Befitting this blighted world, Goldsmith endeavors to find some pragmatic ways out of the terrorism detentions stalemate. Among his basic tradeoffs: keep Guantanamo open and lose the military commissions.

A couple days ago I was on the phone with my friend and occasional Afghanistan sparring partner, Michael Cohen, and the subject of corruption came up. Michael pointed me to a really pungent quote I had missed, from an anonymous Obama official in a Times story: “Fighting corruption is the very definition of mission creep.” It’s easy to see why: what in the world does Afghan government corruption have to do with disrupting, dismantling and defeating al-Qaeda? Indeed, Anthony Cordesman has a really thought-provoking CSIS paper pointing out that one of the most structurally corrupting influences in Afghanistan is the presence of massive amounts of foreign (read: U.S.) cash that vastly exceed the country’s absorbtive capacity.

Leave it to Josh Foust to tease out the implications of some of my reporting better than I did. Not only is ISAF re-highlighting its (apparently) civilian-casualty-free airstrikes, but it’s also letting the public know more about special-forces activity than it (I gather) ever has. Last month, Gen. Petraeus shared with me some rather detailed information about 90 days in the life of Special Operations Forces, including how many insurgents and insurgent leaders they had killed and captured. The AP’s rock-star war correspondent, Kimberly Dozier, takes a look at the data and assesses that Petraeus is releasing the material in order to convince people the war is going well.

To be clear: We should never do something or not do something based solely on the degree of enthusiasm exhibited by the bin Ladenist conspiracy theorists. And those who object to Cordoba House based on are to be pitied and reasoned with in the spirit of comity and brotherhood, even if they won’t extend those sentiments to their fellow Americans.

I might not agree with the way Uncle Jimbo puts everything in this video about the counterterrorism utility behind a counterinsurgent focus on reducing civilian casualties, but he dispenses quite effectively with the canard that counterterrorism can be successfully divorced from a strategy that invests the local populace in Blue Team/White Hat advances.

Perhaps there’s a better way of doing that than a resource-intensive counterinsurgency strategy, but I’ve yet to hear one that persuades me.

Petraeus is Obama’s political insurance policy. Absolutely no one on the right will criticize the war while Petraeus is running it. The right’s only line of criticism on the war is that July 2011 is an ill-conceived deadline. But Petraeus backs the July 2011 “inflection point” on the condition that troop withdrawals after the date occur very slowly, and by picking Petraeus, Obama signaled his assent to that interpretation of his date. Still, Petraeus will testify on Tuesday, as he did last week, that he supports the date.

President Barack Obama has relieved Gen. Stanley McChrystal from his command of forces in Afghanistan and tapped Gen. David Petraeus to replace him.

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.

Kit Bond, who cares very much about not overstating threats. . . .

That Iraq withdrawal we elected in 2008?

Not gonna happen.