The Windy had some serious technical problems while I covered Mark Moyar’s counterinsurgency conference — I’ve been curious about his unorthodox historical take on Vietnam, but his new book A Question of Command was widely praised yesterday — and then I had to run to take care of a bunch of personal things, so here’s my report from the conference, and here’s my ill-fated liveblog of Gen. Petraeus’ remarks. I’ll cut to the chase. Petraeus began by imploring people not to ask him anything about the Afghanistan strategy review or any "pre-decisional" information about troop increases or anything like that. And then, mostly unprompted, he… went off-book.

…Petraeus defends Obama’s review of Afghanistan strategy. “We said we expected some form of assessment that we thought would take place in the fall,” he said, and muses on the Afghan election. There have been “events like election that looks like it may not produce a government with greater legitimacy in the eyes of the people.” He praises Gen. McChrystal’s “superb” counterinsurgency guidance and his “highlight[ing] of the need to change the culture” by such things as obeying Afghan traffic laws. As for the resources McChrystal will request, Petraeus says,  “the resource options piece will be in in a few days as well.”

I happened to be sitting at the same table as Army Lt. Col. Eric Gunhus, Petraeus’ public affairs officer. And while I don’t believe in trying to read someone’s mind, the dude did not appear to have expected Petraeus to talk about about the review nearly as much as he did. And at times Petraeus appeared to drift into Afghanistan talk when there was a moment of pause in his remarks during Q-n-A. Yet Petraeus is possibly the most disciplined human being I have ever encountered. Whether he wanted to deflect Michael Goldfarb’s speculation that his people leaked the McChrystral review or whatever, I doubt he really stumbled, Basil Fawlty-style, into any discussion of the strategy review.