afpak coin to bidenesque

bemusement settles o'er like a pale cast of thought upon learning that the ceefreakingeffarrr is now recommending that the US toss COIN altogether, go CT.  huh.  if i recall, blowhole joey biden was sayin' that shit  a year ago, back when 'bama was pondering afpak porridge: 20 thou, 30, 40, hmm, middle one's jus right. little one's too hot.  and the big one's ... too freaking hot too!  a grave decision, that pentagon demanded number, lower and upper bounds delineated.  and "no" is definitely not on the table.  otherwise, they just whack ya, where "whack" has a very broad meaning.  though he gets whacked all the time, if we know anything of obama, it is that he goes out of his way to avoid getting whacked some more.

biden, though, he said no to whatever stupid number of surge troops would supposedly save the afghan people.  go ct, coin is doomed, was pretty much biden's message.  dork.  as a fully-vested and studiously documented blowhard, biden was easily marginalized, if not outright ignored.  there was something remarkable in this, and little commented upon.  here was the vice president of a still freshman administration, taking a direct and opposing stance against the pentagon, and, as we witnessed, the white house and the president himself.  hardly a whiff of it was noticed.  everyone moved on to the greater carnage agenda, biden disappeared for quite some time, then started yakkin' bout healthcare.

looks like now, the estab wants to roll back on afpak and do a bidenesque ct op.  after the massive deployment, thirty billion and running, the rising ghoulishnss of us soldiers, the pitch of night special ops raids that take out pregnant women, the vile and corrupted contractor profiteering, the taxpayer funded corruption of the entire theatre, now the font of establishment fp wisdom says that the us ought to toss coin and go ct.  go ... what biden said a year ago.  it's all either a grand and brilliantly evil war scheme or the manifest blundering of nincompoops.  it's so hard to tell these days.

of course,  the afpak strat flop is largely an unseen one, as the political establishment focuses on the serious things, and there is nary a discouraging word about the american military mission in afghanistan.  hell, little word there's war on at all.  guess we'll find out when palin tweets it, or faces it, ... whatever those odd people do.  nyt will sure pick it up then, 'cause nyt wants -- needs -- desperately to be hip and on it.  and hip in american politics is whatever the fuck sarah palin is twittering.

doomed.

thought experiment

pose the question to this presumed presidential candidate and wannabe head of the american state,

what is your position on the recent Council on Foreign Relations recommendation that US military operations move from instituted counterinsurgency operations to dynamic counterterrorism operations in the afghanistan theatre?  

Normally in thought experiments, one is supposed to constructively imagine how the experiment proceeds.  in this case, however, i would prefer the question were posed live, so that we all might observe.  And definitely record.  because, frankly, i cannot imagine the answer.

okay, so not really a thought experiment.  fault tolerance error: deviation of variable "palin" exceeds 3 sigma.