Pepe Escobar, unlike his denser American colleagues, makes great use of myths and metaphors in his reportage. As he says in his new piece for Asia Times Online, ‘Surge’ smoke follows Petraeus to AfPak, “Anyone who buys Pentagon spin believing the same successful “surge” will happen in the Pashtun south and southeast of Afghanistan must have smoked Hindu Kush’s finest.”

The head of JTF-435 is pwn3d by Al Jazeera

The video above shows a survivor of a brutal, botched special forces raid on February 12, 2010, in which U.S. and allied forces killed 5 civilians, including local Afghan officials and pregnant women. If that were the extent of the bad conduct in this incident, it would be devastating enough. Unfortunately, personnel under McChrystal’s command compounded the outrage by tampering with evidence at the scene and then attempted a propaganda job and cover-up of the massacre, which has now blown up in their faces.

Continued civilian deaths resulting from night raids by Special Forces in Afghanistan have prompted more spin on the reasoning behind placing these forces under McChrystal’s command.

I usually don’t do this, but I have to take my friend Spencer Ackerman out for a ride. (In my defense, brother, just keep in mind that I’m taking you out for a ride for a blog post in which you took your friend out for a ride. Just sayin’.) And, I want to say at the outset that on a critical point he’s the victim of some really bad timing, and that on that point he’s made a concession, but the episode is illustrative of a larger problem within the ranks of the left-leaning national security crowd and the way they’ve handled counterinsurgency doctrine in the public debate.

In case you hadn’t heard, the next stop in General McChrystal’s counterinsurgency plan is Kandahar, the ideological heart of the Taliban. Using the spadework done in advance of the Marjah operation as a template, McChrystal says the plan is to…

The Wikileaks video in Iraq shows what happens when you train people to kill and put them in a war zone. It is not an aberration, and that’s the problem.

The Pakistani press is crediting Hamid Karzai with the re-appearance of Maryam Siddiqui, daughter of Aafia Siddiqui. But did her release require the authority of Stanley McChrystal?

Vice Admiral Robert Harward, head of JTF-435, continues his process of “training” Afghan personnel to take command of Afghan prisons, in an attempt to deflect responsibility away from the author of US detention abuses, General Stanley McChrystal.

War is ugly. It sounds like a cliché at this point, and most of us never really have to think about how truly horrifying it is. This week, however, we got some disturbing glimpses into the reality of the US wars in Iraq and Afghanistan.