Us politics

Bob Woodwood could write a cookbook and it would be a bestseller, but Obama's Wars, his latest book, will wreak quiet havoc beyond bookshops because Afghanistan already lours over Obama’s presidency. 9 years into the conflict and the limits of victory have been re-defined in the Taliban’s favour. The spat between the White Hosue and Stanley McCrystal has been replaced by further controversy with Petraeus over the withdrawal strategy. Woodward’s book is impartial, but he has given an acidic interview to the Sunday Telegraph where he implies that, when it comes to war, Obama doesn’t have the ‘x-factor’.

When President Obama asked General Petraeus to take over the Afghan command after General McChrystal’s Rolling Stone implosion, there was much speculation that the two men would clash over the date for America to begin withdrawing troops. Obama had set down July 2011 as the starting point but Petraeus was almost certainly going to want more time than that. In Petraeus’s Meet the Press interview on Sunday, Petraeus made clear he might argue that withdrawal cannot begin that quickly 'MR. GREGORY:  I just want to clarify this.  Did — could you reach that point and say, “I know that the process is supposed to begin, but my assessment as the commander here is that it cannot begin now”? GEN.

Here's one divergence between the US and the UK where we can all get behind our American brethren. Yesterday, Barack Obama signed into law a provision blocking his country's thinkers and writers from foreign libel laws. The target is "libel tourism," by which complainants skip around the First Amendment by taking their cases to less conscientious countries. And by "less conscientious countries," I mean, erm, here.         As various organisations have documented, not least the Index on Censorship, the libel laws in this country are a joke – and a pernicious one at that.

Gordon Brown will be seething, and with some justification: he never got photo-ops like these with Barack Obama. Shots of a cosy chat in the Oval Office are usually reserved for Benjamin Netanyahu, following the latest impasse between Israel and America. The Obama administration has gone to great lengths to repair the damage it did to Anglo-American relations at the start of its term. The President was all sparkle and bonhomie during the joint press conference, and he was careful to name-check ‘The Truly Special Relationship’ twice. Obama may be faking it but he looks comfortable with Cameron. He has always given the impression of being a cold fish, short on empathy, and I suspect he objects to leaders fawning at his throne.

I’ve spent the morning contending with the WSJ’s Heath Robinson-esque subscription service so you don’t have to. Inside the paper, David Cameron explains what the Special Relationship means to him. 1). The Special Relationship is close and robust because British and American values are essentially the same, which explains why our national interests are often aligned: 'The U.S.-U.K. relationship is simple: It's strong because it delivers for both of us. The alliance is not sustained by our historical ties or blind loyalty. This is a partnership of choice that serves our national interests.

The implosion of General McChrsytal’s career has refocused attention on Afghanistan. Reading Peggy Noonan’s column on the subject I was struck by this paragraph reflecting on Jonathan Alter’s reporting of Obama’s decision making process when he ordered the surge: More crucially, the president asked policy makers, in Mr. Alter's words, "If the Taliban took Kabul and controlled Afghanistan, could it link up with Pakistan's Taliban and threaten command and control of Pakistan's nuclear weapons?" The answer: Quite possibly yes. Mr. Alter: "Early on, the President eliminated withdrawal (from Afghanistan) as an option, in part because of a new classified study on what would happen to Pakistan's nuclear arsenal if the Islamabad government fell to the Taliban.

G20 summits are usually turgid affairs, but this one has some (limited) potential. Relations between the White House and Britain and the White House and Europe have been frosty of late. Afghanistan, BP, the Falklands, Merkel and Sarkozy’s irritation at Obama’s personal and political aloofness, all of these have been contentious. Diplomatic tension has now developed an economic arm. The broadly centre right governments of Britain, France and Germany are committed to cutting public spending now. Each has introduced an austerity programme, and Cameron has made retrenchment is his international cause. Obama still stands for stimulus.

How wrong I was. President Obama, lambasted by his critics for being ponderous, has acted with lightening speed: less than 24 hours after that Rolling Stone article, General Stanley McChrystal was forced out of his job in place of the only person that could pick up where he left off, namely General David Petraeus. In acting swiftly, the US president has moved to restore the authority and respect his position as Commander-in-Chief deserves; and he has begun to re-establish the kind of civil-military relations that need to exist in militarily-capable liberal democracies like the United States.   What effect the change of commander will have in Kabul remains unclear. But it will have a long-term positive effect on US democracy.

The Taliban are expanding their area of influence, NATO allies are eager to leave Afghanistan, the forthcoming parliamentary elections are likely to be even more fraudulent than last year’s presidential election – in other words, how can it get any worse for President Obama’s AfPak strategy? Oh yeah, the man the US president has trusted to execute the strategy, the man whose name is now synonymous with the international community’s’ plan, General Stanley McChrystal gives an interview to Rolling Stone magazine (in itself a dubious choice), which paints a picture of the commander as insubordinate, unwise or simply not in control of his headquarters.