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The ambassador's cable and the President's response amounted to a black eye for CBS. On Monday David Martin, its man at the Pentagon, trumpeted an Exclusive in which he guaranteed that the decision to send more troops to Afghanistan was a done deal behind closed doors, awaiting only a public announcement. Not so fast, his colleague Chip Reid cautioned. White House correspondent Reid filed from Tokyo, where Obama is starting a tour of east Asia: "He is sending the Pentagon back to the drawing board." Reid's unidentified sources told him that the President "is especially concerned that the options fail to include an exit strategy and a timeline for turning over control to Afghan forces."
ABC's Martha Raddatz, too, zeroed in on Eikenberry's pair of "urgent classified cables." She reported that the ambassador described President Hamid Karzai as failing to "confront corruption in his own government." Raddatz' analysis was that the diplomat Eikenberry is now "at odds" with military brass and that the dispute has now been "brought to a head" for Obama. Eikenberry "does have a lot of clout."
There is no doubt that the transparency of this debate over reinforcements is good for journalists and good for democracy's decision making. Oddly, CBS' Reid failed to see the bright side. He called it "another problem for the President. Instead of being debated in the Situation Room it is all over the front pages." Maybe Reid was upset that the back-and-forth sabotaged the credibility of his colleague Martin.
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