http://ze nhub er.blo gs pot.com/2009/10/new-york-times-tells-us-that-obamas.html

The New York Times tells us that Obama’s advisers are curling themselves around a strategy that will protect “about 10 population centers” in Afghanistan. The debate is no longer over whether to send more troops but over how many more to send. Obama hasn’t made his mind up yet, the Times reports, but the story is a sanctioned leak, so you know he’s pretty close to a decision. This is a propaganda technique known as “desensitizing.” By the time official word comes down the pike, we’ll already be used to the idea and will have moved on to caring about something else.

Military pundit Ralph Peters is on the right side of the Afghanistan issue. “Even if everything went perfectly in Afghanistan—which it won't—the results would be virtually meaningless: Our mortal enemies (above all, al Qaeda) have dug in elsewhere, from Pakistan to Somalia,” he wrote recently in the New York Post. “Our soldiers are dying for a fad, not for a strategy. Our vaunted counterinsurgency doctrine is the military equivalent of hula hoops, pet rocks and Beanie Babies: an oddity that caught the Zeitgeist.” Indeed, counterinsurgency (COIN) is the “it” strategy now, the Army’s reason for being. There won’t be any big tank battles in the Fulda gap. COIN is the only kind of war left; without it, there is no Long War.

Of course, if we don’t need the Long War, we don’t need to do COIN in Afghanistan.

And we don’t need the Long War. But it looks like we’re going to get it.