Hi Andy, I appreciated your Afghan posts this morning. Just one thing on point three in this post:

Second, after my column came the reports this weekend about the eight U.S. soldiers killed in an ambush in the Hindu Kush valley. (See, e.g., here.) If the reports are to be believed, our troops were sitting ducks — deployed in inadequate numbers to protect themselves with their pull-out delayed by a desire to accommodate a request by the Afghan government (which didn’t want to look weak right before the election) and a shortage of resources (like cargo helicopters). I don’t know if all that is true — we’ll have to wait for the investigation. But I don’t need a military background to know that, if it is true, it’s unacceptable.
There have been disturbing incidents in which it appears force-protection was inadequate, and they have to be considered in conjunction with Gen. McChrystal’s explicit theory that, when it comes to force protection, less is more. I am not accusing, and would not accuse, Gen. McChrystal and other U.S. commanders of willfully endangering our troops; I’m certain they believe their strategy will make American personnel safer in the long-run. But good faith is not necessarily good judgment. We need answers on what is happening over there, and why.

I don’t think that awful attack really tells us much about the counter-insurgency strategy McChrystal wants to pursue. Here’s the New York Times the other day:

Insurgents attacked a pair of remote American military bases in Afghanistan over the weekend in a deadly battle that underscored the vulnerability of the kind of isolated bases that the top American commander there wants to scale back.
The commander, Gen. Stanley A. McChrystal, is pressing for a change in strategy that would shift troops to heavily populated centers to protect civilians and focus less on battling the insurgents in the hinterlands.
As though to reinforce his point, insurgents carried out a bold daylight strike on two bases on the Pakistani border, killing eight Americans and four Afghan security officers in the deadliest attack for American soldiers in more than a year, Afghan and American officials said Sunday.
The assault occurred less than 20 miles from the site of a similar attack that killed nine Americans last year, which had already become a cautionary tale at the Pentagon for how not to win the war in Afghanistan.