WASHINGTON – The White House said Monday that President Barack Obama is not considering a strategy for Afghanistan that would withdraw U.S. troops from the eroding war there.
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Obama has invited a bipartisan group of congressional leaders to the White House on Tuesday to confer about the war. He said the administration would brief leaders from both parties and key committee chairmen and would seek their opinions.
Phi Beta Iota: Not only is the White House itself out of touch with reality on Afghanistan, but inviting a “bipartisan” collection of the same appartchiks that allowed us to go into two elective wars and to bankrupt the nation twice over is hardly the way to get coherent strategic advice.
Reform or Go Home (David Kilcullen) End Suicide Attacks (Robert Pape) If You Can’t Beat Them, Let Them Join (Linda Robinson) Pump Up the Police (Anthony Cordesman) Kick Out Corruption (Nader Nadery) Learn to Tax From the Taliban (Gretchen Peters) Polls Have the Power (Merrill McPeak) Take a Risk (Andrew McDonald Exum) Don’t Believe That We Can Afford to Lose (Frederick Kagan) Pakistani Patronage (Paul Pillar)
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4 Broad Strategies Weighed — From Pullout To Boosting Troop Level
Getting out Scaling back
Staying put Ramping up
Integrated Analytics
Phi Beta Iota: In the context of holistic strategy and integrated analytics as depicted by the two thumbnails (click on each to get to the larger graphic), we are stunned by the mediocrity and myopia of the “conventional wisdom.” It's all connected. Absent a coherent world view and strategic analytic model with integrity, this Administration is toast. The Republic has no strategy, no mature threat construct, no Whole of Government planning, programming, and budgeting system (PPBS), and zero integrity in the sense of being honest about the totality of the substance of governance.
October 1, 2009
Obama's War: Take Your Time By David Wood
One brigade commander, Col. Michael Howard, is on his fourth tour in Afghanistan and understands it like few others. Still, there are pieces of this war that stop him cold. One of them is government corruption. “It's a cancer without a cure in Afghanistan, and if we don't come up with a cure, it will cause us to fail,” Howard told me last month, biting off his words angrily. . . . . . . . Given the stakes, Biddle said, “it is appropriate for the commander in chief to be aggressively challenging what he's told by anybody.'
Phi Beta Iota: Truth really is stranger than fiction. The White House is NOT getting the “full spectrum” intelligence it needs to make good decisions, for three simple reasons:
1. No one with access who has both strategic holistic vision and the integrity to demand that the President be fully and properly briefed on the ten high-level threats, the twelve harmonizing policies, and the costs and consequences of ignoring 8 out of 10 threats and 9 out of 12 policies. The President needs a mentor not a partisan nanny or a blindly obedient advisor.
2. A secret intelligence community leadership unable to think for itself and actually generate strategic matrices for the President that are helpful. Right now, using the long-standing OSS.Net, Inc. motto of “Information costs money, intellience makes money,” the US IC is a $75 billion a year sink-hole, largely worthless to the White House or Congress.
3. The President is still wrapped in the partisan bubble that got him elected–like Bush-Cheney, when backed by Wall Street, his insiders know how to steal elections, but they do not know how to govern. Phi Beta Iota persists in believing that Barack Obama could be the George Washington of the 21st Century, but he MUST find his own voice and a new set of advisors that combine strategic vision, integrity, and loyalty to the Constitution over the partisan crime family.
Obama, according to Wall Street people who regularly deal with his economic and budget officials, is acting as if he has a blank check to do what he wants, while ignoring the longterm costs of his policies.
When I was working on my book Soft Despotism, Democracy's Drift, I read a work that Walter Lippmann, the co-founder of The New Republic, published in 1937. In it, with an eye to the New Deal, he observed that, while
the partisans who are now fighting for the mastery of the modern world wear shirts of different colors, their weapons are drawn from the same armory, their doctrines are variations of the same theme, and they go forth to battle singing the same tune with slightly different words. . . .
The largest study of its kind has unexpectedly concluded that smoking marijuana, even regularly and heavily, does not lead to lung cancer.
. . . . . . .
While no association between marijuana smoking and cancer was found, the study findings, presented to the American Thoracic Society International Conference this week, did find a 20-fold increase in lung cancer among people who smoked two or more packs of cigarettes a day.
We are fascinated to see Mort Zuckerman bidding against Bloomberg the company for Business Week. He spoke to OSS '96 to great effect, and with Paul Strassmann has been one of our most dynamic speakers “jacked in” to the real world with real world bottom-line seriousness.
We admire all parties concerned, along with TIME Magazine and Forbes, and we dare to hope that whoever wins, they might try Systems Design & “Reverse Innovation,” two elements of this week's Business Week as issued in Europe.
