The argument over how many troops Obama should send to Afghanistan has largely been distilled to an argument of scale instead of strategy by much of the media. Numbers like 40,000 or 10,000 have come to represent simply how gung-ho a commentator is about the war in Afghanistan. It's easy to forget that there are fundamentally different tasks that these troop levels will, in theory, allow US forces to accomplish.

NYT Military Analyst Elisabeth Bumiller explains what these numbers will actually mean once boots hit the ground:

Should President Obama decide to send 40,000 additional American troops to Afghanistan, the most ambitious plan under consideration at the White House, the military would have enormous flexibility to deploy as many as 15,000 troops to the Taliban center of gravity in the south, 5,000 to the critical eastern border with Pakistan and 10,000 as trainers for the Afghan security forces.

If Mr. Obama limited any additional American troops to 10,000 to 15,000, the military would deploy them largely as trainers, with some reinforcements likely in the southern province of Kandahar, the Taliban’s spiritual home. The neighboring, and opium-rich, Helmand Province and the eastern border with Pakistan, military analysts say, would receive few if any American troops and would remain largely as they are today.

Check out the full article here.

"I do NOT want to go over all the successes of the last eight years."

- President Hamid Karzai of Afghanistan, from his re-inauguration speech today.

This is tone-deafness at its worst. Karzai is clearly having trouble facing the reality on the ground in Afghanistan.

Despite the awkward title, this report on the history and future of the Chinese Navy from the Office of Naval Intelligence is a must read. From the executive summary:

Over the past decade, the People's Republic of China (PRC) has carried out an impressive military modernization effort, providing the People's Liberation Army Navy PLA(N) considerable technological capabilities. Recognizing that it takes more than technology to create a capable navy, China has also actively pursued the modernization of its doctrine, organization, and training with the ultimate goal of developing a professional force. While much work remains, trends in recent years indicate the PLA(N) is beginning to operationalize its modern force, taking on new and more challenging missions.

In response to expanding national interests and revolutionary changes in warfare brought about by long-range precision weaponry, civilian leadership in Beijing began to view the navy as an increasingly critical component of China's national security structure. To support Beijing's objectives regarding Taiwan, to deny an adversary access to the region during times of crisis, and to protect China's vital sea lines of communication, naval power became the key to China's security concerns. In the late 1990s, Beijing embarked on a program to build a modern navy in a relatively short time. Since the late 1990s, the PLA(N) has purchased military hardware from abroad, built increasingly complex naval platforms in China and made substantial upgrades to aging ships.

At 50 plus pages, its a bit of a read, but well worth it. Grab the libation of your choice and enjoy.

In an attempt to live down to already low expectations, European officials selected Herman Van Rompuy as the EU's first president and Lady Catherine Ashton as its first foreign policy chief. Van Rompuy and Lady Ashton are underwhelming choices at best, preposterous at worst.

Europe now has a president with lower name recognition than most members of the US Congress and a foreign minister with no foreign policy experience. Just as Sarah Palin serves as a base caricature of American political life, Van Rompuy and Lady Ashton embody the most frustrating elements of European politics.

Their qualifications for the new positions seem to be almost entirely derived from their banality. And while some apparently believe this is a positive, the issues facing Europe today are far too pressing for these sort of carefully manicured, technocratic choices.

As Martin Kettle at the Guardian puts it: "The choices of Van Rompuy and Ashton suggest that the EU remains in thrall to the lowest common denominator politics of deals made behind closed doors and, by the same token, is collectively averse to taking risky or difficult decisions that threaten the EU's comfort zone, even when such decisions are in Europe's longer term interests."

If anything, the move is indicative that Europe's national leaders, despite their acquiescence to the Lisbon Treaty, are not ready to give up real power any time soon.
 

Abu Musab al-Zarqawi was at the time the most wanted man in Iraq after trying to ignite a Sunni-Shia civil war in the country. Additionally, he was public enemy number 1 in his native Jordan for bombing 3 Amman hotels. This is the apparent story of how America killed him, from a NY Times piece on Gen. Stanley McChrystal:

This time, McChrystal believed, Zarqawi was in his sights. The tip was long in coming, a result of thousands of hours of intelligence work, but according to several sources, it boiled down to this: Under interrogation, an Iraqi insurgent who was a member of Zarqawi’s inner circle pointed to an Iraqi named Abd al-Rahman, who, the insurgent said, served as Zarqawi’s spiritual adviser. 

Whenever Rahman was preparing to meet Zarqawi, the source told the Americans, he would send his wife and family out of Baghdad the day before. McChrystal and his JSOC team watched Rahman for 17 consecutive days. Then, on June 6, 2006, it happened — Rahman’s family was seen piling into a vehicle and leaving the city. 

The next day, a Predator drone followed Rahman himself as he made his way northeast out of Baghdad, to a small house in a palm grove near the village of Hibhib. Rahman went inside. McChrystal had a commando team on the ground, 18 minutes away. 

As McChrystal and his staff watched through the Predator camera, a man, dressed in black, walked from the house to the edge of the road. The man looked to his right, then to his left. It was Zarqawi. He walked back inside. They were sure it was him. At an operations center, a senior Special Forces commander, realizing that time was short, ordered an airstrike. Two F-16’s were dispatched; one of them was hooked up to a refueling plane; the second jet was told to go alone. A pair of 500-pound bombs killed Zarqawi.

Transparency International recently released its annual Corruption Perception Index. You can access the full report here and an interactive corruption map here.

The Bottom Five Most Corrupt Countries:

176 (tie). Iraq
176 (tie). Sudan
178. Myanmar
179. Afghanistan
180. Somalia

The Top Five Least Corrupt Countries:

1. New Zealand
2. Denmark
3 (tie). Singapore
3 (tie). Sweden
5. Switzerland

Update: The BBC recently published an extremely interesting article on corruption in Afghanistan. Money quote:

"The Bertelsmann Foundation, one of the sources for the conclusions of Transparency International, said: 'Corruption is endemic to all state functions (police, judiciary) and is seen as a usual form of business transaction; even ministers were involved in land grabs. Corruption is additionally interlinked with the opium business. Thus, bribery is invested on a massive scale to undermine efforts against the drug economy.'"
Read the full article here.

Some moron writing for the Guardian tracked down Caspian Makan, the boyfriend of Neda Agha Soltan. Neda is the young woman who was murdered by a basiji's bullet on June 20th in Tehran while protesting the rigged Iranian election. The article is worth reading to hear Caspian's story. 

Caspian and Neda had fallen in love while on vacation in Turkey last April. They planned to get married-- until everything changed on June 20th. The Iranian authorities arrested Caspian and held him in the notorious Evin Prison. He was released on bail after pressure from various human rights groups, and then fled the country.

Sadly, the author writes with the skill of a lobotomized monkey. The phrase, "the family were allowed" is not proper English, and should never be published by a newspaper. Then, in the middle of the piece, the author spasms into an unrelated anti-American invective, calling US elections "soporific staged affairs." That doesn't even merit a response.

Worst of all, the author engages in the most repugnant form of journalistic myopia: "It is impossible to say what the election result really was...[although] thousands of Iranians felt they had been cheated."

Are you kidding me??? You aren't sure who won? And in an article about Neda? This person should have their right hand amputated.

Everyone's favorite tyrant is back in the news, this time for attempting to evangelize Rome's beauties. From the BBC:

The girls had to be beautiful, between 18 and 35 - and at least 1.70m tall. The dress code was strict: plunging necklines and short miniskirts were most definitely out. Two-hundred women passed muster and were bussed to a plush residential corner of the Italian capital.

Security scanned and shown into an imposing reception room, they were then left waiting, as several complained, without so much as a glass of water. An hour later, their host's identity was finally revealed. Col Gaddafi proceeded to preach the benefits of Islam, taking particular pains to assure his guests that it was not misogynistic, and encouraging them to convert.

Two hours later, the women left, looking a touch bemused, 50 euros ($75; £45) better off and clutching a copy of the Koran.

Gaddafi rarely makes sense, but is almost always entertaining.

Update: Der Spiegel has an epic photo set here. And Al Jazeera's Arabic language service is reporting that one of the girls actually converted. Money quote translated:

"Reports stated that one of the participants said--at the end of the lecture that lasted two hours--that she was convinced by what the Libyan president said and has decided to convert to Islam. While another participant merely pointed out that what Gaddafi said was important."

Hat tip to Diana for help with the translation.

Johann Hari has a fascinating piece on British Islamist leaders who turned against terrorism. 

Money quote 1: 

To my surprise, the ex-jihadis said their rage about Western foreign policy – which was real, and burning – emerged only after their identity crises, and as a result of it. They identified with the story of oppressed Muslims abroad because it seemed to mirror the oppressive disorientation they felt in their own minds. Usman Raja, a bluff, buff boxer who begged to become a suicide bomber in the mid-1990s, tells me: "Your inner life is chaotic and you feel under threat the whole time. And then you're told by Islamists that life for Muslims everywhere is chaotic and under threat. It becomes bigger than you. It's about the world – and that's an amazing relief. The answer isn't inside your confused self. It's out there in the world."

Money quote 2:

After more than 20 years in prison, they had reconsidered their views. They told him he was false to believe there was one definitive, literal way to read the Koran. As they told it, in traditional Islam there were many differing interpretations of sharia, from conservative to liberal – yet there had been consensus around once principle: it was never to be enforced by a central authority. Sharia was a voluntary code, not a state law. "It was always left for people to decide for themselves which interpretation they wanted to follow," he says.

These one-time assassins taught Maajid that the idea of using state power to force your interpretation of sharia on everyone was a new and un-Islamic idea, smelted by the Wahabis only a century ago. They had made the mistake of muddling up the enduringly relevant decisions Mohamed made as a spiritual leader with those he made as a political ruler, which he intended to be specific to their time and place.

Westerners often think of China as a monolithic behemoth. It isn't. Patrick Chovanec has a must-read piece at the Atlantic that separates China into 9 geographic regions useful for nuanced thinking. An excerpt below:

THE FRONTIER
(Inner Mongolia, Ningxia, Gansu, Qinghai, Xinjiang, Tibet)


The land beyond the Great Wall has long captivated the Chinese with its aura of danger and romance. Wild Mongol horsemen, silk-laden caravans, and the inaccessible mysteries of Tibet offer a thrilling contrast to the regulated confines of Chinese life. But what really set this region apart are its vast open spaces. The Frontier comprises over half of China’s territory and just 6 percent of its population—a landmass and population density similar to the continental United States west of the Mississippi. Its desolate plateaus, scorching deserts, and snow-capped mountains resemble Nevada or Wyoming more than Beijing. 
 

China’s frontier with Inner Asia has always had enormous strategic significance. For centuries, its overland caravan routes—the famous Silk Road—provided China’s richest trade link to the outside world, while its marauding nomads posed an ever-present threat to the Middle Kingdom. To secure control, China developed an extensive network of military colonies and prison work camps, not unlike Siberia’s gulag archipelago. The region’s trackless wastes hide many of China’s most sensitive military facilities. But the Frontier’s greatest strategic value lies in its largely untapped natural resources: oil and gas from the Tarim Basin and neighboring Central Asia; rich veins of nickel, copper, and coal; dairy and wind farms on the vast open grasslands; and vineyards that may someday produce world-class wines.



The key to unlocking these resources is the railroad. By bringing in settlers and connecting them with markets back east, the railroad is transforming China’s frontier beyond recognition. But like America’s Manifest Destiny, China’s “Go West” movement has a dark side. The natives of China’s frontier—the Mongols, Tibetans, and Muslim Uighurs—see their land and ways of life being swept away by a flood of Han Chinese immigrants. When their anger boils over into violence, as it did last year in Lhasa and this summer in Urumqi, the response is invariably swift and brutal. China’s West is being won, but what will be lost in the process?