The Obama team: How to screw things up royally

The top diplomat on the ground thinks the President of the country is a scum bag?

Talk about a gross breach of protocol!

I know it's not really his fault that these cables got leaked, but you just know Karzai is mad as hell about this embarassent.

Couple that with the fact that both the SecDef and SecState are pushing for more troops...

Yeah, it may be time for Eikenberry to "seek excellence elsewhere."

Tom is on to something, these are curious personnel assignments. After all I doubt Obama was very familiar with any of these personalities when the postings were made.

From whence came the idea of sending Eikenberry to Afghanistan and Hill to Iraq and why jilt Zinni? Who is the culprit, Clinton, Holbrooke, maybe Kerry?

As was the case with your Obama at Fort Hood misfire, you need to take a step back. While the personnel assignments may not fit your sense of righteousness, they are a sideshow in a much larger drama.

As recently as a couple of days ago, I argued that it would be politically unpalatable for Obama to advocate a draw down and withdrawal instead of an increase. But as details of Wednesday's war council get teased out (which is to say authorized leaked out) there now is a glimmer of hope that at some point in the foreseeable future a country that has been at war since November 2001 will have welcomed home all of its troops from Iraq and most of them from Afghanistan.

Such a bold move will, of course, upset the congregants of The Neocon Church of Our Lady of Perpetual War.

But they will be unable to get out from under a certain reality: Obama is president of a nation that is only slightly less sick and tired of being lied to about war than it is sick and tired of war itself.

holds the weaker hand.

My assay is whether Karzai fires his brother Dopey before our Pres announces the next increment in troop escalation.

Bluffing and wasta rituals aside, watch what we do, not what we say. The war is more or less static (and the Afstan troop pipeline full) until next Spring anyway. The rate of our Afstan escalation is further limited by the rate of withdrawal from Iraq, which is pending 'national elections.'

On the subject of screwy, how come we hear so little about Beluchistan, if that's where Omar and UBL are hanging?

Nice pic. Why does the fourth man have a hand in Kerry's pocket?

Appointing Eikenberry as Ambassador to Afghanistan was probably a dose of reality, since the previous occupant of the oval office coddled Karzai as if they were both "p-funk home boys," never injecting any discipline into the relationship.

As for appointing Hill to Baghdad; I smell Rob Emanuel running interference for Clinton. Tony Zinni, as a previous CENTCOM, had interfaced with a lot of regional personalities, and having him there may have been seen as upsurping the young turks forming Obama's new foreign policy team.

From knowing everything about the military, Ricks now knows everything about the diplomatic. Weellll, lots, anyway. The idea that the job of any US ambassador to Kabul is to be matey with Karzai don't sound all that attractive. While Khalilzad, that great and good Karzai friend, was boosting the man as the Afghan president, other observers there were describing him as the mayor of part of Kabul. More skepticism seems to have been needed then, and it seems a good thing that it's being tendered today.

Ricks really does seem to be painting himself into a corner, on the proposition that the job of the president of the United States has been elected to hand out whatever generals demand, when they demand it. If there's any difference of opinion, the president's wrong and so is the relevant ambassador. Hard to think of this as, say, the Truman doctrine, and it didn't work out all that well for McKiernan, either.

PS: "Nee" means "born". US generals turning up, noisy, wet and shiny, in the delivery wards these days?

Why link the Zinni-Hill assignments with Eikenberry's appointment? Two separate problems. Having someone who doesn't get along with Karzai is probably smart.

at Bloomberg Washington summit, carried on delay at C-SPAN.
http://bloombergwashington.com/gatherings_agenda.php?gathering=4

Michael O'Hanlon was slow-pitching as moderator, and Petraeus was allowed to take the bit and run out the clock, to mix metaphors. The part that briefly raised my antenna was a passing reference to 'if we increase troops, and I'm not going to comment on the pros and cons of those arguments...'.

We've heard Gen. McChrystal jawboning in Europe. Gen. Odierno, safeguarding our Iraq progress, also has a big stake in (over)committing all reserves to Afstan, and you know he has CENTCOM on his speed dial.

The last time (Sen.)Obama disagreed with a theater commander, he was backing a majority position among the NCA. That doesn't seem to be the case today, what with NSC's Jones, JCS Chair Mullen and SecDef Gates making surge noises. But there has to be a some silent scaffolding of support, beyond Juan Cole and Eikenberry, for holding off on announcing a 'surge' of 30-40K.

How is it that a senior flag officer advocating of the surge side is accorded press access in advance of a WH decision, while the other side seems to be sitting on their hands, or getting leaked against?

The silent position seems to have been ascendant, up until the Eikenberry leak.

Tom Ricks is right to look askance at these assignments. For one thing, we know that Chris Hill is a Holbrooke peep and that his assignment in Iraq is Holbrooke bigfooting his Afpak territory (Clinton is a non-player here).

Both these appointments are odd and reflect Obama's failure to engage the region. Recall that Hill's predecessor in Iraq, ryan Crocker, was a Middle Eastern specialist who spent his career in the region, especially as I recall serving in Beirut and islamabad where he experienced attacks on the Embassies. He was fluent in Arabic and had a wide and deep understanding of the political and social history of the region. His appointment was every bit as key to the success of the surge as was Petraeus'. Hill, by contrast, is an Asia hand who served as envoy in negotiations with North Korea. The rationale for his appointment eludes me(other than his being a Holbrooke bot).

Eikenberry stikes me as an even worse appointment. Clearly he sees his job as undermining Karzai. His super-secret decoded cable strikes me as amusing -- Karzai is corrupt and incompetent! Tell us something we don't know. Is he freelancing? Carrying water for someone whose agenda we don't know? Who's in charge?

It's possible that Eikenberry was sent to Afghanistan specifically to undermine Karzai, in much the same way that Henry Cabot Lodge was dispatched to Saigon in a desperation play by JFK -- either Diem would shape up, become more democratic and fight the war more aggressively, or he would be replaced by someone more to our liking. Either way a win-win was the thinking in Camelot.

Or not, actually.

I tend to think it was Jones who tapped Eikenberry for this job, go to Kabul, knock heads together, etc. But who knows?

If Mr. Rick's logic is to be followed in letter then Karzai should be the mayor of Kabul and all the war lords should be Governors of their respective provinces in Afghanistan as they know their constituency backward! We are yet to see why Karzai has not shown more interest than U.S envoy in the stabilization of Afghanistan.