"Not many people realize the extent to which the Iraq War represents a historic change for American women soldiers. More women have fought and died in Iraq than in all the wars since World War II put together. Over 206,000 have served in the Middle East since March 2003, most of them in Iraq; and over 600 have been wounded and 104 have died in Iraq alone, according to the Department of Defense. In Iraq, one in ten troops is a woman.

"Yet the military--from Pentagon to the troops on the ground--has been slow to recognize the service these women perform, or even to see them as real soldiers. Rather, it is permeated with age-old stereotypes of women as passive sex objects who have no business fighting and cannot be relied upon in battle. As Montoya said about her time as a soldier, "The only thing the guys let you be if you're a girl in the military is a bitch, a ho, or a dyke. You're a bitch if you won't sleep with them, a ho if you even have one boyfriend, and a dyke if they don't like you. So you can't win."

"The pinnacle of this derogatory attitude toward women is the Pentagon's ban on women in ground combat, which it reaffirmed in 2006 despite being perfectly aware that in Iraq women are in combat all the time. (Speculation is that President Obama may finally reverse this ban, but it stands as of now.) Because the US military is so short of troops and Iraq's battlefields are towns and roads, women are frequently thrown into jobs indistinguishable from those of the all-male infantry, cavalry and armor divisions, often under the guise of "combat support." They "man" machine guns atop tanks and trucks, guard convoys, raid houses, search and arrest Iraqis, drive military vehicles along bomb-ridden roads, and are killing and being killed. In Afghanistan, too, women find themselves in these positions. 

"Think of McChrystal's appointment, then, as a decision in Washington to dispatch the bull directly to the China shop with the most meager of hopes that the results won't be smashed Afghans and Pakistanis. The Post's Ignatius even compares McChrystal's boss Petraeus and Obama's special envoy to the region, Richard Holbrooke, to "two headstrong bulls in a small paddock." He then concludes his paean to all of them with this passage -- far more ominous than he means it to be:

"Obama knows the immense difficulty of trying to fix a broken Afghanistan and make it a functioning, modern country. But with his two bulls, Petraeus and Holbrooke, he's marching his presidency into the 'graveyard of empires' anyway."

"McChrystal is evidently the third bull, the one slated to start knocking over the tombstones.

"Of course, there are now so many bulls in this particular China shop that smashing is increasingly the name of the game. At this point, the early moves of the Obama administration, when combined with the momentum of the situation it inherited, have resulted in the expansion of the Af-Pak War in at least six areas, which only presage further expansion in the months to come:

"So the frustration of a war in which the enemy has no borders and we do is bound to rise along with the fighting, long predicted to intensify this year. We now have a more aggressive "team" in place. Soon enough, if the fighting in the Afghan south and along the Pakistani border doesn't go as planned, pressure for the president to send in those other 10,000 troops General McKiernan asked for may rise as well, as could pressure to apply more air power, more drone power, more of almost anything. And yet, as former CIA station chief in Kabul, Graham Fuller, wrote recently, in the region "crises have only grown worse under the U.S. military footprint."

"And what if, as the war continues its slow arc of expansion, the "Washington coalition" is the one that cracks first? What then?"

"The Times lead story for its Washington Edition on May 21 was headlined, “1 in 7 Detainees Rejoined Jihad, Pentagon Finds,” and starts out by reporting that a Pentagon study has concluded that “about one in seven of the 534 prisoners” transferred out of the Guantanamo Bay prison “returned to terrorism or militant activity.”

"But that is not what the Pentagon can possibly know.  Beyond the weaknesses in the Pentagon’s evidence, which is only noted deep inside the Times article, there is the unsupported assertion by the Times that the detainees have “returned” to violent activity, thus assuming that the freed prisoners had previously been engaged in terrorism or other extremism.

"Even assuming that the study is correct about one in seven engaging in militant activity after release, the evidence is lacking about the prisoners previous acts of terrorism because – if such evidence existed – the Bush administration presumably would not have released them.

"In other words, the most that the Times should have reported is that the Pentagon study claimed that one in seven engaged in militant activities after leaving Guantanamo. It is entirely possible that some ex-prisoners became radicalized and joined with extremists because of their sometimes brutal treatment in U.S. custody at Guantanamo.

"That would beg the question why the Bush administration released them in the first place, a point not explained by the Times article. But the assumption must be that the Bush administration had little or no evidence linking the detainees to verifiable terrorist activities before their release.

"Now, the Times is feeding a new mini-hysteria on the danger of releasing Guantanamo detainees no matter how little evidence there is against them – if there is a possibility that one in seven might later join up with militants."