Ben Smith asks who leaked General McChrystal's report on conditions in Afghanistan, and gets a variety of answers. The most common is that this move must compel the president to increase the number of troops, and so must have come from someone in the Defense Department. Indeed, I glimpsed Charles Krauthammer on television yesterday making the common argument that once a theater commander requests more troops, he is constitutionally elevated to the position of commander-in-chief and becomes what is known as "the Decider." Well, not in so many words, but you get the idea. Still, anyone who believes that this review makes an open-and-shut case for more troops hasn't read it. It paints a picture of the Afghan conflict that is very dire, as I noted yesterday, and raises questions about whether creating the capacity to rebuild the Afghan government and military is necessary to U.S. interests. It describes a task that, while similar to the surge in Iraq, is by no means the same in the scale of either challenges or resources required for them, and lacks the coincidence of other factors that allowed the surge to work. The simplest explanation is that someone wanted to look good in Bob Woodward's next book, and we'll all no doubt find out the identity of this leaker in the next year. But whatever that person's intent, this is a document that can be interpreted to justify all manner of decisions.
-- Tim Fernholz
