Public Intelligence Blog

Afghanistan Journal

(PoliticsDaily.com)

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.