Afstan and Obama's national security team

Good news:

President-elect Barack Obama picked a national security team headed by former campaign rival Hillary Rodham Clinton and Bush administration holdover Robert Gates on Monday, and said he wants to consult with military commanders before settling on a firm timetable to withdraw U.S. combat troops from Iraq...

Obama named Clinton, a New York senator, as secretary of state and said Gates would remain as defense secretary, a post he has held for the past two years.

At a news conference, the president-elect also introduced retired Marine Gen. James Jones as White House national security adviser..

Analysis:

As President-elect Barack Obama introduces his national security team on Monday [Dec. 1], it includes two veteran cold warriors and a political rival whose records are all more hawkish than that of the new president who will face them in the White House Situation Room.

Yet all three of his choices — Senator Hillary Rodham Clinton as the rival turned secretary of state [Ms Clinton on Afstan over a year ago]; Gen. James L. Jones, the former NATO commander, as national security adviser, and Robert M. Gates, the current and future defense secretary — have embraced a sweeping shift of priorities and resources in the national security arena.

The shift would create a greatly expanded corps of diplomats and aid workers that, in the vision of the incoming Obama administration, would be engaged in projects around the world aimed at preventing conflicts and rebuilding failed states. However, it is unclear whether the financing would be shifted from the Pentagon; Mr. Obama has also committed to increasing the number of American combat troops. Whether they can make the change — one that Mr. Obama started talking about in the summer of 2007, when his candidacy was a long shot at best — “will be the great foreign policy experiment of the Obama presidency,” one of his senior advisers said recently...

Mr. Obama’s best political cover may come from Mr. Gates, the former Central Intelligence Agency director and veteran of the cold war, who just months ago said it was “hard to imagine any circumstance” in which he would stay in his post at the Pentagon. Now he will do exactly that.

A year ago, to studied silence from the Bush White House, Mr. Gates began giving a series of speeches about the limits of military power in wars in which no military victory is possible. He made popular the statistic, quoted by Mr. Obama, that the United States has more members of military marching bands than foreign service officers...

Mr. Obama’s choice for national security adviser, General Jones, took the critique a step further in a searing report this year on what he called the Bush administration’s failed strategy in Afghanistan, where Mr. Obama has vowed to intensify the fight as American troops depart from Iraq. When the report came out, General Jones was widely quoted as saying, “Make no mistake, NATO is not winning in Afghanistan,” a comment that directly contradicted the White House.

But he went on to describe why the United States and its allies were not winning: After nearly seven years of fighting, they had failed to develop a strategy that could dependably bring reconstruction projects and other assistance into areas from which the Taliban had been routed — making each victory a temporary one, reversed as soon as the forces departed...

Or, as The Economist put it (I wonder what all those Obama-loving Canadian media and opposition politicians think):

Masters of war

Gen. Jones has been Commandant of the Corps and his last military post was as Supreme Allied Commander Europe (NATO's main operational commander) from 2003-2006. That was the period when NATO ISAF expanded out of Kabul to cover the whole of Afghanistan, so useful background there in seeing just how much NATO as an organization can do as the effort in Afghanistan moves forward.

And note this:

Only one American serviceman died in Afghanistan in November, a dramatic drop from earlier months that the U.S. military attributed to a campaign targeting insurgent leaders, an improvement in Afghan security forces and the onset of winter.

Twice this year, monthly U.S. death tolls in Afghanistan surpassed the monthly toll in Iraq, highlighting the differing trends in the two war zones; security in Iraq has improved while it has deteriorated in Afghanistan.

U.S. troops suffered an average of 21 deaths in Afghanistan each month this year from May to October, by far the deadliest six-month period in Afghanistan for American forces since the 2001 U.S.-led invasion. The Afghan Defense Ministry does not release fatality figures...

The last Canadian fatality in the country was on Sept. 7.

Update: For what it's worth, The Torch is noticed at SMALL WARS JOURNAL.