Yes, we watch Rachel Maddow
On Monday night, Maddow invited counterinsurgency expert John Nagl to discuss Afghanistan in her ‘Talk Me Down’ segment. Nagl is a retired lieutenant colonel who commanded an Army battalion in Baghdad and wrote Learning to Eat Soup With a Knife, an influential analysis of American failures in Vietnam. In addition, Nagl worked with David Petraeus on Field Manual 3-24, the Army’s official doctrine for counterinsurgency, which informed the surge. Currently, Nagl serves as President of the Center for a New American Security, the erstwhile home of many of the top civilians in the Obama Pentagon (except Bob Gates).
FYI, the first five minutes of the clip below are Maddow’s commentary, followed by five minutes of discussion with Nagl. You may want to skip to the discussion if you’re not fond of Ms. Rachel. I certainly wouldn’t mind if she stopped making faces for the camera, as if she were trying to be David Letterman of Jon Stewart. But that’s not important.
What’s really interesting is that in spite of Barack Obama’s constant description of Afghanistan, for two years running, as a war we must win, Maddow basically considers it a lost cause and doesn’t seem to think that there would be serious costs to walking off the playing field. Since I’m no expert on the (overtly) liberal media, I’m not sure whether to take Maddow’s position as a bellwether. Yet it seems that even with a brilliant liberal president in office fighting a war considered fully legitimate by the international community, Maddow and others on the left want no part of it.