The US and NATO have just made very, very difficult decisions to attempt what should have been attempted much earlier. As frustrating as this is, I feel strong that it is too soon to start second-guessing.

It sounds like hell for those Marines and their Afghan brothers in arms.

But, simply loosening the rules re air strikes or arty is NOT the answer. In an ambush that is so well prepared, the enemy almost certainly had a plan to deal with air strikes or arty barrages. Probably, they would have attempted the infamous "self-cleaning battlefield".

This is an utterly insidious tactic in which the basic, decent, Muslim practice of burying the dead ASAP is perverted into a powerful weapon in the information war. The bodies of all fighters are removed within minutes or hours, but the bodies of other Muslims, who are civilians or who can be sanitized to look like civilians, are left behind to rot...in some cases, the enemy performs additional desecration on the corpses.

All this is done for the cameras which the enemy has ensured will have access (the typical close-up photos of bodies is yet another desecration, and also a war crime); the video is distributed world-wide according to plan. The text is "the West has committed another 100% civilian war crime for no reason other than blind, impotent hatred of Muslims"; the sub-text is "ha ha we've snookered you again, look how we turn defeat into victory" and so on.

Imagine if we had fallen for the full, multi-layered ambush, instead of simply falling for the initial ambush. That could have caused the NATO deal to collapse, perhaps even caused Obama to loose control of his domestic coalition. The surge might have been defeated right there.

Once the ambush was sprung, I think the commanders were 100% correct to suspect a trap within a trap.

Their failure, for which heads should roll, was in not having a plan vs this trap within a trap, or having that plan, but failing to execute.

It seems to me that, once our guys had pulled back (and lured some of the enemy out of the village), there should have been enough flexibility to cover their retreat with carefully coordinated strikes.

That would give the enemy cameras some explosions to film, but it would also force the enemy to stage the atrocity out in the field, instead of in someone's hut in the village. Next, perhaps we could have had our own cameras there documenting the self-cleaning battlefield and exposing it for the obscenity it is. Also, showing how we saved the village, etc.

But that is all guesswork and hindsight. Perhaps the initial ambush was just too good, and such an organized retreat was not possible. Sometimes we get the bear, sometimes the bear gets us. We weep, and we return to the fight.

If counter-insurgency is done right, in the future we will have warning that the village has been infiltrated, or perhaps, was never interested in talking with us in the first place. Thus we will avoid the encounter, or better still, be able to turn it to our advantage.

"the issue was that the defense minister lied to the German Parliament shortly before the elections"

Well, if he had told the truth, that some civilians were killed, are you saying that he would have avoided scandal?

If the answer is, no, there would have been a scandal anyways, then it seems to me that there has be no de facto reduction in national caveats, and that my statement "a defense minister has to resign every time a civilian is killed" contains only a tiny bit of hyperbole.

As I recall, even after national caveats were reduced, it was still the case that someone from the defense ministry had to approve every offensive operation...and offensive operation was left undefined...meaning that any approval can be endlessly second-guessed after the fact.

Speaking of definitions, I wonder how much of the lie was due to actual intent to deceive, vs. how much of the lie was due to disagreement as to the definition of civilian in this complicated context.