At the end of a really good post on Pakistan, Brandon Friedman refers to a Christopher Hitchens piece from last week in Slate that I missed while in Paktia Province. Hitchens writes about Obama’s Pakistan positions:

[Obama] is committed in advance to a serious projection of American power into the heartland of our deadliest enemy. And that, I think, is another reason why so many people are reluctant to employ truthful descriptions for the emerging Afghan-Pakistan confrontation: American liberals can’t quite face the fact that if their man does win in November, and if he has meant a single serious word he’s ever said, it means more war, and more bitter and protracted war at that—not less.

As the noted U.S. grand strategist Robert Kelly put it: Is you tweaking? American liberals have been advocating a tougher war in Afghanipakistan for years. I myself wrote a really long cover story for noted liberal magazine The American Prospect about Obama’s foreign policy that dwelt at glowing length with that aspect of his record. (Specifically, I said the idea of using military force in Pakistan against al-Qaeda "should not have been controversial.") Other people who see things similarly include my friends Matt Duss and Matt Yglesias of the liberal Center for American Progress. Or — I dunno — Democratic-aligned counterterrorism luminaries as Richard Clarke and Rand Beers. You can read similar invocations of the need to build up troops in Afghanistan and use military force in Pakistan if necessary from Brandon’s fellow Iraq and Afghanistan veterans at VoteVets, an organization established by netroots favorite Wesley Clark. I could go on.

If Hitchens wants to argue that liberals don’t really understand what Obama is advocating — a claim that I’d be curious to see him prove — I suppose that’s one thing. But the idea of going after al-Qaeda in Pakistan has been met with, if anything, liberal enthusiasm, not silence or euphemism.