By Ted Nesi

PROVIDENCE, R.I. (WPRI) – U.S. Sen. Sheldon Whitehouse said Tuesday the United States needs to step up its support for opposition rebels in war-torn Syria, arguing they need America’s help just as the U.S. needed France to win independence from Britain – though he ruled out putting troops on the ground.

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• Related: Reed: US on track to exit Afghanistan, fix Pakistan relations (Jan. 10)

​By Ted Nesi

PROVIDENCE, R.I. (WPRI) – The U.S. remains on track to withdraw most of its troops from Afghanistan by the end of 2014, and the relationship between American and Pakistani leaders is improving, U.S. Sen. Jack Reed told WPRI.com on Thursday after returning from a visit to the troubled region.

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• Related: Senator Reed joins Levin for 14th trip to Afghanistan (Jan. 4)

​By Ted Nesi

WASHINGTON, D.C. (WPRI) – U.S. Sen. Jack Reed left Washington in secret on Thursday for an official visit to Afghanistan and Pakistan, WPRI.com has learned.

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U.S. Sen. Jack Reed is traveling in Afghanistan this week with his colleague Carl Levin. According to the Obama administration, the senators didn’t know the president himself would be joining them in Kabul on Tuesday until a few hours before he arrived there to sign a strategic partnership agreement with the country.

Here’s a photo the White House posted of Reed, right, listening to the signing ceremony at the Presidential Palace in Kabul on Tuesday; the photo was taken by White House photographer Pete Souza:

The U.S. Department of Defense took these two photographs of Governor Chafee and his colleagues meeting with Defense Secretary Leon Panetta at the Pentagon on Monday before Chafee’s departure for Afghanistan.

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The fast-changing politics of war is becoming one of the year’s more interesting developments.

Two weeks ago, I noted the split between Congressmen David Cicilline and Jim Langevin over whether to back President Obama’s intervention in Libya. Cicilline, siding against, was part of a broad coalition of dissenters extending from liberal Democrats to Tea Party Republicans.

Cicilline has been consistently ahead of centrist opinion on this one, calling for a faster withdrawal from Afghanistan during his campaign last year and beating the drum for it since taking office. “I believe we need a larger drawdown and an accelerated timetable,” he said Wednesday night in response to Obama’s speech.

That makes it all the more interesting to read this passage from Ed Fitzpatrick’s Projo column about Cicilline challenger Brendan Doherty’s first big fundraiser:

Doherty said his campaign theme will be “America First” ….

In emphasizing that theme, he said, “We need to reassess the billions we are spending on other countries — other countries you’d have to find a map to find out where they are.” As a caveat, he said, “I understand our special relationship with Israel” and “I understand what is going on in the Arab Spring and the tenets of soft power and smart power and diplomacy.” But, he said, “Some of these countries, folks, you may not have ever heard of them, and we are spending billions of dollars there. What about spending that money here in Rhode Island, here in America?”

That sentence could just as easily have been uttered by Cicilline. “We’re spending money building a country while our own country has urgent needs in terms of infrastructure” and other priorities, the congressman told me in April. “We’re cutting the COPS program here while we’re training police officers in Afghanistan. This is a moment we have to make this country our priority.”

If Doherty sticks to that line on foreign policy, it could deprive Cicilline of an issue he used to draw contrasts in 2010. Before that, though, Doherty may need to wage a primary campaign against John Loughlin, who’s serving in Iraq as we speak. What will GOP primary voters think of Doherty’s message on the wars? What will Loughlin’s message be?

Doherty’s proclaimed slogan – “America First” – is an interesting choice, too.

For voters who know their history, America First brings to mind the powerful isolationist group that fought to keep the United States out of World War II. Its best-known backer was the famous pilot Charles Lindbergh; others who supported it included Gerald Ford and Sargent Shriver. More recently, the paleoconservative commentator Pat Buchanan has praised the group and the message.

(photo: Spirit of St. Louis 2 Project)

Gov. Lincoln Chafee says it’s possible he’ll run for reelection as a Democrat in 2014 – and it’s also possible he’ll decline to endorse Barack Obama’s bid for a second term in the White House.

The next gubernatorial election is “a long way away” and running as a Democrat “would be a hard step, just because of history,” Chafee said Monday during a 45-minute interview with WPRI.com. Chafee’s father was a Republican governor and senator, and the younger Chafee was in the G.O.P. until 2007.

Still, Chafee said he thinks his lack of party affiliation has caused him some political headaches. “I love being an independent, but the disadvantage is I don’t have a party spokesperson – somebody that traditionally fills the role of hatchet man out there,” the governor said.

By contrast, Chafee said being an independent has proven to be “an advantage” in his dealings with the General Assembly, because it allows him to mingle with members of both parties – although he acknowledged “there’s some persona non grata atmosphere” when he visits the Republican minority’s offices.

‘War machine just grinds on’

Chafee endorsed Barack Obama for president in 2008, a year after he left the Republican Party. Obama repaid Chafee last fall by pointedly declining to endorse Democrat Frank Caprio in their gubernatorial race – the impetus for Caprio’s infamous “shove it” comment.

But Chafee says he hasn’t made up his mind yet about whether to endorse Obama again in 2012 – because of his administration’s foreign policy.

“The wars are my only hesitation,” Chafee said, referring to the conflicts in Afghanistan, Iraq and Libya. “It’s costing so much money. And lives. … The war machine just grinds on. Makes no sense to me.”

“Don’t forget – [Obama] stayed neutral in my race,” Chafee said. “So there’s a precedent to stay neutral.”

Chafee did say he was “very flattered” to be seated with Obama at the head table at the White House when his fellow governors were in Washington over the winter. But he questioned the president’s handling of last week’s negotiations with Republicans to avert a federal shutdown.

“It sounded to me like the president might have given away a lot,” Chafee said. “And Clinton didn’t do that – Clinton said, ‘Go ahead and shut down the government. I’m not going to send us into deficits and broken programs that we can’t afford.’ ”

Ducks Magistrate Montalbano question

During his campaign for governor, Chafee frequently referred to his “ABCs” of economic development – maximizing the state’s assets, dealing with the budget deficit, and cracking down on political corruption. On the last of those, he said the key for him will be leading an ethical administration.

“Even if my cousin were the best qualified for the job, you just can’t do it,” Chafee said. “You have to be cleaner than clean when you’re trying to change your reputation.”

But the governor clammed up when asked whether that meant it was inappropriate for former Senate President Joe Montalbano to have been named a magistrate judge last month.

“I’m not going to fight with the General Assembly,” Chafee said flatly.

The governor also responded curtly when asked whether he would read the new memoir by former Providence Mayor Buddy Cianci, one of his staunchest critics: “No.”

However, Chafee did confirm one of the stories Cianci tells in his book – that years ago the future senator and governor asked for a job as a garbageman in Providence.

“That is a true story,” Chafee said, explaining that he and his roommate at Brown University were looking for a summer job after their senior year and thought picking up trash might be a good one. There was a similar program in his hometown of Warwick, he said.

“I just thought about it this morning,” Chafee recalled. “I saw a truck go by with the guy hanging on the back – you talk about being outdoors, that looked like fun. The truck stops, it’s good, hard work, and you’re hanging onto the back.”

Chafee also said he and his roommate were surprised when they wound up in front of Cianci after requesting the job. ”We just reached out to the Public Works Department about a summer program, and the next thing we know the mayor’s invited us into his office,” he said. “We never expected that.”

This is the last of three articles based on my interview with Governor Chafee.

Follow-up: Dem leader Pacheco noncommittal on Chafee joining the party

(photo: Chafee campaign)

U.S. Sen. Jack Reed and his colleague Carl Levin of Michigan have an op-ed in Friday’s Washington Post entitled “The surge Afghanistan still needs” – and no, they write, their support for President Obama’s policy there is not the result of military psy-ops:

A now-discredited report in Rolling Stone alleged that U.S. military officials in Afghanistan used inappropriate information operations techniques to try to persuade us, as well as the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff and others, to support additional resources to train more Afghan troops.

The truth is, we have long argued that the best way to bring our troops home sooner while succeeding in Afghanistan is to build a stronger Afghan military and government. We’ve been making that case because the facts support it – which is why the president and the majority of the American people do, too.

We saw during a trip to Afghanistan in January that the United States, our Afghan allies and our NATO partners have made significant progress in reversing the momentum of the insurgents, seizing the initiative and helping Afghans secure their future.

Areas once closed to travel and commerce are open. Afghans’ confidence is growing, and the country’s security forces increasingly are taking the lead in operations.

While we’ve begun to turn around the once-daunting dynamic in Afghanistan, there is no guarantee that our progress will continue or that our gains will be permanent. The phrase “fragile and reversible” could have been invented for Afghanistan.

Read the whole op-ed here. I also reported on what Reed and Levin learned during their visit to Afghanistan during my trip to Washington in January.

Rolling Stone’s Michael Hastings, whose explosive story about Stanley McChrystal forced him to step down, has another bombshell investigative report – that a three-star general “illegally ordered a team of soldiers specializing in ‘psychological operations’ to manipulate visiting American senators into providing more troops and funding for the war.”

One of those senators was Rhode Island’s own Jack Reed, a senior Democrat on the Senate Armed Services Committee who has visited Afghanistan 11 times since the war there began a decade ago. Others included committee chairman Carl Levin, John McCain, Joe Lieberman and Al Franken.

Reed called for a full investigation of the allegations during a live appearance on MSNBC a few minutes ago.

“Charges of this nature are very serious and disturbing and they have to be fully investigated,” Reed said, though he emphasized that he listened to a range of voices, including diplomats and lower-ranking soldiers, on his visits and “didn’t feel anything unusual going on” when he was there.

“Having grown up as a young Army officer in the Vietnam era, I have an instinctual sort of notion that you have to look very carefully and weigh very carefully what anyone says – not suggesting any improprieties, but there are people with institutional stakes who need to protect their own positions,” Reed said.

The senator also used the opportunity to offer a reminder that he voted against the Iraq war, which he called a “strategic mistake” that drew attention away from Afghanistan and caused coalition forces to “lose a lot of ground” there. He also offered support for President Obama’s plan to begin withdrawing troops from the country this summer.

WASHINGTON — The 10-year U.S. military effort in Afghanistan is showing clear signs of progress ahead of President Obama’s July deadline for the start of troop redeployments, according to U.S. Sen. Jack Reed.

“In Iraq and Afghanistan, we’re beginning a transition from a military-led effort to a State Department-led effort,” though “it’s much more advanced in Iraq,” Reed said at a Capitol Hill press conference where he laid out what he saw on a trip last week through those two countries and Yemen.

Reed and his Democratic colleagues Carl Levin of Michigan and Jon Tester of Montana returned from their trip through the region early Sunday morning. Their focus was on assessing the situation in Afghanistan, Levin said.

NATO and Afghan National Army forces are putting “very severe pressure” on the Taliban leadership, Reed said. The government of Afghanistan’s president, Hamid Karzai, is also “beginning to reconnect with the people,” he said.

Reed said President Obama’s decision to set a July 2011 deadline for the start of troop withdrawals “galvanized” military and civilian leaders in Afghanistan to step up their efforts to retake control of the country from insurgent forces.

The transition from U.S. to Iraqi leadership in that country is “on track and on schedule,” Reed said, although political challenges remain – the country’s leaders still haven’t formed a new government.

The Senate Armed Services Committee, which Levin chairs and which includes the other two senators, will hold a hearing about Afghanistan when General David Petreaus returns from the region in March, Levin said.

Although I think the trio’s press conference may get overshadowed by the State of the Union, they did have a decent showing of reporters at the event. (Seated in front of me was John Mulligan, The Providence Journal’s longtime D.C. reporter.) Here’s another picture of the three senators chatting just before the event began:

Reed and I parted ways at that point so he can go to a meeting with congressional experts, including the oft-quoted Norm Ornstein of the American Enterprise Institute, and then deliver a speech in the Kennedy Caucus Room. We’re going to reconnect after that.

(photos: Ted Nesi/WPRI)