Terror, War & Twilight (10/2/09)

A pair of veeeeeery inconvenient linkages for Generalissimo Obama to have to split-straddle.

1) If you want to hold yourself out as wanting to pursue an effective counterterrorism campaign in Southwest Asia, you have to win the counterinsurgency campaign in Afghanistan first:

Sources say this success is largely because of better intelligence, stemming from greater cooperation by the Pakistani government and a stronger U.S. counter-insurgency program on the other side of the border in Afghanistan.

That added pressure creates the conditions for better intelligence on the ground as to where Taliban and al Qaeda forces are, sources say.

“They’re squeezed,” a Pentagon source says of individuals on the border region. “And when people are squeezed, they talk.”

But military officials who support Gen. Stanley McChrystal’s proposal for a larger counter-insurgency strategy in Afghanistan are concerned that some in the White House interpret this success as a reason to focus entirely on counterterrorism using drones…

Military sources worry that the success of the predator strikes will be seen as “happening in a vacuum,” with insufficient credit given to the counterinsurgency in Afghanistan.

Remember Bill Clinton's periodic cruise missile barrages in the late '90s that, in the immortal words of George W. Bush, succeeded only in "blowing up tents and hitting camels in the butt."  They did not succeed because we lacked "humint," and we did not have humint because we did not have bases and boots on the ground in-theater from which non-technical intel could be mined and gathered.  With those resources in hand, our counterterrorist sorties are vastly more successful.  Quit Afghanistan and hand the country back to al Qaeda and the Taliban, and we'll go right back to square one and the resumption of the enemy's North American offensive.

2) If you're Barack Obama, and let's say for the sake of argument that you didn't plot to abandon Afghanistan along with the rest of the GWOT all along, whose military advice are you going to believe: that of the Af-Pak theater commander YOU appointed, or Vice President Upchuck's?:

According to White House officials involved in the meeting [during Obama's Olympic pitch junket], Vice President Biden offered some of the more pointed challenges to McChrystal, who attended the session by video link from Kabul. One official said Biden played the role of "skeptic in chief," while other top officials, including Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton, were muted in their comments.

Well, yeah, man.  Shucks, what does a four-star general know about running a counterinsurgency next to an ignorant, verbally incontinent buffoon who has evidently tired for the moment of flogging his concurrent economic genius and seeks new fields of idiot savantry to conquer?  Hell, Red Barry wouldn't have to spend ten seconds pondering that choice.

If, you know, he hadn't already made up his mind to run away and start planning for his Quetta summit with bin Laden.  I mean, Ahmadinejad is going to start feeling smothered sooner or later....