...I think it fits with the interesting strategy that McChrystal has because the objective is not the killing of the Taliban. The objective is to gain the confidence of the civilians.

If you announce in advance you will do Kandahar, the capital [of the Taliban], the prize here, you hope that the small bands of the enemy roaming around will think twice about hanging around and facing the U.S. Marines, because they will lose.

And you are doing is appealing to the less fanatical and less ideological and the less suicidal enemy who will sneak around and join the population and give up the fight and become civilians. And we aren't against that.

The idea is once they get integrated in society, that's OK. You don't want a victory where you have to surrender on the battleship Missouri. What you want is to win the confidence of the population.

I don't know whether to be happy or sad when I read this. I didn't see the video, but Krauthammer seems to think this is some sort of a unique strategy. If so, I'm disappointed, because protecting the population as opposed to simply hunting and killing insurgents was the entire strategic basis of the surge in Iraq. I guess that Charles hasn't been reading The Redhunter.

I've gone over this a kazillion times on Redhunter, but once more can't hurt. Maybe there's a new reader who cares about this stuff.

Like any other genre, some Christian talk radio is good and some is bad. Spare me the fire and brimstone. Bring on insightful, intellectual, and intelligent commentary. Of the latter, Christian Research Institute Chairman Hank Hanegraaff is one of the best. I've listened to him long enough to know that he didn't earn the moniker "the bible answer man" by accident. Check your local radio listings for availability.

Hanegraaff has published a number of works, and one day I'll buy more of them. My time for reading being somewhat small, I decided to start with one of his smaller ones, Whose Ethics? Whose Morals? The Best of the Christian Research Journal. At 95 pages, it's not a long read.

The book is a collection of short essays; one by Hanegraaff, and 5 by other authors. My conclusion; there are a few good sections, but in general it was a letdown. Partially this is just me, because any reader of this blog knows that while I am pro-life, I don't spend much time on the subject. Ditto with other hot-button social issues such as cloning and stem cell research. If the details of these subjects interest you, you'll probably find the book more useful than I did.

This and other videos can be seen at DODvClips. The Pentagon Channel also has videos and news stories, so visit it as well.

The transcript is at DefenseLink.

First, an excerpt from Gen Nicholson's opening statement, then on with the Q & A from the assembled journalists:

China, Iran Creating 'No-Go' Zones to Thwart U.S. Military Power
by David Woods
Politics Daily

The United States, Pentagon strategists say, is quickly losing its ability to barge in without permission. Potential target countries and even some lukewarm allies are figuring out ingenious ways to blunt American power without trying to meet it head-on, using a combination of high-tech and low-tech jujitsu....

At the same time, U.S. naval and air forces have been shrinking under the weight of ever more expensive hardware. It's no longer the case that the United States can overwhelm clever defenses with sheer numbers.

As Defense Secretary Robert Gates summed up the problem this month, countries in places where the United States has strategic interests -- including the Persian Gulf and the Pacific -- are building "sophisticated, new technologies to deny our forces access to the global commons of sea, air, space and cyberspace.''

Those innocuous words spell trouble. While the U.S. military and strategy community is focused on Afghanistan and the fight in Marja, others - Iran and China, to name two - are chipping away at America's access to the Taiwan Strait, the South China Sea, the Persian Gulf and the increasingly critical extraterrestrial realms.

"This era of U.S. military dominance is waning at an increasing and alarming rate,'' Andrew Krepinevich, a West Point-educated officer and former senior Pentagon strategist, writes in a new report. "With the spread of advanced military technologies and their exploitation by other militaries, especially China's People's Liberation Army and to a far lesser extent Iran's military and Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps, the U.S. military's ability to preserve military access to two key areas of vital interest, the western Pacific and the Persian Gulf, is being increasingly challenged.''

There seems to be a myth out there that because the U.S. is the U.S. we will automatically win any high-tech war. I call it the "Top Gun Syndrome," and while Hollywood is maybe partially to blame they're just rehashing what they saw in the Gulf War.

Due to other pressures I only have time for the briefest of comments. I also don't have time to set up a bunch of links, and so to a large extent will be going off of my general knowledge of the subject and my previous posts. Lets start with this:

The Air War Over Vietnam

An FDR lesson Obama missed
by Wesley Pruden
The Washington Times

Barack Obama is trying to be the new FDR before the concrete settles around his image as the new Jimmy Carter. History will ultimately decide, but last week's celebrated health care summit made him look more like Mr. Jimmy than FDR.

The president was full of self-righteous talk, mostly about himself, and he twice felt it necessary to remind everyone that he's the president, recalling Richard Nixon's bizarre reassurance that he was not a crook. Some things are self-evident, and if they're not, such things are usually not true. We can stipulate that, like it or not, he's the president.

The Democrats relished the opportunity to portray the Republicans as the wrinkled party of "no," a crabby relic of the 20th century, devoid of anything that anybody could want, and Barack Obama's low-church eloquence would melt skepticism like butter on warm toast. But it didn't happen. Setting out the idea of a plain and simple alternative to Obamacare -- smaller measures to reform, taken step by step -- the Republicans sounded like the party of common sense, purveyors of the kind of kitchen-table solution that would work a lot better than an elaborate welfare-state scheme.

Clinton: Political fights hurt U.S. image: Wants world to see 'unity and strength'
The Washington Times
By Nicholas Kralev

President Obama's diminished political power as a result of fights between the White House and Congress has damaged both his and the country's image abroad, Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton said Wednesday.

Even as she thanked Congress for its bipartisan support for many of the Obama administration's foreign policy goals, Mrs. Clinton said during two Senate committee hearings that recent bickering on domestic issues concerns her and that she hopes "we can figure out a better way to address it."

We hear this line often from Democrats these days. It's a lot of nonsense, and here's why:

Obama tops Bush at ducking reporters
The Washington Times
February 22, 2010
by Joseph Curl

President Obama, who pledged to establish the most open and transparent administration in history, on Monday surpasses his predecessor's record for avoiding a full-fledged question-and-answer session with White House reporters in a formal press conference.

President George W. Bush's longest stretch between prime-time, nationally televised press conferences was 214 days, from April 4 to Nov. 4, 2004. Mr. Obama tops that record on Monday, going 215 days - stretching back to July 22, according to records kept by CBS Radio's veteran reporter Mark Knoller.

The president has seemingly shunned formal, prime-time sessions since his last disastrous presser, when he said police in Cambridge, Mass., "acted stupidly" by arresting a Harvard professor who broke into a home that turned out to be his own. The off-the-cuff comment took over the news cycle for a week, overshadowing his push for health care reform, and culminated in a White House "Beer Summit," where the president hosted white police officer James Crowley and the black Harvard professor, Henry Louis Gates Jr.

Does that mean the public has largely conceded that we've won? In part, I think.

There have not been any briefings lately on The Pentagon Channel or DODvClips, and I'm not entirely sure why. Obviously there is not as much fighting in Iraq as there was a year ago, but I wonder if a decision was taken at a higher level to not do as many as they used to. This is pure speculation, of course.

Fortunately our commander in Iraq, General Raymond Odierno, accepted Dr. Kimberly Kagan's invitation to discuss the future of Iraq at a forum she held on February 16.

The entire interview and Q & A is over an hour, and videos and the complete transcript can be found at the Institute for the Study of War website here.

General Odierno was the #2 man in Iraq during the "surge" of 2007-8, and earned a we'll deserved reputation as the "Patton of Counterinsurgency". The analogy is this; Odierno was to Petraeus what Patton was to Eisenhower. Patton executed Ike's strategy, ditto for Odierno.

Kimberly Kagan's husband, Frederick Kagan, has been accurately described as "the intellectual author of the surge." It was him and retired General Jack Keane (who introduces them in the first video) who first convinced President Bush to change course. Kimberly is founder and President of the Institute for the Study of War.

Between the two Kagans they are probably the two smartest military theorists on the planet. Those who follow this blog know that I have quoted both of them often.

Here is the first part of the interview, with the others below the fold:

The Obama administration's apparent intention to use the "budget reconciliation" process to try to advance its proposed health-care overhaul has shined the spotlight on why it, and the federal government as a whole, should not control what will soon be one-fifth of our economy. Simply put, the president has repeatedly emphasized three problems that must be addressed, while pursuing a course of action that would exacerbate all three.

Lack of bipartisanship: As President Obama said last month in his State of the Union address, the government can't pass needed reforms "if we don't also reform how we work with one another." His "health-care summit" is supposedly an attempt to bring Republicans and Democrats together. The president has said, "Well I think that what I want to do is to look at the Republican ideas that are out there." "Bipartisanship" has been a theme of nearly all of his recent health-care remarks.

number of nations.

This and other videos can be seen at DODvClips. The Pentagon Channel also has videos and news stories, so visit it as well.

The transcript is at DefenseLink.

MG Carter updates us on the progress we're making in Operation Moshtarak in his opening remarks:

In unusually blunt language, an International Atomic Energy Agency report for the first time suggested Iran was actively pursuing nuclear weapons capability, throwing independent weight behind similar Western suspicions.

The IAEA seemed to be cautiously going public with concerns arising from a classified agency analysis leaked in part last year which concluded that Iran has already honed explosives expertise relevant to a workable nuclear weapon.

The report also confirmed Iran had produced its first small batch of uranium enriched to a higher purity -- 20 percent.

Both developments will intensify pressure on Iran to prove it is not covertly bent on "weaponizing" enrichment by allowing unfettered access for IAEA inspectors and investigators, something it rejects in protest at U.N. sanctions.

The United States is already leading a push for the U.N. Security Council to impose a fourth round of sanctions on Iran because of suspicions it may be developing nuclear weapons and has received declarations of support from Russia, which has until now been reluctant to expand sanctions.

"We always said that if Iran failed to live up to those international obligations, that there would be consequences," White House spokesman Robert Gibbs told reporters aboard Air Force One as President Barack Obama flew to a political event.

What consequences? Conveniently, Gibbs doesn't say.

The Taliban's top military commander was captured several days ago in Karachi, Pakistan, in a secret joint operation by Pakistani and American intelligence forces, according to American government officials.

he commander, Mullah Abdul Ghani Baradar, is an Afghan described by American officials as the most significant Taliban figure to be detained since the American-led war in Afghanistan started more than eight years ago. He ranks second in influence only to Mullah Muhammad Omar, the Taliban's founder and a close associate of Osama bin Laden before the Sept. 11 attacks.

Mullah Baradar has been in Pakistani custody for several days, with American and Pakistani intelligence officials both taking part in interrogations, according to the officials.

Another AP story yesterday indicates that he has, in fact, been talking:

Baradar, who also functioned as the link between Mullah Omar and field commanders, has been in detention for more than 10 days and was talking to interrogators, two Pakistani intelligence officials said Tuesday. One said several other suspects were also captured in the raid. He said Baradar had provided "useful information" to them and that Pakistan had shared it with their U.S. counterparts.

All in all this is very good news in that we have neutralized the top Taliban commander just after the launch of Operation Moshtarak, which I covered on Monday. Their propaganda to the contrary, Taliban and other insurgent leaders must not be happy.

Of course, there's more to it than just this. As always with the Obama Administration, the capture and treatment of Baradar illustrates the contradictions inherent in their policies. The New York Times story quoted above goes on to highlight one of them:

Is there any logic in the confusion of the Obama administration's actions and statements on fighting the war on terror?

On the one hand, we had a two-year campaign (2007-08) of damning the Bush protocols, from renditions and military tribunals to Guantanamo and Predator strikes. Then, the Obama administration unleashed Eric Holder and John Brennan, who in highly partisan fashion attacked the anti-terrorism policies implemented from 2001-08 and reflected the themes voiced by Obama himself in his al-Arabiya interview and Cairo speech, many of which were reified by the Mirandizing of the Christmas Day bomber and the announced civilian trial of KSM in New York.

But all that said, Obama never shut down Guantanamo; has not tried KSM in New York; has kept the wiretaps, intercepts, renditions, and tribunals he once castigated; has escalated the war in Afghanistan; and has kept the status-of-forces agreements that Bush negotiated with the Iraqis -- and Joe Biden now claims that Bush's Iraq agreements were Obama's greatest success!

And what I wish I'd said in my first post on it

The New Conformo-radicalism

Groupthink compliance has never felt so right!

by Mark Steyn

A man asks for a plastic bag at the supermarket checkout. Next thing you know, his head's slammed against the counter, and he's being cuffed by the Green Police. "You picked the wrong day to mess with the ecosystem, plastic boy," sneers the enviro-cop, as the perp is led away. Cut to more Green Police going through your trash, until they find . . . a battery! "Take the house!" orders the eco-commando. And we switch to a roadblock on a backed-up interstate, with the Green Police prowling the lines of vehicles to check they're in environmental compliance.

If you watched the Super Bowl, you most likely saw this commercial. As my comrade Jonah Goldberg noted, up until this point you might have assumed it was a fun message from a libertarian think-tank warning of the barely veiled totalitarian tendencies of the eco-nanny state. Any time now, you figure, some splendidly contrarian type -- perhaps Clint lui-même in his famous Gran Torino -- will come roaring through flipping the bird at the stormtroopers and blowing out their tires for good measure. But instead the Greenstapo stumble across an Audi A3 TDI. "You're good to go," they tell the driver, and, with the approval of the state enforcers, he meekly pulls out of the stalled traffic and moves off. Tagline: "Green has never felt so right."

So the message from Audi isn't "You are a free man. Don't bend to the statist bullies," but "Resistance is futile. You might as well get with the program."

Michael Yon

The fight for Afghanistan has begun anew with the launching of Operation Mostarak, or "Together," this past week. For various reasons, our efforts from 2001 to 2005 failed to prevent the resurgence of the Taliban that started in 2006 and by 2009 threatened to grow completely out of control.

A decent and concise summary, I think, of Operation Moshtarak can be found on Wikipedia:

Operation Moshtarak (Dari and Arabic for Together or Joint) is an ISAF pacification offensive in the area that is described as the "poppy-growing belt" of Helmand Province in southern Afghanistan. The combat operations started on February 13, 2010, and focuses on the Nad Ali District and Lashkar Gah district. It involves Afghan and troops of several ISAF-members in addition to the USMC and U.S. Army units.

The main target of the offensive was widely considered to be Marja (also Marjah or Marjeh), which had been controlled for years by Taliban militants as well as drug traffickers. Reports indicate that some 2,500 or more Afghan troops participated, rising to more than 15,000 when American, British, and other coalition troops are included.

As such, the offensive has been described as the largest since the fall of the Taliban, whose government was ousted from Kabul and Kandahar in October-December 2001, but proceeded to resist in the following years in an ongoing guerrilla war known as the Taliban insurgency. This became especially clear during the violent campaign in the midst of the Afghan presidential elections in 2009.

ISAF - International Security Assistance Force, the NATO led operation in Afghanistan

The 1st Battalion, 3rd Marines seize a key junction of roads just outside of Marja:

Via the BBC (follow the link to enlarge):