The surge in Afghanistan is coming to an end without any decisive results. The military and its allies will, as usual, fight any reduction of any military effort and will try to keep the troop numbers up. An active campaign in Afghanistan means more money and faster promotions.

That is why I am very suspicious about the timing and content of this WSJ piece about new Al Qaeda bogeyman "training camps" in eastern Afghanistan:

"The raid gave us insight that al Qaeda was trying to reestablish a base in Afghanistan and conduct some training of operatives, suicide attackers," the senior U.S. military officer said. "They found a safe haven in Afghanistan."

Well, senior U.S. military officer, what have you been doing the last ten years in Afghanistan? If 150,000 soldiers haven't done their basic task in Afghanistan, denying Al Qaida a safe haven there, maybe we should try something different?

But it is not the purpose of the article to question the ever expending and useless military strategy. The purpose of the scaremongering comes with the last graph:

"We do not have an intelligence problem. We have a capacity problem. We generally know the places they are, how they are operating," said the senior U.S. military official, speaking of al Qaeda. The problem "is our ability to get there and do something."

All together now: "We need more troops in Afghanistan."

As for the quality of the intelligence: If that is really no problem, then the only explanation for these raids on ex-Taliban and members of the High Peace Council is a purposeful sabotaging effort to any talks with the Taliban:

International and Afghan security forces are setting back the embryonic peace process by raiding the homes of former Taliban officials instrumental in promoting talks with insurgents, according to diplomats and leaders of the former hardline regime.

At a time when the US has called for a "diplomatic surge" to solve the conflict, the most recent target of the greatly expanded night raids programme, which employs electronic eavesdropping and special forces units on a major scale, was Mullah Zaeef, former Taliban ambassador to Islamabad and a proponent of peace talks. He is regarded as sufficiently important by the international community that last year an international travel ban on him was lifted, enabling him to travel to London.

Just over three weeks ago a mixed force of foreign troops and agents from Afghanistan's National Directorate of Security attempted to enter his house late at night. Zaeef was not present, but there was an armed standoff between the raiding party and his guards, who also work for the directorate.

We know that General Petraeus does not really want any talks with the Taliban until he has squeezed them enough to make talks unnecessary. Of course all the squeezing done so far has obviously not worked. But his only recipe is doing more of the same and again more of the same.

Time for Petraeus to go and indeed Obama considers to sideline him by making him the next CIA chief. They civil spies will likely hate that move. They do want to be under military control and will do their very best to take him down as fast as possible. Something that should have been done years ago.