Tag Archives: Afghanistan

Why the U.S. outspends the world on defense

By CATHERINE NGAI
WASHINGTON – Evan Siff comes from a military family. His great grandfather was a general, his grandfather was in the navy and so was his father. For Siff, staying close to that tradition was second nature.

But, he chose the academic route and pursued an MA in International Relations at Durham University in England. In his dissertation, he examined NATO as an instrument of U.S. foreign policy, and how that relates to US military spending.

If you ask him what he learned as a result of the degree, his answer will be unorthodox.

“When I was writing my thesis, I really examined why NATO didn’t go away. The fall of the USSR made it obsolete,” Siff said. “I found out some things that didn’t help my outlook on things at all…I had gotten pretty cynical. The more you study, you more you will realize how much lobbyists actually determine legislation in the U.S.”

And while most of his fellow-classmates moved into government jobs, Siff chose to work in public relations at Topaz Partners, a Boston-area technology PR firm, because he was disappointed in how “political” the military had become, especially when the U.S. is pouring millions and billions of dollars into two wars that seem too expensive. (Continued below graphic)

In U.S. Dollars. Source: Stockholm International Peace Research Institute
Graphic by Catherine Ngai

The current U.S. defense budget proposal of $708 billion for fiscal 2011, a 6.7 percent increase from the year prior of $663.8 billion. According to the Stockholm International Peace and Research Institute, this number surpasses defense spending in the next 10 countries combined. Some question why this number is so big and whether reducing it would help lower the nation’s budget deficit.

“The US military is the pillar upon which the stability and safety of the international system rests,” said Daniel Goure, vice president of the Lexington Institute, a libertarian think tank based in Arlington, VA, in an interview. “It’s not in our interests to see the Middle East exploding into war or to see South Korea overrun by North Korea.”

Goure says that although the U.S. military budget is large, it acts as an international defense mechanism. He argues that the U.S. uses its military to keep peace internationally.

He also points out that if the entire defense budget were cut to zero, it would further exacerbate the debt situation instead of alleviating it. He reasons that eliminating the defense budget would mean firing the nearly 1.4 million men and women on active duty and the another 1 million in the Reserves and the National Guard. This would mean increasing the already high unemployment rate.

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War Reporting: How to live and tell the tale

WASHINGTON–The War on Terror continues to claim the lives of soldiers, innocent civilians, and journalists. Safety training experts say war reporters have a lot to learn about protecting themselves while trying to get their story.  

“Too many times journalists are the only professionals on the battlefield or in a disaster zone quite unprepared for what they are going to encounter,” said Rodney Pinder, director of the International News Safety Institute. “International journalists do not appreciate the risks and local journalists have neither the means nor the opportunity to access safety training,” he said.

Since the start of the War on Terror, hundreds of journalists have died trying to cover the war. In 2010 alone, 46 journalists have been killed trying to report in hostile environments, including Iraq and Afghanistan. When compared to the Vietnam War, which claimed about 70 news media lives, these numbers reported by the INSI are shocking.

“Those who target journalists are professional killers – we need to be as professional in protecting ourselves,” said Pinder, adding that  hostile environment training can potentially save the lives of journalists, and help them save the lives of others.

INSI is an organization dedicated to the safety of­ journalists working in dangerous environments. Its goal is to “help journalists survive the story” by raising funds to provide training for free to journalists in need. Training programs come in around $3,000 a week and can seem cost prohibitive to freelance reporters. The program teaches journalists about the many aspects of personal safety, pre-deployment planning, conflict management, hostile crowd situations, ballistic awareness, safety from fire-arms, passage through checkpoints, coping with kidnapping, and basic first aid skills.

Technological innovation and smaller, lighter equipment, has made war reporting more dangerous than ever before. Now, more and more reporters are covering the news from the front lines, including camera operators. 

“Those in the military like reporters who­ embed in the battlefield because it establishes a trust between the media and those deployed, said Dr. Conrad Crane, lead author for the U.S. Army Manual on Counterinsurgency and director of the US Army Military History Institute, a part of the Army War College.

To live up to the networks standards of immediacy, fortifying this trust relationship between reporters and the military is necessary. But consequently, a reporter’s­ safety is often at risk­. However, despite how dangerous war reporting can be, it is an essential job that someone must do.

“Our job is to keep the outside world informed. Wars must not, cannot, be conducted in secret,” said Pinder. He believes that transparency in war reporting holds “the government and military accountable. Our reporting counters their spin and reveals actions they would like to keep secret,” said George Espers, a veteran Gulf War and Vietnam War reporter.

 “[War reporters are] the unsung heroes behind most of the news footage we see on our screens every day,” according to Pinder on the institute’s website.

 Being in a war zone is dangerous for anyone, but reporters can take certain steps to educate themselves before entering a combat zone. INSI is just one of many organizations dedicated to the safety of journalists. But at the end of the day, how to proceed successfully often relies on common sense.  

 “There is no guarantee in War. . . .Ask yourself, is this story worth the risk? No story is worth getting killed for,” said Espers.

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Aid workers pay high price for USAID policy in Afghanistan

WASHINGTON –Security for aid workers in Afghanistan is deteriorating and nongovernment organizations blame U.S. development policies for putting more lives at risk.

The U.S. Agency for International Development requires that humanitarian aid projects in Afghanistan support the military’s war strategy, a policy that has made aid workers targets for the Taliban, nongovernment organizations say.

“There are more attacks on aid workers now,” said Ann Richard, vice president of government relations at the International Rescue Committee, a nongovernment organization with programs in Afghanistan. “Security for NGOs has gone in the opposite direction.”

USAID policies explicitly support the counterinsurgency war strategy in Afghanistan, and the agency allocates funding to nongovernment organizations based on how their projects “contribute to COIN goals,” according to agency guidelines. COIN is shorthand for counterinsurgency, the war strategy used in the Iraq and Afghanistan that coordinates military force with development and peacekeeping efforts to defeat insurgent groups.

USAID grants require aid organizations work closely with the military on projects such as “battlefield clean up,” where aid workers are sent to clean up post-conflict damage in communities where there was heavy fighting, Richard said.

Merging nongovernment aid projects with military operations has tarnished the apolitical, impartial image critical to the safety of aid workers, many organizations say. The general assumption among Afghans is that aid organizations are working for the U.S. military, said one aid worker who helps run medical programs for an organization that has worked in Afghanistan for more than 15 years.

“If there’s anger at the military, then often times the NGOs will have to pay for it,” said the aid worker, who asked not to be named for fear he might jeopardize the organization’s programs.

Three aid workers were killed in July when suicide bombers attacked the compound of Development Alternatives, a consulting group that helps implements USAID development projects in Afghanistan. The Taliban claimed responsibility for the attack, which officials said was a response to the recent surge of U.S. troops.

“Even the perception of being tied to the military can have tragic results,” said Brian Katulis, a national security expert at Center for American Progress and a former State Department official.

Development aid has been tied to counterinsurgency since the war strategy was implemented in Iraq during the Bush administration, but only recently have nonprofits started to collectively push back. The Obama administration has ratcheted up aid efforts in Afghanistan, where the need for infrastructure and humanitarian aid far exceeds that in Iraq.

Safety concerns are paramount in Afghanistan, where insurgents are killing civilians at a rate three times higher than they did during the Iraq war, according to a paper released in July by the National Bureau of Economic Research. The Taliban’s murder of 10 members of Christian organization International Assistance Mission on Aug. 5 has escalated fears among aid workers.

“It’s not a good situation,” said Beth Cole, director of intergovernmental affairs at the U.S. Institution of Peace. “The Taliban are circling Kabul. The days are waning.”

Since the start of 2010, there have been 76 attacks on nongovernment workers in Afghanistan, according to the Afghanistan NGO Safety Office, an independent group that provides security information for humanitarian workers in the country. Fifteen of those incidents, which include violent attacks and abduction, occurred in July.

Several nongovernment organizations working in Afghanistan have stopped applying for USAID funding and are instead seeking more funding from private donors and the EU, aid workers reported. Still, many organizations say they cannot regain the trust they worked to earn in Afghan communities since long before the 2001 U.S. invasion.

Some argue that aid workers’ blame is misplaced. Because of the increased threat from insurgent groups, development organizations have to learn to work closer with the military, said Richard Owens, director for community stabilization at International Relief and Development.

“You cannot rely on your good relationship with the local communicates to keep you safe anymore,” said Owens, who has a background in coordinating military-civilian operations. “In a world where the Taliban exists, all bets are off.”

Nonprofits are “naive” to think association with the military puts them at greater risk, said Andrew Natsios, a professor of diplomacy at Georgetown University and USAID administrator from 2001 to 2006. The Taliban target aid organizations because they are bringing development to Afghanistan, Natsios said.

“Whatever is not 12th century in their world view is regarded as the enemy,” Natsios said. “What the Taliban is fighting against is modernization.”

According to media reports, the Taliban killed the Christian aid workers earlier this month because they were “spying” for the U.S. and “preaching Christianity.” The international group included Afghan nationals and had worked in the country for more than 30 years.

A senior adviser at one high-profile aid organization working in Afghanistan said his organization had been doing development work in Taliban-controlled areas because aid workers spent years proving to insurgents that they did not have a political mission. The organization is rethinking where they can send workers and type of projects they can do under increased security threats.

Development efforts have shifted to areas in Afghanistan where U.S. military forces are concentrated. Health programs in other areas of the country have been shut down, replaced by new projects in the south and east, where fighting is the heaviest, said Leonard Rubenstein, a public health professor at Johns Hopkins and former U.S. Institute of Peace fellow.

The inequitable distribution of aid runs contrary to nonprofit development practices that stress equitable resources across ethnic groups and has created animosity among some communities “who feel they are being penalized for being peaceful,” according to research by Andrew Wilder, an expert on governance and aid in Afghanistan at the U.S. Institute of Peace.

Some nongovernment organizations fear communities that have lost development projects may lash out at aid workers, creating new conflict in previously stable areas.

“It’s actually counterproductive,” Rubenstein said. “You’re really shooting yourself in the foot.”

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Media-military relations not improved by Pentagon’s ruling on Hastings embed

Freelance reporter Michael Hastings, whose Rolling Stone profile of Gen. Stanley McChrystal ended the former top Afghanistan commander’s military career, has been denied an embed slot to join a military unit in Afghanistan, according to news reports.

In a Twitter posting, Hastings wrote, “to clarify @AP story: the embed had already been approved for september. now it has been disapproved.” He apparently was working on a story about helicopters and asked for the embed a month ago. The Pentagon acknowledged Tuesday that it had denied the request.

According to the Associated Press, Col. David Lapan “acknowledged that it’s ‘fairly rare’ for the military to turn way a reporter who wants to embed with front-line troops. ‘There is no right to embed,’ Lapan said. ‘It is a choice made between units and individual reporters, and a key element of an embed is having trust that the individuals are going to abide by the ground rules. So in that instance the command in Afghanistan decided there wasn’t the trust requisite and denied this request.’”

But Hastings says the embed was approved, which would show there was “the trust requisite” for at least someone in the military at one point.

Lapan’s vague use of lack of trust as a reason for denying an embed indicates a Pentagon public affairs office that will use this type of reasoning now and in the future to deny access to the troops in Afghanistan – or elsewhere – to any reporter who has written a story that someone in the chain of command finds annoying.

That is a serious precedent. If the military has no evidence that Hastings violated his embed agreement on a previous trip, the Pentagon ought to follow its own rules on his current embed request and approve it.

When Defense Secretary Robert Gates announced new rules requiring military officers and Pentagon officials to notify Gates’ public affairs shop before talking to reporters, a policy announced shortly after Hastings’ article was published, the secretary emphasized that he has often found news reports helpful, “a spur to action” to fix problems like the Walter Reed Army Medical Center problems a few years ago.

“This is not about you,” Gates said of those rules. “This is about us.”

The retaliatory attitude toward Hastings would seem to indicate otherwise.

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Could Academic/Pro Collaborations Rejuvenate Embedded War Reporting?

DENVER – As budget cuts have decimated national security journalism, one of the first things to go has been the kind of deep and prolonged embedded reporting that keeps the public abreast of what is happening in the two wars that the United States is waging, in Afghanistan and Iraq.

The University of Oklahoma and veteran broadcast reporter Mike Boettcher have come up with an intriguing model for how to help sustain that kind of journalism, while also using it as a tool for teaching the next generation of national security journalists.

Boettcher , a visiting professor at OU’s Gaylord College of Journalism and Mass Communication, will work with students to produce multimedia content based on his reports from Afghanistan, for ABC News platforms including ABCNews.com, starting Sept. 1. The school and ABC will divvy up the costs, making it more affordable for both, Boettcher said in an interview here at the annual conference of the Association for Education in Journalism and Mass Communication.

This is AEJMC’s 94th annual conference (it runs through Aug. 7), and more than 1,600 educators are spending their days and nights figuring how they – and their students – can best adapt to the cataclysmic changes in the media landscape.

A full day of pre-conference workshops Aug. 3 focused on how university journalism programs can help fill the gaps left by the cuts at mainstream media outlets. Many schools, including Medill, have established programs through which student journalists are working in cooperation with their professional counterparts on groundbreaking projects.

Under the auspices of the OU-ABC partnership, Boettcher and his son Carlos will spend a year embedded with U.S. troops in Afghanistan, recording footage and interviewing people involved at the front lines of that conflict. Multimedia material will be transmitted to Norman, Okla., where undergraduate and graduate students will prepare it for ABCNews.com and other ABC outlets.

Sarkeys Foundation, which is based in Norman, is funding the project.

Boettcher, who reported from Afghanistan for ABC News last summer, spent many years with NBC News after starting his career with CNN in 1980. He said that he plans to deliver lectures to students from the front lines, via Skype.

“I want to tell the personal stories of the men and women that are fighting this war,’’ said Boettcher. “This project will let me do that and still work with the great students at OU.’’

Charles Self, an OU journalism faculty member and past president of AEJMC, said in an interview that such partnerships are a tremendous boon to students, who get to work with a world-class journalist, even as he reports from the front line of the war in Afghanistan. But he said it could ultimately prove to be a model that could “save’’ foreign reporting, especially long-term embeds in war zones and other conflict areas.

“We know it works because we’ve done it,’’ said Self, referring to a recent pilot project in which Boettcher did a similar reporting/teaching effort in Iraq. “It’s a bargain for us because we don’t have to pay Mike’s entire salary, and it’s a bargain for the news agency because they don’t have to either.’’

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Winners and losers in Afghanistan

As The Washington Post reports, Gen. David H. Petraeus and other commanders in Afghanistan are planning to allow commanders to have access to large amounts of money from a discretionary fund so that they can support reconstruction projects that should be done in a hurry. The money, says Petraeus, is “a weapon system.”

Not everybody agrees. International-aid experts point out that developing the infrastructure of a devastated country takes time and cannot be put on a fast track, regardless of how much money is poured into the projects. Often, the beneficiaries of the U.S. strategy in Afghanistan are the tribal leaders who become business partners with American contractors and friends of U.S. military commanders and intelligence officers. As Jake Sherman, the associate director of a New York University project on peacekeeping and the security sector, told me, “You’re empowering alternative structures of power that have the potential to fight amongst themselves or against the authority of the Afghan state.” Under these conditions, certain tribal leaders end up as winners.

The losers are ordinary Afghans who are left out of the deals or, even worse, targeted because of the false tips that corrupt tribal leaders have provided. Altogether, international-aid experts believe that it is a flawed system that is based on cash payments, with potentially disastrous results for the Afghan people and their nation.

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On WikiLeaks and Pakistan

Some Obama administration officials and congressional lawmakers in recent days
 have sought to downplay the significance of the massive leak of secret U.S.
military files by the organization WikiLeaks by saying it’s “old news,’’ or a 
rehash of what is already well known about the prolonged war.
 But why would they think such a dismissive characterization of the remarkable 
trove of documents makes things better, not worse?

If anything, what they are conceding is that top U.S. intelligence and 
policy-making officials know full well that at least some of the billions of dollars that they have given to Pakistan in recent years has gone to funding the very insurgency that they are trying to wipe out in Afghanistan – with little, if
 any success.

It’s true that Washington has long known that Pakistan has been playing such a
 double game, especially its powerful Inter-Services Intelligence directorate. The 
ISI essentially created the militant groups that became the Taliban to act as
their proxy fighting forces against India and, later, in Afghanistan. 
But the front-line troop reports and other documents posted online by WikiLeaks
 provide chilling and authoritative details about how U.S.-funded allied forces are
 literally at war with our own troops.

And they do so with the kind of specificity 
that the Obama administration and congressional lawmakers will find hard to 
ignore.
 The really smart counterterrorism officials in Washington – who don’t dare speak 
publicly because it could end their careers – are hoping the new disclosures will 
finally force those in charge of Pakistan policy to do something that they
 have been unwilling to do in the past.
 They’re hoping the White House and Congress tie the billions in aid money flowing 
to Pakistan to verifiable efforts by the Islamabad government to slash the ties
 between its intelligence and military services and the Taliban and other militant
 organizations that they are in collusion with.

Speaking on the condition of anonymity, some of them acknowledge that such
 “tough love’’ could be risky. When Washington cut off some aid to Pakistan after 
it clandestinely developed nuclear weapons capability, the Islamabad government 
intensified its ties to jihadi organizations. 
But given the intensity of the Taliban insurgency, they say, that is a risk that 
Washington can’t afford not to take.

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A whole different kind of AWOL

The 17 Afghan men ­stare ­out from the black and white mug shots of a military-issued memo.

The Be-On-the-Look-Out bulletin, or BOLO­, is the modern-day equivalent of a “WANTED” poster, ­shared between different ­federal agencies to help track down fugitives or missing persons within the United States.

These 17 faces are not those of terrorists, according to the U.S. government. They are missing Afghani military members, and, the moment they walked off base where they were training, they became illegal immigrants. And wanted men.

Since it was first reported ­by FOX ­News a few ­weeks ago, the BOLO, and the news it heralds, has caused a stir among government and military officials, catching the attention of members of Congress.

It was issued by the Naval Criminal Investigative Service to alert military professionals that the men had gone missing from the Defense Language Institute’s campus at Lackland Air Force Base.

At the institute outside San Antonio, Texas, the ­Afghan troops were in the middle of, or in some cases had graduated from, an English language-training program that would allow them to go on to other U.S. military educational facilities, anywhere from dental training school to the War College. At the end of their education, they were supposed to return to Afghanistan, where they would help American and NATO forces fight the insurgency and stabilize the country.

“We are continuing to monitor the situation,” said Capt. John Severns, spokesman for Air Education and Training Command, which runs Lackland Air Force Base. He said once they went missing, though, the Afghan soldiers fall under the jurisdiction of the Department of Homeland Security.

Perhaps the bulletin’s most interesting effect has been to illuminate the murky communications between the tangle of military and government agencies that are handling the issue.

“There are a lot of hands in this,” said one defense official with knowledge of the matter, asking not to be named because his agency did not currently have jurisdiction over the Afghan fugitives.  He suggested a number for the NATO agency called the Combined Security Transition Command-Afghanistan, which brought the Afghan men to the U.S. The U.S. number for that agency did not work.

He confirmed that the NCIS bulletin was incomplete and outdated in that it only reported 17 Afghan individuals, when there have been 46 who have gone missing between 2007 and 2009. He said of the 17 named, all but four had been found – many are seeking asylum in Canada. He had no knowledge of what prompted NCIS to issue the bulletin at the time it did.

He and other military officials said they were not concerned that the absences were a threat to security, though. All access privileges are revoked and ID cards inactivated once a person disappears, he said.

At Lackland, Air Force officials can only try to discourage the students who are still there from deserting.

And keeping them under lock and key is out of the question, Severns said.

“They’re students, not prisoners,” he said.

But Rep. Lamar Smith (R-TX) has concerns about the security implications of the disappearances. Smith, a ­member of the Homeland Security Committee, has called for the Air Force and Department of Homeland Security to brief Congress on the issue.

“It’s no surprise that individuals who come to the U.S. legally on visas decide to stay illegally. But when those individuals are foreign military officers – with special access to military facilities – it creates a serious national security threat to American communities,” he said in a ­statement.

It is not uncommon for foreign nationals brought to the U.S. by the military for schooling to decide they like it enough to stay against their visas. According to Air Force and Defense officials, it’s been happening for decades, with many just staying under the radar or heading to Canada.

“People jumping ship is pretty common,” said Muzaffar Chista, Director of the Migration Policy Institute at New York University School of Law, speaking generally about the phenomenon in immigration and U.S. history.

He said the Afghan military members were somewhat similar to stowaways, people who stay on board a vessel just long enough to reach a port where they disembark – and then disappear into the crowd.

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How far will the U.S. go to fuel the war in Afghanistan?

WASHINGTON – Some of the characters are new, but the scene in Bishkek, Kyrgyzstan is one of déjà vu. This past April’s riots were the second time in five years that the United States was left in the uncomfortable position of watching as a president of the small Central Asian country was ousted amidst allegations that U.S. fuel contracts supplying a major logistical hub for the war in Afghanistan were funneling millions of dollars to Kyrgyzstan’s presidential family.

Even before the most recent overthrow, the House National Security Subcommittee was looking into contracts in the region, which is renowned for its corruption. Now, the subcommittee has undertaken a full-fledged investigation, focused on the contracts at Manas Transit Center in Kyrgyzstan, while the Department of Defense moves to open up bidding on the suspect contracts.

“Let’s be honest: At many times throughout our history, the United States has closely dealt with unsavory regimes in order to achieve more pressing policy or strategic objectives,” Rep. John Tierney, D-Mass., said in his opening remarks at the investigation’s first hearing in April. “The United States will have to work hard to restore our credibility in (the Kyrgyz’­) eyes, beginning with transparency regarding U.S. fuel contracts at Manas.”

The F.B.I. collaborated with the Kyrgyz government on an investigation in 2005, when accusations that the son of then-president Askar Akayev was improperly benefiting from U.S. fuel contracts. That FBI report was never made public, but an independent investigator for the Kyrgyz told The New York Timesthat he suspected the new president, Kurmanbek Bakiyev, simply took over the same business model, installing his son, Maksim Bakiyev, as the beneficiary.

Now, the anti-corruption interim government led by Roza Otunbayeva is opening its own investigation, focused on six subcontractors allegedly controlled by Maksim Bakiyev.

“Whatever the Pentagon’s policy of buying warlords in Afghanistan, the state of Kyrgyzstan demands more respect,” Edil Baisalov, chief of staff for the interim lead, told ­The Times in April. “The government of Kyrgyzstan will not be bought and sold. We are above that.”

The closely linked companies at the center of the allegations are Red Star and Mina Corp., which provide enormous amounts of Russian jet fuel to power U.S. troops in Afghanistan. Together, the companies have received more than $1 billion for fuel sales over the past six years.

The fact that companies’ director of operations, Charles “Chuck” Squires, is a retired Army lieutenant colonel and former defense attaché to the U.S. embassy in Bishkek raises some eyebrows. Except in the case where a presidential directive makes an exemption for national security concerns, military contracts are subject to the Foreign Corrupt Practices Act, the law that outlaws bribery in U.S. business transactions overseas.

“If this were a commercial setting, an investigator would probably start by studying whether there really is an arm’s-length relationship between Red Star and Pentagon contractors,” Scott Horton, an expert on accountability in military contracts, said in his written testimony to the House committee. “If not, an investigator might quickly conclude that it is a shell interposed to provide a buffer between the procurement officers and companies controlled by the president’s family.”

The hearing witnesses consistently hit the refrain that the U.S. embassy delegation was unnecessarily close with the Bakiyev regime. The essential question is whether this was a State Department blunder, or if it was part of a larger policy of currying favor with the regime to ensure the future of the Manas air base.

In February 2009, in what was widely seen as a quid pro quo, Bakiyev announced plans to close the Manas base on the same day that Russian President Putin announced $2.15 billion in aid to the country. Later, Bakiyev flipped when the U.S. agreed to pay $17 million more in annual rent for the base.

Earlier this month, the Department of Defense moved to open up bidding on the contracts to the Manas base. Meanwhile, the United States and Kyrgyzstan have been in intense negotiations over taxes on fuel being imported to the base.

In impoverished Kyrgyzstan, the U.S. air base and its connected contracts make an easy whipping boy for disgruntled citizens whose country was ranked 128 out of 149 for corruption by World Audit in 2009.

But in business environments like that of Kyrgyzstan, it may well be that only countries connected to political elite will be in a position to meet U.S. needs.

“Allegations like these are an inevitable by-product of working in this part of the world, where corruption is just the way business is done,” said Martha Brill Olcott, an expert on the region for the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace. “The question is, were these contracts illegal, or were they simply unethical? There are only a few places you can get oil from – you’ve got to have a refinery – and it’s predictable that the bigger companies, the ones with elite connections, are going to be the ones that can get the best deal for the U.S. government.”

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Will COIN in Afghanistan ever work?

Sen. Jim Webb’s recent comments about his concerns about the U.S. role in Afghanistan didn’t make any headlines, but the Obama administration — and the many reporters who cover it—would do well to play close attention to them.

Webb, D-Va., said during a Senate Foreign Relations Committee hearing that, in drawing up its congressionally mandated December report, Progress Toward Security and Stability in Afghanistan, “the administration must provide us some clarity, not only as to specific programs, but as to what their policies are expected to accomplish in a larger sense.”

“The argument that we are in Afghanistan because of 9/11 is true only in the sense that the presence of international terrorists inside Afghanistan at that time illuminated the overall threat,” said Webb. “International terrorism is by its very nature mobile, with the capability to operate in many areas, as we know well.”

In other words, Webb said, if the United States is in Afghanistan to counter the global threat posed by al-Qaida and affiliated militants, it needs to do a better job of explaining how it hopes to accomplish that by surging tens of thousands of additional American troops into the country and asking them to do counter-insurgency—especially when al-Qaida’s command has moved to neighboring Pakistan.

Although counterinsurgency, or COIN, has become all the rage within the Obama administration, a growing number of military experts are quietly saying that it could easily draw the United States into a protracted and debilitating (and extraordinarily expensive) war that essentially cannot be won.

The reason: The COIN strategy means that the U.S. military, and its allies in ISAF, are waging war in order to eliminate—or at least diminish—the legitimacy of the Taliban insurgency in alliance with a U.S.-backed government in Kabul that is, at best, a reluctant partner. For that effort to succeed, U.S. forces must also convince the Afghan population to support the Karzai government, even as the already unpopular regime grows even more unpopular with each revelation of corruption—and each public increase in U.S. support.

In his explosive Rolling Stone article last month that resulted in Obama firing his Afghanistan war commander, Gen. Stanley McChrystal, freelance journalist Michael Hastings captured some very telling conversations between the general and soldiers that he was visiting on the front lines of the counterinsurgency effort. One of them tells McChrystal that some of the men believed the U.S. is not only losing the war, but that the troops don’t even know why they’re there.

In the piece, Hastings reports that McChrystal defended his counterinsurgency strategy but that the troops remained highly skeptical. Moreover, Hastings quotes McChrystal’s own chief of operations as saying that the U.S. COIN effort in Afghanistan is, essentially, doomed.

“It’s not going to look like a win, smell like a win or taste like a win,” Maj. Gen. Bill Mayville, McChrystal’s chief of operations, is quoted as saying. “This is going to end in an argument.”

Although Webb’s comments were more measured, they carry a lot of clout. Besides being a decorated Marine Corps veteran and former secretary of the Navy, he has in relatively short order become one of the more influential congressional Democrats on the issue. He serves on both the Foreign Relations and Armed Services committees in the Senate.

“In its December review, it is important for the Administration to clearly show how the process it is putting into place in Afghanistan will degrade or defeat the threat of international terrorism,” Webb said at the hearing. “This can only be done by demonstrating: (1) measurable results, (2) evidence of political stability; and (3) an agreed upon conclusion to the U.S. military presence in Afghanistan.”

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