Over at TPM, Josh Marshall has an insightful (as usual) post on the merits of continued and increased involvement in Afghanistan. The piece doesn’t come down squarely on either side of the Af-Pak debate, but notes the legitimate concerns of both. It’s worth the read.

One thing I want to note, however, is this excerpt:

So you wouldn’t want one country where bin Laden and his pals could live more or less unmolested and in the open — though given what happened and how many drones we have on patrol, it’s not really credible to me that quite that would ever be allowed again.

A recurring theme I see in media, both new and traditional, coverage of military operations is that we are routinely portrayed to be much cooler than we actually are. Speaking as someone who spent much time watching Predator feeds in a TOC in Afghanistan, I can assure you that if you do not know how many drones we have in Afghanistan, whatever number you are imagining is probably far more than the number that actually exists. In fact, sometimes a lack of drones in Afghanistan is a significant problem.

This isn’t an issue that applies only to unmanned aircraft. When we were down range, my battalion was portrayed in the media as having done things, both positive in negative, that never happened. They never happened because we had no desire to do them. In the case of the positive events, it wasn’t the case that we were incapable of accomplishing the attributed feats; we certainly were. But they had nothing to do with our assigned mission, so why would we want to?

Also at VetVoice.