Obama, Panetta, Petraeus

By Michael J.W. Stickings

President Obama shook up his national security team yesterday, notably moving CIA Director Leon Panetta to the Pentagon and Generalissimo David Petraeus to the CIA.

It was "a game of musical chairs," Slate's Fred Kaplan observed, though "under the circumstances, it's hard to imagine a shrewder set of moves, both politically and substantively."

Panetta is a Washington insider. Can he succeed at the Pentagon? Maybe. He certainly has credibility where it matters, on Capitol Hill:

The next defense secretary will have to wind down the wars without losing them and will almost certainly have to cut the budget without wreaking havoc in the Pentagon. It's a nightmare job for anyone, but Panetta has as much experience as anyone at carving out that sort of territory.

I don't much care for him, and he's come to be an apologist for the Bush-Obama national security state, but I suppose he has the political clout to lead what is undeniably a deeply political office. (Whether he manages to secure the trust and support of the military brass, not to mention of the rank-and-file, is another matter, though that may not matter given his political priorities in the months/years ahead.)

As for Petraeus, well, Obama had to do something with him, not least given his political inclinations, if not aspirations, and connections to the conservative/Republican foreign/military policy establishment:

Picking Petraeus to run the CIA is a move worthy of chess masters. He's been a wartime commander of one sort or another for eight years, almost non-stop. It's time for him to leave the battlefield; that was clear even to him. Yet for much of that time, he's also been a household name -- and widely hailed as the U.S. military's finest strategic mind in a generation. So the question -- which would have been vexing for any president -- is: What to do with this guy? Some who are close to the general refer to this question, with a slight smile and a cocked eyebrow, as "the Petraeus problem."

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Keeping Petraeus on the inside -- in a job that's related to, but not quite of, the military -- is a judicious stroke.

But will anything actually change? Well, we'll have to see. Maybe Panetta is the right man to deal with Iraq and Afghanistan, and particularly to preside of the end of the latter war. And maybe Petraeus will be a fine CIA director.

But these are political moves, first and foremost. Obama puts an ally/confidante at the Pentagon and a possible rival/critic at the CIA. Panetta will do what Obama wants him to do. Petraeus will perhaps be more independent, but he will also be constrained by his position.

Yes, it was a game of musical chairs. And Obama won.

U.S. military fucks up in Afghanistan, killing children, strengthening Taliban

By Michael J.W. Stickings

The Times:

Nine boys collecting firewood to heat their homes in the eastern Afghanistan mountains were killed by NATO helicopter gunners who mistook them for insurgents, according to a statement on Wednesday by NATO, which apologized for the mistake.

The boys, who were 9 to 15 years old, were attacked on Tuesday in what amounted to one of the war’s worst cases of mistaken killings by foreign-led forces. The victims included two sets of brothers. A 10th boy survived.

The NATO statement, which included an unusual personal apology by the commander of the NATO forces in Afghanistan, Gen. David H. Petraeus, said the boys had been misidentified as the attackers of a NATO base earlier in the day. News of the attack enraged Afghans and led to an anti-American demonstration on Wednesday in the village of Nanglam, where the boys were from.

Something tells me the personal apology from Petraeus isn't going to help much. As Comrade Misfit puts it, "[n]o matter how many clinics NATO sets up or how many schools are opened, the relatives of the dead children aren't going to be in a forgiving mood."

And neither, of course, will the Taliban, which only gets stronger each and every time the U.S. (and NATO) fucks up like this. As Andrew Sullivan puts it:

Of course this was a mistake. But it reinforces the human toll of fighting an insurgency you often cannot see in a region you cannot fully control where insurgents and civilians are often interchangeable. At some point, the inevitability of this kind of civilian death makes one reassess the justness of this long, long war -- and the chances of "success" whatever that now means.

Can you imagine how we would feel if nine American boys were slaughtered from the air by an occupying power? Does anyone think this kind of mistake -- inevitable in such a war zone -- can do anything but help the insurgency?

Maybe it was inevitable, maybe it wasn't. But the fact that it happened, along with the inevitable anti-American response from justifiably angry Afghans, reveals a great deal about a war that has turned into a quagmire of failure.

Americans would never put up with this. Why should we expect the Afghans to?