US Army photo of General Stanley McChrystal speaking to the press after Afghan President Hamid Karzai’s shura on June 13.

As evidence continues to accumulate that the US-led NATO counterinsurgency plan (COIN) in Afghanistan is an abject failure, we now see panic setting in on several fronts. In stories out today, we see in the Washington Post a continued effort to rehabilitate the image of detention operations in Afghanistan. In the Post story, General Mark Martins, Deputy Commander of Joint Task Force 435 claims "You can’t kill or detain your way out of an insurgency", even though General Stanley McChrystal’s historical record is precisely an attempt to kill or detain our way out of counterinsurgencies in both Iraq and Afghanistan. That story gets coupled with the revelation by Reuters that the NATO command structure in southern Afghanistan, where the operation in Kandahar has been changing daily between being "on" and "off", is being restructured:

In a radical restructuring of its military command in southern Afghanistan, NATO said on Monday it had split the country’s most violent region in half in a bid to improve security by focusing on smaller geographical areas.

Although the shake-up had been planned for many months, Monday’s announcement marked the official start of a new Regional Command Southwest (RC-SW), reflecting the influx of thousands of new U.S. troops into the region.

The move comes as more than 20,000 foreign and Afghan troops prepare to push the Taliban out of their spiritual heartland in southern Kandahar province in a series of operations expected to last several months.

But perhaps the biggest signal of panic at the highest US levels about Afghanistan is the revelation in the New York Times that vast mineral reserves have been found in Afghanistan.

Clearly, with a trillion dollars worth of minerals now waiting to be "harvested", it is only a matter of time until the rationale for remaining in Afghanistan becomes the need for us to see that there is no corruption in how Afghanistan doles out leases for those minerals rights. Oh yes, MMS is certainly the model we should impose on Afghanistan, isn’t it?

In fact, in reporting this development, James Risen was able to get a direct quote from General David Petraeus:

“There is stunning potential here,” Gen. David H. Petraeus, commander of the United States Central Command, said in an interview on Saturday. “There are a lot of ifs, of course, but I think potentially it is hugely significant.”

If Petraeus says this has the potential to be "hugely significant", look for it very soon to be the primary reason for keeping troops in Afghanistan. No other reason for remaining there has any credibility at this point.