Sen. John Kerry (D-Mass.) introduced today’s Senate Foreign Relations Committee hearing on Afghanistan and Pakistan — in which Deputy Secretary Jack Lew, who has the portfolio for managing the State Department, is joining Gen. David Petraeus and Ambassador Karl Eikenberry — by emphasizing two themes: “How Afghan governance will improve, More…
President Obama convenes the national security team for another debate on Afghanistan-Pakistan strategy, and I notice an addition to the guest list is Deputy Secretary of State Jack Lew. Lew is the deputy in charge of management and personnel for Secretary Hillary Rodham Clinton, so perhaps part of today’s More…
It was supposed to be an event detailing how thoroughly the Obama administration was preparing to handle the non-military challenges of the Afghanistan war. Richard Holbrooke, the administration’s powerful special envoy to Afghanistan and Pakistan, introduced ten of his key deputies from across the government to an More…
The New York Times has a big, excellent piece about the Obama administration’s inability or unwillingness to produce its long-promised metrics for measuring success in Afghanistan and Pakistan. I’ve been covering that for months, as you can read here, and it remains almost surreal that there aren’t any More…
It’s easy and cheap to grouse about Pakistan’s “will” to confront extremism in the tribal areas, but this Washington Post piece about how the Pakistani military is taking its sweet time to conduct its much-boasted-about military offensive in the tribal areas contains quite a dash of cold water:
“It’s
It is not a question I can answer. Ever since the not-quite-State-Department-Iran-envoy got scheduled to move over to the White House, all I’ve heard is that… he was moving to the White House, taking a position of some undefined scope. Pretty much every State Department briefing for the last More…
Buried within the guts of a very good New York Times story about problems with the Afghan security forces is word of this effort at rooting out police corruption:
The United States is also retraining uniformed police units in a process called Focused District Development. Under this program, police
The Cairo speech has eaten up most of my day, but last night, Bruce Riedel, the chairman of the Obama administration’s strategy review on Afghanistan and Pakistan, appeared on a panel at the International Spy Museum to talk about the Pakistani Inter Services Intelligence organization and its relationship to More…
As the number of displaced people rises due to the fighting in Pakistan’s Swat Valley, Sen. John Kerry (D-Mass.), chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, wants to up the totals for U.S. relief aid, according to this just-released statement:
“The humanitarian crisis in Swat gets worse every day, which
The Pakistani Army is claiming that it has practically cleared the Taliban out of the Swat Valley. Now comes the real counterinsurgency test: holding the area. In this (sadly unembeddable) video from the Pakistani newspaper Dawn, you can see a lot of creative angles of Pakistani soldiers letting off More…
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