Hamid Karzai's younger half brother, Ahmad Wali, was a master of balancing various powerful forces in southern Afghanistan -- tribal leaders, U.S. and NATO military and intelligence interests, allegedly even powerful drug lords. It's what made him such a valuable asset to his older brother.

He was also a link for President Karzai to the murkier side of Afghan politics -- tribal power. Karzai may have won the presidency through elections, but he maintained power the way politics in Afghanistan has always been played -- through patronage and tribal links.

Moreover, Ahmad Wali managed the troubled southern city of Kandahar, keeping it in his brother's political sphere. As Vali Nasr, a former senior advisor to the U.S. special representative for Afghanistan and Pakistan, put it, "Afghan politics is all about power brokers and their webs of relationships. The bigger your web, the more powerful you are."

His assassination -- which the Taliban has taken credit for -- leaves a number of tricky questions for Karzai and the United States.

Did the Taliban just send a message about negotiations?

Just last month, Hamid Karzai said peace talks with the Taliban are "going well." As relations between Karzai and the United States have become more contentious -- and the U.S. drawdown begins -- the Afghan president has grown more open in public to reestablishing relations to the Taliban.

As far as negotiating tactics go, killing the leader's brother isn't exactly a way to send a positive signal. Even if they didn't kill him, as Matthieu Akins suggests, they are still taking credit.

"It would suggest they are not in a reconciliation mood," Nasr told Foreign Policy.

President Obama has seen political negotiations as necessary to ending the war. Karzai's death may have just delivered a severe blow to those hopes.

"It puts the burden on the United States and the Karzai government," said Zalmay Khalilzad, the former U.S. ambassador to Afghanistan from 2003 to 2005. "Will we suspend talks with the Taliban because they claimed credit for something like this? The burden is on Karzai. He's been calling them his ‘brothers,' talking to them, and encouraging them to make peace."

Who fills the sizable power vacuum in Kandahar?

Ahmad Wali was an easy figure to criticize -- a man with murky ties and no clear political ideology -- but his absence will be felt in Kandahar, a city key to U.S. efforts in Afghanistan.

"Good or bad, he was nevertheless Karzai's most important instrument and pillar of authority in Kandahar," Nasr said. "Without him, we'll have a much more dangerous time dealing with that city."

Now, who will manage the complex web of tribal power brokers there? Potentially the Taliban, said Nasr. But expect some battles between aspiring warlords over his turf.

Karzai will surely try to fill the breach with someone else. But there's no guarantee his new man -- whomever that may be -- will be able to keep the lid on the city with quite as much success.

What does his death mean for the United States?

The United States could never seem to make up its mind about the younger Karzai. They acknowledged his vast corruption and dirty dealings, but also seemed to realize his brand of Afghan power politics was necessary, to a degree. He was regarded by U.S. intelligence officials as "indispensable," according to the Washington Post, even if he "has long been viewed with mistrust by American military officers, who describe him as an obstacle in their efforts to fight corruption and bolster the rule of law."

Last March, Gen. Stanley McChrystal, then commander of U.S. forces in Afghanistan, told his subordinates to "stop saying bad stuff about" the younger Karzai and to work with him.

Karzai had ties to the CIA (some reports say he was on their payroll in exchange for security forces and providing safe houses around Kandahar). But many in Washington also believed he was tied to the opium trade and other illicit activities.

Still, Khalilzad said that when he was ambassador, the United States dealt with him effectively on a number of security issues, as well as facilitating engagement with local leaders. "He was seen as being helpful," he said.

However, another former U.S. Ambassador Karl Eikenberry called Ahmad Wali Karzai an obstacle to U.S. efforts, according to a leaked diplomatic cable obtained by Wikileaks.

"One of our major challenges in Afghanistan [is] how to fight corruption and connect the people to their government, when the key government officials are themselves corrupt," he wrote. The memo singled out Ahmad Wali as "widely understood to be corrupt and a narcotics trafficker."

Good or bad, his death surely complicates efforts to bring peace to the southern region of Afghanistan -- and clearly highlights the lack of security for the highest echelons of the government there.

WHAT HAPPENED?

The one thing everyone seems to agree on is that nearly $900 million dollars disappeared, the majority of which is not likely to be returned. Kabul Bank is the largest private bank in the country, responsible for upwards of 80 percent of the government's payroll, including the salaries of soldiers and police officers. In September, after the extent of the fraud was uncovered, a rush on the bank resulted in a panic that nearly crippled the economy (a long Ramadan holiday weekend may have actually been what saved it). Fitrat and others outside Afghanistan allege that the bank operated as a defacto pyramid scheme, in which politically connected people -- such as President Hamid Karzai's businessman brother -- were given large, interest-free loans at the expense of the lowly depositor. Most of that money was then invested overseas in places like Dubai, where they bought things like expensive villas.

"There was no political will on the part of the Afghan government to get to the bottom of it," said Andrew Wilder, director of the Afghanistan and Pakistan program at the United States Institute of Peace.

When the Dubai housing market imploded in 2008, the extent of the problems at Kabul Bank became clear -- and the United States and the International Monetary Fund (IMF) pushed the Afghan government to take action. As a result, the central bank, headed by Fitrat, took over Kabul Bank and fired its top management.

WHO IS ABDUL QADEER FITRAT?

Depending whom you ask, he's either a hero who stood up to some of the most powerful people in the country or an incompetent bureaucrat who idly watched while Afghan's banking system fell into almost into total financial collapse. The former IMF and World Bank consultant was appointed governor of Afghan's central bank by Karzai in 2006 with a mission of fighting corruption and fraud. The central bank is supposed to oversee and supervise all the private banks in the country -- much like the Federal Reserve in the United States. Fitrat had the strong backing of the international community, given his experience in international financial institutions. In the wake of the scandal at the Kabul Bank, he was pushed to get to the bottom of it, and ultimately he publicly accused several important Afghan officials -- including the vice president, Qasim Fahim, and Karzai's brother -- of being involved.

This past Monday, he told reporters he heard from credible sources his life was in danger and had to flee the country. He landed in the United States, where he resigned as head of the central bank.

The Afghan government says that it was Fitrat's responsibility, as governor of the central bank, to oversee financial institutions and that he failed to respond to the problems at Kabul Bank. Rumors about the improprieties had been circulating since 2006; but until the crisis bubbled to the surface, Fitrat did nothing, the government says.

"It would be as if you were the chief of a fire station and reports came that there was a fire, but you said you couldn't go because I'm not supposed to be in that neighborhood," Torek Farhadi, a former economic advisor to Karzai and advisor to the central bank, told Foreign Policy. "It was his job to know something was irregular."

But Fitrat says he didn't know about the irregularities -- and even if he did, he wouldn't have been able to do anything, since it involved the most powerful people in the country.

"On the one hand, he's being pressured to investigate thoroughly and get to the bottom of it," said Wilder. "On the other hand, the people he's being asked to pursue are among the most politically powerful in the country. He was stuck between a rock and a hard place and ultimately he decided northern Virginia was a better place than Kabul."

HOW COULD SO MUCH MONEY BE LOANED OUT WITHOUT INTEREST AND NO ONE ASKED ANY QUESTIONS?

Read on

His latest attack came Saturday:

You remember a few years ago I was saying thank you to the foreigners for their help; every minute we were thanking them. Now I have stopped saying that... They're here for their own purposes, for their own goals, and they're using our soil for that.

Even as Karzai's rhetoric has turned sharply anti-Western and anti-American, it's not clear he actually wants foreign troops to withdraw, a step that could endanger his government's stability.

Still, his language has frustrated U.S. officials, who feel that he is undermining the war effort. "At the point your leaders believe that we are doing more harm than good, when we reach a point that we feel our soldiers and civilians are being asked to sacrifice without a just cause, and our generous aid programs dismissed as totally ineffective and the source of all corruption," outgoing U.S. Ambassador to Kabul Karl Eichenberry said, in response to Karzai's latest verbal barrage. "The American people will ask for our forces to come home."

So what's behind Karzai's anger? A chorus of officials and analysts think he has simply become unhinged -- U.S. intelligence reports have reportedly voiced the theory that he is "manic-depressive."

But others believe that Karzai is calculating that anti-American statements will burnish his nationalist credentials and curry favor with the Afghan population.

"He doesn't want to be seen as a lackey of the United States, he cultivates a sense of separateness," said Vali Nasr, who served in the Obama administration on Afghanistan-Pakistan policy until this spring. "My read of him is he doesn't trust our strategy and doesn't believe we have a commitment to him."

The contested 2009 presidential election, during which he was accused of vote fraud by many observers, represented a turning point in his relationship with the United States, Nasr said.

"In the past two years, he's come to doubt our commitment and strategy," he said. "And he sees what we demand of him as counter-productive to his political ambitions. So he lashes out."

Still, Karzai is running the risk of undercutting support for the military intervention that is crucial for him to fend off the insurgency. Polls indicate that Americans are losing patience with the Afghan war. And when Afghanistan's leader vociferously condemns American soldiers as occupiers, their impatience only grows.

"He's systematically been creating the impression that we are wasting our time over there," Nasr said.

Below, Foreign Policy compiled some of Karzai's most notorious recent statements.

Read on

Afghans who live under Taliban-controlled areas these days have suffered abuse for not growing a beard, not praying, and, more generally speaking, for being a woman. But ridicule for your license plate? As of this spring, that's a Kabul specialty:

Afghanistan's booming car sales industry has been thrown into chaos by a growing aversion to the number "39", which almost overnight has become an unlikely synonym for pimp and a mark of shame in this deeply conservative country.

Drivers of cars with number plates containing 39, bought before the once-harmless double digits took on their new meaning, are mocked and taunted across Kabul.

"Now even little kids say 'look, there goes the 39'. This car is a bad luck, I can't take my family out in it," said Mohammad Ashraf who works for a United Nations project.

No one's quite sure about the origins of the obsession; the most frequently reported story pins it on an Iranian pimp from the western city of Herat who lived in an apartment numbered 39 and had a 39 on his license plate.  Whatever the cause, though, it's becoming a problem for more than just car drivers:

Afghans with 39 as part of their cellphone numbers have to endure so much derision that some have blocked people from seeing their number when they call. Others have switched their phone numbers altogether.

To avoid being needlessly ridiculed, Afghans who are 39 years old will sometimes tell people they are "one less than 40."

Kabulites aren't alone in their distaste for a specific number.  In 2007, Brussels Airlines had to add a dot to their 13-dot logo to assuage customer fears. The Chinese have a long-standing animosity towards the number 4, which, in Chinese, sounds like the word for "death". The superstition prompted government last year to stop issuing license plates with 4's. You never know when your license plate will come back to haunt you.

It's been a tough couple of weeks for al Qaeda. Since the successful Navy SEAL raid that killed Osama bin Laden, the terror network has suffered additional losses that analysts say are taking a heavy toll on the group.

Ilyas Kashmiri, al Qaeda's operational leader in Pakistan, was reportedly killed by a U.S. drone strike earlier this month (though al Qaeda hasn't confirmed his death, reports of which have been incorrect before). And last week, an al Qaeda leader in East Africa -- Fazul Abdullah Mohammed -- was killed by Somali forces in Mogadishu. Mohammed was the most wanted man in Africa.

Analysts and U.S. officials say the deaths have created a power vacuum.

"The organization is in a great deal of turmoil," a U.S. counterterrorism official told Foreign Policy. "It's trying to sort itself out with what's going on."

Bruce Hoffman, director of the Security Studies Program at Georgetown University, said Kashmiri and Mohammed were key operational figures, not easily replaced due to their long pedigrees of planning and executing attacks.

"They are especially important because they would have been looked on to plan and implement any acts of retribution [for bin Laden's death] from al Qaeda," he said. "Their killings knock them seriously off balance."

Of course, al Qaeda is well-known for its ability to replenish its ranks. Analysts like Hoffman and Evan Kohlmann, who has consulted with the U.S. government, see a few key names potentially emerging to fill the void.

1. Saif al-Adel

Born in Egypt in 1960 or 1963, according to the FBI. Currently believed to be hiding in Pakistan's tribal region.

Al-Adel was reportedly named the interim chief of Al Qaeda after bin Laden's death. After the 9/11 attacks, he fled to Iran, where he was eventually put under house arrest. In 2008, Iran swapped him for a diplomat taken captive by al Qaeda in Pakistan.

Signature attacks: Has played a hand in many al Qaeda attacks, allegedly dispatching Richard Reid, the shoe bomber, to meet Khalid Sheikh Mohammed; and aiding the 1998 attacks on the U.S. embassies in Africa.

Read on

You've probably heard by now that NATO got totally punk'd by an unknown man posing as a high-ranking Taliban leader. How embarrassing. If only they'd looked out for these 10 ways of telling the true Talib from the con man, we wouldn't be in this mess:

10. Keeps asking if the peace talks can be held in the Maldives

9. Eyepatch switches sides from meeting to meeting

8. Introduces himself as "Colonel Iqbal from the ISI"

7. Runs up a large minibar tab at the Four Seasons Kabul

6. Wife angling for a spot on "The Real Housewives of Kandahar"

5. Claims to be texting Mullah Omar but is actually just playing Angry Birds the whole time

4. Offers to settle Afghan War with a game of Jenga

3. Turban made of an actual towel

2. Wears trench coat, offers to sell the letters O and U

1. Agrees to trade Osama bin Laden for Justin Bieber

With the likely withdrawal Saturday of the Palestinians from their ill-advised direct talks with Israel, it looks increasingly like Barack Obama's foreign policy is headed for catastrophic failure.

Nearly across the board, the president's initiatives are going down in flames. Nowhere is this more true than in Pakistan where, Jane Perlez reported Wednesday, the civilian government in which the U.S. has invested billions is perilously close to collapse -- if not facing a military coup.

Now comes word that Pakistan is cutting off NATO's supply lines into Afghanistan in retaliation for U.S. helicopter strikes in Pakistani territory -- strikes made necessary because the Pakistani military can't, or won't, crack down on militants unless they threaten the Pakistani state directly.

As for the war in Afghanistan, it's going very badly.

Further east, the United States seems headed for a disastrous currency war with China, although Beijing's recent diplomatic blunders have sent Asian countries running into Uncle Sam's loving arms.

To the west, Iraq still has yet to form a government after seven months of post-election deadlock, and attacks on the Green Zone are metastasizing in a frightening way.

One rare bright spot is Russia where, despite the complaints of Cold Warriors and human rights campaigners, relations are at their highest point since the Yeltsin era. But much of the good work Obama's team has done could easily unravel, especially if the Senate deep-sixes the new nuke treaty.

As for Iran, it's a mixed bag. Obama has kept Europe on board with tough sanctions, and brought along a few other players. But China is likely to undercut those efforts and relieve the economic pressure, leaving the United States and Israel with few options for stopping Iran's nuclear drive. Meanwhile, the drums of war are beginning to beat in Congress.

Of course, if Obama really wants to make a hash of the world, I can think of no better way than to start launch airstrikes on Iran. But I doubt he's going to do that.

Barack Obama's White House aides have been furiously spinning Bob Woodward's new book as one that paints a positive image of the president, a wartime leader making touch decisions in the interest of the American people.

Some may see that image in Woodward's first of three adaptations of the book, published in today's Washington Post. But once could also see a president who doesn't trust his military advisors and treats them a little bit like the help. Consider this anecdote about the Afghan strategy review:

He was looking for choices that would limit U.S. involvement and provide a way out. His top three military advisers were unrelenting advocates for 40,000 more troops and an expanded mission that seemed to have no clear end. When his national security team gathered in the White House Situation Room on Veterans Day, Nov. 11, 2009, for its eighth strategy review session, the president erupted.

"So what's my option? You have given me one option," Obama said, directly challenging the military leadership at the table, including Defense Secretary Robert M. Gates, Joint Chiefs Chairman Adm. Mike Mullen and Army Gen. David H. Petraeus, then head of U.S. Central Command.

"We were going to meet here today to talk about three options," Obama said sternly. "You agreed to go back and work those up."

Mullen protested. "I think what we've tried to do here is present a range of options."

Obama begged to differ. Two weren't even close to feasible, they all had acknowledged; the other two were variations on the 40,000.

Silence descended on the room. Finally, Mullen said, "Well, yes, sir."

Later on, we find Obama telling Gates that 30,000 more troops was his final answer:

"I've got a request for 4,500 enablers sitting on my desk," Gates said. "And I'd like to have another 10 percent that I can send in, enablers or forces, if I need them."

"Bob," Obama said, "30,000 plus 4,500 plus 10 percent of 30,000 is" - he had already done the math - "37,500." Sounding like an auctioneer, he added, "I'm at 30,000."

Obama had never been quite so definitive or abrupt with Gates.

"I will give you some latitude within your 10 percentage points," Obama said, but under exceptional circumstances only.

"Can you support this?" Obama asked Gates. "Because if the answer is no, I understand it and I'll be happy to just authorize another 10,000 troops, and we can continue to go as we are and train the Afghan national force and just hope for the best."

"Hope for the best." The condescending words hung in the air.

So which is it? Tough commander in chief or insecure armchair general? I suspect this will be a question for history to answer.

Bob Woodward's new book about Barack Obama's presidency promises to create enormous headaches for a White House that's already reeling from a weak economic recovery and a surging Republican opposition, judging by accounts in the New York Times and the Washington Post. The accounts paint a portrait of a president sharply at odds with the military and deeply ambivalent about the war in Afghanistan. And they rip the veneer off an administration that had hitherto been known for its tight message discipline and a relative lack of infighting.

If you thought the Rolling Stone article that got Gen. Stanley McChrystal fired was damning, you ain't seen nothin' yet. Get a load of some of these nuggets:

• Neither Richard Holbrooke, the special advisor for Afghanistan and Pakistan, nor retired Lt. Gen. Doug Lute, the White House "war czar," believe in the current U.S. war strategy. Woodward quotes Holbrooke saying flatly "it can't work"; Lute apparently said that the Afghan strategy review didn't "add up" to the course the president ultimately chose.  For his part, Vice President Joe Biden is quoted calling Holbrooke "the most egotistical bastard I've ever met."
• Afghan President Hamid Karzai has apparently been diagnosed with manic depression and is treating his condition with drugs (though perhaps not opium, as suggested some months back by the ousted U.N. diplomat Peter Galbraith). Woodward quotes Karl Eikenberry, the U.S. ambassador, as saying, "He's on his meds, he's off his meds." That'll go over well in Kabul.
• Axelrod apparently asked Obama, "How could you trust Hillary?" when Clinton was being considered to be secretary of state.
• In comments that fall into the category of "true but not a good idea to say," Obama tells Woodward, "We can absorb a terrorist attack. We'll do everything we can to prevent it, but even a 9/11, even the biggest attack ever . . . we absorbed it and we are stronger."
• Plenty of people have the knives out for national security advisor Jim Jones, who in turn rips  unnamed presidential aides as "the water bugs," "the Politburo," "the Mafia," and "the campaign set." I'm not sure what he means by this or to whom he's referring, but I have some educated guesses.
• Defense Secretary Bob Gates apparently doesn't like Jones's deputy, Tom Donilon, and thinks he would be a "disaster" as national security advisor. Gates was offended by a remark Donilon made about a general who isn't named in the book. Meanwhile, Joint Chiefs Chairman Adm. Mike Mullen and Vice Chairman Gen. James Cartwright don't trust one other -- Cartwright worked closely with Biden on a proposal for a smaller Afghan surge force than was ultimately chosen.
• Gen. David Petraeus, the man now charged with saving Obama's ass in Afghanistan, thinks White House advisor David Axelrod is "a complete spin doctor." Petraeus also told his aides in May that the administration was "[expletive] with the wrong guy," though it's not clear what the context was.

The most explosive revelations, however, center around the Obama's decision last year to send 30,000 more troops to Afghanistan but set a controversial July 2011 timeline for beginning to withdraw -- an awkward compromise that Woodward's sources seem eager to portray as very much the president's own. And Bob's got the goods: Obama, who comes across as deeply skeptical about the war and overwhelmingly concerned with finding an "exit strategy" rather than winning, personally dictated a six-page "terms sheet" outlining the conditions under which he was sending the troops. Woodward describes a tense Nov. 29, 2009, meeting where the president demanded that each participant read it and raise any objections "now." According to the Post, "The document -- a copy of which is reprinted in the book -- took the unusual step of stating, along with the strategy's objectives, what the military was not supposed to do."

As Woodward describes it,  the memo represented Obama's attempt to keep the military from boxing him in and pushing to escalate the U.S. involvement in Afghanistan (a storyline we've heard before, though with fewer details). At one point, Woodward says, Obama told military leaders, "In 2010, we will not be having a conversation about how to do more. I will not want to hear, 'We're doing fine, Mr. President, but we'd be better if we just do more.' We're not going to be having a conversation about how to change [the mission] ... unless we're talking about how to draw down faster than anticipated in 2011." It's not clear just who's boxing in whom at the moment, though. The Post remarks on the irony that Petraeus has been tasked with implementing a strategy with which he clearly does not fully agree, but the general has been pretty savvy about thus far about establishing that the withdrawals will be "conditions-based."

Obama told Gates and Clinton at another meeting that he didn't want to stay in Afghanistan for a decade: "I'm not doing long-term nation-building. I am not spending a trillion dollars." He also made a similar remark to Lindsey Graham, telling the South Carolina senator, "I can’t let this be a war without end, and I can’t lose the whole Democratic Party."

Republicans are going to have a field day with this one.

A Japanese journalist held hostage in Afghanistan fooled his abductors with an unlikely source: Twitter.

Kosuke Tsuneoka's captors asked him last Friday to show them how to use their new Nokia mobile phones, and after activating the devices Tsuneoka demonstrated how to access the Internet. After showing them Al Jazeera's website, Tsuneoka made his move:

Then I told them there is a thing called 'Twitter'. They asked me to show them what it was, so I sent Twitter messages with the phone in front of them. Because nobody understood English, it was no problem.

Tsuneoka tweeted two messages: "i am still alive, but in jail." He then followed up with his location: "here is archi in kunduz. in the jail of commander lativ." He was released the following day, though he suspects it was as a result of his captors' failure to secure a ransom payment.

Tsuneoka further noted that he was well treated in captivity, even given three meals a day, but that his captors were "dreadfully uneducated" and "even their knowledge of Islamic teaching was very poor."

Tsuneoka claims he was held by fighters loyal to Hizb-i-Islami commander Guldbuddin Hekmatyar -- and not Taliban fighters, which the Afghan government and some media organizations reported.

Hekmatyar, a veteran mujahedeen commander, earned his name during the campaign against the Soviet Union in the 1980s. Hizb-i-Islami is believed to be the second largest insurgent group in Afghanistan.

I've already said I was underwhelmed by the Wikileaks docu-dump on the Afghan war, and Peter Feaver and Dan Drezner have also weighed in with similar takes. As Drezner puts it, "So it turns out that the war in Afghanistan is not going well and Pakistan is playing a double game? Well, knock me down with a feather!!"

Nonetheless, a lot of people seem to be shocked by the revelations in the documents. One of them is New Yorker editor Amy Davidson, who discusses one incident where a convoy was shaken down by Afghan gunmen "in the pay of a local warlord, Matiullah Khan, who was himself in the pay, ultimately, of the American public." (Khan was the subject of a lengthy New York Times profile in June.)

Davidson seems outraged by this, but I find her reaction naive. She writes: "We may be the ones being shaken down on the highway, but from an Afghan perspective we are, by aligning ourselves with and propping up Hamid Karzai, also deploying the bandits. We are robbing ourselves, both of our purse and of our good name."

Fair enough. So who should the U.S. align with? And how does she think all those supplies get to U.S. bases?

Three news organizations -- the New York Times, the Guardian, and Der Spiegel -- today published explosive reports on a treasure trove of more than 91,000 documents that were obtained by Wikileaks, the self-proclaimed whistleblower site.

I've now gone through the reporting and most of the selected documents (though not the larger data dump), and I think there's less here than meets the eye. The story that seems to be getting the most attention, repeating the longstanding allegation that Pakistani intelligence might be aiding the Afghan insurgents, offers a few new details but not much greater clarity. Both the Times and the Guardian are careful to point out that the raw reports in the Wikileaks archive often seem poorly sourced and present implausible information.

"[F]or all their eye-popping details," writes the Guardian's Declan Walsh, "the intelligence files, which are mostly collated by junior officers relying on informants and Afghan officials, fail to provide a convincing smoking gun for ISI complicity."

The Times' reporters seem somewhat more persuaded, noting that "many of the reports rely on sources that the military rated as reliable" and that their sources told them that "the portrait of the spy agency’s collaboration with the Afghan insurgency was broadly consistent with other classified intelligence."

Der Spiegel's reporting adds little, though the magazine's stories will probably have great political impact in Germany, as the Wikileaks folks no doubt intended. One story hones in on how an elite U.S. task force charged with hunting down Taliban and Al Qaeda targets operates from within a German base; another alleges that "The German army was clueless and naïve when it stumbled into the conflict," and that northern Afghanistan, where the bulk of German troops are based, is more violent than has been previously portrayed.

Otherwise, I'd say that so far the documents confirm what we already know about the war: It's going badly; Pakistan is not the world's greatest ally and is probably playing a double game; coalition forces have been responsible for far too many civilian casualties; and the United States doesn't have very reliable intelligence in Afghanistan.

I do think that the stories will provoke a fresh round of Pakistan-bashing in Congress, and possibly hearings. But the administration seems inclined to continue with its strategy of nudging Pakistan in the right direction, and is sending the message: Move along, nothing to see here.

A U.S. military official in Islamabad told the American Forces Press Service: "The Pakistani military deserves our respect, and frankly, they deserve our support." Special Representative Richard Holbrooke endorsed the recent warming of ties between Islamabad and Kabul. In his statement condeming the leak of the documents, National Security Advisor Jim Jones said, "[T]he Pakistani government – and Pakistan’s military and intelligence services – must continue their strategic shift against insurgent groups." And finally, the White House sent around an eight-page document containing examples of President Obama and other U.S. officials urging Pakistan to turn decisively against the militants.

The other message coming from the administration, as noted in an email from White House spokesman Tommy Vietor, is: It's not our fault. "The period of time covered in these documents (January 2004-December 2009) is before the President announced his new strategy. Some of the disconcerting things reported are exactly why the President ordered a three month policy review and a change in strategy," Vietor wrote in an email published by the Times.

In this case, I'd say that's spin I can believe in.

Maybe it was all the excitement with the Russian spies last week, but somehow we missed one of the more intriguing things to grace the Wall Street Journal's letters page in a while: A full-throated defense of Hamid Karzai's brother, Mahmood Karzai, written by Gerald Posner. Posner, you may recall, was an investigative reporter for the Daily Beast until February, when he resigned after being caught plagiarizing from the Miami Herald and other news sources. In the letter -- which concerns an unflattering recent story about Karzai ferrying cash out of Afghanistan -- Posner identifies himself as "Gerald Posner, Attorney at Law," and refers to Karzai as "my client." Huh?

FP spoke this afternoon with Posner (above left), who says he isn't just representing Mahmood Karzai (above right), but also the other two Afghan presidential siblings, Hamid's younger half-brother Ahmed Wali Karzai and older brother Qayum Karzai. It's an odd twist on the disgraced plagiarist-fabulist rehabilitation story, which often involves a legal career but not usually in the service of a beleaguered Central Asian ruling family. "They are really proud of the reputations that they have earned," Posner says of the Karzais, "and sort of in shock that they are viewed with such disdain in a country that is their ally in this process."

Read on

President Obama has just announced that General David Petraeus, head of U.S. Central Command, will replace now-booted General McChrstyal as top commander in Afghanistan, technically a lower position though probably a more strategically vital one . This isn't entirely unprecedented. In 1941, then-President Franklin Roosevelt demoted Douglas MacArthur as part of a strategic -- not punitive -- change of policy. A Time article from that year describes the general's surprising composure in the wake of professional reshuffling:

Field Marshal Douglas MacArthur, Military Adviser to the Philippine Commonwealth, had just taken a demotion in rank. As he stood at a window in his penthouse apartment atop the swank Manila Hotel, looking out on the bay, on the brooding fortress of Corregidor, he was (for practical purposes) no longer a field marshal or the four-starred general he had been when he retired three and a half years ago from the U.S. Army. His Commander in Chief had just called him back to that Army in reduced but impressive rank.

General MacArthur was not downcast at this technical demotion, and he had no reason to be. For he had also been made commander of The U.S. Army Forces in the Far East."

Ten years later, of course, MacArthur got the axe for real for his public disagreements with President Harry Truman over U.S. strategy in the Korean war. Strangely, Dugout Doug seems to have set a precedent for both the generals in the current controversy.