Now is the time to rethink your position on the war in Afghanistan.

President Obama managed to show just how nimble and how disingenuous an administration can be in his response to the WikiLeaks fiasco.

What does the story of a night raid in Wardak province tell us about the consequences of our war in Afghanistan?

One of the gems buried in Michael Hastings’ now ubiquitous Rolling Stone article is a senior adviser to General McChrystal thanking his lucky stars for public ignorance of the state of the war:

In the wake of General McChrystal’s firing, supporters of his counterinsurgency strategy have shifted to the blame game. Their target? US Ambassador to Afghanistan Karl Eikenberry. But is Eikenberry really at fault, or has he been right all along?

General Stanley McChrystal’s getting hit for switching up his plan to secure the city of Kandahar. So it feels like a response when he says that his responsibilities include “listen[ing] closely” to Afghans and “adapt[ing] constantly.”

Read Michael Cohen’s piece on this. You can see its antecedents in an exchange we had a couple weeks ago. So not to belabor the point, but if Michael wants to know why there isn’t more liberal outrage over Afghanistan — and by which he means more liberal institutional outrage, I gather — here are some suggestions that he doesn’t really get into.

Defense Secretary Gates wants to extricate himself and the president from the impending P.R. disaster shaping up around the flailing Kandahar operation set for this Fall. Also, ISAF and the Pentagon are now comically denying that they ever planned an “offensive” in Kandahar.

Simply put, the president’s continued troop increases aren’t working.

The problem in Afghanistan is not picking the right or wrong counterinsurgency strategy, but picking any military strategy at all.