Friday, April 29, 2011

Credibility of Mr. Petraeus

"In March, for example, Petraeus told a congressional hearing that the momentum achieved by the Taliban since 2005 "has been arrested in much of the country and reversed in a number of important areas."  A week earlier, Gen. Ronald Burgess, chief of the Pentagon's Defense Intelligence Agency, had painted a far less rosy picture. He said intelligence analysts could see "no apparent degradation" in the Taliban's capacity to fight.  For its part, the CIA has warned that the Taliban still fields a capable fighting force and that tactical gains by U.S. forces since Obama approved the deployment of 30,000 additional troops has not added up to strategic progress in winning the war."