Read this article in the Weekly Standard by Frederick Kagan. He counters the facile “experts” (who know a “bunch of stuff,” no doubt) on foreign policy, those who keep telling Petraeus the real battle should be in Afghanistan, not Iraq.

Then read this post of mine describing Obama’s revolutionary new foreign policy of “dignity promotion.”

Then try to put the two together. A while back Obama angered the leaders of Pakistan by suggesting that if he were President he’d attack the country to root out al Qaeda, without understanding or dealing with any of the stumbling blocks to that action raised in the Kagan piece—or even those that would occur to most thinking people.

And now, please try to figure out how his foreign policy of “dignity promotion” squares with Kagan’s final point about Afghanistan:

To the question, “Is there really nothing we can do unless we send more troops?” the answer is unequivocally that there is something we can do. Congress can do it, in fact, and very quickly. Pass the supplemental defense appropriation that would allow development money to flow reliably to our soldiers in Afghanistan as well as Iraq. The advantage of Afghanistan’s poverty (for us) is that a little money goes a long way. American soldiers have increasingly been leveraging development funds to starve the insurgency of recruits in a way similar to what has worked in Iraq (but tailored appropriately to conditions in Afghanistan). They need more money. One of the problems the British face in the south of the country is that their government does not give their soldiers development money to spend. We should find ways to help them out. Congress could do all of this with one roll-call vote in each house, and the aid would start flowing to Afghanistan faster than any additional brigades could arrive. American soldiers in Iraq often say that dollars are their best bullets–the same is true in Afghanistan.

I suppose “dignity-promotion” is only a good thing if it’s a Democratic administration doing the promoting.

And I suppose it’s no surprise that Obama isn’t concerned about insulting the leaders of Pakistan, or getting their cooperation in the fight to root out al Qaeda in that country. After all, he doesn’t need no steenking leaders—he knows the people.