It is all about perceptions.

Today’s leaking of a memo from the US Ambassador to Kabul, Karl Eikenberry, to Washington about his concerns over sending more than 10 to 15,000 reinforcements here, is not the first leak this week.

There’s been a flurry of backhanded information coming out of Washington in the past few months.

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I was standing outside the front gate of Fort Hood in Texas when we heard that one of the victims shot dead on Thursday had been pregnant.

“Do we add that to the total dead?” asked an American producer. read more

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The Obama administration have all but admitted that their attempts to re-start the Middle East peace process have failed.

The State department are now advocating a new tactic – where both sides take “baby steps” toward lower level talks because they know there is no chance of getting Palestinian leader Mahmoud Abbas to sit down with Israeli PM Binyamin Netanyahu for meaningful discussions anytime soon.

There has been a bit of fuss about whether Hillary Clinton made an error at the weekend when she described an Israeli offer to partially freeze settlement building as “unprecedented” even though it was far short of what the US had originally demanded – a total freeze.

But that wasn’t the real mistake. read more

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Yesterday the sudden shocking deaths of five British troops in Helmand got everyone thinking whether the strategy to train Afghan forces to eventually take over would work. If Afghan police can shoot their mentors dead, how can they trust each other to work together?

And today there’s another large question mark over this eight year occupation. The United Nations have said quite openly they are pulling out all but their 400 essential staff. read more

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We are told that President Obama didn’t watch election night coverage last night of the bad results from Virginia, New Jersey and elsewhere.

Instead he was apparently tuned to a two hour long HBO documentary about how he stormed to electoral triumph this time last year.

I was watching it too – so was everyone else in the C4 Washington bureau.

We were all enjoying reminiscing about the campaign and our small part in it. Even if we didn’t learn much that we didn’t know at the time. There were very few revealing moments.

We never saw the Obama facade crack.

Either this was the most disciplined, best run and resolutely self confident political campaign in history or this was the best controlled behind the scenes access in history.

But there was one glimmer of revelation – right at the end.

Soon after Obama was declared the winner but before he’d made his acceptance speech in Grant Park in Chicago a junior aide took a call on his cell phone.

We heard him brushing off the caller saying “The President Elect is keen to talk to the Prime Minister too – but he’s a bit busy right now”.

We can only assume it was Gordon Brown on the phone. Getting his first taste of how UK – Obama relations were to proceed.

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As protestors fill the streets of Tehran again, my favourite slogan so far is: “Freedom of thought won’t happen with hairy beards”! Apparently, it rhymes in Persian. read more

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Apparently President Obama did not watch the “off year” election results come in last night.

He already knew it was going to be bad news. So today, on the anniversary of his own historic victory a year ago the Democrats are left wondering where all their voters went.

The key results that really matter are the governorships of Virginia and New Jersey. Both had been held by democrats – both are now having Republicans move into the governor’s mansion.

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The White House is making it very clear today that it will not be rushed into any decision about whether to send more troops to Afghanistan – or how many they might send.

Robert Gibbs, the White House spokesman, is stressing the need for a “legitimate” Afghan government and a “credible partner” for the US to work with in Afghanistan. In other words: no announcements about troops until the mess that was the Afghan elections is sorted out – somehow

Here, Republicans are getting impatient and insist that the president must make up his mind soon. Otherwise it looks like America is being indecisive, and they say that emboldens America’s enemies like the Taliban.

Democrats who support the president’s right to take his time making up his mind counter that if George W Bush had spent a bit more time considering the right strategy in Iraq, then a lot of blood and treasure could have been spared.

And the longer the decision-making process goes on, the more comparisons are made with Vietnam – as they always are whenever US troops are sent anywhere. I can’t count the number of times I have heard Iraq being referred to as the new Vietnam. And now commentators are insisting that Afghanistan is even more like Vietnam that Iraq.

It’s not just because of what’s happening on the ground in Afghanistan but also because of the way Lyndon Johnson’s attempts to pass progressive domestic legislation were made so much harder by the quagmire in Vietnam – and the parallels with the difficulties the Obama administration is having with healthcare reform now and will soon have with climate change legislation.

So as we watch this current president wrestling with the options for how to continue his war, it’s very interesting to read what key members of LBJ’s team now have to say about the agonised decisions that president had to make on Vietnam.

Shortly before he died, LBJ’s national security advisor McGeorge Bundy told interviewers that Johnson wasn’t really listening to any of the advice he was being given. He said Johnson “wants to be seen having careful discussion and he does indeed want to hear what everyone is saying”.

But apparently the president wanted to hear all the arguments so he knew what the opposition was thinking, not because he wanted to listen to them. Strategy meetings and conversations on the war were a façade, said Bundy. “The process was for show and not for choice.”

No wonder the White House keep insisting that President Obama is seriously listening to every option that’s being presented to him in the situation room. Even the views of Vice-President Joe Biden, who wants to reduce US troop numbers and whose ideas are usually dismissed as too kooky to be realistically considered

Here are few interesting pieces on the Vietnam/Afghan parallels that have appeared in US papers in the last couple of days -

- New York Times: From Defeat, Lessons in Victory
- New York Times: The Vietnam War We Ignore
- Washington Post: The Anguish Of Decision – Vietnam In Hindsight

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Can you believe it was almost a year ago that “President Elect” Barak Obama told an ecstatic crowd in Chicago that “Change had come to America”?

With less than a month to go before the first anniversary of that speech a lot of people in America are asking themselves whether much of that change has yet been delivered? read more

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