Lindsey Graham hit the war default button yesterday on one of the Sunday shows, saying that the US should engage in military action against Pakistan for their relationship with the Haqqani network. The US has accused the network of a truck bomb attack on the US Embassy and NATO headquarters on September 13.

What is less known is that the Obama Administration reportedly threatened the same thing last week. They said that Pakistan must engage the Haqqanis or face unilateral action against them from the US.

Buried in with today’s news was this story about one of our secret wars, this time in Somalia. It appears that now we’re using African proxies to fight Al Shabab there.

There’s a lot of talk about defense budgets, and some internal squabbling between Congressional liberals and Leon Panetta over balancing cuts to the military with cuts to the safety net. But I think some of this misses the larger point, that the budget that needs to be put under control is the largely secretive one, the budget of the intelligence agencies. Because it’s pretty clear that warmaking capabilities are being moved out of the Defense Department and into covert ops.

In other words, the goal in Afghanistan is to attack safe havens in Pakistan. And that’s backed up by Spencer Ackerman’s reporting. There will be no movement of troops east, where the Taliban is dug in. Instead, the strategy will be “drones, drones, training Afghans, commando raids, and drones,” to quote Spencer. The mission has shifted to counter-terrorism, only with far more troops that you need for that mission (Sen. Coons didn’t see such a shift, but the refusal to go into the east is the tell). And the special ops forces, the JSOC guys, are being used to selectively take out Taliban to keep them at the negotiating table.

This is why the permanent bases are so important.

Senior Administration officials praised Panetta’s ability in running large agencies and managing large budgets, but there wasn’t any hint that he would somehow become this obsessive budget-cutter at Defense. I would ask the question: just how much did the CIA budget decrease over the past couple years?

President Barack Obama has signed a secret order authorizing covert U.S. government support for rebel forces seeking to oust Libyan leader Muammar Gaddafi, government officials told Reuters on Wednesday.

According to a big new story from New York Times’ Mark Mazzetti, David Petraeus signed a classified directive — the Joint Unconventional Warfare Task Force Execute Order — last September approving the deployment of small special operations teams to go into friendly (Saudi Arabia and Yemen) and unfriendly (Iran and Somalia) countries to collect intelligence.