THE BITTER PILL – AT 8:12 P.M. ET:  The latest on the attack in Afghanistan that killed CIA operatives.  From ABC News:

The suicide bomber who killed at least six Central Intelligence Agency officers in a base along the Afghan-Pakistan border on Wednesday was a regular CIA informant who had visited the same base multiple times in the past, according to someone close to the base's security director.

The informant was a Pakistani and a member of the Wazir tribe from the Pakistani tribal area North Waziristan, according to the same source. The base security director, an Afghan named Arghawan, would pick up the informant at the Ghulam Khan border crossing and drive him about two hours into Forward Operating Base Chapman, from where the CIA operates.

Because he was with Arghawan, the informant was not searched, the source says. Arghawan also died in the attack.

This is a very bitter situation.  The senior CIA officer killed was a married woman with three children.

The story seems to corroborate a claim by the Taliban on the Pakistani side of the border that they had turned a CIA asset into a double agent and sent him to kill the officers in the base, located in the eastern Afghan province of Khost.

The infiltration into the heart of the CIA's operation in eastern Afghanistan deals a strong blow to the agency's ability to fight Taliban and al Qaeda, former intelligence officials say, and will make the agency reconsider how it recruits Pakistani and Afghan informants.

COMMENT:  We are again reminded of how hard this is.  The war against Islamic extremism will go on for decades.  As we noted here twice in the last two days, the enemy gets a great deal of help from leftist groups in the West, who are trying to undermine our side in the battle, as they did during Vietnam.

The Bush administration can properly be faulted for letting the situation in Afghanistan drag on without direction for too long, but it is now Obama's war.  It's interesting that Afghanistan is the one area where the president's poll ratings have gone up, something that happened after he announced his decision to send more troops to the conflict.  That doesn't mean Americans are ready to write a blank check, but it does mean that enough of us are willing to give Obama a chance if he starts to show backbone and tries to pursue a winning strategy. 

The end result, though, is far from guaranteed, and I wish the president would finally explain to the American people that they must be prepared for decades of opposition to a hateful ideology.  It would mean opposing the left wing of his party, but that, in my view, doesn't carry much risk.

January 2, 2010