All About Oil

Residents of this onetime Taliban sanctuary [Marja] see signs that the insurgents have regained momentum in recent weeks, despite early claims of success by U.S. Marines. The longer-than-expected effort to secure Marja is prompting alarm among top American commanders that they will not be able to change the course of the war in the timePresident Obama has given them.

Firefights between insurgents and security forces occur daily, resulting in more Marine fatalities and casualties over the past month than in the first month of the operation, which began in mid-February.

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The Afghan government has assigned representatives to help deliver basic services to the population, but most of them spend their days in the better-appointed provincial capital 20 miles to the northeast.

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Gen. Stanley A. McChrystal, the top U.S. and NATO commander in Afghanistan, told officers here in late May that there is a growing perception that Marja has become "a bleeding ulcer."

  WaPo

Nearly nine years into the Afghan war, with the number of troops here climbing toward 100,000, the pace for air crews that retrieve the wounded has become pitched.

In each month this year, more American troops inAfghanistan have been killed than in any of the same months of any previous year.

  NYT

The top U.S. commander in Afghanistan said Thursday that the civilian-military offensive scheduled to begin in the southern city of Kandahar this spring would take months longer than planned.

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"There's no point in clearing an area until you have the capacity to do the hold, to bring governance" that does not now exist, one military official in Afghanistan said. "Without the Afghan government civilian capacity -- without a district government that can provide some basic services -- you'll end up with what we're experiencing in Marja right now."

  WaPo

In the last administration, he would have been canned for that assessment.

The Afghan government has not produced the civilian leadership and trained security forces it was to contribute to the effort, U.S. officials said, and the support from Kandaharis that the United States was counting on Karzai to deliver has not materialized.

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President Obama has said he will begin withdrawing U.S. troops from Afghanistan in July 2011.

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By June, more than 10,000 newly deployed U.S. troops were to begin clearing the Taliban from the outlying districts [of Kandahar], up to 80 percent of which the military estimates is controlled by insurgents.

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Gen. Stanley A. McChrystal, the top U.S. and NATO commander in Afghanistan, said Thursday […] the Kandahar operation has been pushed back until at least September.

Ooopsy.

Karzai's promises to stem corruption have yielded few results. Last week, he fired Interior Minister Hanif Atmar and intelligence chief Amrullah Saleh, two top cabinet officials whom the United States considered among the few who are competent and honest, in the culmination of long-running feuds with both.

Sometimes it's hard to keep your puppets in hand. They have a way of getting swelled heads and thinking they're in charge.

The Americans are reluctant to blame Karzai and his government directly for the delays in Kandahar. But the Marja experience, with troops fighting to provide political space for government officials who still have not appeared, taught them that their efforts must be matched by the Afghans.

Ah yes, the "Government in a Box."

"You've got to have the governance part ready to go," Brig. Gen. Frederick Hodges, one of the top U.S. commanders in southern Afghanistan, said in an interview last week. "We talked about doing that in Marja, but didn't realize how hard it was to do."

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[Gen. McChrystal] acknowledged that winning support from local leaders was tougher than expected.

When will they stop thinking that everything they want to do will be a cakewalk? How they long for the days of Mohammad Reza Shah of Iran.

As for Karzai's view point….

President Hamid Karzai has lost faith in the US strategy in Afghanistanand is increasingly looking to Pakistan to end the insurgency, according to those close to Afghanistan's former head of intelligence services. Amrullah Saleh, who resigned last weekend, believes the president lost confidence some time ago in the ability of Nato forces to defeat theTaliban.

  Guardian UK

Not completely dense then, is he?

Saleh's colleagues say that Karzai even accused the two men of a plot with the Americans and the British to wreck his peace plan.

That sounds like he's lost his faith in more than the strategy. Bye-bye Karzai.

The latest casualties yesterday took Nato's toll to 29 deaths in nine days, according to an AP count. The United States, whose some 94,000 troops vastly outnumber the rest of the allies' contributions in Afghanistan, has lost 17 service members since Sunday.

If you were to read a military report, however – say: June 12: This Week's Operational Update on Afghanistan you would think everything is coming along swimmingly. And regarding a wedding slaughter by suicide bomber last week, you would learn that when it's not us doing the slaughtering (47 at a July 2008 Afghan wedding – or 90 in a separate air strike in November of that year ), "These cowardly attacks against innocent civilians reflect the Taliban’s lack of vision for a peaceful, prosperous Afghanistan."

So the news out of Afghanistan is about what you might have been expecting. But there is a dropped sentence in that NYTimes article that I'd like to have fleshed out: "[Medics working rescue in Afghanistan] picked up two Marines bitten by their unit’s bomb-sniffing dog."