Administration officials are trying to make us forget that President Obama promised to start withdrawing troops from Afghanistan in July 2011, but that might not be so easy: Stan Greenberg suggests that continued escalation is likely to draw a primary challenge.

It’s startling to be reminded how long ago 9/11 was because our public figures keep talking about the Afghanistan War like it started last year. General Petraeus let us know back in February in a Meet the Press interview that we were just then getting “the inputs about right,” and were now “starting to see some of the outputs.” Nine years into this war, and Petraeus lets us know they’re just getting warmed up. Good God.

Bob Woodward’s inside-the-White-House books always provide scoops and provoke controversy and his new one, Obama’s Wars, is no different, but with one vital twist: It is less a look back than a look around. Readers don’t merely re-live or debate, say, a president’s decision to start a war – nothing much can change that – but how he is now conducting, even escalating, a conflict at a key moment. The book concludes with an Oval Office interview with President Obama less than three months ago.

The Washington Post dismisses concerns about the cost of the Afghanistan war on the grounds that it is less than 1% of US GDP. But the Post supports raising the Social Security normal retirement age, although the savings to the government from doing this would be less than 1% of US GDP.

Jasmine Farrier’s Congressional Ambivalence tackles a subject that is both classic and timely: delegation of policy choices to the President and the executive branch. Farrier analyzes delegation to the executive on military base closures, trade policy (“fast track”), and the “War on Terror”—the PATRIOT ACT, Iraq policy, Guantanamo, and surveillance wiretaps. She finds a recurring theme of ambivalence: expressions of reluctance before Congress cedes power, expressions of regret after the fact. But Farrier suggests that Congress nonetheless rarely reclaims power once it has been ceded to the executive, a point illustrated perfectly by the PATRIOT act.

This morning, Attackerman aptly skewered both the tone and the PR-heavy nature of the New York Times’ article on the evolving relationship between President Obama and Gen. David Petraeus.

But I couldn’t get past the substance, such as it was, in the story’s opening paragraphs.

Paul Street’s new book, The Empire’s New Clothes, closely examines the first year of the Obama administration, critically evaluating it within a context of strong liberal-Democratic support and fierce – even hysterical right-wing opposition. Barack Obama is seen very differently by Americans. Many see him as a symbol of how far America has come since the days of openly-supported racial segregation and the terroristic violence directed against the black community. Others see Obama as a dangerous “socialist/Marxist” who is threatening the American middle class and crippling future generations with “big government” and “unsustainable” debt.

The Pentagon’s public relations machine is working overtime these days trying to sell a theme of “progress” in Afghanistan to push back against calls to end the war. The message machine behind this push is gargantuan, costing $547 million and employing more than 27,000 people. But, as our latest Rethink Afghanistan video shows, all that wasted P.R. money can’t paper over the fact that the Afghanistan War isn’t making us safer, and it’s not worth the cost.

As government reaction grows against the whistleblower website Wikileaks, in the aftermath of the release of tens of thousands of Afghan War Logs, showing the real face of the Afghan war, a group of prominent activists has started up a petition to defend Wikileaks, and point out that it is the U.S. government that with the invasions and occupations of Iraq and Afghanistan that has “blood on its hands.” The article includes the full petition text.

Speaker Nancy Pelosi has told the Huffington Post she expects a “serious drawdown” of U.S. troops from Afghanistan in the summer of 2011. The House Rules Committee has now approved an amendment for consideration on the war supplemental that will allow Speaker Pelosi to “put her money where her mouth is.”