“Putting a military face on the American judicial system is counterproductive for our image abroad,” Eaton continued, recalling his work to convince Iraqi soldiers to obey the rule of law and civilian control of the military. “If you put the judicial system into the military’s hands, that is really a challenge to the premise that civilians and not the military are responsible for guiding and directing military activities. It is really a logic break to try these cases in a military setting.”

The record is clear: Dick Cheney and the Bush administration were incompetent war fighters. They ignored Afghanistan for 7 years with a crude approach to counter-insurgency warfare best illustrated by: 1. Deny it.  2. Ignore it. 3. Bomb it. While our intelligence agencies called the region the greatest threat to America, the Bush White House under-resourced our military efforts, shifted attention to Iraq, and failed to bring to justice the masterminds of September 11.

The only time Cheney and his cabal of foreign policy ‘experts’ have anything to say is when they feel compelled to protect this failed legacy. While President Obama is tasked with cleaning up the considerable mess they left behind, they continue to defend torture or rewrite a legacy of indifference on Afghanistan. Simply put, Mr. Cheney sees history throughout extremely myopic and partisan eyes.

Eaton, a former infantry officer, had a 30-year Army career that including deployments to Somalia, Bosnia and Iraq. After retiring from the Army in 2006, he criticized Rumsfeld that March in a widely read op-ed for failing to understand counterinsurgency and, indeed, the nature of the Iraq war more broadly. Later he signed on with Hillary Rodham Clinton’s presidential campaign before supporting Barack Obama in the general election.

At NSN, Eaton’s official title will be a senior adviser, but he’ll be the public face of an organization set up after the Democratic defeats of 2004 to bridge the policy and messaging divides between the progressive and national-security communities. NSN employees describe him as a “bonding agent” between progressive politicians and the military: while NSN has had no shortage of national-security experts on its roster, Eaton is the first retired flag officer to sign up. With progressives divided over what to make of the Afghanistan war, Eaton’s new role should be one to watch, as NSN has taken a cautious position in favor of the administration’s strategy. He starts on Monday.

NSN’s original leadership has been absorbed into the Obama administration. Founder Rand Beers, the former White House counterterrorism chief, is now an undersecretary at the Department of Homeland Security, where original communications director Moira Whelan serves as deputy in the Office of Gulf Coast Rebuilding. Ilan Goldenberg now has a large part of the Iran and Israel portfolios in the Department of Defense’s policy directorate.

(Full disclosure: I’ll be taking part in a National Security Network-sponsored panel discussion on Afghanistan at this year’s Netroots Nation conference in Pittsburgh next month.)

In that light, check out the bottom of this Laura Rozen post on who’s joining Michele Flournoy’s Pentagon policy directorate:

Meantime, sources told The Cable that Major Gen. Paul Eaton (ret.) is among those discussing possible assistant secretary level jobs with Flournoy. Eaton was the first head of the U.S. training program for Iraqi troops and wrote a 2006 New York Times op-ed critical of then Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld. Eaton declined to comment on his discussions.

Now, clearly civilian control of the military will — somehow! — survive Eaton’s ascension to an assistant secretaryship. More important will be what position Eaton — who helped create the Stryker brigades as a transition to a lighter, more mobile and deployable Army (ironically, an alleged Rumsfeld priority) — would actually get.

A few weeks ago I had the chance to speak with Eaton about Afghanistan. He’s a big supporter of the troop increase there, as well as the rebalanced civilian/military approach to national security that the Obama administration has championed. “We’ve failed to apply, truly, interagency planning in Afghanistan. We’ve got colonels in the press, in major newspapers, saying ‘I need agriculture experts, water engineers, medical support,’” he said. He advocated a “very robust PRT effort,” referring to the Provincial Reconstruction Teams of mixed diplomacy, development and security advisers designed to be rapidly responsive to the human needs of the locals. Should Flournoy tap Eaton to become one of her assistant secretaries, it’ll probably represent a doubling down on that “whole of government” emphasis.