afghanistan

With U.S. and Afghan forces about to attempt to take the Afghan village of Marja in Helmand province away from the Taliban, Gen. Stanley McChrystal records this message about how — speaking mostly generically — he wants to show the Afghan people that the Afghan government is about to come into the area and offer [...]

Afghanistan optimism: Catch it!
“I still will tell you that I believe the situation in Afghanistan is serious,” said the commander, Gen. Stanley A. McChrystal.
“I do not say now that I think it’s deteriorating,” he added. “And I said that last summer, and I believed that that was correct. I feel differently now. I am not [...]

Below is the Pentagon’s presentation of the long-term budget picture. Why’s it going from Fiscal 2001 to Fiscal 2015? I don’t presume to know for sure. But the effect is clear: It’s immediately obvious that President Obama is proposing spending more, consistently, on defense — excluding the cost of the Iraq and Afghanistan wars — [...]

So the budget is out. But where’s the roughly $150 million needed for the Obama administration to buy the Thomson Correction Center from Illinois? That’s the necessary step for closing Guantanamo Bay this year, as the administration desires: Without the money to buy Thomson, the government has nowhere to transfer the remaining Guantanamo detainees, so [...]

Speaking of. According to the Servicemembers Legal Defense Fund’s blog:
We expect the Department of Defense to announce at the Senate Armed Services Committee hearing on Feb. 2 that ”Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell” discharges were down by almost 30 percent last year. Indeed, the department may release the discharge numbers before the hearing. As we alerted you here last week, the new [...]

NATO’s major diplomats and other assorted friends are in London right now to reinforce their commitment to the post-Taliban government in Afghanistan headed by Hamid Karzai. The so-called London Conference (following on the 2011 Bonn Conference) has just issued its communique, essentially a document outlining political, security, economic and diplomatic goals and the commitment of [...]

Al Jazeera:
Hamid Karzai, the Afghan president, has said his country must reach out to its “disenchanted brothers” in an effort to stabilise the war ravaged nation.
Addressing a one-day international conference on Afghanistan’s future in London, the British capital, Karzai said that fighters who are “not part of al-Qaeda or other terror groups” must be reconciled [...]

Don’t expect to see many detainees once held at Bagram Air Field return to the fight, Vice Adm. Robert Harward, detention operations chief for Gen. Stanley McChrystal, said on a blogger conference call this morning.
Asked by Jeff Schogol of Stars & Stripes about the recidivism rate, Harward said  ”very, very few” detainees leave U.S. detention [...]

Vice Adm. Robert Harward, a former senior officer with the Joint Special Operations Command and U.S. Joint Forces Command, arrived in Afghanistan in late November to take charge of detention operations for his longtime colleague, Gen. Stanley McChrystal. In those two months — his command formally stood up on Jan. 8 — Harward took the [...]

Rolf Mowatt-Larsen, a longtime intelligence official who works at the nexus of al-Qaeda and weapons of mass destruction, writes that al-Qaeda “has been far more sophisticated in its pursuit of weapons of mass destruction than is commonly believed.” And there’s no reason whatsoever to disbelieve him. But what ought to be pointed out is al-Qaeda’s [...]