No matter how many times Gen. Petraeus tries not to make news in the D.C. area, I’ll probably attend, and watch the PowerPoint presentation on Centcom’s area of responsibility, because he might say something newsworthy or I might get to ask a question and this is what I get paid to do and enjoy doing. If it turns out not to be so newsworthy, so it goes. That’s why I spent my early afternoon at the Reagan building, where Petraeus held a small post-Afghanistan ROC trip conversation to a Wilson Center audience while everyone else in town focuses on the Nuclear Security Summit. I got this out of it, and it’s not the most newsworthy thing in the world. Petraeus, as I tweeted, made a couple of firm statements about how civilian casualties “undermine everything” in counterinsurgency, which took on a certain salience so soon after the Kandahar road shooting and the Gardez raid-gone-awry.

Now, I wanted to ask a question about the firmness of JSOC elements in Afghanistan falling under Gen. McChrystal’s command at tactical, operational, and strategic levels and if there’s an argument for a separate SOF command when trying to meet a population-centric objective, because I don’t know what it could be. But I didn’t get called on. And one of the reasons I didn’t get called on was because Rep. Jane Harman did. Now, I’m fairly certain that whenever a member of Congress wants to ask a question of a combatant commander, the combatant commander will make an effort to provide an answer, or at least be responsive. Or, put better, any combatant commander is going to make more of an effort to be responsive to a legislator, who votes on that commander’s budget, than to a journalist, who can be safely ignored 9 times out of 10. So, members of Congress, I ask you: don’t bigfoot reporters, thinktankers, or members of the public who attend these sorts of sessions.

Harman, as it turned out, asked a good question about balancing priorities and resources with respect to counterterrorism in Yemen. But still.