Afstan news

A good collection for today (my birthday) by milnews.ca at Milnet.ca. This one is disturbing--and may well be realistic about the least worst outcome (the headline is, however, a bit over-the-top):

British envoy says mission in Afghanistan is doomed, according to leaked memo
...
The allied governments should start preparing public opinion to accept that the only realistic solution for Afghanistan was to be ruled by "an acceptable dictator"...

And this just in:

...
The president received an Oval Office briefing from the top U.S. military commander in Afghanistan, Gen. David McKiernan, who said before the meeting that he needs more troops and aid quickly. The counterinsurgency, McKiernan said, could worsen before it gets better...

McKiernan said at the Pentagon earlier that stabilizing Afghanistan will require more than additional troops. It also will take strengthening the Afghan government, economy and its military and police forces, he said...

Bush thanked McKiernan for "your candid briefing" and said the general was assessing his troop needs.

At the Pentagon, McKiernan said he was encouraged by recent Pakistani military operations against insurgents waging cross-border attacks into Afghanistan. But he also said that it is too soon to tell how effective they have been.

He endorsed the suggestion by Afghan Defense Minister Abdul Rahim Wardak to try to create a joint force of Afghan, Pakistani and U.S. forces to secure what is a porous, mountainous, ungoverned border region.

"I think in the future I would certainly support the idea of combined patrolling along that border," said McKiernan. If it's handled the right way, he said he believes the Pakistanis would go along with the plan.

"There are mutual border security concerns that both the Afghans and the Pakistanis have," he said. "So the more we can work together to approach those concerns, the better off we all are."..

Update: An e-mail from Terry Glavin does a delightful forensic dissection of the Times story:

The Brit ambassador story: I've become increasingly dismayed by the decline in basic journalism standards at the good old Times of London. If I was still editing a college newspaper, I'd have sent back a story written this way and demanded a complete rewrite.

To start with, the screaming headline isn't even supported by the attention-grabbing lead paragraph, which isn't supported by the rest of the story, which unfolds in such a way as to slowly reveal that the "leaked report" is really just a translation of a report in a French weekly which purports to be an account by a French diplomat of something a British diplomat may or may not have said. That's tabloid territory. Disgraceful. And it is only in the last sentences that we read: "Although it is understood that the meeting between Sir Sherard and the French envoy to Kabul did take place, the version of events contained in the diplomatic cable is regarded in Whitehall as a 'parody' of what was said. The British side is particularly dismayed that they reportedly support a dictatorship in Afghanistan. Insiders insist these words were never uttered. There is a suspicion that the British position was deliberately 'exaggerated' to produce a version that Paris wanted to hear."

My guess is that the British diplomat expressed grave reservations about the emerging American strategy, owing to it having unreasonably elevated hopes on both sides of the party fence in the US elections, and the British are very suspicious about a simplistic send-more-soldiers approach. And you know what? It may well have been a perfectly sound critique, but thanks to the Times, we don't know, and now we may never know, since they bollocksed the story so badly you can be almost certain that the Times won't have easy access to the principals now.