A former top CIA counterterrorism official today questioned the central tenet of the war in Afghanistan, saying a U.S. defeat and Al Qaeda's return to a safe haven there would not pose a grave threat to the United States.

Paul R. Pillar, a South Asia expert who was deputy chief of the CIA's Counterterrorism Center in the late 1990s, argued in a Washington Post Op-ed piece that Al Qaeda's haven in Afghanistan was not critical to the success of the Sept. 11, 2001 attacks, and would be even less so today.

"How important to terrorist groups is any physical haven?"  Pillar asked.

Key Democrats' disenchantment with the war in Afghanistan appeared to accelerate Monday with Rep. John P. Murtha's hardening opposition to sending more troops U.S. troops there.

"In Vietnam it took 500,000 troops and that didn't solve the problem. So we have to take a different approach," the chairman of the House Appropriations Committee's subcommittee on defense told my erstwhile CQ colleague Josh Rogin in his debut column at Foreign Policy online.

What do you call a tsunami that falls on a deserted island?

A seismic event.

George Will's call for troop withdrawals from Afghanistan, which surfaced on Aug. 31, seems to fit that category. It hit Washington when the chattering classes were at the beach, toughing out stay-cations or busy putting their kids in school.

So let's take another look.

Former Goldman Sachs chief Philip D. Murphy evidently arrived in the style to which he is accustomed last month to take up his new post as U.S. envoy to Germany, touching down in an ostentatious top-of-the-line executive jet that left German Chancellor Angela Merkel grinding her teeth over President Obama's gift of ambassadorships to wealthy donors.

Already wrestling with a renewed controversy over contract killers, the CIA reacted angrily Thursday to a news organization's revelation of yet another secret interrogation center.

ABC News reported that the CIA had a secret site in Lithuania where interrogators grilled terrorist suspects,  "one of eight facilities the CIA set-up after 9/11 to detain and interrogate top al Qaeda operatives captured around the world."

As U.S. commanders in Afghanistan ready plans to wipe out drug lords financing the Taliban, there's little they can do about insurgents' biggest source of cash: do-gooders.

According to a little noticed report last week, the mullahs and their henchmen are raking in hundreds of millions of dollars - some say a billion - annually by shaking down foreign organizations and contractors building schools, roads and bridges across the struggling nation.

It's a racket The Sopranos would love: In exchange for a hefty "fee," local Taliban commanders provide "protection" on a project, allowing construction to go forward unmolested.

Killing off Afghanistan's drug lords sounds like a nifty idea -- as good as any in the 72 years since Congress outlawed marijuana in the United States.

As presented in the New York Times on Monday, the Pentagon plans to hunt down and kill or capture 50 Afghan drug kingpins supporting the Taliban.
 
It's a very good time, in other words, for the drug lords to switch sides.

The feds have been hyping their domestic terrorism cases for several years now, and the arrest of seven North Carolina men this week appears to be no exception.

The headliners in the case, of course, are ordinary folks Daniel Patrick Boyd and his two sons, who prosecutors say led three lives: good family men, likeable neighbors and secret terrorists.

Anyone who thinks that Predator drones and NSA intercepts have made the old-fashioned recruiting of human spies a waste of time - as many U.S. commanders in Afghanistan seem to think - should talk to the family of Pfc. Bowe R. Bergdahl.

According to an exclusive report from ABC News reporter Matthew Cole moments ago, Bergdahl, who disappeared June 30 from his base in Afghanistan, has been moved to South Waziristan, in Pakistan, where U.S. forces are officially prohibited from operating.

Last September, when the military-media complex was all-atwitter with Bob Woodward's revelations of a revolution in counterterrorism methods, I found myself talking with a confidante of Gen. David Petraeus at an off-the-record cocktail hour.

Petraeus was then commander of coalition forces in Iraq, and was generally being credited with developing a breakthrough technology to find and track terrorist suspects that was so secret that Woodward couldn't reveal the details.

But according to my interlocutor, Petraeus, whom he had talked to hours earlier, gave complete credit for the counterterror revolution to Gen. Stanley A. McChrystal, the new U.S. commander in Afghanistan, for developing and running the program, which is still shrouded in mystery.

A retired Pakistani general confided a deep worry to a friend in Washington last week: that some young officers in Pakistan's regular army have become increasingly sympathetic over the past few years to the Taliban and their brand of radical Islam.

While he had no numbers or percentages of officers sympathetic to the Taliban, the possibility of any defections raises questions about the reliability of these officers during any sort of push against the Taliban by the Pakistani army.

About 20 years ago I had the privilege to interview Gen. George L. Mabry, the second most decorated soldier in the history of the U.S. Army, at his home in Columbia, S.C.

Mabry had been awarded the Medal of Honor for his heroics in World War Two. The young captain had already earned a chestful of ribbons for his "Saving Private Ryan" performance at Utah Beach on June 6, 1944. Only the legendary Audie Murphy earned more medals.

I had to laugh when I heard our next ambassador to Afghanistan say, "every poll will show that 90 percent of the people firmly reject the Taliban."

You can't make this stuff up.   

Lt. Gen. Karl W. Eikenberry may be a great warrior, a very smart guy, and turn out to be a  very fine ambassador. But that's a bunch of baloney.

Vice President Joseph R. Biden more than backed up his boss's view Tuesday that U.S. and NATO troops are not winning the war in Afghanistan.

"We are not now winning the war, but the war is far from lost," Biden told a news conference in Brussels today after three hours of talks with NATO allies.

But an assertion by Biden that 70 percent of Taliban guerrillas could be persuaded to stop fighting or turn against their Afghan brothers-in-arms drew scoffs from experts in Kabul.

Special Forces troops tend to think they carry the fate of the world in their rucksacks.

In Pakistan, they may be right.

Years from now we may look back at the "secret" deployment of some 70 U.S. military advisers to Pakistan as a turning point in the global war on terrorism, the moment when a daring idea and brilliant execution snatched victory from a looming disaster.

Or the opposite: a Pakistani version of Ia Drang, the 1965 battle when North Vietnamese regulars showed they could go toe-to-toe with American troops, signaling a long, devastating and -- in that case -- losing war.

Make no mistake about it: Pakistan hangs in the balance.

It's intermittently amazing to me that we managed to conquer Japan and Germany in four-plus years (with no small help from the Russians, of course), yet after almost twice that time we haven't been able to crush a raggedy band of 8th-century minded terrorists in an area no bigger than Montana.

We didn't even have a plan, as it turned out, as late as last spring, almost seven years after al Qaeda launched big hits on us from its mountain redoubts on the Afghan-Pakistan frontier. Today it's said to be ensconced in the Federally Administered Tribal Areas, or FATA, loosely controlled by Islamabad in a regional autonomy arrangement.

American civilian advisers to Afghanistan's National Police, considered the linchpin in any successful effort against the Taliban, say restrictions on their movements are making their efforts basically worthless.

The advisers are not permitted to stay overnight in Afghan police installations or even go out on raids with their charges, two former CIA operatives who worked with the police in the past year say.

The grumbling about Afghan President Hamid Karzai has grown so loud you'd think the Obama administration has given up on him.

Indeed, you could almost hear the knees knocking in Karzai's embassy here when incoming Obama officials met privately during inauguration week with at least two Afghan politicians who would like to replace the president.

With the war going badly, criticism has grown of Karzai's seeming tolerance of endemic corruption in his government, which threatens to turn Afghanistan into a narco-state, if not grease the return of the Taliban to power.

Could his days be numbered?

CIA ground teams operating on the vaguely determined Afghan-Pakistan frontier are well aware of  the presidential executive order banning assassinations, says a recent returnee from the region's fighting.

The problem is that al Qaeda suspects and their Taliban supporters don't wear what's normally considered a uniform, which puts American hit teams in potential legal jeopardy for violating Executive Order 12333, which bans the CIA from carrying out assassinations.

The order was signed by President Reagan in 1981 following congressional investigations into alleged CIA assassination plots targeting foreign leaders.

So the teams in Afghanistan have a simple rule of thumb:  If the target "looks military," i.e., carrying a weapon or walking in the company of other armed men, he's a legitimate target.

If there's an absence of same, the target is considered a civilian, and the decision gets bucked up the chain of command for further deliberation.

Of course, this may be a distinction without a difference. The CIA-administered Predator drones have been targeting al Qaeda "civilians" for some time now.

On Sept. 17, 2001, President Bush said Osama bin Laden was "wanted dead or alive," prompting a flurry of questions about U.S. assassination policy.

White House spokesman Ari Fleischer said that E.O.12333 remained in effect, The Washington Post reported at the time, noting that Presidents Gerald R. Ford and Jimmy Carter had issued their own executive orders on the subject, numbers 11905 and 12306, respectively.

While the directives forbid assassination, they do not define the term, Post reporter Barton Gellman noted.

Fleischer declined four times to interpret the text, he reported.

"I'm going to just repeat my words and others will figure out the exact implications of them, but it does not inhibit the nation's ability to act in self-defense," Fleischer said.

UPDATE: The CIA ground team veteran had emphasized that the agency and its operatives took care to operate within the law, a point that could have been made more clear in the first version of this story.

A CIA spokesman, for example, thought it had portrayed the agency badly. 

"This report is truly bizarre, an apparent part of the cottage industry dedicated to portraying the agency as careless and slapdash," CIA spokesman Paul Gimigliano said late Thursday.

Word hasn't leaked yet, but I wouldn't be surprised if President-elect Barack Obama has already figured out that when he wants quick answers to what's going on in the world, the last person to ask is the head of U.S. intelligence.

The steady deterioration of personnel and standards of intelligence analysis, especially at the CIA, has been going on for decades, a number of former top intelligence officials I know say.

The tip of the rot surfaces from time to time, such as with the 9/11 surprise and the gimcrackery reports on Iraq's weapons of mass destruction.

The dogs howl and the caravan moves on. Nothing changes, many well placed former intelligence officials have been telling me.  But the current, possibly fatal dangers we face demand the problems be fixed.

We've been spending too much time chattering about the operations side of intelligence lately, they say, in particular whether Leon Panetta, the former OMB head and chief of staff to President Clinton, is up to handling the spies and back-alley guys and gals.

But officials have been reminding me that it was the dismally poor analysis of intelligence that enabled President Bush to lead the nation into the disastrous invasion of Iraq -- not faulty espionage (such as it was).   

And it's the analysis served up by the CIA and other spy agencies, they point out, that will guide President Obama's decisions on Iraq, Iran, Afghanistan, Pakistan and North Korea, among other front-burner emergencies.

And that, say many rueful former officials, is where the agencies need a severe spanking.

Can Obama do it where so many of his predecessors have failed? One can only hope that the erstwhile professor, forged by the Socratic methods of his Harvard Law School instructors, will lay the lumber on his intelligence chiefs and briefers, asking them harder questions than they're used to.

Such as, "How do you know that?" 

Now, this is a staple of a good newsroom. It's a question editors ask reporters, and good reporters ask sources, all the time. I like to think that an old-fashioned city editor would have laughed the pre-war intelligence on Iraq out of their newsrooms.

But the melancholy truth, according to my well placed sources, is that even after the  intelligence disasters of 9/11 and Iraq, President Obama has a better chance of getting up-to-the-minute information on, say, Hamas, from newspapers than he does the PDB - the President's Daily Brief - served up by the Directorate of National Intelligence and CIA.

"So," I asked a former intelligence agency head over seafood this week, "if I'm President Obama, and I call Leon Panetta into the Oval office and ask him to tell me how Hamas leaders are holding up under the Israeli assault, will he be able to tell me?"

The former official shook his head, nearly blushing.   

No.  "That's not the kind of information" they focus on.

"Well, what do they focus on?" I asked.

If the viability of Hamas isn't important right now, what is?
 
He said the CIA, State Department and Pentagon intelligence agencies do have people specializing on the Palestinians, and even Hamas. But it's not likely they would have up-to-the-minute information on whether, say, in response to Israeli military pressure, its leaders are fighting among each other, unifying, or even where they are.

They just don't have that kind of stuff, he said.

Wow.

What about the NSA? I asked. Could the CIA's Hamas guy call his NSA counterpart and get cell phone intercepts from Gaza to help fill in some holes?

"They won't give it to him, because they don't want their information to help CIA look good."

Right.

And the National Intelligence Directorate, which was set up to put an end to that kind of horse play?

A work in progress, he smiled.  

Ok then: What can CIA briefers tell Obama about Hamas next Wednesday morning?

"They would tell them what they know," said, like squids squirting ink, until they could get back to headquarters and ask around.

But even then, said this former official, Panetta or Adm. Dennis Blair, the incoming head of National Intelligence, would probably not have anyone on staff to answer such specific questions.

Unbelievable, even to me.

He agreed: Unbelievable.

He nodded. "You tell people this and they don't believe it."

This from a man who has devoted his entire adult life to U.S. intelligence.

But doesn't the CIA have guys like Robert Redford in "Three Days of the Condor"? I asked, half joking, guys who read books, who specialize in more or less arcane things?

Doesn't it have people immersing themselves in subjects like Hamas, as intelligence intellectuals? A CIA version of New York Times columnist and author Thomas Friedman, to name just one of the better known?

Not so much any more, he said. There was a time when the CIA and other agencies hired and encouraged analysts to drill down deeply in, say, Chinese wheat harvests. 

But no longer, he insisted.  And there's little intellectual curiosity in the analyst ranks today, he maintained. A roguish kind of independence among the best journalists is neither sought, nor encouraged, in U.S. intelligence these days, he said.   

Everyone in the spy agencies is feverish about "current intelligence," writing reports that might get the attention of their bosses, maybe even the President of the United States, he said.

But isn't the current leadership structure of Hamas - I kept coming back to that - "current intelligence"?

No, not necessarily, he said. "Current intelligence" is the big-picture stuff that CIA chiefs like to show off to the president -- "what we know about Iran,"  usually larded with sexy secrets -- not necessarily what the president needs to know. 

It's quite likely that the analysts' bosses might not have asked them to track the state of Hamas, he said.  And when their bosses haven't tasked them with such a challenge, the analysts then to be "passive," fixating on a hot piece of secret information that came in over the transom, no matter how incidental to the more critical question: what's Hamas up to?

After much resistance, CIA and DNI finally did set up an Open Source Center with analysts, some of whom don't even have security clearances, working from unclassified material. And they've proved to be very good, some experts say, giving the spy agency a fresh view on developments ranging from Iran to North Korea. The final verdict is far from in, but one well informed former official said that on at least one subject he was familiar with, the regular CIA analysts "couldn't hold a candle" to the Open Source Center's product.

But of course, that begs the question of exactly what the 16 agencies of the so-called U.S. intelligence community -- who still hoard information like children at day care, according to most accounts -- are actually doing with $65 billion a year.

And what, especially, should be done to fix the CIA, with all those floors upon floors of people scattered across Northern Virgina gathering and analyzing secret information?  

"Blow up the place," my lunchtime guest said, "and start over."

Unfortunately, that's not a new idea, either.

"(T) he Israeli attack on Gaza, widely seen here as an act of aggression enabled by the United States, has become conflated in the minds of some Afghans with U.S. motives and actions in Afghanistan," she wrote on Jan. 5. 

"Taliban propaganda and sermons by conservative clerics," she adds, 'have contributed to a notion of the United States as an occupying power that seeks to subjugate the Muslim world."

"We have cable TV, and we know what the Americans are doing. First they attacked Iraq. They didn't find any nuclear weapons, but they killed a lot of Muslims. Now they are supporting Israel in killing innocent Palestinians. If they have come here to help us, we will welcome them. But if they come to destroy us, we will drive them out like we drove out the Russians. Real Muslims only need the protection of God."

"At best, it would be a tactical gain, but also an immense strategic loss," said Ali Jalali, a former Afghan interior minister and now a visiting professor at the National Defense University, noting that by fragmenting power and undermining the authority of the central government, the strategy in the long run could actually worsen the instability it sought to ameliorate.

He called this "effort to gain peace through manipulating tribal dynamics" a "colonial approach."

President-elect Obama's selection of former congressman and White House official Leon E. Panetta to run the CIA is likely to give Republicans fresh ammunition to reopen questions about the Clinton administration's counterterrorism policies.

Critics have long maintained that Clinton was uninterested in intelligence issues and slow to come to grips with the threat of Islamist terrorism, even after the first attack on the World Trade Center, in 1993.

Panetta was budget director and later chief of staff during the first Clinton term.

In an interview three months after the 9/11 attacks, Panetta said that senior Clinton aides viewed terrorism as just one of many pressing global problems.

"Clinton was aware of the threat and sometimes he would mention it," Panetta told the New York Times. But the "big issues" in the president's first term, he said, were "Russia, Eastern bloc, Middle East peace, human rights, rogue nations and then terrorism."

"When it came to terrorism, Clinton administration officials continued the policy of their predecessors, who had viewed it primarily as a crime to be solved and prosecuted by law enforcement agencies," the Times said.

Information gathered through grand jury investigations by the Justice Department after the 1993 bombing pointed to overseas, but the information was not shared with the CIA because of the "wall" that existed then between intelligence and law enforcement operations.

As for Afghanistan, the CIA virtually abandoned the region in 1989 after defeating the Red Army, and the Clinton administration (and Congress) did nothing to reverse that policy, leaving the spy agency with few sources to follow the emergence of al Qaeda.

Another Clinton aide back then, George Stephanopoulos, said he believed the 1993 attack did not gain more attention because, in the end, it "wasn't a successful bombing."

"It wasn't the kind of thing where you walked into a staff meeting and people asked, what are we doing today in the war against terrorism?" he added.

It wasn't until a truck bomb tore into the Alfred P. Murrah Federal Building in Oklahoma City on April 19, 1995, killing 168 people, that plans to reorganize the government's counterterrorism efforts were revived, Panetta said.

If Oklahoma City could be hit, a terrorist attack could "happen at the White House,"  Panetta said.

Two months after the bombing, the Times reported, "Mr. Clinton ordered the government to intensify the fight against terrorism. The order did not give agencies involved in the fight more money, nor did it end the bureaucratic turf battles among them."

Three years later, Clinton responded to the 1998 bombings of two U.S. embassies in Africa with cruise missile strikes on Sudan and Afghanistan, moves that drew caustic comments from Republican presidential aspirant George W. Bush   during the 2000 campaign.

Panetta was appointed chief of staff to Clinton in 1994, and served in that position until 1997.

In 1996 he was handed the duty of informing then-CIA Director John M. Deutch that his appointment would not be renewed in the second administration.

He was a Democratic congressman from California's 17th district from 1977 to 1993.

Panetta was also a member of the bipartisan Iraq Study Group, which recommended a timetable for the withdrawal of U.S. troops.

He is firmly on the record against the use of torture to interrogate terrorist suspects.

"We cannot and we must not use torture under any circumstances. We are better than that," Panetta wrote in The Washington Monthly last spring.

The Justice Department's Inspector General gigged the FBI today for allowing its agents in Iraq and Afghanistan to do some creative writing on their time sheets.

Give me a break.  As soon as I read the headline on the 88-page scolding, I thought of Frank Burns, M*A*S*H's lovably feckless martinet, and his handwringing sidekick, Hotlips Houlihan. The Army lifers revelled in uncovering minor rules violations amid the hell of war.   

Can anyone here spell Green Zone? 

 "The OIG found that the FBI inappropriately permitted employees to regularly claim overtime for activities that are not compensable as 'work,' such as time spent eating meals, exercising more than 3 hours per week, and socializing," a press release accompanying the report said.

Imagine the party-hearty life in Afghanistan.

It also said the FBI had "adjusted the work week" for its underfire agents and technicians, giving them extra pay for Sundays, etc.

Gee, these guys must be millionaires by now.

And "socializing," for anyone who knows anything about Iraq after five years there, amounts to heavy drinking, playing video games and watching DVDs, with maybe a little regretful sex thrown in, cooped up in the cheek-to-jowl enclave known as the Green Zone.

Shocking.  

"I agree, big deal," said a former top FBI official with plenty of experience investigating overseas terrorism, who also happens to be a decorated Vietnam vet.

"We were sending civilians to a war zone.  With regard to shifting the formal work week, does the IG have a freaking clue?  By that I mean that, as you well know, the work week in a Muslim country is Sunday through Thursday. Geez."

The FBI's response reminded me of Hawkeye and B.J. standing contrite before Colonel Potter.

"We accept that Headquarters management, in an effort to quickly develop a simple system to compensate FBI employees who volunteered to leave their domestic assignments and serve in war zones, allowed a flawed system to develop and remain in place too long," said top spokesman John Miller, in a prepared statement.
 "Early in the conflicts in Afghanistan and Iraq ...FBI employees lived with sniper attacks, mortar fire, and roadside bombs as part of their daily work environment. They attempted to adapt a long established, domestic pay system for domestic law enforcement to unprecedented wartime assignments for FBI personnel."

It won't happen again, sir.

Here at SpyTalk HQ, we eagerly await the Justice Department's rigorous prosecution of American war profiteers.

The increasingly bold attacks on NATO supplies in Pakistan should be cause for serious worry, U.S. counterterrorism operatives are saying.

The attacks mean that Islamic extremist fighters in the region are adopting the tactics that their fathers and uncles employed more than a quarter century ago -- with CIA backing - to drive the Soviets out of Afghanistan.

The objective: to choke off supplies to occupying troops on the ground.

"The bad guys understand our operations and what our lifelines are all about," said an analyst with counterterror experience in the region.

Newly minted CENTCOM commander Gen. David Petraeus gets a chance to see if his Iraq magic has any chance of working elsewhere next week, when he travels to Islamabad amid a swirl of negotiations aimed at getting the Taliban to halt its Afghan insurgency.

According to some reports, the U.S. itself is ready to talk directly with the Taliban in hopes  of driving a wedge between it and al Qaeda, which it has hosted since the 1990s. 

But while the Taliban was talking in the Pakistani capital this week, its fighters were striking in Afghanistan's capital, in a brazen attack on the Ministry of Culture in the heart of Kabul. 

According to some reports, Saudi Arabia had already quietly brokered talks between the Pakistanis and the Taliban, who were said to be tiring of the al Qaeda Arabs led by Osama bin Laden. 

One of the more provocative but little noticed passages in Bob Woodward's fascinating new book, The War Within, reports on a meeting between Defense Secretary Robert Gates and retired Army General Jack Keane, the White House's secret, backchannel conduit to the Iraq War commander, Gen. David Petraeus.

President Bush and Vice president Cheney were using Keane, a plain spoken Irishman with a boxer's face, to get around the Joint Chiefs of Staff and communicate directly with Petraeus, who'd presided over a dramatic reduction in violence in Iraq.  It didn't hurt that Petraeus welcomed more troops in Baghdad, while the Chiefs worried about U.S. forces being stretched too thin to handle emergencies elsewhere in the world. He'd also managed the Sunni tribes' U-turn on al Qaeda in Iraq

On April 7, the end of Petraeus's tour of duty was on the horizon, and Keane was working hard to convince the brainy general to take over CENTCOM, where he'd be responsible for U.S. military forces across the entire region, instead of the far more comfortable, and traditionally prestigious, slot as supreme commander of NATO.

Keane also wanted Gen. Ray Odierno, the highly regarded, "unsung hero" of the turnaround in U.S. fortunes in Iraq, to take Petraeus's job in Baghdad.

Both men opposed any withdrawal timetables of U.S. forces in Iraq while the situation remained dicey there.

An Obama administration would find it difficult to oust either of them, Keane argued to Gates.

"Let's be frank about what's happening here," Keane says.

    "We are going to have a new administration. Do we want these policies continued or not? Do we want the best guys in there who were involved in these policies, who were advocates for them?"

Keane presses Gates.

    "Let's assume we have a Democratic administration and they want to pull this thing out quickly, and now they have to deal with General Petraeus and General Odierno. There will be a price paid to override them."

After his July visit to Iraq and Afghanistan, Obama said he would listen to the senior military leadership on Iraq, but not be bound by their advice.

    "It is clear that Gen. David Petraeus, in his role as U.S. commander in Iraq, prefers 'maximum flexibility' over a timeline for troops withdrawal. The notion is that either I do exactly what my military commanders tell me to do, or I am ignoring their advice. No, I am factoring in their advice and placing it into this broader strategic framework."  

An Obama spokesperson could not be reached late in the afternoon, but it's safe to say that the Democratic candidate will replace, or keep, any general he wants to as commander-in-chief.

McKelvey: You liken Obama to Britney in your famous ad, while portraying yourself as the more serious candidate. Which celebrity would you like to be compared to? Bob Dylan? Jack Nicholson?

McCain: Kiefer Sutherland. [laughs, imitates a voice from the show 24] "It's Jack Bauer." We have a lot in common because he escapes all the time.

McKelvey: Um, he's also a torturer.

McCain: Yeah, that's right. That's where Jack and I disagree. He believes in torture, but I don't. He says, "Tell me where the weapons are." The person says, "I won't." Bam! "OK, I'll tell."

Barack Obama sounds almost Rumsfeldian when he talks about a couple brigades -- about 7,000 troops -- being enough to save our bacon in Afghanistan. The Pentagon says it wants three, which also could turn out to be far from adequate.

"A lot of intelligence -- much of it unclassified and possible to discuss here -- indicated that senior Afghan officials were deeply involved in the narcotics trade. Narco-traffickers were buying off hundreds of police chiefs, judges and other officials. Narco-corruption went to the top of the Afghan government. The attorney general, Abdul Jabbar Sabit, a fiery Pashtun who had begun a self-described "jihad against corruption," (said)  he had a list of more than 20 senior Afghan officials who were deeply corrupt -- some tied to the narcotics trade. He added that President Karzai -- also a Pashtun -- had directed him, for political reasons, not to prosecute any of these people."

Lots of spook literature these days: Especially noteworthy are two new ones -- two! -- by former CIA operative Gary Berntsen, whose memoir of leading the first agency team into Afghanistan after 9/11 and cornering Osama bin Laden, Jawbreaker,  read like a true-life thriller.  

Now comes The Walk-In (written with novelist Ralph Pezzullo), a fictional thriller involving an Iranian defector that seems awfully close to reality, even as it follows conventional plot lines -- renegade CIA agent saves the world and all that.  Pub date is Aug. 12.