Author: Spencer Ackerman

Roll Call reports:

Sen. Joe Lieberman (ID-Conn.) announced Monday that he plans to introduce legislation to repeal of the military’s “don’t ask, don’t tell” policy.

“I will be proud to be a sponsor of the important effort to enable patriotic gay Americans to defend our national security and our founding values of freedom and opportunity,” Lieberman said in a statement, noting that he has opposed the policy since it was implemented in 1993 under President Bill Clinton.

“To exclude one group of Americans from serving in the armed forces is contrary to our fundamental principles as outlined in the Declaration of Independence and weakens our defenses by denying our military the service of a large group of Americans who can help our cause,” Lieberman said.

Good for the Connecticut senator who often appears to govern principally in the interests of getting liberals’ goats. He’s going against his friend Sen. John McCain (R-Ariz.) on this and backing Adm. Michael Mullen, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff. As it happens, Gen. David Petraeus, the commander of U.S. troops in the Middle East and South Asia, declined to give his personal view on repeal to David Gregory, but backed the process designed to remove “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell” in a minimally disruptive way — and hinted that he’s pretty much in favor of it:

GREGORY: Do you think soldiers on the ground in the field care one way or the other if their comrade in arms are gay or lesbian?

PETRAEUS: I’m not sure that they do. … You heard Gen. Powell who was the chairman when the policy was implemented, had a big hand in that, who said that yes, indeed, the earth has revolved around the sun a number of times since that period 15 months ago. You have heard a variety of anecdotal input. We have experienced certainly in the CIA and the FBI — I know, I served, in fact, in combat with individuals who were gay and who were lesbian in combat situations. Frankly, you know, over time you said, hey, how’s this guy shooting or how is her analysis or what have you?

Speaking of Afghanistan, the Dutch government has become the first to fall over the Afghanistan war after the Labour Party walked out of a governing coalition to reject NATO’s entreaty to keep Dutch troops in the war effort. The Financial Times:

Dutch withdrawal will be a psychological blow to the alliance and might set the tone for other nations seeking to minimise their involvement at a time when Barack Obama, the US president, has been lobbying Nato members to provide more troops for operations in Afghanistan. The Dutch pull-out will make it harder for Canada, for example, to reverse its decision to withdraw from Nato’s International Security and Assistance Force (ISAF) before the end of 2011.

[Prime Minister Jan Peter] Balkenende said, in an interview on Dutch television: “When President Bush asked us to extend our activities we said yes and when President Obama, who has a lot of support in the Netherlands, made such a request, we say no.”. The prime minister said he was worried that the move could damage Dutch influence in international bodies like Nato and the Group of 20.

Beyond even the Afghanistan war, the Dutch collapse may be the first major setback for the Obama administration in Europe, where foreign publics tend to rate President Obama fairly highly. And the beneficiary of the collapse, according to the FT, may be a far-right Islamophobic and immigrant-bashing party firmly against the Afghanistan war.

I’ll have more on this later today.

As the extensive NATO/Afghan campaign to take the Helmand Province regions in and around Marja — home to an estimated 75,000 Afghans– away from the Taliban enters its second week, NATO is emphasizing the steps its taking to provide for Afghan civilians. A New York Times report on Saturday played up opinion polling NATO conducted to gauge opinion of the locals. And The Wall Street Journal has an eloquent account of a Marine captain repeatedly delaying an air strike on insurgents planting roadside bombs out of fear that the attack will kill children. But anxieties among the populace are increasingly visible to reporters on the ground — to be expected in war, certainly, but an additional challenge for a mission predicated on protecting civilian lives.

The Times’ C.J. Chivers:

All the while, in northern Marja, the fighting grinds on at a pace of several firefights a day — a climate that has displaced many civilians and kept others hiding inside. Abdul Ajahn, an elder here, voiced a lingering fear.

“If the Taliban shoots from that side, and you are on this side, and I am in between?” he said to the Marines at a meeting arranged by a commander and local elders over the weekend. “Then I am sure you will shoot me.”

The Wall Street Journal’s Michael Phillips follows Marines through a Marja marketplace:

At the bazaar on Monday, shopkeepers asked passing Marines when they would get compensation for broken locks, crushed display stands and other damage. Mr. Khan sought compensation for his prize Jersey cow, who produced 40 kilograms of milk a day before the troops shot her during a firefight, he said.

“It’s going to be a few stressful months trying to satisfy people and convince them we’re here to help,” said Cpl. Douglas Woltz, a 25-year-old from Hampstead, Md.

The colonel describes the locals he has met as “very pragmatic and stoic,” but not yet friendly. Some Marjah residents say they fear both the Taliban and the troops—and they still resent the way government officials trampled on tribal traditions in the past.

None of this is aided by a NATO airstrike that killed “at least” 27 civilians in southern Afghanistan several hundred miles from the fighting. Nor by a NATO announcement that getting development aid into Marja is “progressing slowly due to ongoing resistance by the insurgents”:

There has been an increase in displaced persons with 542 families registering yesterday. The local government has provided assistance and relief to approximately 1,430 people. Out of all those registered, five families have requested shelter since the clearing operation began. RC-S is looking at ways to facilitate the delivery of aid to address UN concerns of a lack of food and water in Marjah. The Government of the Islamic Republic of Afghanistan, Helmand Provincial Reconstruction Team, Manoeuvre Enhancement Brigade and others are working together to establish how further assistance can be delivered within Marjah.

The longer the aid takes to arrive, the more difficult it will be to persuade the people of Marja that a capable and concerned Afghan government, backstopped by NATO, is in their interest. The Los Angeles Times runs a story that raises doubts whether the so-called “government in a box” described by Gen. Stanley McChrystal, commander of NATO forces in Afghanistan, is actually prepared to deliver for the locals. Combined with Gen. David Petraeus’ confirmation yesterday on ‘Meet The Press’ that the campaign plan is to export a stable security situation with capable governance and development from Marja east into Kandahar and beyond over the next 18 months, Marja is already shaping up to be a proving ground for the realism of NATO’s promises.

Stuart Bowen testifies before Congress on Iraq reconstruction in 2007. (Mark Murrmann/ZUMA Press)

Just as the U.S. government’s Iraq reconstruction watchdog formally unveils a proposal to revamp the integration of civilian and military activities in combat zones, opposition from the State Department and the Pentagon threatens to scotch the whole effort.

Image by: Matt Mahurin

When he testifies Monday before the congressionally created Commission on Wartime Contracting, Stuart Bowen, the U.S. Special Inspector General for Iraq Reconstruction, will present his solution for the poor coordination, planning and policy implementation among U.S. diplomats, aid workers and military personnel he has documented in Iraq since 2004. Bowen proposes the creation of a new agency, known as the U.S. Office for Contingency Operations and jointly answerable to State and Defense, to be responsible for organizing and implementing civilian diplomatic, development and reconstruction efforts and interfacing with the military during stabilization and reconstruction operations. First reported by The Washington Independent in November, Bowen’s so-called USOCO proposal, the product of months of effort by him and his deputy Ginger Cruz, will be printed Monday and delivered to every member of Congress by Tuesday.

There’s only one problem. The two departments to which USOCO would report are both against the idea.

In formal responses appended to the USOCO paper, two senior administration officials praise Bowen’s effort and endorse his diagnosis that civilian and military efforts in stabilization and reconstruction missions suffer from an ad hoc planning and implementation structure, saying he “correctly identifies under-funding [and] lack of capacities” within State and the U.S. Agency for International Development as a key weakness. But both reject USOCO as a solution. Undersecretary of Defense for Policy Michele Flournoy writes that the problem is “one of capacity and not of structure” and observes that congressional support for a restructuring “in today’s fiscally constrained environment seems unlikely.”

Deputy Secretary of State Jack Lew, presenting State’s lengthy formal response to USOCO, pledges to Bowen that the USOCO proposal will receive “full consideration” from an ongoing State Department and USAID comprehensive review of development and diplomacy known as the QDDR. But he says Bowen’s fix is “problematic on several fronts,” and that USOCO would take too much policymaking responsibility away from the Secretary of State and the department’s regional bureaus.

While the State Department’s formal response to Bowen embraces some of his specific proposals to bolster civilian planning and budgeting authorities for stabilization operations, it suggests that the current Afghanistan campaign, which “far surpasses previous examples of civilian input into military planning,” already shows that State and Defense can cooperate successfully, even on an ad hoc basis. State denies the need for new institutional structures like USOCO for improving such coordination and chides the focus on stabilization and reconstruction operations as “an overly narrow view of the challenges that face U.S. foreign policy over the coming years.”

Bowen, in an interview with TWI, indicated that he will now pivot to selling USOCO on Capitol Hill. He said the fact that both Lew and Flournoy “specifically agreed with most of our targeted recommendations” in the paper provided an opportunity to convince Congress that existing bureaucratic structures are insufficient to deal with the problem. In addition to the Commission on Wartime Contracting hearing today, Bowen is scheduled to testify before the oversight subcommittee of the House Foreign Affairs Committee on Wednesday.

Image from "Applying Iraq’s Hard Lessons to the Reform of Stabilization and Reconstruction Operations (February 2010)" by Stuart Bowen.

“The core issue is this,” Bowen said. “There is no one entity responsible and accountable for stabilization and reconstruction operations. They are part of the missions of the departments of State and Defense, part of USAID’s mission, and the missions of the departments of Treasure, Agriculture and Justice, among others, but there is no central point of planning and management, and that bred the problems of poor coordination and weak integration we’ve encountered” in Iraq and Afghanistan.

It is unclear where the White House stands on the issue. Gayle Smith, the National Security Council senior director for global development and humanitarian affairs, is said to be skeptical of USOCO, but White House officials would not comment.

But USOCO still has a number of high-profile supporters. In the USOCO proposal, Bowen cites the endorsement of retired Lt. Gen. Brent Scowcroft, the national security adviser to President George H.W. Bush, and Spike Stevenson, the former top USAID official in Iraq. And in an interview last month, Ryan Crocker, the well-respected former ambassador to Iraq during the 2007 troop surge, also said that existing bureaucratic structures were insufficient to handle stabilization and reconstruction missions. “The current situation requires a perpetual reinventing of wheels and a huge amount of effort by those trying to manage contingencies,” Crocker told TWI.

Bowen, who has earned bipartisan plaudits on Capitol Hill for years by identifying millions of dollars in wasted or poorly managed Iraq contracts, intends to test Flournoy’s proposition that Congress will have no appetite for the big bureaucratic overhaul USOCO represents. In addition to the hearings this week and the formal publication of the proposal, he is pushing USOCO to key members of Congress, including the leaderships of the House and Senate foreign affairs and armed services committees, as well as the Senate Government Reform and Homeland Security Committee.

“Resistance does not mean end of the argument, it just means we continue,” Bowen said. “This issue is still very much in flux.”

photo by iafrancevi (detail)

Jon Landay has a very good piece about Gen. McChrystal overruling his officers’ judgment in eastern Afghanistan about closing two remote military outposts that “were worthless and too costly to defend.” An official investigation into a deadly insurgent attack on one of them last fall ignored McChrystal’s role in the decision and appears to hang out to dry the colonel and the lieutenant colonel who wanted the bases shuttered. That’s wrong and can’t be allowed to happen. But McChrystal’s judgment in this case appears to be on the continuum between defensible and solid.

Here’s why McChrystal kept the bases in Nuristan Province open:

Nuristan Gov. Jamalluddin Badr pressured the United States publicly and privately to keep troops in Barg-e Matal to prevent the village from falling to the Taliban before Afghanistan’s Aug. 20 presidential election. The two U.S. defense officials said McChrystal’s decision to keep the outpost there open until the local militia was trained was intended to help Badr survive the political fallout had insurgents captured the village after an American withdrawal.

“Everyone knew why we were in Barg-e Matal,” one U.S. defense official said. “McChrystal . . . was not in favor of pulling out because of the political ramifications.”

Now, perhaps Governor Badr was just saving his ass. But perhaps he was also legitimately concerned with keeping Barg-e Matal out of the Taliban’s hands. Either way, here’s the governor of an Afghan province expressly asking the U.S. to delay redeployment — McChrystal has explicitly ordered remote outposts closed so as to focus on population centers — because of the prospect of Taliban infiltration, something that happens quite a lot in eastern provinces bordering Pakistan.

Say you’re McChrystal. You’re working on a campaign plan predicated on convincing the Afghan people their material needs — security, government services, economic activity, justice — will be secured by an Afghan government for now backstopped by NATO forces. That’s the heart of everything you will do in Afghanistan. You recognize that a move away from an ineffectual counterterrorism basing posture requires closing bases that aren’t in and around population centers. But an Afghan governor comes to you and says to hold off on closing one, just for a few months, so as not to give the Taliban the run of the place. Your commanders in the area say the base isn’t defensible. Their judgment can’t be ignored. But what will it mean for the broader objectives of the campaign if you ignore the Afghan governor and leave him and Barg-e Matal to its fate? Why will the Afghans, who’ve been let down so much by empty American promises, read that move as anything other than the U.S. viewing its peoples’ lives as more precious than theirs?

I’m not saying this is an easy call. I am not qualified to assess the defendability of a combat outpost and so I defer to Col. George and Lt. Col. Brown. I have been to a combat outpost in Paktia Province manned by a single cavalry troop that made me, in my very inexpert judgment, worry about its exposure to assault. And if there’s a decision made to keep the bases open, it’s more than legitimate to ask whether they could have been reinforced — and if so, why they weren’t (as they apparently weren’t).

But this is the sort of war where the perceptions of the Afghan people, as McChrystal famously said in his confirmation hearing, are strategically decisive. (That’s why it’s encouraging and not embarrassing that NATO polled the residents of Marja before Operation Moshtarek.) You obviously can’t protect everywhere. But there really is strategic value, if not uncomplicated value, to listening to Afghan officials when they ask you to keep a prophylactic presence against the Taliban, if only for a little while and however complicated by the prospect of a looming election. This is a judgment call. But it reflects favorably on the commander’s judgment that he prioritized his support for the Afghans when he made it.

Apparently a direct result of the interrogation of captured deputy Afghan Taliban commander Mullah Abdul Ghani Baradar:

Police in northwest Pakistan arrested Mulvi Kabir, one of the top 10 most wanted Taliban leaders and a former Taliban governor of Afghanistan’s Nangahar Province, Fox News reported on its website Sunday.

The network, citing two unnamed senior US officials, said that Pakistani police captured Kabir in the Naw Shera district of Pakistan’s Northwest Frontier province.

The capture is a “significant detention,” a senior US military official in Afghanistan told Fox.
Information leading to Kabir’s capture was obtained from Mullah Baradar, the Taliban?s second in command, whose arrest was announced on February 18 following a joint US-Pakistani operation, according to Fox.

And to think, the Los Angeles Times reported yesterday that some U.S. officials are concerned that the Pakistanis aren’t getting Baradar to talk. Meanwhile, Pakistan launched jet strikes on insurgent positions in South Waziristan as well.

Dear Ms. Cheney,

I don’t know if you saw ‘Meet The Press’ this morning, but a general you may have heard of named David Petraeus — he’s the commander of U.S. forces in the Middle East and South Asia and is the most distinguished Army general since Colin Powell — graced your television. He was asked about whether the U.S. ought to torture Mullah Abdul Ghani Baradar, the deputy commander of the Taliban, recently captured in Pakistan. “I have always been on record, in fact since 2003, with the concept of living our values,” Petraeus replied. Every time the U.S. took what he called “expedient measures” around the Geneva Conventions, those deviations just “turned around and bitten us on our backside.” The effect of torture at Abu Ghraib is “non-biodegradable,” he continued, and boasted that as commander of the 101st Airborne in Iraq, he ordered his men to ignore any instruction to use techniques outside the Army Field Manual on Interrogations. Besides, the non-torture techniques that manual has long instructed? “That works,” he said. “That is our experience.”

But hey. You’re a former deputy assistant secretary of state! You obviously know better than the man who implemented the surge in Iraq. Why don’t you enlighten Gen. Petraeus about all the glories of torture? And since you consider “enhanced interrogation” so necessary to secure the country, perhaps there’s a full-page ad you’ll take out in a major newspaper?

Cordially,
Spencer

The Justice Department’s Office of Professional Responsibility released its report on professional misconduct over torture authorized by ex-Justice officials John Yoo, Steve Bradbury and Jay Bybee today, and the results aren’t so good for them. While they avoided a formal recommendation for disbarment, Justice Department ethics officials found that Yoo “committed intentional professional misconduct” and Bybee “committed professional misconduct” in such authorization. (OPR rejected that conclusion, but still harshly criticized the legal judgment displayed by Bradbury, Bybee and Yoo.) And here’s just one example of how.

Recall that it came out last year that in a classified August 2002 memoranda, Yoo and Bybee approved such tortures to captured al-Qaeda detainee Abu Zubaydah as placing insects inside a “confinement box” along with the detainee, who was to be led to believe the insects were poisonous. They concluded such a move wouldn’t be torture. Here’s a snippet of how they reached such a conclusion. They use the bizarre nickname “Boo-Boo” for Abu Zubaydah:

On June 30 [2002], Yoo asked [NAME REDACTED] by email, “[D]o we know if Boo-boo is allergic to certain insects?” [NAME REDACTED] replied, “No idea, but I’ll check with [NAME REDACTED]” Although there is no record of a reply by [NAME REDACTED] the final version of the classified Bybee memo included the following, “Further, you have informed us that you are not aware that Zubaydah has any allergies to insects.”

These were grown men sworn to uphold the law.

Both Yoo, now a Berkeley law professor, and Bybee, a federal judge, object to several findings listed in the report.

Update, 7:48 a.m., Feb. 20: My apologies for a hasty initial misread. Justice Department ethics officials found that Yoo and Bybee were professionally negligent, but OPR itself — while still treating their work harshly — found their misconduct didn’t rise to that standard.

Greg Sargent finds a plum for liberals inside a new CNN poll.

As you know, the police and FBI agents always inform suspects of their constitutional right to remain silent and to have a lawyer present during any questioning. Do you think law enforcement officials should or should not follow this practice for people who are suspected of attempting to commit an act of terrorism?

Should 56%
Should not 43%

What’s more, 65 percent of respondents say the FBI was right to Mirandize Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab, the would-be bomber of Northwest Airlines flight 253.

As Greg points out, the poll is hardly pure sunshine for the Obama administration, since 59 percent want Abdulmutallab tried in a military court. (The poll doesn’t mention the exponentially greater success rate for civilian prosecutions of terrorists.) But, he concludes, “The above numbers about Mirandizing suggest that it’s possible for Dems to win an argument about national security. The White House has mounted an extremely agressive pushback on its decision to Mirandize terror suspects, and the above numbers suggest the White House may be winning this particular dispute.”

Starting on Sept. 1, when combat troops depart Iraq and 50,000 training/advisory troops remain, the war once known as Operation Iraqi Freedom will become Operation New Dawn. The name change will “recognize our evolving relationship with the Government of Iraq,” Defense Secretary Robert Gates writes to Gen. David Petraeus, commander of U.S. troops in the Middle East and South Asia.

The symbols are less important than the actual withdrawal, which will be completed in December 2011. But one bit of trivia: Operation Iraqi Freedom was so named because of an effort to tie it to what used to be known as the War on Terror in Central Command’s context. The Afghanistan war had been dubbed Operation Enduring Freedom, so Centcom under former commander Tommy Franks thought of calling the Iraq war Operation Desert Freedom, since all Centcom’s previous Iraq operations — Desert Shield, Desert Storm, Desert Fox — had “Desert” in the title. But then someone thought that the rest of the Arab world would take “Desert Freedom” to mean “The Americans are invading here next” and thought better of it. Operation Iraqi Freedom it was.

This arrest doesn’t appear to be anywhere near as important as the last several. Nor was this individual captured in Pakistan. But this is the latest news from Operation Moshtarek in Afghanistan, courtesy of a NATO press statement emailed to reporters:

A joint Afghan National Security Force (ANSF) and International Security and Assistance Force (ISAF) patrol detained a Taliban commander involved with improvised explosive device (IED) manufacturing and planning Taliban attacks, Wednesday in Helmand province.

After identifying the vehicle in which the Taliban commander was travelling south of Wushtan village in Helmand’s Sangin district, ANSF and ISAF forces captured the primary suspect and two associates, without firing a shot.

In addition to detaining the suspects, a search of the vehicle yielded 143 military grade detonators.

I dunno. NATO press releases typically call alleged Taliban suspects “commanders.” And why would a commander’s vehicle have so many detonators? That would appear more like foot-soldier behavior. On the other hand, maybe ISAF is right and this is another commander taken in.

Sam Stein catches up to the former Attorney General at CPAC:

In an interview with the Huffington Post at the Conservative Political Action Conference, the former Bush administration official said that there are “a variety of tools that ought to be available to an administration” in its efforts to curb terrorism and bring terrorists to justice.

Asked specifically about holding civilian trials for terrorists, he said such a venue “has use and utility.”

When asked how to distinguish whether to use a military tribunal system or criminal courts for terrorist suspects, Ashcroft said: “It depends on the circumstances.”

Of course, Ashcroft prevented the Bush White House from circumventing the Justice Department’s certification that blanket surveillance in the name of counterterrorism was illegal, so you know he’s a squish.

First she exposes her ignorance on interrogations at CPAC. Now this:

“There is no polite way to put this: Obama’s incompetence is getting people killed.”

Being as charitable as one possibly can to Ms. Cheney, let’s say that the 13 people killed by Nidal Malik Hasan were President Obama’s fault. Just grant that to her. If that’s the way she wants it, the administration she and her father served allowed 3,000 Americans to die on 9/11, and another 4,000 to die in Iraq for a pointless and unrelated war. That doesn’t count the untold tens, if not hundreds, of thousands of Iraqi civilians who died in that conflict, nor those tortured and wounded. Who’s incompetent, again?

Meanwhile, the people actually getting killed by President Obama sure seem to belong to al-Qaeda and the Taliban.

A great piece in The Washington Post gives real reason to believe that the apparently-torrid pace of arrests in Pakistan of Afghan Taliban leaders is the result of a real strategic shift by Pakistani leadership that cultivated and then tolerated the Taliban for years. The arrest of deputy Taliban commander Mullah Abdul Ghani Baradar was planned for weeks, the result of increased integration — particularly with regard to surveillance technology — between the U.S. and Pakistani intelligence apparatuses. And that, in turn, was the broader result of the Obama administration’s year-long effort to convince the Pakistanis that it would cater to their interests, not merely expect Pakistan to cater to America’s. The Post:

Pakistan’s decision to go after the Afghan Taliban leadership reflects a quiet shift underway since last fall, said officials from both countries, who cited a November letter from President Obama to Pakistani President Asif Ali Zardari as a turning point.

The letter, which was hand-delivered by U.S. national security adviser James L. Jones, offered additional military and economic assistance and help easing tensions with India, a bitter enemy of Pakistan. With U.S. facilitation, the Indian and Pakistani foreign ministers have agreed to meet next week, the first high-level talks between the two countries since terrorist attacks in Mumbai in late 2008.

The letter also included an unusually blunt warning that Pakistan’s use of insurgent groups to pursue its policy goals would no longer be tolerated.

That Barack Obama sure doesn’t know how to deal with terrorism, does he?

Update: Although maybe that Baradar capture wasn’t quite so thoroughly planned…

Over at CPAC, TPM’s Christina Bellantoni caught up with Liz Cheney and elicited this response to a question about the recent capture of Taliban deputy commander Mullah Abdul Ghani Baradar:

I worry though when we capture these leaders that we no longer have the option of using any of the enhanced interrogation techniques because the president took those off the table. When you’ve got people in captivity we’d like our CIA officials in particular to have the capacity to do more than just ask the terrorists to please tell us what they want.

I guess it’s not so surprising that a Cheney loves torture, but I don’t recall Liz Cheney being quite so explicit about her enthusiasm for torturing people. More significant is her presumption that only torture is effective in eliciting intelligence, which every experienced interrogator — Ali Soufan, Malcolm Nance, the people at the High-Value Detainee Interrogation Group — will tell her is the direct opposite of the truth. It would be interesting to hear her tell Gen. David Petraeus why the Central Command leader is wrong about the relationship between torture and success in counterinsurgency, to say nothing of Petraeus’ views on the relationship between torture and the moral fabric of America. No one who doesn’t have the last name Cheney or hasn’t ever depended on a Cheney for a position or a paycheck believes that Liz Cheney has more credibility on this subject than these individuals.

Sirajuddin Haqqani of the infamous Haqqani network — which, among other aspects of bloody rampage, took New York Times reporter David Rohde hostage — may have been hit in the latest drone strike in Pakistan, Newsweek reports. DNA evidence will ultimately determine if Sirajuddin, son of the longtime guerrilla leader Jalaleddin Haqqani, was in a car incinerated by a missile fired from a remotely piloted plane.

Given how soon this drone strike comes after Pakistan aided in the arrests of deputy Taliban commander Mullah Abdul Ghani Barader and another senior Taliban official, Newsweek adds:

It was not immediately clear why the Pakistanis appear to be cooperating much more than they had in the past. However, the Pakistani government has grown more and more concerned about the danger to its own stability from extremist forces it once thought it could control. Pakistani officials may also want a greater say in forging a political solution in Afghanistan once the U.S. offensive is over.

Perhaps one of the only big surprises in Gen. Stanley McChrystal’s December congressional testimony was his disclosure that the Taliban pays its soldiers about $300 per month, less than what the U.S.-sponsored Afghan government pays. According to Maj. Gen. David Hogg, the deputy commander for training Afghan soldiers, it’s still true. While a recent increase in Afghan soldiers’ base pay has aided recruiting, Hogg told a blogger conference call this morning, the base pay is now roughly $165 per month — a little more than half of what the Taliban pay.

In response to a question from TWI, Hogg suggested that the discrepancy isn’t such a big deal, saying “We’re not in competition with the Taliban for pay.” Instead, the NATO training effort seeks to provide Afghan soldiers “with a pay level that lets them take care of their family,” which includes medical support and “a lot of other benefits, if you will.” (There’s also a combat-pay-like bonus structure, which provides $75 extra per month to Afghan soldiers in so-called “red” zones like Helmand Province.) Hogg didn’t specify how his command and the Afghan Ministry of Defense derived the amount of monthly base pay sufficient for an Afghan family, but said he heard a lot from Afghan soldiers about patriotism motivating their service, although he added, “Pay is important. We all know that.”

Whatever the pay structure sweet-spot, Hogg said that his command was on a “glide path” to increase the size of the Afghan National Army from 104,000 soldiers currently to 134,000 by Oct. 31. He had a lot of praise for the efficacy of the Afghans he’s seen who complete recently-expanded training programs. “These guys can shoot,” he said, though “what they lack is leadership.” Expanding the capabilities of Afghan commissioned and noncommissioned officers is accordingly a priority, Hogg said.

The Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty, simply put, is an international accord banning above-ground nuclear-weapons testing. Most of the world has embraced it, including every nuclear power except India. The two nuclear powers that have signed the treaty but have not ratified it are China and the U.S., which failed in 1999 to get the 67 Senate votes necessary for full ratification. Even still, the issue of ratification is academic: President George H.W. Bush ordered a halt to above-ground nuclear testing that has held to this day.

Today, Marc Ambinder previews Vice President Biden’s speech this afternoon on steps to implement the Obama administration’s nuke-free-world vision, a radical idea first embraced by such socialists as Ronald Reagan, and Marc’s preview contains this highlight:

Vice President Joe Biden will mount a stout defense of the Obama administration’s commitment to the nuclear test ban treaty today, vowing to pursue its ratification as part of its comprehensive non-proliferation and nuclear security agenda.

At the risk of stepping on Mike’s beat, Biden has been out in front in criticizing Senate dysfunction. Does he really think that in an election year a GOP minority that’s grown reflexively hostile to anything the administration proposes and which thinks it can retake the majority is going to work with him on this?

Last week, as violent protests marred the Iranian regime’s anniversary celebration, the Iranian government launched an effort at jamming the attempts of western broadcasters to report the disturbance. Deutsche Welle, the BBC and the Voice of America issued a statement condemning the censorship attempt. But Josh Rogin reports that the National Security Council had some misgivings about VOA joining the statement, initially telling Jeff Trimble — the executive director of VOA’s overlord, the Broadcasting Board of Governors — to hold back.

According to several emails sent from Trimble to several BBG staffers, the NSC first didn’t want the VOA to join the statement if it mentioned “jamming.” Later in the email chain, the NSC modified its position to object to the use of the term “intensified jamming.”

“NSC is ok with our confirming that jamming continues, they ask that we not say for now that it has intensified,” one Feb. 11 email from Trimble to several BBG staffers read.

Dan Austin, the president of VOA, acknowledged that changes had been made to the statement, but declined to discuss the NSC’s role. He said that the U.S. government should not be interfering with the BBG’s editorial content, but acknowledged that on the communications and policy side, the lines were less clear.

Also less clear is why the NSC objected to “jamming” but not “intensified jamming.” Representatives didn’t respond to Rogin’s request for comment.

At today’s White House press briefing:

White House press secretary Robert Gibbs told reporters Wednesday that Mullah Abdul Ghani Baradar, who was arrested earlier this month in a joint operation by CIA and Pakistani security forces, “is a big success for our mutual efforts in the region.”

He praised Pakistan for the capture, saying it is a sign of increased cooperation with the U.S. in the terror fight. Gibbs confirmed Baradar is being interrogated but wouldn’t divulge the results.

It must have taken Herculean restraint not to call out Republicans for failing to capture such a senior Taliban official when they were in power.