From Gen. Jones, a cautionary performance

Reading newspapers, tea leaves and body languages for signs of what actions the Obama administration will ultimately take in its reassessment of an Afghanistan strategy can be a fruitless enterprise. Deciding the sources and motivations of leaks, interpreting the ground commander's seeming insubordination in London, balancing Gen. Petraeus' reported endorsement and then non- or iffy endorsement of Gen. McChrystal's plan -- all have afforded tentative conclusions, at best.

The same probably holds true for reading too much into Gen. Jim Jones' appearance on CNN's "State of the Union" yesterday, but there's always hope, especially in the sense that the national security adviser seemed rather hopeless.

To me, he came across as a man weighted down by the heftiest of doubts and reservations -- emotions he didn't mind betraying without openly sobbing. An exaggeration, but you get the point. Marine commandants are, in general, gung ho, while Jones was anything but.

"As you know, we have been there a while," he said to host John King, and he did so with a decided weariness that colored his entire performance. Naturally, after months of running the Afghan gauntlet he might only have been physically tired, but I got the impression his exhaustion extended to his intellect: that here was a man who, having examined all the angles, realized there was no way out -- except for just getting out, which itself could be fraught with as many dangers as staying in.

What little cheerleading Jones did seemed perfunctory. There's "more work to do," he said unconvincingly as to our share of it, in fostering Afghanistan's "economic development, good governance and rule of the law." In brief, nation building; standing thousands of years of Afghan culture on its head almost literally overnight, and trying to do so with domestic support that's increasingly limited to neoconservative pinheads like John McCain and Joe Lieberman.

Both of whom relish the kind of faith-based abstractions that ground us down in Iraq, which, in time -- and the clock is already ticking -- will revert to the ethno-sectarian hellhole that it is. All for nothing. The surge's success is a mirage, soon to be blown away in the ancient sands of the desert winds.

Yet Iraq, relative to Afghanistan, was a neocon cakewalk, "blessed" as it was with a reasonably modern economy and unquestionably centralized government. Afghanistan, on the other hand, is still bubbling in a medieval cauldron of narco-mobsters and ruthless warlords and, above all, theocratic cutthroats who, as the NY Times described them on Saturday, "can fight anonymously with roadside bombs or stealthily with kidnappings -- but also can operate like a disciplined armed force using well-rehearsed small-unit tactics to challenge the American military for dominance on the conventional battlefield."

That, as mentioned, was from Saturday, and further from a leaked internal report compiled by the Army's Combat Studies Institute detailing "how not to win in Afghanistan." Which is to say, at the end of nearly seven years, there we were, still unmindful of "intelligence reports ... warning of militants massing," still unheedful of rumors of "Afghan officials of dubious loyalty," and still largely oblivious to "an increasingly tense and untrusting relationship with the Afghan people."

That, to repeat, was after seven years; then, this Sunday morning and just prior to Gen. Jones' appearance on CNN, came the news of a deadly firefight in Afghanistan -- more than a year later -- that mirrored all the foolhardiness which had prompted the aforementioned report.

"Eight U.S. Soldiers Dead in Bold Attack in Afghanistan," read the Times' headline, whose story went on to describe, essentially, a lethality in vain: "American forces had planned to pull out of the sparsely populated area, as part of a strategic shift to place more troops in heavily populated centers."

Yes, and should that "strategic shift" materialize, the theatre of operations will be moved by an anonymous, stealthy, disciplined and opportunistic enemy armed force to ... where?

I haven't read what the expected combat casualties are under McChrystal's more muscular counterinsurgency plan, other than encountering, that is, that exceedingly vague term of "higher," but I have read that the cost to the public treasury could exceed $1 trillion.

Those were, no doubt, just two of the inextinguishable weights so visibly pulling Jones down yesterday. Then, the overnight news of more of the same, which, no matter how the strategy and tactics are refined and altered, will likely promise yet more of the same.

I just hope I didn't misread what seemed like his profoundly cautionary, if not intellectually dispirited, performance.