Neocon take on the imaginary afghan pullout: “a win for al-CIA-duh”

During his State of the Union speech, Obama said he will end the decade-plus occupation of Afghanistan in 2014. This may be another one of Obama’s illusory promises (remember you can keep your doctor and closing down Gitmo?), but that didn’t stop a key neocon from climbing up on his hobby horse and demanding more tax money and USAian lives be flushed down a rat hole. Frederick Kagan, a neocon darling at the pro-illegal war American Enterprise Institute think tank, wrote on Jan 27 in the WSJ that leaving Afghanistan would amount to a victory for AQ, and he expanded on this to Faux News after Obama’s teleprompter recitation. But then we should expect Kagan to say this, since the war in Afghanistan is one of his pet projects. Back in December, Rajiv Chandrasekaran writing for the WaPo examined the relationship between Kagan, his wife Kimberly, and David Petraeus back when he was the top US commander in Afghanistan. Chandrasekaran writes:

Although Fred Kagan said he and his wife wanted no pay in part to remain ‘completely independent,’ the extraordinary arrangement raises new questions about the access and influence Petraeus accorded to civilian friends while he was running the Afghan war. The four-star general made the Kagans de facto senior advisers, a status that afforded them numerous private meetings in his office, priority travel across the war zone and the ability to read highly secretive transcripts of intercepted Taliban communications, according to current and former senior US military and civilian officials who served in the headquarters at the time.

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