afghanistan

Farhi Saeed bin Mohammed, an Algerian national who was captured in Pakistan and turned over to the U.S. military after fleeing from Afghanistan, was ordered released from the U.S. detention facility at Guantanamo Bay by a U.S. District Court judge yesterday, according to the human rights group CagePrisoners. Judge Gladys Kessler’s written opinion is still [...]

Jeffrey Kaye at Truthout has a good piece today on the suicide — or murder? — of Yemeni Guantanamo Bay prisoner Mohammad Ahmed Abdullah Saleh al Hanashi in June. It’s a powerful reminder of why human rights advocates, as well as U.S. military leaders, think it’s important to close that prison soon.
I admit I overlooked [...]

Despite Hasan’s reported contacts with an al-Qaeda-connected cleric in Yemen, the U.S. Army’s Criminal Investigation Division and FBI will handle the probe.

Because The New York Times is reporting that Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton is now the Obama administration’s indispensable interlocutor with Afghan President Hamid Karzai. Lots of gauzy quotes:
“It is critical Obama develops a channel to Karzai where hard messages can go both ways,” said Bruce O. Riedel, who helped the administration formulate its [...]

Sometimes I think President Obama is making policy just to be easy on national-security reporters. Josh Rogin reports:

The Obama administration won’t announce its new comprehensive strategy for Afghanistan and Pakistan until after Thanksgiving, a White House official confirms to The Cable, and observers and experts close to the discussions see it as the White [...]

If there were a healthy or coherent relationship between civilian and military efforts in war zones or weak states or post-conflict environments, there wouldn’t be any need for, say, Stuart Bowen to propose a new U.S. Office of Contingency Operations. Instead there’s ad-hoc and personality-driven relationships and operational incoherence. This, for instance, is what Secretary [...]

That would be former Sen. Fred Thompson (R-Tenn.).
Via Ben Smith, Thompson says the problem with the Afghanistan war isn’t the seven years that the Bush administration presided over its deep and thorough decline, but the seven weeks that the Obama administration has taken to review how to reverse the Bush administration’s errors. It’s a mystery [...]

TWI national security reporter Spencer Ackerman appeared on MSNBC’s “The Rachel Maddow Show” last night to talk about his “game-changing” story on the limited number of troops available for an Afghanistan escalation. Video after the jump.

It was once the case that the American and Afghan Presidents shared a certain bond. It was a cordial relationship, even warm, begun by contingency and entrenched by videoconference. But the two men’s ties did not translate into similarly deep U.S.-Afghanistan relationship, and so governance, prosperity and security all deteriorated, and Afghans and Americans died [...]

Laura Rozen reports a few post-Asia trip scheduling conflicts:
Hillary Clinton is hosting an all-day retreat for her senior staff Friday at Blair House. Deputy secretaries, undersecretaries, and assistant secretaries are due to attend. On the agenda: briefings on policy & budget, an urgent challenges panel on Iran, the Middle East, Afghanistan/Pakistan, and North Korea; around the world priorities, [...]