Out Come the Long Knives

" have been waiting for this; At Afghan outpost, Marines gone rogue or leading the fight against counterinsurgency. It was a matter of time before the losers in Washington DC and Kabul took their bureaucratic infighting public by leaking to the press. You send in the Marines, ask them to do a job nobody else has been successful doing, and what do they get? A shank in the back. My contempt for FOB-bound bureaucrats knows no limit, but at least the reporter presented a fair, easily understood accounting of the debate. Not so for my boy Dexter “call it in” Filkins of the New York Times, which I will get to in a minute. Check out this quote from the WaPo article on the Marines:

“We have better operational coherence with virtually all of our NATO allies than we have with the U.S. Marine Corps,” said a senior Obama administration official involved in Afghanistan policy.
Some senior officials at the White House, at the Pentagon and in McChrystal’s headquarters would rather have many of the 20,000 Marines who will be in Afghanistan by summer deploy around Kandahar, the country’s second-largest city, to assist in a U.S. campaign to wrest the area from Taliban control instead of concentrating in neighboring Helmand province and points west. According to an analysis conducted by the National Security Council, fewer than 1 percent of the country’s population lives in the Marine area of operations.”

Are you kidding me? Better operational coherence with NATO allies than our own Marine Corps? ISAF would rather have the Marines redeploy to assist in the upcoming campaign for Kandahar? Senior Obama Administration official airing out our dirty laundry to the press? Stand by for a rant:"
FRI

If you haven't already, read this.