Last week, 4,000 US Marines launched a major operation in Helmand, the poppy-queen province in southern Afghanistan. The Marines performed magnificently, reaching their objectives with minimal casualties -- mostly from the 110-degree heat. But something important was missing: Afghans in uniform.  A few hundred Afghan players showed up in the backfield. But the village elders saw only American guns. The Marine mission is to provide security for villagers, build trust and instill confidence in the Kabul government. This would all be far easier if the Afghan military and police were competent, trustworthy and present. They're not. What's the problem? Why haven't years of effort and billions of dollars, coupled with our training expertise, forged fully reliable military units and constabularies? The answer lies in...

Obama went to Moscow desperate for the appearance of a foreign-policy success. He got that illusion -- at a substantial cost to America's security. The series of signing ceremonies in a grand Kremlin hall and the litany of agreements, accords and frameworks implied that the United States benefited from all the fuss. We didn't. We got nothing of real importance. But the government of puppet-master Vladimir Putin (nominally just prime minister) got virtually all it wanted. In Moscow, this was Christmas in July. That's because we just agreed to the disarmament position of the American Communist Party of the 1950s.

Our effort in Iraq passed a major milestone this week: Our troops are leaving the cities. Advisers remain in place. Joint patrols will still occur. And our forces will wait nearby to respond to Iraqi calls for support. But the last of the bases and US-only outposts within Iraq's urban centers will be vacated. Terrorists have already begun testing the new security arrangements. Iraqi forces won't always pass with flying colors. Yet this situation seemed a pipe dream not so long ago: Iraq's security forces, serving an elected government, assume primary responsibility for the good order of their own country.  It is an extraordinary achievement, the credit for which goes to President George W. Bush.

The Chief of Naval Operations Adm. Gary Roughead announced in Annapolis recently that "diversity is the number one priority" at the Naval Academy, where I have been a Professor of English for 22 years. The Naval Academy superintendent, Vice Adm. Jeffrey Fowler, echoed him. Everyone understands that "diversity" here means nonwhite skins. Fowler insisted recently that we needed to have Annapolis graduates who "looked like" the Fleet, where enlisted people are about 42 percent nonwhite, largely African American and Hispanic. The stunning revelation last week was that the Naval Academy had an incoming class that was "more diverse" than ever before: 35 percent minority. Sounds good, only this comes with a huge price tag. It's taxpayers who bankroll the military. Yet nobody has asked us if we're willing to pay this price. Instead we're being told there is no price to pay at all. If you believe that, you probably also believe in the Tooth Fairy.

To borrow historian Niall Ferguson's metaphor, if finance is an evolutionary process, then regulation is its intelligent design - which, I would add, is a cognate of faith, not science. Or, to take the observation of former Federal Reserve Governor Frederic Mishkin, if "the financial system (is) the brain of the economy," then, I would suggest, heavy regulation is its lobotomy; while it removes the emotional highs and lows, it also dulls the perception, facility and adroitness. A century ago, medical science had faith in lobotomies. Today, it seems, Washington political science has faith in lobotomizing financial regulation.

Last weekend's European Parliament and British local county council elections (6/04-07) were not only a victory for the right over the left. More significantly, they were indications of the growing rejection of the last 60 years of denationalized European history. They were, particularly, a sharp assertion by many indigenous Europeans that they will not put up with losing their culture to overly assertive Islamic immigrants in Europe. The latter point was made emphatically by the voters of Holland, Hungary, Finland, Britain, Austria, Denmark and Italy.  But the loudest vox populi was heard in Britain.

During his White House years, William Jefferson Clinton -- someone Judge Sonia Sotomayor might call a "white male" -- was dubbed "America's first black president" by a black admirer. Applying the standard of identity politics and pandering to a special interest that earned Mr. Clinton that distinction, Barack Hussein Obama would have to be considered America's first Moslem president. This is not to say, necessarily, that Mr. Obama actually is a Moslem any more than Mr. Clinton actually is black. However - after his five months in office, and most especially after his just-concluded visit to Saudi Arabia and Egypt, a stunning conclusion seems increasingly plausible:

St. Petersburg, Russia. The economic glitterati have descended on Russia's "second capital." President Dmitry Medvedev, vice premiers and ministers, CEOs of Intel, Nissan, Coca-Cola and other Forbes 500 companies, and oligarchs are rubbing shoulders with superstar pundits such as Thomas Friedman and Nuriel Rubini. All have flocked to the St. Petersburg International Economic Forum. Russians are all smiles after the purchase of 2 percent of Facebook, and state-owned Sberbank's participation in acquisition of the General Motors Corp.'s German subsidiary Opel. The public discourse is all about diversification, innovation and coping with the global crisis. Mr. Medvedev says he wants innovation-based growth. But privately, many sotto voce discussions turn to the question: What is Russia's global strategy?

From an Israeli perspective, Mr. Obama's speech yesterday (6/04) in Cairo was deeply disturbing. Both rhetorically and programmatically, Obama's speech was a renunciation of America's strategic alliance with Israel. Rhetorically, Obama's sugar coated the pathologies of the Islamic world - from the tyranny that characterizes its regimes, to the misogyny, xenophobia, Jew hatred, and general intolerance that characterizes its societies. In so doing he made clear that his idea of pressing the restart button with the Islamic world involves erasing the moral distinctions between the Islamic world and the free world. In contrast, Obama's perverse characterization of Israel - of the sources of its legitimacy and of its behavior - made clear that he shares the Arab world's view that there is something basically illegitimate about the Jewish state.  

Standing in front of an array of photovoltaic solar panels at Nellis Air Force Base last week (5/29), Mr. Obama claimed that his vision for an America powered by clean, renewable energy and awash in green jobs is becoming a reality faster than anyone could have imagined. Nellis, near Las Vegas, is the home of the largest solar-energy plant in the Western Hemisphere and, in the president's words, a "shining example" of what renewable energy can do to put our economy on a "firmer foundation for economic growth." Beyond these words, uncritically reported by the mainstream media, is the reality of a make-believe industry touted by environmental zealots, corporate freeloaders parading as entrepreneurs, and a president capable of staggering disingenuousness (that's a fancy word for dishonesty).

You can not win a war if you don't know who the enemy is," teaches master strategist Sun Tzu - a commonsense maxim that needs repeating as the Obama administration seeks a way out of the newly designated AfPak (Afghanistan/Pakistan) imbroglio. As the Pakistani army battles Taliban insurgents in Swat and elsewhere, the answer to the question of who exactly the Taliban is, and what is the nature of its relationship with al-Qaeda, is of key importance in judging the chances of success for the emerging Obama strategy. For even as Washington pushes Islamabad to keep the Taliban from expanding its territorial sway in the North-West Frontier Province, the administration seems to think the real solution to the Taliban problem, on both sides of the border, lies in striking an "acceptable compromise" deal with the militants. Such thinking is a dangerous combination of ignorance and naïveté.

Like nature, Israel's strategic relations abhor a vacuum. In the wake of the Obama administration's decision to drastically curtail the US's strategic alliance with Israel in the interest of American rapprochement with Iran and Syria, the Netanyahu government has been moving swiftly to fill the void. On Monday (5/11), with Pope Benedict XVI's arrival and with Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu's visit with Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak at Sharm e-Sheikh, two potential strategic alliances came into view. Rather than viewing with alarm Mr. Obama's clear antipathy towards Israel, Mr. Netanyahu views it as an opportunity to pursue alliances in Israel's interest without regard to the wishes of the American president.

Mr. Obama sat down yesterday (5/06) with the presidents of Pakistan and Afghanistan to seek a way out of the existential crisis now facing those two nations. As reported by the press, Obama secured commitments from them for greater cooperation in the struggle against the "common threat," as well as assurances that Pakistan's nuclear weapons would be secure - in other words, the same promises and commitments that every White House meeting with Pakistan's leaders since 9/11 has invariably delivered. Put simply, the Taliban, murderous as it is, is not the problem. The problem is the Pakistani military and the stubborn refusal of Washington to comprehend this basic reality.