Tom Ricks is going to be the medium for the financial downfall of this ignorant country boy by previewing all these interesting books. . .Oh wait, Amazon has “The Triple Agent” for chump change that even someone savaging Social Security and the DoD military retirement center can afford!

Anyway, I thought I’d move down from the back row of the peanut gallery and mention that the 2009 incident at our station in Khost certainly was a failure of insufficient focus on counterintelligence as mentioned in the review. . .And I don’t mean those having an intelligent idea had it countered either, which always struck me as the definition of military counterintelligence.

Further, once-upon-a-time, recruiting and running agents was easily a full time job and those who did so, had proven a depth of experience as a case officer that would provide the constant counterintelligence awareness that could have prevented this tragedy. . .But, in all fairness, whose idea was it to put an analyst in charge that had never run informants in the field for at least four or five years or so, before earning such a post?

I wonder if the book touches on the fact that a Jordanian Captain by the name of 'Ali bin Zayd was also killed, and it would be my bet he was the primary handler of al-Balawi who obviously fooled Jordan's Directorate of Military Intelligence and/or General Intelligence Directorate as well.

In closing, I have a general question: as fast as we are said to be killing Al-Qa’idah’s leadership and supernumeraries in the AfPak region, are we perhaps seeing a Pakistani Taliban taking their place, and also, does this go on forever?

That doesn't seem suggested by the author's pleased memory of how some CIA types have told him they think his book is great. This applause as readily suggests the opposite.

Whom those drone strikes are killing is the big mystery question of modern warfare. There used to be agreement that these killed innocent civilians alongside some bad guy or guys. Then it came out that those civilians were always being guesstimated too low. Now the fiction is that one drone strike equals one dead guy or more -- but no civilians at all. There seems no reason to believe that civilians are now magically spared from such events. They weren't, before.

But let's forget those civilians, as evidently Washington would like us to. An equivalent deep mystery is why Kandahar, a city of fewer than half a million, would have more than 990 separate insurgent leaders, all available to be killed there last year. That was the claimed tally of such leaders killed there in highly successful JSOC sweeps. This seems another dubious claim.

So what we have is the official position that every person killed by drone strikes is an insurgent, unless (after six months' investigation) a Marine. And the suggestion that among insurgent circles, the best way to be promoted to leadership is to have your bleeding corpse left behind by a nighttime JSOC strike. Unless, perhaps, you're a close relative of Mr Hamid Karzai.

All of this seems irrelevant to the central issue of all these killing: are they winning this pseudo war? The people claiming the truthful answer is yes are, let's recall, those making dubious claims about whom America is killing in Afghanistan and Pakistan these days.

This tragedy smells of ambition and too many cooks spoiling the broth. People should remember to have everything nailed down and triple-checked before telling anything to the White House. It's a bad scene when multiple people on the ground are overruled or second-guessed by bosses 1000's of miles away. Also, nailing any particular AQ boss does not seem to make much of a difference. Would be interesting to learn how his debacle influenced the Raid on Osama's compound. Balawi seems like he was in the category of the Underwear Bomber and Richard Reid: his AQ or TTP bosses knew he was good for one operation, so his life for all of those Agency personnel was a good trade, Thankfully, the CIA seems to have a deep bench.

An equivalent deep mystery is why Kandahar, a city of fewer than half a million, would have more than 990 separate insurgent leaders, all available to be killed there last year. That was the claimed tally of such leaders parenting guide killed there in highly successful JSOC sweeps. This seems another dubious claim.