a lot warmer at Yankee Stadium than Coors Field in Denver when the Rockies played the Philadelphia Phillies last week and the World Series several years ago in that mile-high city.

Why can't Major League Baseball wise up and at least play the World Series in a dome or warm weather park? These frigid nights playing baseball ruins the game. Oh, I know both teams face the same conditions. The National Football League always schedules the Super Bowl in a dome or nice winter weather city. No one complains even though the sport can be played in a snow storm or on a frozen tundra with less problems than the game of baseball.

I played right field for my high school team once in a mist and temperatures around 40 degrees. It wasn't much fun. My hands suffered what seemed like an electrical shock after fouling off a pitch. My cleats were caked with mud.

Major leaguers fare much better but the cold weather still distracts from any given strengths and accentuates its weaknesses. In short, the elements change the game the way it is designed to be played.

Television revenue is the driving force for mostly night games in mid-October. I'm not knocking that except for one humongous flaw. Night games are played so late that children -- the future of the sport -- should be in bed asleep. I pine for the days when we listened on our radio transistors
in sophomore science class the 1954 World Series between the Cleveland Indians and New York Giants or cutting a college class to watch Don Larsen pitch a perfect game against the Brooklyn Dodgers.

I don't want to change the game by shortening the regular season from its current 162-game schedule nor abbreviating the playoff system.

I just want to watch baseball played as it was designed for fair weather and batted balls that don't create a splash when landing in the outfield or skid crazily on half-frozen grass. Except for the high stakes, the game we see this late in the year is not the one we saw in August.

Unless the Padres are involved, I don't have a dog in this show.