December 08, 2009

Watch McChrystal's congressional testimony

Click to start stream

December 07, 2009

Pentagon announces the first of the Afghanistan surge troops

Today, the Pentagon announced the first of the 30,000-35,000 surge troops headed to Afghanistan. Secretary of Defense Robert Gates began working on the orders last week, he told PBS’ Jim Lehrer News Hour, on the flight back from the president’s speech at the United States Military Academy at West Point, N.Y. Dec. 1 where he announced the strategy. In all, the Pentagon announced 16,000 troops.

From the Marines, the three deployment groups:
 
Task Force 1st Battalion, 6th Marines, based out of Camp Lejeune,
N.C., with approximately 1,500 Marines, deploying before the end of December
2009
 
Regimental Combat Team-2, headquartered at Camp Lejeune, N.C.,
with approximately 6,200 Marines, deploying early spring 2010.
 
I Marine Expeditionary Force (Forward) headquarters from Camp
Pendleton, Calif., with approximately 800 Marines, deploying spring 2010.
 
These units will bring the total number of Marines deployed to Afghanistan
to approximately 19,500.

And for the Army:
lst Brigade Combat Team, 10th Mountain Division, Fort Drum, N.Y., with approximately 3,400 soldiers, deploying spring 2010. They are tasked with training Afghan security forces

In addition, another 4,100 combat support troops from several services, including military police will be deploying spring 2010.

UPDATE: Dear readers. A couple of my numbers were off by 200. I have corrected them. My apologies.

December 02, 2009

Rumsfeld's recollection of no Afghan troop requests appears faulty

Perhaps former Secretary of Defense Donald H. Rumsfeld might want to do some more research as he writes his memoirs about his service in the Bush administration.

Rumsfeld on Wednesday issued a rare statement disputing President Barack Obama's assertion in his West Point speech on Tuesday evening that the Bush administration rejected commanders' requests for additional troops for Afghanistan.

Calling Obama's claim a "bald misstatement," Rumsfeld indignantly declared: "I am not aware of a single request of that nature between 2001 and 2006."

Actually, U.S. commanders asked for an additional 2,000 Marines to help protect voters in Afghanistan's 2004 presidential and parliamentary elections. Rumsfeld approved the request, temporarily boosting the size of the U.S. force there at that time to about 15,000 troops.

A report issued last weekend by majority Democrats on the Senate Foreign Relations Committee said that Rumsfeld refused U.S. commanders' requests in December 2001 for U.S. troops to deploy on the mountainous Afghan-Pakistan border to prevent Osama bin Laden and his closest followers from escaping into Pakistan.

Instead, Rumsfeld and his top commander for the region, Army Gen. Tommy Franks, chose to rely on U.S. air power, ragtag Afghan militias and Pakistan's ill-equipped paramilitary Frontier Corps.

"On or around December 16, two days after writing his will, bin Laden and an entourage of his bodyguards walked unmolested out of Tora Bora and disappeared into Pakistan's unregulated tribal area. Most analysts say he is still there today," said the report. "Rumsfeld said at the time that he was concerned that too many U.S. troops in Afghanistan would create an anti-American backlash and fuel a widespread insurgency."

For the most part, however, U.S. commanders knew better than to ask Rumsfeld for additional troops, aware that the Bush administration's priority was the 2003 invasion and occupation of Iraq, said a senior U.S. defense official who was involved in the Afghan war. He spoke to Nukes and Spooks on condition of anonymity because he was not authorized to discuss the issue publicly.

"It was clear that Iraq was the main effort and Afghanistan an economy of force mission," said the senior U.S. defense official. "Hence, resources would be allocated accordingly."

Asked about Rumsfeld's statement, White House spokesman Robert Gibbs said that Obama had been referring to a request made in 2008 for additional troops, and he called on Rumsfeld to explain, "whether he thinks that the effort in Afghanistan was sufficiently resourced during his tenure as secretary of defense."

We here at Nukes and Spooks are all ears.

December 01, 2009

Tracking Santa's flight

For our younger readers eager to track Santa’s progress, the North American Aerospace Defense Command (NORAD) has put out this website for you to follow his movements. You can also track him on Facebook, Twitter, YouTube and Flickr.

Santa trackers will begin answering phones and replying to email at 4:00 a.m. MST (6:00 a.m. EST) on Christmas Eve. Children of all ages can call the NTS toll free number 1-877-Hi-NORAD (1-877-446-6723) or send an email to noradtrackssanta@gmail.com. 

According to the website, starting on Dec. 24, children can watch Santa prepare his sleigh and reindeer. And for those of you interested in the history of NORAD tracking, here is the story, straight from NORAD’s press release:

The NTS program began on Dec. 24, 1955, after a phone call was made to the Continental Air Defense Command Operations Center in Colorado Springs, Colo. The call was from a local youngster who dialed a misprinted telephone number in a local newspaper advertisement. The commander at Cheyenne Mountain Air Force Station, Colo. who answered the phone that night gave the youngster the information requested – the whereabouts of Santa. This began the tradition of tracking Santa, a tradition that was carried on by NORAD when it was formed in 1958.
 
The NTS program has grown immensely since first presented on the Internet in 1998. The Web site receives millions of unique visitors from hundreds of countries and territories around the world. In addition, the NTS Operations Center will be occupied for 25 hours with over 1,200 volunteers on Christmas Eve, who will be receiving hundreds of thousands phone calls and emails from families around the world.
 
We look forward to helping you with NORAD Tracks Santa!
 
Enjoy!

November 30, 2009

When Obama didn't do during his Afghanistan deliberation

I was reading this piece over the weekend about Vice President Joe Biden and his role in the U.S. policy toward Iraq. Inside the magazine were several photos of the vice president in Iraq, including one we affectionately here at N&S call “the Paul Bremer look” –  when a pol goes to a war zone wearing a suit and combat boots. (Former CPA leader Paul Bremer first donned this look in 2003 while serving in Iraq; every politician since has adopted it. Indeed, it has become perfunctory.)

The piece reminded me that for all the time Biden has spent in Iraq, the president has yet to visit Afghanistan, even as he is about to deploy roughly 34,000 more troops there, in addition to the 21,000 he sent earlier this year. That is, for all the time the president spent deliberating, he never actually touched down on the ground and saw the mission for himself. He went once, in July 2008, when he was running for president, but not since.

Is this a good or bad thing? I can’t decide. On one hand, this trips are costly and largely vapid of actual fact finding. More then anything, they have become political missions. Yet, should the president visit a war zone before he doubles the number of forces going there? Readers, I kindly ask for your thoughts.

November 24, 2009

How much turkey does it take to feed soldiers on Thanksgiving?

465,000 pounds worth the Pentagon announced today in anticipation of the Thanksgiving holiday.

The Defense Logistics Agency is shipping that much turkey so that the 180,000 troops serving in Iraq and Afghanistan can experience the holiday.  In addition, the agency is sending 63,000 pounds of potatoes; 8,700 cans of cranberry sauce; 61,000 pounds of stuffing and 67,000 pies and cakes, Pentagon spokesman Geoff Morrell said Tuesday.

Having spent several Thanksgivings in either Iraq or Afghanistan, I can tell you the DoD also goes to great efforts to send thousands of decorations, some more, well, interesting than others. My personal favorite was a life-sized mermaid (in a mermaid ever came to life) cut out of butter in a chow hall in Tikrit, Iraq in 2007.

In addition, third-country nationals who serve the troops will don Thanksgiving-themed hats. Here is one of my favorite pieces about the modem military effort to bring Thanksgiving to the troops.

Alas, Happy Thanksgiving everyone, particularly to those serving overseas now. I know many of our readers, as they sit down Thursday for a meal with family and friends, will count your service to country among the many things they are thankful for this year.

November 20, 2009

Has the Obama administration begun the sales pitch for its new Afghan policy?

When an administration changes its stance on something, it often does so subtlety. After all, who wants to boast of  changing his or her mind, which suggests that he or she might have been wrong at one point? So when an administration wants to change its position on something, it sends key policymakers out to start telegraphing the change in their talking points. They tweak a sentence or the official  answer to a commonly-asked question in a way that only those who follow the issue closely are likely to catch. Usually, a coterie of policymakers working on the same issue alter their wording about an issue at around the same time.
 
Our friends in the intelligence community call this a "delta," from the mathematical symbol for change. If such tea leaf reading serves us well, Obama’s top national security advisors have begun tweaking their message on Afghanistan, and their latest remarks make it appear to us at Nukes and Spooks that President Barack Obama probably has decided to send thousands more troops there. After all, it doesn't make much sense to start making nice to Karzai if you're planning to tell him that you're not sending him any more troops even though the Taliban-led insurgency is gaining strength and territory and your top military commander there, Army Gen. Stanley McChrystal, has told you that he can't win without tens of thousands more troops.
 
Today, The Washington Post had what clearly was an authorized account of Secretary of State Hillary Clinton's visit with Afghan President Hamid Karzai. Until now, the administration made little effort to hide its disdain for Karzai, whose government is riddled with corruption and whose August (but not august) election was tarnished by charges of widespread fraud. It was no secret, for example, that both Vice President Joe Biden and special envoy Richard Holbrooke had butted heads with Karzai. The administration, however, knows that it cannot ask Congress and the American public to support sending more troops to train Afghan forces that would serve a government  the administration thinks is corrupt and incompetent.
 
Today, though, we started hearing the administration say that Karzai is showing some potential for change and improvement. He brought a list of goals to his meeting with Clinton, the Post was told. The administration apparently thinks he's redeemable now, despite the fact that, as my alert colleague Dion Nissenbaum reported from Kabul yesterday, one of Karzai's most tainted cronies, Uzbek warlord Abdul Rashid Dostum, was front-and-center at Karzai's second inaugural yesterday _ seated at the opposite side from Clinton. (Keen-eyed readers also will spot a slap or two or three at Holbrooke in the Post story, which quotes one of several unnamed U.S. officials saying, fairly enough in our view, that it was a mistale for Holbrooke to try to bully Karzai the way he once bullied Yugoslav President Slobodan Milosevic.)
 
Also yesterday, Secretary of Defense Robert Gates hosted his first press conference with reporters in weeks, and what he said sounded a bit like the bureaucratic equivalent of what the military calls "preparing the battlefield." The usually cautious secretary, a veteran of many years at the CIA who most recently was expressing uncharacteristically public anger at officials who leaked word of the president's plans for Afghanistan, spoke with some certitude that more American troops are going. Yes, he included the usual caveats to every statement he makes about the way ahead in Afghanistan, but they increasingly sounded like throwaways, formalities to make sure he didn't  upstage the president’s announcement.
 
Most notably, he said: "I anticipate that as soon as the president makes his decision, we can probably begin flowing some forces pretty quickly after that."
 
If more troops go to train Afghan forces, the assessment of Afghan readiness will be made on a province-by-province basis, Gates said. If the United States decides to deploy troops quickly, the military will have to work aggressively to set up logistics for them because of Afghanistan’s limited infrastructure, he said. And the secretary rejected a timeline for their service in Afghanistan, saying it depended on how far the Afghans are coming along.
 
A few weeks ago, Gates refused to entertain such questions because the deliberations were ongoing. He wasn't talking about what would happen when the announcement is made, but about the process itself.
 
“I believe the decisions that the president will make for the next stage of the Afghanistan campaign will be among the most important of his presidency, so it is important that we take our time to do all we can to get this right,” Gates told a group of Army officers last month, adding: “Speaking for the Department of Defense, once the commander in chief makes his decisions, we will salute and execute those decisions faithfully and to the best of our ability,” he said.
 
Simply put, Clinton and Gates didn't make those comments on their own. They were speaking on behalf of the Obama administration and how it's looking at Afghanistan. The signs suggest that thousands more troops may be sent to Afghanistan, and that the Obama administration, having concluded that bullying Karzai doesn't work, will now try to turn the flow of additional forces on or off in an effort to maintain pressure on Karzai to clean up his government's act. 

November 19, 2009

Army backs down, lets media into Palin event

Well, the Sarah Palin book tour is coming to some military bases.  It is not surprising since McCain/Palin ticket had large support from the military As such, fans are eagerly planninng to line up at Fort Bragg to get their copies of “Going Rogue” signed by the vice presidential candidate herself. The Army had announced that the media, however, could not cover the event.  We are now hearing they are planning to media in. Read the latest here.

According to this Associated Press report, the Army was going to keep the media out because it feared that the signing will turn into a political event, specifically an occasion for anti-Obama grandstanding.

My dear colleague, Erika Bolstad, pointed out to me that Palin is headed to Fort Hood on Dec. 4.  Here is what she wrote about it on her Facebook page about it: “I'm looking forward to seeing everyone in every stop on the tour, but I'm especially looking forward to meeting our brave men and women in uniform at Fort Hood. I'm joining the efforts of many others by donating my royalties from the book sales during our stop at Fort Hood to the families of the victims whose lives have been forever changed by the tragic events of November 5th. I am humbled to be able to join the larger effort called "Community Response to 11/5," which was established by the Central Texas-Fort Hood Chapter of the Association of the US Army (AUSA). You can read more about their great efforts here: http://www.forthoodausa.org/.”

I wonder how Fort Hood will handle her visit.

November 16, 2009

The SECDEF aka the Plumber

If you have been reading the coverage of the debate within the Obama administration about the way ahead in Afghanistan, you quickly noticed much of it hinged on unnamed sources. At the Pentagon, they were not hard to find…until now.

The military wants a decision about what to in Afghanistan as they feel is time is wasting away. Indeed, violence against Afghans and troops alike are at their highest levels of this eight-year war. And a resurgent Taliban is taking over large swaths of the country. Some feel the president is not properly supporting his top commander in Afghanistan, who has asked for thousands of troops.  And because the whole furtive deliberation only includes the top national security advisors, the environment had become ripe for leaking.

Sometimes, a leak would come out of the White House and the Pentagon would respond with a counter leak. Sometimes a military official would leak to get the commander’s viewpoint into the public discourse. The job of a journalist became sorting through the leaks and the leakers to determine what should be reported and why. You can read out breakdown of the leaks here.

But last week, Secretary of Defense Robert Gates announced that if he found out who in his building was leaking, it would be a “career ender.” He made the declaration while sitting in his plane en route to Osh Kosh, Wisc. At one point, he declared: “Everyone ought to just shut up.” He had little faith that we reporters traveling with him would report his comments. But we did. And the message had made its way into every hall of the maze that is the Pentagon.

Sources that eagerly talked to you now won’t. Sometimes sources volunteer they have nothing to say before you ask the question. Others are canceling appointments with reporters all together out of fear of being called a leaker by the secretary. 

But I can already feel the dam cracking as some officials are desperate to get their views out. Will this lock down hold until the president announces his decision? To really know, watch the stories coming out on this in the day ahead and see how many unnamed sources are in them. 

November 10, 2009

The facts on Fort Hood

Let me begin by saying I know how overwhelming the events at Fort Hood have been for all those who serve. The idea that someone, whatever his reasons, would shoot fellow soldiers hits the military like “a punch in the gut,” as so many soldiers have said to me. I understand that times like these are incredibly stressful for those tasked to get information out as quickly as possible. That said, I feel compelled as a journalist to explain to you, dear reader, why you have been hearing so many conflicting stats and details about the incident;  the Army’s effort to get details out on this event has been abysmal.

There is, as Maj. Gen Kevin Bergner, an Army spokesman, said Friday the inevitable “fog and friction” in the initial hours after an incident like this ,  and mistakes happen.  But the Army has gotten nearly every major detail about this incident wrong in the hours – and sometimes days – after Thursday’s shooting. Here are just the ones I have noticed:
1. Hasan’s survival: It took the Army five hours to correct an earlier announcement that the shooter was dead, even as the military said it had an investigator with him the whole time shortly after the shooting. Indeed, Lt. Gen. Robert Cone, the base commander, said his injuries were not life threatening.
2. Hasan’s name: Originally reported as Malik Nidal Hasan, the military did not correct it until hours later, Nidal Malik Hasan. The following morning, Fort Hood put out this press release that had his name mangled yet again.
3. Hasan’s deployment: The Army gave various reports about where Hasan was scheduled to be deployed, finally settling on Afghanistan. As late as yesterday, however, some in the Army were still saying he was headed to Iraq.
4.  The number of wounded: That figure has jumped from 31 in the morning after the incident to 42 today.
5. The ages of the wounded: Today, the military put out a list of the wounded. Unfortunately, a basic background check shows that most of the ages are wrong.
6. The investigation: It is not clear what kind of investigation the Army is conducting, who is in charge of it and when officials expect to get the results.

Moreover, it is hard to know where to go for information. Ask Walter Reed Army Medical Center and they direct you to the Pentagon; ask the Pentagon and they say ask Fort Hood; ask Fort Hood and they say call the Army. At that point, the Army will say it does not know.

That is all to say, as you read the coverage, you will likely notice that facts change days later. And I don’t think the reporters who cover this know how to fix it other than to make adjustments in story. But it all means it will take longer for the public to get any clarity on what exactly happened.