The caption says “Taliban score decisive points in the guerrilla war.” H/T Abu Muqawama.

Bibi and Obama were all smiles and handshakes yesterday, but there is lots of speculation that the tensions between the two administrations remain.

This sounds about right to me:

Obama is not convinced that Netanyahu is serious in his declared intentions regarding the process, and the Israeli premier is not confident that the current American administration is committed to maintaining the same relations with Israel as those held by its predecessors.

Of course, these are two sides of the same coin. If Netanyahu’s government was more serious about negotiating a two-state solution, the Obama administration wouldn’t be so annoyed with it. The reverse argument – that Obama is inherently anti-Israel – doesn’t hold.

Even though DC is quite hot in July, it is not going to seem that way to Netanyahu. The US is Israel’s strongest ally and the country would be far more isolated if the US did not defend it. Continued isolation of Gaza, expanding Jewish suburbs in Jerusalem, and building more settlements in the West Bank seem like pretty pathetic reasons to destroy a close relationship with the US.

I watched a bit of Petraeus’s hearing before the Senate Armed Services Committee today. The hearing really made clear that Obama’s too-clever-by-a-half Afghanistan strategy, starting to pull out of Afghanistan in July 2011 if conditions in Afghanistan warrant, isn’t holding any longer. There was no middle ground (Democrats wanted to know if July 2011 meant July 2011 and Republicans wanted to know if facts on the ground meant facts on the ground).

I don’t blame the grumpy old white men for this. It’s Obama’s fault. He is trying to have it both ways (to dems: yes, we’re leaving; to the GOP: but not quite yet). This problem is not going away, rather its going to intensify as July 2011 (just a short 12 months away) nears.

I don’t think Thomas Friedman and Fareed Zakaria set public opinion, I think they reflect it and this sounds about right to me.

Free Range International typically holds the opposite view on Afghanistan from consensus in Washington – and FRI is typically right. It is thus not surprising that FRI is skeptical about the wisdom of replacing McChrystal with Petraeus. I’ll put my money on FRI.