Red State

In several places, I've made the case that a proper counterinsurgency needs to be implemented in Afghanistan, along the lines of what is being done in Iraq. Because of differences in geography, culture, urbanization and other factors, the tactics in will be assuredly different in Afghanistan, but the general principles of clear-hold-build should apply. Am I absolutely sure about this? No, but I've seen some materials that are persuasive. The Atlantic is one.

Politically and strategically, the most important level of governance in Afghanistan is neither national nor regional nor provincial. Afghan identity is rooted in the woleswali: the districts within each province that are typically home to a single clan or tribe. Historically, unrest has always bubbled up from this stratum—whether against Alexander, the Victorian British, or the Soviet Union. Yet the woleswali are last, not first, in U.S. military and political strategy.

Large numbers of U.S. and NATO troops are now heavily concentrated in Kabul, Kandahar, and other major cities. Thousands of U.S. personnel are stationed at Bagram Air Force Base, for instance, which is complete with Burger King, Dairy Queen, and a shopping center, but is hundreds of miles from the heart of the insurgency. Meanwhile, the military’s contact with villagers in remote areas where the Taliban operate is rare, typically brief, and almost always limited to daylight hours.

The Taliban are well aware that the center of gravity in Afghanistan is the rural Pashtun district and village, and that Afghan army and coalition forces are seldom seen there. With one hand, the Taliban threaten tribal elders who do not welcome them. With the other, they offer assistance. (As one U.S. officer recently noted, they’re “taking a page from the Hezbollah organizations in Lebanon, with their own public works to assist the tribes in villages that are deep in the inaccessible regions of the country. This helps support their cause with the population, making it hard to turn the population in support of the Afghan government and the coalition.”)

The rural Pashtun south has its own systems of tribal governance and law, and its people don’t want Western styles of either. But nor are they predisposed to support the Taliban, which espouses an alien and intolerant form of Islam, and goes against the grain of traditional respect for elders and decision by consensus. Re-empowering the village coun­cils of elders and restoring their community leadership is the only way to re-create the traditional check against the powerful political network of rural mullahs, who have been radicalized by the Taliban. But the elders won’t commit to opposing the Taliban if they and their families are vulnerable to Taliban torture and murder, and they can hardly be blamed for that.

To reverse its fortunes in Afghanistan, the U.S. needs to fundamentally reconfigure its operations, creating small development and security teams posted at new compounds in every district in the south and east of the country. This approach would not necessarily require adding troops, although that would help—200 district-based teams of 100 people each would require 20,000 personnel, one-third of the 60,000 foreign troops currently in the country.

Each new compound would become home to roughly 60 to 70 NATO security personnel, 30 to 40 support staff to manage logistics and supervise local development efforts, and an additional 30 to 40 Afghan National Army soldiers. The troops would provide a steady security presence, strengthen the position of tribal elders, and bolster the district police. Today, Afghan police often run away from the superior firepower of attacking Taliban forces. It’s hard to fault them—more than 900 police were killed in such attacks last year alone. But with better daily training and help only minutes away, local police would be far more likely to put up a good fight, and win. Indirectly, the daily presence of embedded police trainers would also prevent much of the police corruption that fuels resentment against the government. And regular contact at the district and village levels would greatly improve the collection and analysis of intelligence.

Perhaps most important, district-based teams would serve as the primary organization for Afghan rural development. Currently, “Provincial Reconstruction Teams,” based in each provincial capital, are responsible for the U.S. military’s local development efforts. These teams have had no strategic impact on the insurgency, because they are too thin on the ground—the ratio of impoverished Afghan Pashtuns to provincial reconstruction teams is roughly a million to one. Few teams are able to visit every district in their province even once a month; it’s no wonder that rural development has been marred by poor design and ineffective execution.

Local teams with on-site development personnel—“District Development Teams,” if you will—could change all that, and also serve to support nonmilitary development projects. State Department and USAID personnel, along with medics, veterinarians, engineers, agricultural experts, hydrologists, and so on, could live on the local compounds and work in their districts daily, building trust and confidence.

Deploying relatively small units in numerous forward positions would undoubtedly put more troops in harm’s way. But the Taliban have not demonstrated the ability to overrun international elements of this size, and the teams could be mutually reinforcing. (Air support would be critical.) Ultimately, we have to accept a certain amount of risk; you can’t beat a rural insurgency without a rural security presence.

As long as the compounds are discreetly sited, house Afghan soldiers to provide the most visible security presence, and fly the Afghan flag, they need not exacerbate fears of foreign occupation. Instead, they would reinforce the country’s most important, most neglected political units; strengthen the tribal elders; win local support; and reverse the slow slide into strategic failure.

This strategy appears to be in synch with the latest Army field manual, FM 3.07, Stability Operations, and it looks like a natural extension of the counterinsurgency manual (FM 3.24). Mountainrunner has a summary of FM 3.07, but the bottom line is that it focuses on a comprehensive approach, and it challenges every soldier to be more than just a warrior:

The manual honestly realizes that the Soldiers (it is an Army document) are public diplomats and must intelligently operate in a local and global information environment where perceptions matter.

2-74. Stability operations are conducted among the people, in the spotlight of international news media, and under the umbrella of international law. The actions of Soldiers communicate American values and beliefs more effectively than words alone. Therefore, military forces ensure consistency in their actions and messages. They provide the media with prompt, factual information to quell rumors and misinformation. They grant media representatives access to information within the limits of operations security. Finally, they understand the culture of each audience and tailor the message appropriately.

2-75. No other military activity has as significant a human component as operations that occur among the people. With urbanization, these operations will be increasingly conducted among concentrations of people and thus significantly affect their psyche. Human beings capture information and form perceptions based on inputs received through all the senses. They see actions and hear words. They compare gestures and expressions with the spoken word. They weigh the messages presented to them with the conditions that surround them. When the local and national news media are unavailable or unreliable, people often rely on “word of mouth” to gain information or turn to the Internet, where unverified information flows freely at unimaginable speeds. To the people, perception equals reality. Creating favorable perceptions requires an understanding of the psychological motivations of the populace and shaping messages according to how people absorb and interpret information to ensure broad appeal and acceptance.

At Registan.net, Joshua Foust highlighted how we've screwed up in terms of civilian casualties and poor information ops. We can't prevail in this kind of conflict when more civilians are killed than militants. This is no way to conduct a COIN campaign.

Another critical component to a successful plan is to work toward political solutions. The structure of the government matters less than its legitimacy and its ability to represent the people. In this New York Times piece, a couple of veterans from Afghanistan have some ways to get the Afghan government to a better place:

First, the Afghan government must confront corruption in its own ranks. Tribal elders in Ghazni told us that they are “slapped on one cheek by the Taliban, and on the other cheek by the government.” They talked of extortion by the police, dysfunctional courts and rampant bribery in government offices. The average Afghan spends one-fifth of his income on bribes. It’s no surprise so many actively or passively support the Taliban.

To fight corruption, President Hamid Karzai should immediately do three things: fire those seen as the most corrupt cabinet ministers, provincial governors and district governors; arrest and prosecute the most notorious warlords from the civil war in the 1990s, who committed unspeakable atrocities but are living openly in Kabul or the provinces; and break the relationship between the government and the country’s largest industry, the poppy trade.

The coalition can assist in these reforms by “embedding” Western civilian experts in law, government and business management at every level of the Afghan government. This can improve performance and transparency. For example, one government worker described to us how a corrupt land deal was reversed because “locals were able to confront the governor together with a coalition representative, which made the issue hard to ignore.”

Second, the Afghan government must rethink its approach to extending central government control throughout the country. Afghanistan’s remote valleys have long sheltered tribesmen with an antibody reaction to outside power. Yet the Afghan Constitution, drafted under close American tutelage, posits a highly centralized government, with the leaders of Afghanistan’s 34 provinces appointed by and beholden to Kabul, rather than to their own people.

Decentralizing power does not necessarily require amending the Constitution, but it does demand that central authorities in Afghanistan focus on providing services of national scope: an army and police force, roads, electricity, a postal service and the like. Actual governance at the district level must stem from traditional tribal, social and religious structures.

Third, the Afghan government must negotiate with Taliban groups that have shown an honest willingness to renounce violence in exchange for a path back into the country’s political life. Most Afghans we spoke with drew a sharp distinction between Afghan Taliban and other groups opposing the government — Al Qaeda, Arab foreign fighters and members of the Pakistani Taliban. They view Afghan Taliban as “sons of Afghanistan” who deserve to be treated differently than their more extreme foreign counterparts.

Afghanistan is a rural, conservative country, and there will inevitably be districts where the people elect local Taliban rule. What’s essential is that these places don’t provide a staging area for a coup against the Kabul government or terrorist plots beyond Afghanistan. Incorporating the unarmed Taliban members into the government would give them something to lose, thus providing Kabul with new leverage over them.

Enhancing the legitimacy of an elected, representative government is the coalition’s central task. With the help of “the lion of the people,” the Afghan government and the coalition can defeat all spoilers in Afghanistan; otherwise, no amount of force will ever be enough to win.

As with Iraq, we cannot achieve victory through military means alone. This was a lesson we did not learn in the Vietnam War. The South Vietnamese government had all kinds of problems, and we did little to reform it over all those years. In Iraq, Ryan Crocker and David Petraeus worked in concert, and it worked, combining military ops, political reforms and economic aid. A similar set-up is needed for Afghanistan. The NATO hierarchy is not working and it needs to be reorganized, and the nations that refuse to let their soldiers engage in kinetic operations need to send those soldiers home. Herschel Smith has had it up to here with NATO, saying it cannot be rehabilitated:

More than five months ago on the heels of a number of bureaucratic entanglements that had slowed the progress of recently deployed Marines in Afghanistan, The Captain’s Journal asked the question Can NATO Be Rehabilitated? We also predicted that in order to give Petraeus latitude to implement counterinsurgency doctrine, we would have to bring U.S. forces out from under the command of NATO, or possibly place a U.S. General in charge of NATO forces. This has come to pass as we predicted.

We have also noted that the campaign in Afghanistan relies heavily on special forces and raids against mid-level Taliban commanders rather than contact with the population and ensuring security. In other words, it is being treated as a counter-terrorism campaign rather than a counterinsurgency campaign. Australian infantry is not even allowed to engage in kinetic operations, and must sign documentation concerning their deployment that they have not provoked such fire fights.

Rather than making contact with the population, many NATO troops have been kept on Forward Operating Bases (FOBs); rather than finding and killing the enemy, NATO has placed emphasis on reconstruction efforts, reconstruction that goes unused in many cases because there is no security. Rather than conducting dismounted patrols, many troops have been confined to vehicles, obviously increasing the risk from IEDs.

[...]

Our question five months ago was prescient. There are individual countries who are assisting in Afghanistan, but as an organization, our judgment is that NATO cannot be rehabilitated. This is why, for all of his bluster about returning America to a position of respect across the globe, Barack Obama’s demand that NATO fulfill an increased role in Afghanistan is a doomed strategy. More troops to sit on FOBs and provide force protection for themselves (while Marines and British forces take the brunt of the battle in the South) won’t help the campaign.

Smith is making a lot of sense to me.

Michael Yon is in Afghanistan and he weighs in.

This is a land of paradox. The people here are friendly and hospitable, violent and suspicious. The war effort enjoys broad support, yet our alliance is unraveling. The Taliban are widely despised, and yet certain elements of it are integral parts of Afghan society. People want the national government to succeed, yet they have little or no faith in it. In many respects, while the country takes center stage in today's geopolitics, it is stuck in the Middle Ages.

I've driven over a thousand miles up and down Afghan roads during the past few weeks to find that many locals are thankful to the coalition of American, British and other NATO forces that are trying to bring peace and stability to the country. Others say they hate us.

It has become clear to me that we're losing this war. But losing doesn't mean lost.

When someone says they know what to do in Afghanistan, it's best to remain skeptical. Some folks are flat-out lying, like recent attempts to deny the existence of a secret report documenting how 10 French soldiers who were killed didn't have enough ammo or working radios. Others are telling us what we want to hear, like it will just take a few more troops and some border incursions into Pakistan to straighten out this mess.

There are a few honest players in Afghanistan, and I'm listening carefully to them. But please understand this much: In a land whose paradoxes can confuse and even crush powerful empires, any solutions - if they even exist - will not be simple or painless.

When I traveled extensively in Iraq, I spent a lot of time with combat units that were consistently winning against the enemy, both in kinetic operations and gaining the support of the people. All the while, we were losing certain aspects of that war, both in Iraq and back on the home front. It wasn't until our tactical superiority was supported by an effective strategy that we started turning things around. Iraq now has the chance to become a peaceful andprosperous country, and a good ally. I sense that the day will come when I will request a visa togo on vacation in Iraq.

Can the same thing happen in Afghanistan? I am less confident - for today, anyway.

Gen. David Petraeus, who recently assumed command of Centcom, responsible for U.S. forces in Afghanistan and Iraq (and many other countries), knows that these two countries present different challenges. The counterinsurgency manual he revised, and his own doctoral dissertation on the effects of Vietnam on the American military and foreign policy, show an intellect that is subtle enough to recognize a paradox and honest enough not to try and hide behind it. One of the paradoxes described in the counterinsurgency manual is: "Tactical success guarantees nothing."

If anyone can unravel Afghanistan, it's Petraeus. But that might be beyond even his talents.

Describing his successful partnership with the U.S. ambassador to Iraq, Ryan Crocker, Petraeus recently said: "There has to be absolute unity of purpose, unity of effort, even if there cannot be and will not be unity of command."

Right now, our enemies have unity of purpose: They want to kick us out of here. Meanwhile, we can't even agree about whether or not this war can be won.

More troops alone will not solve the problem. Another veteran from Afghanistan offers a four-step plan:

(1) Increase the local and international security presence and its intelligence, surveillance, and reconnaissance capabilities; focus on population-centric operations. More international security forces, particularly in the east and south, are crucial. The increase must be accompanied by an intensified effort to raise and develop Afghan forces. Furthermore, we must devote more intelligence, surveillance, and reconnaissance assets to the contested areas. As a rule, each battalion-sized task force should have constant unmanned-aerial-vehicle and close-air-support coverage.

These forces must concentrate on protecting the population. To that end, they must build allies among the people; reduce the friction associated with the presence of foreign forces; work with local leaders to promote security in villages and on roads; promote local solutions to local problems; crush the militants when they reveal themselves; and give people compelling reasons to support the government and the counterinsurgency.

(2) Invest in bottom-up capability; attack the problem from both ends. Decentralization can be a powerful force on the side of the government if used responsibly. Afghan identity works from the inside out: Family, clan, village, and tribe are far more compelling to the individual than the nation. Afghans regard their elected village, district, and tribal shuras (councils) as their true representatives, not the appointed district administrators or provincial governors. Empowering these local councils to bring effective governance, basic services, and economic opportunity to their people in a manner integrated with national efforts is the best way to connect people to their government.

Local governments desperately need to draw on the expertise of civilian partners from the international community to develop durable systems relevant to everyday life. The military cannot do this alone. Ensuring these efforts are properly distributed and aligned with the national government will mitigate the very real risk of a return to the warlordism that racked the country after the Soviet war.

(3) Fix critical economic and fiscal policies at the national level. A functional economy, coupled with social and political institutions at the local level, would destroy the Taliban. The overwhelming majority of military-aged males in contested areas are unemployed outside subsistence farming. They fight for money. The economic logic of violence must change.

Afghanistan has considerable natural resources that could be harnessed to spur business and other economic growth. Sadly, national policy hamstrings efforts to do this. For instance, the timber trade has been virtually outlawed, preventing the development of local businesses while creating a black market that feeds the insurgency and resistance to the government. The underground timber economy has also resulted in significant deforestation. A smart timber policy would create incentives to manage forests in addition to generating business opportunities consonant with local interests and capabilities.

Tax policy is another study in dysfunction. According to local officials, a district is authorized to collect taxes on sales, but it must send all of the money to Kabul, which then redistributes it on the basis of perceived need. This encourages district officials to collect no taxes and claim poverty, thereby securing money from the national government. Enabling local governments to retain most of the taxes they collect, and creating systems to ensure transparency and accountability for how the money is spent, would end up bringing more money into the national coffers as well as providing better for the localities. Getting the economic and fiscal incentives right while improving local governance would also reduce the problem of government banditry.

Building systems and institutions that make local governments robust enough to earn the loyalty of their people while remaining tied to the national government is the heart of the matter in the long run. If this is done, local militant groups will die on the vine.

(4) Work with Pakistan to apply the same full-spectrum approach across the border. The socioeconomic dislocation seen in Afghanistan is similarly endemic in the Federally Administered Tribal Areas and North-West Frontier Province of Pakistan. Working with our allies in Pakistan to eliminate insurgent safe-havens is critical, but so is investment in local governance and development in the impoverished areas that have become breeding grounds for militants. Here too, potential recruits to the militant groups need a reason to support their government. The insurgencies must be defeated on both sides of the border in order for Afghanistan (and Pakistan) to have peace. Progress on these fronts, of course, would also support the counterterrorism campaign against the senior al Qaeda and Taliban leadership.

I haven't talked much about Pakistan because, if we can't send U.S. forces into Pakistani territory, there's little we can do. The options are continued diplomacy and using economic incentives and sanctions. We might as well consider Pakistan just another border country, just like Syria and Iran are border countries with Iraq. Al Qaeda leadership and the nastier Taliban leaders have safe haven (more or less) in the Pakistani frontier, so perhaps the only thing we can do is pressure them from the west with a workable COIN strategy, and pressure them from the east by encouraging the Pakistani government to get off its ass and do something about its problem with Islamist militants.

Associated Press just slapped down the race card in its latest "analysis" by Douglas K. Daniel.

By claiming that Democrat Barack Obama is "palling around with terrorists" and doesn't see the U.S. like other Americans, vice presidential candidate Sarah Palin targeted key goals for a faltering campaign.

And though she may have scored a political hit each time, her attack was unsubstantiated and carried a racially tinged subtext that John McCain himself may come to regret.

This is nothing short of a flat-out smear of Palin and the McCain campaign. Yesterday, Sarah Palin clearly conveyed the message that Barack Obama is too liberal and too far to the left for the American electorate. This is why she raised Obama's six years of crafting education policy with Bill Ayers, a left-wing political extremist and unrepentant domestic terrorist. Either "reporter" Daniels is an idiot or in the bag for Barack Obama. The intellectually dishonest bias in this article is incredible. Here's a small example:

Obama, who was a child when the Weathermen were planting bombs, has denounced Ayers' radical views and actions.

Ayers' crimes happened long ago, but to this day, he has not expressed a word of regret or sorrow for his acts. In fact, he was quoted that he and his group didn't bomb enough. If I had the time, I'd fisk it more thorougly, but this one should go down as one of the biased articles of the campaign season.

In another CNN "factcheck", they tested the veracity of this Joe Biden statement:

"...our commanding general in Afghanistan said the surge principle in Iraq will not work in Afghanistan."

CNN judged Biden's statement to be "true", but it's not true. The drive-bys at CNN don't understand the difference between a surge in forces and the surge strategy. Surge strategy = counterinsurgency strategy. The surge in forces is but one component of the larger strategy. Here's how Palin responded to Biden:

"...the surge principles, not the exact strategy, but the surge principles that have worked in Iraq need to be implemented in Afghanistan."

Surge principles = counterinsurgency principles.

Here's what the Washington Post reporter said about McKiernan's comments:

The new top U.S. commander in Afghanistan said yesterday that more U.S. troops are urgently required to combat a worsening insurgency, but he stated emphatically that no Iraq-style "surge" of forces will end the conflict there.

"Afghanistan is not Iraq," said Gen. David McKiernan, who led ground forces during the U.S.-led invasion of Iraq in 2003 and took over four months ago as head of the NATO-led coalition in Afghanistan.

During a news conference yesterday, McKiernan described Afghanistan as “a far more complex environment than I ever found in Iraq.” The country's mountainous terrain and rural population, its poverty and illiteracy, its 400 major tribal networks and history of civil war all make for unique challenges, he said.

“The word I don't use for Afghanistan is 'surge,' ” McKiernan emphasized, saying that what is required instead is a “sustained commitment” to a counterinsurgency effort that could last many more years and would ultimately require a political, not military, solution.

McKiernan was clearly saying that just an increase of forces wouldn't end the conflict, that we can't use the same tactics as in Iraq, and that we need to commit to a sustained counterinsurgency strategy. The transcript of McKiernan's remarks confirms the intent of what he was trying to convey. Biden was wrong and Palin was right. An excerpt of the transcript:

Q: And does that include the request for 3,500 trainers or is the trainer request on top of that?

GEN. MCKIERNAN: The trainer request is being reviewed right now, because what we're looking to in the future there is having units come to Afghanistan that are trained to conduct counterinsurgency operations, but are -- also have been trained to work with the Afghan army and the Afghan police. So that might change the requirement for what are called the training teams or the police mentoring teams in the future.

McKiernan was talking about differences in tactics, not in the principles underlying the overall battle plan. General Petraeus was saying the same thing just days earlier. The operations still fall under a counterinsurgency umbrella, but the tactics adjust to the situation on the ground. The hacks at CNN don't have the first clue as to what counterinsurgency doctrine is. Add their other failed "factcheck" and it's clear to me that CNN is in the bag for Obama.

Update: Even NPR isn't buying it.

General David McKiernan, the US commander in Afghanistan this week said "Afghanistan is not Iraq. .. What I don't think is needed -- the word I don't use in Afghanistan is the word surge."

On the other hand, speaking today, McKiernan said more troops should be rushed to Afghanistan "as quickly as possible." So while he doesn't believe in using the word surge because it resonates of Iraq, he does believe in rushing more troops to Afghanistan -- a surge by another name.

As I wrote here, Joe Biden was being less than honest when he said Obama would never meet with Iranian president Ahmadinejad without preconditions in the first year of his presidency. In a "factcheck", CNN shows that they're in the bag for Obama by parsing "leader" and "president". Newsflash. President Ahmadinejad is an Iranian leader and the country's highest elected official. Whether he is the leader of Iran is irrelevant. The Obama campaign is dishonestly to trying to slide away from Obama's remarks in July 2007 by parsing words in Clintonian fashion, and CNN is the latest enabler.

September was another month of declining violence in Iraq, both for civilians and military personnel. Below are the pictures, and I'm guessing that Barack Obama would prefer that you don't see them.

Once the progress in Iraq became all too obvious, even to Obama, he credited the success to the increase in troops, the troops themselves, the Sunni Awakening movements, and Muqtada al Sadr, but I haven't heard him say a single word about the actual strategy that helped turn Iraq around. The surge in troop levels was only part of the overall plan.

We shouldn't forget that when violence was at its very worst in Iraq, the freshman Senator from Illinois crafted a bill that would withdraw all combat brigades in less than sixteen months. The repercussions of such a withdrawal at such a time would have been staggering, in my opinion. It would've been a full-blown disaster.

Going forward, this issue cannot be more significant because Obama is proposing more troops for Afghanistan, yet he hasn't said a thing about what those troops would actually do when they get there. "Get al Qaeda" isn't a plan, it's a hope, and we know hope is not a plan, even when words like "change" are thrown in. McCain has proposed a counterinsurgency (COIN) strategy along the lines of the successful strategy employed in Iraq. Obama has just said "get al Qaeda", or strengthen NATO, or something like that. I've looked at Obama's issues, and he has no plan for Afghanistan. This is one of the reasons why I say that Obama is a military and foreign policy lightweight.

In Baghdad, residents are saying "we should go outside and live". Yes, risks remain and al Qaeda can still pull off suicide terrorist attacks, but the city and nation are significantly safer. On the national political stage, progress is slower and more difficult to come by, but parliament passed a provinical elections law and Anbar province has been passed from coalition forces to the national government. A Defense Department report to Congress cites improving conditions but a still-fragile environment, which in turn affects the pace of conditions-based troop withdrawals.

But with Iraq quieted, the challenge going forward is Afghanistan-Pakistan. Al Qaeda is headquartered in the Pakistani frontier areas, and so are the more belligerent Taliban leaders. There's little we can do in Pakistan except urge the new president to take control of his own country. We can help tribal leaders wrest control from Taliban and al Qaeda chieftans, but since those Pashtun leaders don't have U.S. firepower behind them, the chances for success are questionable. One measure of the state of disarray in Pakistan are the increased number of suicide bombings. Since July 2007, nearly 1,200 have been killed.

But putting aside whiny defeatist remarks from British ambassadors, there's plenty we can do in Afghanistan. It looks like General Petraeus is going to push for a comprehensive COIN strategy for Afghanistan, and it's long overdue. As it stands now, we don't have sufficient force projection, and we have European troops who refuse to engage in kinetic combat operations. This needs to change, and I hope it will. This Atlantic article is worth a full read, and I'll excerpt some fair chunks:

The U.S. engagement in Afghanistan is foundering because of the endemic failure to engage and protect rural villages, and to immunize them against insurgency. Many analysts have called for more troops inside the country, and for more effort to eliminate Taliban sanctuaries outside it, in neighboring Pakistan. Both developments would be welcome. Yet neither would solve the central problem of our involvement: the paradigm that has formed the backbone of the international effort since 2003—extending the reach of the central government—is in fact precisely the wrong strategy.

National government has never much mattered in Afghanistan. Only once in its troubled history has the country had something like the system of strong central government that’s mandated by the current constitution. That was under the "Iron Emir," Abdur Rehman, in the late 19th century, and Rehman famously maintained control by building towers of skulls from the heads of all who opposed him, a tactic unavailable to the current president, Hamid Karzai.

Politically and strategically, the most important level of governance in Afghanistan is neither national nor regional nor provincial. Afghan identity is rooted in the woleswali: the districts within each province that are typically home to a single clan or tribe. Historically, unrest has always bubbled up from this stratum—whether against Alexander, the Victorian British, or the Soviet Union. Yet the woleswali are last, not first, in U.S. military and political strategy.

Large numbers of U.S. and NATO troops are now heavily concentrated in Kabul, Kandahar, and other major cities. Thousands of U.S. personnel are stationed at Bagram Air Force Base, for instance, which is complete with Burger King, Dairy Queen, and a shopping center, but is hundreds of miles from the heart of the insurgency. Meanwhile, the military’s contact with villagers in remote areas where the Taliban operate is rare, typically brief, and almost always limited to daylight hours.

The Taliban are well aware that the center of gravity in Afghanistan is the rural Pashtun district and village, and that Afghan army and coalition forces are seldom seen there. With one hand, the Taliban threaten tribal elders who do not welcome them. With the other, they offer assistance. (As one U.S. officer recently noted, they’re "taking a page from the Hezbollah organizations in Lebanon, with their own public works to assist the tribes in villages that are deep in the inaccessible regions of the country. This helps support their cause with the population, making it hard to turn the population in support of the Afghan government and the coalition.")

The rural Pashtun south has its own systems of tribal governance and law, and its people don’t want Western styles of either. But nor are they predisposed to support the Taliban, which espouses an alien and intolerant form of Islam, and goes against the grain of traditional respect for elders and decision by consensus. Re-empowering the village coun­cils of elders and restoring their community leadership is the only way to re-create the traditional check against the powerful political network of rural mullahs, who have been radicalized by the Taliban. But the elders won’t commit to opposing the Taliban if they and their families are vulnerable to Taliban torture and murder, and they can hardly be blamed for that.

To reverse its fortunes in Afghanistan, the U.S. needs to fundamentally reconfigure its operations, creating small development and security teams posted at new compounds in every district in the south and east of the country. This approach would not necessarily require adding troops, although that would help—200 district-based teams of 100 people each would require 20,000 personnel, one-third of the 60,000 foreign troops currently in the country.

If this sounds familiar, it should. I've read similar material two years ago about Iraq, prior to the Republicans losing the majority in Congress. A key difference is that Afghanistan is more decentralized than Iraq, so it makes even more sense to move troops out of the few large forward operating bases and into many smallish combat outposts. The Marines in Helmand province have already demonstrated that this strategy works. For a good uptake on the current situation in Afghanistan, Herschel Smith has a comprehensive post on the subject.

(Hat tip to Engram for the graphs.)

From the Washington Times:

House Speaker Nancy Pelosi has directed nearly $100,000 from her political action committee to her husband's real estate and investment firm over the past decade, a practice of paying a spouse with political donations that she supported banning last year.

Give her credit for supporting a ban on this practice last year, but it sounds like she needs an intervention. She just can't help herself, paying her husband's business using funds given to her by political supporters.

I know the contributors know this, and I'm going to say it anyway. This version of Redstate sucks. It takes way too long to navigate around this site. I'm glad the 500 internal server errors have gone away, but I just clicked on the main page icon and it took me over two minutes to get there, and that's with a cable modem. It doesn't matter which browser is used, this is unacceptable, especially in the middle of an extremely heated presidential campaign. I feel for you, Erick and Moe and company. I want this site to do better. But this platform is clearly a step backward. Gaaiieee! It feels like a microcosm of the McCain campaign, what with the missteps.

I saw the latest interview between Sarah Palin and Katie Couric, and she did much better. Here it is.

It looks like she's getting the hang of dealing with national media, and she's looking more comfortable on television. Even on Hannity's home turf a couple of weeks ago, she looked a little shaky, but she did OK on Hugh Hewitt today. It was a rough start back then, but she's improving at answering the myriad questions. So if she does passably well in the debate with Joe Biden, Governor Palin should ask for a couple of gack exemptions. What do I mean by this? Let me try to explain how she could respond:

You know, Katie, unlike Joe Biden, I haven't been running for president since the 1980s. While he was on his long run for the highest office, I was raising a family and serving the City of Wasilla and the State of Alaska. I was too busy to contemplate higher ambitions like the Senator from Delaware. So when John McCain picked me for vice president, I knew I could perform the job because of my executive experience and my record of reform. But quite frankly, when he picked me, I didn't know all the details of John McCain's foreign policy positions and I didn't know all the details of his biography. Who would? So when I sat with Charlie Gibson and you, I gacked. Anyone else in my position would.

But I'll tell you this: I'll know all those details by January 20th, 2009, and I'll be ready for the job on Day One.

And here's what I knew from the very beginning of this journey: I know intrinsically and instinctively the principles that John McCain stands for, and I know the principles that Ronald Reagan and Theodore Roosevelt and Abraham Lincoln stood for. So if you're going to forgive Joe Biden for his daily or twice-daily gaffes, I think I should be forgiven a couple of gacks in these early stages. The important thing you should know is that if a President McCain is incapacitated in one form or another (God forbid), I'll be ready to carry forward his conservative principles, his issues, his sense of honor, his desire for reform, and his reputation as a maverick.

Or something like that. Of course, if she tanks in the upcoming debate, get ready to whistle Hail to the Chief for Barack Obama. Why do I think she should take this tack? Because if she does decent enough from here on out, she deserves a do-over or two. I can't remember a more intense personal and political destruction campaign than I've seen perpetrated against Palin. She deserves just that much slack.

John McCain has been losing ground for the last two to three weeks, and it's now or never for him to turn things around. The electoral map doesn't lie. McCain needs to make major structural changes to the campaign, and I have some ideas.

First, he should fire Steve Schmidt. The highly disciplined campaign template doesn't work for John McCain. He tried it prior to mid-2007 and the results were substandard, even before his immigration bill nearly wrecked his campaign. McCain won the GOP nomination by being the most authentic in the group. He kept his press availability open and he trusted his instincts. He pared his staff down to the longtime friends and advisors who know him. McCain will trip up with some unguarded comments, but he works better when the Straight Talk Express is in high gear. This route would be much better than him being strait-jacketed by gun-for-hire consultants.

Second, instead of shutting off press availability to Sarah Palin, the McCain campaign should go the other way and open the Palin Straight Chat Express. But right up front, she's going to have say that she was too busy running a state to know every detail on foreign policy and every detail on McCain's biography and work record. She's going to have to say upfront that her goal between now and November 4th is to make less than half as many gaffes as Joe Biden, and she likes her chances of succeeding in that endeavor. She'll have to say that she's a quick study but not as polished on camera as Obama, but come January 20th, 2009, she'll be ready for the job. This is a risky strategy, but McCain picked her, and it's ultimately his fault if she effs it up.

Third, the rapid response team in its current form is terrible. They need more and better people, especially if step #1 and #2 are implemented. The press pile-ons are almost too many to count. Smears need to be addressed within hours of the smear being made. Attacks on McCain or Palin need to be addressed within hours of the attack, with bonus points for turning them around on Obama.

Fourth, any negative attacks on Obama must be accurate and truthful. McCain needs to show that Obama is too inexperienced and too liberal, especially in light of his scant voting record. He should challenge Obama and the media by highlighting Obama's close and longtime relationships with a pastor who's a left-wing political extremist, and that Obama crafted education policy for six years with a left-wing political extremist and unrepentant domestic terrorist. McCain should say that Obama is a Chicago machine politician with no substantive record on change, and he should opine that America can't risk another Jimmy Carter during a time of economic uncertainty and when we're in the middle of a War Against Militant Islamism.

Fifth, McCain also needs to focus on his positives, that he's the one with the better economic plan, that he has the real record of making changes in Washington, and that he knows to win a war and work with foreign leaders. If he really wants to be a maverick, he'll make a maverick proposal such as letting the tax cuts expire for those making over $250,000 a year because of the cost of the bailout and because he's committed to fiscal sanity.

McCain needs to shake things up, and I think this is the best way he can do it.

Engram nails it..

When Obama says "I've always said", it's time for a little fact-checking. On Bill O'Reilly's comedy hour, Obama said:

"I think that the surge has succeeded..."

The thing is, he has never previously credited the strategy for the gains we've made since General Petraeus came on board, and it's unclear if he gave it credit on the O'Reilly Factor. Why is it unclear? Because I can't tell if he was talking about the increase in troops (which was only part of the strategy) or the strategy on the whole. Prior to the show, Obama said the improvements were because of the Sunnis in Anbar, al Sadr crumbing, and the skills of our fighting men and women, but never the actual strategy that enabled the Sunnis to stand up to al Qaeda, or helped cause al Sadr's militias to crumble. Nor has he lauded the actual strategy that our troops actually employed to improve the situation. Obama's "plan", if you can call it that, was (and is) to get our troops out of Dodge. Nothing else.

What did McCain say in early 2007? This:

"I am not guaranteeing that this succeeds," said Mr. McCain, who has long argued that additional troops were needed. "I am just saying that I think it can. I believe it has a good shot."

For me, I wasn't sure if it had a good shot, but I believed that it merited a good shot. Actually, a last shot. The bottom line is this. McCain was right on Iraq and Obama was wrong, and Sarah Palin had the audacity of hope to point that out:

"But just last night, Senator Obama finally broke, and brought himself to admit what all the rest of us have known for quite some time, and that's thanks to the skill and valor of our troops, the surge in Iraq has succeeded," Palin said referring to an answer Obama gave to Fox News' Bill O'Reilly Thursday.

In his first appearance on "The O'Reilly factor" Obama said that the troop surge succeeded 'beyond our wildest dreams.' "I think that the surge has succeeded in ways that nobody anticipated, by the way, including President Bush and the other supporters," he told O'Reilly.

Palin took issue with Obama's response and reminded voters that John McCain initially supported the troop surge.

"I guess when you turn out to be profoundly wrong on a vital national security issue, maybe it's comforting to pretend that everyone was wrong too. But I remember it a little differently. It seems to me there was one leader in Washington who did predict success, who refused to call retreat and risked his own career for the sake of the surge and victory in Iraq and ladies and gentlemen that man is standing right next to me. Senator John McCain," Palin said.

I shouldn't have to explain why this is important, but here's one reason. Iraq is on a favorable trend line but Afghanistan is not. Barack Obama has proposed more troops for Afghanistan, and so has McCain. The difference is that Obama hasn't said a word about the strategy those troops should actually implement when they get there, McCain has proposed a counterinsurgency strategy similar to what is working in Iraq. What's more, our Marines in Afghanstian's Helmand province are using the very counterinsurgency tactics in Afghanistan that they learned in Iraq, and it is indeed working. This is change I can trust.

In this episode, Andrew Sullivan is alluding some sort of equivalence between Jeremiah Wright, the bona fide left-wing political extremist who was Barack Obama's paster for twenty-plus years, and Larry Kroon, who is pastor of Wasilla Bible Church, where Sarah Palin currently attends.

I read the transcript of the sermon that bent Sullivan so out of shape, and it's your typical Sunday morning message. The preacher was talking about the book of Zephanaiah, which discusses the end times for all the earth. Since Wasilla is on earth, it is not excluded. The whole point of the sermon boils down to the final two paragraphs.

Yes. There's anger with God. He takes sin personal. But there is something that answers to that anger, and that's His love. And it's a love that, we're told, not only does He love the world--"He loved the world so much that He gave His only begotten Son.", He put His Son there and said, 'You take the anger for them.' And with that promise is "Whoever believes in Him shall not perish, but have everlasting life." No 'perhaps' there. It's simply sayin' "I’m gonna seek the Lord, starting with Jesus, responding with faith." That's what you do, given the reality of the day of the Lord.

What's your next steps? What we've talked about today...what we've talked about today is one of the most defining things in the Christian worldview. It's at this one point of teaching that you'll probably decide whether you'll accept Christianity or reject it, whether you'll take it seriously or not. If there is no great final day of the Lord there's really no reason to take Jesus seriously. If there is such a day and God has taken your sin very personally, then it’s absolutely essential that you take Jesus seriously. This is the issue you gotta respond to. If you choose to respond you make it personal. You call out to Jesus and you simply say, "Save me. Save me."

Wow. Pretty extreme stuff, right? Wrong. This isn't even close to Reverend Wright's many anti-American statements and paranoid falsehoods and factually challenged rhetoric. Way to go Andy. In my book, you're now an official tool for Barack Obama.

Charley James writes for the LA Progressive and he penned a sneering article about Sarah Palin in particular and Alaska in general. This seems to be par for the course for many on the left, but the interesting part of it is that Charley James has his own blog on the Obama for President website. Must be that "new kind of politics" that Obama's been talking about. We should take bets to see how long his blog lasts before the saner heads in the campaign scrub him out of existence.

This one is so blatant that it has to be deliberate. Here's how the article starts:

Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin told ministry students at her former church that the United States sent troops to fight in the Iraq war on a "task that is from God."

This is false. You know, it says something when Huffington Post gets it right but AP and its reporter, Glen Johnson, gets it so, so wrong. Mr. Johnson from Associated Press continues:

"Our national leaders are sending them out on a task that is from God," she said. "That's what we have to make sure that we're praying for, that there is a plan and that plan is God's plan."

Glen Johnson from AP basically said that Palin proclaimed that our troops were on a mission from God, just like Jake and Elwood Blues and their particular mission. AP writer Glen Johnson is putting forth a lie. Why do I say this? Because the son-of-a-bitch didn't even have the courtesy of quoting her entire sentence, and by not doing so, he completely changed the meaning of what she said. What did Sarah Palin actually say? The bolded portion is what AP's Glen Johnson left out:

"Pray for our military men and women who are striving to do what is right. Also, for this country, that our leaders, our national leaders, are sending [U.S. soldiers] out on a task that is from God," she exhorted the congregants. "That’s what we have to make sure that we’re praying for, that there is a plan and that that plan is God’s plan."

Sarah Palin was actually saying that we should pray that we're doing what's right, not that we're sending "troops to fight in the Iraq war on a 'task that is from God'." Or to put it Ed Morrissey's way:

...she’s not asserting that we’re doing God’s will but simply praying that we are. It’s the difference between me saying "McCain will win" and "I pray McCain will win." The first is an assertion of fact/secret knowledge, the second is an expression of desire/hope. The AP actually stoops to picking up the quote mid-sentence to make it better fit the stereotype of the holy-roller yokel claiming divine inspiration for Bush’s Crusade.

In other words, Glen Johnson from Associated Press is trying to portray Sarah Palin as some wild-eyed, white-trash religious nut. The one-sidedness is further exacerbated because Glen Johnson (from AP) quoted a fella from Americans United for Separation of Church and State but didn't even bother to quote anyone from the McCain campaign or any Palin supporters. By the way, did I mention that Glen Johnson is the AP reporter who wrote this? Oops, I guess I did.

A few days ago, it wasn't clear. If it turned out that 70 (or more) civilians were killed in a recent airstrike in western Afghanistan, then it is an indicator that the U.S.-led NATO command in Afghanistan is pursuing a flawed strategy. Coalition forces lack sufficient force projection on the ground, and it looks like there's an overreliance on air support. Afghanistan is 48% larger than Iraq and has 16% more people, yet the size of the NATO contingent is only around 60,000 and Afghan army isn't anywhere near as combat-ready as their Iraqi counterparts. With a resurgent Taliban, we don't have sufficient resources to mount an effective counterinsurgency campaign. It's not just that more troops are needed, more troops are needed to secure the populace, hold territory, build political and physical infrastructure, and figure out some way to deal with the opium trade.

But if it turned out that Afgahn government sources were wrong, and that only five civilians and 25 militants were killed in the recent airstrike, then it is also an indicator that the U.S.-led NATO command in Afghanistan is pursuing a flawed strategy. Why do I say this? Because it means that our information operations are substandard, and we're unable to override false narratives that are being put out. This is an ideological conflict every bit as much as a military conflict, and if we can't prevail on the mediafront, then it's not going to matter how and what we do on the battlefront.

The U.S. command is investigating the matter, but the incident is a lose-lose proposition for the NATO coalition and a poor example of how counterinsurgency warfare is being conducted.

However, it looks like unacceptable numbers of civilians were killed. The UN Assistance Mission in Afghanistan (UNAMA) has investigated and, guess what, it's a bad deal:

"Investigations by UNAMA (United Nations Assistance Mission in Afghanistan) found convincing evidence, based on the testimony of eyewitnesses, and others, that some 90 civilians were killed, including 60 children, 15 women and 15 men," U.N. Special Envoy to Afghanistan Kai Eide said in a statement.

The U.S. is currently running the NATO operation in Afghanistan, and we're screwing it up. Badly. This has got to change.

Russians play chess, and the Putin government orchestrated a chess match when it came to Georgia, and they're levering their actions in Georgia by bullying America into making a choice. The Russian government also has a choice, [i]if[/i] they can get over their bellicosity, paranoia and imperialist tendencies. Ralph Peters has interesting take on Russia's readiness to invade Georgia:

Let's be clear: For all that US commentators and diplomats are still chattering about Russia's "response" to Georgia's actions, the Kremlin spent [i]months[/i] planning and preparing this operation. Any soldier above the grade of private can tell you that there's absolutely no way Moscow could've launched this huge ground, air and sea offensive in an instantaneous "response" to alleged Georgian actions.

As I pointed out Saturday, even to get one armored brigade over the Caucasus Mountains required extensive preparations. Since then, Russia has sent in the equivalent of almost two divisions - not only in South Ossetia, the scene of the original fighting, but also in separatist Abkhazia on the Black Sea coast.

The Russians also managed to arrange the instant appearance of a squadron of warships to blockade Georgia. And they launched hundreds of air strikes against preplanned targets.

Every one of these things required careful preparations. In the words of one US officer, "Just to line up the airlift sorties would've taken weeks."

Working through their mercenaries in South Ossetia, Russia staged brutal provocations against Georgia from late July onward. Last Thursday, Georgia's president finally had to act to defend his own people.

But when the mouse stirred, the cat pounced.

The Russians know that we know this was a setup. But Moscow's Big Lie propagandists still blame Georgia - even as Russian aircraft bomb Georgian homes and Russian troops seize the vital city of Gori in the country's heart. And Russian troops also grabbed the Georgian city of Zugdidi to the west - invading from Abkhazia on a second axis.

Make no mistake: Moscow intends to dismember Georgia.

This is the most cynical military operation by a "European" power since Moscow invaded Afghanistan in 1979. (Sad to say, President Bush seems as bewildered now as President Jimmy Carter did then.)

The Economist called it a "scripted war":

Russia was prepared for the war not only militarily, but also ideologically. Its campaign was crude but effective. While its forces were dropping bombs on Georgia, the Kremlin bombarded its own population with an astonishing, even by Soviet standards, propaganda campaign. One Russian deputy reflected the mood: "Today, it is quite obvious who the parties in the conflict are. They are the US, UK, Israel who participated in training the Georgian army, Ukraine who supplied it with weapons. We are facing a situation where there is a NATO aggression against us."

In blue jeans and a sports jacket, Mr Putin, cast as the hero of the war, flew to the Russian side of the Caucasus mountain range to hear, first-hand, hair-raising stories from refugees that ranged from burning young girls alive to stabbing babies and running tanks over old women and children. These stories were whipped up into anti-Georgian and anti-Western hysteria. Russian politicians compared Mr Saakashvili to Saddam Hussein and Hitler and demanded that he face an international tribunal. What Russia was doing, it seemed, was no different from what the West had done in its "humanitarian" interventions.

There was one difference, however. Russia was dealing with a crisis that it had deliberately created. Its biggest justification for military intervention was that it was formally protecting its own citizens. Soon after Mr Putin’s arrival in the Kremlin in 2000, Russia started to hand out passports to Abkhaz and South Ossetians, while also claiming the role of a neutral peacekeeper in the region. When the fighting broke out between Georgia and South Ossetia, Russia, which had killed tens of thousands of its own citizens in Chechnya, argued that it had to defend its nationals.

More from The Economist here. At Small Wars Journal, Bob Killebrew looks at Russia's coordinated operation:

From a military perspective, the first impression is that the Russians laid an effective "strategic ambush" for Georgia President Mikhail Saakashvilli, inciting anti-government attacks in South Ossetia by local militias and then responding to the Georgian offensive with a well-planned and rehearsed offensive of their own. Even when viewed through the imperfect lens of news media scrambling to catch up to events, military experts understand that the joint and combined-arms attacks Russia staged in the opening hours of the war were anything but spontaneous. For historians, a retrospective on Nazi Germany's offensive to "protect" the Sudaten Czechs shows a striking similarity of purpose and method.

The Georgian armed forces were obviously not prepared for the Russian counteroffensive. Having recently purged older, Soviet-trained officers from its top commands, the Georgian military lacks doctrine, cohesion and experience; U.S. military assistance has been focused on preparing Georgian soldiers for duty alongside U.S. forces in Iraq, not in larger-scale, combined-arms warfare, and it shows. At this writing, the Georgian armed forces have virtually disappeared, their patrol boats sunk at their docks and their infantry collecting somewhere near the capitol city; Russian forces have broken contact and breakaway militias are rampaging in areas in and around South Ossetia and Abkhazia.

To observers familiar with the sight of Russian troops riding to battle on the back decks of BMPs, the Russian campaign looked like previous warfare in Afghanistan and Czchneya. [b]But in this case, the familiar Soviet-style, firepower-intensive armed campaign was preceded by a sophisticated cyberattack against Georgian information systems and, more ominously, a prelaid global information campaign that both advanced the Russian argument for its right to intervene and fed both the news media and wavering Western politicians with trumped-up details of Georgian atrocities.[/b] Look for the information campaign to intensify as Russian troops settle into positions in Georgia, where their location will become negotiable in the next phase, which will clearly be to drive the pro-Western Saakashvilli government from power. The Russians have "got" modern war, however outdated their "kinetic" operations may appear. In their operational concept, the information war preceded, and is superior to, actual combat operations on the land and sea. Western military authorities, whose ability to influence information operations of this type are nonexistent, can only look on in frustration.

Emphasis mine. Thom Shanker at the New York Times offers similar observations:

So along with the old-school onslaught of infantry, armor and artillery, Russia mounted joint air and naval operations, appeared to launch simultaneous cyberattacks on Georgian government Web sites and had its best English speakers at the ready to make Moscow’s case in television appearances.

If the rapidly unfolding events caught much of the world off guard, that kind of coordination of the old and the new did not look accidental to military professionals.

"They seem to have harnessed all their instruments of national power — military, diplomatic, information — in a very disciplined way," said one Pentagon official, who like others interviewed for this article disclosed details of the operation under ground rules that called for anonymity. "It appears this was well thought out and planned in advance, and suggests a level of coordination in the Russian government between the military and the other civilian agencies and departments that we are striving for today."

In fact, Pentagon and military officials say Russia held a major ground exercise in July just north of Georgia’s border, called Caucasus 2008, that played out a chain of events like the one carried out over recent days.

"This exercise was exactly what they executed in Georgia just a few weeks later," said Dale Herspring, an expert on Russian military affairs at Kansas State University. "This exercise was a complete dress rehearsal."

The Washington Post goes further in debunking Russia's claims that Georgian were engaged in genocide in South Ossetia:

This charge was initially leveled by Prime Minister Vladimir Putin and has been taken up by others, including President Dmitry Medvedev, who on Thursday came up with the interesting formulation that South Ossetians "had lived through a genocide." Mr. Medvedev has referred to "thousands" killed, and Russian officials frequently have cited 2,000 South Ossetians killed (out of a population of 70,000). They have said Georgia razed the South Ossetian capital of Tskhinvali. These purported depredations are given as the main motivation for Russian military intervention.

A researcher for Human Rights Watch who visited Tskhinvali reported as follows: "A doctor at Tskhinvali Regional Hospital who was on duty from the afternoon of August 7 told Human Rights Watch that between August 6 to 12 the hospital treated 273 wounded, both military and civilians. . . . The doctor also said that 44 bodies had been brought to the hospital since the fighting began, of both military and civilians. The figure reflects only those killed in the city of Tskhinvali. But the doctor was adamant that the majority of people killed in the city had been brought to the hospital before being buried, because the city morgue was not functioning due to the lack of electricity in the city."

Even today, on the pages of the Wall Street Journal, Russian foreign minister Sergey Lavrov is trotting out the lie that Russian "peacekeepers" were watching acts of genocide. More on the Russian "peacekeepers" and whom they enabled:

This formulation has alternated with repeated Russian statements, repeatedly disproved, that Russian forces were not in Georgia at all, or were leaving, or were about to leave. In fact, journalists, human rights observers and others have documented that Russian troops have ranged far into Georgia, including the city of Gori and the port of Poti. They have razed, mined and looted Georgian army bases and destroyed civilian houses and apartment buildings.

Militia forces under Russian control include South Ossetians and others brought in from Russia itself -- what Deputy Assistant Secretary of State Matthew Bryza described as "the North Caucasus irregular forces that the Russian military inexplicably encouraged to enter South Ossetia to murder, rape and steal." They have attacked civilians in Gori and engaged in ethnic cleansing of Georgian-populated villages in South Ossetia. Remarkably, the Russian-allied "president" of South Ossetia acknowledged the ethnic cleansing yesterday in an interview with the Russian newspaper Kommersant, although he did not acknowledge the killings of Georgian civilians that others have documented. Eduard Kokoity said that his forces "offered them a corridor and gave the peaceful population the chance to leave" and that "we do not intend to allow" their return.

Who knew that the Russian model for peacekeeping included ethnic cleansing. So far, Russia's withdrawal from sovereign Georgian territory has been negligible. All it would take is for some perceived slight and the Russians could use it as a pretext for continuing their occupation and ethnic cleansing.

So does Putin deserve all the blame? No, but most of it, and he's been agitating against the Saakashvili government from the beginning, as Matthew Continetti has documented. Saakashvili proved to be too impetuous, goaded into an ill-advised decision, so he shares some blame for poor judgment. It looks like the U.S. did not adequately consider the Russia reaction to Kosovo's independence, as well as the expansion of NATO into former Soviet states, so we share some blame for getting caught flat-footed. But Russia planned their invasion and how they would handle the aftermath, all well in advance. It has all the markings of an operation masterminded by a KGB agent.

So what to do? We can't do much. Bailing out of the 2014 Winter Olympics in Sochi is bone stupid because it punishes athletes who have nothing to do with international politics. Bringing Ukraine and Georgia into NATO at this time would not be smart, but I wouldn't take the issue off the table. Maybe later. Should we move to take Russia out of the G8? Yes. The intent of the G8 is to have a working group of the largest industrialized democracies come together to advance common interests. Russia is not a free country, its industrialization is anemic, and its interests appear to be diverging from the other seven nations. The pictures don't lie.

As Engram noted:

A rating of 1 indicates free, whereas a rating of 7 indicates not free. Again, does one country again stand out as being not like the others?

Why, yes, one country clearly does not belong in this group, and that country is, quite obviously, Russia. I think it is past time that we demote that country by excluding it from future meetings of the G7. We obviously need to talk to the Russians about many issues, but we don't need to artificially and inappropriately elevate their status by pretending that they belong in a meeting of economically advanced democracies.

India and Brazil have much lower per capita GDP than the G7, but they have free or partially free governments and their economies are moving in a favorable direction.

What else? We have the levers of sanctions, diplomacy and media to encourage Russia to move away from their belligerent behavior. The Russians engaged in some serious information operations, and we can definitely push back on that, but our other options are pretty limited.

Amid all the hullaballoo about tire pressure, I wonder if anyone else noticed the following in Obama's recent energy speech:

"Breaking our oil addiction is one of the greatest challenges our generation will ever face. It will take nothing less than a complete transformation of our economy," he said. "This transformation will be costly, and given the fiscal disaster we will inherit from the last administration, it will likely require us to defer some other priorities."

I believe us conservatives are missing the gravity of what he said, and it raises a whole legion of questions that our mainstream press has not been asking. What does he mean by "complete transformation"? How would he make this happen? What restrictions would he implement? What regulations would he enact? How much would this cost? Will he raise taxes to pay for it? What "other priorities" must we defer in order for Obama to undertake this transformation? Would he be willing to put us in a recession to make this happen? Will we all to drive Minis and scooters? Will we need traveling papers?

The questions spilleth over, but I hear no one in the mainstream press asking them. Let me put it another way. Obama said he intended to fundamentally change our American economy, the largest and most prosperous economy in world history and the engine that drives the world economy. When a liberal Democrat with virtually no economic track record and almost no economic experience makes these Large Pronouncements, I get nervous. We should all get nervous. We should also hold Obama to account for his remarks, and it needs to happen right now.

I was checking factcheck.org this morning, and it looks to me like the McCain campaign is stretching the facts way too much. It needn't be this way. We can take Obama to task without distorting anything. For example:

• He was flat wrong on the surge strategy in Iraq, a top two issue.

• His plan for turning things around in Afghanistan is practically non-existent.

• He is in favor of market-distorting ethanol subsidies.

• He has put forward no new ideas for taking the bite out of gasoline prices. He voted for keeping the Brazilian ethanol tariff in place, he has opposed the expansion of offshore drilling (until recently), and he is proposing a windfall profits tax on oil companies, a la Jimmy Carter.

• For nuclear energy, his opposition to Yucca Mountain as a repository means that he would rather kick the can down the road instead of build new plants, thus restricting the expansion of our energy base.

• He will significantly grow the size of government.

• He wants to raise taxes, including taxes on Social Security.

• He wants to restrict free trade, opposing both NAFTA and a free trade agreement with Colombia.

• He favors the Employee Free Choice Act, which would restrict employee free choice because the bill removes secret ballot provisions.

• Obama is woefully inexperienced for the job of Leader of the Free World, as Baseball Crank well points out.

And the list goes on and on. Because of all this good and true material out there, I don't see why the McCain campaign thinks it's necessary to distort the facts or take things out of context. I have no problem with negative ads, so long as they're true and accurate, but Factcheck.org has found plenty of those ads and statements wanting. This is a concern because, if the negative ads aren't credible, then undecided voters will tend to tune them out. Going down the list, on Obama and electricity:

McCain's new ad claims that Obama "says he'll raise taxes on electricity." That's false. Obama says no such thing.

McCain relies on a single quote from Obama who once – and only once so far as we can find – suggested taxing "dirty energy," including coal and natural gas. That was in response to a reporter's suggestion that a tax on wind power could fund education. Obama isn't proposing any new ta