The story of the day on cable news is the combat troops leaving Iraq. MSNBC was trying to make it a sappy story about victorious troops coming home, but it felt hollow and forced. The Onion‘s coverage seems a bit more on-target.

Afghanistan is not Iraq.

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.

While this will probably lead to higher budgets, it also will make clear that US foreign aid is not a tool of US foreign policy, but national security. Afghanistan, Iraq, and Pakistan are the new normal.

For a long time, I have thought Obama has a particularly long to-do list. Steve Benen agrees with me:

Since then [April 2009] – in addition to the two wars, economic crises, and global flu pandemic — it’s been hard to keep up the pressing and immediate challenges on the Obama administration’s to-do list. We’ve seen natural disasters (Haiti’s earthquake, Nashville’s flooding, Oklahoma’s tornadoes), man-made disasters (the BP oil spill), default crises (Dubai, Greece, Ireland, Spain, Portugal), foreign policy crises (North Korea, Israel), and attempted terrorist attacks (Abdulmutallab on Christmas, Shahzad in Times Square).

I can only assume that it’s fairly common for President Obama to wake up, receive his morning briefings, and say, “You’ve got to be kidding me.”

Well, nobody made him run for president.

The cost of the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq is just about to hit $1,000,000,000,000 ($1 trillion). Al Qaeda spent $200,000 carrying out the 9/11 attacks. This means that for every $1 al Qaeda spent on 9/11, the US has spent $500 million fighting al Qadea, or about $30,000 per US citizen. I can’t think of a reasonable way to justify this expenditure.