Battleland

Another Afghan War Expert Weighs In, Tet-a-Tet

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Afghan investigators inspect the body of an insurgent killed during Tuesday's attack in Kabul / Photo by Shah Marai / AFP / Getty Images

Tony Cordesman, the resident military èminence grise at the Center for Strategic and International Studies, starts out riffing more optimistically than ex-DIA analyst John McCreary on what the Kabul attack means for Afghanistan. But then he details a daunting laundry list of things going wrong that must be reversed — soon — if progress is to be made. Like McCreary, he also pulls out some Vietnam references, which drive folks in the Pentagon up their limestone walls.

Too much of what is coming out of the U.S. government on Afghanistan “increasingly is taking on the character of the daily press follies in Vietnam,” Cordesman says (echoing Battleland compatriot Mark Benjamin’s Tuesday post). “The level of realism that took place in official reporting during the initial period when the new strategy was adopted has been replaced by Vietnam-era business as usual.”

Full take here.