The Hightower Report

Who's Doing the Surging in Afghanistan?

The surge is on in Afghanistan! Unfortunately, the surge that appears to be most effective is not the 30,000 additional U.S. troops that President Barack Obama has now poured into this hellacious war, but a wholly unexpected surge by the enemy.

Gen. David Petraeus' surge strategy was to concentrate our soldiers in the Afghan south and east, attacking the Taliban where it is strongest. The gleaming gemstone of this plan was to be the taking of Kandahar, Afghanistan's second-largest city and the birthplace of the Taliban. This goal was supposed to have been achieved months ago, but ... well, stuff happens. Or in this case, doesn't happen.

The assault on Kandahar is finally under way, but meanwhile, the Taliban has slipped away and is surging throughout the country, including in provinces that were previously Taliban-free. Indeed, four years ago, the enemy had strongholds in only four of Afghanistan's 34 provinces. Now they're in 33 of them, and practically every independent observer of the war says that Afghanistan has become more dangerous than it has been at any time since our 2001 invasion.

It is so dangerous that election officials simply shut down hundreds of polling places in 25 provinces for September's parliamentary elections, and international observers could not even go into the rural areas, where most Afghans live. This situation gave a free hand to warlords and political power brokers to commit a massive level of voting fraud that delegitimizes the national election.

Even America's hawkish foreign policy establishment has begun arguing that this war is neither winnable nor worth the enormous cost we're paying in lives, money, and reputation. As former CIA official Paul Pillar now flatly says: "A U.S. military victory over the Taliban is simply not necessary to protect U.S. interests."

Bingo!

BPreening

Here's today's number: 93.4. That's $93.4 million – the amount that BP has now admitted to spending in just four months on its national advertising blitz, which is intended to put some gloss on its badly faded corporate image.

Unless you've been under a big rock since BP's Gulf oil blowout in April, it's been practically impossible to avoid the giant's self-serving ads, which constantly blare from TVs and holler at us from the pages of all major city newspapers. This unprecedented PR campaign is running under a slogan proclaiming: "We will make this right." Each ad praises the corporation's efforts in the Gulf region to clean up the mess, restore the ecology, and compensate the businesses and workers who have been suffering devastating losses.

Heretofore, BP adamantly refused to disclose how much PR money it had been throwing into this puff-and-buff job, but Democratic Rep. Kathy Castor of Florida, who serves on the House Energy and Commerce Committee, demanded an accounting on behalf of the hard-hit folks in her district. "Every day you get up and see these full-page ads in every newspaper," she says. "It's really ticking people off."

They're even more ticked off now that BP has admitted to spending more than $5 million a week on its window-dressing effort. Its total ad expenditure for the four months came to $5 million more than it granted to four Gulf Coast states to help revive their decimated tourist industries. Worse, BP proceeded to insult the intelligence of the area's people by claiming that this huge ad outlay was necessary "to keep [coastal] residents informed."

Come on – BP has done all it can to deceive the people. Telling such blatant fibs as that is as useless as putting lipstick on a hog – it can't hide the ugliness that is BP.