Naheed Mustafa at Registan:

There’s a general sense here that a massive PR push is afoot, to make things look as good as possible to as many people as possible. There’s a drive toward “good news” stories, which isn’t necessarily a problem except that because there are so few, they take on a disproportionate importance. And no one denies these stories are a deliberate part of the media strategy. They’ll help immensely when Afghans are left to clean up the mess after the internationals are long gone and the world can shrug it off by pointing to the good news and saying Afghanistan was doing ok when we left.

Free Range International sees some good signs.

What’s missing from this press release? It says nothing about military spending in Afghanistan even though it is about 30 times greater than foreign aid and there is massive corruption involved with it. Lowey’s continued refusal to acknowledge that military spending is a major source of the problem is really unfair to USAID.

Today’s attack on the DAI compound in Kunduz is as an excellent example of the hypocrisy Rep. Nita Lowey (D-Hypocrisyville) demonstrated in her (unsuccessful) efforts to cut USAID funding to Afghanistan, but not military funding. The attack on the compound shows that aid workers are as much on the front lines of the war as is the military. Moreover, if it were not for the war, DAI would not be working in Kunduz. Lowey’s attack on USAID was not only hypocritical, it was demeaning to all of the people who are putting their lives at risk implementing USAID projects. Perhaps Lowey can reflect on this over the long weekend.

The Captain’s Journal has an excellent post on the myth and reality of the role of COIN in Iraq. To put it bluntly, the Marines were far less interested in winning hearts and minds than they were in destroying Al Qaeda in Iraq.

Bing West raises good points about pop-centric COIN:

• There was no state-building or pop-centric coin in Anbar Province where the Sunni Awakening began.
• The Sunnis came to the US for help; the US military did nothing to win their hearts and minds.
• “If NATO so alienates the population by accidentally killing civilians that many more join the Taliban, then why do the Taliban deliberately kill three times as many ordinary Afghans without causing three times the backlash, leading to their defeat?”

See Captain’s Journal for an excellent and detailed analysis, as opposed to my mediocre and short one.

Yeah, what she said:

Rep. Nita Lowey (D-NY), chair of the State & Foreign Operations Appropriations Subcommittee, announced that she would cut $4 billion requested for State Department and USAID funding for Afghanistan due to concerns about corruption…While the $4 billion in the fiscal year 2011 budget that Lowey wants to cut is no small amount of money, the 2011 Defense budget includes $138 billion for the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan…It’s taking the easy way out to use the money as a vehicle for criticizing the war, playing on misperceptions about the efficacy of foreign assistance, while not facing any pushback from scary Republicans who will tell them they don’t support our troops.